Laos: Boats, Baguettes and Strong Coffee
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Well, we can't say many positive things about colonialism in general, but the hot sausage in a baguette and strong coffee that we found in the dusty bus stations of rural Laos were  welcome remnants of the French influence.  Laos proved to be quite a bit different from Thailand. It was palpably communist, notably poorer, and mainly rural.  What we saw of Laos was largely from boat trips and bus windows.  Entering Laos we crossed the Mekong river from Thailand to the port city of HuayXia, found Mr. Singh's bungalow guesthouse, and booked a 2-day boat trip up the Nam Tha river to a small remote town called Luang Nam Tha.  A less-traveled route, the trip was classic. 

The two of us and Rom, an Israeli traveling on his own, met at the ferry landing to board a very skinny, long open wooden skiff-like boat, powered by a small Toyota truck engine on which was mounted on a 10-foot shaft and propeller.  Our driver PonSai, probably all of 22 years old, fired it up, loudly so, and we took off.    The first 2 hours were wet as we travelled down the Mekong. The waves and wind were well more than this little toothpick/plywood craft could stand.  We then turned upstream into the Nam Tha.  We powered our way up rapids, through shallows, past women standing waist-high in the river hand-harvesting dense bright green seaweed, fat-free men in their underwear fishing with nets or poling a long-boat against the current.  Groups of naked or half-dressed children waved excitedly from the banks. 

It was hot in the bright sun and it was never clear that the boat would make it up any given rapid, but we enjoyed the 8-hour trip up the river.  Villages appeared around each lazy bend, various goods and passengers were being loaded and unloaded from similar boats, water buffalo swam near the shore and the banks were neatly planted with vegetable gardens. In this dry season the sandy banks are above the water level and rich with the sediment of the prior seasons floods.  We spent the night in a small riverside village where the local 10 year-old girls sold us some beers and the village elder grinned as he suggested we buy him one too.  After a dinner of sticky rice and omelets provided by a local family  we fended off the many opportunities to purchase local textiles and crawled into our mosquito nets to sleep.
The next day, the classic Asian "change of plan" began.  First we were ordered to join with 4 Germans in a boat only slightly larger than our own, along with all of our backpacks and a half-dozen locals.  We declined vigorously and our boatmen begrudgingly powered onward up river  in our own boat.  2 hours later we got the "river is too low" ploy, well documented in the Lonely Planet.  They tried to herd the 3 of us plus the 4 Germans into ONE small sawngthaw (mini-pickup-like taxi).  But, as one of the Germans and Bill tried to negotiate at least TWO sawngthaws, Deb held strong and demanded that we proceed by boat to Luang Nam Tha (LNT).  After much resistance from our captains we finally piled back into the boat.   3 hours later, having climbed out of the boat into thigh-deep rushing water 10 times to move the boat off of some rock, our boatmen claimed, "the engine...is feeenish," and pulled onto the bank.  We finally acquiesced and climbed the river bank up to a small village. As the afternoon sun blazed, we tried with limited success to get the local children interested in a game of hackey-sack.  Meanwhile transport was being arranged by our driver who came back with a half-smile to tell us that a small tractor pulling a little cart  would be our 2-hour ride to LNT.   Alongside the driver's wife, their kid of about 12, loads of their stuff, our boat driver, and our backpacks, we piled in.  Averaging about 3 mph we made our way over the hills to LNT by sunset, hot, sweaty, and covered in red dust.  It was a quintessential travel day.
Luang Nam Tha is a small village near the Chinese border boasting multiple ethnic residents such as the Hmong and Aca peoples.  After some breakfast Pho,  we decided to take a sawngthaw 2 hours north to an even more remote village called Muang Sing.  In the bus station we fended off minority Aca women who, speaking through bright red lips and black teeth stained by beetlenut, were desperate to sell us some of their beaded bracelets and embroidered fabric.  In Muang Sing we expected to see handicrafts from various minority cultures, handwoven silks and a lively market.  Not quite what it was billed, it was still an enjoyable excursion with beautiful mountainous landscape and the Chinese border 10 km in the distance. 
An 8-hour scenic bus ride took us through the hilly, farm-etched countryside to Luang Prabang.  Now a world heritage site, Luang Prabang is a beautiful town of notable French influence sitting on the MekongRiver.  We haggled with a local boatmen for a long- boat ride up the Mekong to the Pac Ou caves.  On the return journey Bill was asked to take the helm while the boatman relieved himself off the roof of the cabin!....the pilothouse with its tiny steering wheel was just barely sufficient for the diminutive pilot and his tiny Rubbermaid stool...Bill almost required a crow-bar in order to adopt the squat necessary to keep the boat on course! 

Strolls through the streets visiting ornate Laos-style Buddhist temples (low eaves nearly reaching the ground and broad porches) admiring silk and handicrafts, and savoring coffee on upstairs verandas occupied our few days in Luang Prabang.  New Years Eve 2004 was quiet for us, despite the neighborhood karaoke that continued until after 4:00 am (we expect that between 2 and 4 it was a single older man singing to himself, though at top volume!)
New Orleans came to mind several times as we noted the substantial similarity in architecture and pace in the larger towns of Laos.  Smaller villages had teak houses on stilts, with outdoor verandas, rusting corrugated tin roofs and decorated railings reminded us of the bayou..  The similarities were striking....those French! 
Our last stop was the adventure town of VangVieng, a new backpacker favorite, where the limestone karst scenery was similar to that of Guilin and Yangshuo in SE China, the Ko Chang area of the Gulf of Thailand and the Ha Long Bay scenery in northern Viet Nam.  We rented bikes, kayaked on the river, and explored some mammoth caves where villagers hid during bombing raids conducted by the U.S. during the Viet Nam/American war.  Again beautiful rural landscape, friendly locals, and of course coffee and baguettes made Laos a true favorite. In Vientiane, the capital, we caught our flight  to Ha Noi, Viet Nam where we would meet up with Bill's parents!