We spent eight nights in Luang Prabang, a very tourist-friendly colonial town situated at the intersection of the Mekong and Nam Khan rivers. Here are Steppil's impressions of the setting.
Pil's Perspective
Across the street from the TAEC’s driveway, we entered an art gallery building that turned out to have four floors of photography on display—much of it brilliant, some of its most powerful work produced by teenagers. This isn’t something that’s been done to entertain tourists, it’s something that people did out of love for art. To see a Luang Prabang more like what its residents see, you must wander through the sprawling Phousi market (a pleasant half-hour walk west; pictured above), where hundreds of people who have lived here for years and intend to continue living here are buying and selling everything from giant fresh fish on ice to small Asian toys packaged in plastic.
At the market, get a bowl of noodles from any vendor with a full counter in front of her; those noodles come from love and experience (ours told us she’s been doing this for fifteen years). Also, cross the Nam Khan on the creaking bamboo bridge; pay the whopping $0.75 toll. This residential part of town is where once, as we came home from buying dinner on sticks at a street market, we crossed paths with a friendly English-speaking Lao man and his six- or seven-year-old son, with whom we’d chatted over a bowl of khao soi lao in the commercial district the day before, when they had been out to breakfast together. Tonight, they were coming home to where they lived.
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| A bhodi tree at the base of Mount Phousi |
Between its thirty-three wats, the former royal palace (now a museum), the gorgeous river, and the colonial architecture, there's plenty on display here. We spent our share of time consuming coffee and Lao dishes
at cafes, but we gained so much when we stepped off those convenient avenues. Even on the main streets, you see many
parents—fathers every bit as common as mothers—taking care of
children while they operate their home businesses. As you head into the tangled networks of thin residential alleys, you can start to
see a longer-term, more organic Luang Prabang. If you
pause halfway up the long, ancient staircase that is the spine of
Phousi Hill in the center of town, you can see to one side the
terraces of homes where in back yards of dirt people are tending wood
fires and constructing things out of bamboo. From the back of the
Tribal Arts and Ethnology Centre, on rooftops set in away from the
street, you’ll see shallow baskets of seeds and fruits drying
in the sun. We used those very baskets at our first farm in Thailand.
Across the street from the TAEC’s driveway, we entered an art gallery building that turned out to have four floors of photography on display—much of it brilliant, some of its most powerful work produced by teenagers. This isn’t something that’s been done to entertain tourists, it’s something that people did out of love for art. To see a Luang Prabang more like what its residents see, you must wander through the sprawling Phousi market (a pleasant half-hour walk west; pictured above), where hundreds of people who have lived here for years and intend to continue living here are buying and selling everything from giant fresh fish on ice to small Asian toys packaged in plastic.
At the market, get a bowl of noodles from any vendor with a full counter in front of her; those noodles come from love and experience (ours told us she’s been doing this for fifteen years). Also, cross the Nam Khan on the creaking bamboo bridge; pay the whopping $0.75 toll. This residential part of town is where once, as we came home from buying dinner on sticks at a street market, we crossed paths with a friendly English-speaking Lao man and his six- or seven-year-old son, with whom we’d chatted over a bowl of khao soi lao in the commercial district the day before, when they had been out to breakfast together. Tonight, they were coming home to where they lived.
Step's SideWhere to start with Luang Prabang? There are so many conflicting sides to this Southeast Asian coin: tropical foliage exploding around the peninsula; an abundance of French pastry and wine; colonial villas now owned by Laos renting to Westerners; a mercurial, take-no-prisoners cuisine; the same shitty backpacker bar street seen all over the world. My experience of this town was so flavored by what came before it: two months in rural Thailand, where we did have some wonderful amenities (like a pizza oven where I made weekly challah, and wifi), but definitely no Western food on the regular (besides the pound of chocolate my lovely mother mailed); and a week in Chiang Mai, where I was so busy trying to get as many of the bright and steaming objects into my mouth as possible that I didn't spare a thought for sub-par baguette.
But in Luang Prabang, after two months without baguette, the baguette is amazing, and this is incredibly weird. What the hell is a good bakery doing in the middle of Laos? And why is it a block away from the same noodle shop where I got complimentary shots of armadillo-infused Lao Lao, aka moonshine rice whiskey? This might be the only decent side-effect of French colonization, and it certainly makes for a surreal dining experience.
Because of the rest of the country's relative poverty, Luang Prabang felt like a decadent place to be. The elegant lines of the UNESCO-protected buildings were a far cry from what we'd see in our later travels, where communist right angles ruled or bamboo houses teetered in the dust. There was a café serving espresso on every block, and a temple every twenty feet, and all of these colors everywhere. There's even a "Royal Ballet" operating out of one of the deposed king's buildings; it was more like seeing a play in the high school gym, but even so, it was worth it to see a shadow of what the royal arts might have looked like, a hundred years ago when the king's pockets were lined with francs.
It felt really different when we moved further out of the center of town, like to Phousi market or to the villages on the other banks of the river. Things looked familiar there, but in a different way: they looked like the Asia we'd grown to love in rural Thailand.
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