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Wanderlust
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By Rolf Potts

July 10, 1999 | By the time Chris and I started down the southeast bend of the river above Thakaek, the Mik Sip had traveled more miles down the Mekong than most Lao citizens travel in their lifetimes. As we steered our northern-style fishing vessel into the southern reaches of the river, we may as well have been driving a dogsled into downtown Dallas. Fishermen in small, long-tail powered dugout canoes stared in confusion or bemusement as Chris and I thumped past in a high-gunneled, canary-yellow craft that was twice as long and half as maneuverable as anything else on the river.

Since the logistics of a two-man crew pretty much precluded socializing, Chris and I drove straight through to Thakaek. Piloting in shifts, we stuck close to the tobacco fields of the Lao shoreline as the river gradually widened. By late day, we could no longer make out the fishing boats on the Thai side of the Mekong.

When the sun went down amid an orange halo of burn-off smoke from the Thai fields, we drove the last two hours to Thakaek by moonlight. In the dim neon glow, the shores of the Mekong dissolved into a bluish veil of noises. The rattle of the Mik Sip's engine reverberated from the Lao bank with a warping echo, sounding like some back-masked message from Babel; dim strains of karaoke drifted across the waters from the Thai shore, as eerie and tuneless as white noise. Whenever Chris shouted to me from the pilot's seat, it sounded like there were 100 of him in a very large and empty room. Though we certainly weren't on the river much past 8 p.m., it felt like time had stopped altogether. We pulled into Thakaek as enchanted and spooked as Huck and Jim below the Ohio.

I fell asleep in my hotel room within an hour of arriving, and woke up disoriented at 4:30 in the morning. Hoping to straighten my bearings, I went for a walk through the darkened pre-dawn streets of Thakaek.

If Luang Prabang is a tiny Manhattan, then Thakaek is a Laotian St. Louis -- an 1850s-style gateway city, where little girls try on their mother's lipstick by kerosene lamp light behind the shuttered windows of crumbling mint-green Lao-French homes, and blue banners advertising Pepsodent flutter above dusty piles of red brick in the old colonial town square, and sad chickens screech like broken radios in the moments before sunrise.

As I walked, Nakhon Phanom, Thailand, blazed in electric splendor just across the river -- a vision of an alternative future -- its riverbanks hemmed with smart concrete walkways, its avenues webbed over with telephone lines, its temples as clean and uniform as McDonald's franchises.

In a century defined by technological progress and Western standards of living, the Lao shores of the Mekong often feel like a dusty asterisk in the history books. Indeed, some 85 percent of Laotians still survive on a subsistence lifestyle -- farming or fishing for food, building their homes from native materials and occasionally bartering for consumer items.

Outside influences look to change all that. Just a few decades after having dropped 2 million tons of bombs on Laos (as part of an ill-defined "secret war" that reduced the peasant culture of Xieng Khouang province to rubble), the United States has already poured $1.5 billion of investment into Laotian modernization and economic-development schemes.

The city of Thakaek, though, symbolizes the potential of a much stronger influence on Lao society: Thailand. In 1996, Bangkok and Vientiane signed a memorandum of understanding to build a bridge connecting Thakakek with Nakhon Phanom. Thus -- with the increased flood of Thai commerce bound to arrive on the Lao shore -- Thakaek represents how Laos is at a sensitive crossroads: primed for changes that will likely redefine the country in another 20 years.

It has been suggested, of course, that this is a bad thing -- that avoiding foreign influences and maintaining the purity of local culture is somehow more ideal. But a close look at Lao culture itself shows how it's too late to arbitrarily stop time and make judgments of cultural purity. After all, the basic precepts of Lao mythology, philosophy and religion are heavily influenced by the ancient Khmers (who themselves were influenced culturally by India), most Lao pop culture is already Thai-derived and for hundreds of years there was no distinct border between Laos and Vietnam.

All of this in addition to the fact that -- even in the charming pre-dawn streets of Thakaek -- I never once saw any Lao citizens who could knap flint in the manner of their Stone Age ancestors.

Within two hours of my morning walk, I was back on the river. While I'd been asleep the night before, Chris had invited Liz and Duncan, a good-natured young English couple, to join us for the final stretch.

The four of us made it two days downriver from Thakaek -- and not more than an hour past Savannakhet -- when I personally drove the Mik Sip over a submerged rock shoal, snapped the propeller off and set us adrift in the swift current.

"Well," Chris said with a trademark phlegmatic drawl that indicated he was panicking, "if we don't start paddling right now, we're gonna lose this boat."

Thus began our descent of the Khemmarat rapids.

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