Fourth day, third city. Slowing down, but still the fourteen day visa in Laos and a need to get back to Bangkok by April 2 for a flight to Nepal and see some of northern Thailand between Laos and Bangkok keep the pressure on. I'm traveling faster than I prefer, but I do have to come home sooner or later.
The city I am in today and leaving tomorrow is Luang Prabang. Okay, so it's not a city for Western standards but for the middle of northern Laos, I think this is as modern as it gets. Its also the most charming city I've encountered so far in all of my travels through SE Asia.
It was a four hour bus ride from the last city to here. I lucked out and happened to get to the bus station in the late morning ten minutes before an air conditioned tour bus was leaving for Luang Prabang. Air conditioned and mostly empty, so I camped out with two seats to myself and was very happy to have taken my time getting to the bus station that morning. Sometimes not planning pays off.
After an hour on the bus, we were deep into mountain country. I wasn't really aware how mountainous Laos is, but the bus climbed for almost two hours, spinning and jerking around the top of one mountain after the next, my stomach spinning and jerking slightly out of time and making me not so hungry when we stopped for lunch. As we climbed and climbed, there were nothing but mountains for miles and miles. The close ones a deep, unharvested green and the distant ones a light black outline of their tops etched in the sky.
We descended for another two hours to the valley and then onto Luang Prabang. I spent the day walking the streets along and between the Mekong and Nam Khuan rivers and, even better, exploring the narrow lanes that wind between the wide streets. On the streets are restaurants with porches where people sip $.30 fruit shakes and rich Lao coffee. The restaurant names are carved on blocks of wood and hung from the porch and the windows are tall and shuttered looking into a room cluttered with small wooden tables and chairs. Everywhere are palm trees and potted flowers and even though its the dry season, things seem to be fragrant and blooming. The horns and bustle of Vietnam are far behind. The few mopeds that pass putter along and their drivers are prudent with the use of their horns, treating them as a privilege rather than a necessity.
Down the alleys are more traditional Lao houses, wooden structures built on stilts. Their porches are also covered with potted flowers, the roads they stand on are too narrow for more than one small car and made of dirt and gravel. There are people on the porches selling small glass cases of housewares and detergents, others working on laundry or cleaning their motorbikes or sweeping the dusty sidewalk. Rice cakes laid out on large bamboo mats and propped up against bamboo fences are left to dry in the sun.
I climbed a wat (temple) built up on the only hill in town to get a better look at the city. The stairs were littered with white milky white lotus flowers, as if someone had laid them there for a ceremony. At the top of the Wat you could see the whole town spread out in the land between the two rivers, palm trees, red aluminum corrugated rooftops and the barely perceptible movement of a town in slow motion.
