Our next two days are spent exploring Luang Prabang at a very leisurely pace as Ollie ramps up towards his work deadline. We stroll around the historic centre, enjoying this beautiful riverside city with its hundreds of temples and gaggle of monks flitting in and out of them, and taking advantage of the broad, cheap, and good-quality food selection on offer.
Our stay is punctuated by chance encounters with my mum’s group: we are all touring the same sights, and catch them briefly at the Royal Palace’s vintage car exhibition, as well as in a few restaurants around town. It adds a nice dimension to our visit as we can exchange impressions and recommendations as we go - although we never made it to the morning market, too busy enjoying a rare series of lie-ins to get there before 9am.
We start with an obligatory visit to the old royal palace (no pictures allowed!), converted in a museum since the country’s switch to communism in the 1970s. It’s not a very big building but it’s nicely laid out for visits, with plenty of explanations, and we enjoy our walk-round once we’ve stopped fuming about the arbitrary “no bag” rule and the obligatory elephant pants rental for Ollie. Our highlight is the discovery of a different local epic tale: until now everything we’ve seen since Bali has been based on the same Ramayana, but the palace has a series of painting representing another legend. The Vessantara Jataka doesn’t make much sense to our western sensibilities (although the hit-and-miss translation is partly to blame) but it’s nice to find another story represented.
Our next big stop is the Laos UXO centre. Laos has the dubious honour of being the most bombed country in the world. In the 1960’s, in a bid to halt the rise of communism in neighbouring Vietnam, the USA started a carpet-combing campaign that would see more explosives dropped over Laos in the next ten years than were used over the course of the whole of WWII. As with all ordnance, the failure rate means that many of the devices did not detonate on impact, and those are still around, booby-trapping the entire country. Some of the bombs were explicitly designed to entice children to pick them up and play with them - and are still fulfilling that cruel purpose now, decades after this never-declared war supposedly ended. The UXO centre provides a free exhibition to raise awareness about these issues - it’s a sobering visit and we leave wondering about the human darkness that came up with these tactics.
Finally, over two days we leisurely visit a few of the city’s most notable temples: Wat Wisunarat, with its ancient stone chedi, Wat Sene Soukharam, made from 100,000 stones fished from the Mekong, and Wat Xieng Thong, where kings used to get crowned. They do look the same after a while, although they are all very beautiful and I particularly enjoy the ornate roof ridges with their seven parasols at the middle point - this seems to be a Laotian addition which I don’t remember seing on the Thai pagodas.
To fuel our visits, we take full advantage of the nice food on offer: delicious gelato, sweet pastries, an amazing Thai-Italian fusion pizza, and lots of cheap Laotian food - my favourite is the local twist on laarp, a minced meat and herb salad which is a lot less spicy here than in Thailand.
Luang Prabang is a very pleasant city to stay for a few days, and we have an extremely comfortable time here. But despite the riches and the tourist influx, something feels very different about Laos compared to the other countries we have visited. Even here in the old capital, replete with wealthy expats, poverty and deprivation are more apparent than in Thailand. It almost feels like there’s something a little bit downtrodden about Laos as a whole - a pervasive sadness like the country hasn’t recovered yet from the horrors of the war (not that I fault it for that). New roads, and the new high-speed train line in the North, are evidence of a bounce back, and I hope that Laos will soon see the same growth its neighbours are enjoying - and that its people will all find their smiles for good.
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