Rolling...Rolling...Rolling Down the Mekong River

Today you're in for a special treat! Not only do we have a few days' worth of fun adventures to regale you with, but we're going to bring extra excitement to the story telling by alternating paragraphs between me and Debbie. Therefore you'll get both Debbie's witty and insightful style and my humorless, descriptive take on things. Should be a good mix.

Before we begin, I should note that there are actually only 762 curves between Pai and Chiang Mai (not 768 as I said in my last post), and John rocked them all and made it back to Chiang Mai (and ultimately home to Oakland) safe and sound.

OK, so now our story.

Mike: We boarded a minibus at 8:00pm on Thursday. Given the windiness of road to Pai (762 curves!) we knew we were in for a wild ride. Since we wanted to be able to sleep and not vomit, we decided the best thing to do before boarding the minibus was to down a few beers. So, yes, we were quite tipsy when we boarded. And that whole falling asleep plan would have worked out great if I didn't need to stay awake enough not to fly into the door (or Debbie's arm) every time we took a turn. The problem is that the drivers don't find it necessary to stay in their own lanes, so they take curves at ridiculous speeds and you really can't avoid flying around helplessly. At least, I couldn't...Debbie had the window seat. I thought I was going to have some room to brace myself on the other side, as no one was sitting there when we took off from town. But then about 10 minutes down the road we picked up a very large, burned out Australian hippie who in turn did his best not to crush me on those turns. I don't know what was worse...his size/heft or the fact that the only conversation he could make was about bands he had seen. I'm telling you: BURNED OUT.

Debbie: We pulled in to a town on the Thai border at around 3 am, where a dude came out of nowhere and was like..."Take any room, have a nice sleep, see you at 7!", he said it with cheer, like it was more than 4 hours away. After an awkward encounter which involved having to make more of an explanation than necessary that the burned out Aussie should not be in our room with one double bed, we went to sleep. A restful 4 hours later, we were fed breakfast and told to load up into the back of a truck to head to the border. It took some rearranging to get everyone and their stuff in... and the truck started to move...and we realized we had left someone behind! A woman from the hotel grabbed her motorbike and followed the truck, and we all made it safely to the border. We checked out of Thailand, and headed down to taxi boats across the river. It was at this point that I fell into the Mekong river a little bit.... Don't worry! I was ok! Dirty, but ok... It just turned out that what I thought was dirt was really compact sand, and about a foot of it fell off, with me on it... After that minor mishap, it was on to the Laos border, then a chat about how epic our journey would be and how to get the best seats on the boat...however, by the time they let us get on the boat we were the last ones on and had to settle for whatever we could find.

Mike: In truth, the boat trip itself was pretty uneventful. The boat was long, fairly narrow, and wooden, with (really uncomfortable) two-person benches on either side. Your options for going down the river are the slow boat (2 days) or a speed boat (1 day), but the speed boat is described as a harrowing and/or near-death experience. Actually, a number of people die on them each year, as they're really not much more than surf boards with car motors on the back (to cite Lonely Planet). We saw a few of them go by during our two-day journey, and all of the passengers were wearing helmets and rain gear. The slow boat, on the other hand, is much safer (although at the beginning of the trip we were told that recent water levels have been so low that some of the boats have run aground in the middle of the river). But as I said, our journey was blessedly uneventful. The only incident of note was when the boat was piloted towards shore about an hour into the trip and five or so kids (ranging from maybe seven to thirteen years old) got on with baskets of beer, cigarettes, soda, and chips to sell. Seeing a really adorable seven year old walking through the boat hawking "Beer Lao" in the cutest voice imaginable was heartbreaking in both a good and bad way. Otherwise the best part of the journey was simply the people on board (there were probably about 70 of us), including Americans, Australians, English, Israelis, a Dutch woman, a German guy, and a French woman living in New Zealand who is travelling with her ADORABLE 3.5 year old son Matteo. There was lots of socializing, beer drinking, reading, napping, and singing/music-playing. And of course some of the 20-something English dudes smoking joints in the back of the boat. All in all a lazy trip down a lazy river.

Debbie: All told, our butts were sore, but we were super glad we did the slow boat.  We're off to Vang Vieng tomorrow for more awesome scenery and tubing down a river, hopefully with loads of our new friends. Keep your eyes peeled for our Luang Prabang post (I'll give you a hint. it will be up tomorrow)