Other People
28 Jan - 3 Feb, Ian
This week could be defined by the many
fascinating things that we haven't done. We knew that the burst of wat watching
that we did when we first came to Luang Prabang might soon fizzle out as we
settled into a week or two of R&R but our indolence has surprised even me.
The town is very photogenic, if you get your shot quickly enough to frame out
everyone else taking pictures, but my collection of snaps so far is poor. I
meant to get out one day and amble along the street idly enough - or even sit at
a pavement cafe long enough - to get some decent photos. The weather has
brightened and the skies are now clear blue, and if I only hauled myself again
up to the wat that stands on the central hill I could improve the crumby snaps I
took last week of the surrounding district. Luang Prabang is only a small city
and it would be easy to explore its quieter streets. And we thought we might
buy ourselves a silk to hang at home, and some of the little painted stone
figures that they sell here. Yet we've done none of
this.
I did have a Lao massage a few days ago. It was good, but disappointing. I too quickly let them talk me into the one hour routine rather than the two hour one that I wanted. Like the Thai massage I'd had in Nan, the masseuse started with a comprehensive work-over of my legs, although this one was gentler. But she stopped on the hour and timed out of the back and shoulder treatment that I was most keen on. I told her before she began not to crack my joints but she couldn't resist doing a couple of toes, even as I told her to stop: it's not that she didn't understand me or was wicked: I think she simply couldn't break out of her routine, or understand why anyone would ask her to.
After a busy month or two and the uncertainty over Nepal/Bhutan we've fallen into a recuperative spell of lassitude. Often we've not been getting up until after 10:00, and breakfast has slid into lunch, and lunch into dinner. Routine works well for a family and we've lost it. But that's okay for now: "it's not a competition".
We've read plenty. Since I last blogged I've got through a couple of Agatha Christies and The Power and The Glory by Graham Greene. The latter is one of those books that influences you (or me anyway) even if you don't actually read it; now I have. We finished all of the DVD's of season four of West Wing that we brought here, and we'd already finished all seven of the Buffy seasons. They run trips from here to villages where you can see local crafts - weaving or woodworking or even whisky making, for example. I'd like to go to the village where they practise the traditional Asian craft of DVD bootlegging. A reasonable choice of DVD's is available in town: I couldn't get season one of Lost but we did manage to pick up season four of 24 - after I'd checked in the store that it really plays on my region 2 mac - and we've watched the first episode. The box has photo splashes of characters who died (and died conclusively - I know it's Hollywood) in previous seasons; the DVD menus are all mislabelled; the picture quality is not so sharp; and the video and audio are a little out of sync - but we're happy enough and it's morally just since none of the $16 I shelled out is going to the studio.
Since the girls finished their Thailand newsletters (see our homepage) and did well with their maths this week we bought them a new box of The Simpsons, which is less flawed in its packaging than our 24 (and it's very funny).
We went to a public showing of a movie, too. King Kong was screened on a normal TV in a room over the bookshop. About 20 of us sat around on low chairs and floor cushions, although the number dropped steadily throughout the film, particularly when Jurassic-themed bugs started attaching themselves gruesomely and gratuitously to the cast. It was a good two hour movie that unfortunately ran to three hours. We didn't, to be fair, have the most sympathetic viewing conditions. Although they eventually brought us the gin and tonics (Paula) or hibiscus tea (me) that we pre-ordered while we watched, the film only occupied the middle third of the screen. The lower third was given over to a joke-English rendition of the dialogue: at least, I think that's what it was, for at many points it was hard to tell. The heroine, for example, started off as Helen in the sub-titles, and ended the movie as Anne, and there were several references to a "right bower" that didn't have any analogue in the film that I could discern. Paula and the girls returned to see The Chronicles of Narnia last night while I did chores, and they report that it was better.
Apart from plugging directly into some version of Anglo-American culture we've made a little project of finding out what all the other tourists are doing here. There are plenty of case studies to be made, and you don't have to do any leg work to unearth them. For example, any time we passed through the Villa Santi's lobby we stood a good chance of hearing an American or two at the front desk complaining about a lost room reservation. At dinner one night we had a single guy older than me sitting on the tables to either side of us. They both looked melancholy and a little lost and I couldn't help thinking that they had each travelled in search of romance, probably with a VTPR.
One morning we had a long conversation with an English girl called Jodie, aged 22. She has been travelling around South East Asia for about 18 months and isn't planning to return home for another 6 months. Her mother and younger sister had joined her in Luang Prabang for a week or so, and it was the first time she'd seen them since she left home. She didn't speak to her father until she'd been away for a year, and then didn't have much to say to him: she didn't seem to feel any antipathy towards him, just a remarkable lack of interest, which was presumably reciprocating his attitude to her. Jodie's favourite travel experiences have been on trains or boats, "because [when you're on them] you're not supposed to be doing anything else". She also liked settling into a cafe for a day with nothing to do other than drink tea and read her book. The ascetic tranquility that she's found is admirable, and fitting for the region, but if Zoe or Heidi turned out like this it might seem to me almost as if they'd joined the Moonies. I do, though, hope that they find their independence and I shall encourage them to travel. There seem to be far more single girls than guys of this age roaming around, and I suspect that many of them, like Jodie, want a period of calm and control between the turbulence of their teens and the uncertainty of their adult lives.
Many of the tourists around here are on organised party tours of SE Asia and a month's duration seems to be typical. I ran into to a very jolly American couple two or three times who were doing just this and we chatted about cameras. Although they were packing a rather cumbersome Olympus point-and-shoot I pegged him as a Nikon SLR man and asked him if he wasn't going to buy a D70. "No, I bought a D200 last week," he gleefully replied, "11 Megapixels! New model, just came out." And Luang Prabang is an SLR type of town: variable light, everything at mid range, where you can just park yourself and your heavy precious camera in a cafe or a tuk tuk or a boat and get your fast lens to snap up the rich colours of the world moving around you.
Paula met a Canadian couple who are also on a one month tour of SE Asia. When she told them about our journey the man seemed astonished, wondering if the world wasn't too small to occupy a whole year.
Tourists aren't the only Westerners here. At least a couple of them make a living from the smarter textile shops here, and these seem to have some sort of symbiosis with culture-sponsoring quangos. One of the pricier shops is run by a Canadian woman who claims to have been here 30 years, although this didn't stop her bawling out one of her Lao staff in English in front of us, her crime being to arrange the display of cushions on a bed incorrectly. A photo of the Canadian lady with Mick Jagger is placed with smug prominence on a shop wall.
Our most decisive encounter with a fellow Westerner occurred four or five days ago outside a cafe, where I bumped into a friend, Kim, from work. She had emailed me to tell me that she was taking a sabbatical for three months and would be in Thailand, and we quickly found that our dates there didn't match. Neither of us realised that we'd be in Laos at the same time so it was a total surprise. It turns out that another guy from her department was in Luang Prabang earlier in the week, and we must all have beetled past each other along the main street, ignorant of each other's presence.
On Wednesday we went back to the Kuang Si falls, this time with Kim instead of Mike, and had a refreshing swim in a cool aquamarine pool and a spicy green papaya salad from one of the lunch shacks. This morning Zoe and I got up at 6:15 and met Kim on the street outside our hotel to watch the monks filing past, holding bowls into which we could drop "alms". The better prepared people had brought snacks with them to dole out. Many of the rest of us were prey to local women selling rice in bamboo containers, which they carried in the pairs of baskets that hang from a pole balanced over their shoulder . As soon as these ladies spotted a tourist who might be pressed into buying their rice they would sprint up to them, three at a time, each pushing forward their goods and demanding a dollar, before settling for 50 cents.
The procession of monks went on for a surprisingly long time. They're always to be seen out on the streets, in the wats and doing their email in the internet cafes but that doesn't prepare you for seeing them all lined up together. There were even more monks than cameras out to snap them, although if you'd told me that while we were waiting in the crowd before the monks came along I mightn't have believed you. Imagine that you take all of the boys from a school in a reasonably large town, shave their heads, dress them in orange robes and send them out on the streets behind a few of their teachers, also in the same garb: that's how it was. If we could have forgotten that most of the monks are simply school boys dressed in orange we were reminded by the sight of them trying to throw rocks at us from the banks of the Nam Khan river earlier in the week; since they were too far below us to risk an actual hit us I suppose it might have been a Buddhist exercise in the appreciation of futility.
Kim is wisely staying in the 3 Nagas hotel, which is next to ours. It's a boutique hotel (as a large sign over the terrace informs you) and has a restaurant that looks worth trying over the street; this has a house that you can rent attached to it. The rental place used to be an extravagant spirit house - they are usually only the size of bird shelters with a few candles and Buddha figures at the top of a post - and so no local would dream of staying there. But the hotel is better than the Villa Santi, especially if you don't need a pair of adjoining rooms. The Villa Santi has been disappointing. The breathing problems that Paula and Zoe had at the last place have persisted, with the air con and improved circulation being offset by the feather bedding and heavy, dusty drapes. It's not all the fault of the hotel: there is so much roadwork taking place in town that the air is laden with particles of sand everywhere. But conceding this, the hotel's rooms and service aren't as sharp as they ought to be for the money (though we did get a better room rate than expected).
Fortunately, when we arrived last week we made a snap decision to re-book our second week at Villa Santi's resort 5 km out of the city, and we moved here today. This is much more congenial, with a great pool and a lovely suite, and if we can get out and about on bikes and back into town for lunch or dinner on the shuttle bus we stand to have a perfect week. In the daytime it's easy to cycle into town, if we're careful to avoid the squadrons of scooters, motorbikes and tuk tuks that are permanently flying around. It's common to see two, three or four people on a scooter and the girls, who almost all wear the long local skirts, ride side saddle if they're not driving.
We haven't yet really spoken to any of the other guests here at the resort; judging from the sample sitting around the pool today they all seem to be European. As in town, the Lonely Planet Laos guide is as ubiquitous here as the Gideons Bible in the West. Whenever I watch people wandering around with their noses earnestly buried in it I hope they're not missing the point. For we have, health issues and hotel aside, really enjoyed soaking up the gentle vibe of Luang Prabang this past week and to appreciate it you need to put the guide book away and relax into the atmosphere for a few days. But then those visitors, like Kim, who have troubled to consult Lonely Planet's latest Laos edition might have found the 3 Nagas.
I did have a Lao massage a few days ago. It was good, but disappointing. I too quickly let them talk me into the one hour routine rather than the two hour one that I wanted. Like the Thai massage I'd had in Nan, the masseuse started with a comprehensive work-over of my legs, although this one was gentler. But she stopped on the hour and timed out of the back and shoulder treatment that I was most keen on. I told her before she began not to crack my joints but she couldn't resist doing a couple of toes, even as I told her to stop: it's not that she didn't understand me or was wicked: I think she simply couldn't break out of her routine, or understand why anyone would ask her to.
After a busy month or two and the uncertainty over Nepal/Bhutan we've fallen into a recuperative spell of lassitude. Often we've not been getting up until after 10:00, and breakfast has slid into lunch, and lunch into dinner. Routine works well for a family and we've lost it. But that's okay for now: "it's not a competition".
We've read plenty. Since I last blogged I've got through a couple of Agatha Christies and The Power and The Glory by Graham Greene. The latter is one of those books that influences you (or me anyway) even if you don't actually read it; now I have. We finished all of the DVD's of season four of West Wing that we brought here, and we'd already finished all seven of the Buffy seasons. They run trips from here to villages where you can see local crafts - weaving or woodworking or even whisky making, for example. I'd like to go to the village where they practise the traditional Asian craft of DVD bootlegging. A reasonable choice of DVD's is available in town: I couldn't get season one of Lost but we did manage to pick up season four of 24 - after I'd checked in the store that it really plays on my region 2 mac - and we've watched the first episode. The box has photo splashes of characters who died (and died conclusively - I know it's Hollywood) in previous seasons; the DVD menus are all mislabelled; the picture quality is not so sharp; and the video and audio are a little out of sync - but we're happy enough and it's morally just since none of the $16 I shelled out is going to the studio.
Since the girls finished their Thailand newsletters (see our homepage) and did well with their maths this week we bought them a new box of The Simpsons, which is less flawed in its packaging than our 24 (and it's very funny).
We went to a public showing of a movie, too. King Kong was screened on a normal TV in a room over the bookshop. About 20 of us sat around on low chairs and floor cushions, although the number dropped steadily throughout the film, particularly when Jurassic-themed bugs started attaching themselves gruesomely and gratuitously to the cast. It was a good two hour movie that unfortunately ran to three hours. We didn't, to be fair, have the most sympathetic viewing conditions. Although they eventually brought us the gin and tonics (Paula) or hibiscus tea (me) that we pre-ordered while we watched, the film only occupied the middle third of the screen. The lower third was given over to a joke-English rendition of the dialogue: at least, I think that's what it was, for at many points it was hard to tell. The heroine, for example, started off as Helen in the sub-titles, and ended the movie as Anne, and there were several references to a "right bower" that didn't have any analogue in the film that I could discern. Paula and the girls returned to see The Chronicles of Narnia last night while I did chores, and they report that it was better.
Apart from plugging directly into some version of Anglo-American culture we've made a little project of finding out what all the other tourists are doing here. There are plenty of case studies to be made, and you don't have to do any leg work to unearth them. For example, any time we passed through the Villa Santi's lobby we stood a good chance of hearing an American or two at the front desk complaining about a lost room reservation. At dinner one night we had a single guy older than me sitting on the tables to either side of us. They both looked melancholy and a little lost and I couldn't help thinking that they had each travelled in search of romance, probably with a VTPR.
One morning we had a long conversation with an English girl called Jodie, aged 22. She has been travelling around South East Asia for about 18 months and isn't planning to return home for another 6 months. Her mother and younger sister had joined her in Luang Prabang for a week or so, and it was the first time she'd seen them since she left home. She didn't speak to her father until she'd been away for a year, and then didn't have much to say to him: she didn't seem to feel any antipathy towards him, just a remarkable lack of interest, which was presumably reciprocating his attitude to her. Jodie's favourite travel experiences have been on trains or boats, "because [when you're on them] you're not supposed to be doing anything else". She also liked settling into a cafe for a day with nothing to do other than drink tea and read her book. The ascetic tranquility that she's found is admirable, and fitting for the region, but if Zoe or Heidi turned out like this it might seem to me almost as if they'd joined the Moonies. I do, though, hope that they find their independence and I shall encourage them to travel. There seem to be far more single girls than guys of this age roaming around, and I suspect that many of them, like Jodie, want a period of calm and control between the turbulence of their teens and the uncertainty of their adult lives.
Many of the tourists around here are on organised party tours of SE Asia and a month's duration seems to be typical. I ran into to a very jolly American couple two or three times who were doing just this and we chatted about cameras. Although they were packing a rather cumbersome Olympus point-and-shoot I pegged him as a Nikon SLR man and asked him if he wasn't going to buy a D70. "No, I bought a D200 last week," he gleefully replied, "11 Megapixels! New model, just came out." And Luang Prabang is an SLR type of town: variable light, everything at mid range, where you can just park yourself and your heavy precious camera in a cafe or a tuk tuk or a boat and get your fast lens to snap up the rich colours of the world moving around you.
Paula met a Canadian couple who are also on a one month tour of SE Asia. When she told them about our journey the man seemed astonished, wondering if the world wasn't too small to occupy a whole year.
Tourists aren't the only Westerners here. At least a couple of them make a living from the smarter textile shops here, and these seem to have some sort of symbiosis with culture-sponsoring quangos. One of the pricier shops is run by a Canadian woman who claims to have been here 30 years, although this didn't stop her bawling out one of her Lao staff in English in front of us, her crime being to arrange the display of cushions on a bed incorrectly. A photo of the Canadian lady with Mick Jagger is placed with smug prominence on a shop wall.
Our most decisive encounter with a fellow Westerner occurred four or five days ago outside a cafe, where I bumped into a friend, Kim, from work. She had emailed me to tell me that she was taking a sabbatical for three months and would be in Thailand, and we quickly found that our dates there didn't match. Neither of us realised that we'd be in Laos at the same time so it was a total surprise. It turns out that another guy from her department was in Luang Prabang earlier in the week, and we must all have beetled past each other along the main street, ignorant of each other's presence.
On Wednesday we went back to the Kuang Si falls, this time with Kim instead of Mike, and had a refreshing swim in a cool aquamarine pool and a spicy green papaya salad from one of the lunch shacks. This morning Zoe and I got up at 6:15 and met Kim on the street outside our hotel to watch the monks filing past, holding bowls into which we could drop "alms". The better prepared people had brought snacks with them to dole out. Many of the rest of us were prey to local women selling rice in bamboo containers, which they carried in the pairs of baskets that hang from a pole balanced over their shoulder . As soon as these ladies spotted a tourist who might be pressed into buying their rice they would sprint up to them, three at a time, each pushing forward their goods and demanding a dollar, before settling for 50 cents.
The procession of monks went on for a surprisingly long time. They're always to be seen out on the streets, in the wats and doing their email in the internet cafes but that doesn't prepare you for seeing them all lined up together. There were even more monks than cameras out to snap them, although if you'd told me that while we were waiting in the crowd before the monks came along I mightn't have believed you. Imagine that you take all of the boys from a school in a reasonably large town, shave their heads, dress them in orange robes and send them out on the streets behind a few of their teachers, also in the same garb: that's how it was. If we could have forgotten that most of the monks are simply school boys dressed in orange we were reminded by the sight of them trying to throw rocks at us from the banks of the Nam Khan river earlier in the week; since they were too far below us to risk an actual hit us I suppose it might have been a Buddhist exercise in the appreciation of futility.
Kim is wisely staying in the 3 Nagas hotel, which is next to ours. It's a boutique hotel (as a large sign over the terrace informs you) and has a restaurant that looks worth trying over the street; this has a house that you can rent attached to it. The rental place used to be an extravagant spirit house - they are usually only the size of bird shelters with a few candles and Buddha figures at the top of a post - and so no local would dream of staying there. But the hotel is better than the Villa Santi, especially if you don't need a pair of adjoining rooms. The Villa Santi has been disappointing. The breathing problems that Paula and Zoe had at the last place have persisted, with the air con and improved circulation being offset by the feather bedding and heavy, dusty drapes. It's not all the fault of the hotel: there is so much roadwork taking place in town that the air is laden with particles of sand everywhere. But conceding this, the hotel's rooms and service aren't as sharp as they ought to be for the money (though we did get a better room rate than expected).
Fortunately, when we arrived last week we made a snap decision to re-book our second week at Villa Santi's resort 5 km out of the city, and we moved here today. This is much more congenial, with a great pool and a lovely suite, and if we can get out and about on bikes and back into town for lunch or dinner on the shuttle bus we stand to have a perfect week. In the daytime it's easy to cycle into town, if we're careful to avoid the squadrons of scooters, motorbikes and tuk tuks that are permanently flying around. It's common to see two, three or four people on a scooter and the girls, who almost all wear the long local skirts, ride side saddle if they're not driving.
We haven't yet really spoken to any of the other guests here at the resort; judging from the sample sitting around the pool today they all seem to be European. As in town, the Lonely Planet Laos guide is as ubiquitous here as the Gideons Bible in the West. Whenever I watch people wandering around with their noses earnestly buried in it I hope they're not missing the point. For we have, health issues and hotel aside, really enjoyed soaking up the gentle vibe of Luang Prabang this past week and to appreciate it you need to put the guide book away and relax into the atmosphere for a few days. But then those visitors, like Kim, who have troubled to consult Lonely Planet's latest Laos edition might have found the 3 Nagas.
Posted: Sat - February 4, 2006 at 01:27 PM
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Published On: Feb 04, 2006 01:28 PM
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Published On: Feb 04, 2006 01:28 PM