TRAVERSE 175
TRAVEL- VIETNAM
LEIGH WILKINS
LIKE THE CURRENT THAT NEVER STOPS MOVING
Water, in Vietnam, is never simply scenery. It is movement, labour, memory, and survival, all carried in the same slow current. You begin to notice it almost immediately, not as something dramatic, but as something constant. It slips through cities, presses against villages, feeds fields, shapes coastlines, and dictates the rhythm of daily life in ways both subtle and absolute. To travel through Vietnam is to follow water in its many forms, from the wide northern rivers to the intricate canal systems of the south, from imperial waterways to coastal tides, and into the vast, shifting body of the Mekong itself.
I began to understand this not from a map or a guidebook, but from sitting low in a wooden boat somewhere in the Mekong Delta, watching a man steer with one hand while the other trailed absently in the current, as if checking the pulse of something alive. Out on the wider reaches of the Mekong River, the illusion of tranquillity disappears. The river is wide, muscular, and busy with purpose. Barges move slowly but with authority, stacked with sand, rice, or cement, their wakes rocking smaller wooden boats that seem fragile by comparison. I spent a day observing a crew hauling sand from the riverbed, a trade that has existed in some form for generations but now operates at an industrial scale. The men, and occasional woman, worked with a rhythm that felt both practiced and resigned. One of them, Minh, told me that the river used to give more freely. Now it must be worked harder, dredged deeper, pushed further. The Mekong has always carried immense quantities of sediment, the very material that built the delta itself over thousands of years, but that balance is shifting, and the riverbanks show it, sections
TRAVERSE 175