LAOS
Dispatches #3-4 · newest dispatch · back: Thailand · next: Vietnam

DISPATCH #3
Down the Mekong · written in Luang Prabang, typed in Vientiane, Tuesday, August 10, 1999

Sorry for the silence, everybody. Laos is not a country where you trip over an internet cafe every fifty feet. I wrote these in my notebook as I went and I'm typing them up now in Vientiane, which has a couple of places with computers, fans and very patient owners.

On Monday the 26th of July I crossed the Mekong. It's a lot less dramatic than it sounds. You get your passport stamped on the Thai side in a little office by the river, walk down a muddy bank, climb into a long skinny wooden boat with an outboard motor and five other people, and two minutes later you climb out on the other side and you're in Laos. Huay Xai, the town on the Laos side, is basically one street climbing up a hill from the river. The pace changed the minute I stepped out of the boat. Nobody was trying to sell me anything. A dog was asleep in the middle of the road and the traffic went around it.

From Huay Xai there's no real road downriver to Luang Prabang, so you take the slow boat. It takes two days. It's exactly what it sounds like.

The boat was long and low and wooden, with a tin roof and wooden benches about as wide as a ruler, and it was full: about sixty people, maybe a third of them backpackers and the rest Lao families going home or to market, with sacks of rice, baskets of vegetables, a crate of chickens, two motorbikes lashed to the roof, and one small and very dignified pig in a woven basket that rode the whole way at my feet. A monk in an orange robe had the best seat, up front, which everybody seemed to agree was right. After about an hour, the backpackers gave up on the benches and sat on the floor on our packs, and the Lao families, who had all brought cushions, looked at us with what I'm pretty sure was pity.

The river in rainy season is brown and fast and huge, with whole trees floating by in it, and there were places where the water boiled up in big slow whirlpools and the captain steered around them like he'd done it a thousand times, which I'm sure he had. On both sides there were steep hills covered in jungle right down to the water, and every so often a little village on the bank: a few houses on stilts, a long boat pulled up on the sand, kids running down to wave and shout at us, women washing clothes in the shallows, water buffalo standing in the river up to their necks with only their noses and horns showing, looking completely satisfied with their lives. We stopped at some of the villages to let people off and on. Nobody had a schedule. Nobody seemed to need one.

The first night you stop at Pak Beng, which is a village about halfway that exists mostly because the boats stop there. It's built up a steep hill from the riverbank, a row of wooden guesthouses and noodle shops, and when the boat pulls in, about twenty kids come down the bank to offer to carry your bag up for a few coins. I said no, then watched an eight-year-old girl carry a German guy's enormous backpack up the hill on her head while he struggled behind her, and changed my mind. The electricity comes from a generator, and at ten o'clock it goes off, and the whole town goes dark at once. Then the insects start. I've never heard anything like it. It's like sleeping inside a radio tuned between stations.

The second day the hills got higher and the river got narrower and faster. In the afternoon we passed the caves at Pak Ou, which are in a limestone cliff right over the river, full of old Buddha statues that people have been leaving there for hundreds of years. And then, around five o'clock, there was a golden spire on a hill over the water, and roofs, and a long line of boats tied up along the bank, and we were in Luang Prabang.

I didn't want to get off the boat. I had a sore back, a sunburn on exactly one side of my face, and I didn't want to get off the boat.

DISPATCH #4
Luang Prabang and Vientiane · Tuesday, August 10, 1999

Luang Prabang is the most peaceful place I have ever been, and I'm including my grandmother's house.

It's a small town on a narrow point of land where a smaller river, the Nam Khan, runs into the Mekong. It used to be the royal capital, and it's all temples and old wooden Lao houses and two-story French buildings from the colonial days, with shutters and balconies, under big trees. A few years ago the whole town was made a World Heritage Site by the UN, so they're not allowed to build anything tall or ugly, and you can feel it. There are almost no cars. People ride bicycles, slowly. In the evening everybody climbs the hill in the middle of town, Phousi, which has a gold stupa on top, and watches the sun go down over the Mekong, and nobody talks very much.

There are something like thirty temples in town. My favorite is Wat Xieng Thong, down near the point, which has a roof that sweeps down almost to the ground in layers, like a bird settling its wings, and a back wall covered in a mosaic of colored glass that shows a tree. I went back four times. On the third visit a novice monk, about fifteen, came over to practice his English on me. He wanted to know about America, mostly about basketball and whether everyone has a car. I wanted to know about being a monk. He said he gets up at four, studies, meditates, and is learning English and also math, and that he will probably be a monk for a few years and then go back to his village, which a lot of boys do. He asked me what I'm going to do with my life. I told him I didn't know. He thought about this seriously and then said that was all right, and that I should probably meditate about it. I said I would. I haven't yet.

But the thing I'll remember from Luang Prabang is the morning alms.

Every day, at dawn, the monks from all the temples walk through the town in long single-file lines, barefoot, in their orange robes, each carrying a covered bowl. People wait along the streets, mostly women and older people, kneeling or sitting on little mats with baskets of sticky rice, and as each monk passes they put a small ball of rice in his bowl. Nobody speaks. The monks don't stop. The whole thing is silent except for bare feet on the street and roosters going off somewhere.

The woman who ran my guesthouse explained it to me the night before. She said it's not charity, exactly. The monks need the rice to eat, and the people giving it are making merit, doing something good, and so both sides are giving something to the other. She said that tourists are welcome to watch, but to stay back, across the street, not to get in the way or stick a camera in anyone's face, and not to use a flash. She said if I wanted to give rice I should do it properly or not at all, and that most foreigners should probably just watch. So I watched.

I got up at five and sat on a step across the street from a temple and waited. Around six, the line came around the corner. It went on and on: old monks, young monks, novices who couldn't have been more than ten. The light was coming up gray, then gold. A grandmother next to her front door knelt with a little girl, maybe four, and showed her how to roll the rice and put it in the bowls, one and then the next and the next, and the girl was so serious about it she frowned. I didn't take a single picture. I didn't want to. I just sat there until the last monk had gone by and the street was empty, and then I sat there some more.

I was supposed to stay four days in Luang Prabang. I stayed nine.

Then I took the bus south to Vientiane, eleven hours over the mountains on a road that goes up and down and around so many switchbacks that by the end nobody on the bus was talking. The views were incredible when I could look at them. Vientiane is the capital, but it feels like a small town that someone told was a capital and it's still getting used to it. It's on the Mekong too, and you can sit at the cafes by the river in the evening and look across at Thailand on the other bank.

I fly to Hanoi on Friday. Lao people have been kinder to me than I deserved, and I'm going to miss this country a lot.

Sorry about the length. The fan in here is broken and I've been sweating through this one for an hour.

« THAILAND · Newest dispatch · Next: VIETNAM »

[email protected]