Travel Day: Pak Beng to Luang Prabang

I barely got an hour of sleep last night – the sound of the guy downstairs puking his guts out permeated my room’s paper thin walls until around 1 o’clock when he settled in for the night. The neighbourhood roosters began crowing not long after that. The final straw came when a noisy drum procession marched through the town’s main street at around quarter past four. I carefully got dressed in the dark, making sure not to wake up my neighbours, and made my way downstairs to see what the commotion was all about. The drumming had since stopped and the offending parties had departed, but it was curious to see that the town had come alive. According to the guesthouse owner, the morning procession didn’t have any cultural or religious significance as I had thought. Instead, it was simply the town’s early morning wakeup call.

Since sleep was no longer in the equation, I sat along the front of the guesthouse and watched as the townsfolk carried on. Adolescent children darted back and forth from the communal water supply, gathering buckets of water to bring home, shop fronts were carefully arranged in preparation for the morning exodus of tourists, children swept the front porches of their homes as their parents worked inside.

I took a seat above the docks to watch a cloud crawl its way over a mountain at sunrise:


Today’s journey was essentially the same as yesterday’s, except it was in a painfully smaller boat.

That said, I’m glad I went with the slow boat option because it has afforded me a fine group of traveling companions: a fellow Canuck, an Israeli guy and two very lovely Swiss girls. This is certainly a welcomed change from traveling solo.

Our protection for the trip: A bored teenager with a loaded kalashnikov.