1. When I began this journey, I hoped to get as close to the source of the Mekong as was feasible, not in the sense of "discovering" the source of the river, but to find a place where life on the river begins. I traveled with an old Tibetan friend, Dakpa Kelden, and as we jounced along in an ancient four-wheel drive Pajero towards the source in the middle of nowhere, I saw three tents on a distant hill. At that point we were about 60 miles from the actual source of the river and to reach it would have required a five- or six-day horse ride each way. I decided that we should try and climb the hills and see who lived in the tents, capacious black things of woven yak hair. At that altitude, the climb was more arduous for me than Dakpa, but we managed to make it and found a nomadic family and their herds of yaks. The head of the family was Phon Dza, who moved with his yaks from one pasture land to another, following the seasons. We several hours there talking, his extended family gazing on in silence. As we got up to leave, it seemed that Phon Dza was going to represent the source of the Mekong for me, a man and his family, living in isolation, and in an almost mystical union with his yaks and the river.

2. In Tibet and northern Yunnan, the river stampedes through deep canyons and the only way to follow it is in a four-wheel drive on roads unworthy of the name. We creaked into the village of Mehrushun where Dakpa recognized the sound of wedding music coming from a house. The village here was dangling on a precipice overlooking the river and great cracks had opened in the cliff and were eating into the village itself. Dakpa said we should find the wedding, which we did after clambering up rickety ladders to the roof of a thick-walled house. There, in her finest regalia, was the bride, the somber-eyed Yongha, her bridesmaid and a chorus of eight young women who stood behind her, serenading the assembled villagers with love songs, eerie and moving in their cadence. Strangely, no one at the feast seemed in the least bit surprised at the sudden arrival of a visitor in a New York Yankee hat, and Dakpa and I were welcomed as if we were family. As is often the case on occasions like this, the bride's father was veering toward inebriation and sought to lure us in the same direction. We escaped only slightly buzzy.

3. On the road south -- the violence of the river still prohibited boat travel -- I wanted to go to visit Lijiang, for two reasons. First, it was in the early part of the 20th century the haunt of Joseph Rock, an extraordinary polymath whose work included botany, linguistics, history, anthropology and adventure. And second, I hoped to track down a musician named Xuan Ke, who had survived China's serial intellectual purges and persecutions and who was now occupied with preserving ancient eighth- and ninth-century Tang music, played not by Chinese but by the native Nakhi people. Xuan Ke had formed an orchestra to play the music for both locals and visitors. Lijiang itself, though, is also of tremendous interest because it is one of the few remaining ancient towns in China that has not met up with the wrecker's ball, a fate due not to any Chinese sense of historical preservation but a lack of money for development. Although there are now several broad streets in the town that teem with tourists, mostly Chinese, away from the hordes there are wonderful alleyways, gardens, old houses that endured a recent earthquake and elderly Nakhi women in their traditional blue robes with capes emblazoned with symbols of the stars and the moon.

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