The Best Women's Travel Writing by Lavinia Spalding

and, with daylight fading, made camp. By now, the boat was leaking like an old wooden bucket. The Skipper had a long night of bailing ahead of him. As darkness eclipsed the river, I looked up at the dusky sky and noticed a single line of cable swooping over the opposite bank. Electric wire meant there was a road nearby, and only one major road ran through this part of Laos: Highway 13. Every southbound vehicle on it stopped in Luang Prabang. Fate was once again lighting up an exit sign with flashing lights, and this time I was going to follow it. Flint encouraged me to go and even apologized for getting me into trouble, but he refused to come with me. He was determined to push on to Nong Khiaw, the transit hub at the widest part of the river where most of the boats turned around.
    â€œI want to finish what I started,” he said.
    Like the river, he confounded me with his duality: was he bold and imaginative or merely grandiose and puerile? Too exhausted to fight, I simply recounted our most recent judgment errors aloud and advised him not to confuse stubbornness with integrity.
    I think he heard me, but in the end, we held dramatically different visions for the journey and for life. I had been pushing our broken boat upstream for nearly a year, against an impossible current, and as much as I treasured the picture of us dreamily afloat on the Irrawaddy, it was time to admit this river was too much for me.
    For a while, the only sounds came from the whirring cicadas, grumbling cows, and the scrape-and-slosh of Flint’s bailing bucket. I tucked in the mosquito net and was drifting off to sleep when I heard him say quietly, “You were magnificent out there today, in your knickers. I wouldn’t have made it this far without you. I’d have lost the boat, or worse.”
    In the morning, Flint started the temperamental engine, and we buzzed to the opposite shore. Struggling up a sugary-soft dune, I found myself in Ban Had Kok—a small weaving village barely an hour by road from Luang Prabang. I returned to the boat with a fresh baguette for my queasy stomach and fresh intel for Flint: the bread vendor had a cell phone he could borrow. While he went to call for backup, I stayed with the boat, befriending a trio of little girls who had been spying on us from down the beach. Swiftly reaching the limits of my Lao vocabulary (about six phrases) and their English (A through G of the Alphabet Song), we moved on to charades and sand-pictures. By the time Flint came back, the girls were vaulting in and out of the boat, frolicking in the mucky water, and gleefully raiding our remaining stash of Lacta-Soy. It was the kind of afternoon I’d come for in the first place. Flint had managed to reach the fellow who’d sold him the boat and extracted his promise to send a “top mechanic.” When the children wandered away, I strapped on my pack and scaled the sand dune once more to reach the road—the dull, hot, blessedly dry road. Sticking out my arm, I flagged down the first vehicle in sight. Never have I been so happy to see a tour company’s mini-van.
    Chastened, I returned to Luang Prabang ten pounds lighter, nursing a sprained wrist and torn rib cartilage that would never fully heal. But a hot shower, a decent meal, and another round of Tinidazole solved much of my woe. I had no regrets about walking away. For me, there would be other rivers, more reliable boats.
    Flint continued up the Nam Ou alone. The trip to Nong Khiaw, less than six hours by “express boat” from Luang Prabang, took him nearly six days, even with the help of several mechanics and a local driver. He spent his final night on the boat, its keel half-submerged in mud, next to an impoverished Khmu village. Like indigenous tribes everywhere, the Khmu have genuine problems not of their own creation. I like to think it may have finally dawned on him that he was only playing castaway, an actor who had bought himself a small