The girl on the slow boat to Luang Prabang was trapped in the developing body of a young teen, her frizzy brown hair tied back in a messy ponytail. Her prepubescent breasts protruded from her thin t-shirt, braless, a sight parents in more puritanical countries would have kept well hidden. She was a moon-faced child, plump and jolly, squawking in French and staring back unabashed, exploding into sudden bursts of strident giggles. There is, my boyfriend and I whispered to each other, something off about her. (We had, naturally, started gossiping about the other passengers seconds after they stepped onboard).
It took a few hours for the boat to fill, first with those who had stayed in the small border town overnight and then those who had been driven over from Thailand the morning of. Almost everyone was a westerner. Truth is, when it comes to domestic travels, most Laotians opt for the bus, a much more practical albeit less poetic journey than that of the slow boat.
And yet, its virtue had been so greatly extolled in guidebooks and online travel blogs that we had expressly planned part of the trip around the northern Thai-Laos border in order to take this ride down the Mekong River.
Pre-departure, tension for an uprising was percolating. The slow boat was clearly divided into superior and inferior sections: the coveted open-air front, the bathroom and snack stand, and the covered engine room, where the thunderous roar of the machinery was notoriously deafening (blogs warned: come early to stake out a seat up front!). Those who hadn’t come three hours in advance to the pier, as we had, found themselves stuck all the way in the back, where families of locals had already been ordered to stack like canned sardines. A few young European backpackers staged a walk-off to force the staff to start another boat where they could sit up front. None of the boat company people, however, gave much of a damn. They must have dealt with no-sitting-near-engine strikers every time they ran a tourist vessel. As the boat was about to set sail, the protestors returned on board, tails between legs, and sat on the floor of the aisle dividing the rows at the boat’s front, more willing to be climbed over by passengers eager to relieve their beer-laden bladders than to dwell in the second-class engine compartment.
A group of middle-aged Irish tourists seated right behind the captain befriended a disheveled guitarist and started singing every song from Hey Jude to Auld Lang Syne, rowdy and drunk from a handle of vodka half decimated by mid-morning. The water of the Meikong River was brown and slow-moving. On dirt banks along the edge, children descended from clusters of bamboo huts to wave to the tourists. One by one, the local families in the back of the boat got off at one of these unnamed dirt banks, bulging canvas sacks of commodities slung over their shoulders. (Note: land-locked Laos is one of the poorest countries in the world, in no small part due to the unexploded bombs dropped by American fighter jets during the Vietnam War that still pepper hills and fields, rendering vast areas of otherwise agrarian land worthless.)
Upon disembarkation at the overnight stop, children swarmed around us with printouts of guesthouse adverts. The Mekong was aglow in the last light of day.
We searched for Laotian food, but restaurants here only offered pseudo-Asian dishes: this or that with curry, this or that stir-fry.
This was not uncommon in small towns along the “Banana Pancake Trail” (named, I’ll conjecture, for the abundance and popularity of cafes offering backpackers the south-east Asian ‘backpacker staples’: exotic fruit shakes, western breakfast and pancakes, cold local beers amounting to a week of salary in local wages, etc.) And so this was indeed our dinner: a vegetable stir-fry and a pineapple shake, into which I poured the last of a flask of Thai whiskey. We were alone in the restaurant save for two young girls who cooked in the semi-enclosed kitchen and an old Caucasian man who was nursing a few beers alone one table over. I imagined the people on the boat socializing at the bars around us, forging bonds and learning each others’ names and stories, and about all the new acquaintances we were not making.
Silence and reserve are far from my defining attributes, but on that boat, something about that boisterous community of strangers made me recede deeper than ever into a shell.
I had saved up after a year of employment to travel and cobbled together a yearlong trajectory that meshed long-term hiking with Eurotrip-style hostelling, dwelling with friends and relatives, and, of course, good old fashioned backpacking through South East Asia. It was on this last leg of the trip, which on paper promised the most dazzling confusion of the senses, that I began to feel trapped in a well-trodden illusion. The street food and markets and monks were here, yes, but so was the eternal touristic paradox: resenting the presence of fellow tourists. The further we forayed into exoticism and poverty, the more constricted I felt as a foreign visitor. We were not 19th century ethnographers, discovering Amazonian tribes or observing deep-rooted existences impermeable to our presence. The reality was crude and unsurprising: what little economic activity existed here was centered on the tourist industry. Our meager daily budget, which definitionally was to be spent, was necessarily courted by one vendor or another, and options for any food, beverage, transportation, accommodation or activity had incorporated the consumption footprints of the hundreds of thousands of travelers who had taken their wallets out before us.
This is a reality of traveling in non-first world countries that, I think, every traveler ought to accept: your relationship to your host country is, first and foremost, economical. In many areas of the world (and especially South East Asia), much of your experiences will be shaped by your economic status as a tourist, and not your quest for life’s true meaning. Unless you can sustain your journey “off the beaten path”, you will time after time find yourself surrounded by fellow tourists, engaged in an overtly or surreptitiously touristic activity. Prior to coming to South East Asia, I had seen the same social media narrative from almost every person who had been backpacking there: pictures of them standing before Cambodian temples, posing with baggy “elephant pants”, arms raised by a waterfall, grazing the sand in Ko Phi Phi. I found myself in many of these pictures, sometimes posting these pictures, or surrounded by people capturing and posting these pictures. Some of these people were the very same backpackers on our slow boat to Luang Prabang, and at any rate most of these backpackers had, or will, take the slow boat to Luang Prabang, as you may someday.
The next day, we were greeted at the pier by a bigger boat, and everyone western fit into the open-air section. The moon-faced girl sat up front with her parents, two tan, French middle-agers with leathered skin and mysterious smiles. The girl made drawings for the passengers in her close vicinity, asking for their names before she wrote them down on paper, but often frowning as she tried to spell. Her mother explained that the girl was eleven but with a mental age of four, and that she will always have a mental age of four.
The moon-faced girl laughed, what now sounded, in our guilt for having ever found her unsettling, like a crystalline child’s laughter. She was undoubtedly the most social being on the boat, some kind of a special treasure imparted on us all, an epicenter of life in a microcosm. Yet it now seemed to me that everyone here, whether stuck in a gimmick or excited by it, was making the best out of the boat trip. In the tug-of-war between the desire to experience something culturally authentic and the inevitability that one’s companions on the “banana pancake” trail will predominantly be people like you, doing the things you do, our boat-mates had decided that they might as well embrace the communal experience. Around us, a socially gauche Dutch man was handing out beers, and a tomboyish, squarely built young Argentinian woman dispensed safety ratings for various Latin American destinations to her incredulous audience: “Buenos Aires? Safe. Peru? Very safe. Chile? Very safe. Venezuela? Safe. Columbia? Yes, yes, safe. Brazil is safe, ok. Mexico? Mexico is, em, safe, yes, they all are safe if you do nothing stupid.” Young women made pacts to travel to remote towns together. Hackneyed topics in politics and philosophy were debated with genuine gusto. And, intermittently, each pair of eyes would return to the four year-old in a teen’s body, and find her laughing or wrestling with what used to be a complete stranger.
When we docked at our final pier at around 4 or 5 p.m., the moon-faced girl started dispensing post cards from a souvenir album. She seemed to be constantly giving her possessions away, to be leaving mementos of her existence. No one had yet breached into the farewells. Once on land, packs of passengers would pay a set price for a tuk-tuk ticket and be driven into Luang Prabang, six miles downriver, by motorcycle-drawn rickshaws. My boyfriend and I started walking down the highway, deploying legs sore from two slow days on the boat, towards the mountain range that shrouded the city. Around us, the vegetation was lush and the sun scorching. One by one, the tuk-tuks throttled by us, carfuls of tourists hugging backpacks to their chests, some still deep in conversation, some staring at us wide-eyed as they left us in the dust.
They say you either love or hate the slow boat. Frankly, I still don’t know which it was for me.
Imagine we had been on the slow boat a day earlier or a day later—would the essence of its ephemeral communitarianism have changed? Would we have partaken in it?
To the bitter end, we never learned any of the passengers’ names. Yet I remember most of their faces, and especially that of the moon-faced girl. I do not even recall her name, though I did overhear it, and I think that through the fog of memory it will one day come back to me.