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Mekong (Discovery Channel Expedition) - 2001

Mekong - 2001

Jacek Pałkiewicz
2006-06-18 23:10:07

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Down the river

The "Mekong 2001" expedition has gone down the river, through the whole Indochina (Laos, Cambogia and Vietnam).

The Mekong is myth and history. His waters, charges of fertile limo, testify the sunset of the khmer empire, the falls of regimes, the defeats of colonial dominoes, the horrors and tragedies of bloody wars, trafficis of drug, but they are also the principal source of prosperity and vital way of communication. The imposing course of waters, along 4.300 kilometers, it marks visibly the border between Middle Ages and Year two thousand. Thailand, with his wastes, one of the Asian Tiger, is the country more developed of the immense region that is compared with the rhythm of life not yet grazed by the progress in Laos.

Giorgio Fornoni has realized the documentary film for Discovery Channel, to Polish director Jan Jakub Kolski a film for the Polish TV.

And still there is the river, the Great River, the Mother of the Waters, running its immense course from Tibet to the South China Sea. We finally know the location of the Mekong's source, since the French explorer and writer Michel Peissel, and his companions settled its exact position in September 1944. At an altitude of 4975 metres, at the head of the Rupsa-la Pass in eastern Tibet, they found that the river rose at latitude 33 degrees 16 minutes 534 North and longitude 93 degrees 52 minutes 929 East.

Few travellers will share this sight of the Mekong's begin¬nings in the windswept, treeless landscape of upland Tibet. But there is much that can be seen along the river from its mouths on the South China Sea to the point at which it flows out of China. Beyond that point, the Chinese government remains reluctant to allow a travelled to use the waterway to move downstream from Jinghong into northern Laos, but there is no difficulty in viewing the Mekong at various points along its course in Yunnan. No longer the unknown river that Francis Gamier saw in the 1860s, what the Mekong lacks in mystery at the end of the twentieth century is more than compensated for by its variety and its grandeur.