Day 36 - 37 (Laos)

By 11am we had all the material for what we believed would be the raft to end all rafts, the owner of the guest house being rather amused by our idea had sponsored us the wood for the raft and we had purchased two truck tubes to act as sponsins. Building went well and by 3pm we had all the staff of the guest house helping us nail the raft together as well as a new Irish traveller equally interested in our mission. 3:30pm was the do or die moment, with tons of locals all watching from the bank of the river....how can I put this properly......GLUG GLUG GLUG. The raft handled 1 person but two put it straight down to the bottom. And just then the skies opened and it came downs by the bucket loads so depressed and rather embarressed we retreated to the guest house to regroup and replan. We really believed that our hopes of cruising the Nam Tha river had gone down with the raft.

Day 37

Agreeing to let the dream go we arrived at the bus station enroute for Luang Probang ticket in hand and baggage at the ready with only 10min to departure, it happened in of those moments of brovado/craziness/impulse?? We had the tickets refunded, went back to the tyre shop bought an extra tyre, concocted another crazy plan and left for the river. The raft was now simply 3 tyres tied to each other, one of us on iether side and the lugguage in the middle....ingenious....Ok simple but it worked. We took of on a racing Nam Tha at an extremely high level, against advice from locals, and without oars but the bottom line was that we had finally embarked left on our crazy adventure.


Although, all feelings of jubilation were soon replaced with bad humour and mild grumpiness as the rain started again and hunger set in. We landed in a small village just before night fall to find food and shelter. After an hour of looking we found a school that had a decent overhanging roof. later a little boy brought us rice and fried fish to eat, so out of the rain and fed life was once again good, however we had begun talking about how much better a bamboo raft would be.... . That night we were attacked by a million and one mosquitoes, the realization that we were in a high malaria risk area never really set in.