Mekong River journey: Day 1

Is it Friday? Is it any day out here? Grime sweat coats skin and manges the hair on my arms, such a hot, humid night. The bugs are still with us. The lizards have left to their hiding places. No sooner awake and downing a few eggs when it�s off like a shot to the ferry. Gate to Indochina the antiquated arch states. Only steps from Siamese freedom before realizing we�re about to bypass immigration. A small procession of backpackers queue up to a tiny glass window in a small anonymous wooden building. Local Thais come and go as they please through the gateway. Riverside huts abound and unchartered visaless shuttling from country to country would easily go unnoticed by the small-numbered and benign authorities.

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               These are the credits as we step into a tiny longboat, its roaring on-deck motor playing our exit music as we�re taxied across to Huay Xia (/hwe sja/), Laos. We step off to a more conspicuous checkpoint with non-official women waving us up to the desk. VISA UTILIZED is emblazoned across the all-important visa stamp. With this stamp comes a series of forms, signatures and random numbers. They don�t mess around, and as we�re shuttled up to the slowboat docks in a sawngthaew our passports are again taken for further inspection. A woman disappears with a stack of passports to another anonymous office...a potential goldmine in the right corrupt clutches.
               Immediately it is noticed how much poorer Laos is in comparison to Thailand, the latter still only an earshot away. In worldly terms, Thailand is still considered third world, striking poignancy then for the poverty and destitution of Laos. Still, as with their Thai neighbours, the Lao folk smile just as brightly and are just as hospitable and friendly.
               Already my white elephant instruments are striking up interest in the locals as two staffers at a food inn give a blow to my Thai wod and Akha hill tribe lahdje, pan flute species of another world.
               Brown Mekong currents race southeast from the highlands of Tibet, past the opium-laced Golden Triangle, laying segregation to Thailand and Laos and finally stabbing through Cambodia and Vietnam to lay silt and greet the South China sea. This filthy brown created what is now Cambodia. This filthy brown hides away legendary epic-length Mekong catfish. This filthy brown plays home to the <100 round-nosed Irrawaddy dolphins. This filthy brown may even lay refuge to a rogue Siamese crocodile or two.
               Oil tankers are pushed by tugboats up river along the edge and then across, the strong currents giving strange trajectory, yet precision accuracy on docking. These giant tankers made weak by nature�s forces. A car or two is ferried across, explaining the presence of both right and left-hand-side driven vehicles.
               Those eggs I mentioned earlier. They are getting to me. They are wanting to get out of me. Asia�s squatter system is difficult to see the least, for me. It takes some leg power, really giving your quadriceps femori a run for their muscle fiber contraction. And no squatter would be complete without a complete lack of toilet paper. It is the user�s responsibility, as was the fecal mush a result of the combination of some bad eggs and last night�s chicken paad thai. No garbage, nor sink are added (actually subtracted) anti-bonuses, all par for the course that �this ain�t america no more,� and more excellent foreshadowing of this boating ride before us.
               More and more sawngthaews are arriving with more and more backpackers. Everyone�s passports are up for final scrutiny, their return left up to a small girl no older than ten wandering around the loading zones with this new stack of passports, waving them at beckoning and hopeful hands.
               �The children are in charge of immigration here.�
               25-seat boat. That�s what we�ve all heard rumors of. But no mention of how many people actually get into these seats. We�d seen pictures of spacious two-storey ferries full of room to stand and walk around, even erect a hammock, and with paired front-facing seats with good omni-direction views. Some were most certainly promised these were the luxurious boats they�d be sailing the river on. Not today, toady.
               Down at the docks are a series of long boats with wooden benches up the length of each side.
               �Don�t get stuck in the back engine room,� a pretentious yet informative young backpacker told us the night before. He was stuck in this upstream, and wound up choking on fumes and half-soaked from a gas spill.
               I remember him well, over my now-excreted paad thai. Young, arrogant, office worker. �I work in an office,� he said smugly.
               �I�m from Germany,� he said when asked, just as smugly.
               But here we are lining up for the slowboat. Already a few speedboats have shot off like yellow-red amplified tenor cicadas, their deafening engines to be endured for six hours. Still, on our quieter, bright side, we had two full days to go in the slow boat. And how many slowboats are there for all of us?
               Answer: one.
               About twenty-five seats...make way for over 70 people. It fills up fast, and the sorry souls have to work their way to the engine room. Motor fires up and smoke and hazy fumes consume the deck. People choking, tissues pressed up to fouled nostrils and pursed lips below stung wincing eyes. The Lao population of our small ship sit up front behind the captain. However, as we soon find out, we will pick up (and fortunately drop off) many more locals before the journey is through. This is merely a trade route for locals to get from village to village. All along the way newcomers come, waving at the river�s edge to be picked up. Other locals go, pointing to an otherwise empty part of land and stepping into the mucky water and pulling themselves up on ground only to disappear into the jungle to some invisible homestead. Petrol and maintenance (if the latter exists on the rickety old vessel) are nourished by revenue of the excess baggage : all us backpackers going �off the beaten paths.� And on we go, off those beaten paths, cramped together quite uncomfortable wooden benches looking across at whichever weary neighbour is adjacent: a grad student couple from Boston, some unemployed Canadians from B.C., an Israeli family on extended vacation.
               Here is a proposed advertisement poster: Good time for Israelis to travel! The current state of affairs in Israel prove this, and the multitudinous number of Israelis in Laos confirm.
               Six hours or so to go today...until we reach Pakbeng for the night, the eddies, whirlpools, jutting rocks and murky water hiding submersed deadweights and inconsistent depths. We had to stop more than a couple occasions as we hit bottom or struck one of hundreds of logs floating down with us.
               A pretty young Lao woman holds her baby over the side of the boat as it pees into the water. Other backpackers have made it up to the roof for better views and sunburns. They can simply piss off the roof, and they do at least once as I see a stream rain down past an open window. Was there a squatter or not back in the depths of the engine room? I do not know. I held it. On both days, I held it for hours.
               Short stop at a village. Greeted by armed police officers drinking beer in the high sedating heat. Take a stretch and go for a walk up a hillside of strange semi-porous �dirt-like� rocks. Can�t stray too far. Feeling anonymous and the captain and crew speak no English, I could quite easily envision being left behind. Can�t go far at all, and definitely want to retain what little comfort I�ve found along the main deck.

               Back on water a speedboat races up beside us. These things can be heard for miles away, giving a voluminous full experience of the Doppler effect. However, this time it slows down and draws close to our ship. Are we going to be boarded? Pirated?
               It�s police, in military fatigues, and they are not happy! They are pointing over to a dock, as though they want us to �pull over.� They are yelling and seem quite irate. Look at that:
               �They have a mounted machine gun!�
               �Pull over!� they must have said in their native Lao tongue.
               Something�s not sitting well and there is tension as we are routed back over to a dock. Glances are being exchanged between everyone.
               �Hide the evidence.� No one really knows what�s going on.
               Random pills? (Yes).
               Down the hatch, no need to explain a bunch of loose tablets in my pocket. I�m sure others are cautious, confused, possibly worried.
               Outcome: we manage ourselves over to the dock, and the military fellows� facial expression have turned to brotherly friendship. All they wanted us to do was load a sewing machine up onto the slowboat to be ferried downriver to one of the villages, that�s all. Sometimes extreme measures require extreme methods. This was a case in point perhaps.

Pakbeng

               With the sun above the Western sky some larger buildings make sign of an actual town...Pakbeng. And it�s really not much of a town: a few guesthouses and restaurants. Nothing much more.
               Walk a plank across murky water to semi-hardened muddy earth. A seedy group of all ages are there in greet. Guesthouse touts shout �this way� and �that way� as the bags are slowly packed off the roof of the boat. Small children beg to carry travelers� heavy backpacks in hopes of making a few cents. I can�t let a little kid do that. Some of these bags are as big as them. Given their frail child frame and malnourished states, most of these bags probably outweigh them by at least two-fold.
               Within 30 seconds of being off the boat I am approached by a nervous gentleman whispering and signaling with his eyes to look down. He has a pocket full of ganja and opium and wants to make sale. Fresh off the boat and not keen to the scene of this town yet, I must decline his services. He is pushy, and I have to just walk away.
               �No trouble, no trouble,� he repeats at middle-volumes.
               �Yeah, but it may be some trouble for me,� the Canadian guy says when he is targeted for pressure.
               Walking to our guesthouse gives us that �not much of a town� impression as described above. No trouble indeed. And you wouldn�t want to find any on your own either, we�re pretty far out in the jungle here. No escaping the silence.
               Rumors later of young children trying to make a baht with their own private stash of ganja. This town is budding with young entrepreneurs. Child labour and drug trafficking. Horrible settings on an ominous night.
               As it darkens a BeerLao empties in front of us as we await our food with the British Columbian couple. Our food seems to go forgotten for nearly two hours, until Alya finally interrupts the cook�s dinner to re-order for the third time. It�s a nice view though. Picturesque river mountain scene with the sun setting in the background shedding it�s final yellow-orange glow on the high tree line of the hills. Insects chirp and screech into the night, the silent air. Sliver of a moon bleeds through the indigo tapestry...I�m panicking. Terror surfaces, manifesting an old forgotten cardiac neuroses and panic attack and no way out what can be done?
               �You�re fine, you�re fine, you�re okay.�
               The others have gone for a walk, bringing back those rumors of dope-dealing youngsters. The noodles, when they finally came were soused in oil and tasted plain and plain awful. There�s no way out of here. Pakbeng better not be the end of it. There�s got to be something beautiful at the end, at the end when the boat reaches final port. Panic. Why? There�s no way to be free if something were to happen. And this is just getting the better of me on this night. I know it�s induced, and I have to relax, and realize that nothing bad is really going to happen. Panic attacks hit you like a gunshot whizzing past your mind; leaving a shock and a palpitating heart, nothing more. Consume you like a burst of Acetylcholine to the ganglionic chain of the sympathetic autonomic nervous system. In turn, Noradrenaline over-fires in every major organ and panic peaks with surges in blood pressure, pulse, and wide-eyed mydriasis, staring out into the dark night hearing the rushing water that can get me nowhere. Emergency states in a place where help doesn�t exist. Where emergencies cannot be aided. Control. Control. Control.
               I�ve turned French overnight, and I�m talking breads...ryes...whole wheats.
               No time for geckos right now, especially the ones you can only hear. I�ve ridden in that car for far too short a time to get up now. Sitting here watching you.
               �[I�m] sitting here watching your write,� she said.
               Fight off the paranoia. This time it�s not for real.
               Music for eyes and means so much. I wish for weather and my dreams come true. You�re in love with what you love.
               This is the history of a lifetime presenting itself, repeating itself for future posterity. Think in terms of molecular vegetable lifeform with a penchant for walking up and pinching your nose. The brightest germ (human-sized these day you know) sits on a pedestal of soy mucus, wearing pince-nez and reading a foreign newspaper.
               That dog looks like a bear.
               Didn�t see it.
               Share and share a like.
               Gecko: chirp... chirp... chirp.
               Fancy meeting an old thought like you after all these years. We�ll be waiting for you later on. An expression of dignity tattooed across a gecko�s supple rib-lined side. Chief organizer of the reptilian parade hails the scale. Cheers for reptiles of all leagues. Calls forth arms up in cheers for the rare taxonomic Tuatara strain (sole leftover of Order Rhynchocephalia). Gecko fanfare, and even one step down got in on the act: bullfrogs, and second-string toads croak out a bass-tenor orgy.
               And then the thundering and silencing cymbal fin� of the tail of a Japanese giant salamander.
               The next day we cleared our heads and got back on the boat.
               �He probably dropped his tail on that one.�
               -
               nothing gets by the germ
               -
               It wears new-fangled jeans with old-fangled waistlines. Writes in a rubber-faced notebook, pen made of steel, some ink, and an osmosis-enhanced automatic mind.

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