Riding the Pine Onboard the Slow Boat to Laos

The next step after our three-week stay in Thailand is Laos. Laos is the only landlocked country in the SE Asia region. We plan on spending a little over a week here, split between the three cities of Luang Prabang, Vang Vieng, and Vientiane (the capital). Though there are no oceans hugging any of the boundaries of the country, Laos does have several significant rivers running through it. The largest of these, the Mekong River, served as our highway into Laos via the acclaimed “Slow Boat.”

Taking the Slow Boat consists of a three-day two-night trip, mostly spent on a larger long-tail boat. We traveled by five-hour bus from Chiang Mai to the Laos border on day one, then switch to the boat for six hours the first day, spend the night in a small town near the river, and then board the boat for about eight hours the second day. The boat is a lot like the long-tail boats that served as taxis in Thailand, but this boat is about 80 feet long by eight feet wide and holds about 120 people. I don’t know how that works out for sq feet per person, but let’s just say it’s tight. The seats are made up of about 30 rows of pairs of two-seater straight-back benches. Lucky for us we are not the tallest couple around because the legroom is about half that of an economy class plane seat.

This all paints a rough picture for a three-day trip, but it was surprisingly fun. We met some new friends on trips similar to ours, got in a lot of reading, a few hands of Phase 10, and deepened our knowledge of global economic concerns – specifically the value of “schmoogling” Red Bull into Denmark. It was one of those experiences that at times seemed painful in the moment, but the memory of it gets better with time. Give us a few weeks and we’ll have transformed the Slow Boat into the Love Boat.