Hello from Denver DREAMING of Laos! Back from my trip and updating my blog finally - internet was very slow in SEA and I just couldn't take the time to upload photos there for the blog.
Just as gray is the new black, Laos is the new Romania for me.... it was my favorite country on this trip. I went in with high expectations based on people that had been there and it didn't disappoint.
A word of explanation. It took me about a week to realize that noone in SEA pronounces the "s" in Laos. When the French colonized Laos in the 1800s, there was no single country but instead, several kingdoms of the Lao people- so the French aggregated them and called them the plural Laos. Being French, they didn't pronounce the "s". Being American , we do. Mistakenly.
After the hurly-burly and in-your-face commercialism of Vietnam, Laos was an oasis of calm. It is one of the least populated of the SEA countries ( 6 million to Vietnam's 90 million), very poor, starting to ramp its economy outward, very Buddhist and..... Communist! For a very long time now, since 1975, or the fall of Saigon. It was fascinating to compare these two seemingly Communist countries (Vietnam and Laos) bring in international investment and privatize business.
I flew to the old royal capital, Luang Prabang, which is a Unesco World Heritage site. There are 32 Buddhist temples in the area that I was looking forward to visiting. LP is a gracious old French colonial town - and way too easy to travel in. I spent 1.5 weeks there, staying at a hotel with CNN so I could keep up with political news, great food, the temples, cooking class, etc. In case you hear Laos and think it might be rough to travel there - think Carmel, California. No kidding. Those French have been visiting for years.
The pic up top is of the morning alms. Each day, the monks in the temples walk down the main street at dawn with their alms bowls to collect food. Its a traditional interaction between monks (who don't work in paying jobs) and the townspeople. Monks get food for the day and the townspeople get implied blessings. Monks can only eat until noon, so they eat at dawn and just before noon. Since there are so many tourists and locals participating in this each day, the monks had a ton of food in their bowls. I saw them periodically reach in and give a handful of rice or fruit to young kids standing next to this line with baskets. They are poor kids from the town and the outlying area. It was nice to see that sharing. I loved this morning - seeing hundreds of monks in their bright orange robes lined up down the street.
One of my fave temples was Xieng Thong - it had a building housing the wagon for burial of cremated remains of the Royal family. It also had these gents and many more Buddhas lining the walls.
I talked to one of the young monks for awhile and he invited me to the evening chanting - it went on for 30 minutes and was magical. Note that the monks below cover their feet when in temple - the feet are considered dirty and it is an insult to point your feet at someone. Even if they are the tourists in the back of the temple.
This temple complex was covered in glass mosaics. On the back of the main temple was this Tree of Life mosaic - incredibly beautiful, albeit hard to capture on my camera.
Here is a detail of a mosaic on one of the smaller buildings - lots of elephants.
I had just walked away from my monk buddy after the chanting when I walked by Rick Cord - Rick and I had worked together at McDATA and knew that we were both in SEA but hadn't coordinated a meet anywhere, nonetheless in a temple in Luang Prabang. Amazingly small world - here we are enjoying a beer to celebrate.
Laos women still wear their traditional silk/brocade-edged skirts with sandals, and most women have long hair in a bun or ponytail. So I loved this street sign for pedestrians above. You can see the little girls at this primary school are dressed that way, also, with the lead girl hoisting an umbrella.
Many of the temples have extensive painted murals inside -this one had tigers and lions next to Buddha.
The temple below was a large one that houses many of the statues that need repair - this effort is funded by the UN, I think. So behind the altar , there were dozens of statues in states of disrepair.
The temple below with the exterior painted SO reminded me of the Romanian painted monestaries in Bucovina that I visited last summer. The murals in Laos told the story of Buddha in 92 cartoon-like panels - and I am sure, like the biblical stories painted on the monestaries in Romania 600 years ago, that they were meant to teach the illiterate people the stories of their religion. Love the symmetry. I've attached a pic of Voronets, one of the Eastern Orthodox monestaries in Romania, for comparison.
There is a lovely waterfall outside of Luang Prabang that is popular with the tourists.
Below the waterfall are pools that you can swim in. I ducked into one that was off the path - and had it all to myself as a result - imagine me paddling around those rocks in the middle of this milky, turquoise blue pool on a hot day - heaven!
There is a hill in the middle of LP with a temple and a large golden stuppa on it - this view is from the top of the hill, when I walked up to see the sunset. You can see the rooftops and temple spires of LP, as well as the Mekong River, sand islands and surrounding hilly countryside. I've included a pic of the main road in LP - old colonial buildings now occupied by travel agencies , shops and restaurants.
I was getting a little too comfortable in Luang Prabang (a friend expressed concern over my CNN addiction) so I went up the Mekong for a few days to a village called Muang Ngoi. My friend Laurie had been to the village just before it 7 years ago and asked me to go farther on so that she could live vicariously through me - and I am so glad that I did. You reach Muang Noi by boat - there are no roads there. There is one road in town , stretching the 3 block length of town. MN was a simple fishing village until about 2000 - when it bought some generators for electricity and starting opening guest houses for backpackers. Its still a pretty rustic place - here is a pic of the road with one of the many canine inhabitants (sorry - my Mac is uploading some pics on their side even though I have rotated them). Its a dramatic view up the street to a mountain. The town is surrounded by mountains and it lovely. I picked a super deluxe hut for $2 a night - had a shared toilet, a spiggot on the wall for showering (cold, of course), a lightbulb that was on 6:30 to 9:00, when the generators ran. It also had a view of the river to watch people wash clothes or themselves, and a hammock. At night, I fell asleep to the thunder of bug, dogs and roosters crowing.
On the river on the way to town, passed a boat like ours - with cattle on the roof.
One of the attractions of Muang Ngoi is that there are several villages nearby that you can walk to to see village life as it has been for 50 years (no electricity, cooking over fire, etc). So one day I walked about 90 minutes to a village called Huyxen. On the way, I passed through incredibly pastoral valleys surrounded by hills, layered with dormant rice fields, and haunted by many water buffalo. I passed this foursome taking a mud bath - they do this to keep bugs off them and to keep cool.
A few shots of the valley I crossed. I stopped at one of the huts to absorb my experiences this day - it was so peaceful and beautiful and moving. Until the bombs went off.
Laos is one of the most bombed countries on the planet. In the late 60's, the CIA worked with the incumbent government in Laos to keep out the communists that were attempting to overthrow the government. This behooved the US since the North Vietnamese were using eastern Laos to run troops and supplies down to South Vietnam during the American war. We had not declared war on Laos with Congress, so therefore the CIA ran a secret war in Laos and heavily bombed eastern and northeastern Laos with 250,000 bombs , in hopes of hitting the northern Vietnamese troops. 20% of these bombs didn't explode and remain in the earth. Each year, 100 people die as the bombs are accidently triggered, predominantly women looking for firewood. As I walked through these beautiful valleys, or lay in my bed, I heard 5-7 booming explosions a day - there are UN and British teams setting off the bombs. At this rate it will take 100 years to make the country safe. Its a tragedy for so many reasons, not the least of which is that , like Bosnia, its a physically stunning country primed for outdoor adventure travel. Hearing these bombs echoing off the valley walls was a reminder to me that these people continue to have a very hard life. But I sensed no animosity to myself as an American. Below is a shot of a bomb sitting next to my guest house.
Here is a view up the river, as water buffalo wandered over and into the water before collapsing in a "huff" to submerge themselves.
My nickname growing up was Garlic Gut so boy did I love seeing that garlic is a local crop - here is a local pup raiding the garlic drying on the main road. And below, that same boy is getting a bath in the Nam Ou River.
The main road has drainage channels on either side of it - this baby was making a run for it over outside my guest house.
I spent about 2.5 hours in the village of Huyxen. There was one place to eat, so I ordered Vegetables Curry, rice and a Coke (yes, they walk cans of Coke in for tourists to buy for $1). While I was eating on a platform with two tables, about half a dozen villagers wandered up on the platform to hang out on the hammocks and chairs. Noone directly engaged me but I think they were curious about me. I was the only tourist to walk to town that day, it seems. One of the girls had cut her finger hacking at bamboo - so I put a bandaid on it. She kept looking at it - maybe she had never seen one? After lunch, I hung out with the kids - they had a chart of the English alphabet with a picture of something beginning with each letter - they asked me to pronounce each word. It was an odd chart - showed Giraffes for G - so I guess it must be for an international crowd, since these kids would have no idea what a giraffe was.
I asked the kids to show me their school (it was Sunday) so we wandered over to their wood-framed, bamboo walled school. We spent some time copying my English phrases on the blackboards - until they started climbing the walls - literally. They crawled up the walls saying "photo, photo!" for me to take their pictures.
Here is my lunch coming down the ladder - Laos houses, like Cambodia, are traditionally on stilts even out of a floodplain.
Walking around the village - you can see how basic the houses are - and how many kitchen activities are done outside (probably to prevent fire and keep smoke out of the house).
It was a great day - walking through such beauty and playing with kids. When I got back to MN, I had dinner with Martin, my neighbor in the next hut. He is on a 6 month trip from Switzerland, travelling without using a plane. He took a cargo ship to Singapore and will take the TransSiberian railway back west - very inspirational given that I used my carbon footprint for 5 years taking regional planes. At dinner we met the boy below, Hom, who lived in the village. He agreed to take Martin on a traditionally fishing trip the next day and a hike up that mountain at the end of the street for a great view. There was much negotiating back and forth on price (in Laos Kip and Thai Baht) and the inclusion of LaoLao, local Laos rice whiskey. Here is a pic of them sealing the deal with a handshake.
Walking back from dinner was fun - there were sounds of singing and drumming through the town. We learned that the women of the town get one day off a month to "not work" and they party like its 1999 that night - went to sleep listening to the drums.
Back to Luang Prabang for a few days before I flew to Thailand. I took a boat across the
Mekong to visit some less travelled temples- here I am with a local boy acting shy. His friends wanted to take pictures with my camera. If you took the picture, you ended up turning it around for the kids to see themselves, accompanied by much giggling. I also got a great video of two little girls doing local dancing and singing but its too large to upload!
One of the temples I visited had funding to train monks to maintain the artwork in the temples around town. Here are several monks taking a class on drawing. They also learn carving and gilting.
This monk opened the temple for me and we ended up having a long conversation. His name is Bounnian, which means sticky rice. He told me it was because he was born so compromised they thought he would die. His grandmother thought to put him in warm water, which revived him and he survived. She called him "sticky rice" since she has to put him in water like rice. So I called him Sticky. He was trained in gilting and did the art to the right inside his temple. He was interested in reading English (very common for all monks to walk to learn English) so I gave him a book about Bhutan, including about Buddhism in Bhutan, that I was walking to a bookstore to donate.
Here is a store in LP that I frequented each night for water. I loved how they had EVERYTHING outside on the sidewalk.
Each night in Luang Prabang, there is a night market for local crafts. I can't believe that they haul in and set up their goods each night but they do - and it stretches for 6 blocks. Here is a view of it out of my hotel window.
Sigh, time to go. Can you tell that I loved Laos? I reluctantly flew to Thailand when my visa ran out. Here is my tuk-tuk taxi to the airport... I already miss these little guys.
