The slow boat down the Mekong river - Laos to Thailand

I didn’t think I’d get the chance to do this journey, one listed as a must, as people had been going on about it not being possible as the water was too low, blah, blah, blah. Don’t listen to them, get yourself to one of the starting points and see if the boats are going. They normally are, even if it's the very dry season, which it  was when I was there.

So how to do it?

Buy your ticket at the boat docks, not at an office in town. I was going from Luang Prabang (LP) to the Thai border and visited many offices and thought I’d got the best price, ha! I paid 250 000 kip for a ticket all the way from LP to Thailand, but if you buy your ticket in LP to Pak Beng (PB) it’s 100 000 kip then PB to Huay Xai (HX) it’s another 100 000 kip and you can buy your tickets on the boat.

Tubing in Vang Vieng

First off: you don’t need a tube to go tubing, but get one at least once, otherwise it’s not tubing, is it?

To hire a tube, it was 115 000 kip, 60 000 of that is the deposit for the tube, which has to be returned by 6pm that day. Needless to say we didn’t get our deposits back, we weren’t back in time, nor did we have our tubes. The 115 000 includes the 10 000 kip tuk tuk ride to the starting point on the river. People tend to begin between 12-2pm, any later and you don’t get very far down the river and to many bars before it gets dark.