A few days further downstream, past the charmingly petite capital of Vientiane, I stop in the small town of Thakek, surrounded by striking limestone karsts and protected forests. The animals here are shy, mainly because they are still hunted and eaten, so I see few. Forest-harvesting villagers pass me with assorted edibles in their baskets, including mushrooms, snails, insects, squirrels and a Mekong River weed that they dry. They munch on red ants and I try one – it pops in a citrussy burst in my mouth. I set out to rent a good off-road bike, ending up with a 100 cc scooter with a broken petrol gauge and speedo. I get a new inner tube for the rear tyre, get pumped and head out of Thakek on a three-hour voyage into the jungle, following a tributary river back from its Mekong entry in the hills. I pass fields being prepared for rice planting, fat black and pink buffalo wallowing happily in ponds and muddy pools, children firing stones from slingshots, and women in sarongs breastfeeding. Road-building, that ubiquitous Anthropocene signature, is under way even here. In a few years, the boat trip I made will be obsolete or maintained only for tourists. A 1,500-kilometre road from the Burmese port of Mawlamyaing, via Thailand and Laos to Danang in Vietnam, is almost complete. Already, journeys which used to take two weeks by sea between Bangkok and Hanoi now take only three days overland. The new ‘east–west economic corridor’ will change Laos rapidly, spurring industrial and economic growth faster than any hydroelectric dam.
After about eighty kilometres, the road further disintegrates into mud and cavernous potholes, and the land becomes suddenly bare and brown. Engineering on a massive scale is under way here at the site of the Nam Theun II hydroelectric dam, the Lao government’s pride and joy. I pass the powerhouse and then the road twists up and up through cooler damper air to Nakai village. Here I dismount, my backside numb from the ride and my feet and hands tingling from the vibrations.
I have arranged to meet American naturalist Bill Robichaud here, a man so crazily eccentric that ‘he looks for animals in the jungle, but not to eat them!’, as the Lao waitress explains to me in amazement. We meet in a surprisingly plush French restaurant, with prices to match – dam construction means foreigners, which means money. A couple of hundred metres from our table is the old river, already flooded into a large lake, drowning seventeen villages, the ancestral homes of 6,600 people, who have been relocated to nice-looking, newly built, traditional stilted houses above the village. The hydroelectric dam was only made possible with World Bank assurances to the dam’s international partners that it would underwrite the project should things become ‘problematic’ politically in Laos. And the bank also loaned Laos a third of the $1.5 billion funds. But the money came with caveats, including that people displaced by the waters be compensated (hence the natty housing) and that the forest be properly protected.
This is widely regarded as a successful dam project, both socially and environmentally. Even anti-dam campaigners concede that care has been taken with the design, siting and efforts to mitigate its impacts. Unfortunately, even with what appears to be the best will, things aren’t so simple. When asked where they would like to be relocated to, the villagers unsurprisingly said they wanted to stay near to their village, their friends and their river. The problem is that prime land in the village was not available – people were already living there – and so all that was left was infertile clay soils. The people were subsistence fishermen, but without the river they needed alternatives, so they were provided with crops. Everything died in the poor soils. Buffalo were given to them, which also died having nothing to graze on.
However, at the edge of the artificial lake, people are unravelling fishing nets to capture food to eat and sell – an enterprise that was not nearly as lucrative before the reservoir was created. Talking to them, most are cautiously positive about the project – they are already getting electricity for the first time, and the road is enabling communication with the outside world, as well as trading opportunities, and giving them options they never had previously. ‘I don’t miss my village,’ one old man tells me. ‘Now my life is much easier.’
The Nam Theun River didn’t drop with enough of a gradient before entering the Mekong for sufficient profits to be generated by the hydropower company. So, in an ingenious piece of engineering, the river has been dammed into a large basin, at the bottom of which a tunnel 250 metres long and nine metres wide has been bored down to the Xe Bang Fai River, which runs parallel to the Nam Theun but at lower altitude. This gives the water the rapid drop and strong flow needed for hydropower generation. While this will produce more than 1,000 megawatts of electricity, most of which is to be sold to Thailand for tens of millions of dollars a year, it also dramatically alters two rivers (affecting tens of thousands of people who depend on them) and impacts the Mekong, into which they both flow.
The dam is already having an effect on the ecosystem here. This forest is very special. Scientists rank it second only to Madagascar in terms of small-mammal diversity, and its 3,500 square kilometres have hardly been studied.5 It is an important refuge for nine species of primate, tigers, leopards and elephants as well as newly found species, including some thought previously to have been extinct and known only from the fossil records. Among its oddities is the saola, an antelope discovered in the 1990s, known as the ‘Asian unicorn’ despite its two horns, which is a new genus and possibly a new sub-family.6 It lives high in the Annamite mountains. And there is the kha-nyou, which is a totally new mammal family. It is a type of rodent, related to the porcupine, which looks a little like a big squirrel and lives among the limestone karsts.
It’s Bill’s job to oversee protection of this vast wilderness, and he’s been given an impressive $1 million per year for the next twenty-five years to do so. But the dam has created plenty of problems. The raised water means that parts of the Nakai forests are now accessible to hunters on boats. The site was also flooded before all the vegetation was cleared, meaning that plant matter is rotting within the lake, poisoning the waters, killing fish and producing methane.
We meet a day after Bill has returned from a two-week visit to some of the remote communities that live within the protected area, and he has some tragic stories. The forest is home to ancient hunter-gatherer communities as well as subsistence rice and vegetable farmers. But in recent years, the Lao government has been systematically seeking out and expelling hunter-gatherers and housing them in villages, where they are given some land to farm. Government officials find the presence of hunter-gatherers a national embarrassment that doesn’t fit well with its desired image of a modern developed nation. But once removed from the forest, most of these people become sick and die. Entire tribes have been lost in this way. They believe that their protective spirits stay on in the forest, too far to provide protection. It could be that they are exposed to new viruses or simply become depressed and unable to settle into agronomy. The remaining few want to be allowed to return, and Bill is negotiating on behalf of fifteen from one tribe.
I return to Thakek and follow the Mekong down the country until it shatters into a thousand rivulets, rapids and waterfalls at Si Phan Don (Four Thousand Islands). I stay in a sleepy village on Don Khone island, where there is no electricity save what the generator provides for a few random hours between 6 and 10 p.m. My fan hovers immobile above me through the sweaty night, its three blades paralysed above the mosquito net. Even the geckos, languid and fat on flying protein, seem to swelter in the heat, their calls dying mid-tone.
But all this will change, my excited host Mr Pan assures me. Soon will come electricity when the new dam is built. With soaring fuel costs, he can’t wait to abandon his generator. ‘And we will have Internet on the island with the dam’s electricity,’ he says.
Here, as everywhere else in Laos, the river is the heart of daily activity. I pass children playing in the waters, swimming and attempting to net small fry, a man bathes further down near to a woman who is washing up. Domestic ducks gabble further round the bend and I pass a floating vegetable garden. I take a twisty pathway down to Dolphin Beach, so-called because it hosts regular sightings of the rare Irrawaddy dolphin. At the beach I get chatting to local fishermen and end up joining them on one of the six daily sorties they make to gather their catches.
It’s early on in the rainy season, which means that the trap of choice is a slatted bamboo contraption that catches small fish swept up by the rapids. It’s one of ten specialist fish-catching devices that I count