Word: mekong
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...dusk when the first fireball burst from the Mekong. A glowing pink orb hovered over the chocolaty waters for a split second then accelerated noiselessly skyward, winking out some 100 meters above. Minutes later, another soared from the roiling river. Then some way downstream, a string of four burst into a bruised sky that was looking angrier by the moment. Each tiny eruption was greeted with a jubilant roar, like a kickboxing crowd hailing a series of withering knee strikes. The lights looked a bit like exploding flares, though there was no hiss or smoke, no sparkling arc back...
...Nong Khai's Naga has become the Mekong's Loch Ness monster. In this sleepy province in the heart of the Isaan region 620 kilometers northeast of Bangkok, where men are men and bugs are food, just about everyone is happy to regale you with tales of monster sightings or giant, snaking tracks left in the riverbank's mud. Some locals brandish grainy pictures of what could be anything from a log to a boat, and swear it is evidence of the outsize serpent. And then there's that postcard: ubiquitous and eye-catching, of a band of U.S. service...
PLAYING WITH FIRE In Mekong Full Moon Party, this year's surprise Thai hit film about the Naga fireballs, a hapless television journalist is desperate to expose the phenomenon as a hoax. A month after the movie's October release, Thai television station ITV screened a documentary claiming that the fireballs were merely AK-47 tracer rounds fired by bored Lao soldiers on the opposite bank of the river. Mere coincidence? Or are strange, dark forces at work...
...July 27, sometime past 11 a.m., my sister Suzanne and I were cruising down an unnamed tributary of the Mekong River, about 80 miles south of Saigon. I was thankful the rickety raft’s single engine drowned out her voice: She kept complaining about Vietnam’s Third World status, evidenced, she thought, by its lack of Diet Coke. I got here by accepting a Let’s Go job backpacking through Borneo and the Philippines. My reward for completing the itinerary was an open-ended airline ticket. I came seeking to confirm my mother?...
...Baan, as the Dai call it (Luosuo Jiang on Chinese maps) is about two hours' drive from Jinghong. The first part of the trip is scarier than the rafting: a twisting road dips and soars above the furious foamy rush of the Mekong's narrow gorges. Just when you're wishing you had found time to write your last will and testament, though, the road eases off into long, straight runs through rice paddies, and the previous hour's terror is left behind?much like the worst moments of river rafting, once the boat reaches calm waters. "We do fall...