Lao!
Trip Start
Oct 19, 2006
1
50
55
Trip End
Apr 05, 2007
Luang Prabang, Lao Peoples Dem Rep
Monday, March 12, 2007
It's the dry season now, which means that the river is low, and gardens of marigolds, tomatoes, eggplants, are planted all along the river banks. It also means that farmers are burning their fields in Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar. Apparently the fires in Myanmar are the ones that are causing the hazy skies all day, and the constant rain of ash from the sky. The haze means that the sky is a bright indirect light in all our pictures, a squinty grayness that seems the same all day long. This morning Christopher said he was daydreaming of blue skies. The light is different here than other places we've been - it seems yellower, giving everything a sort of sepia-toned, faded photo look. It feels like the whole country exists in a state of late-afternoon slanted light.
As we get toward the end of our trip, Christopher and I are finding it hard to concentrate on traveling. Distracted by thoughts and plans for when we get back to the States, we are having to work harder to feel motivated to do sightseeing around town. We are also feeling the pinch of getting to the bottom of our money-supply. This means we are trying to cut some corners, to save money where we can. After our first night in Luang Prabang, we checked out several other guesthouses - all the rooms in town are $10, several dollars more than we were hoping based on our guidebooks (apparently LP has become much more touristed even in the year since our books were written). We did find a room for $7, but the cheap price is because the room doesn't have a window. Maybe that's why the light seems so important to me, after a week of waking up in complete darkness.
We have managed to see lots of Luang Prabang, even if it's been an effort. We climbed to the top of the one lonely hill, past several old wats and a huge footprint of the Buddha. Despite the haze, we could see the lights of LP extending far past where we had walked around town, and the darkness of the river.
We crossed the Mekong to the small village on the other side and visited an abandoned wat and monastery as well as a deep hot cave-wat. The abandoned monastery had so many neat buildings with sweeping stone stairways leading to (but unattached to) timber and plaster buildings of simple small rooms. We saw a new kind of building - a walking meditation hall. Just a long narrow building with a door in the middle, low ceilings, and enough room for two people to stand next to each other.
We visited the national museum which was the Royal palace until the royal family was ousted in 1975 and disappeared, never to be heard from again.
We rented bikes to ride around town one day, which was fun, until one of the bikes got stolen. All week we've been having these hard days, and looking for the bike in the backyards of the neighborhood where we were did not help. Neither did the hassle of getting enough money changed to pay the $60 to replace the bike. There is one newly installed ATM in town, but it seems to work only intermittently. The kiosk where we changed money handed us our stack of bills with a rubberband around it - at 10,000 kip to the dollar, it was quite a stack.
Just up the street from us, across from the closest wat, is an abandoned yellow house. I have been having a week-long daydream about buying the house and property and fixing it up. It has two floors, and the upstairs has a room that Christopher suggested would be perfect for a library, with a sunny reading nook. That was the last straw - this is the perfect house. No need to keep looking for apartments in Philly, I'm moving to this small street in Luang Prabang. Unfortunately, we found out that the house is owned by (or at least protected by) UNESCO and so they aren't really looking to sell it to me. It's probably for the best - I had decided that I'd learn construction in order to be able to do it all myself, and my maximum offer for the house, shed, and property could only be about twelve dollars at this point. So, I'm just enjoying the fantasy.
We found out about the house by going to the Heritage Foundation office in town and looking at their database. They have an amazing database of all kinds of buildings - residential, commerical, temple - as well as ponds, roads, alleys. All the buildings are classified by their structure and the material they are made of, and the database shows you where they are on the map. Another section of the database has "everyday" pictures of Luang Prabang - typical dishes and foods, natural and industry-related photos, pictures of people walking along the street. It seems like an amazing project and a good resource, and it was free! Just a quick plug for the Heritage Foundation.
Since the boatload of tourists arrives every day around 6, a night market is a perfect idea. It sets up along the main street each
evening, maybe 100 tarps laid on the ground with perfectly organized
displays. Christopher and I were happy to see some new things, some
beautiful handmade embroidery and quilt-square crafts. They also sell
t-shirts (of course), Lao coffee and tea, old opium pots and silver and
bronze weights for weighing opium. (We have been offered opium several
times.) We walked through the market several nights before we made our
big shopping trip, still trying to save pennies by bargaining hard and
thinking about exactly how much space we have left in our bags. Won't
be that long now before we have to somehow get everything on the plane
home.
