The Mekong

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Canals are the major thoroughfares through the densely populated Mekong Delta, with boats of all sizes cramming the waterways...
A farmer takes advantage of the flood swollen Mekong outside Phnom Penh, Cambodia to fill his irrigation buckets. The river b...
Fish farming is literally a cottage industry along the Mekong, with some 600 floating houses moored near Chau Doc on the Vin ...
Free enterprise blooms in the Vietnam delta town of Can Tho, where peddlers sell everything from snakes and blue jeans to vii...
The place the Tibetans call the sacred source of the Mekong is a frozen river bed at an altitude of 17,000 feet on the Tibeta...
The inhospitable gorges carved by the Mekong near Lanping, in northern Yunnan, keep the river unused and unnavigale until its...
man smokes opium
Guided by first light, a fisherman, plies the rock-studded Mekong on the Laos-Thailand border.
The dream of 19th-century French explorers to use the Mekong as a trade route to China was dashed on obstacles like Khone Fal...
Victims of the thousands of land mines buried throughout Cambodia pass the time at the 1/79 Military Hospital in Phnom Penh, ...
Two sisters at play splash in the murky waters of the Mekong as it churns through Phnom Penh, the largest city on the river, ...
house on stilts
house on stilts
Traders meet at the confluence of five canals at Phung Hiep.
A fine-feathered cargo of live ducks heads to market at Can Tho along one of the delta's few hard-top roads.
Crossing these "monkey bridges," as these spindly structures are called, requires the agility of a simian.
At a rice mill in Soc Trang, the heart of Vietnam's "rice basket," women collect bran to sell as animal feed. The factory all...
Deep in Vietnam's U Minh forest, an extensive mangrove swap once withered by defoliants, woodcutters seek trees for the forei...
Cormorant fishermen on Erhai Lake, which forms an important part of the Mekong's watershed, train their birds to retrieve the...
Dawn in Qinghai reveals the Tibetan Plateau's dramatically beautiful skyline. Beyond these mountains of the towering Tibetan...
A Tibetan family at an encampment near the sacred source of the Mekong. A yak-skin tent houses Meiga, a guide, Daji, his wife...
As impervious to the bitter cold as her ice-encrusted yaks, a woman in Qinghai, China milks a dri, a female yak. With a hundr...
The yak is central to the livelihood of the Tibetan herders, providing milk for yak-butter tea, meat, dung for cooking fires,...
The Mekong River outside Zadoi, the northernmost town on the river. The water's graceful bend belies the wild, uncontrollable...
Zadoi, the Gateway to Tibet. despite a climate so brutally harsh that washing becomes a rare event, daily life goes on.
Yak Herders drive their animals through treacherous narrow mountain passes on the outskirts of Zadoi, Qinghai, China.
With the closest bridge 25 miles away, villagers of the Lisu tribe still use this ancient and precarious form of river crossi...
Her wares on her back, a vendor - of the Bai tribe - takes her vegetables to Zhouchang Market on the shores of Erhai Lake. Zh...
The village of Xizhou in China's Yunnan province, with its distinctive Bai-style houses build around a central courtyard, ove...
Bai woman working in rice paddies, Xizhou. Yunnan, China
A single umbrella protects a fashionable young couple during rainy season in Jinghong. Yunnan, China
Balancing buckets of fertilizer, a woman works in the rice paddies of Xishuangbanna, home of the Dai tribe. Yunnan, China.
The 100-year-old wooden Double Crane Bridge crosses a tributary of the Mekong at Daltien. Yunnan, China.
Once the rice crop is planted, the Bai tribe celebrates the Rao Shao Lin festival in Qindong Village in Dali. Bai women pray...
A diver silhouetted against the sky plunges into Erhai Lake, a popular tourist spot. Yunnan, China.
Boys paddle their dugout canoe through a polluted pocket of the generally clean Mekong in the village of Mengham. Yunnan, China.
Farmers moonlight during the dry season prospecting for gold along the banks of the Mekong. Most of the panners are women and...
Their world rapidly changing around them, a displaced Hmong hill tribe family poses in traditional dress against a backdrop o...
To the accompaniment of horns and drums, amateur kickboxers go at it with feet, fists and elbows flying. Kickboxing is the ma...
To the accompaniment of horns and drums, amateur kickboxers go at it with feet, fists and elbows flying. Kickboxing is the ma...
Disco dancing is the amusement of choice among the youth of Chiang Saen in Thailand's Golden Triangle, where the Mekong forms...
A monk sweeps the courtyard of Wat Xieng Thong as part of his morning ritual of chores in Luang Prabang, the old royal capita...
Young monks share a communal breakfast at Wat Xieng Thong, after their daily ritual of binthabat, or rice collecting, through...
The Mekong during the dry season is so shallow at Vientiane that people can practically wade across its entire width into Tha...
Elephants like Toum, this 50-year-old female, outnumber cranes and bulldozers in Laotian logging operations along the Mekong....
A former teak forest is reduced to skeletal branches piercing the surface of Nam Ngum Lake, Laos, formed by the daming of a M...
Two fisherman confront the raging cataracts of Khone Falls, gingerly tossing their nets to catch fish as they jump through th...
The Khong Falls of the Mekong River at the Cambodia/Laos border thwarted the efforts of early explorers in search of an inlan...
Mountains resembling a Sung dynasty watercolor loom above the Mekong as it flows through Pak Ou, Laos.
A woman practices the ancient art of dip-net fishing in the shallow water along the banks on Vientiane, Laos' sleepy capital ...