Post #3 - Alex & The Shifting River
I met Alex, the tour owner, on the boat. He is French-Lao. His parents left Laos in the 1980s (or 70s?); he was born and raised in France but returned years later to make a life here. He wears a necklace with a golden Naga pendant, a keepsake from his grandfather.
The Naga is a mythic serpent, a water spirit, the guardian of rivers. In Lao (as in Khmer and Thai, especially Northern Thai) culture, Nagas are everywhere—in temple carvings, across textiles, on stair‐railings, in stories. They are the symbols of protection and fertility, of the river’s power, and its mystery.
Alex loves Laos the way people love a first language. As we floated, he spoke passionately about his worry for the dams on the Mekong, and about the flood of Chinese investments reshaping his country. Not for his business, he said, but for the land, the fish, the banks, the villages, everything that breathes from the water. Interrupt the flow and the whole ecology shifts: silt trapped, fish routes broken, forests cleared, families uprooted.
He also talked of life in Laos and how much slower it seems compared to Saigon. How the stillness, the breathing spaces, the pauses between places, allow time for meditation, reflection, for listening to the river’s voice.
Brief wander further back into my memory: I visited the villages in the Vietnamese delta often when I was a kid, we call it về quê or going back to the countryside. It can also be translated as going back home. Memories of the ferry rides are especially vivid. The Mekong vast, brown, languid. The smells—gasoline, sweat, wet mud—all mixing. The sound—horns honking, people shouting and directing traffic, vendors selling rice crackers, peanuts in thin plastic bags. Heady, dense, but strangely comforting. Then mid-river, the thrum of the motor carried us. Other noises quieted. A hush fell, and everyone seemed to take a breath, as if yielding to the water.
Life downstream was certainly different. But it is changing quickly, too.
Alex pointed to a more recent change, the Laos–China Railway. Officially opened in December 2021, the 414-kilometer line runs from Boten on the Chinese border to Vientiane, stitching Laos directly into China’s economic orbit. On our trip, we passed beneath two of its bridges, the Luang Prabang Bridge and the Ban Ladhan Super Major Bridge. Designed, constructed, and mostly financed by Chinese entities, they are impressive engineering feats.
As Brian Eyeler writes in Last Days of the Mighty Mekong, the railway is emblematic of how China has turned Laos from a “land-locked” into a “land-linked” nation, but at a steep price. It has accelerated access, trade, and tourism, yet also saddled the country with heavy debt and tilted its political economy toward dependency. Chinese investment dominates everything from hydropower to real estate, raising fears that local priorities, environmental stewardship, and cultural rhythms are being overrun by outside speed.
For Alex, the project is a double-edged thing. It brings more connection, yes, but also more pressure. More influence from beyond. More risk that the slow rhythms, the water’s story, the Lao way of life are drowned out. (The Lao way of life is also a complicated thing to unpack as Lao is made up of numerous ethnic groups, I will save that for another post perhaps).
That afternoon, drifting under the warm February sky, I realized again: the Mekong is not just geography. It is memory. Myth. Identity. And all of them are shifting.
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Eyler, B. (2019). Last days of the mighty Mekong. Zed Books.