Post #2 - Ochre yellow water and cream vanilla sand
If you haven’t guessed already, these posts are written months after the trip using notes from a journal/sketchbook I kept along the way, and from the memories that return when I look back. They carry hindsight, reflection, and the weight of additional reading layered in after the fact.
Continuing on the slow boat in early February, 2025: we departed Luang Prabang early in the morning. The sun was up but was veiled by streaks of cloud. The air has a slight chill. The Mekong opened like a box of paint. There were many colors, vibrant but not aggressive—not the hot, overwhelming glare of Saigon summer. Mountain green. Orange-ochre cliffs. Sandbars in pale vanilla and light taupe. Behind them, teaks, banana trees, figs, and palms weaved a tapestry of green shades and stark beige bark. Further back, a dark blue ridge.
I was one of two Asian passengers, the only Vietnamese voice on board, and certainly the youngest guest. The captain’s quiet daughter, still a teenager, moved gently among us. Most of the others were older European couples, retired, in their seventies. Maybe people think a trip like this is too slow, too costly for its speed? But slowness has its own brightness. The river’s surface was cream one moment, dark ochre the next, water stitching light to shadow, then letting it go. On the banks, buffalo idled, children darted between boats, vegetable terraces pressed into the slope, gold panners waving as our boat went by…
In his posthumous book Embrace Fearlessly This Burning World, Barry Lopez wrote in an essay about Richard Nelson “To be patient, to pay attention to the world that is not yourself, is the first step in the neophyte’s discovery of the larger world outside the self, the landscape in which wisdom itself abides.” I hold these words close as I sat completely mesmerized by the scenes unfolding in front of me.
It was the dry season. You could read the old water on the sandy banks like tally marks, showing where the flood once reached and would again. The captain told me the river rises ten meters higher at the peak of monsoon. The boat hummed steadily, moving north against the flow. The day loosened. Colors kept arriving, as if the mountains themselves were sending them downriver.
—-
Lopez, B. (2022). Embrace fearlessly the burning world: Essays (D. Gwartney, Ed.). Random House.