The red evening sun turned to burnished copper the woman rinsing her shampooed hair in the muddy brown water. A berg of brilliant-white soap bubbles drifted downstream with the current and broke into floes against the legs of the Water Buffalo standing beside her. An old woman presided over them on a rickety wooden pier cleaning fish for dinner. Welcome to the Mekong. It is born of snow flakes falling in the Himalayas 4,900 Kilometers to the north. By the time the trickle reaches the Gulf of Thailand it has split into nine wide separate tributaries known to the Vietnamese as the ‘Cuu Long’ or the Nine Dragons. The Mekong drains over 300,000 square miles of land and passes through China, Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. The Mekong Delta produces over forty-percent of Vietnam’s food.
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