The vessel taking us down the Mekong River looks like an old military patrol boat, with heavy metal gunwales and a sturdy hull built for navigating the mud and reeds of shallow waters.
Standing at the helm with the wind whipping through my clothes, I feel like Captain Willard on his mission to hunt down war-maddened Colonel Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. Yet I'm not in Cambodia, but far to the north, on the border of Thailand and Laos. And my only mission is to arrive in the beautiful city of Luang Prabang through its most picturesque gateway.
The Mekong is the world's 11th longest river. It starts in the mountains on the northeast rim of the Tibetan plateau and flows more than 4,300km through or along the border of six countries - China, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and finally Vietnam, where it empties into the South China Sea.
Only China has so far dammed the Mekong, and controversially so: many communities still depend on the river for food, water, fertile silt, trade and transport. But there are signs that governments further downstream may also cave in to the lure of lucrative hydropower development. Feasibility studies are being carried out at seven sites for potentially huge dams, two of which lie on the stretch of river we are in.
Our boat comes with a captain and a couple of accommodating cabin crew who have a knack for delivering cold beer at exactly the right hour and conjuring up three-course Lao lunches from a tiny galley. All that's left to do is watch, at the leisurely pace of the current, the day-to-day lives of the people along the riverbank.
The trip sets out from the Lao town of Houay Xai, with Thailand on one side and Laos on the other. The eight metres of riverbank exposed when the water level drops from its wet-season high to dry-season low belongs to Laos, providing extra land for locals and a sequence of fascinating vignettes.