Spiritual tourism

On my last morning in Luang Prabang I woke up at 6am and walked down to feed the monks. Yes, I know, sounds like a zoo, doesn't it? It's actually a very old tradition. As I walked down towards the temples, women passed me at a trot, long bamboo sticks over their shoulders with baskets at either end. As they slowed next to me, I could see the banana leaf packages inside holding rice, and the women held these out to me, calling "Feed monk? Good karma, lucky. Only 5,000 kip!" I felt a little nervous of pretending to join in on this spiritual journey, but when I got to the main street I saw quite a few tourists kneeling on grass mats among the Lao, so I let a seller persuade me to buy a plate of bananas, and knelt in the dust. The dawn was only just breaking when the first sunrise-coloured robes appeared at the corner. Each monk carried an ornate silver bowl around his neck, and as he moved down the waiting line of devotees he paused long enough for each woman - for they were mostly women - to place a food offering in the bowl.

My bananas weren't as popular as the sweets the next lady offered - at least with the younger monks - but they went quickly enough, and I straightened up to watch the rest of the procession pass by. It was fascinating to see the long line of monks, not looking at the people and especially avoiding any physical contact with women.

Although, once again, I felt like I was taking part in a Disney play specially put on for me, when I left and walked down a side street, all the women offering food were Laotian, and it does strike me as a good way to feed those in the temples while spreading the burden of support over many shoulders. For the monks, it constitutes their only meal of the day, eaten at lunchtime after chores, and often shared with an attached orphanage or school. Some of the women were Hmong and likely to be Christian, so perhaps this is seen as more of a cultural tradition than a religious one.

Anyway. Suitably reassured, I walked down to the food market nearby. The food market is two or three streets, quite narrow, lined in the mornings by sellers from the surrounding province. The narrowness of the lanes does not, however, prevent scooters from entering; add in the surprising amount of live produce, the chatter and the loud bartering and it makes for a noisy experience.


Welcoming though - every time I requested a photograph I was answered with a smile. I felt something bang into my hip once - it was a basket being carried by a grey-haired lady with a deeply lined face. She held up her hands and smiled in apology and as I smiled in return she grasped my arm and patted my face, laughing to the other women.

The food on sale was mostly vegetables, many of which I couldn't recognise, green leaves and flowers, alongside deep purple eggplant and the pink dragonfruit I'd come to recognise in the fruit smoothies I had every morning on the side of the road.


Some of the fishermen's wives were selling balls of river weed from wicker baskets, eaten much like seaweed is elsewhere in Asia; it looks just like the weed I used to drag out of the pond as a kid and dry in strips, and probably tastes much the same, too (as a kid, I was smart enough not to eat these things - as an adult, not so much.)


There were stalls selling dried strips of pale meat - less like biltong than leather straps. The small meat section had anonymous cuts of meat sharing space with such joys of the meat-eater's world as pigs' ears and testicles; hordes of flies were kept away - though only just - by women waving plastic bags tied to sticks. I hurried past. I paused to watch two women squeezing honey from a comb into a bucket.


As I was crouching to photograph the scene, something in the foreground caught my eye, which I'd only heard of till now: two splayed and roasted rats!


Laos is well known among conservationists for its fervent consumption of anything that swims, walks, slithers or flies, regardless of the animal's position on the endangered list. It's why generally I haven't seen much wildlife here, apart from the Rivertime Lodge where the land is protected. Although the authorities are clamping down in an effort to make Laos an eco-friendly county (eco-tourism is big business here), it's still possible to see, in certain markets, monkeys, spiders and snakes sold as meat. The rats I saw were probably just common field rats though. There were also grass snakes and little piles of beetles neatly laid out on mats.


Apparently not too long ago some wildlife experts discovered a species of rat thought to be extinct before they saw it roasted at a market. It hasn't been seen since, either...



I caught the midday plane back to Vientiane, where I was treating myself with a stay at the Vayakorn Inn. All hardwood floors and dark Laotian furniture, it's not a five-star soulless hotel, but it's pure luxury for me after sharing a bathroom with 5 boys for four days! The view from my balcony takes in the magnificently ugly Cultural Hall which was built, clearly, by a big fan of gold kitsch. It's very central, so I take a walk around town as soon as I'm settled in.

Books and the art of kayaking

On Tuesday, I've booked to go on a two-day trek, spending a night in a Hmong village. On enquiring at the tour office, I find that this has now turned into a one-day trek and kayak due to market forces beyond their control. I'm a little worried about the strength (or lack of it) in my arms, but the guy assures me it's only an hour or so of kayaking, and the river current does most of the work.

Tuesday dawns, and I'm at the tour office bright and early to meet up with the other travellers - a Brit, two Canadians, and three Spanish girls. I'm already wary as the tour company promises a maximum of six on a tour. We set off in the back of a truck, kayaks strapped to the roof. The truck sets us down after 40 minutes at the end of a dusty road - very dusty, as it's the dry cold season season in Laos, though you wouldn't know it from the oppressive heat. From there we walk to a nearby school. I've brought some books in town from Big Brother Mouse, a charity that could have been set up just for me, it's so perfect: they write and publish bilingual children's books which they try to distribute to kids who have sometimes never seen a book before. I've chosen a Lao fairytale, a collection of Aesop's Fables and an English picture dictionary, which all cost me about £3 in total, and now I hand them over to the headmaster, who tells us he's trying to start a library for the use of the whole village. Great! Literacy and a bit of English in one dedicated push.

The trek leads us up over a hill through fields and rubber tree plots, and then down into the luxurious caller where a wide river winds all the way to Luang Prabang. And that's the trek over. Mis-selling? I think so! The kayaks are waiting on the beach; I share with Nicola, a British girl teaching in Thailand. We set off onto the river, which turns out to be so placid and calm that we are in fact doing all the work. We break for lunch half an hour in, but other than that it's three and a half hours of constant paddling. Despite the dull ache in my arms, I find myself enjoying it. We're low on the water looking up at cliffs and mountains and mostly the only sounds are our paddles hitting the water, and the snorts of the water buffalo. As usual there are thousands of butterflies on the shores and a few fishermen beating the water with long sticks to flush the fish into the waiting nets.



There are also lots of semi-submerged bamboo baskets, cleverly disguised with river weed and baited with food. When a fish bites, a trapdoor is released, holding the fish until it can be collected.

Sometimes we pass men panning for gold... The shores are shiny with fools' gold (I assume... unless I made a terrible mistake spending my holiday kayaking instead of collecting my fortune...)

There are rapids to break up the heavy paddling; the first lulls us into a false sense of calm but they get more and more difficult (and proportionately more fun) until we reach one where the Canadians, their centre of gravity slightly askew, Nicola supposes, flip over. From there on, every tumbling stretch of white water plunges them into the wet. Nicola and I, evenly matched in weight, coast over, shrieking with laughter and crying like kids "Again! Again!" We're almost a little jealous of the Canadians cooling off from the heat... until the last one drags them for almost 30 metres, banging them against rocks and leaving them with bruised limbs and small cuts. Luckily it's almost the end though. Nicola and I have visions of easily coasting onto a sandy beach and flinging our oars down in triumph, but we're grounded in the shallow waters and have to climb out and scramble over rocks and pebbles, dragging our kayak behind us.

It's a triumphant ending, nevertheless. Back in town, I fling myself onto my bed for a second and only open my eyes hours later in the dark when my arms ache me awake. That's when I discover the two blisters on the inside of my thumbs from the oars, one open and bleeding. The Laotian Injury List just passed the Balinese one.

The rest of my time I spend walking, endlessly. Luang Prabang is a small town but it's quite easy to while away a few hours without realising in its narrow back streets full of laundry and bougainvillea and boys playing khataw, a kind of mix between football and volleyball.


It's played with a hollow rattan ball, the players seeming to compete with each other for title of most impressive move. Their legs are amazingly strong and they fly through the air executing high kicks. In one game I watched, two players aimed at the net at the same time, grazing each other's thighs and coming perilously close to depriving Laos of future generations. It caused an outburst of raucous laughter among the spectators as the players, pale but smiling, grabbed at their crotches.

Sometimes I see older men playing petanque, the pitch boundary made of bamboo pipes so that the sandy thunk of the boules is often followed by a hollow 'tok!' as they hit the bamboo. I told one man that we play the same game at home in my family and was rewarded with a surprised smile and an invitation to join in their game. As my family knows, I'm no expert, but the two other players were very kind to me and applauded my weak attempts!

My wanderings were punctuated with cups of thick dark coffee in a thousand different cafes where I sat and wrote and watched the streetlife pass by.


It was in one of these cafes in a back street shaded by frangipanis that I met Martin, a German man working as an engineer in China, who spent a few years in the Limpopo valley, and lived in a commune in East Berlin as a university student. He was interested in my childhood in Zimbabwe, as I was in his experiences of communist Germany so we walked and talked together for a while. We crossed yet another rickety bamboo bridge to the opposite bank, paying 20p towards its upkeep to an elderly woman spinning thread in a hut.


On the other side we found the village empty, the occupants presumably enjoying a siesta in the midday heat, so we slipped down a path littered with the bones of old boats to the banks of the Mekong, where a hut, perched directly above the meeting of the Nam Khan and the Mekong, offered fresh coconuts and cold beers.


As we sat there discussing the similar confluence of communism and capitalism across Asia, an old man dressed in his underpants and an open shirt, his wide smile betraying toothless gums, climbed up from where he'd been washing to offer us a boat to the bars on the far bank. But I was flushed from the heat, and tired, so I decided to mimic the villagers and head back to the hostel for a siesta in the hammock. The blisters on my thumbs from holding the oars the previous day had split so I needed to tend to them and my various other injuries as well. I really don't know how I've turned into such a clumsy traveller - no one else I know ever returns from holiays as battered and bruised as I do.

Refreshed, I went at sunset to meet Martin and Nicola for drinks at a bar where the evening's entertainment was a catwalk to showcase traditional clothing from some of the 40-odd Laotian tribes. The variety that has developed in such a small country is amazing - I'm always a little embarrassed when people ask about the traditional clothes of Britain or Zimbabwe - neither show anything near the imagination Asians put into the way they dress.

Fairyland And Its Inhabitants

Early on Sunday morning I packed my bags and left Rivertime for the airport. On the 40-minute drive, Joy told me of his great happiness at entering the army in two months' time. So very different to South Korea where most men would do anything to get out of serving... With Lunar New Year and Valentine's Day falling on the same weekend this year, the streets were awash with red - lanterns for the new year, teddies and roses for the lovers, everything sold together from tiny stalls on the roadside. There was one particularly blessed woman somewhere in Vientiane, whose boyfriend sat in a tuk-tuk in front of our car, red and white balloons billowing out the back and completely obscuring the door. Even the dress code matched the event, with a red t-shirt or dress atop every scooter. I was rather glad to leave the American-style commercialism behind at the airport gates!

I quickly cleared check-in and went through to the waiting lounge, a grid of hard plastic chairs looking out to the runway where a plane was waiting. Not, surely, my plane, for I was flying the national airline on their busiest route, and this was a teensy tiny propellor plane.



With a lovely flower on its tail, yes, but still teensy, nonetheless. I sat and waited, but no other flights were announced and no other plane showed up, and the pilots walked through, pushing the unlocked doors open to the tarmac, and then a sweet lady in her silk uniform told us we could now board. So we all did, walking across the tarmac to get to the 5-step ladder. Which of course I have done before at other small airports. I have, however, never had to duck to get in through an aeroplane door... My window seat was right in the middle, right under the wing, and next to the wheels.


I started to understand why other travellers were wary of flying Lao Airlines, but in the end it was a perfectly pleasant, very short flight over valleys and mountains and bright red dirt roads. As we descended into Luang Prabang, the Mekong stretched and yawned beneath us, curling around the little town, gold temples reflecting the morning sunlight into my eyes. Luang Prabang used to be a distant colonial outpost for French officials who, for one reason or another, never wanted to go home again. In my 40-minute flight I leapt over a month's travelling. It used to take longer to get from Bangkok to Luang Prabang than to go from Bangkok to France by ship! Perhaps as a result of this unimaginable distance, the officials who settled here eventually turned it into a beautiful village in the French style, with shuttered two-storey cottages lining a narrow street, and a boulevard running above the Mekong with space for a cafe table or two.


The town mostly fills the peninsular space between the Mekong and the Nam Khan, a river that joins the Mekong here. On the 15-minute tuk-tuk ride to my hostel, I started to see the chaotic Asian traffic I missed in the Vientiane countryside. There are scooters and tuk-tuks everywhere, although it's still far from the stereotypical Vietnamese streetscene. I was barely at the hostel long enough to dump my bag on my bed, and then I was off to the main street, Th Sisavangvong, named after the king at the time of independence from France. Lovely.

Of course, it has the usual ebullience of Asia, but the allure of the town is in the bougainvillea creeping over the carved wooden balconies, and the open-fronted cafes. Asia shows her motherhood in the street food sellers - I buy a coconut dumpling straight away from a man who says he has 7 children to feed, although at least in the drawing on his cart they all have very smiley faces - the friendliness of the people - the dumpling seller chats to me for 5 minutes then makes me another one because he sees the sticky smile on my face, then tries to refuse to let me pay my 10p - the brightly coloured tuk-tuks everywhere - often with movie scenes painted on the sides.

Of course, because this is the 21st century, all the houses and cottages are now massage spas and restaurants, tour agencies and money changers. This is a town where people feel comfortable leaning over from their table to contribute to your private conversation, as if because we're all tourists we're the same, and should help each other out with tips and warning tales. Every Lao person is seemingly in the tourist industry, from men guiding the tours, to women giving foot massages and selling silks, to the children selling trinkets when they're not at school. At least the kids do go to school - when I tried to fob off one persistent ten-year-old with "maybe tomorrow", she retorted "Tomorrow school, every child learning learning. You buy now."

I did "buy now" in the end...

I retreated to my room for a late afternoon siesta but I'm back at 5:30 for the night market, a sea of silk and silver that shuts down Th Sisavangvong.

I eat street food, which in this fairytale land means a vegetarian baguette and a fruit smoothie, and wander about talking to sellers and deciding what I would buy if I were a millionaire. I pass the boat pier where a rotund man sporting an improbably moustache suggests I might like to take a boat to the other side of the river, "with your boyfriend" he says. I tell him I have no boyfriend. He and a nearby tuk-tuk driver laugh and shake their heads at the shame of being an elderly spinster. "That pity," the boatman says, "but don't worry, for today, I can be boyfriend." I laugh with the two of them, politely decline, and move on.

On Monday I walked down to the Mekong, still bleary-eyed with sleep, which was interrupted repeatedly by the person in the dorm above mine shifting position in his (I presume) sleep. Not a well-soundproofed room - but then, it is almost eighty years old. I've booked a space on a boat down the river so I patiently wait on the benches at the ticket office (a glorified shed under some lovely old trees on the riverbank) until my ticket number is called.


I scramble down the steep steps and wobble my way onto a boat, where before the five other passengers can say hello, I nearly knock myself out on a low beam, adding a bump on the head to an infected scrape on a toe on my list of Laotian injuries. Not as impressive as the Balinese list yet, but it's early days... The boat is a traditional long boat. Low and narrow, both ends sit out of the water. It's steered from the front, though the engine sits towards the back, in front of a living space. Only six passengers are accommodated on each boat; the rest of the area is taken up by the family whose home this is. I could see that being awkward, but I'd luckily been assigned a lovely young couple, the wife nursing a cheerful baby boy, and it felt less like an intrusion than a homestay.

At the other end of the two-hour journey were the Pak Ou caves: the lower one, Tham Ting, a gaping black cavity in the limestone cliff, reached by crude, whitewashed steps.


Our boat driver moored at the far end of a line of boats; we climbed over three other boats to reach a wide bamboo raft which acts as jetty and leads to the foot of the steps where a $2 entrance fee must be paid.

The cave had religious significance for the people living in the valley long before the Lao arrived here from China. The religion changed, the significance remained, and then Buddhism arrived. Inside, the cave rises from the mouth, creating a kind of amphitheatre in which we the visitors become the actors on a stage. The audience, silent, but each with their own unique expression, is thousands upon thousands of Buddha statues. They sit and watch, some in the meditation pose, or Calling for Rain. Some with their hands extended, open-palmed, exhorting listeners to Stop Arguing, a rare pose for a Buddha. A few lack heads or arms or bodies: these have been brought here and left, as if it were a Buddha graveyard for unwanted icons. Many, though, were crafted by royal sculptors for kings.

They sit on rocks and in cracks right up to the ceiling of the cave, gold, bronze, wooden and painted.



I venture up a path on the side of the mountain to the second, higher cave. All the way up there are ragged children who wave tiny, meticulously made bamboo cages. Inside tiny songbirds flutter their wings, waiting for Buddhists to buy them for a dollar and release them, thereby purchasing extra credit in the ladder of good karma. I wonder if you wouldn't gain just as much karma by not buying them, thereby discouraging their capture in the first place. I am taking a photo of the view over the river when a boy thrusts a cage at me and cries "photo!" So I take one, and show it to him. He smiles, but then babbles in Lao and another child translates: "He say, you take photo, you pay him. Only one dollar. You pay." Whoever told me Lao weren't as mercenary as their Asian neighbours had their tongue firmly in their cheek.

On the return journey, our boat pauses at Ban Xang Hai, a village famous for its lao-lao - rice whisky. We get off the boat onto a jetty, 500m of death-defying rickety bamboo poles crossing the exposed Mekong mud. In the village we're invited to try the lao-lao, which tastes like wine laced with vodka, and watch it being fermented, which is very exciting. Like watching grass grow. The pots remind me of the clay containers used for fermenting kimchi in Korea.

The boat trip itself is perhaps the most interesting aspect of an interesting day. There are fishermen in bamboo hats casting fine nets from their low boats, and women cultivating lettuce and cucumbers on the banks. Now and then a village passes into view, connected to the shore by ladders or sometimes mud steps, the grass-roofed huts poking out of thick vegetation.

During the Vietnam War, the US waged a "secret war" in Laos, training Hmong fighters for illegal skirmishes along the Vietnamese border. When the Vietnamese started importing arms along a trail that led through north-eastern Laos (the Ho Chi Minh Trail of legend), America carpet bombed the "neutral" country, increasing support locally for the communists, both Lao and Vietnamese. With the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I can't help feeling the Americans will never learn their lesson. Floating peacefully down the river I watch the thick forest lining the banks and imagine how terrifying it must have been to have had to travel in the 1970s - with the CIA, the Viet Minh and the local communist army, the Pathet Lao all operating in the area, I can't imagine feeling less safe.

That afternoon I spent wandering the peninsula and drinking thick Lao coffee at street stalls. In amongst the hundreds of tourists, ordinary Lao went about their business unobtrusively. I started to see beyond the play put on for tourists. Though I've generally found the people here to be far less friendly and open than down near Vientiane (too much contact with pushy Westerners perhaps?), once I start sitting and smiling at people, I can see their hospitality and willingness to talk resurface.

Everywhere I look, the saffron and yellow robes and shaved heads of the monks brighten the day. They wander the streets, their faded golden bags slung over their shoulders, talking to each other and buying fruit. The novices are as young as 7 or 8, taken to the temples by parents desperate to ensure them education and a daily meal (just one though - the monks eat only at lunchtime, I'm told). Sometimes a truck or tuk-tuk passes, filled to the brim with the orange robes.