[travel] Luang Prabang, Laos
Feb. 27th, 2009 11:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mattbellLuabg Prabang is just about the most Buddhist city in the world. There's a wat (temple / monastery) on every block, and many of them are incredibly ornate The wats have a very distinctive style that has a Thai influence but otherwiae seems unique. The town feels like a mix of Berkeley and the morning Burning Man crowd, with a dose of totalitarian government thrown in. (There's an 11:30pm *curfew*. Seriously.) I first got a sense for this dichotomy when the immigration checkpoint at the airport was staffed by goofy 19-year-olds, and I noticed a cluster of empty Beerlao beer bottles sitting behind the counter. I thought to myself “Oh, these must be the greeters”.
Buddha is normally depicted as meditating on a lotus flower. The motif of the lotus flower is used on the curbs of all their their traffic circles, so you get the curious effect of thinking there should be Buddha in the middle of every traffic circle.
The traffic itself, like the rest of the culture in Laos, is very laid-back. Everything runs on “island time” despite the complete lack of beaches.
The government (your standard totalitarian Communist regime that eventually realized Communist economies don't work but wanted to remain in power) deposed the royal family in the 1970s, but they happily held on to the royal palace as it makes a lovely tourist trap. The most amusing part of the royal palace tour was seeing the moon dust from the Apollo 11 mission presented as a gift to the Lao government from Richard Nixon. Nixon sent them this while a secret US air force bombed the shit out of them because Vietcong guerillas were using eastern Laos as a conduit into southern Vietnam.
Here's the bad news.
By the time you get there it will be ruined. Not to be overly negative, but there should be a giant progress bar billboard here, with the title “Selling our soul...” and the bar about 30% filled. The prices from the Lonely Planet 2007 guide are one half what they are now, and the town appears to be putting up Western-oriented restaurants and guesthouses as fast as they can. A monk tried to hustle me pretty hard with his spiel about why I should give him cash. (His final line was “Why won't you play for me to learn English?”) I get the sense that most young monks who talk to me aren't in it for the Buddhism.
Ironically, the thing that made it possible for me to visit (their airport) is what is going to reatly accelerate its corruption.
Buddha is normally depicted as meditating on a lotus flower. The motif of the lotus flower is used on the curbs of all their their traffic circles, so you get the curious effect of thinking there should be Buddha in the middle of every traffic circle.
The traffic itself, like the rest of the culture in Laos, is very laid-back. Everything runs on “island time” despite the complete lack of beaches.
The government (your standard totalitarian Communist regime that eventually realized Communist economies don't work but wanted to remain in power) deposed the royal family in the 1970s, but they happily held on to the royal palace as it makes a lovely tourist trap. The most amusing part of the royal palace tour was seeing the moon dust from the Apollo 11 mission presented as a gift to the Lao government from Richard Nixon. Nixon sent them this while a secret US air force bombed the shit out of them because Vietcong guerillas were using eastern Laos as a conduit into southern Vietnam.
Here's the bad news.
By the time you get there it will be ruined. Not to be overly negative, but there should be a giant progress bar billboard here, with the title “Selling our soul...” and the bar about 30% filled. The prices from the Lonely Planet 2007 guide are one half what they are now, and the town appears to be putting up Western-oriented restaurants and guesthouses as fast as they can. A monk tried to hustle me pretty hard with his spiel about why I should give him cash. (His final line was “Why won't you play for me to learn English?”) I get the sense that most young monks who talk to me aren't in it for the Buddhism.
Ironically, the thing that made it possible for me to visit (their airport) is what is going to reatly accelerate its corruption.
