Imagine boating from your hometown all the way to the nearest river in something akin to a dugout propelled by a miniature engine sputtering in such a rapid sequence it sounds like a purr. Moreover, picture being able to see little more than roofs of barns, houses and the tops of trees.

It was like that boating to Lao Pako, an Eden-like resort, one September morning last year. And that was but the first half of the journey. It was like the first chapter of the ‘Genesis’: "And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." I truly hoped so, there being so much water everywhere.

Under ordinary circumstances you can speed for 30 minutes on Route 13 South to Pakxap on the right bank of the Nam Ngum River and take a slow boat to Lao Pako, 15 gently curving kilometers downstream. In spades, this particular morning the river silently came to us 10 kilometers south of its regular eastward course.

I had never seen anything quite like it before except in Vietnam during the 1966 rainy season. This time it was a far different experience being on the ground - I mean being on the water - than being airborne in monsoon wetness. It was quite beyond me how our boatman knew when to shove the rudder left or right.

Maybe he was counting banana trees... 8,001, 8,002, 8,003. Then steer northwest for 4,005 banana trees more. The guy had to be a minor genius doing this in 1995 not only without a power -notebook-with-built-in-calculator on his lap but at the same time keeping clear of all hazards to navigation.

Like thatch rooftops, for example - not a boatman’s everyday run of the mill hazard. No spiffy sheet metal here that will, for skippers anyway, obligingly sink to the bottom.

There were other minor geniuses. Approximately every two minutes at least one skipper motored past in the opposite direction in a similar flimsy dugout. Most rode so low that at times I doubted there was any kind of boat beneath them at all and thus must be witnessing a Miracle.

The crafts were crammed with serious-looking people facing the bow and not so serious-looking bananas, still attached to the stem, facing all directions. But a smile was usually returned with a smile, a wave with a wave. A great attribute of the Lao is their unfeigned friendliness.

After 30 minutes we came to the first and -last symbol of civilization: a row of electric poles. At least 20 in an east-west file apparently coming from no place, apparently going no place. As we had been so far, we were headed north. The water being deep, I felt we might reach up and touch the overhead wires as we motored beneath this electrifying parade marching nowhere.

Considering the circumstances, was this a vestige of some advanced bygone civilization? I aimed my camera and took a picture. And another. Rather than beginning in one, perhaps the world was ending in another great flood. The pictures would prove that people with an inventive bent once roamed the earth.

The boatman navigated past more tree tops. But this scenario was short-lived: I noticed the complete absence of boats with smiling, waving people and non smiling, non-waving bananas. Maybe the world was flat after all, and any minute we would go over the brink.

From left to right, soon there came a great smoothness of wide water flowing powerfully in a solid mass. It materialized so unexpectedly after motoring past the last tree tops that it was frightening. I felt my stomach contract. Where were we? And wasn’t the scenery becoming a bit Dantesque?

Somsavath (my colleague) was in the narrow bow. I was in the narrow middle facing Somsavath’s stiff back. The boatman was in the narrow stern facing my own stiff-back -laughing at the sudden rigidity of our body language? I mean the whole eight meter long boat was concocted from no more than three pieces of wood hardly a foot wide and what was the boatman doing playing with Life like this?

"It must be Nam Ngum, " I said with urgency if not gravity to Somsavath, who seemed baffled by the sudden change in scenery. Perhaps he was feeling like the parachutist who jumps from the plane and then realizes the truth in the old adage that life gives the examination first, the lesson second. As though it were a comforting, rational explanation I added with emphasis toward the bow, "In flood!"

Was the river ever in flood. I mean the word took on a whole new meaning. With a mere three planks keeping us from drowning, the boatman deftly steered east into the center of the Nam Ngum, a river that was plainly perilous beneath its serene surface.

How many millennium had it flowed southward and eastward seeking lower ground? To the Mekong. To the South China Sea. To the Pacific. At least in respect to time, I thought we were indisputably insignificant. Like Noah’s birds unable to find terra firma, we three sat hunched over with wings pulled in as if resigned to a perch on a log ambling down stream with the semi-brown current.

As Auden wrote, I was at once mindful that all this was taking place while someone else was "eating or opening a window or just walking dully along." How bizarre life is.

Enveloped by what looked like a quivering, unearthly haze the trees fumed in chorus with all the stops pulled out downriver. A towering choir on each bank but the banks were invisible, the long arm of deep water overstepping its natural bounds and reaching far onto the flood plain - even beyond it, it seemed, at least as far as the eyes could see.

The melancholy if pure light of centuries was unearthly. Scudding clouds hid pristine Phou Kao Khouai, whose unseen grey-green slopes rose a mere 10 or 15 kilometers away. I was, suffice it to say, overwhelmed and even bewildered by what might be called a sort of surrealistic beauty. Like never before, I felt humbled.

It began to dawn on me how spirit worship had intuitively come to mankind - the spirit of a cavalier river, the spirit of adomineering tree, the spirit of a phantom wind, of an inundating rain and of an incomprehensible heaven. All, of course, remain beyond our control. And I suppose believing in spirits is as good as believing in something.

Eventually we came close to and paralleled the right bank. Trees rising out of the water straight, smooth and silvery and branchless for a hundred or more feet, seeing all but silent sentinels were awesome. By some prehistoric comportment alone, or a lost tongue, I could not fathom, these pseudo-paralysed giants soaring over us shouted they owned everything in sight and it occurred to me that maybe I was trespassing. Could we see them, their time-gnarled roots probably confirmed they did and I was.

Higher still, canopy after canopy unfolded like gargantuan fireworks and was so thick, so concentrated, very little daylight got through.

Where it could penetrate, it descended in great weightless light-beams that mysteriously disappeared in gloomy pools of water rather than be reflected - perhaps some laws of physics have yet to be discovered. Either way, the foreboding canopy and searchlight-like prisms corroborated my belief that I was on the threshold of trespassing.

All manner of serpentine-like leafy vegetation climbed the stately trunks. In the opposite direction, multi-stranded rope-like vines descended straight-down from concealed upper limbs, finally disappearing into gloomy pools. Riotous if luxurious these vines reminded me of prison bars, and after thinking about it I was unsure if I was on the outside looking in or the inside looking out.

On the second leg to Lao Pako, this half-hour mini-cruise provoked and then sustained some sort of metaphysical experience. Upon this spellbinding Alice in Wonderland waterway, its cathedral-like walls flanked by a chorus of giant hardwood trees often embellished with orchids, we three dim minuscule silhouettes, in unfamiliar rhythm with something so big, it seemed unfathomable, glided along on three planks as if chaperoned by a Higher Being.

In flood, the Nam Ngum was as Conrad asserted about life on the Congo: ‘Reality fades.. .the inner truth is hidden.. .because we are travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone ,leaving hardly a sign - and no memories’.

It was also a reminder of American poet Robert Frost’s assertion at JFK’s inauguration: ‘We were the land’s before the land was ours’. Darwin, like so many intellectuals gone native, would have been at home here.