Buddhas in repose

I went to Xiang Khuane, about 25km outside of Vientiane. I thought about catching a tuk-tuk, but in the end was so glad I didn't. It was a fifteenth of the price to walk to the bus station behind the Morning Market and get on a waiting bus. It was a shabby one, full of Lao people travelling to outlying villages. It stopped on the way at the Thai border, then carried on down the Mekong through small villages almost back to back. Through gaps I could see Thailand over the river. I couldn't work out what was bothering me about the scene and I kept glancing back at the wide green river, the hotels and temples on the other side, the fishermen's boats... Then I realised. There was no security. No ten-foot fences, no guardposts protecting men with guns, not even cameras as far as I could see. It was a peaceful river between two friendly nations. Korea has obviously jaded me.

Xiang Khuane is an oddity, the dream of a Lao artist in the 1960s who mixed Hinduism and Buddhism and from the stew in his head created hundreds of concrete statues of gods and Buddhas and fantastically intricate beasts. At the entrance is a huge pumpkin-shaped construction. I've met a Chinese girl on the bus who's also travelling alone. She has no English, but we stick together taking photos of each other and laughing at the impossibly small spaces we have to scramble through. The pumpkin is meant to represent the realms of hell, earth and heaven as you climb. Somehow we get into the centre of earth where dusty statues of soldiers and broken body parts lurk in the gloom. My partner has a torch, thank god, as otherwise I don't think we'd find the stairs upwards. I say stairs, but really they were uneven ridges not wide enough for a foot. We squeeze through a narrow opening into daylight and find ourselves in heaven with a view of the whole park.




Going back down again, we discover actual steps which lead to an outer corridor circling the rooms we stumbled into - but I still think ours was the more interesting route.

The main attraction of the park is a massive reclining Buddha; I'm smaller than his feet!


Some of the statues I'm not entirely sure of, but they're a creative use of concrete - much worthier than Patuxai for instance...


I have a feeling the one above is a god eating the sun, perhaps from Indian mythology, but my shallow knowledge fails me.

When the park is exhausted, and it doesn't take too long, I pay a smiley child for the use of a mosquito-haunted pit latrine and head back on the bus into town. The driver stops on the way to pick up his lunch from his daughter in one of the villages, and we have to pause for the little girl to climb on and give her dad a hug. He smiles apologetically at the Chinese girl and I, the only foreigners, lifting his hands, but I'm not bothered - it's just another perk of being in Laos.


Everywhere in Laos, homes have small shrines in the corner of the gardens, intricate, coloured, or plain wooden mini houses, with steps and chairs and ornate rooves. I'd thought these were a Hindu method of worship but apparently Buddhists use them too. Every morning offerings are left, and it's something I love about Eastern gods. Beside the marigolds (in the sacred orange colours) are laid sweets and lao-lao and cigarettes and beer, as if the gods are just like us in their pursuit of pleasure!















Finally, because all good things must end, my last day arrives. I do some last-minute shopping at Talat Sao, have coffee and a baguette at a French cafe, and sit and read in the garden, waiting to catch a tuk-tuk to the airport. On the way back to the hotel, though, I catch sight of an advert for an English teaching job in the window of a cafe. So who knows, Laos, I may be back...