Man, I am falling way behind on this blogging thing… I’ll try to make things brief here so that I can get back up to date. Let’s begin, shall we?
Laos: an obscure and fabulous little place to hide away in Indochina while the rest of southeast Asia goes insane during lunar new year. Sure, there are more direct ways to get here: across from Hanoi in Vietnam, by Mekong river boat from Chiang Mai in Thailand, up from the Khmer ruins in Cambodia… we chose to get here circuitously through Malaysia simply to avoid the madness in the rest of the countries that observe Chinese New Year. We heard stories of borders closing down for a week (Vietnam), overcrowded accommodations (Thai beaches), and jacked up prices for everything (Malaysia, Borneo), and as such decided to avoid said countries like the plague. Besides, Chinese New Year was the one time that my vacationally challenged friend Ward Miller could get any time off and he hadn’t been to Laos before. Our timing seemed to be predetermined by fate: So let it be written, so let it be done.
We started off in the northern town of Luang Prabang, which is a river town standing guard at the confluence of the Mekong and Nam Khan rivers. It’s a small town that’s really laid back and quaint, set amongst a myriad of Buddhist temples… a perfect place to quietly unwind and enjoy the scenery. Well, kind of. We showed up in town a day ahead of Ward, and as we inquired about an extra room for the following night, the lady at the front desk simply responded, “check tomorrow morning, no problem. Big explosion party tomorrow 9am… Everybody awake, check out early!” Which made absolutely no sense to us but we decided to roll with it anyway. Sure enough, at 9 o’clock the next morning there was an explosion party of sorts. You see, someone had managed to find an UXO (UneXploded Ordinance) possibly a leftover from the Secret War, and it was sitting directly across the river from our guesthouse! Yikes. The lead-up to 9am consisted of much shouting in Laotian over a megaphone followed by a countdown, “three, two, one…” BOOM! It was probably the largest explosion that I have ever heard, and we were close enough for Ana’s hair to blow from the blast wave. Welcome to Laos people!
Ward arrived shortly thereafter and the three of us proceeded to catch up on lost time. I hadn’t seen my best friend from high school in about two years, so it was nice to just hang out, shoot the shit, and joke about old times together. Ana has a funny theory about guy relationships and why they differ from how the ladydeez relate to each other: Guys can be separated by time and space for years, not really keeping in touch… but give them a couple of beers and crass jokes to tell and its like they were never apart. I don’t know if that’s just me, but she may have something there. Ward has been living in China for a few years now, but it felt like we had just talked yesterday.
We rented some bikes and explored the outskirts of town without a map… which was great as there were dozens of temples scattered around town: an unexplored Wat around every corner. We saw big Wats, little Wats, Wats on hills, and Wats along the river… it was great, but after a while we were pretty Wated out and in dire need of a drink. There’s actually a fairly decent selection of watering holes in Luang Prabang, all serving the local national drink of Beer Lao: which can be ordered one liter at a time. It’s a good thing that there is a 12am curfew in town (sarcasm), as we were getting rip-roaring drunk pretty early every night. The bar scene was pretty cool though, as a lot of the places were perched on the banks of the river with bamboo mats and lounge pads to laze away the evening. Now this was living!
While out here we ran into a bunch of cool people who were volunteering to teach the novice monks in town some English through a UK program called GVI (www.gvi.co.uk). We met Ron and Amy from Canada, who volunteer on a regular basis. Ron is one of those interesting cats who seems to have done every hard-core thing you wish you had the guts to do. Besides being a park ranger, he was at one point a skydive instructor (even owning his own plane which he bought for one dollar)… which he has since given up to become a dive-master instructing disabled (paraplegic, etc.) persons how to scuba dive. Way cool. We also met a kid from the States named Henry who was a blast to hang out with and share some beers with. With any luck we’ll be able to meet back up with him in Bangkok and party like rock stars. Can’t wait.
Some pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/richmosko/LuangPrabang
…and as usual a map to illustrate exactly where the hell we are: Map (Click Here)
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