slow boat to pak lai

on the first morning in luang prabang i saw a small printout taped to the window of a travelling agency advertising a tour to the lao elephant festival in pak lai. i spoke to a young man inside. the "tour" was basically a drive there and back. he suggested i find my own way there.
the option to travel by road looked tedious and down right dangerous. everyone said the public bus would take at least two days. but one look at the map and i noticed that pak lai was right on the east bank of the mekong. so i walked down to the peir and spoke to a few boat drivers about hiring a boat. that night ben and i spoke bravely of buying a boat and floating all the way to saigon, but in the end we hired a boat and left the following morning with great expectations.

the weather was rather cool, and did not exactly fit with my idea of a tropical cruise. and our driver, who had been so friendly the day before when we checked out his boat, had become quite unfriendly. he steered the boat from the front, and all day long he would glance over his shoulder at us, or possibly his stern and pregnant wife, with a look of fear in his eyes, as if he expected to encounter some ongoing disaster behind him. i too began to peer towards the back of the boat as that same fear began to grip me.
as the sun dropped behind the low hills to the north east we rounded a five hundred foot limestone cliff and pulled into a small village on the opposite shore. the engine cut and we could hear the screech of some owl way up on the cliff, looking down on us.
our boat driver, who told us his name was mr. c., grapped me and led me up the hill into the village. we had to get dinner, he said. chicken. as we walked through the town the sun had completely surrender to the horizon, and we began to stumble around the dusty houses. we encountered a few fires in yards, and a few lao looked into the darkness at what must have seemed, even in the darkness, a little foriegn. a drunk accosted us.
then mr. c. pointed to a house and said, chicken. i could he the quiet throaty clucks of the chickens in the pen under the house. several locals gathered. as mr. c. and a few locals entered the pen through a door on the opposite side, a kid, just in front of me, reached in and grapped a chicken by its leg. there was a brief struggle. then mr.c. emerged with the beautiful bird in his arms. dinner, he said. i looked over at ben and cath. ben looked a little stunned, but poor cath was rather upset. they stayed behind as mr c and i took the bird back to the boat.
leter we had a spicey chicken soup, tom gai, some sticky rise, khao niaw, and a spice fish sauce for dipping called nam phi. we drank our red wine quickly. mr. c. brought out some lao moonshine made from rice. we got quite drunk eating our chicken on a boat floating in the mekong under the wall of limestone. we stumbled back up the hill into the town and slept on the floor of a wooden house.