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A lucky break in Paklay | page 1, 2
"But you can pay for a speedboat!" the Paklay customs officer told me brightly. I retreated into town to eat a baguette and mull this over. At the restaurant, the owner made a big show of seating me at an outside table in view of his (presumably jealous) neighbors. He proudly presented me with his English-language menu, which featured such delectable dishes as "Prawn Soaking Fish Sauce" and "Sour Soup Skid and Prawn." Entrees aside, the most interesting detail about the menu was that it had been made from an old communist children's book. On the cover (which now read "MENU" in blue Magic Marker) was a sentimentalized drawing of Lenin, looking beatific and suspiciously Jesus-like, surrounded by adoring children. The pages inside had been torn out and replaced with a laminated menu card that listed prices in Lao kip, Thai baht and U.S. dollars. Communism is unraveling, it seems, in the dusty corners of Laos. Halfway through my baguette, I looked up to notice two Americans staring at me from the street. The sandy-haired one, who introduced himself as Chris, held a plastic jug full of cherry-red gasoline. The other one was Robert. He said, "Still interested in going down the Mekong with us?" I would later discover that half of the Mik Sip crew had turned up sick and couldn't make the trip, but at that moment I didn't even ask why I'd been invited: Within 20 minutes, I had purchased some food and a blanket and was stretched out languorously in the bow of the boat that would eventually take me to the Cambodian border. - - - - - - - - - - - - Traveling downriver in a handmade fishing boat makes the Mekong seem so much more immediate and alive. From the bow of the Mik Sip, I noticed details that I had missed on the larger, louder huahoua-leim freight boats: white-bellied birds darting for insects just over the surface of the water; slowly rotting skeletons of huge old riverboats in the shore mud; ashes from slash-and-burn fires fluttering through the air like brittle black feathers; butterflies as big as my hand. Fishermen clung to the rock outcroppings where the channel of the Mekong narrowed to a boil, sweeping the foamy water with their big, V-shaped nets. Lao families panned for gold on the gravel shoals, using a wicker-basket/wooden-pan technique that hasn't changed in 100 years. Dead dogs bobbed -- bug-eyed, bloated and morbidly comical -- in the eddies. Robert steered us through the channels of the Mekong like he'd being doing it all his life (with Chris spotting pylons with the binoculars, Robert unflinchingly ran a rapid that had swallowed a French gunboat in 1910). Whenever we lost a propeller to rocks or gravel, Robert and Chris would curse, paddle us to shore and have a new one jury-rigged within minutes. Both of these guys would eventually teach me the ways of the river, Mark Twain-style -- Chris with the cantankerous patience of Captain Bixby; Robert with the no-nonsense bluntness of Captain Ahab. Just after sundown, we stopped for the night at a sandbar. Robert's years of experience on Bristol Bay gave our camp a decided air of competence and efficiency: In the fading light, he managed to pound 20 nails into the gunnels of the Mik Sip, grease the drive shaft, top off the engine oil, build a fire and cook us a dinner consisting of baked potatoes with garlic, coconut-milk vegetable curry, cucumber salad, French bread with cheese, oranges, papayas, Lao whiskey and cowboy coffee. During dinner, Chris -- a Nevada City carpenter of indeterminate age (I'd thought he was just a few years my senior until he offhandedly mentioned that he'd joined the Navy the year I was born) -- kept us entertained with old road stories, such as the time when his Colorado River rafting guide stripped naked and declared himself God after eating a wild mushroom, or the time he saw a cow tumble 1,000 feet down a Peruvian mountainside. After we'd finished eating, Robert tuned in his shortwave radio and we listened to Orson Welles' famously constipated rendering of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, which for some reason was playing on the Voice of America. Sitting on the banks of the Mekong in Laos, it sounded creepy and mesmerizing, like a transmission from another galaxy. - - - - - - - - - - - - The following day we made it to Vientiane -- a national capital so unassuming and bucolic that, thinking it just another Lao Mekong town, we passed it by accident and had to backtrack seven miles before we finally arrived. By the time I would leave the Laotian capital, I would be the co-owner of the Mik Sip -- and the primary instigator of a rather foolhardy conspiracy to take the boat down the most notorious rapids on the Laotian Mekong.
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About the writer Sound off Related Salon stories Guns, muskmelon breasts and the Laotian Gandhi An American takes a Mark Twain-like journey by riverboat down the Mekong.
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