With the paving of roads in Luang Prabang & Udomxai provinces, regular boat traffic downriver of Muang Khua has decreased. When river levels are high enough, daily slow boats still link Hat Sa & Muang Khua, serving little villages in a mountainous province that has only a few sections of sealed road - paved by neighbouring countries in order to access whatever resources they want to harvest & ship out of Phongsaly.
A cold wave was sweeping over north Lao, with single digit temperatures in Phongsaly & Houa Panh provinces. Cold + windchill + drizzle = locals saw to it that the cat & other female passengers were stuffed into the sheltered part of the boat, hence limited photos with the restricted view:
Everyone & everything still got wet though. The boat leaked along its entire length & some of the Nam Ou hitched a ride by pooling at the bottom of the boat, insisting on being carried instead of helping to carry the boat downriver.
Green forest:
With Mr Boatboy's green mouthwash flowing by:
Having most of the men at the unsheltered front of the boat served another purpose - to keep their cigarettes as far away as possible from the jerrycan of fuel & the fuel-soaked wooden engine housing at the rear. To fill the fuel tank, a rubber hose was used as a siphon, & to fill the hose, Mr Boatboy used his mouth to suck fuel into the hose from a jerrycan. Things didn't always proceed smoothly & the poor boy had to rinse his mouth several times with the Nam Ou. Some day when he is old & senior enough to be Mr Boatman, he will be in the position to order a future Mr Boatboy to handle such sh*twork.
Interlocking spurs shrouded in cloud:
Beautiful from a slowboat point of view, heartstopping from a speedboat point of view, especially if there is a slowboat taking up most of the narrow river channel at this point:
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