Post #4 - Klaus & The Drifting Rocks
Klaus, a Belgian in his seventies with the curiosity of three people, points at the various sized outcrops sticking out of the water. “Look,” he says, “the rock.” Slate-like plates. Dark blocks. Rounded river stones. Rose, rust, blue-black in color. By profession Klaus is an accountant, but his heart belongs to travel and photography. And to talking. Thankfully, he talks about the things I love listening to.
He tells of old seas, buried mountain bones, the Earth’s skin wrinkling, crust pushing, folding, cracking, lifting, until a river found the seams and ran its fingers through them. I love the grammar of it: grain, bedding, fracture, weathering. Outcrops rise like half-told stories, peeking through vanilla sand and ochre water. On them, horizontal water stains mark the ebb and swell of past seasons, a ledger written in stone.
I admit it: I love rocks. In my old day job, I designed outcrops for parks, visited distant quarries, measured and scanned stone, wrestled for weeks and months with drawings to make them buildable. I crawled across breakwaters, checking if boulders were interlocking right, searching their nooks for oysters, crabs, and mussels. I traced their veins finding life within their cracks. Rock feels intimate to me, hard, patient, unhurried.
Klaus’s lesson is backed by deep history. Much of the Indochina peninsula once lay beneath shallow tropical seas. Throughout the Mekong River Basin, Paleozoic sandstones, limestones, and shales record those ancient waters. About 50 million years ago, the collision of India with Eurasia landmass sent ripple impact across the continent, pushing, folding, and stacking the crust. The granites we passed are remnants of igneous bodies formed even before that time, 250 millions years ago!
The Mekong now slices through this geologic archive, carrying fragments downstream: limestone from the ancient sea’s bones, granites from molten rock, river cobbles tumbled into rounded silence, mud silt and sand dyed the water brown. Each outcrop we glide past is a reminder of how even the largest mountain is continuously shifting.
Klaus eventually moved to stories of his children and grandchildren. I keep listening. The boat slides on. Rapids press against the rocks, stone against water, a conversation that has lasted for millions of years.
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Gupta, A. (2009). Chapter 3. Geology and landforms of the Mekong Basin. In I. Campbell (Ed.), The Mekong (pp. 29–51).
Wang, Y., Jian, P., Zhang, Q., Zhao, P., & Li, J. (2016). Paleotethyan evolution of the Indochina Block as deduced from granites in northern Laos. Journal of Asian Earth Sciences, 118, 135–151.
Sterling, E. J., Hurley, M. M., & Minh, L. T. (2006). Vietnam: A natural history. Yale University Press
