Treasures of Laos (2010)

After our at-first-adventurous-and-then-incredibly-gorgeous introduction to Laos, the next week-plus there just continued to cement it as one of the most amazing places I’ve ever had the chance to visit. We left off just as we were arriving in Louang Phabang (aka Luang Prabang and other English transliterations)…

Louang Phabang has a population about the same size as Santa Cruz (~55,000), but that makes it the 5th largest city in Laos, whereas Santa Cruz is about the 150th largest city in the state of California. Regardless, Louang Phabang was an absolutely amazing stop. We spent one day just wandering the city and then two days touring the areas around it (as well as seeing more of LP in the afternoons/evenings).

Just walking the streets there was amazing. It was hot and humid, like it had been in Vietnam, but there was a cooling effect from the nearby water as LP is really a peninsula sticking out into the confluence of the Nam Khan with the Mekong River. It’s tropical and overgrown, but peaceful, beautiful, calm.

One of our favorite parts was the night market, where handicrafts and street food were equally strong attractions…

Speaking of food…it was great. Let’s break this down a bit. Southeast Asian food is top notch. As I mentioned previously, being at the crossroads of South Asia (think Indian curries) and East Asia (think Chinese stir-fries) makes for some awesome flavor combos. In general, Vietnamese food is what I label my favorite, but the abundance of great Thai places in the U.S. makes that a great choice as well. And, what sits right between those two countries? Laos! (Also, Cambodia.) In fact, there are quite a number of both “Thai” and “Vietnamese” restaurants in the U.S. that are actually Laotian, as Laotian cuisine borrows from and has influenced neighbors in all directions, and I think most people have no idea where Laos is, so it probably helps sales to label it with something more familiar. Needless to say, Lao food was excellent. Tangy, spicy, with tons of fresh herbs and a great blend of flavors that were both recognizably Thai and Vietnamese, but also uniquely Lao.

[An aside: The actual name of the country is Lao People’s Democratic Republic, but everyone just calls it Laos. Evidently, that comes from the French practice of labeling the place after the people who lived there, the Laos.]

Probably the most interesting and unique part of Lao cuisine was the regular use of purple sticky rice. The rice is served in reed baskets and it is really sticky. You take a small handful of the rice and use it to make a little scoop in your hand with which you pick up and eat the various vegetables and meats. (Silverware is provided to westerners upon request, but isn’t traditionally used for many meals.) This use of sticky rice is particularly common with laab. Laab (or larb) is made of chicken, beef, pork, or fish that has been chopped into tiny bits, mixed with a bunch of herbs, and then cured in fish sauce and lime juice. For westerners, they cook the meat, but traditionally it is raw. We never tried the raw stuff, but now that I’ve gotten used to Peruvian ceviche, I might be willing to give it a go. Regardless, it made a great tangy contrast to the sticky rice.

One of the things that stands out most in Louang Phabang is the vast number of wats, Buddhist temples. There seems to be another one around every corner. (I just looked it up and one website says there are “over 30.” That feels about right.) We visited at least half a dozen different wats during the time we were in town. Each had its own look and unique history. I can’t say that I recall a ton about each one specifically (some more than others), but as I mentioned previously, I had been teaching about Buddhism in my classes recently, so it was interesting to experience a culture where Buddhism was taken much more seriously. Unlike Vietnam, where the Mahayana branch of Buddhism is most prevalent, in Laos, most people follow the Theravada (more traditional) form of Buddhism.

Let’s just take a moment to appreciate the beautiful and impressive variety of the wats of Louang Phabang. I won’t belabor these too much, but do take a look at the architectural similarities and differences, the gorgeous attention to detail in the decor, and the plethora of religious artifacts in each of the different wats…

To start off, out the window of our hotel, we had this view of Wat Xiang Mouan…

Just around the corner from there (and also built in the mid-1800s) was Wat Choum Khong. I especially loved the doorway…

Around the corner and a block down the road was Wat Pa Phai. A bit older, but superbly artistically embellished…

And another block away was Wat Siphoutthabath. Some of the grounds here were less impressive, but it still had some truly beautiful bits in the lush surroundings.

At the far end of the “Old Town” peninsula were three more amazing wats. Wat Khili is one of the oldest structures, dating back to the late 1700s…

Around the corner, Wat Xieng Thong dates back even further (to the 1500s), but has been one of the most important throughout the history of the region. Besides being a key temple for the royal family, it also now houses the funerary carriage of King Sisavang Vong, the first ruler over a united Laos (with some help from France).

And just a few blocks away, Wat Sene Souk Haram (“Temple of a 100,000 Treasures”) dates back to the early 1700s and was really quite stunning…

Right in the heart of Louang Phabang was the old Royal Palace which now serves as the National Museum (no photos inside, alas). If you haven’t caught on yet, Louang Phabang was once the center of its own kingdom, the most powerful in Laos before the country was reunified following World War II.

But, getting back to wats, the most beautiful one in the city was definitely Haw Pha Bang, just in front of the Royal Palace. This gorgeous structure is the newest incarnation (late 20th century) of a series of temples that held the Pha Bang, a sacred image of the Buddha from which the kings of Louang Phabang claimed their divine right to rule.

Probably the most memorable moment of our time in Louang Phabang occurred across the street from the Royal Palace. (Of all the stories from our time in Southeast Asia, this is the one Jessica likes to talk about the most. See if you can spot why.) We were approached by a girl, maybe 14 years old or so, selling jewelry and other trinkets on the street. This wasn’t an uncommon occurrence. She spoke a little English — also not uncommon — and approached us to show us her stuff. Her main sales technique was to tell Jessica, “You, beautiful. Him, same same monkey,” while pointing out how hairy my arms and legs were. Jessica thought this was hilarious. Even more so when we saw her again the next day and she repeated the line. Grrrr.

The second time we saw her, we were climbing up Phou Si, a large hill in the center of Louang Phabang with a great view over the area and a series of religious sites on the way up displaying images of the Buddha. As with other sites around Louang Phabang, you’ll notice the Nagas (mythical snakes, or sometimes snake-human hybrids) protecting the entrance to the hill as they often are outside of temples and other important places.

So, with all these wats and other religious sites around, it’s obvious that Buddhism is pretty important in Laos. Of course, this means there are a ton of monks. At each of the wats we visited, and pretty much everywhere we went in Louang Phabang, we saw monks. But this wasn’t always men deeply invested in religious prayer. While some dedicate their life to religious practice, it is also very common for teenage boys in Laos to spend a few years living in a monastery. So, when we say we saw monks everywhere, that means we saw teenage boys dressed in monks robes hanging out with their friends…

…paddling, reading…

…and occasionally doing something that seemed like it might have a religious purpose…

Probably the funniest was this bunch of boys who seemed to be arguing over who got to hit the drum. They also later laughed over playing some sort of horn poorly. All in all, it was fascinating to see a totally different way of being a teenager…and also to see how similar most of it was to how kids interact with one another in the rest of the world.

Every morning, the monks process through the streets, receiving alms from the citizens of the city. Most frequently, people give them bananas or handfuls of sticky rice.

Notice that the monks go barefoot and that the people serving them also meet them with bare feet. This continues even on rainy days.

Probably my favorite two-photo sequence from this trip was a moment we witnessed on one of the morning processions. An older monk approaching a man handing out sticky rice with a somewhat wary expression in the first photo, and both laughing together in the next. I think this gets at the ultimate humanity of the monks. They may have a special roll in society, and live by certain rules dictating their behavior, but they still laugh. I just really love the smile on both their faces.

So, that was Louang Phabang. But we also spent two days doing day-trip tours from the city to the surrounding countryside. The first day we went with a guide and a couple from Switzerland on a tour up the Mekong River.

We began the day with a visit to a mulberry paper workshop. You already saw some examples of these crafts above in the night market, but it was pretty cool to see a bit about the process of making these creations.

We also visited a nearby weaving workshop. There were tons of beautiful textiles that we saw produced in Laos. We actually ended up buying a comforter cover we really liked when we were in Louang Phabang. Sadly, it only lasted a few years — pretty but not durable.

A bit further up the river, we went to a home distillery where lao-lao is produced. Lao-lao is the local name for rice-based alcohol. There we tasted varieties ranging from 15% to 55% alcohol content. I couldn’t quite bring myself to buy a bottle with a scorpion in it. Too creepy. But we saw these bottles on bar and restaurant shelves all over Laos.

From there we went about an hour up the Mekong to the Pak Ou Caves. This is located where the Nam Ou flows into the Mekong, so we had already passed it on our rainy day arrival in Louang Phabang. The Pak Ou Caves are home to thousands of statues of the Buddha. He is seen in every possible pose and in sizes ranging from a few inches tall to several feet. Some of the statues are new, others old. Most are wooden, some clay, a few metal. Groups are arranged in orderly rows. Others are in wild disarray. The caves are a site of ritual bathing during the Lao New Year (April?), but are stunning to visit whenever.

Our co-tourists had paid for the extra add-on elephant ride on the trip. We were given the option to sit and wait for them for an hour or to pay to ride an elephant. Not on our bucket list, and felt way too touristy (and I’m not really an animal rights activist, but this is on the edge of my comfort level in terms of human use of animals), but it also sounded better than sitting with nothing to do. So, we rode an elephant.

I had thought we’d be directly on the elephant’s back. Scary enough. Instead, we were perched on an awkward bench swaying back and forth on top of the elephant with nothing really holding us in. We had to really grip the bar in front of us to keep from sliding out of the seat and down to the ground. It was a bit terrifying. Also hilarious. Most amusing was when the elephants decided to stop to eat and couldn’t be coaxed to continue walking for quite a while. That was an adventure. Not one I really wanted. Not one I’m likely to do again. But still an odd and interesting (if a bit uncomfortable physically and morally) way to spend an hour.

Finally, we got back out on the river and jumped in some inflatable kayaks. It was fun to paddle around a bit, but (a) the Mekong moves fast, and (b) inflatable kayaks are very light and spinny, so controlling them was pretty difficult. Regardless, it was a nice way to get out on the river before returning to town for the evening.

Our second trip out of LP was aimed at seeing the beautiful Kuang Si waterfalls. We were with a group of about a dozen tourists on this trip. On the way, we stopped at a couple of other interesting spots: a Khmu village and a Hmong village — both minority ethnic groups in Laos. If you recall, we’d already spent significant time in Hmong communities in Vietnam. As with Vietnam, there is a dominant ethnic group (Lao), and lots of minority groups. However, in Laos, the majority group is a much smaller percentage of the population (something like half). Wikipedia tells me there are 160 ethnic groups in Laos, with Hmong and Khmu being two of the larger ones (numbering in the hundreds of thousands).

The first stop was in the Khmu village. The Khmu houses are generally built on stilts and this village seemed to be in relatively good shape. We learned that one of the reasons many of the cultures of Laos build their homes on stilts is because of the poisonous snakes which are less likely to creep around in your house if it’s up off the ground. (Shivers.)

In contrast, the Hmong homes are built on the ground. I don’t know if that is simply a cultural preference, but it seemed to me a reflection of their social standing. Almost every Hmong village we saw in Laos appeared a bit shabbier than the other villages and homes we passed. Maybe I’m wrong, but I got the impression that the Hmong were for one reason or another generally less well off than the Lao majority and others we saw (like the Khmu village). Of course, it’s all relative. Laos is one of the poorest countries in the world (World Bank data), so it’s not like anyone there is particularly wealthy. But, there was a difference where most folks in Laos seemed to be comfortably surviving, whereas some of the Hmong folks seemed a bit more on the edge of extreme poverty. I do remember appreciating that we interacted with a few more people in the Hmong village, and it is always interesting to meet people and get a glimpse of the variety of ways that people live around the world.

Eventually, we got to the area near Kuang Si Falls. From our van, we hiked through fields and jungle to reach another (see previous post) set of caves where people had sought refuge during the U.S. bombing campaign.

From there, it was a short walk to the top of the falls. This was a gorgeous area, with warm water running over the tangled roots of trees and a series of shallow ledges before reaching a sheer drop which we were able to walk right up to edge of.

From there, we hiked down a set of stairs built right into a side channel of the river. That was both amazing and a little scary.

At the bottom, we had a stunning view of the main waterfall. A bit further down, the river formed a variety of pools with rounded stone lips that the water ran over into the pool below. These formed an excellent series of swimming holes and the tourist crowd (including us) took full advantage of that…

The visit ended with a chance to see the sun bears at the rescue facility there.

Overall, a really fun and interesting day: a quick view into the variety of lives in Laos, and then some amazing natural beauty. Not bad.

From Louang Phabang, we then left on a 2 day tour that took us quite a bit further east, to an area of Laos known as the Plain of Jars. When we first decided to go to Laos, and I started researching it, the Plain of Jars was on my list of places I definitely wanted to go. But, it’s a bit out of the way, and not on many tourists normal itinerary. So, even though we signed up for a group tour, it was just Jessica and I with our guide, Lee.

The drive from Louang Phabang to Phonsavan (the main city in the area), wasn’t exactly short, so we broke it up with a quick stop at…yet another cave used by the Laotians to hide out during the Vietnam War.

Not that each of these caves wasn’t interesting or beautiful or historically important, but it was starting to seem like a regular theme here. And for good reason. Laos is known for being the most bombed country in the history of the world thanks to the CIA’s campaign to destroy the communist allies and transportation corridors of the North Vietnamese there. The U.S. dropped more bombs on Laos than were used during the entirety of World War II. And Laos is pretty damn small. More specifically, the Plain of Jars was the most heavily bombed area of the most heavily bombed country in history.

So, naturally, Lee had stories. Most horrifying was when he talked about a time he was a young kid, hanging out with a friend when he found something shiny down by the creek one day. When he picked it up, it exploded, killing his friend. You see, Lee was pretty young — younger than us — born long after the war was over, but there are still tons of unexploded cluster bombs and mines all over the country, and especially in the Plain of Jars. Tens of thousands of Laotians have died long after the war ended as a result.

The preponderance of these lethal devices was driven home when we arrived in Phonsavan, where nearly every hotel and restaurant had decorations of disabled munitions outside their front door or in their windows.

We also passed multiple sites like this one, where a series of stupas on a hillside marked the locations where a group of people were killed during the war.

And then there were the various historical sites we visited. Each had a sign like this outside of it…

…explaining that the area had been scanned for “UXO,” unexploded ordinance, with data about how much had been found and when. You can see on this one that the scan was only completed in 2004, meaning that the 127 unexploded bombs found here were active and dangerous for decades after the end of the war. As we walked around each site, paths were marked showing where had been scanned and where had not, and we were told to stay on the right side of the markers. (Though, there were a couple of times that Lee took us across the line into “uncleared” zones, assuring us it was safe while we held our breath.)

Oh, but let’s talk about the Plain of Jars! Why does it have such an odd name? What were at these sites of which I speak? Well…Jars!

No. Seriously. It was a bunch of jars.

The jars are giant carved stone containers, most about 4 or 5 feet tall (some a bit bigger, some smaller) that litter the wide open plains of this area. There are three major jar sites here open to the public, with dozens more in the area, and a number of smaller similar sites stretching across Southeast Asia all the way to India. The jars seem to date back about 2000 years, but no one is totally sure what they were used for. The main theory is that they were funerary urns, but some people believed they were used for making lao-lao. The fact that more have been found elsewhere leads some to think they were part of some sort of ancient trade route.

Regardless, they were beautiful and fascinating. The open grassy hillsides, overcast skies, and mysterious lichen-covered stones made the place feel reminiscent of Stonehenge. But, instead of an insane number of tourists, we saw virtually no one else there as we visited each of the three main sites over the course of our trip. It was an absolutely amazing place to see. Highly recommended. (Please enjoy the following enormous number of photos of rocks.)

While in the Plain of Jars, we also visited Mouang Khouane, the ruins of the capital of a small kingdom about 500 years ago. Mouang Khouane was renowned for its beautiful, jewel-covered stupas. We visited the remains of a wat there and marveled at the construction of a giant Buddha, and then hiked to two of the remaining, somewhat jungle-covered stupas. Another beautiful out-of-the-way site.

Rather than returning to Louang Phabang, we arranged for our tour to drop us off at the next major tourist town on the common route south from LP through Laos. On the way, we visited another Hmong household (photos included above), where we spent a bit of time talking with the family who lived there. Eventually, we arrived in Vang Vieng, a town situated in a beautiful valley along the Nam Xong river that is evidently quite popular with the Thai beach/drug scene crowd. I’ll give the first half of that description a big thumbs up and the second half a deeply sarcastic “yay.”

We spent only a day and a half in Vang Vieng, but it was memorable for a variety of reasons.

On our one full day there, we took a little vaguely-planned walk across the river to an area where there were supposed to be some cool caves to explore. We wandered through rice paddies and pastures and eventually followed some handmade signs inviting us to see an “amazing” cave. Crossing a bamboo bridge, we eventually arrived there where the farmer whose land we were on invited us to follow him into the cave. It was definitely not the biggest or most dramatic cave I’ve ever been in, but I appreciated that it wasn’t built out for tourists and that we had to scramble a bit to get around in there.

More importantly, the valley we wandered through on the way there and back to town was just stunning. Lush and green with a layer of fog hanging around the peaks of the limestone karsts surrounding us.

We spent the afternoon just chilling in town. It turns out, we weren’t the only tourists doing that. Sadly, we ran into the gang of folks from New Zealand who were abusive and disrespectful to locals (see previous post). Bleh. When we walked into a cafe and saw them there, we turned around and walked out. There were other places we could go. Oddly, though, every restaurant, cafe, or bar we entered had one thing in common: a TV playing old episodes of “Friends.” Why? Not that we’re big “Friends” experts, but it seemed that each place had a different season playing on a continuous loop. I suspect that one DVD collection made it to town somehow and got divvied up between a number of places. It was disconcerting.

That evening in Vang Vieng was also the source of two of my favorite funny travel stories.

#1: At dinner, when the waiter delivered the bill, I read it in Lao. He asked (in English) if I spoke Lao, and I replied that I could count and proceeded to count to ten for him. He immediately ran to the kitchen and brought out several other staff members and asked me to count again to much applause and laughter. Before we left on our trip, I had made sure to learn to count in Vietnamese, Lao, and Khmer and had found it helpful a couple of times for bargaining or asking questions about times and prices, but this was the first time that anyone had been that excited about it. They told me that I was the first tourist they had met who bothered to learn any of their language, which made me both happy and a bit sad at the same time.

#2: That night, I got out of bed at some point to go to the bathroom. As I was sitting on the toilet, a gigantic spider crept under a crack in the wall and ran across the floor towards me. When I say “ran,” I mean it. It was fast. It had very long spindy legs that moved. I lifted my feet off the ground, trembling in terror — I’m pretty arachnophobic — as it ran under me, past the toilet and up the wall behind me and stopping just a foot above my head. I finished peeing and yelled to Jess, asking her to bring me a shoe so that I could kill it. (I’ve moved beyond the freak-out-and-run version of arachnophobia to the point where I just kill them if they’re indoors, knowing I won’t sleep otherwise.) As I stood up, Jessica appeared in the doorway with one of her tiny, size-5 flip-flops in hand, looked at the spider, and said, “I think I’d better get a bigger shoe.” She returned with one of mine and I promptly dispatched our long-legged friend.

Side note: upon reflection, I sometimes question if it was a spider. I think, in retrospect, that it might actually have been an insect (6 legs), but it was very spider-like in its movement and it was definitely larger than my hand in terms of total wingspan, so it was terrifying enough regardless of its biological categorization.

Also, sorry, no photos of that one.

Our second day in Vang Vieng, I convinced Jessica to go tubing with me. Riding inner tubes down the Nam Xong is pretty much the main tourist attraction in town, but we were hesitant to do it. You see, part of the experience is that along the route there are several bars serving everything from beer and lao-lao to psychedelic mushroom shakes. Fun times…and sooooo not our scene. But we decided that if we went first thing in the morning, it would be relatively free of drug-addled tourists. This turned out to be correct.

What we didn’t account for was a fact that we should have been very aware of. You see, the Nam Xong was flooding high over the banks at the moment. We knew this. We could see it right from the deck of our hotel room that overlooked the river. We were told that it was still fine to inner tube. But, it turned out that instead of a lazy couple-hour ride down the river, it was a panicked 25-minute roller-coaster ride where we were constantly paddling to try not get swept into a stand of trees or a giant boulder that happened to be in the middle of the river (but usually would have been well up on the banks). It was super-fun, but super-fast. No photos from that craziness, but here’s a few of what the river looked like as it rose over the course of our visit to Vang Vieng…

That afternoon we left town, taking a bus down to the capital of Laos, Vientiane. We only spent one day in Vientiane, and, while interesting, it was definitely the least exciting part of Laos that we visited. I recall that the day started with an thrilling bout of food poisoning that hit me after having some poorly prepared congee for breakfast and ended after a massage provided by women that Jessica and I have since described as having “thumbs of steel.” In between, we visited a few of the tourist sites of Vientiane.

Vientiane is extremely flat compared to the other parts of Laos we visited. It has wide streets and sidewalks and generally felt less crowded, busy, and lively than the rest of the country. It lies just across the Mekong River from Thailand, and it was here that we learned about Laos’ inferiority complex. Lao and Thai are very similar languages, so a fair amount of the television and movies shown in Laos are actually in the Thai language, but during the hardcore communist era of the 1970s, the government officially stripped down the language to simplify it (though I don’t know the details). So, evidently, many Laotians feel that their language is basically an unlovely version of Thai. Sad.

We were in Vientiane at the beginning of the period of the Buddhist calendar known as “Vassa,” which is sometimes translated as “Buddhist Lent.” It’s a period in which monks retreat to their temples and is often a period of intense meditation. In preparation for this retreat, donations to temples are at their peak so that the monks have supplies to survive their retreat. It was a bit funny to see monks hauling off baskets full of food, candy, drinks, and cash.

One of the main sites in Vientiane is Wat Sisaket, the oldest temple still standing in Vientiane. It is home to thousands of clay Buddha statues, many sadly headless. We also visited the nearby Haw Phra Kaew, which was once a wat and is now a museum.

Across town, the That Louang is a giant stupa that has history dating back over 2000 years and was once supposed to be home to a relic (a bone?) of the Buddha.

And, halfway between the two lies that Patuxi, an impressive structure in the middle of a great plaza at the end of a wide boulevard…

But, honestly, the best part about visiting there was this sign…

I just crack up every time I think about a sign at a tourist site proclaiming that “it appears even less impressive, like a monster of concrete.” What a great phrase. I’m just sad I didn’t come up with it. But it seems to be, as I said above, a sign of a people with an inferiority complex.

Nevertheless, the view from the top was, as advertised, excellent.

Finally, after that fairly chill day wandering Vientiane, we took off the next morning for Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

To sum up, Laos is awesome. If you’re up for an adventure, go!

We’ll wrap up Southeast Asia in the next blog…