Detour

(NOT SO) SMOOTH SAILING It was the romance of it all that persuaded me to take the slow boat to Luang Prabang from Huay Xai, meandering down the Mekong through a veil of river mist like some intrepid adventurer of old ... Well, O.K., romance and fear: the fast boats have a reputation for dispatching passengers to the murky depths.

At $13, the slow boat was half the fare for the souped-up floating dragsters that rend the Mekong's serenity with their high-pitched whine—and probably 50 times safer. That it took two days to chug the 300 km downstream instead of six hours seemed a reasonable trade-off, particularly after watching boatloads of spray-drenched adventurers go roaring past, teeth clenched and legs braced against every bone-rattling bounce.

Yes, the slow boat was definitely the way to go. We were soon scudding down the river in a small wooden boat stuffed with twice as many passengers as the dozen plank benches were designed to hold. I had expected the dry season to be the safest time, but in fact the opposite is true. "It's much safer when the river's full," said Mr. Hong, the captain. "April is the worst time. It's very hard to dodge the rocks." And indeed, it was white-knuckle stuff in some sections, where the river narrowed dramatically between towers of scoured rock. Vicious eddies buffeted and sucked at the boat as we bobbed perilously close to hull-ripping crags. The waterway's violence was apparent everywhere; shipwrecks bleached on the banks alongside vast uprooted trees.

A few hours out of Pakbeng, where we overnighted in a basic but adequate guesthouse, one passenger inquired as to whether he might partake of some marijuana on the roof. "No," replied Mr. Hong. Despite the refusal, a sweet scent soon filled the boat. "I'm not stopping if he falls off," shrugged the captain. A Japanese photographer fell off the roof of his boat three months ago and was sucked down into a whirlpool. "There was nothing I could do," Mr. Hong said. "They found his body a few weeks later—in Vietnam."