Bulek Eye

Heading upstream on the Mekong in northern Laos, you’re lulled into a kind of trance. The engine chattering at the back, the swishing water against the narrow junk’s hull, the twirling whirlpools in the cataracts, the misty mornings, the beat of the warm wind in the afternoon. You settle in, watching a simple, slow world go by at 10 knots. Water buffalo loll in the shallows, hopeful fishermen stalk the shore with handnets, children run their toothpick dugouts downstream. Most everyone waves, gently. Around each bend is a new assemblage of villages obscured by tangles of trees, and empty, sandy banks crisscrossed by foot trails, and another stretch of murky, mocha water that disappears again behind a distant limestone escarpment.

There were a dozen other foreigners on the two-day journey early this month from the old enshrined, royal capital of Luang Prabang to the Thai border. A French Ph.d candidate studying transitional justice, an English cameraman and his actress girlfriend, an American teaching in Japan, six Australian first-years on winter break, a Danish truckdriver. The wooden benches on the spare 20-meter boat were too narrow for big Western skeletons. So we roamed the deck, and gathered on the floor near the refreshment table at the back and up near the captain’s wheel. A few hours into it, most everybody’s story was known. We wondered where we were always, but never could quite tell. We came to accept that we were on the river and would stop at sunset.
None of the handful of locals went the distance, instead departing on beaches deep in the green gorges, received by small clumps of barefoot family members who shouldered the passenger’s burlaps sacks full of city clothes and rice. Other people hailed the captain into shore and sent a father off to the Thai docks, a student up to university, a mother to a guesthouse. Deep in rural Laos, this was still the working highway.
The first afternoon I leaned out over the wooden rail as we labored up through a fast stretch squeezed between two rock walls. Forty meters away, in an eddy against the rocks, was a body. Its bloated stomach had a light-colored t-shirt on it. Maybe it wasn’t a body. We drew even with it and I could make out the beginnings of legs and shoulders and a neck. I froze, totally engrossed. Soon, a rotting stench wafted through the boat. “There’s a body,” I said to the Dane. He didn’t hear me for the engine. “A body!”. “Whew, smell it!” He said. He fixed his zoom lens on it. “Sure is,” he said coolly. He told the cameraman, who turned slightly pallid. We stared at it, receding to a speck. For some reason, we saw no reason to alert the captain. Equally strange, he didn’t see it. And, quickly, we detached from it. “There’s some crazy shit going on upstream in Burma,” the Dane said. I speculated it might be opium trade in the Golden Triangle. “I’m glad my girlfriend didn’t see that,” the Brit said.
That night we stopped at Pakbeng, a funky little outpost of guesthouses and restaurants that owes its existence to boatloads of travelers invading the place at 6 pm each night and leaving at 8 am the next morning. We narrowly beat a jam-packed downstream boat to shore and had our pick of rooms; I settled with two other Americans at one house that promised hot water (by the bucket) and generator-spun electricity through the night. Out on the restaurant strip, we waded through a gauntlet of proprietors trying to snare us, before stopping into an Indian restaurant. The owner won us over when he swore the advertisement at a Lao spot next door — “Come here and understand why I’m married to my wife” — was bogus. “His wife doesn’t even cook anymore,” said the Indian. After our meal, washed down with a bottle of the smooth Beer Lao, he asked: “Need any sandwiches for tomorrow? I’m up at 6:30 for breakfast, too.”
We boarded a new boat with a fresh crop of locals in the morning and nosed into the current. Just after the mist burned off a few hours later, the captain sidled into a shoreline of pointy rocks to drop off two men carrying a stack of re-bar and some thin, steel framing. A girl, 10ish, in a floppy, cotton sunhat crouched on a rock looking down at us and her family unloading the guys’ stuff. The engine hushed and the boat steadied. A few of us leaned over the rail to take pictures, and I flashed a quick wave at the girl. She didn’t move or smile or frown. She only stared intently down on the whole exchange, the looks, the goods, the people, the photographs, the wonder. Nobody could force an expression out of her, the wheels in her head spinning madly from curiosity towards understanding, perhaps. I watched her still as we pulled away; it was many boatlengths before she left her perch, finally, and hopped down to the group to carry the things to the village.
The trip was supposed to take six hours that second day, but it dragged deep into the afternoon. We stopped half an hour at one village to load up two dozen yellow Beer Lao crates full of empties. We passed a group of women washing rice (or panning for gems) at a creek mouth. We wrote off the possibility of crossing into Thailand before the end of the day. But it was worth it. As we approached Huay Xai, our endpoint, the river crept out of the limestone gorges and into a broad plain. The sky rolled through the whole spectrum of orange, the water became a glassy silver. I tried to soak it up, to stay in river time for one more moment. The lights and the apartment houses and docks and Chinese trading junks in Huay Xai inched closer, and then finally absorbed us.