Luang Prabang the Second

Luang Prabang is an odd town. Sometimes you can feel that there's nothing in it but tourists and people working for tourists. But then you wander a little, and you get off (gasp!) the Sisavangvong Road, and you stumble on a street full of Laotian boys singing karaoke...

My hotel was quite a way from the main tourist street, and the lane in front of it was occupied not by chic French cafés or backpackers wearing Phuket t-shirts, but by a couple of tiny, dark houses where the inhabitants lived towards the back of a large ground floor room and sold essentials from a glass case at the front. To buy a drink, I stood at the door and called inside "Sabaidee! Hello! Sabaidee!" for about five minutes, until the lady heard me from her bed, then came to charge me smiling for the can I already had in my hand.

While my friend did the tourist route for her first time, I simply wandered about the streets, drinking coffee, watching people, and, yes, shopping. I found one tiny shop with a cat on the doorstep and a weaver within, and couldn't resist buying my cousin's birthday present from there.

One day, I dropped into the library.I admit, my main reason was entirely selfish: I was wilting in the 32-degree heat, and there was a little cafe attached to the side of the building. But once I'd downed my cold drink, I got talking to a volunteer at the door who suggested that if I had nothing better to do, I might like to step into their back room, where at that very moment their afternoon conversation club was running. I did indeed have nothing better to do, so I let myself be guided into the room, where around 20 foreigners were chatting to Lao counterparts. I was assigned to a young monk, Phoung, which I was thrilled about. I'm not a religious person, but if I were seeking an answer to life, I think Buddhism would probably be the route I'd choose. Yet I know next to nothing about the lives of the thousands of saffron-clad men who'd populated my train window scenery since southern Thailand. 


Phoung was extremely chatty - perhaps the most driven student of English I've ever met - and so I just let him talk for the next hour about his life in the monastery. Actually a novice, he was just 16, and had come to the monastery in Luang Prabang from his rural village at just 12. So young, I though, but then I know people who went to boarding school at 5, and this seems, in many ways, quite similar to a religious school in the west. He's up at 5am for chanting, then he goes on the walk for morning alms-giving before spending time with an older monk who tutors him in religious and secular matters. Later he does chores - that morning he'd been painting the temple, and then, because it was a full moon, he'd been called to shave the abbot's hair off - he would have his own head shaved later that afternoon. After that it's lunchtime, and then he's free for 2 hours - this is the time everyday when he comes to the library to practise his English with tourists. When that's over, he returns to the temple to carry out religious duties and to wash before the evening chanting. Later in the evening there's time to attend his English course with an American volunteer before bed at 11:30. Replace the chants with mass or chapel, and it's very close to any Christian boarding school in the west. At 18, they are given the choice of taking vows and becoming full monks, or making their way into the world. Phoung wanted to be an IT technician.

After a while, we were all evicted from the library but outside I sat a little longer to chat with the librarian, Phoung and his friend, and a Swiss woman, Jutta, who recently left her job and instead of finding a new one packed up and moved to Laos, intending to start up English classes for women (boy, do I wish I was her.) She's ended up having a lot to do with the temples, though, and knew Phoung well. She invited me to visit one of the temples she works with, explaining on the way that today was a full moon. That meant shaved heads, but also some rather special drumming. We sat with a novice called Keo just outside a small pavilion on the temple grounds. Other novices came jogging up, some running hands over heads shaved moments ago. They gathered inside the pavilion and one started the beat with the huge, hanging drum. Others joined in at the sides with smaller drums and cymbals. 

The afternoon heat - even at 4pm - meant that every minute or so, sweat streaming off his head, the drumming novice would make eye contact with another novice who would take up the mallet and continue, without missing a beat. It was pretty hypnotic stuff, and before I realised it, 20 minutes had gone by and the novices were slowing down, pausing, stopping for good.

Or at least until the next special day - a full moon, half moon, new moon, old moon, time for blessing... the novice sitting with us said with a laugh, "Many festival days for Buddhists!"

Jutta and I went into the temple next, where, thanks to the full moon again, buckets of water had been brought by villagers to be blessed. The hall was full of women sitting on their heels, soles of their feet carefully pointing away from the golden Buddha statues at the front. The monks came in - not the novices this time - and sat in a semi-circle at the front just before a line of the only four men in the hall. They held a piece of string as they chanted; my eyes naturally followed the string along its course, through the clasped hands of the monks, around the buckets of water, through a small circlet of marigolds, and out through the window, where it was looped around a brand new pick-up and motorbike - obviously two of the men had been doing well recently... The chanting rose and fell, and as I sat on my heels I quickly learnt to do as the other women did, leaning forward and swiftly slipping my feet from side to side. Several times I wasn't fast enough and my feet fell heavily asleep. The chanting was faintly soporific and went on for nearly 90 minutes (to Jutta's surprise, who attends it regularly, despite being an atheist) but the women certainly didn't just sit in reverence; they joined in from time to time, quietly spoke to neighbours, placated children, and came and went from the hall as needed. Towards the end a teenage boy came in on his knees and handed out cups of sweet, icy tamarind juice, and my neighbour, who had been grinning at me and Jutta and setting us right when our hands drooped or we didn't move in time, forced one into my hands, saying "You welcome! Drink!" The men started to pass forward gifts to the monks - banana leaves wrapped into cones and decorated with marigolds and cash. With more novices and monks owning mobile phones, apparently, money is becoming a more welcome gift than the traditional food and clothing. 

Right at the end, a monk gathered together all the buckets of water - they would remain in the temple overnight and during the morning chanting, then the villagers would be taking them home to sprinkle around their houses and thus keep their families safe from spirits a little longer.

Outside the temple I said goodbye to Jutta, but with every intention of seeing her again here before she leaves - each day I spend in this little town makes me love it more. It's terrible that so many people never see past the shiny veneer of tourism; Jutta and I were the only foreigners in the temple, and although there were a few other tourists at the drumming, they didn't hang around, just got up close, took their photos and left. I asked Jutta and Keo what they thought of all these tourists; Jutta told me that they're mostly intensely shy young men, embarrassed by attentive paparazzi. Keo said he'd had tourists at the almsgiving pushing their cameras into the line of monks and using the flash; the day before, a woman had said loudly, "Well, I think they all look like beggars - they don't even have the respect to wear shoes." He told me that he and many others don't like non-Buddhist foreigners to take part in the almsgiving, although discreet photos are okay, and  I promised to pass it on, while flushing at the memory of my last trip to Luang Prabang, when I allowed myself to be easily bullied into offering food. So this is me passing it on: should you ever go to Laos, watch the almsgiving, and enjoy an ancient cultural tradition, but don't treat them like they're in a petting zoo, and there for your entertainment. Okay. Lecture over. Learn from my mistakes.

So the next morning, I was woken at 5:45am as on every other day, by the temple bells. When I lived in Coimbra, Portugal, my house was opposite a Catholic cathedral that tolled the bells early every morning - I have to say, I do kind of prefer the Buddhist version. I blearily came out onto the balcony, and down below me saw the women waiting to offer rice from their traditional baskets. 

Bearing in mind the friendly pleas of the novice, I didn't join the hotel staff who were also making offerings, but I did crouch next to the gate (being careful to keep my head below theirs) and take a few photos. I was rewarded by a big smile from one of the monks (they are the ones with both shoulders covered), and was left feeling slightly less of a sponging tourist! 

It was on my last evening, the night of the full moon drumming, that I went for a walk through the town at 10pm, unable to sleep. Probably because of the 11:30 curfew, there was barely a soul out. The full moon made it all a bit eerie and I was turning back for the hotel, and that was when I passed the street full of karaoke singers. It's a remarkable town, this Luang Prabang of mine.