hard to imagine such a thing happening in poorer, one-party Laos.
In the steamy hills of South East Asia’s Golden Triangle, on the Thai–Burmese border, I take a slow boat into tropical Laos, beginning a journey along the Mekong River that will end 2,600 kilometres downstream in the South China Sea. The Mekong is the planet’s twelfth longest river and one of its richest biodiversity sites, supporting over 1,300 varieties of fish and the world’s biggest inland fishing industry. The river basin is home to some 60 million people in six nations, who depend on it for food, water and transport. It couldn’t be more different to Patagonia’s Baker River, yet, here too are highly contentious plans to dam the river for hydropower. As we enter the Anthropocene, the Mekong has become the most visible focus of international debate over the future of the world’s great rivers.
The boat is wooden, flat-bottomed and broad enough for two rows of hard benches to run its length. We cut a winding route through hills and mountains draped in lush vegetation. Vines and creepers extend down from the canopy, cloaking the forest in a continuous verdant blanket from bank to peak. The river is interrupted by oily granite and limestone karsts that protrude from the banks and out of the water in peaks that mirror the larger green ones. From some of these rocky outcrops, bamboo canes point over the water. Fishermen from indiscernible villages haul in nets or wade through the water in swimming pants to catch something silver and fast that flashes beneath.
The mighty Mekong is narrow and shallow here, sucked dry on its journey from its source in the Tibetan Plateau, 4,500 metres higher in the Himalayan snows, through China’s Yunnan province – until recently a region of such unspoilt beauty that Shangri-La was said to have been located there. The upstream extractions water China’s wheat baskets and the country is growing thirstier every year. China has constructed several hydrodams on its portion of the Mekong, both for power and water storage. The remote Xiaowan Dam, completed in 2008, which at almost 300 metres high is the world’s tallest, holds a reservoir some 170 kilometres long, and sends power all the way to Shanghai.
In some places the water appears to be boiling, bubbling up with unseen rocks. China intends to quell these rapids, blasting them with dynamite and streamlining the Mekong so that it is navigable all the way to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. It has busted a stretch north of Thailand, but protests there put off their projects south – for now.
We pull up at banks occasionally, where a village is hinted at by far-off stilted houses growing out of the forest. Local people come aboard carrying baskets of fish and vegetables or live chickens – the boat transport is the only link many of these rural people have to life and markets beyond their village. Almost all of the country’s 6.5 million inhabitants live on the Mekong or its tributaries. At one spot, a woman tries to board with two large monitor lizards and a big dead rodent on a string. The boat becomes uncomfortably crowded.
We glide though Luang Prabang, once the shimmering capital of the kingdom of Laos. French colonial villas, with painted shutters and verandas that hang with bougainvillea are interspersed with gold stupas and richly decorated Buddhist wats. Orange-robed monks with tranquil faces weave through the sleepy town. Officially it is a city, but with just 100,000 inhabitants, it scarcely merits the insult.
Above me, slash-and-burn scars denude the mountain slopes. It is a traditional but very destructive farming technique, in which forests are chopped and burned to make agricultural land. It leads to ruinous soil erosion and high carbon emissions, and it is one of the reasons for the success of opium in these parts – the poppies survive poorer soil compared to other crops. Opium use, traditionally practised by several tribes here, was manipulated by every colonial power across Asia. Now, the global opium industry is almost entirely in Afghanistan; nevertheless, I am offered it on several occasions.
Laos is on the list of least-developed nations. One reason for this is the cluster bombs littering the country that make it tricky to plough a field or build a road without painstaking and expensive mines clearance. One-third of the 2 million tonnes of bombs dropped on Laos during nearly 600,000 US missions during the Secret War in the late 1960s failed to detonate. More than forty years later, the bombs continue to kill and maim people especially during the sowing season when they are triggered by farmers turning the soil. The number of casualties is increasing, particularly among children who are seeking out the orange-sized bombs, because of the lucrative new market for scrap metal in China. Another hindrance to development is the Communist government, which after 1975 saw 10% of the population flee the country or be interned in re-education camps. Those who left were primarily the educated, middle-class intellectuals, a migration that cost the country a generation in development time, while its neighbours Thailand, Vietnam and China spent those years playing rapid catch-up to the established Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan). The vast majority of Lao live at subsistence level, fishing the rivers of the landlocked country or rice farming across its spine and plains. What forest remains is an essential source of food and other materials for the largely rural people, half of whom don’t have electricity. Their livelihoods are further threatened by unfair compulsory land purchase, in which the government pays little compensation for taking land from families for infrastructure projects or in corrupt deals with wealthy people or businesses. It has become such a contentious issue that even the state-controlled media reports it.
Laos has long nurtured aspirations of becoming the battery of South East Asia. With the majority of the Mekong’s waters gushing down its length, it has unrivalled hydropower potential. It was the French who first dreamed of taming the Mekong – at the turn of the twentieth century it took longer to travel from Saigon to Luang Prabang than to Paris. But their attempts at railways, rapid-busting and canals came to nothing. A few decades later, international companies flocked to Laos with new plans for hydrodams down the length of the Mekong that would transform the country and hasten its development. War and political conflict put paid to that idea.
Until now. Eleven hydroelectric dams are at advanced planning stage on the untamed Mekong River. The Communist government promises electricity and the other riches of development for the people of this poor nation, but the environmental and social consequences of stifling this uniquely biodiverse river are potentially enormous. While the government sells off the country’s natural resources from river to forest, reaping quick profits from electricity sales, rubber plantations, timber and mining, the people of Laos are in danger of losing everything.
A few days further downstream, past the charmingly petite capital of Vientiane, I stop in the small town of Thakek, surrounded by striking limestone karsts and protected forests. The animals here are shy, mainly because they are still hunted and eaten, so I see few. Forest-harvesting villagers pass me with assorted edibles in their baskets, including mushrooms, snails, insects, squirrels and a Mekong River weed that they dry. They munch on red ants and I try one – it pops in a citrussy burst in my mouth. I set out to rent a good off-road bike, ending up with a 100 cc scooter with a broken petrol gauge and speedo. I get a new inner tube for the rear tyre, get pumped and head out of Thakek on a three-hour voyage into the jungle, following a tributary river back from its Mekong entry in the hills. I pass fields being prepared for rice planting, fat black and pink buffalo wallowing happily in ponds and muddy pools, children firing stones from slingshots, and women in sarongs breastfeeding. Road-building, that ubiquitous Anthropocene signature, is under way even here. In a few years, the boat trip I made will be obsolete or maintained only for tourists. A 1,500-kilometre road from the Burmese port of Mawlamyaing, via Thailand and Laos to Danang in Vietnam, is almost complete. Already, journeys which used to take two weeks by sea between Bangkok and Hanoi now take only three days overland. The new ‘east–west economic corridor’ will change Laos rapidly, spurring industrial and economic growth faster than any hydroelectric dam.
After about eighty kilometres, the road further disintegrates into mud and cavernous potholes, and the land becomes suddenly bare and brown. Engineering on a massive scale is under way here at the site of the Nam Theun II hydroelectric dam, the Lao government’s pride and joy. I pass the powerhouse and then the road twists up and up through cooler damper air to Nakai village.
