Fabienne in Asia

never take a fast boat up the mekong. ever. i like to think of myself as a fairly daring person – sometimes stupidly so -and i usually come out the other side of extreme situations pumped up and thrilled, no regrets, ready to recommend the experience or tackle the adventure all over again. not this time. give me white water, dense jungle, a rock face, a mountain top, a clear cut swarming with blackflies; I’ll take it on with gusto. you have to have a death wish – a gruesome, guts-splaying, blood-spouting death wish – to ever take a fast boat up the mekong river.

she’s a mighty river, the mekong. she boils and swirls unexpectedly, drops ten feet on a whim, and is home to tree tops, dead heads, and random bushes that probably pick up and relocate as inconspicuously as ents. these fast boat drivers have nothing in mind but the profit they’ll make on their boat trips, and the faster they get you to point ‘b’, the faster they can jet back to point ‘a’ for another load of tourists. the boat sits about 5 inches above the water at top speed, maybe 2 on a lower setting. it swerves last-minute around whirlpools, and clips little green islets that pop up out of nowhere. no helmets, no life jackets. at least with white water, in a raft or a kayak, you have control over yourself and your boat, you’re moving at a relatively manageable speed, you’re wearing protective gear, and you can really only kick yourself if something goes terribly wrong. we all had our own ways of coping. i quickly decided that my backpack meant nothing next to my life, and that if i were to die, and least i would die having set off to see the world, loving life, missing great friends, anticipating new ones…adventuring and learning and happy. then i just started singing leonard cohen songs to myself, every single leonard cohen song i knew, from ‘bird on a wire’ which reminds me so much of my dad, to all of the memories surrounding ‘chelsea hotel’, to thoughts of sitting in the house in ottawa, jess and rejean close by, snow outside, doing high school homework to ‘famous blue raincoat’.

natalie got out her lonley planet once we arrived in laos and read the page about fast boats on the mekong. the book says not to take one unless you have absolutely no other option. 2 a week usually go down, often full of tourists because the locals know not to take the boats, and if people don’t die, they lose all of their backpacking possessions to the currents of the mekong.

Tags: Travel

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