Today is Thursday, January 20, 2005 and I am in Hanoi, Vietnam. Tomorrow, after five days in Hanoi, I'm heading south to Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City if you are a Vietnamese government official, Saigon for everyone else). It's a bit cold and drizzly here with temperatures in the 60's, it will be nice to go somewhere a little warmer and I think Saigon will be just the place with temperatures in the 80's or 90's.

I haven't had to worry about air conditioning since I left Bangkok almost a month ago and that's been nice but it's been too long since I've had warm days and some sunshine. Not that it's too cold or anything, its all relative. Today was the first day I've had to wear a jacket since being on the slow boat and I only wore the jacket because I was out walking in the drizzle.

You will note that this blog entry restores the chronological order upset by the previous entry called "Update". I'm going to break up Luang Prabang into two blog entries.

Coming off the Slow Boat at night into Luang Prabang was interesting. There were 60 or 70 of us travelers on the boat all anxious to get off after two days cruising the Mekong. Also, everyone needed to find a place to stay (I doubt anyone made reservations) for the evening so there was a mad scramble up the river bank into the hands of the local touts and tuk-tuk drivers. Most people had guidebooks or some reference with listings of various places to stay within their respective budgets and either tried to walk and find them in the dark or got into a tuk-tuk for a short ride to their chosen guesthouse.

The challenge was to find a place within your budget that actually had rooms available. Most of the better places (places with hot water and in-room bathrooms costing $8-$12) were full leaving only the cheap and the expensive places. Fortunately I found a decent place rather quickly for $5 that was en-suite with a hot shower, the only drawback was that it didn't have a door only a shower curtain. I'm not sure why and didn't feel real comfortable leaving my stuff in an unlocked room but it was relatively clean and cheap. Also, the lack of doors made it very noisy and let mosquitos into the room.

It was only for one night. The next morning I found a much nicer place (next door) for $12. This guesthouse, The Mano Guesthoue, had a very nice restaurant, clean rooms, satellite TV (with only 2-3 English speaking channels) and was somewhat quiet at night.

Quiet at night is relative to what you are used to. Night noises in Asia are ever present, just different in different countries. In Laos there is very little street noise or partying noise at night but there are thousands of roosters (I think chickens are the national bird) and they are everywhere. I always thought that roosters only crowed at dawn and maybe that's just American roosters. Laos roosters start crowing about 2:00 AM and the neighborhood roosters then alternate their crowing until well after dawn. The worst ones are the stupid roosters outside your guesthouse windows! It's worse than a roommate who snores. Thank goodness for ear-plugs.

Luang Prabang is a great place and I thoroughly enjoyed the 5 days I stayed there. I could have very easily hung out for longer as it is a very easy place to hang out, quite relaxing.

Here are some pictures of Luang Prabang taken in various places around town.
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Luang Prabang is in North-Central Laos and is situated on the Mekong River. It is the capital of an ancient kingdom and actually housed a monarch all the way up to the Communist take over in 1975. The "official" Laos government propoganda denies the lineage of the Luang Prabang monarch past 1959 saying he was never officially crowned. Whether or not he was crowned the Communist government that took control saw it fit to imprison the King and his family in a "re-education" camp in far northern Laos where the everyone died within 5 or so years of malnutrition and lack of proper medical care. These facts aren't publicly recognized by the current goverment. Of course, victorious governments throughout history of the world have utilized revisionist, or re-written, history to alter facts that serve to make current regimes look bad. The winners always seem to think they have the perogative to alter history texts and keep their people in the dark as they see fit and all goverments throughout history in the world have done so.

Enough of that! Luang Prabang is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. UNESCO is an acronym for United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization. What this means is the U.N. recognized Luang Prabang as one of the few places where French colonial architecture and design have survived. By making it a World Heritage Site, Luang Prabang becomes eligible for UN assitance to preserve it's colonial architecture and rebuild many areas to certain specifications.
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The French colonial feel to the town is very apparent, mostly in the buildings and the food. Most Lao's don't speak French anymore as the colonists exited the country by 1975. The second language of choice for Lao's is definitely English (as is true with most SE Asian countries).

The buildings are taken care of by the UNESCO bureaucracy but the food had a real French feel. It was weird to see, smell and taste fresh bread, croissants and hot baguettes everyday!. Pastries and sidewalk cafes were common.

It had a really neat Night Market on the main street. The street was blocked off at dusk and vendors lined the street for about a mile selling stuff.
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One thing to remember, in Laos everything is hand-made, no mass-produced machined items. Many of these vendors make the stuff they sell themselves so there is a lot of pride in their merchandise.
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Luang Prabang has many wats as would behoove a mostly buddhist country. Wats in Laos are not as prevalent as in Thailand although the people in Laos worship as fervently as they do in other countries. The relative lack of religious imagery has more to do with the Communist rulers. In 1975 the Pathet Lao leaders attempted to decrease the Buddhist influence on the population (hoping of course to replace the Buddhist influence with their ideological influence). This was not effective and served to alienate much of the population so the government wisely backed off on this policy and open Buddhist worship is now more common though somewhat restrained as people do not want to bring governmental attention to themselves.
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Here are a few of the many monks seen around town.

Here's another sign that I liked:

Monkeys are quite common in Laos and unfortunately some are captured and kept as pets. I don't think monkeys make good pets and they certainly can't be happy on a chain. Here are a couple of pictures of one cute, small monkey I saw. I wanted to unchain him and let him go!
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I'm not quite sure why these are bottled up like this and what they're for. Some sort of medicine or exotic potion...

Rice is a very common food in all Asian countries and is a staple in the diet of most everyone. This is the first time I've seen a cat eat rice though!

That's all folks! More on Luang Prabang and Laos is forthcoming.

Thank you for reading this. I hope to make this blog both interesting and entertaining. Please post a comment and let me know your thoughts, observations or counsel. Hearing from readers and knowing I have an audience is a great motivator and will be a great morale booster during down times on the road. Don’t forget to bookmark this site and tell a friend! Please feel free to e-mail me at “JeffMichie at Yahoo Dot Com”