We took a slow boat (or perhaps one could call it a junk) up the Mekong from Luang Prabang to the Thai border. We’ve seen several faces of the Mekong now. First, we took a longboat around Mekong Delta in Vietnam, where a branch of river meets the sea. Then we stayed on the stylish Mekong riverfront in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Vientiane has a more laid back waterfront on the Mekong. And now we’ve journeying through some beautiful rolling hills and craggy rock formations in Laos, seeing occasional fishermen or gold panners on the way.
We stopped at "Whiskey Village" yesterday, and saw how they distill fermented rice into high-proof firewater. We tried some of it — smooth.
And we breaked at Buddha Cave, a vertical limestone cave in a riverside cliff, that the devout have filled with Buddhas for centuries.
We overnighted at a beautiful lodge at the halfway point, that seems fairly socially responsible. The staff was incredibly nice, and we had a fun evening with some of our shipmates.
The next morning, the fog over the hills was pretty and reminded us of Ireland/Oregon.
We had some really great sweet rice candy wrapped in banana leaves with our tea.
And sat around doing nothing but watching the scenery and reading books.
hi lovelies,
this is an inane question, but how do you get your books? do you order from amazon as you go along?
rapturously reading about your travels weekly.
xoxo kat
Hi Kat,
It’s funny you should ask. We thought that’s what we’d be doing before we left. But then we realized there’s a “backpacker trail” just about everywhere — we’d had no idea. Basically (at least in Southeast Asia), in all the places popular with backpackers (and other types of travellers), there are slews of businesses geared around backpackers, such as cheap “guesthouses” for people to stay in, restaurants with reasonably priced food, internet cafes (where I’m at now), and used bookshops. Sometimes we feel we rely too much on the backpacker trail.
You’ll be interested to know, in Vietnam, there are actually ladies carrying 3-4 foot high bundles of books into backpacker restaurants trying to sell them to you. At first it’s charming, but after seeing ten of them during one meal, it’s annoying. And they sell PHOTOCOPIED books that are professionally bound, as apparently photocopying is cheap enough to make it worthwhile, and the copyright laws are lax. We ran into photocopied books in other countries too, but only saw those peddlers in Saigon.
Miss you!
xoxo
Summer