MEKONG
DO YOU WANT TO BUY A BOAT?
Myself (right) with Luc (Left) and Tich Nhut Thong an 84yr old Vietnamese Monk taken in the Mekong Delta,Vietnam.
In 2014 myself and writer/photographer and dear friend Luc Forsyth bought a boat in the tiny floating village of Kampong Luong in Cambodia’s Pursat province. The idea was to self-drive that little fishing boat and explore the Mekong and Tonle Sap Lake and River in Cambodia, when and if we had the time. The whole thing was an incredibly boy-ish idea to start. The idea of chucking our cameras and some tin food into our little boat was, if we were to be honest, a completely selfish venture for an adventure, rather than the idea we put forth, and almost believed ourselves, which was to go and cover the river like no one had before. In hindsight it was a brilliant decision.
Once we got the boat back to Phnom Penh with help of the local Chams ( Cambodian Ethnic Muslims) we learnt to drive that damn boat, a real flimsy piece of wood, with a popcorn machine for an engine, and a make shift shade cover that looked like an umbrella that had already been blown inside out. After what we thought was a enough practice, we packed our gear and food trunks into her and decided to drive her from Phnom Penh to Siem Riep up the Tonle Sap River and into the lake exploring the communities and life along the riverbanks. What a wonderful disaster, we were not boatmen nor really prepared. GPS? Nah we had iPhones with GOOGLE MAPS. Tools? A few, none that we could use to fix the boat when it broke down, and it did. Food? Enough.
So sometime in October of 2014, we left Phnom Penh and headed up River. For the next month we drove our boat almost all the way to Siem Reap, her little engine giving up the go leaving us stranded in a floating village that resembled a scene out of the 1995 film Water World staring Kevin Costner. No gills or webbed feet present but these people were anything but land dwellers. They were also incredibly kind, they fixed our boat, filled us up with some gas and sent us off. This is one of many remote village encounters we had. Sharing driving and shooting responsibilities, we drove our way up and down that river and lake exploring every nook and cranny we could find, regularly getting lost, bumping into other boats, arriving on small islands to shocked and scared faces that always eventually welcomed us in. And thus began the love affair.
We limped back into Phnom Penh nearly four weeks later, with one hell of an experience behind us, and not nearly as much footage as we would have liked. Getting that boat in and out of anywhere was a two-man job for sure, and it often meant sacrificing a picture or Video Footage for the safety of the people around us more than ourselves. After a day or of two sleeping in real beds and not eating dried fish and rice, we put together a little blog post that was posted on Luc’s webpage, thinking nothing of it and returning to daily duties. I think I can speak for both of us that despite the roughing it; we were pretty much ready to get back on that boat after a week. Enter fate.
To our surprise that little blog post was seen by an NGO that contacted us with the proposition of documenting the entire Mekong. They liked the boat, they liked they idea of us using it, and they had a budget to work with that was realistic. After putting together a budget and doing the research for the initial preparation for the project, we quickly realized that our boat would not be a suitable vehicle to explore this mighty river. We would need way more space to accommodate gear a cameraman and translator if the project was going to be successful.
Neither of us had ever undertaken a project of this magnitude, the planning and research that went into just the logistics took us months to figure out. We worked so hard on that, that we had little time to actually do all the research we needed to do pertaining to the actual river itself. That would come from experience itself.
With all the logistics and budgets worked out we climbed on a bus and headed to Southern Vietnam, picking up our first driver, car and translator. A night in Saigon to pick up a few goodies we needed and we were off to the coast, where the Mekong meets the sea.
The next morning we were 25 kms of the coast aboard a shrimp fishing boat with The Nguyen family, I remember that first 4am journey like it was yesterday, the darkness that surrounded us sea to sky the boat engine grumbling over everything. I remember looking at Luc, I remember his acknowledgment of throwing the map out and trusting our guts, from here on out everything was instinctual. That’s how this was going to work. Following our nose, and our tails at times.
Nothing we did prior, no planning could have prepared us for anything that was about to happen. For the next 18 months we took countless boats, ferries, motorbikes, cars, buses, planes and whatever other mode of transport we could jump on to get us from Vietnam to the Langsoma Springs on the Tibetan Plateau where the Mekong originates. We had to unlearn everything we thought we knew. It consumed us. The river became our home and our office. It’s path our road and we became family.
The group project found its way onto a web page called A RIVERS TAIL, it’s an incredibly in depth multimedia project on the river. We are very proud of it.
The Mother of Waters is my personal outcome of that journey; it’s an exploration of a river that gave us so much. It’s an exploration of the people and animals that depend on that River. It’s and exploration of what life on that river looks like at present.