Day 15
We have found a car big enough to contain our oversized European bodies and all of our luggage. Back packing, ha!
We leave Fellasi and drive south beside the Mekong. Our first stop is a strange little tourist spot were some hot spring have been captured in a shallow wading pool. Only one of us dares the not sweet-smelling waters to try a cure for his aching legs. Glancing over the edge of the pool’s decking we discover a thick shower of rubbish from the restaurant attached to the tiny resort, smashed beer bottles, wrappers, all ignorantly thrown over the edge to tumble-down into the small gully of a seasonal creek flowing into the Mekong. Just a few days away from the River’s source where we drank the translucent water to sake our thirst, and I would not feel clean if I were to swim in its violent currents. A million untreated toilets, and another million restaurants, and more houses emptying all of their waste daily into the forgiving opaque River’s flow. No wonder the dolphins in Cambodia have not given birth to a surviving pup for years. The River is being poisoned from the moment it starts its journey to the sea.
Crossing back to the road side of the river we stop again to walk through a village. The people here are mostly Tibetan farmers, and our travel was during the harvest of corn and just as the heads of rice were turning golden. A fast-flowing stream had been channeled through the village’s lanes, a cold and clear disposal service passing beneath the cobble stones between the forced earthen wall. These homes are the most substantial farm houses we have yet seen with high thick walls, and fine hard wood beams supporting their tiled roofs. In a court-yard outside their decorative wooden door two middle aged women are baking and then pounding corn for storage through the winter. Corn here is mostly intended as a feed for pigs. Walking further in the patterned shadows cast by ancient trees we met an old man carrying an infant boy. The man’s hair was braided and wound around his head in a red scarf, the traditional style of Tibetan warriors, where their long black hair is woven with wire to render it a virtual helmet for Battle. The man told us he was a great-grandfather and that his family had lived in the large white house he was entering for 6 generations.
He explained that Tibetans here do eat fish, unlike their northern nomadic countrymen, but that now was harvests time and no one had time for fishing. Their relationship with the Mekong seemed tenuous, as it is too violent for boating, and too low in its course for irrigation. Instead they divert mountain streams through a series of channels to feed their crops.
A few kilometers downstream he told us about a village, Ruda, which would soon be relocated across the River.
A few 100 kms out of Weixi we stopped to photograph some half completed buildings that E told us are the first parts of a dam building project across the River’s main channel. This is the first we have heard of this dam although we will later learn that this will become the Lidi dam.
Aiwa, a small village we pass has the distinction of being the site of the first boat we have seen on the River. As we continued the signs of construction became more significant until we were following a chain of big tip trucks along a dirt road, while piles of metal and concrete parts were strewn on both sides of the road.
By night fall our 4 hour day trip had devolved into an eleven hour plastic mini bus nightmare on roads designed by a schizophrenic around a mind numbing chain of death defying cliff side roads descending incrementally on the side of vertical faces that fall into the seething torrent of mud and stones that the locals call Lancang Jiang. It put our little team in a frayed state.
Finally we arrived at our daily destination, Weixi. This little town assaults you with its chaotic ugliness and neon depravity, a crude step out of the agrarian past into the cheap and flashy future. Descending from the elevated plains and mountain ranges forged as two continents collided millions of years ago, it seems today we have begin a descent into the contemporary South East Asian world of greed, and poverty, of the birth of unbridled consumerism and pointless destruction of the old and construction of the disposable new. The miraculous natural beauty of the world is being defiled and poisoned by its development into an industrial site, and the stains are leaching down every gully and streambed. At the head of China’s share of the Mekong River the glare of brothel lights opens a doorway to a parallel journey, this one down the intestine of a ruthless and insatiable body of humanity.
Here in the first Chinese city of our Mekong travels we find that menus include fish. The streets are steep and filled with outlandish farm vehicles, three wheels carts and trucks with exposed engine blocks spluttering through the glistening twilight. The dust of the mountains ground down to make roads shrouds a disappearing world of ornate wooded houses with their polychromatic carved wooded eaves, blond wood shutters decorated with dragons, tigers ad winged aquatic creatures. Impossibly graceful footbridges perched on unlikely granite blocks spanning icy streams. Grasses sprouting from ancient oven fired roof tiles, across sparkling voids where the atmosphere is drained between the teeth of ancient frozen mountain peaks, this is the world being replaced by cars, undrinkable water, polluted cities and the poverty of all nations.
Filed under: Traveling down the Mekong River | Tagged: mekong, tibet | Leave a comment »
