The Confluence from above.
I look at the confluence for all those who loved Laos and are no longer here.
“I prefer an aisle seat, please,” I told the check-in staff. I don’t care for a window seat. Today, the seats in the front section were empty. I’ve seen it so many times. I’ve filmed it and edited the take off with a Brian Eno soundtrack, on my iPhone with the time-lapse capture, just lock the phone with your fingers on the molded frame of the window. Wide-angle selected: you see the engine and the wing, and get that rounded corner of the window as your frame. There, lock it in. Capture.
PG 942 takes off on the dot on a sunny afternoon from Luang Prabang. The Airbus A319 makes a 270-degree turn before heading towards Bangkok. The Nam Khan’s pale green waters meet the murky Mekong at the end of the peninsula. The plane flies again over the confluence before leveling the wings and heading towards the Thai capital.
The peninsula below is not geometric. It is organic. A cigar of earth shaped by two rivers that have been arguing about its edges for ten thousand years. From the ground, at the tip, you see it, clear as day: pistachio and caffe latte. The Nam Khan traces a perfect slide before joining the Mekong. From up here, you finally understand what you have always known.
I think of Henri Mouhot. The French naturalist arrived in Luang Prabang in July 1861 after a 500-mile journey through the jungle. He mapped and marveled and died here four months later, of malaria, on the banks of the Nam Khan, the same river I am looking down at now. He was 35. He never once saw this.
I think of Doudart de Lagrée. École Polytechnique man, naval captain, expedition leader. He left Saigon on 5 June 1866, convinced the Mekong was the great highway into China, and slowly, painfully, realized it was not. Rapids. Gorges. The river refuses to be tamed or navigated. A Herzog film before Herzog existed. He died in Yunnan on 12 March 1868, never having seen the confluence from above either.
It matters to me that it is an Airbus. The Montgolfiers gave us the sky in 1783. Santos-Dumont refined it. The Wright brothers industrialized it. And Airbus was built by engineers from the same grandes écoles (elite schools) that produced Doudart de Lagrée. The same French engineering tradition that sent men up the Mekong eventually sent them above it. It is not a Boeing. The same country that dropped more bombs on Laos than fell on Europe in the entire Second World War does not get to give me this view.
I think of my father. He was the Director General of Royal Air Lao. He was passionate about aviation all his life.
I think of Jean-Sou, grandson of Prince Phetsarath, who was the first to plant the gardens of Phou Vao. He dreamt of being a flying postman in Laos. Delivering letters above the mountains, village to village, by air. He never got to.
My friend François, who shaped La Résidence Phou Vao into what it is today, once told me he loved flying leisurely over Laos because there is no one up here. No traffic. Pilots don’t have to constantly report in. Just the river, the ridgelines, the silence between mountains.
The engine hums. The confluence disappears behind us.
The Mekong continues south. It is no longer its own river.
Cool photos