Mekong Diaries: Day 5

Day 5

When we ‘wake’ our Khampa hosts have been up for many hours, gone with the herd to take them to the best grass. A few cups of salty tea, starts to taste better every time, and we are well set for a day of hiking.

It should be noted that the Khampa are a noble and war-like tribe without an economy of coins and notes. Rather a man’s wealth is completely measured in cattle, with yak being the most desirable beast, far outweighing sheep and goats. A single yak can be worth over and above 3000 RMB, and a large concern number in the many hundreds of animals. At the conclusion of the grazing summer a herder will slaughter one animal whose meat will sustain his family for up to half a year. When they sell yaks for money they exchange it for jewellery, ivory bangles, gold earrings, and turquoise and amber headdresses. The husband will adorn his wife with these stores of his wealth, and sign of it, as he will himself show off his success in jewellery for himself.

We discover that we are in a camp quite close to the ‘source’ of the Mekong. At this point we are lost for clarity, but another man comes to visit us in the tent and confirms that the source is a spring we can reach today.

We are a bit confused about the geography of our objective. We are in a bowl with sides made of the world’s greatest mountain range. We are now in what is locally referred to as the Mekong Mountains, Za Qie Je, the land of the Mekong. We head off. For a while we follow the road as its winds over the smoothed hillside of this area.

After a while we can see the spot, but the weather looks like it’ll get wet soon. The car will go no further so we continue on foot. We realise that the streams we are following must be the Mekong.

We reach the spot but the stream clearly continues to climb through the meadows and set a new goal. Yet the site we have reached indeed has a marker claiming it to be a source of the Mekong. A local source.

We spend the afternoon filming and investigating the place,

The glacial source is only four hours away, or so we are told. A plan is roughly drafted to travel there tomorrow. It is very difficult to get any clear sense of the best way there. Also, we are warned, that there is a serious danger of being attacked by wolves. One wolf will not trouble us but 3 or more will have a go and attack. We decide that unless we can get a guide, a local who knows where we are going we will not pursue the idea in the morning.

Mekong Diaries: Day 4

Day 4

Before us literally rising into the clouds is a singular peak topped with ice and stones, marked with one zig zig road carved on its sheer flank and leading up towards its awesome shoulders. For the first time we sense the character of our journey and feel the anxiety of going into an unknown place.

At the base of the mountain we cross a new bridge over the Mekong and climb the mountain past black tents where, perched on these steep slopes, nomads tend their black haired yaks.

Today is a journey through an ocean of mountains, every wave a stony peak over 5000 meters high. In the valleys are alpine streams, some small and easily crossed, others wide and difficult. We are racing against the sun in the sky to reach the Mekong crossing before dark when to our surprise there is a brand new bridge making the crossing effortless. We see a large herd of deer high on the side of one peak. Our good fortune is momentary when our car breaks down. For a couple of hours we are stranded in the bed of a small creek on the wide ridge of the ranges as the car gets fixed.

Finally, we drive on until in the dimming light we see a small group of black tents. Driving over the hill over the cottage cheese mossy ground, we pull up next to a tent just as the sun catches on the lip of the opposite rise. The family of Khampa,  welcome us into their tent with salty yak butter tea and just like that we are invited to spend the night.

The Black Tent is impressively suited to the world of the nomads. In rainy weather the weave tightens and intrinsic water resistance of Yak hair, evolved over millions of freezing wet years, renders the whole structure water proof, a dry warm, and very very smoky space in the middle of a wild and lethally inhospitable isolation.

Touching the hairy walls of our new home at 4800 metres brought forth a tiny dam break of cold water. In this unexpected smoked blackness I spent a near sleepless night, fighting a sense of asphyxiation and claustrophobia, altogether grateful for the unremarked hospitality of these hardy and beautiful people. I wait for sleep listening the family laugh and speak softly in the moving darkness.

Mekong Diaries: Day 1

Day 1

On our way.

Land in Xining capital of Qing Hai Province, and go to our hotel, flanked and fronted by KTV bars. Dinner in a Muslim cafe, the fellow diners, some pale skinned Han people, others burnt dark brown, with distinct red patches on each cheek, in slouching gangster hats, and cheap sports jackets, cowboys, the real thing.

We are heading to the land of the Khampa nomads. The Khampa still live in the black tents made of yak hair, grazing their herds in the Northwest. The Mekong River is born in the lands of the Khampa. Tibetans like the Khampa call it Dza chu River of Rocks , and the county we are headed for takes it name from the River. We hope we have located the source of the Mekong on the map, some 2 days drive from the town of Moyun, in Yushu Country.

People tells us about the Tibetans practice of River Burial for babies, that because infants have pure and innocent hearts, they are given to the river, a pure body of water. The upshot is Tibetan’s don’t eat fish, a diet we all hastily adopt.

Mekong Diaries: Day 2

Day 2

Xining to Yushu

We arrived in Yushu late after a 14-hour 800 km drive up onto the Tibetan Plateau. Our drivers’ driving style although consistent, is on the other hand clearly not designed for well-surfaced roads. It is a rather bi-polar attack and stall approach.

Locals explain the rows of low houses set in the empty plains we passed on the drive are the destiny of the Nomads. Apparently the Chinese Government selects them in loosely associated groups and orders them to send all their kids to school or face jail.

We have traveled through vast plateaus of grass while above continents of weather form and boil away in an endless sky. It is a world without trees, where grass rules.

There are signs of Tibetan Buddhism everywhere, cairns, flags, temples, monasteries, in the mountains, on the plains, beside rivers, everywhere. The white flags are markers for the dead, coloured flags are magic circles that can be seen by specially gifted monks, as energy patterns from the sky impressed into the soil, and are erected to protect all life, human and non-human.

Mekong Diaries: Day 3

Day 3

Yushu to Zaduo.

Last night was a rough sleep, getting used to having less oxygen. Leaving Yushu in the rain construction equipment teems on the walls of the Mekong’s valley. On this cold gravel road we see a chain of pilgrims making their way towards Lhasa in between the roaring bulldozers, graders and trucks. In a long line they each progress by flings themselves down, sliding along the cold rough road, stand for three … … and fling themselves down again.

We spoke with one man who explained that his journey would take 6 months from Yushu to Lhasa, and every inch will be performed in this aesthetes’ masochistic ritual. He explained that these pilgrims pray for everyone, and everything. Their prayers are intended even for the smallest bugs in the prairie.

We continue on over hills shadowing a little stream which soon delivers us to the first length of the Mekong River we have seen in Tibet, a wide bend where the small stream mixes its clear water with the turgid Mekong.

In summer the river is red, and in winter blue as the warm weather melts the ice lifting the earth into the waters. Continuing upstream we encounter a surprise small dam and hydroelectric station, surely the highest hydroelectric power station on the river.

As we continue we stop at a place where the reservoir of the Mekong’s water laps at the side of wide flat grassland. Here a black tent and two highly decorated white tents have made a camp. We talk with the husband and father and the mother, washing clothes in the river. Continuing on from the Nomad’s camp we soon reach Zaduo, a muddy strange town at the edge of the times, where the wildness of its shifting population, unwashed nomad cowboys with decorated chopper style motorbikes, long black hair and slouch hats. The Mekong races through town, eating at the rocky soil. It is a world of mud and money, as the river’s water gathers in parallel to the region’s wealth here. The world in every direction of a construction site, the works of man, our roads, bridges, dams and buildings, tiny before the immense projects of nature, the crumbling mountains, global weather patterns and continental rivers being born.

We go to bed with plans in our minds.

Traveling down the Mekong River, with RFA

Zachu, Tibetan for the Mekong River, is said to be sacred by nomads living on the Qinghai plateau. That’s where our team of reporters starts the journey. As they progress down the least developed of the world’s major rivers, they file video dairies, slideshows of amazing photos rarely seen before and regular blogs and tweets offering a window into an extraordinary trip.

Their goal is to give a voice to some of the millions of people who live off the river, and will see their lifestyles transformed by industrialisation, global warming and cheer political arogance.

http://www.rfa.org/english/multimedia/MekongProject

A fisherman throws nets off his barge in the Mekong River in Chiang Khong, Thailand.