Happy Cruising – Nong Khiaw to Luang Prabang

But let’s start at the beginning: We did not want to miss a slowboat journey in Laos and headed to the sleepy town Nang Khiaw. The 250km journey took us 6 hours and lots of Tigerbalm under our nares to ignore the puking teenagers in front of us.

In Nong Khiaw we wanted to take the boat to Luang Prabang. This sounded like a plan. Unfortunately we did not take the low season in consideration. The only people riding slowboats nowadays are tourists and the boats only take off if there are enough tourists. You do not know if there are enough passengers until 15 minutes before the boat leaves. There are no such things as list to register the day before. We started to ask around but did not find any tourists planning to take the boat the next day. The operators did also not sound promising, saying that in the best case chances are 50/50. We were really disappointed and thought about chartering our own boat. However, it was quite expensive for Laos so we surrendered and agreed on taking the bus. 

The next morning we were ready to take the bus, when we suddenly saw more and more people walking to the pier. Mysteriously many tourists, except the people we asked the day before, decided to go by boat to Luang Prabang. Yeahh lucky us, we quickly changed our plans and got ourselves on a 6-hours boat ride on the Nam Ou. We enjoyed the sun and the stunning landscape around us as well as the cool means of transportation. The captain and his mechanic were constantly busy fixing something, so we had several extra breaks along the way.

A few kilometers before Luang Prabang the Nam Ou merges with the Mekong. There we ended up floating in our slowboat. The staff was not very talkative; they just kind of paddled towards an unknown destination, maybe Luang Prabang? Never saw such an unmotivated paddler before, sometimes it seemed that we were going backwards. After a while the captain started pointing at a bigger boat on the shore. As we got closer we noticed that the boat was actually a floating gas station. Seemed that all the fixing used more gas than usual… but they had a plan!

Not even five minutes after the gas stop we arrived in Luang Prabang, although we nearly oversaw it. Being one of the main cities in Laos we expected it to be touristy and noisy. The old quarter, which is a UNESCO heritage site, is very sleepy and quite, at least in low season. We tried to explore it but it was, again, too hot to do it properly. Intense cultural interest evaporates at 42 °C. Nevertheless, we covered the main sites and Luang Prabang left a good impression.