Luang Prabang – In Search of the Real Laos
The first thing I did the next morning was grab my bag and get out of Whiteyville. It’s great to have a place to go for email and travel services, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not the type of place to get a feel for local life. Up the Mekong from Whiteyville is another, more charming guesthouse district. I parked myself between to two, in a guesthouse near a locals’ market. Chickens running around in all directions, old ladies selling veggies from the garden, bomb shells used as plant pots – now that’s more like it!
I went in search of breakfast. Bacon, eggs, toast…oi. I ducked down another alley to find a noodle shop. Not only do I tolerate spicy noodle soup in the morning, I’ve come to prefer it.
A wander around town in the blazing afternoon sun yielded many wats – small temples. Some of these have recently been restored, but others are wonderful examples of faded grandeur (no sarcasm). I took refuge in a teashop called l’Etranger for a bit of Bohemian rather than tourist style Western atmosphere. I sampled Lao smoked green tea. It is not nearly as smokey as lapsang souchong, just adding a hint to complement the astringency of strong green tea. Why they can’t have places this cool in Canada I’ll never know.
I passed through a few wats and wandered along the river. Even at the critical point where the Nam Kham meets the Mekong, Laos is relaxed – just some monks doing light farming. In the middle of town is a hill. Halfway up is a Buddha’s footprint, a large indentation that resembles a footprint and at five feet long could only be attributed to a man larger than life.
I passed through a section of traditional Lao houses. A game of volleyball was being played without hands. I know this game was developed in Rio in response to a ban on soccer at the beach, but I’m unsure if the Lao got it from there or if this is some traditional game. The ball was made of wicker and there were three players aside. The rules were the same for volleyball except a player could have consecutive touches. The net was only five feet high, allowing for spectacular bicycle-kick smashes. It was very entertaining, but I was the only foreigner who stopped to watch.
I then settled in on the shores of the Mekong for a coconut shake and spicy papaya salad. The latter was shredded green papaya with hot sauce, quite similar to the shredded cabbage with hot sauce you get with pupusas at the Latin kitchens in Kensington Market. I followed this with a competition with some local kids as to who could throw a rock farther out into the river. Luang Prabang had started to grow on me.
Night Market
Perhaps the best place for dinner is the night market. The main market is on the main street and sells pretty fabrics and trinkets. I spent about three minutes there and hit the food alley. Unlike in China’s tourist towns, I actually had to share the market with other tourists, but it still had some charm to it.
I had a glob of barbequed rice on a stick ($0.10). There are no grains, just a big mush coated in chile and peanut sauce. There were $0.50 per plate vegetarian buffets, but they were all cold so I gave them a pass. Rather, I had a barbequed quarter chicken fresh from the fire ($1.00), a starfruit shake ($0.30) a savoury barbequed sausage ($0.50) and for dessert a pommelo ($0.30). I didn’t bother to bargain. When you can get all that for $2.20, what’s the point?
Pak Ou Cave Excursion
Upriver from L.P. are the Pak Ou caves. Though Laos discourages mass tourism, there are hints of it in the wooden longboats full of tourists heading up the Mekong to the caves. The tour operator boats are much cheaper than chartering your own, so I ran with it. They make a junket out of it with stops at villages en route.
The first of these is the paper-making village. Tree branches are manually smashed into pulp with a hammer and tree stump. The pulp is washed, flattened, dried and dyed. The paper is soft and coarse, and is used to make lampshades and souvenir notebooks.
The village also does fabric-making and I popped into a silkmaker. They had silkworms in varying stages of development. The larvae spin cocoons for themselves and at a certain point these are hard enough to spin into thread. There were a variety of natural dyes on display. It was amazing to see that flawless shades can come not just from seeds and flowers but various roots and tubers as well.
The next village was the whiskey-making village, a misnomer as they merely boiled up a terrible-tasting rice firewater. In addition they had “medicinal” varieties, which are bottled with various poisonous animals inside, a practice I abhor.
The Pak Ou caves consist of an upper and lower cave, located in cliffside above the river. These are filled with hundreds of Buddha statues. The comparison to the Hill of Crosses in Lithuania is obvious, and both are pilgrimmage sites. However, the Hill of Crosses is larger, more sober, and with much better examples of art. The caves weren’t bad, but paled under such a comparison.
We pulled back into Luang Prabang and I was so starving I forgot the basic rule of dining – great location = crap food. I was rewarded for my laziness with great views of the Mekong and the worst meal since the trainwreck shawarma my last night in Moscow. I mean, sauce from a can, ingredients that simply do not work with the base flavours of the dish (which was merely sweet & sour chicken) and a drinkmaker too lazy to hold the button on the blender down long enough to properly grind my coconut shake.
A side note on fruit shakes – they’re very easy. Take crushed ice, chopped fruit (I like starfruit and dragonfruit the best), coconut cream powder and cane syrup and blend until smooth. Delicious.
Tags: Laos, Luang Prabang, Travel
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