Muang Ngoi
At the end of the first day we stopped in Muang Ngoi, a little village consisting of barely more than a single mud road flanked with a couple of dozen rickety houses and shacks. Muang Ngoi is rapidly becoming a destination for boat trips from Luang Prabang, since roughly 50% of these shacks are now "guesthouses", which usually means some mattresses and a poorly translated menu in English with fried rice and banana pancakes. This is the antithesis of the authentic Laos that we came to see, but it had its charms; the mountainous scenery was beautiful, and we managed to sample some serious Lao cooking as well as lao lao, a kind of rice whiskey that is best taken in small amounts at a time.