A note about 'The Traveller'

One of the weird things about this trip is the lack of travellers that Andrea and I have met that we have actually liked (apart from the lovely Germans who we took the bus to Chiang Mai with and were quite possibly the nicest couple I have ever met). The boat trip was a case in kind for some of the more horrendous types of traveller: let me describe some of the more memorable people and then you might sympathise with us and realise we're not that unfriendly!

First up were 2 girls we noticed trying to cross the border in Thailand and making a mess of it. One had gone slightly overboard on the ethnic and was in flowing skirts, flowing hair (with a flower in it), a sarong draped over the shoulders, dangly earrings and some kind of natural sunscreen on her face which looks like she'd been rolling in the mud. They were the type of people who have pleasure in showing off how absorbed in the culture they were. As soon as we got on the sangthaew to the boat the girl with the flower in her hair called her mum and proceeded to lecture her on how to say 'kaa' properly in Thai (women say kaa at the end of words to make it more polite). Having established her mum had a good kaa she then described how 'intense' the border crossing had been and her first impressions of Laos (which she had been in all of 5 minutes). Was she for real...?!
We also met some guys on the boat crossing the border who spent the whole 5 minute boat ride moaning about how they had got ripped off they had been with their tickets, then how drunk they had been for their entire trip around Thailand. This does seem to be the norm for people in Thailand, I just can't quite get excited about it any more.
Another memorable group was the french parents and 8 year old child (the only kid) on the boat. The man was the tallest and lankiest I'd ever seen, wearing 'ethnic' clothes and kept doing weird contortion exercises on the boat as well as being the only person brave/stupid to swim in the fast flowing muddy water; the poor kid was rather a brat but covered in mosquito bites all over her face.
We were sitting opposite some of the most horrendous americans I'd ever met, slightly overweight, chain smoking and on the Beer Lao from 10 when the boat left, they took up the whole of the aisle and proceeded to get more and more noisy as the day went on; luckily the girl sniffed out a spliff and had a couple of 'tokes' in the afternoon which calmed her down a bit!
I was also sitting in front of Andy from Little Britain's big brother who smoked almost in my face and kept sitting on the side of the boat with his rather large behind in my back.

The one saving grace on the boat was meeting Rich again who I had met in KL in Malaysia and his friend, they have restored our faith in ever meeting some nice travellers! And they had the Economist which made Andrea very very happy. And the nice Irishman sitting next to us on the second day who alas was a smoker but made up for it by being charming. Halelujah!

Unfortunately LP being extremely small we have managed to run into most of these people at some point during our 3 days here. We ended up sitting right next to the obnoxious americans at dinner last night, typical!