Quickly Down the Mekong
Laos
A full moon rises above Huay Xai in Laos and is reflected in the waters of the Mekong. From the Thai side of the river at Chiang Khong, the annual Loi Krathong festival commences. Tea light candles are placed on banana leaves and bedecked with hibiscus, incense and a coin before being launched on the river. These krathongs chart a flickering course on meandering crosscurrents carrying their Buddhist alms. Their propitious journey is the culmination of a garish street parade that involves the entire village strolling down the main street to the pier.
Colourful floats on the back of trucks are adorned with traditionally costumed Thai girls. Their doll-faced, stoic demeanour is in contrast to the distorted blare of amplified music and the dancing, laughing throng knocking back rice whisky. Skyrockets wail a screaming ascent and crackers are thrown in front of unsuspecting people, their explosions deafening. The acrid sulphur fumes coalesce into clouds that drift over the multi-coloured flashing lights of the floats, adding to the surreal nature of the spectacle.
I arrive in Chiang Khong in the far north of Thailand after two buses from Bangkok. The first an overnighter to Chiang Mai, the second an all-day trip across mountains and then lowland rice fields. I can’t stay awake and the trip remains a melange of images, from rice being harvested to non-descript modern Thai towns with their concrete “egg-carton” architecture. At one point a replica Dutch windmill fashioned into a house stands out from a rainforest valley. At another a delighted bus driver bears down upon dogs locked in a potentially fatal embrace in the middle of the road.
At Chiang Khong I walk a dusty main road past quaint teak houses, suspicious dogs and shop-fronts chock-o-block with useless plastic goods. The Tamila guesthouse perched above the Mekong offers itself as an oasis from the heat. The restaurant is nestled within a tropical garden and provides great views across the river and surrounding hills. A delicious green curry resplendent in fresh kaffir lime leaves and dripping with stalks of green peppercorns complements the view.
Chiang Khong is one of the few official border crossings into Laos. Huay Xai is only a short passage across the river. This Lao village is quite down at heel compared to its sister-town across the water. At the ferry departure point nothing much moves bar the scratching of chickens and the aimless circling of dogs. Men sit idly at food-stall tables smoking and drinking beer from plastic jugs. Occasionally a boat pulls in. Cargo is unloaded, including an armful of ancient rifles. Uniformed customs guards who stamp my passport reinforce this frontier feeling.
With manic intensity a man runs past me armed with a long, thick branch. He stops and raises the branch over his head, faltering with the weight until his feet find a purchase in the soft riverbank mud. A cobra, sensing danger, slides down the bank towards its attacker with a raised head and flared hood. The branch comes hurtling down crumpling the snake which then receives another half dozen blows for good measure. The drama over, the beer-hall patrons swagger over, women peer from their shacks overlooking the river and dogs cautiously sniff the air. The snake is well over two metres long, gunmetal grey with white underparts. I’m reminded of it later that week when I lick a stamp bearing its likeness.
Finally the last warm beer-lao is consumed and it’s time to venture onto a “long-tailed” speedboat. The tail is the three metre drive shaft connecting the engine to the propeller. This modified canoe is barely wide enough to seat a single passenger but two of us by necessity squeeze into the wooden frame, knees around our ears, feet buckled from the platform in front. Kitted out with requisite motorcycle helmets and our packs stored precariously on the bow, a creeping sense of anxiety pervades. It is exacerbated by the deafening “VROOM” of the car engine acting as an outboard motor kicking into life, and the nonchalance of our pilot who is about to brave this journey sans helmet, cap or sunglasses.
The boat rears out of the water, the thrust of the engine pinning us back as we accelerate to eighty kilometers per hour. Swinging across the river we can see the rapids ahead. The pilot picks his line and when it is beyond the point of no return, he accelerates past the boulders and through the bubbling eddies of submerged rocks. However, negotiating the wake of passing speedboats often prove hairier than the rapids. “It’s a good day to die,” I pondered and equanimity is nearly restored. I attempt to drag my gaze away from the river and into the monsoon-jungle clad mountains that tower all around.
It is surprising and heartening to see so much rainforest spilling down from mountains to the river, seemingly untouched. Occasionally the forest gives way to small clearings or banana groves. Regenerating clearings from slash and burn agriculture exhibits a patchwork quilt effect, an entire hillside may be ruffled by the telltale signature of humans. Bamboo and thatch huts nestle in the flats above the river flood line. One can only imagine the serenity of these people for we whizz past at break-neck speed and despite the helmet, I am almost deafened from the engine noise. This may account for the lack of birds sighted on the trip.
Pakbeng – ancient seat of power, magnificent faded glory – it isn’t. Modest houses crowd both sides of a road that clings precariously to a ridgeline above the river. The road serves many purposes – shop fronts, a small vegetable market dominated by hill-tribe people, promenade, travel route, even a kitchen – a dog is roasted over a small fire in the middle of the road. It is slowly rotated on a sharpened stick that skewers the animal from mouth to anus. The incongruous sight of satellite dishes attached to bamboo and thatch homes testify to the fact that the times they are a changin’. In the evening, the glow of televisions serve to attract children like moths. In a line five or six deep, they peer over each other’s shoulders at the slither of screen seen through open doors.
The Lao people are shy but friendly. The presence of tourists wandering through their village is still a relatively new experience. A lot of mutual staring goes on. There are plenty of kids who shyly respond to my saabaa dii greetings. I am called over by two young men and a woman who proffer me with grilled ladyfinger bananas and rice whiskey, lao-lao. A round of shot glasses are downed and immediately refilled by the woman.
Much merriness ensues as we try to make ourselves understood. I am caught in a cultural dilemma – it is probably impolite not to drink what is offered and for the Lao woman, it is probably impolite not to refill my glass straight away. We avoid offending each other by downing most of the bottle! I extricate myself from this situation when the men can no longer open their eyes properly and as the sun has already set, I manage to stumble off into the shadows.
A slow boat down the Mekong to Luang Prabang is my lao-lao hangover choice. Crawling under a low-slung roof afforded shade, resting against my pack, I sit on the wooden floor. Eventually the boat fills with passengers and their supplies. Sticky rice wrapped in banana leaves is the local fare for lunch, biscuits and bananas for the foreigners. Yet another un-muffled engine drones on for all of eight hours.
Water buffalo are seen on the riverbank, many of them a shade of cream, perhaps from wallowing in the light-coloured river mud. An elephant drags a log by a chain. Laotian forests of this region may just survive the industrial onslaught if this mode of production remains in place. Near our destination the river carves through impressive limestone cliffs, one of which shelters a Buddhist statuary in the Pak Ou caves. The silhouettes of Buddhas appear from the sepulchral gloom. They gaze over the Mekong’s confluence with the Nam Ou river, the point at which the Mekong bends southward.
Luang Prabang, ancient seat of power and magnificent faded glory – it is. A royal palace and a laid-back tropical charm add to the spell of this place. A narrow neck of land is enclosed by the Mekong and Khan rivers and cradled by a range of craggy mountains permanently cloaked in tropical haze.
PhouSi Hill lies prominently smack-bang in the middle of town and provides a fantastic vista of river, town, palace and mountains. It has an inexorable pull around sunset. You can walk a thousand cracked concrete and brick steps steeply up through the PhouSi wat compound. Young monks clad in saffron robes stare blankly from their quarters. Incense wafts from Buddhist shrines, peace (or maybe it’s boredom) prevails.
A dense stand of Frangipani tangles its way around the upper slope. On top, another temple, and ironically, far from there being religious devotees in attendance are the other class of devotees – the sunset snapshot backpacker set. The west-facing railing is elbow to elbow with shutterbugs. Someone jumps over onto the rocks and gets in everyone’s frames – is there no respect for a decent sunset over the Mekong shot!
The next morning I’m awoken by the almost unholy drumming and cymbal clashing of monks from the adjacent wat welcoming the dawn. I snooze until an encore performance awakens the dead. My guesthouse, the Pa Phai (bamboo forest), is run by a lovely, French-speaking Laotian woman who continues one of the few good colonial customs of fine coffee and croissants. I hire a bicycle from her to better appreciate the dusty roads and country town atmosphere of its wide boulevards. I begin to understand the shortcomings of my bike that turns out to have only one gear, high, and thus, a stubborn resistance to climbing hills and a pedal crank that is skew-whiff, making for some interesting leg movements.
Circumambulating the heart of the city reveals a mish-mash of French colonial double-storey “mansions,” Lao hybrids and authentic bamboo thatch shacks. Interspersed are wats and their rambling compounds, perhaps the best being Wat Xieng Thong which houses an intricately painted chapel with a low-slung, steeply-tiered roof and a huge “tree of life” mosaic adorning the outside of one wall. Gold-leaf facades glitter in the noon sunshine, saffron-robed monks amble over the courtyard and to one side is the languid Mekong. This imagery confirms the suspicion that a traditional stereotype of Asia still lurks in its increasingly accessible backwaters.
