Days 114 – 115: Luang Prabang

Photos: http://princeton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2058088&l=0e93c&id=1101094

For the second morning in a row I awoke to the crows of roosters outside my window, but luckily these roosters were in the right time zone and the crowing started at 6am instead of midnight.

I walked into town, and the food stalls from the night before were now filled with mountains of baguettes. It seems that due to the French colonial presence in Laos, bread managed to enter the local cuisine, and now everyone seems quite proud of their (mediocre) sandwiches. The baguettes, though, are quite good, and I ate one with strawberry jam for breakfast.

I spent the morning in the Royal Palace Museum brushing up on my Lao history. For those of you who aren’t Indochina experts, I’ll summarize: present-day Laos was never a true nation until Western intervention. Before the 18^th Century, a series of principalities ruled various regions of Lao, some more successfully than others, and then France, Siam (Thailand), and China drew a line around the territory, added a silent “s” to its name, and proclaimed the new territory Laos. France ruled Laos until 1953, during which time it did almost nothing to develop its new colony; it seems France had little hope for the territory and was far more concerned with neighboring Vietnam.

France granted Laos independence in 1953, and for the next twenty years a chaotic battle for control of the country raged between the communist forces, backed by the USSR and China, and the right wing parties, backed by the US. In 1973 the country was divided in half between the communists and the rightists, but by 1975 the communists had wrested control of the whole country and the Lao People’s Democratic Republic was born.

Since 1975 the Lao government has backed off from hard-line socialist economic policies, and private expenditure and foreign investment are now allowed. But the political scene is little changed—one-party rule still prevails, and political dissent is not tolerated.

Buddhism is the religion of choice for the majority of Lao people, but following the ascension of the communists in 1975 all religion was banned. But the party relented in 1992, and Buddhism has flourished since.

I ate lunch at a restaurant in town; I ordered a Lao noodle dish and sticky rice, and everything was good, but I’m still spoiled from Thai food.

I spent the afternoon wandering through the streets of colonial Luang Prabang; the town is nearly picture perfect. The one drawback is that, as I realized when it took me an hour to find a guesthouse vacancy, the place is packed with Westerners. The streets are now lined with adventure tour companies, trendy coffee shops, and expensive souvenir shops. I’d love to know what the place looked like before the influx of tourists.

I checked out a handful of wat (Buddhist Temples) over the course of the afternoon; they looked almost identical to Thai wat, except that Thai stupas have round bases, while Lao stupa bases are square. At this point I think it will take a lot for a temple to impress me—I’ve just seen so many of them.

It started raining in the late afternoon, so I headed back to my guesthouse. That night I ate dinner at the food stalls, which were fewer in number due to the rain. But the chicken-on-a-stick guy was still there.

The following morning I got up early and climbed Phu Si, the hill in the center of town that houses three different temples. The top of the hill is supposed to be the place to watch sunrises and sunsets, but with the cloud cover there was no sunrise. Still, the views of the Mekong and the Nam Khan (a smaller river that empties into the Mekong at Luang Prabang) were worth the climb.

I climbed back down from Phu Si and took the long way back to town, following the Nam Khan to where it met the Mekong. I climbed down the hill to the riverbank, hoping to cross to the other side of the Nam Khan via a bamboo bridge that I spotted from the road above. But when I got to the bridge, monks were selling tickets to cross it for 50,000 kip. Five dollars to cross a stupid bridge? Clearly, there are too many rich tourists in this town.

I had plans to visit a waterfall outside of town, but the cold drizzly weather made swimming in a waterfall a less-than-exciting prospect. Figuring that I’d spent long enough in Luang Prabang, I decided to catch a bus to Vientiane that evening instead of the following morning. How much farther would I have to go before I got off the tourist track? Cambodia?