Toto, I think we're not in Thailand any more

Laos is different. Luang Prabang is different.
LP is one of the oldest cities in Thailand. It was the residence of the last kings, who reigned from 1904, as French dependents through 1975 as American dependents until the Pathet Lao victory in 1975. The oldest part of LP is a peninsula formed by the intersection of the Mekong and the much smaller Khan River (which join in view of our hotel window). The town is all of four blocks wide, one street on each river and two streets running down the middle. There are about a dozen Wats on the peninsula and another 20 or so nearby. What was once the Royal Palace and is now a museum is just big enough to entertain, just small enough so as not to oppress. The view from Phousi Hill, just across from the palace—there’s a picture up of the palace looking down from the hill—is spectacular. In the mornings, the roughly 250 monks who live in the various Wats form a processional, walking down one street, back another as locals, mostly women, and a few inappropriate tourists place rice and some other food in their baskets. (Becoming a Buddhist monk, it turns out, is not a permanent commitment, like becoming a priest. Rather, it’s something many boys do, starting as early as ten, for limited duration and as a way of getting an education. The monks are almost all kids, mostly teenagers, and the almsgiving seems as much a way of supporting education as a religious duty or, maybe, religious duty is supporting education.)
Other than the Wats, which aren’t that tall themselves, none of the buildings in town, not even the Royal Palace, is more than two stories high. The architecture, aside from the Wats, is French Colonial with some Lao twists. The riverside streets are lined with waterfront cafes. The two inner streets are lined with shops and restaurants, some pretty good, interspersed among the Wats. The food is not so spicy as Thai food but delicately seasoned and cheap. (Meals in two of the priciest restaurants in town ran, for the two of us, about $35 one night and $30 the next, although someone hell bent on spending more could run up the tab by ordering imported wine instead of drinking local beer and whiskey.) To top it off, the weather is perfect—in the 60s in the morning and at nights, in the 70s with crisp sunshine during the day.
One day we walked around town. Another day we took a van about 20 miles to the beautiful Kuang Si Falls—not only words but pictures fail me, although I’ve posted some—with a very depressing stop on the way back at a Hmong Village. Yesterday, we took a boat up the Mekong--just like in Apocalypse now but with nobody shooting at us—to the sacred Pak Ou caves. The caves were not particularly interesting but the ride was gorgeous. The pictures fail me again but I’ve posted them, anyway.
“CULTURES” AS TOURIST ATTRACTIONS
The tourists—and there are lots of them here, but in the hundreds not the thousands--turn out en masse for the monks’ processional at dawn. The monks do not seem to mind but there are various signs and brochures around town asking tourists to respect the ceremony, not to give alms if they are not themselves believers, asking photographers to keep a respectful distance. Most of the tourists are respectful but some are unpleasantly aggressive. I found it annoying but not horrifying and it certainly wasn’t horrifying enough to keep me from taking pictures of my own.
The Hmong Village was something else. The stop there, on the way back from the falls, was clearly a stop sanctioned by the authorities and apparently welcomed by the villagers. But it was very depressing. We got out of the van and followed a path past women and children selling trinkets, the wail “one dollar, one dollar” made even more plaintive by the tonal sounds of East Asian speech. At the top of the path was a sign to a Hmong Museum, which turned out to be a thatched hut with a dirt floor, apparently the same as every other structure in the village, and with a couple of primitive pieces of something decorative, three bamboo pipes, and what looked like a discarded mattress lying on the ground with some other junk. The village was, well, dirt poor. There was some electricity. But the thatched huts had no floors, no furniture that we could see, no running water. I did not take any pictures and I felt dirty—mentally and morally not physically—as we climbed back into the van. The Hmong, by the way, were the staunchest allies of the US during the war.
“WE’RE GOING TO BOMB THEM BACK TO THESTONE AGE” General Curtis LeMay
“From 1964 to 1973, the U.S. dropped more than two million tons of ordnance over Laos during 580,000 bombing missions - equal to a planeload of bombs every 8 minutes, 24-hours a day, for 9 years.”
By 1973, the US, in an effort to close down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, had dropped more bombs on Laos than had ever been dropped on any country before. It’s hard to imagine. The total population of Laos is 6 million and was probably about half that in 1970. Eighty percent of the population is agricultural and more than half of that involved in subsistence farming—all this after ten years of collectivization and twenty year of pro-market reform (which began earlier here than elsewhere in SE Asia.) There were French colonialists here for about 60 years but Laos was the backwater of the French Empire. (Indeed, Laos is the backwater of Southeast Asia. The Vietnamese, the Cambodians/Khmer, the Thai/Siamese, and the Burmese have all taken turns as the dominant power in SE Asia. Not the Lao, whose turn taking has consisted of becoming the colony or dependency of one or another of the dominant powers.) It’s not easy to figure out what Lao nationalism is, as nation seems to be both an ideological and administrative construct imposed by the French, but at least it’s imaginable. But in a country where there weren’t even many landless peasants or many big estates and where big business even now seems to consist of little more than opening a twenty room hotel, it’s hard even to imagine what either Communism or Capitalism could mean. In Luang Prabang, market reform seems to mean that Europeans have come back, to open what is still only a smattering of upscale hotels and restaurants. At our hotel, the Swedish owner hired a Swedish manager and has seventeen Lao, mostly graduates of one of the Wats, reporting to him. It is hard to imagine that market reforms have had much of an effect on the countryside, much as it’s hard to imagine that collectivization made much difference.
By most estimates, two hundred thousand Lao civilians died as a result of the American bombings. There are roughly 700,000 Lao émigrés in the US, Australia, and Europe.
I MIGHT NOT BE ABLE TO DEFINE CHARM BUT I KNOW IT WHEN I SEE IT:
Luang Prabang is charming. Here’s why:
It’s small—four blocks wide, maybe 10-15 blocks long

The buildings are low, nothing more than two stories high

The buildings are small. Other than the wats, the hotels are probably the biggest buildings around but they’re more like guest houses than hotels and none have more than 20 rooms or so

The Motorbikes outnumber the cars and the pedestrians outnumber the motorbikes.

The ratio of sidewalk to street is pretty high. That’s not literally true but people walk in the street, which is pretty much the same thing.

There are no traffic lights. (For the sociologists, here’s Louis Wirth from “the City”: “The clock and the traffic signal are symbolic of the basis of our social order in the urban world, [a way of handling] frequent close physical contact, coupled with great social distance”)

The monks are scenic. It helps both that Buddhism is not a proselytizing religion, which would not be charming. And that the monks are young, which makes it easier to treat them as cute, or something like that, rather than sacred. It also helps that the monks were pretty chatty, since they wanted to practice English

Restaurants all had open air seating and, Naomi says, good lighting

Lots of cafes along the river

There’s a lot of wood in the buildings, not just concrete. The wood is particularly notable on second floor balconies, and balconies themselves are charming.

There are a lot of flowers.

Nobody seemed to mid in the least that tourists were wandering in and out of the Wats. Plus, there are so many Wats that they became part of the scenery, not destinations or “sites”

Nobody seemed to mind the tourists in general. There are a lot of tourists but only by the standards of a sleepy little town. Even the “throngs” at the processional numbered only about a hundred or so. Didn’t even outnumber the monks.

At our hotel (7 rooms), the owner hung out a lot. He gets around town on a no gear bike.

There’s a lot of water around but it doesn’t move fast.

So, what do I get from this. Charm operates on a small scale (town, building, streets). It “prefers’ nature to the human made but prefers its nature tamed (flowers by the river, open air cafes, wood in building). Charm is personal or at least appears to be personal (hotel owner hanging around, chatty monks, small hotels). It distrusts things mechanical and power driven (walking rather than driving, riding bikes rather than driving cars). It lives on the culturally distinct rather than the universal (monks in orange, even better if they’re carrying umbrellas, the Wats, those funny looking boats). And it requires invitation rather than coercion (no born agains, nobody seemingly much concerned with what anyone else is up to).

There’s much more to say but we’re now in Hanoi, which raises a whole lot of different issues—not least how anyone survives the traffic. We’re off for 5 days, first to the mountains (Sapa), then to Halong Bay. We’re likely to be without internet all or most of that time so it’s unlikely anyone will hear from us for at least a bit.