A Beer and a Backpack

Brimful with sleepy travellers and sacks of rice, our creaky wooden boat rocks noisily down the Mekong into Laos. Steep green valley sides drift past, cloaked in silken mist and tree cover. Yesterday we spent eight hours packed onto this vessel; this morning, over twice as many bodies climbed aboard and we have ten hours to go. Western safety officials would lose their minds.

I’ve surrendered yesterday’s rigid bench to the surging crowd and am on the floor, wedged snugly between my backpack, some enormous bags of rice and the legs of a moany Englishman. I am dangerously over-caffeinated thanks to the crinkly-eyed lady selling coffee down at the back of the boat, strong and dark and sticky with condensed milk. I scribble in my journal, enjoying both the occupation and the occasional cigarette, which I think cultivates an enigmatic, writerly air.

The boat sways on. My friends are playing cards with fellow travellers, stretching across ragged backpacks and bronzed legs to swap cards. An unsteady cage hangs out the back of our boat, an unfazed rooster wobbling within. Something smells of curry. An old man in a canoe floats by and smiles, his two excited dogs panting happily and rocking his boat.

A Thai man leans over the rice to tap my shoulder. He points at my journal and offers me 135 baht if he can read it. I giggle. I am very poor and half tempted, and if it didn’t contain such unambiguous details of our Full Moon debauchery two weeks previously I would probably take the cash and let him at it. I thank him and decline. The sun sinks behind blued hilltops; comatose bodies curl against unforgiving walls in the dim light. The card players lapse into quiet contentment over cans of cheap beer.

We drift ashore in Luang Prabang. The air fills with chatter, eager offers from hostel owners and drug dealers. Laos pulls us in with warm, open arms, and we sink into it. The buffalo larb we order for dinner takes two hours to make it to our table; the restaurant owner grins crookedly at us and tells us this is "Lao time,” local code for “doing it whenever it feels good.”

We crack open more beers, because we have nowhere to be and nothing to do except cuddle up to this concept of letting it all slide, so foreign to perennially time-pressured Western minds. We could have taken the bus from Thailand and avoided the rickety boat, but we would’ve missed out: it was our unhurried cradle, quietly rocking us into a new world of languid, content disarray and slow smiles.