February 01, 2006
The Mekong, halfway down
The Mekong is low.
It's a bit spooky. Vientiane sits right on the Mekong, and you can see that it's supposed to be a serious river, like the Mississippi or the Danube. It's like a mile wide.
Except it isn't. From the shore -- or where the shore should be -- several hundred yards of dry, bare ground stretch to the water's edge. You have to walk for five or ten minutes before you reach the actual river, huddled mournfully against the opposite bank. At a guess, I'd say half of the Mekong's bed is bone dry right now. You can see that this is a recent thing, because no ground plants are growing on the bare mud flats yet.
Is it normal? I have no idea. It's the dry season now, and in monsoon countries rivers go up and down a fair bit. Maybe this happens every year.
On the other hand, it seems a bit much. Imagine looking out from New York and seeing the Hudson two-thirds dry. It's that level of odd.
Googling shows a lot of "low Mekong" stories from 2004, but nothing more recent. So maybe it's normal.
One fact which may or may not be related: holy cow, there are a lot of mosquitoes in this town. They're everywhere. In my hotel room, in taxis, in the meeting room at the World Bank. Aircon doesn't seem to stop them. They're not overly aggressive -- I've been bitten worse in Maine -- but they're totally omnipresent.
Is it because of the mud flats? Or, again, is this just normal? No idea. That's what it's like sometimes. You come into a country for some short time (two weeks), you spend most of your time in meetings or working in your hotel room, you leave with a lot of unanswered questions.
Oh, well.
[Update, a bit later:] Apparently it's all normal. And when the Mekong gets really low -- which it isn't now -- a determined traveller can wade across; the main channel goes down to just four or five feet of depth.
Cool.
Posted by douglas at February 1, 2006 10:36 AMMosquitos in a meeting room at the World Bank? I am ... uh ... surprised. Either those are some incredible mosquitos --- and I've been in some mosquito-ridden places --- or there's a level of rapid decay in Laotian architecture that you're not telling us. May I ask which it is?
Posted by: Noel Maurer at February 2, 2006 01:19 AMDear Doug: I think that there are a couple of things going on. In September I was in Iquitos, Peru, on the upper Amazon, and you'd walk maybe a brisk 15 minutes just to get to the water's edge...and you turn around and there's the city in the hazy distance.
It just doesn't seem Right, almost like an optical illusion, there is an internal dis-quietude feeling that there SHOULD be water here...but there isn't.
And that's the second element, the expectations we bring to the seeing...we expect a mighty river to be mighty, if only because that is what we are used to. I was a little distressed at the lack of water, the children playing soccer on the richly green and now grassy cracked river bed...but apparently all was as it should be. This is, as you note, apparently true of the Mekong also.
But it remains weird to see and be there, that's for sure.
Best Wishes,
Traveller
Posted by: Traveller at February 2, 2006 10:11 AM