The Journey is the destination

The journey is the destination. Sorry to open with such a hackneyed sentiment, but this statement most accurately sums up my last 5 days here in Laos. In the last five days I've logged in about 39 hours of travel time and over a 1000 kilometers, traveling by bus and slow boat and minibus. Last Saturday morning I boarded a slowboat headed North up the Mekong to Houakxai, some 300 km upstream on the Mekong. This journey took 2 days, 9 hours each day, stopping halfway at the backwater town of Pakbeng, where the electricity went out at 10:30 and soldiers armed with AK47s wrangled drunk farang into their guesthouses at the 11 o'clock curfew. Between Louang Prabang and Houakxai I saw some of the most remote stretches of the mekong, where steep standbanks were left to erode on their own, flowing like sand glasses into their watery reflections, carving out facsimiles of the grand canyon--like watching the history of the earth at an accelerated time scale, saw albino carabou that looked like big pigs with horns, saw small fishing villages where the fishermen young and old in their skimpy briefs, cast their nets, their compactly muscled and tanned frames like something Walt Whitman would have waxed rhapsodically over, catalogueing each limb, each sinew, met on the boat a girl from Manila (at first though she was fil-am, the few phrases I first heard her utter without an accent, also her voice reminded me of Julia Reodica, who once appeared in a photo in the NY Times Sunday arts section in an article about performance artists working with biohazard materials--in the photo she was wearing a tshirt that read terrorist and was disguised in a ski mask) who taught acting in an arts center in Manila and was travelling with her Italian boyfriend who sported an off center pigtail and worked in Manila for a Spanish-Catholic NGO, among the many things I learned from her on the first leg of the trip: there exists a cult in the Philippines, the Rizalistas, that worship the national hero Jose Rizal as the second coming of Christ (I told her that in Bangkok a cult formed around King Rama IV, where people left offerings to his statue to improve their lives and fortunes), she agreed with me that between Buddhism in SE Asia and Catholicism in the PI there's not a whole lot of difference, just different icons and different talismans that people offer things to to curry favors. Among the people on the boat I immediately made judgements against: an italian guy--not the filipina girl's BF, another italian guy who wore the same yellow Lao-beer shirt and sagging jeans two days in a row (who also spoke english with an american accent for some reason) who tried to take a photo of an old Lao woman riding with her drunk middle-ages son, he asked her if he could take a photo, but she covered her face and said something in complaint, her drunk son argued with her and forced her to pose, making a scene, the italian guy was flustered by her protests and said that's okay I won't take her picture, I told him jokingly: after 5 hours of being wind-blown, she's not at her best, which I think further embarassed him, you have to admit she's a beautiful woman, he said, and when I didn't respond he slunked back to his seat at the back of the boat (In Pakbeng this guy roomed next to me in a 2-dollar guesthouse, stumbling around his room drunk after midnight, the wood sheet walls were so thin that not only could I hear his every drunken move, but I could see his flash light through the wall and the spotlight on my ceiling), the There were these 2 Germans a boy and a girl, couldn't figure out if they were siblings or a couple who brought along cards and dice, and played some dice game where they vigourously shook the dice in a cup like they were making a cocktail. The three blonde swedish kids turned out to be okay, the curly-haired one taking photos at the aft of the boat and writing in his journal, the girl at turns languidly gazing at the banks or smoking a cigarette, the other boy with the mesh cap and studded belt always waved back enthusiastically whenever village children waved at our passing boat, you gotta love that, there was an older north american guy with his Lao wife who for some reason only talked to the Germans, on the second leg of the trip there was a Japanese guy--I thought he was Lao at first--who kept to himself and never smiled or showed much enthusiasm, and I saw how I could easily be mistaken as a Japanese national.
On the stretches, where I would watch the scenery pass me,I thought about fractals, the enumeration and repetition in rock formations, stratified layers of rock pitched at an upward angle by ages of tectonic pressure, the lines etched on the bank formed by the receding river, the trees, the eddies and ripples in the river, I watched how the Mekong would narrow to these craggy, rock-strewn passages and at the next bend suddenly widen into vast, calm waters, the juxtaposition like cinematography out of a Kubrik film, I watched ashes from clear-cutting drift from the sky along with downey, cotton-fluff seedlings, I watched sparrows with their dagger wings wheeling tight circles above the river, we saw a few speedboats their passengers with lifevests and crash helmets (they can make the same 300 km stretch in 6 hair-raising hours), I saw strange flotsam: folded banana leaf packages, animist offerings to the river spirits? Sometimes I would fall asleep my head resting on the edge of the boat, the wind blowing in my face and I would wake up startled by so much water.