In the age of the explorers, French crews dismantled their ships to get around the falls.From the 4,000 Islands of southern Laos to the Golden Triangle, the Mekong unrolls nearly two thousand kilometres of eddies and rapids. The explorers of old spoke of water monsters and solid-gold Buddhas buried at the bottom of the river; somewhere, forty metres down, the treasure of La Grandière, a French gunboat, is said to lie. But old photographs stay frozen, and the only treasure worth having now hides in the hearts of those who live by daring on the Upper Mekong: fishermen, captains, gold prospectors, divers. Provided there is still water: in places, only a few centimetres remain, and the ships wait on sandbanks.
The journey begins at the foot of a wall of water, the Khone Falls. Somvang, a tightrope fisherman, crosses them by his own means: he hangs his life on a line to cast his net over the fish resting in a few centimetres of water. He started at about fifteen, following his parents, “the right age to withstand the current”. At first he was petrified; he still does not underestimate the danger, but there are so many fish here: a big basket a day, some 500,000 kip. In Si Phan Don, life is worth five euros a kilo. At nightfall, the men tell each other the day’s exploits by the fire, eat the smallest catches, and the bulk of the haul goes to market. At daybreak, an engine set on a cargo of bamboo heads upriver towards the capital. Vitaya, the captain, is nineteen; he has loved engines since he was very small and prefers to sail alone: “It’s when you hesitate that you can have an accident.” But the water is getting lower and lower, he will probably have to change trades, and to deliver his bamboo on time, he will sail all night.
He says he is the only one who fishes this way in Si Phan Don: “The others just copy me.”
When a friend comes with him, he stands at the front to show the way, “but very often he gets it wrong”.Further upstream, in Khoc Saat, seventy families live off salt. The water is pumped from 250 metres down, from an ancient sea, then spread into large basins; three days later it has evaporated and the white gold appears. Phèng, thirty-three, does the work of her parents and her ancestors: the company that dug the wells allocates the basins according to the size of each family, eight for hers, and no one wants to give up their place. Under the sheds, some forty women bag the 5,000 tonnes produced each year. To extract salt despite the storms and the monsoon, the water is also boiled in large vats, in an inferno close to 45 degrees; a Christian worker prays there every day for more salt, and wishes his son a job sitting down, in an office. In Vientiane, it is insects that provide a living. At Donpakhai market, Lèm fries crickets and water bugs herself, “fat and crunchy”, which taste of salt and lemongrass. In a nearby forest, the women hunters sometimes find eight or nine hundred cicada larvae at once; a farmer, for her part, raises grasshoppers, proud to watch them grow, and happier still to scald them.
Leaving the capital, the ships are all aground, in knee-deep water; one cargo boat comes to help another and runs aground in turn. The captain who finally agrees to take a passenger heard his father speak of French boats sunk near Thadeua: Vietnamese and Chinese are trying to recover their treasures, but the elders say that crocodiles and giant fish stand guard. He has to turn back all the same. The next day, a bolder old tub weighs anchor. Its captain, Khamseng, holds the helm fourteen hours a day, running on M150, the country’s energy drink; he remembers every rock in the river and says he risks his life “eight times out of ten”. In the morning mist, the gold prospectors appear. For Peu, forty-two, when the wife decides to set off on an adventure, the husband cannot escape it: “We decide that kind of thing together.” In the evening, little gold, no money, and mercury handled without precaution. Where they used to go, the Chinese have posted their own militia. They are also looking, says Khamseng, for a gold Buddha seventeen or eighteen feet tall buried in the Mekong, and if the water is so low, it is because they open and close the sluices of their dams as they please.
Normally, the trip from Pak Lai to Vientiane takes only a day; at the moment, it takes a week.
None of his friends dares to come aboard with him: “They’re scared.”
That was in Satouk, where you could find “nuggets the size of an arm”; no one slept there at night.
Nearly 10,000 people in the region leave the rice paddies after the harvest to settle on the riverbanks.In Luang Prabang, every morning, tourists follow the procession of monks on their alms round, cameras in hand. Joy, one of the last wise men of the town, draws the spirits of the mountain, who guide him even in his hunt for bugs; the day the tourists have overrun everything, he predicts, the bugs will rule the world. One of the oldest captains in the country is a hundred years old: he used to row for eleven nights to reach Houay Sai, which is now reached in seven hours, and he once carried the king. Of the French boat, he has never heard. Yet a mahout leads the way through the forest to the monument to the sailors of La Grandière, which was wrecked in 1910 with part of the King of Laos’s treasure in its hold: looters destroyed it, and only a heap of stones remains. Further on, a diver with special powers raises boats that sink. In the Golden Triangle, finally, young Lao women sort sapphires for a Hong Kong concession, and a Chinese company with a capital of 86 million dollars has built a casino, the Kings Romans. “I came for a golden Buddha at the bottom of the Mekong, and I found a dragon in a puddle.”
Mae Keo, thirty years old, was left to him by his parents; she eats 200 kilos a day and weighs more than three tonnes.
He can stay underwater for three minutes, dives down to eighteen metres, and earns two to three million kip per rescue.
They have an appointment six hours away, to preach the dharma so that the spirits stop troubling the villagers.
The only craft unaffected by the river’s low water: it slaloms between the rocks at 80 km/h to arrive before nightfall.“It’s true, I’m an adventurer, I am.”Khamseng, captain for twenty-three years