For a small fee you can ride on top of a cargo boat down the Mekong river in Laos for a few days.  It’s a gas. There I met two middle-aged women traveling together.

“We’ve been traveling almost eight months,” they said. “We started at our home in Zurich, took a train to Moscow, then took the Trans-Siberian railroad across Siberia to Lake Baikal. From there, we traveled all summer throughout Mongolia, then down through the deserts and mountains of western China for a few months. We crossed the border from China into Laos a few days ago.”

What is Mongolia like? I asked.

“It’s like Montana,” they said. “Like a golf course the size of Texas.”

That’s quite a trip, I said.

“Oh, we’re having a great time,  just like last year, when we spent eight months exploring Bolivia and the Amazon.”

You do this every year? How do you manage that?

“We’re both nurses in Zurich. We work all the shifts we can for four months each year, save our money, then travel for eight. We travel cheap. Then we go home and do it again. We don’t own anything. No car, hardly any clothes. We don’t go out much. We live in my dad’s basement.”

Laos is beautiful, friendly and cheap. Bongo optional.