Every Laotian family sends its sons to a monastery. It offers an opportunity for secular education, as well as the study of philosophy and the disciplines of Buddhism and it freed the household of the burden of an extra mouth to feed. I spoke to several such students and all seemed content. I never felt they had been forced into training against their will. I also noticed their gentility and grace.

On our second morning anchored in Luang Prabang, I rose before dawn for the ceremony of alms-giving. Filing out from all the temples in this holy city were orange monks. Each carried a small basket, usually with a flip-open lid. As they walked the streets, seated women gave each and every one a small handful of sticky rice. The men who were almsgiving were allowed to stand. The rule is that women must keep their heads lower than the monks.
The ritual was carried out in silence; it began in darkness and by the time the monks had made their passage round the town and gathered their day’s victuals, the sun had risen. It was a memorable spectacle.

Luang Prabang was such a laid-back place; a city to reawaken the soul’s stirrings. In fact, it was my overriding impression of all that I saw of Laos, but unfortunately behind all this were the worries for the future. Each and every one of these river people are facing an uncertain tomorrow…

After visiting one of Luang Prabang’s bustling markets, I sat alone to contemplate a view of one of the river’s tributaries. There, I fell into conversation with a local fisherman, an elderly fellow with a face as weather-beaten as worn sandpaper. He spoke remarkably good French and confided how life was changing for everyone in his country as well as the other five countries bordering this ‘bounteous mother of waters’. Tourism, he said, shaking his head, was the only future remaining to them and that would also bring concerns. The dams in China (Laos also has plans to build a dam of its own) are causing major environmental problems. From his point of view, the fish were particularly endangered. Of the hundreds of species of fish in the river, over 80% are migratory. When the dams closed off the water flow and the southern sections of the river became dry, the fish had nowhere to go or breed. And the local people had no means of earning a living or feeding their families. ‘Our traditions will die out. Hotels are being built to create a new means of livelihood and tourism will change the geographical face of our region,’ he sighed.

Vientiane

Vientiane (meaning Sandalwood City) was destroyed by the Siamese in 1828 and rebuilt by the French in 1900 and again in 1931. Today, stallholders wheel their fruit wares about the streets or, displayed woven plates of delicious little rice cakes outside their doors. Down along the scruffy waterfront where the Mekong was so distant it appeared tidal, I saw a man cross-legged on the grubby sand collecting and cleaning used bottle tops from the ground.
I found Vientiane to be a dusty metropolis of bland modernity, yet a city of contradictions where monks and military walked side by side or sat together on street corners. Italso had many magnificently opulent temples and palaces. Yet Vientiane did not inspire me or light up my soul as Luang Prabang had done and I was not too sorry to say goodbye and move on to Cambodia. Sadly, this was also where we bid farewell to our floating home, the Mekong Sun. The rapids and waterfalls further south made the journey into Cambodia by boat too treacherous. We travelled on from here to Siem Reap in a private aircraft.

Angkor Wat, Cambodia

Angkor lies approximately six kilometres north of the modern city of Siem Reap, which is north of Tonlé Sap, a tributary of the Mekong and the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia. Angkor was a temple complex and city built by the Khmer in the twelfth-century. (Angkor Wat means City Temple). It has become a symbol of Cambodia, is represented on their national flag and, without argument, is the biggest tourist attraction within this war-ravaged country.

By the time we arrived, it was the second week of February and the Chinese (or Vietnamese, Cambodian) New Year was in full swing and the temples were overrun with tourists who expressed little respect for the spirituality of these holy places. Angkor is a magnificent legacy of Asian history and after the quietude of our slow passage down the Mekong, the clamouring was hard to take. Nevertheless, watching the dawn come up over the walled city of Angkor Thom, marvelling at the sun climbing in the sky and spilling its carmine-red reflection across the ruins and moat takes some beating no matter how many thousands of people are sharing the experience with you.

My personal favourite was Ta Prohm Temple. It is an unrestored site, used as an eerie location in the film Tomb Raider. What made it so remarkable was the almost symbiotic relationship it displays between jungle and masonry. It was originally built in the 12th and early 13th century as a temple and university but once the Khmer empire disintegrated in the 15th century, it was abandoned and fell into ruin. While the principle temples such as Angkor have been restored, Ta Prohm has been left to decay and stand as a fabulously pictorial witness to both the force of nature and the staying power of the Khmer structures. It has merged with the jungle and everywhere the roots of the silk-cotton and strangler fig trees move through the ancient buildings, wrapping themselves about the brickwork like silent reptiles.

Returning to my hotel early one morning, I was surprised to see that the moat encircling Angkor was being hand cleaned by local men and women. I watched from a bridge as they fished out what looked like algae and tossed it onto the banks. As you can see in this photograph, they wore hats and face masks but were fully clothed and not protected in any other way. It highlighted for me how poor the majority of the citizens in Cambodia are and how high the rate of unemployment is, although the government has put in place many programmes to rebuild the infrastructure of this remarkable, yet devastated country.

After his second visit to Angkor Wat, the English novelist, Somerset Maugham, pronounced that ‘No one should die before seeing the temples of Angkor’. He would possibly have made the circuit by elephant and it would have been a far more serene experience. Alas, those early days of tourism are over. Still, I will return to Angkor, but it is the water beyond, the Mekong itself, that truly beckons me back. There is rarely a day that I do not recall an image or two from my Mekong voyage, brief as it was. I frequently dream of continuing that slow boat journey I embarked upon in northern Laos. I long to discover the Tonlé Sap (the flowing heart of Cambodia) with its remarkable shifts of river flow and its uniquely rich source of aquatic life, to participate in the Mekong’s water festivals and to follow the Mekong to its delta in Vietnam and its final plunge into the South China Sea.

Carol Drinkwater flew to Vietnam with Captain’s Choice Tours; www.captainschoice.co.uk. The river cruise was with cruisemekong.com (it can be booked by Captain’s Choice or independently); www.cruisemekong.com.

Images and text by Carol Drinkwater. Her latest book is The Olive Tree by (Phoenix, £7.99); www.caroldrinkwater.com

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