Closer To Fine

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We had heard so many positive things about Luang Prabang from fellow travelers that we flipped our itinerary to accommodate a trip here. Luang Prabang is not easy to reach unless you’re willing to fly. It’s a 2 day slow boat ride down the Mekong River from the north of Thailand or a 12 hour bus ride from the south. However, that being said, it is really worth the effort.

 

A Unesco World Heritage site, it sits beautifully on a peninsula between the Mekong and

Nam Khan rivers. French colonial architecture is evident throughout the town, all ranges of accommodations are provided, wonderful restaurants abound, night markets and many small shops dot the tree lined streets, while there are neighborhoods of silversmiths and textiles and paper makers. I find myself wondering what this bohemian town is doing here in the middle of nowhere. You could spend 2 or 3 days just investigating the many guesthouses that proliferate throughout town – or you could just hang out on the main drag at a different café every day drinking thick, rich Lao coffee (you add condensed milk to top it off).

 

One of the advantages of staying longer at each location is the opportunity to develop habits, however small they are. For instance, I have my favorite WiFi internet café up the street that we go to every morning, or we frequent this noodle lady around the corner that makes the best fried noodles, or the crepe and fruit shake stand up the street, or the nice wine bar downtown that we’ve gone to every night. We just try and make it feel like home if only for a few days, and think spending quality time in each place - by staying longer and patronizing local guesthouses and restaurants - is a higher priority than trying to see everything.

 

In our travels we met Lynda and Alan who have a sister Carol who works in town on a project to help local Lao people develop learning skills to better their opportunities in life. This involves reading and writing exercises, learning English and developing computer proficiency. Education in this country is not very developed, yet this town is the ‘Harvard’ of higher education and has the best schools. We were both very impressed with the effort Carol is making in her project  www.thelanguageproject.org

 

 

Despite the appearance of prosperity in Luang Prabang, a quick 5 minute boat ride across the Mekong to the other side of town will bring you face to face with the more realistic face of Laos. Here rice farmers tend their fields as they have for many generations and live in well worn bamboo bungalows. Walking through these poor villages, all the kids would readily call out ‘hello’ in Lao which sounds phonetically like ‘sabbai dee’ (said very quickly). It seemed like everyone was running out of their house to say hi to the two tall tourists – pretty funny. How they manage to distill so much happiness and zest for life from the apparent meagerness of their material possessions is refreshing to see. To them

a successful day at the office is scraping together 50 cents for a bowl of rice or finding six

eggs in the roost or replenishing their water from the local well. Unlike the ‘Land of Smiles’ (Thailand) where smiles seem opportunistic, these are genuine.

 

In a few more days we’re going to head three hours north to the town of Nong Khiau, set in a dramatic mountainous region along a spring fed river. The town itself is not visited very often and Marge has purchased some books from an organization in town that distributes reading material to kids of all ages – even adults. We’ll take them to local villages up there and do a lot more ‘sabbai dee’s’. From there we’ll do a week long loop thru a few other

villages - Phonsaven and the ‘Plain of Jars’ - before returning to Luang Prabang for a few days before taking the slow 2 day boat trip up the Mekong to Northern Thailand. Today we realized that we have 60 day visas, so we’re not rushed to exit Laos and may spend more time here.

 

I’ve named this posting after one of my favorite Indigo Girls songs – after spending time in many towns and villages and big cities the last few months, it’s invigorating and encouraging to find such a gem as Luang Prabang. Even more inspiring are the people that populate this great country, some of the nicest people you’ll ever come across. It’s certainly not perfect, but closer to fine than anywhere else we’ve been so far.         

 

One added note – back in the states I subscribed to this service ($50/year) that backed up all my files off site – it runs in the background, detects when changes are made to any files and backs them up (only changed or new files). I transferred this service to my new laptop and within 10 minutes had access to all the files backed up from my old PC. Very easy to restore backed up files, this service is very slick. My laptop is now configured to backup all my digital pictures, so whenever I have an internet connection it backs up any new pictures (which I download every day from my camera memory card). Send me an email if interested…

 

Thankfully, I see all my Indigo Girls songs on my backup, so the next rainy day I’m going to work on getting them on my Ipod where they were inexplicably not included in my final
play list.