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Wednesday, Dec 3, 2008
After relating the story of Kommadan, feeding me lunch and telling me more statistical information than any sane person needs to know about Houay Xai Upper Secondary School, Xouliphone found me passage downriver to Pak Beng on a boat loaded with Sprite, Pepsi, floor tiles, laundry detergent, Chinese cookies and three old ladies. I could have kept things simple and taken the tourist ferry, but I wasn't in a hurry and I wanted to try something different.
The three old ladies had a boombox and gave me my first exposure to Lao pop music, which sounds torturously similar to a sack-full of cats cascading downhill to a synthesized backbeat. On a more pleasant note, they'd brought a basket full of bananas, and they thought it was infinitely funny that I could eat so many of them. They also found it a real hoot when I took out my Lao phrasebook and (unsuccessfully) tried to make conversation with them. I ultimately gave up and climbed out onto the tin-sheeted roof of the boat to watch the river go by.
This type of diesel-powered freight boat, called "huahoua-liem" by the Lao, operates on an apprentice-pilot system not unlike what Mark Twain experienced on the Mississippi. The older pilot sits at the front of the 60-foot craft in a small cabin and mans the wheel, while the cub pilots sit in the back to heft freight, bail water, maintain the engine and -- presumably -- learn the river's routes and dangers. Officially, Laos' roads now move more freight than the Mekong (the last time the river out-hauled the road was in 1991), but these river pilots have job security in the steady downriver commerce (much of it illegal) from Thailand and China to the old royal capital of Luang Prabang.
Originally, the French had hoped to compete with British Hong Kong by using the Mekong as a backdoor trade route to China, but this was proved impossible by the Francis Garnier Mekong expedition of 1866-68. Garnier, a hardy 26-year-old French naval officer who deserves a place among the great explorers of the 19th century, spent two years on the river before finally reaching China, even though his trade officer concluded as early as the cataracts of northern Cambodia that "steamers can never plough through the Mekong, as they do the Amazon or the Mississippi, and Saigon can never be united to the western provinces of China by this immense riverway."
Ultimately, attempts at economically exploiting the Laotian Mekong were a flop for France, as Laos accounted for only 1 percent (and most of that opium) of France's foreign trade in Indochina.
Because of the Mekong's failure as an international superhighway, it is one of the very few great rivers of the world that retain a somewhat pristine character. As I sat on the tin roof of the boat, I took in sights that probably hadn't changed much since Garnier arrived 133 years ago: rattan-and-thatch homes clinging to hillsides at the high-water mark; smiling locals cooly navigating rapids in dugout canoes; sarong-wrapped women bathing beneath black-rock cliffs at sundown; naked, sunbrowned kids clowning around in the shallows, gleefully calling out to me as I drifted by, long and pale atop my riverboat.
However, "pristine" is a purely relative term here at the end of the 20th century. Whereas the Garnier expedition described the Laotian wilderness as an "unending, unpenetrable forest," the land I saw from the riverboat was marred with countless stretches of smoldering burn-off and deforested clear-cuts. The burn-off is the result of traditionally practiced "shifting cultivation" (as of 1990, 1 million Lao still practiced slash-and-burn agriculture), but the clear-cuts are evidence of a more recent phenomenon: Thai loggers, who began to exploit Lao forests when Thailand banned commercial logging a decade ago. Three hundred thousand hectares of Laotian forest are lost annually, despite recent government efforts to reduce both shifting cultivation and foreign logging interests.
The most obvious result of this deforestation is the lack of wildlife. Whereas Garnier reported seeing all manner of tigers, leopards, wild elephants, monkeys, crocodiles and boa constrictors haunting the shores of the Mekong, all I noticed was a smattering of birds and insects.
Just before dark, our riverboat pulled into the village of Pak Beng, which is perched on a steep slope overlooking a gorgeous, canyon-like stretch of river. In 1997, Pak Beng featured three guesthouses; by the time I arrived, that number had grown to 15 -- all of them built to house the "Visit Lao Year" onslaught of backpackers headed up or downriver between Luang Prabang and Houay Xai.
Despite the hotel boom, Pak Beng still resembles a dusty cow-town from some Wild West movie, right down to the splintered wood-slat sidewalks, the storefront dry-goods shops and the squint-eyed, cheroot-smoking locals. My hotel room cost a dollar, opened with a skeleton key and didn't have electricity or running water. The only restaurant in town with an English-language menu featured "Minced Skin With Sliced Paper" and "The Fried Insides of a Hen." After dark, barefoot little boys shyly sidled up to me in the street and whispered "O-pee-umm?" If I didn't immediately react, the little boys would wink and pantomime taking a hit from a hookah.
The chickens of Pak Beng ran wild in the streets and screamed all night like the tortured souls of murderers. I didn't get much sleep.
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Too tired the next day to look for freight boats, I departed for Luang Prabang on the tourist ferry, which contained five Americans, two Norwegians, six Hmong hill tribespeople, 20 sacks of rice and one hog-tied hog. I'd had the intention of climbing atop the roof of the boat to look for elephants and stare out at the karst limestone formations, but the Americans and Norwegians proved too entertaining. Sometimes the best-laid plans are undermined by simple camaraderie: I spent most of the Pak Beng-Luang Prabang transit drinking whiskey, playing spades and trading inane pirate jibes ("Shiver me timbers!") with my fellow travelers. We made Luang Prabang by nightfall.
Had I been any better at talking to women, and had an Italian traveler not bled to death in a Luang Prabang hospital, and had a Paklay restaurant owner not made such a big display of seating me at an outside table one Friday morning, my Mekong travel might well have ended there.
Such were the odds that eventually landed me on a rickety secondhand fishing boat with two Americans headed downriver.
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