Luang Prabang, Laos

I started this entry last night.  I wrote 2 long paragraphs & then somehow managed to delete them.  Grrrr.  Ah well.  Here’s my second attempt.

We love Laos.  It is so different from Vietnam.  As busy & hectic  as Vietnam is (with so many cars & scooters making it almost impossible to cross the street in Saigon & Hanoi), that’s how calm & serene & laid back Laos seems to be.  Luang Prabang is the second largest town in the country & it’s just a small village.  The weather (which is so important when you travel) has been great;  pleasant in the mornings & evenings (nice enough to eat breakfasts & dinners outside which we both love to do) and hot in the afternoon.  As a result, we spent mornings sightseeing & afternoons at the pool (a real hardship!).  We are staying in another boutique hotel.  This one feels like an old French colonial estate.  The food has been much more exotic & tastier.  I think that might be partially due to its newness;  we frequently eat Vietnamese food in NY & find it to be not that dissimilar from Chinese food.  The Laotian food has used unfamiliar spices & foods.  And lastly, we’ve had experiences here that we have not had anywhere else.

Here’s the view from our patio.

Let’s start with those experiences.  There is a tradition in Luang Prabang that at dawn long lines of monks walk around the town collecting rice & alms from the local people.  We were “scheduled” to observe this tradition on our second day here, but hadn’t decided whether we really wanted to get up that early.  In our room was a note that one could observe the monks near the hotel which is outside the main town.  On day 1 I happened to wake up at 6 AM & on the spur of the moment (while Marty slept) I decided to go find those monks.  The concierge gave me directions & off I went into the dark all by myself.  After a few blocks I came to the appointed spot.  I could see that local women were sitting on the ground so I assumed I was in the right place.  Then a German couple came & I even managed to have a conversation with them in German.  By now it wasn’t so dark any more. Eventually 10 monks appeared, walking in a straight line.  When they got to the townspeople, they stopped, chanted for a few minutes, collected their rice and alms & went on their way.  It wasn’t as dramatic as I imagine the scene in the town proper is, but it was my own little adventure & I loved it.

New experience (of a sort) #2:  While I am a big fan of dance (& go to dance performances frequently with several of you), Marty is not.  While sightseeing on Wednesday in the town, we came to a theatre that announced there would be a dance performance that evening of the Lao National Ballet.  The performance started at 6 PM, was only an hour long & our dinner reservation was at 7:30.  It was meant to be & Marty was game.  There were 3 pieces;  the first & third were abstract, while the middle piece told a Laotian folk tale; they gave us a written synopsis of it (in English & French).  Marty enjoyed the folk tale while I preferred the other two pieces.  BTW, the tickets were $18, just like in NY; not.

Third new experience:  by now many of you have seen the photos in FaceBook of us riding on an elephant.  Clearly, this was something we had not done before & it was a lot of fun.  Strangely, it had not been built into our “tour”, but luckily our guide suggested it.  Clearly, one of the many benefits of traveling with your own guide is the ability to re-work the schedule;  the pool time wasn’t part of the schedule either!

Other things we saw here over our 3 day stay:  The National Museum which was the former royal residence.  It once housed the sacred Emerald Buddha which is now in Bangkok where we will see it later on our trip.  The museum has a replica of the Prabang – a golden Buddha from Cambodia which gives the town its name.