River town

Mark Elliott's eccentric and helpful "Southeast Asia: the Graphic Guide" (Trailblazer Books) lists only a few "special dangers" in its section on Laos. One is the temptation of opium, and another is unexploded American bombs in the Plain of Jars. The one that resonated with Joe and me was "forgetting to leave."

Places you like, like Luang Prabang, often remind you of other places in which you have been happy. There's a bit of small-town Ethiopia here with the green hills, the lively marketplaces, the suddenly quiet side streets after nine at night. But what hit me last night around ten, while Joe and I were wandering back to the Sayo Guest House after a late dinner, was how much this town on the Mekong reminds me of Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1949---or at least Lock Haven as I remember it when I was ten.

Only a few cars were out and about. From open windows and doors you could hear low voices and maybe a little pop music. The streetlights at corners burned a warm orange. The air was still and felt clean in your lungs. The Mekong reflected the big yellow moon. Inside Luang Prabang's white stucco houses with red tile roofs people were no doubt leading lives as complex as the lives of the grown-ups in the Susquehanna Valley of 1949. But the evening calm of Luang Prabang is precisely the mysterious hush that excites a lone ten year old, and last night it wrenched me back happily. There's more than one Gaugin (sp?) imitator here. But the Frenchman's paintings resemble life in Laos only superficially---Tahiti is a long way from here---and the artists I keep thinking of in Luang Prabang are Wood, Benton, Sloan, Hopper. The Lao people live their daily lives very much in the present, of course, but this place feels to me like a lost world I had unexpectedly recovered.

Stretching along a narrow peninsula between the wide brown Mekong and the green and creek-like Nam Kahn, this town of 70,000 people was Laos's political capital off and on from the 14th century to the late 19th, and its cultural and religious center from its founding until now. For 700 years Luang Prabang was the center of Lane Xang, the Kingdom of a Million Elephants and the White Parasol. Royalty survived the French, here for 75 years, but not the communists; in 1975, when the Pathet Lao took over, the royals were taken off to a cave and not seen again.

Luang Prabang is the holiest site in Lao Buddhism. Its 43 wats mean it has more monks per capita than any other Lao town. At six in the morning a drum is beaten at each temple, and all the monks stroll out in their orange robes and the townspeople come out of their houses and offer food. The wat across from our hotel, Wat Xieng Mouane, is a center for teaching monks the vanishing arts and crafts of preserving and maintaining the town's deteriorating wats. This program is supported by Unicef---which has given Luang Prabang world heritage status---and by the Norwegian and other governments. From our second-floor window in a French villa-turned guest house, we can see the monks carving Buddha statues and we can hear their chanting in the late afternoon.

A monk novice engaged Joe in conversation---most are naturally friendly and like to practice their English---and showed him around the monks' cramped quarters. Before Joe departed, the young monk tied orange cotton bands around Joe's wrists for good luck. "How long should I keep these on?" Joe asked. "Maybe forever," the monk said.

It's cool here this time of year---70s daytime, 50s at night---and it's a perfect time for ambling around beneath the palms and tamarinds and discovering the wats and other town institutions in an unhurried way. There's Phou Si, the hundred-foot hill, with a view of the entire town and the two rivers and the distant mountains on all sides. The royal palace is a museum now, with treasures such as a golden howdah for the king to sit on atop his elephant, and many Buddha images of stone, plaster and concrete, nearly always covered in gold leaf. In a glass case is a gift from the United States of America, a little model of a moon-landing module that looks like it came from Ka-Bee Toys.

Tourism is what keeps Luang Prabang afloat these days. The modest main street is known informally as Tha Farang. It is lined with restaurants and cafes, and travel agencies offering tours to "the Buddha caves"---caves where disused crumbling Buddha statues have been stashed---and something called "the whiskey village." Instead of going to those, Joe took a one-day Lao cooking class. And yesterday we hiked a mile or so out to the edge of town to the main market where the Laos get their food, and marveled at the variety of meat and produce that this poor but fertile country manages to come up with. (Farming was collectivized in 1975 and decollectivized ten years later when people began to starve.) The more exotic items were cakes of congealed water buffalo blood---it's the reddest red we ever saw---and a Mekong weed that is toasted with sesame seeds and served with a chili and buffalo skin chutney. We had some of that and it was of interest. Joe will do a blog entry on Lao food, which isn't as complex and exciting as Thai food but is satisfying in its quieter way.

Speaking of which, the Laos are surely some of the sweetest people on earth. (Pakbeng Ken was an abberation.) If the Thais are sweetly, pleasingly goofy, the Laos are sweetly, pleasingly serene and reserved. There's no highway mayhem here, or "fuck shows." Which is not to say the Laos aren't interested in modernizing selectively. There's a hunger for modern education and modern communications you can feel when you talk to them, and English is a tool Laos see as essential to joining the modern world. Even the communist government gets it. Political opposition is still forbidden, but otherwise it's a market economy and the educational system is only superficially, half-heartedly ideological.

A good Peace Corps-style project under way here (the Peace Corps just started a program in Cambodia but isn't in Laos) is Big Brother Mouse. This is the publishing operation mentioned in an earlier blog posting and founded by American Sasha Alyson. The company puts out children's books in Lao and Lao and English. Previously, kids here had only badly written school texts and otherwise had to read books in just-English or Thai. Sasha and his Lao co-owner and staff have signs all over Luang Prabang urging tourists to give children books instead of candy. And they urge trekkers headed out to the mountains to carry books to village children. Big Brother Mouse has a retail shop and a practice-your-English storefront in LP and another office up in Luang Namtha in the North. I'll get Sasha's Web site and post it on the blog for anyone interested in supporting BBM, either financially or by popping over here to help out in the office.

Our vague plan is to remain in Luang Prabang a few more days, move on, and maybe come back later. We may go to Luang Namtha, where a former Peace Corps guy runs a well-respected eco-tourism center. But the airport up there has been closed for two months on account of "problems." And the nine-hour bus trip over bumpy, dusty roads sounds as if it should be avoided if possible. So we'll see. A big part of the pleasure of this trip has been surprising ourselves.