Today I left Thailand and caught a river taxi across the river to Houei Xia in Lao. The immigration was the easiest I had to deal with as last night I paid at the hotel the visa fees, 1600 Baht and gave them my passport and completed the application form. They did all the paperwork. I did not have to go through immigration to leave the country and once I arrived in Laos as I was our part of a group I just waited for them to hand my passport out.

We then went to the place where we caught a slow boat from. When we got there we were told that the boat would not be leaving for another 2 hours, so I decided to go for a walk.

I went to a telephone shop in the city and order a SIM card for my iPhone so I could use it to access the Internet and email. When I got it I could only use it to make a phone call, not for using the internet. I then had to ring the company and with the combination of my hearing impairment and try to communicate with someone with a foreign accent it was not easy. From what I can work out, I had to go to the phone company store to have it activated. Why I couldn't do it where I was I don't know. Well I guess I will have to wait till I get to Luang Pra Beng to get it, well at least the SIM card was cheap, 10,000 kips ($1.20 Aust)

About an hour after I left the boat for a walk, my tour guide came and picked me up to take me on his motor bike back to the boat as they had decided to leave now!

The scenery on the river was just lovely. On both side of the river there were tall mountains and the river was in part wide, though not as wide as the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. I was told my the tour guide in Houei Xia, that the river had already travelled over 4000 km to where we were and that the head of the river started in the Tibet Plateau.

Certainly it was a beautiful river and along it we saw the country side of Laos with small villages appearing along the river, with water buffalo on the side of the river as well as cattles. There were fisherman fishing from their small boats as well as numerous fishing net. The local certainly seems to be depended on the river for living.

I wondered how the local Laos people depends on for living as there didn't seems to be too much fishing and the mountain was too deep for farming and certainly there didn't seems to be too much farming occurring apart from occasional bananas growing now and then.

The journey for this trip took 7 hours to complete and we arrived in a small village, Pak Beng where we spend the night. The village was small and is set up as a tourist's village to accommodate the tourist traveling from Houe Xia to Luang Pra Bang.

A few comments on this trip:
1. I had read on previous website that it was necessary to buy a pillow because we would be sitting on hard seat. This doesn't appear to be the case any more as the boat now have car seat on them.
2. I had the option of traveling to Luang Pra Bang via a speed boat and I would strongly recommend anyone thinking of doing it is not to do it despite that you would be travelling in one day instead of two. The reason are there are many rocks on the river and accidents do regularly happens on the river and people do look uncomfortable sitting in it as you do need to wear a helmet and a life jacket and you are open to the elements of the weather.