The stories of the Mekong River and of modern Laos cannot be told separately. It was, in fact, to see the river that we visited southern Laos' famed Si Phan Don. The name translates into 4,000 Islands, the uncountable number of which are scattered like gems in the Mekong's girdle.
Below: Mighty and meek flows the Mekong in southern Laos.
A three-hour bus ride took us from Pakse to Ban Nakasang, where pirogues chugged towards the popular river islands of Don Det and Don Khon. We immediately recalled our last journey in a developing country by boat transfer - it felt like a delivery, for how we were packed like cargo and the very fact that we got off safe and sound at all. But the slender Laotian pirogues made the Guatemalan speedboats look like cruise liners.
The boat let us off on the northwestern shore of Don Khon, where our hotel Sala Don Khone was. We had paid for a floating bungalow for our two nights there. This was literally a bungalow moored just off the bank. Bridged by a makeshift wooden gangway, the structure bobbed slightly when the wake of passing pirogues lapped its edges. I spent half the nights worrying whether the rainy season would be unleashed as we slept, and whether or not our bungalow would be carried away by a torrent. I shouldn't have worried, of course - they fitted the place with lifejackets. Paranoia aside, the views were fantastic, especially of brooding sunsets blending aubergine sky and mauve river. Nightfall merged sky and river into pitch and brought forth infernal hordes of flies which swarmed around whatever lights remained.
Below (top to bottom): pirogues on the Mekong at Nakasang, from where travellers are ferried to the islands of Don Det and Don Khon; our floating lifejacket-equipped bungalows.
The Mekong eases disarmingly through much of this region. But at its southern edges, the river is channelled through a series of narrow, rocky drops and attains elemental force. The sets of rapids most accessible to tourist are Li Phi Falls on the western shores of Don Khon, and the Khone Phapheng Falls 13 kilometres south of the island. In these places, the river roars and its previously placid green plaits roil in an implacable white tumult.
Below: Li Phi Falls. The name Li Phi translates into spirit trap, and the falls are thought to catch the spirits of deceased people and animals floating from upriver. Here the Mekong churns a series of narrow rocky channels before resuming its unhurried passage just before the Lao-Cambodian border, where it calms again. There, sun-starved travellers, many of them westerners, lounge by the river beaches exposed during the dry season.
As had been mentioned, the genesis of modern Laos with its French colonial imprint is bound inextricably with the Mekong. When the French acquired Saigon (today's Ho Chi Minh City in southern Vietnam) in 1860, they looked with envy on Singapore which commanded the maritime gates to both China and India and on Shanghai which dominated the Yangtze River. French colonial officials dreamt of Saigon as the Shanghai of the Mekong, a potential gateway to China through the Chinese southwest. They knew little of the Mekong's passage, and French expeditions soon learnt about Khone Phapheng, which ships could not pass. The Mekong imperial dream was thus shelved for ten years.
In the late 1870s, however, as the French sought to rebuild national prestige following their damaging defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, control of the Mekong territories (as much of Laos today was known back then) came into focus once again. To counter Siamese claims of sovereignty and co-ethnicity with the area's inhabitants, French colonial officials played up fact that the Lao constituted a separate ethnic group from the Siamese, and thus set themselves up conveniently to protect the Lao from overbearing Siamese overlordship.
Today, Laos (as do the other riparian states) still have dreams for the Mekong. Like what China has accomplished upstream, they want to borrow the river's power by building a dam across a channel to the east of Don Khon. This would reduce the flow of the Mekong, and the level of both Li Phi and Khone Phapheng Falls. Crucially too, it cuts off the only year-round upriver fish migration route, with grave consequences for their spawning and for the fishery on which so many river folk depend for their livelihood. The urgency to see the falls in their pristine condition was increased when the Lao government announced the commencement of construction earlier this year.
Below: Witness the power of the Mekong at Khone Phapheng, and how lusty we are as a species for this power.
We earlier thought our arrival in the country would see the start of the rainy season, but the dry season still held on grimly, and temperatures reached 36 degrees Centigrade. On our way to both falls, the landscape we encountered was one of parched tautness. Cattle hurdled under the meagre shade of trees. Buffalo immersed themselves in dwindling pools, heedless of the wide world beyond. Even the air was still. The heat cauterized instantly any intention to stir.
The river was the only thing that dared to move. At both Li Phi and Khone Phapheng Falls, although we stood at a safe distance, we felt the Mekong's frenzied breaths as it writhed, twisted and crashed its way south. There was little to separate the two falls. Li Phi is a more extensive, scattered set of rapids, which at no one point are visitors able to view in their entirety. Khone Phapheng, on the other hand, gathers its waters along a single front, which pours along an arc into a wide cauldron. It was almost like choosing between the sun and a starlit night. Both undoubtedly reveal their brilliance, but keen, almost harsh, in one and diffused in the other.
Below: Portraits of peace, augur of latent power. The river gives life, particularly to these fisherfolk who seem to receive it on sufferance.
The waterfalls were an outstanding display of Nature's versatility, showing both the might and meekness of the Mekong in the same breath. There is not the slightest hint of the river's incredible turn of speed just mere metres before Li Phi and Khone Phapheng Falls begin.
It seems our prowess as a species has grown, too. Two other things have also grown - regard for ourselves, and its absence for all other elements which do not obey our will. Waterfalls have been tamed and silenced before. It might not be long before the dream of a navigable Mekong to China becomes a reality, though not before both Li Phi and Khone Phapheng Falls are both irreparably crippled.
Now, if only some of the Laotians we met had been honest people...
Note on logistics: We rented bicycles for 10,000 kip each to get to Li Phi Falls, a leisurely 2-kilometre ride along a stony path from Sala Don Khone. We carelessly paid 55,000 kip per person for admission to the falls, and later found out it was 25,000 kip. Khone Phapheng can be arranged, for a lump sum price of 250,000 kip as a half-day trip from Don Khon. A boat brings you out to Nakasang, from where the falls are a short fifteen-minute drive.
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