{"id":2567,"date":"2026-02-28T12:06:51","date_gmt":"2026-02-28T12:06:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aerowalsh.com\/cr\/?p=2567"},"modified":"2026-02-28T12:07:26","modified_gmt":"2026-02-28T12:07:26","slug":"fri-27th-feb-huayxai-to-pak-beng","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/?p=2567","title":{"rendered":"Fri 27th Feb – Huayxai to Pak Beng"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

CR: For the next two days we cruise down the Mekong River from Northern Laos (Huay Xai) to one of the main cities in Laos (Luang Prabang). This is an extremely common way to traverse the country for tourists as it is both scenic and far more relaxing than the shitty main roads. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There’s a few ways you can do this river journey. The most expensive is a private boat. The second is a premium tour boat option with small guest numbers – we did this one, at a cost of USD300 each. The highest number of tourists would choose the third option, which is a ‘public boat’ at USD20 per person. This one is the most popular only because 90% of tourists in Laos are cost-conscious backpackers on six month holidays. Finally there is a ‘fast boat’. I am not sure how much this cost but we did see a few of them zipping past us and all customers were locals and about half were wearing motorcycle crash helmets, so that doesn’t inspire much confidence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am really happy with the expensive option. There’s tonnes of space – there are even lounges we can even lie down and have a snooze if we nab them first (DW: two Germans take a quarter of all available napping lounges for basically the entire time). We get a tasty lunch both days. There is a tour guide (DW: his name was Por Xiong, I remember as it sounded like Poisson) who is a local and has really good English so we can learn more about Laos. This is the only experience we’ve done so far that I would be confident everyone would enjoy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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CR: Slow boat tour. Sounds relaxing. It did not start that way. The port was 5 minute drive away from our hotel. The company provided a pick up scheduled between 9-9.30am. That window was confusing, why is the variance so large when the port is so close? At 8.50am we return from breakfast and the van is there waiting for us an full of people already. We run upstairs and hastily throw everything in the suitcase and come down. This porter would be fuming if he knew the amount of books he was lugging down the slope.
DW: Caitlin constantly makes faux efforts to carry her bags when these porters approach. She feels guilty at making these teenage boys carry all of her unread books. They don’t care for her pleasantries and just want their kip from our guide.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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CR: The slow boat follows the Mekong downstream, with an overnight stop halfway. There are sights to behold aplenty. Such as this house that has eroded away.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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CR: I feel as if we are cruising through Jurassic Park and a T-Rex will emerge shortly. Protected species, do not hunt for jungle meat.
DW: Most of the trip has the river threading its way through large forested hills on either side. It always looks impressive and the photos never really capture the sense of majesty properly.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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DW: Slow boat life is punctuated by minor activities. The initial activity is rolling the sticky rice in a way to let the devils out. Caitlin excels. I struggle. In 40 minutes we eat the sticky rice.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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DW: Our trusty steed. The Shompoo (one of four, no further names given). It is roomy and premium. There are a paltry 11 guests on board and plenty of room to spread out. In 2024 during the wet season the Mekong flooded well above the elevated bank I took this photo from. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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CR: Lots of downtime for reading.
DW: Reminder that MountainDevil is still being updated during the holidays with book reviews.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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DW: Slowboat life has a big emphasis on relax. It sounds like each boat is basically run by a family, but the structure isn’t really explained in any comprehensible manner to us. There is a single driver (adult male), general helper for nautical things and also hospitality (teenage male) and cook (elderly female) in addition to our guide (he is explicitly not part of the “boat family”).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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DW: The banks of the Mekong are really interesting from a geological perspective. You can see the successive layers of sediment deposition that have been warped over the years to create fine wavy patterns in the eroding rock. There are also 10m high sand dunes along the bank where silt deposits every wet season.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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CR: Down on the bank the most common activity is not fishing but gold panning, which is pictured here. Groups of 3-10 people congregate to try and find gold in using a variety of methods, the lowest barrier to entry of which is panning with a big round sieve and earns approx usd$3 a day. This has become much more popular as an income stream in the last five years given the spike in gold prices. Declan muses that it is crazy Trump’s tariff policies, which were a large contributor to this increase in this flight to gold, are changing the daily patterns of Laotian life like this.
DW: We see gold related activities all over on the first day in particular. There are three distinct levels with increasing capital investment required and throughput: the first is panning as seen here (only needs a pan), then using a homemade sluice (a wooden box) that you shovel riverbank into, then finally suction pump (instead of shovelling riverbank into the sluice you suck it up with a pump). Somehow this gold gets bought and presumably makes its way to China to be melted down into something usable.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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DW: It is not an easy river to navigate. The boat is 30-40m long and there are often sections with massive rocks that have to be navigated through carefully while respecting the constant fast flow of the river. On the second day we actually discover the boat ran aground last year and everyone had to clamber a short distance to the shore. That was not in the intro brief or on the website.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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CR: The halfway stop is a small village entirely set up for slow boat residents to overnight in. It’s really quite nice though, hard to complain.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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CR: All this relaxing is hungry work. We have a super quiet evening, just enjoy a Beerlao and have a read before dinner. Once again, this massive restaurant was so empty. There were more staff than customers. Laotian economy outside of the big city is incomprehensible.
DW: I was told my schnozz got a bit burnt and am sad.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Flow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2618,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-thailand-laos-cambodia-2026"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2567"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2567\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2655,"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2567\/revisions\/2655"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}