Leaving Luang Prabang

Will, Bill, Nick, Rick and me in Luang Prabang as we turned in our bikes

We had our final dinner at Le Elephant – an excellent French-Lao restaurant along Luang Prabang’s main street, Th. Sisavangvong– across the night market from our hotel.   Unfortunately the Lao set menu was  mostly beef, so I went for the French menu, with an intensely neon green vegetable soup and mushroom canellonis in a cream sauce.   Very different from the rest of the trip – and quite good. 

The night market appears to be a permanent fixture along Th. Sisavangvong.  There are acres and acres of silk hangings and puffy elephant slippers.  A little of this is made here (most probably the t- shirts, which are often so thin you can read the text on the back through the front  of the shirt).  I’m guessing that many of the goods are actually made in China, including the hangings in the style of the Hmong and other minority tribes.  But at 9:15 (preparing for a 10pm closing) the merchants start packing up – and by 10:05 you’d never even know that the market had been there!

Luang Prabang is so smoky that I felt like I had inadvertently walked into a bar when I opened the door of my (air conditioned!) hotel room in the morning.   It’s a charming city, though, with tourists all over, and restaurants ranging from American to French to Italian and Asian.   It’s also got watts and stupas all over.  Many are being renovated – and there are novice monks all over. I got out of the hotel a bit too late to witness the saffron-clad novices parading down the street and receiving the alms of small kip notes and balls of sticky rice from locals and tourists alike.  

Novice robes out to dry

National Museum

I was able to see the national museum, including a photography exhibit “The Floating Buddha” by a German photographer  Hans Georg Berger who spent years documenting the reintroduction of Buddhist education into Laos after the current government through its hands in the air when it realized it could not eliminate religion.  In fact, it’s likely the Buddhism that gives Laotians a sense of peace even in a relatively impoverished land. The quote I’ll remember from the exhibit is the one line distilling Buddhism “Cling to nothing whatsoever.”  The photos are truly amazing – I can’t find any to link to on line, though, and photography was prohibited in the museum.

The government also had an especially hard time figuring out what to do about the long legacy of the royal family in Luang Prabang, which gave way peacefully to the Pathet Lao (communists) in 1975 as the US fled the region.  The King, Queen and Prince were initially under house arrest and later taken to camps in the mountains or caves; they apparently all died there, perhaps of malaria, but it’s really a mystery.   The Palace has become the National Museum – featuring the royal family’s books, gifts from around the world, and their cars .   The museum is much like a shrine to the royalty. Like the Buddha, though, they are gone from this earth.

View from Phu Si

The guidebooks say that a walk up to the temple at Phu Si – the hill overlooking downtown Luang Prabang, is especially rewarding for the view.  Take my word for it – not in smoky March!   The temple itself is much more diminutive than many others in Luang Prabang, and I deferred on climbing down the other side to see the Buddha’s footprint.  The temple had no one else inside, though, and I sat down on a pillow cross-legged for a few minutes in the darkness there with the faint smell of incense – and did feel very peaceful

 I took a dusty 3 km walk to the Phousy Market – the less touristy market –and the sights and smells were amazing.  Not much for a tourist like me to purchase there except for dried river weed – which was delicious at yesterday’s lunch, but I’m convinced it would be river weed powder by the time I got it home, so I deferred.

Market at Phousy

We’ll be on an ATR72 prop plane out of the smoke of Luang Prabang and into the hassle and noise of Hanoi in another hour – where I will try to talk my way onto a flight a day early so that I can have two days to recover and reorient myself to East Coast time.   Given daylight savings, it’s one less hour of reorientation since I left.