Slow Boat To Laos

And so we decided to take this slow boat ride into Laos. The advice from Lonely Planet wasn’t far off – indeed humans get treated like hapless cattle on occasions. Our boat (over)brimmed with mostly backpackers like us, and the operators seem to hold the belief that all of us knew what’s happening, so instructions aren’t necessary. Even what time the boat will leave. It gets tragic for some travelers who aren’t conversant in English as people start bouncing updates off each other.

The boat made a pitstop in the middle of nowhere. Small kids from a distant village then came racing by with snacks and drinks, shuttling with heavy bottles of over-priced Beer Lao to feed the alcoholic habits of the frat-party-like backpackers in our midst. It gets a bit heart-wrenching. Thoughts fly – do these kids get to attend school and why are they here selling beer? Where are their parents? What opportunities lie for them ahead?

Linda (a Thai we befriended and who’s working in Singapore) shared with us during dinner that the people in Lao are much poorer than those in Thailand, and the outward syndrome of “greed” stems primarily from the lack of opportunities in Laos. A structural and systemic problem indeed. So who’s to blame the kid for (presumably) skipping school and sell Beer Lao to touristy farangs? If I were that kid, I might just run a bit faster to reach that farang waving that fat dollar in the air. That could possibly mean a difference in whether my household gets any electricity that week.