Back to Beyond

OK, so when you write something from an airport lounge, leaving somewhere you really enjoyed, there is a sweet filter of nostalgia that imbues everything with a slightly gauzy look. If you can be nostalgic about somewhere you have only been for four days. But here, to paraphrase Dave Nichols, are some memories of Luang Prabang (and environs), across a bit of an emotional spectrum.

Our guide here often asks if we want the good news first or the bad. The bad is usually a joke, along the lines of “I will be your guide today”, but we always ask for that first, just to be on the safe side. So let’s start with the sad today. We spent a little time at the UXO visitors centre. UXO means, regrettably, unexploded ordnance. Laos was bombed so thoroughly across a nine year stretch of what is referred to here as the American War that it became the most bombed place on earth on a per capita basis. The equivalent of a full plane load of munitions every 8 minutes for 9 years. And about 30% failed to go off when it was supposed to, going off instead when it was not supposed to over the past 50 years. The volume of, and risk presented by, all this UXO has materially impeded Lao’s agricultural and economic development, and the difficulty of dealing with it means that they are averaging only about 50 km square in cleared land per year. Anyone interested in the consequences of constant and indiscriminate bombing should have a look here: https://www.undp.org/laopdr/press-releases/new-uxo-exhibition-opened-luang-prabang-lao-pdr.

Our guide here also says that good and bad come together. He was born just after the war ended, and refused to express anger after taking us to UXO, referring to it only as “history”. Instead, he was keen to talk about the elephant refuges nearby, where rescued and non-rescued elephants could kick back in a “no riding” and “no heavy labour” environment, made possible by tourist dollars.

The good take-always from Luang Prabang and thereabouts are legion. Many were from nature. There are the elephants, of course, watched over by their one-on-one mahouts and with their leathery trunks unexpectedly softer underneath and the delicate way they can pick up, fold, and tuck stalks and leaves into their mouths. There was the much touted boat ride from the elephant camp up the Khan River to “the waterfall” which, we were told just before heading off, had no water because it was the dry season but would we like to see it anyway? There was the real year-round waterfall that cascaded down through the jungle to the delight of the vast milling crowds who had apparently never seen a waterfall before. And there was a lazy trip up the Mekong for an hour or two to see some caves into which people keep putting more and more Buddhas each year and which made for a bizarre destination that justified a lovely afternoon watching boats, fishermen, water buffalo and scenery.

And some of the good take-aways were people. We went to a little dance recital by students dancing the dances of the many “tribes” living in the valleys and on the hills of northern Lao, held in a family’s house where the entire extended family blessed us, one by one, and then sat around the periphery cheering on the dancers. We also went out into the pre-dawn dark to join the locals and the other tourists giving the daily alms to the monks. I had worried that we would be intruders in this ritual, but in the end it did not feel that way. We bought sticky rice and something rolled up in banana leaves from a woman who makes her living this way, and the interaction with the 40 or so monks who came by in four lines Across about half an hour from four different nearby temples felt respectful and even useful. There was no sense of charity in what I think of as the western sense, with its notion of the less fortunate – instead, this felt like part of an overall material and spiritual ecosystem in which one shares and evens things out a bit and if good karma comes of that so be it – it beats the bad karma that comes, maybe more quickly, from failing to do one’s part.

The last thing we did was wander through the town one last time and up and over the big hill in the middle along some back streets with women making pork patties amid a small patchwork sea of corrugated roofs. This took us to the grounds of a large temple where there was an annual ceremony, marking Buddha’s death, that involves a continuous three day reading of his teachings and Buddhist history coupled, as though to reflect Buddha’s recommendation of a middle path between extreme asceticism and indulgence, with a small fun fair where the little Buddhist novices and civilian kids alike could try their hand at popping balloons with darts or shooting pop bottles off a shelf with a pellet gun. Then that was it – poof – the end of our time in lovely Luang Prabang.