Mekong diary: a journey through Laos

Day 3 of 10 chugging upstream on the Mekong in Laos, from Vientiane to Huay Xai on the Thai border. I am re-reading Jon Swain’s compelling River of Time, as our boat cuts through the Mekong’s depleted but still majestic waters.

“Great rivers have a special magic” writes Swain. “There is something about the Mekong which, even years later, makes me want to sit down beside it and watch my whole life go by.”

The Mekong is a prop for Swain’s swash and buckle. Swain, for those who need reminding, was the Sunday Times stringer portrayed in the Oscar-winning Killing Fields, which describes the fall of Cambodia’s capital to the unhinged Khmer Rouge. But I know what he means.

The Mekong bubbles up from a small spring in the Tibetan Himalayas and runs for nearly 5,000 km through six countries before easing itself gracefully into the South China Sea at the delta below what was Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City.

Today we’re in the rich, green hills of central Laos, drifting past small riparian settlements and panhandlers prospecting for tiny gold fragments washed downstream. The water changes subtly between various shades of green, depending on how the sun strikes it.

Laos is a predominantly rural country. Α family’s wealth in the outback is measured among other things by the number of water buffalo they have. In the late, hazy afternoon these working beasts cool off in the river before lumbering back for their evening meal.

In the hills a little further north, beyond Luang Prabang, ancient capital and tourist trap, there are said to be a few surviving tigers, clouded leopard, crested gibbon, and newly discovered saola deer.

In between the tranquillity, however, giant diggers claw sand and gravel out of the river like prehistoric beasts to feed the voracious building trade in the exploding urban centres of south-east Asia.

The industrial revolution has finally reached this vast agrarian wilderness. And like our own in England in the 18th and 19th centuries, rural communities are being driven off their ancestral lands and into the cities, where their lack of possessions feels less like the simple life and more like abject poverty.

Life is slowly being choked out of this most abundant and varied stock of freshwater fish on the planet. The Mekong, once the provider of life, employment and protein to 50 million people, is being transformed from a complex ecological system where man, jungle and fish live in a delicate and intricate balance, into a lithium battery for south-east Asia.

Dozens, eventually hundreds of dams — beginning, inevitably, in China’s Yunnan province, where this fateful river runs for nearly 2,500 km — are changing the Mekong and its hinterland forever.

The Chinese also want to turn the river and its tributaries into a trade route through Myanmar for its goods to south-east Asia and beyond. Ancient dredgers dig it out. Sappers blast reefs and sandbanks to deepen it. Breeding grounds are being exterminated. Fish stocks are slowly disappearing.

There are still fish to be caught. Small, narrow long-tail boats with their little outboard engines still carry fishermen casting their nets. But Asia’s richest source of protein – and Laos’ most important source of income – is being supplanted by energy sold to the highest bidder in neighbouring Thailand and China.

We pass through Laos’s first major dam on our 28-berth, shallow-draft replica of an old Irrawaddy steamer. We are lifted up by two giant locks towering 100 feet above us and deposited upstream. The $3.8 billion dam is 95% funded by the Thais, who also take 95% of the hydroelectric power it generates.

Laos, the poorest nation in south-east Asia, gets the scraps. Little Laos is often portrayed as a Chinese vassal state. It’s in hock to China’s Belt and Road imperial policy for half its GDP. But this is an oversimplification.

There are bits of Laos that feel like a Chinese colony: the grotesque gambling outpost in the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone, where a Hong Kong Chinese corporation (labelled as a criminal organisation by the US) offers a full suite of services, including seamless money-laundering and a specialist narcotics operation.

But with what little leverage it has, Laos does what it can to avoid putting all its eggs in the Chinese basket. It would be foolish to do otherwise. Like other small nations around the developing world the Laotian government is aware of the temptations – and perils – of China’s debt trap.

The Chinese and Thais have a chokehold on the economy. But there’s a more laid-back feel to it all which is partly down to the nature of the people. Laotians are less frenetic than Cambodians, less grasping than the Vietnamese, less overbearing than the Chinese and less unctuous than the Thais.

The Mekong, like the Ho Chi Minh trail, was the Vietnam War’s secret pathway. As a result Laos may be the most bombed nation in history. Nixon’s “secret war” in Laos, carried out mostly by B52 bombers from a great height, was intended to disrupt the supply of men, women and weapons down the Ho Chi Minh trail.

American and South Vietnamese troops tried to fend off the incursions of the North Vietnamese, but this merely delayed the inevitable. The result, after America’s humiliating departure in 1975, was communism, poverty and a striking absence of enterprise.

Westerners have a curious co-dependent relationship with Indo-China. We are infatuated with its exoticism. But we also stereotype it. Perhaps not in the same ways as John Buchan’s Levant or Joseph Conrad’s Africa. But films like Apocalypse Now, The Deerhunter and Good Morning Vietnam have created an enduring, familiar image of Indo-China.

Swain, as he readily admits, is guilty as charged — drawn by a heady mixture of war, women, opium and the intoxicating flavours and smells of its streets. Through his eyes we see Indo-China as mysterious, seductive but ultimately out of reach. This was Robin Williams’ tragedy in Good Morning Vietnam. We see it as poetic. But our sentiments are piled on top of exploitation, war and death. It’s a kind of voyeurism.

Perhaps the exception were the French colons in Laos and in Cambodia who immersed themselves in the local life. They, too, eventually had to cut and run. But at least they tasted the forbidden fruit.

Laos remains a one-party state. Shops selling iPhones fly the hammer and sickle. It’s not a free country. The People’s Revolutionary Party is authoritarian. It does not tolerate dissent. But there’s an understated quality to this dictatorship. It’s not shouty. Like the Mekong — which throbs with life in Cambodia and Vietnam – authoritarianism assumes a more modest guise in keeping with the mores of an ancient Buddhist kingdom.

Laotians, like their Chinese neighbours, watched perestroika upend the Soviet Union. And like China the introduction of capitalism and foreign investment is subject to one, overriding litmus test: will it weaken or strengthen the party’s hold on power?

The steady thrum of the big diesel engines powering my boat — a carbon copy of trading vessels built by the (Scottish) Irrawaddy Flotilla Company — is oddly soothing.

In the early morning a dense mist shrouds the river. It’s chilly. As the sun rises the haze disperses, revealing great sweeps of water with hardly any traffic. Surprisingly, sadly, there’s also very little birdlife.

Giant bamboo, painted emerald by the setting sun, grows along its banks beneath ancient rain forest, steadily eroded by cultivation.

These are special moments full of quiet joy.

It is hard to say how long the Mekong will survive as a giver of life, as opposed to a gigantic power bank. But, in a country damaged by foreign wars, where the average monthly wage is $120 and young graduates routinely leave the country in their thousands to seek their future elsewhere, it’s hard to blame the Laotians for exploiting the one big resource they still possess.

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