Post #1 - The Beginning - Slow Boat from Luang Prabang
I’ve been wanting to start this blog for a long time. Not sure why I’ve been hesitating. Maybe because it matters so much to me, and I wanted to shape it in the most beautiful, meaningful way possible. But that kind of waiting feels silly, just another form of perfectionist procrastination.
So I’ll start here.
In February this year, after visiting Luang Prabang with my uncle and my mother, I stepped onto a slow boat along the Mekong River. It felt like a pilgrimage. A journey I had been carrying in me for years, maybe a decade or more, ever since I first read about the 19th century Mekong Expedition led by Ernest Doudard de Lagrée, Francis Garnier, and their crew.
Their expedition was driven by the desire to trace the river to its source, thought to be hidden somewhere on a far plateau. It was also about finding a trade route to China. And, I imagine, it was just as much about ambition, the urge of young men to prove themselves, to carve their names into history.
For me, it was something else, though I’m still trying to figure out what it is. Sitting with the ochre-yellow current, so much like the ochre-yellow water I touched and smelled in my many trips to the Mekong Delta since I was a child. But it’s also different, life along the bank here is slower--fishermen casting nets, children waving, temples flickering gold in the late light…
A slow boat isn’t about destination. It’s about suspension, drift, time stretched across water. It’s about being reminded that the river is older than any border, carrying stories from mountains to delta, carrying me too, if I let it.
This was only the beginning. But beginnings matter. And perhaps writing it down now is another kind of journey, too.
