Mekong River journey: Day 2

               We cleaned up where we left off. Said �good-bye� to Pakbeng and its mutinous melody of languid reptiles.
               We kept asking: �How did the snakes play?� but the relevant question now was: who are the reptiles now?
               This is just a local trade route, the only paying customers us foreign folk with a little time on our hands. Whirlpools and eddies. Would it matter?
               Alya was a real trooper, injury after injury, a real wound factory that one this time. I love it through jungle-sweat fear she tells me to write it all down. Get the murder out of my head. Encaged in Pakbeng. Blue for me. Pink, her. Mosquito net shrouds and liquid spider web tendril-like umbilical from aura to aura with love and mutual exhaustion.
               Menstruating morning and poor choices at the food stand. Not much food for a long wet ride ahead. We�d waited two friendly hours in dark, quiet evening to black, waiting for bad food which just didn�t want to come. Grime-coated lust two humanoids frenzy for the ferry and leave this poor representation for the country.
               Memory: Of a lifetime. Flashflood straight up in a local fireburn. Fastfood to go. Baguette sandwich. Veggies with either tuna from can, sitting second-preference (first, for the flies) to foil triangles of cheese slapped down on one corner of the baguette and spread across uniform with a plastic spoon.
               Bunch of those small bananas, (what are they called?...=> bananas), make that half a bunch (more than enough in the end). Raining in Pakbeng. Early morning everyone out for business, selling fruits and beverages and vegetables and more fruit.
               Earlier than usual morning. Boat leaves at 7. Near full at about 6:30, no one wants to be screwed for space like yesterday, caught in the engine room, with the fumes and potential petrol regurgative. Make a seat in the back quarter near a soft mountain of backpacks no one wants wet. So many more to come for that hellish back-engine room. Just made the cut, back end of first-string and people choosing the less than semi-discomfort of the center strip denying leg-room to early-birds and the last lucky few who thought to make it just a few minutes before schedule.
               And that�s where the French girls walk in.
               Soon enough on the road pull up to a village. Closed window pops open, bangs heads and Lao family crawls in through from moored boat. Window to window, nearly scissored at the torso some of them. Family of six or seven and a giant sack of rice makes a nice seat for the woman. And the whole scene is an uncomfortable ride. Sleep most of the way and dreams vivid of the night before.

               Continuant flashback: Still boarding: Still pouring. And now the leaks come. Tarp above replete with leaks, as luck would have that. Two unlucky boys (Americans?) took the seat I nearly had, before being waxed to portside on a sunshine (then absent) angle. Rain drips down and wave water splash through and they�re getting it good. Try to hook up a windbreaker jacked to catch the leaks as the rest of us in the area shake heads and exchange glances and twisted smirks, knowing the eventual and inevitable weight of the rain will pull down the net and drench the whole strategy. Regardless, there they are trying to tape up the coat. Tape! A Dutch daughter clues them in on the strings indigenous to the jacket � a step up in affectivity but still cognizant of a soaking wet terminus. With time, they give up with futile smiles, drenched and tolerant. Reading with dry ends of fingertips only, just a nine-hour ride or so...with no stops and we did not bring enough food � just this veggie baguette w/ cheese and some small bananas I don�t even like.

               It was pouring and when it stopped pouring it was raining. All morning. Currents flowing swimmingly for a quick pace ahead. Sleepy-eyed and a bit early for 7 a.m. re-departure and the boats almost packed already, nobody wanting to get stuck in the engine room. Backpacks are sitting in-deck this morning as well, allowing for even less sitting space...But...some faces don�t arrive. For those who sleep in, the boat goes at 7 with or without. Perhaps, for some, there was never an intention of coming back. In another dimension completely: some new faces enter. What people did in Pakbeng during �extended stays� I�ll never want to know.
               Wood roof covered with a tarp. Tarps get holes. Leaks. Leaks all over. Two unfortunate fellas the unfortunate sub-tenants of a major series of a leak system. They try to put up a windbreaker jacket to catch the water, missing the fact that it will just pool up and eventually let under the weight simply drenching them in one go. The real clincher: they are trying to do this using tape. Fools will be fools. Young Dutch girl gets them in on using the jacket�s drawstring rather than the tape. They get drenched. A series of innovative and ridiculous ideas, but they get drenched. The dryer of the two reads a book off to the side of the problem area. The other, smack dab in the middle of it, admits defeat, passes that point of trying to retain dryness and just accepts it. He sits there, beaten by the elements, and lets the water come down on him. Next to us is that photograph memory: the boat we all thought we would get to travel in.
               There it is. Ample space, upriver not being a popular journey with the tourists, only a handful of backpackers stroll comfortably around the decks, dry as can be. We pull out of dock, waves crashing in. Everyone slams the wooden windows down, and now it�s dark and dingy and the sweet gassy fume haze floats through the deck. Don�t light a match. Don�t even bother trying to read. Somehow though, I manage to sleep the morning away. Pleasant treasures find us at opportune times. You can dream like mad when you haven�t been able to dream for days.
               We�d let a whole family, rice and all in at some point. They crawled through the window from another boat, bopping us on the head on the way in through ours. As the boats drifted in dissimilar, and dangerously opposite directions, one fellow was nearly rended into two pieces.
               The curious bunch in the middle of the floor. Sacks of rice for auburn tongues and glottal stops. Girl holding pen in the strangest of ways, and everyone all decked out in new-molted skin on the slow boat to (Indo)China.
               She rests on my shoulder and I rest on her heard for hours to a point of no rain. The morning precipitation putting a push to the current not present yesterday. More and more locals and their bags of rice enter. Woman sit knees up motionless position on a burlap sack on the floor of the boat. The family surrounds, crowding personal space. Women. Where do they rank here? Is there equality? Pushing up and stretching out. Making comfort out of discomfort. A younger brother reads from Lonely Planet�s Southeast Asian phrasebook, using the Lao section in reverse fashion to practice the English tongue. Alya and I now switch places, now between me and a European mannequin.
               Up the way a pair of monitors gobble up fiction hour by hour. Me, in my new position, sort things out on spatial fronts. Lots of room for love now. I can scooch. Move over and give room. Comfort from where comfort was not a moment ago. Sprawling Lao adolescent retreats, pulls back for my dominance in the flock. We�re back in style and for diplomatic relations I share my chips with the family. Alya asleep at my bosom, at times hindering to my note-taking and observations but in love here. When we work together good things can occur.

               Stop at the beach to end all. Collapsed sand and I nearly drop in like a French girl�s camera (more on her later: note). Land�s covered in buffalo shit and the captain�s screaming �Let�s go!!!� in Lao. Back inside the reptilians are less restless after emptying their poisons like the buffalo before them. The females are still having their communal circle of urination. It�s a hold-up. In a time-frame sense.
               �Let�s go!!� (in Lao).
               Corpses sleeping on the roof taking in UV rays like you wouldn�t believe despite the clouds and I�m breathing in their first-hand smoke.

               Gaia�s hiding zone: greenness and oneness of this jungle...vertical fields...beyond these jungle, more...giant diatribe trees and more mundane mini-clear cuts...hidden rock faces and huts and rest zones for the tenders of these vertical fields.
               Trees that plume up into the sky like a tail feather. Clear invisible drops scattered into the brown Mekong water. So green all these trees all around.

               If there is anywhere cosmic inter-woven mind of the previous is alive and well-spoken for (but hidden � hence Gaia�s hiding zone) it is the vertical field. Other Options?

               How bizarre can river water get?
====>Cyclones raging all around, the captain is put to challenging task. Only in the daylight, that is the light of day, and with clear precision of bio-optics can our fearless man at the helm steer this over-crowded, nay over-stowed, leaky creaking wooden boat carcus to safe ground again.
               That�s all we are really. We all don�t know it. We are paying customers. Anonymous paying customers. And so we mean nothing. Where are the life jackets? Where are the safety precautions? We are as anonymous as the locals, the non-paying lifers of this river-route who choose to be anonymous every day of their lives. We too, may have chosen to be anonymous, sojourning to these further-out, less-tainted, �off-the-beaten-path� zones of the word, but only in a temporary sense. All with a keen mind to some time get back to the Western World and become identified again. Open, ready, and willing with tales of an untamed vacation. All perfectly real, but temporary.
               And so, we are merely stowage. No safer or more valuable than the luggage, the backpacks, only with the potential ability to swim, and the higher probability of getting to shore without being sucked down a cyclone and/or colliding with sharp jutting truth of hard rock. Swimming to shore to catch one�s breath and then go where? Death, as natural here as it is anywhere, surely goes more unrecognized, and without scrutiny. Perhaps, even, we are less valuable than our backpacks, most costing a pretty penny to begin with, and, now visualizing, with just-who-know�s how much money �hidden� away in the folds and zippers. All the guidebooks warn against keeping your travel money in your backpack, but we all do it.

               I did, didn�t you?

               With a couple more hours to go (that�s the hope and I�m sticking to it), with all these people. Not enemies, no longer passengers, travel mates, not even acquaintances or friends-for-the-day, just entities dissolving into this journey. One of the corpses rejoins the empty mass, not tolerating the light cool rain. What happened last night that I was so frightened? When there�s no way out, what�s the point of freaking out?

               A brave, brave man indeed, who captains this vessel.

               Rats were crawling in the walls last night. Me, safe in blue porous semi-permeable membrane, air but not pushed air only. Free air can come in, manipulated air rejected from passive transport. Okay, electricity down at the strike of 10:30. The gecko, a lone babe in the wood, gurgling and then to the bleet of his name. Outside my window. Wake up and there�s no sign of this.
               (There was a) hole, 1.5x1.5 feet in the corner ceiling. Square hole (still a hole?) up into the attic on inspection. All the rooms connected on this roof shaft. No worries, but is this where the rats dwell and run free also? One room to the next, right to the worker�s mat-covered floors next-door to our room, connected by this hot, stale attic space.
               Smoke is thick today. Perhaps many were skulking in yesterday�s twilight in search of young children. An honest buck (U.S. dollar, Thai baht or local kip, for those few lucky and eligible enough to have made some currency exchange/accruement prior to getting river-bound) for an honest young lad/lass supporting the family with their ability to pick foliage from the jungle. It wafts downwards in through the rickety window frames of our river-ship. Some males of the species brave and savage enough to prostrate back against mountainous backpacks and light up.
               I was a crazed lunatic when I wrote my on-site experiences of Pakbeng. An honest human looking for matter and safety in the paranoia of my anonymosity. People travel, and they look for themselves, and many may even think they find themselves, but here, this dark routeless plate of existence, I got lost. If only for the moment, I got lost, and it was a frightening helplessness.

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