Luang Prabang

PEOPLE'S ROYAL CITY [1989] index

Wide wide muddy Mekong and green green mountains, temples and bicycles, French bread and French shutters, monks and motorcycle trishaws, children and "Sabai dee!", sarongs and smiles - this is Luang Prabang.

Ancient royal city made Fr ench provincial capital, it slumbers under Lao People's Revolutionary Party rule, river port, market town, administrative and religious centre. The temples are well-kept and adequately monked, the shophouses in French Indochina style have faded charm, rough-cobbled streets lie between overhanging frangipani trees, fine-featured lowland Lao smile with reserve, cute kids squeak "Sabai dee!" and giggle at their own audacity.

"Sabai dee!" is the standard greeting; it encompasses meanings such as "feeling good", "good health" and "nice'n'easy" as well as "how are you?" and this is so apt. Nothing could be more accurate for the visitor and apparently neither for the locals, laid back and serene as they usually seem.

Lane Xang, the Kingdom of a Million Elephants, was founded here in 1353 and it lasted until 1707 when internecine rivalries split the land into three, the kingdoms of Luang Prabang, Vientiane and Champassak. The dynasty only fell in 1975 with the December 2 proclamation of the Lao People's Democratic Republic. In 1977, the former King Savang Vattana and the Crown Prince were arrested as counter-revolutionaries and taken to the northern forests, never to be seen again.

His palace, built under French protection in the 1900s, is now a museum, its interior much as when the king left, together with the treasures of centuries brought from the monasteries for safekeeping. Chief amongst these is the Pra Bang, symbol of the kingdom and source of its name, a golden buddha said to have been cast in Sri Lanka two millennia ago. Others are massive gold rings of the 15th century set with large jewels and the royal costumes, hand-sewn with gold thread. On show too are modern gifts from friendly heads of state - Burmese silverware and Japanese porcelain, a moonrock from Tricky Dicky Nixon and a boomerang from guess where.

The throne room is magnificent - furniture in gold leaf and red walls encrusted with multi-coloured glass depicting scenes of everyday life and Buddhist legend. Behind it is complete simplicity, the day-to-day living quarters furnished in the stark lines of i930s Europe, albeit in teak. Officially the king had one wife, whose bedroom lies to the right of her master's. But to the left is the second wife's bedroom and, according to the guide, ten concubines slept on the floor at the foot of his bed.

Majestic as all this might be, the true wonder of Luang Prabang lies farther up the street, past decaying colonial shophouses, past several time-honoured temples, at the tip of the tongue around which the River Nam Khan winds into the mighty Mekong. Here is Wat Xieng Thong, the Temple of the Golden City, where the kings were crowned and cremated. Steep-roofed pavillions of widely differing dimensions cluster together upon a spacious paved square. The principal one is all black and gold inside, two smaller ones are deep pink outside and encrusted with glass like the palace throne room. Gold leaf on black paint or multi-coloured glass against pink, hundreds of brilliant figures show the life of the kingdom and the legends of the Buddha.

Wat Xieng Thong is a kaleidoscope through which saffron-robed monks drift and local urchins frolic. Usually serene, at the end of Buddhist Lent in October the temple becomes a scene of the most bizarre rowdiness. Novice monks and neighbourhood kids shoot fireworks at each other, hooliganism reigns! At this time, Luang Prabang people go down to the river one evening and lay little floral floats holding candles upon the murky waters, and their troubles float away downstream. It is like Loy Krathong in Thailand.

Some temples build skeletal bamboo boats hung with lanterns. At Wat Xieng Thong, around 9pm that evening, the monks manhandled their boat down the broad flight of steps to the riverside. There, many townspeople laid candle-lit floats upon the boat, and the monks placed open oil-lamps underneath. Then the bedlam erupted. As the monks launched the brightly-lit boat and manoeuvred it from two canoes alongside, people shot fireworks at them and they shot fireworks back. High-pitched buzz-bombs screamed back and forth and children were hooting and jeering and everybody was shouting. The lantern boat burnt merrily and the monks attempted to straighten it but the whole shebang of three boats swirled around in circles and the people bellowed and shot more fireworks and the monks and the burning boat drifted off into the gloom of midstream and away downriver to God knows where.

They have a name for it: Bang Fai Dok, the Firework Flower Festival. Monks' Folies might do just as well. Whatever, it changed my view of monks and devotees irrevocably, at least for Laos. Reports from another site were equally rumbustious: a lantern boat with banknote bunting for good luck became ambushed as it was launched; people grasped at the money, fell over each other and nearly capsized the whole thing. The piety of Luang Prabangians is now much in doubt.

Daylight brought nice clear skies and a trip upriver. The long solid riverboat, wood painted blue, sliced upstream through the broad brown waters past thickly forested hills. About thirty kilometres up, a sheer cliff-face heralded the tributary Nam Ou and some riverside caves littered with Buddha images from minute to massive. Local people have placed them there in a centuries-old tradition. Splendid views across the river to mountainous upland Laos.

Downriver a little, the boatmen stopped to buy kapok at a hamlet. This turned into a photo event, a photographic bonanza. Every time I held up my camera, dozens of dusty kids crammed into the frame grinning from ear to ear. It seemed that, if this village lived off kapok, it lived for the camera. The boat set off again, we all waved madly at each other.

Ours was virtually empty, but normally these boats are the main transport all along the Laotian Mekong and they are crammed with people, animals and goods, inside and on top if need be. Indeed, they are the main transport system of the country, for roads are few and poor, and most people live close to the river anyway. Buses and trucks serve the hill people, but infrequently and roughly. They start off when full, and that means full, every space on seat, floor and roof taken up with people, baggage, produce and animals. In the West, buses leave at specified times - even if they are empty. The height of madness! The sheer folly of a bus starting with nobody or nothing in it, not even a chicken!

Within half-an-hour of Luang Prabang on the red-dirt road to Vientiane, you are in precipitous mountain country, with just enough space for a few ricefields, banana plantations and vegetable patches. Here live a mixture of peoples, the upland Lao and the hilltribes - Meo, Yao, Black Thai and so on, wearers of colourful traditional clothes and cultivators of the opium poppy. The value of the opium crop, destined to become heroin, accounts for the vast amounts of silver coins that they possess and the rows and rows of gold teeth that the old women sport.

River bank and mountain valley are the typical locations of Laotians. Towns are few and small, subsistence farming and fishing the normal occupations. It would seem, however, that a fair sprinkling of Laotians are bureaucrats. The foreign visitor soon finds that bureaucratic permission seems to be required to do quite normal things such as take a bus or buy a map. To travel outside Vientiane, you need a laisser-passer. When you go to visit the Royal Palace at Luang Prabang, they tell you to go first to Lao Tourism to get a permit. It begins to seem that, if you want to go to the toilet, you're going to need a laisser-pisser.

Pierre, a classically irascible Frenchman at Luang Prabang's laid-back Hotel Phousi, would break out into periodic tirades against The Laotian Way. "This kind of bureaucratic system is completely idiotic! They employ ten people to do one person's job and not one of them even knows how to do it! It's lunatic, a total waste of time and money". I say it gives people jobs. "Eh oui, eh oui, ca c'est sur!"

Nevertheless, things are on the up and up. A belgian adviser of six years residence recounts that, until 1988, he had to have an official companion with him just to walk about town. Now he can go as he likes. There is a recent flood of radios and small motorbikes from Thailand, so some people are benefitting from the opening-up of the economy. But inflation is near 100%p.a. and some people are suffering.

Maybe the government should try to emulate Tak Baht Ok Phansa. At the dawn of Ok Phansa, the festival of the end of Buddhist Lent, townspeople lined the streets in large numbers to give food to the monks, despite pouring rain. Monks under big black umbrellas shuffled past citizens kneeling under multi-coloured ones. With the right hand, people gave food from their rice-baskets. Meanwhile, such was the abundance, the monks shovelled food from their overflowing alms-bowls into the plastic bags people had slung over their left wrists.

A perfect system: the people make merit by giving food, the monks get fed, and the people get the food back anyway. The communists have a long way to go before they equal this! In fact, the party's new way is to encourage capitalist enterprise under its guidance; market controls have been eased and state enterprises streamlined. Cooperatives are in decline, entrepreneurs are on the rise. "The Choice Of A New Generation", as Pepsi says, with official sanction.

Under Laos's New Economic Mechanism, foreign investment, trade and tourism are encouraged, though circumscribed. Thais and Japanes are falling over themselves, and occasionally tripping up, at this new business bonanza, and package tourists from Asia and the West are testing the water. Individual travellers are having a harder time since mid-1989 when a lot of young Westerners of freewheeling bent and good intent offended officialdom by looking funny, wandering far and wide, and not spending enough. By being young, in other words. The government clamped down on the issue of individual visas, and re-emphasised the need for permits to travel outside the capital. Fortunately, though the regulations are made in Vientiane, like most things Laotian, they don't travel very far. Officials 100km up in the hills have never heard of these rules; they see a stranger, they smile and say "Sabai dee!" and that's it, Bon Voyage. And in Bangkok, with the right agent and the right money, individual visas are to be had.

All in all, it seems that a period of retrenchment is occurring in tourism; realising that it wasn't prepared for a tourist onslaught, the government is rapidly renovating hotels and revamping its airline, ready for a more professional approach. On the business front, there are moves afoot to improve procedures. What will be the result of the new openness? After centuries of coping with foreigners with guns, how will Laotians cope with foreigners with fat wallets?

Certain realities will remain. Sandwiched between Vietnamese militarism and Thai commercialism, four million people against twice sixty, with a billion Chinese lurking to the north, Laos will always have to tread carefully. An old Lao saying goes "When the buffaloes fight, it is the grass that gets trampled". How long it will follow its present path is impossible to say, though reform is certainly the mood of the times in the communist bloc.

What is sure is that, for the present, for the visitor who does not require luxury, or even electricity, and who enjoys tranquillity, eccentricity, unpredictability, friendliness and profound beauty, Laos is waiting. Most hassles are removed by taking the inclusive tours that Lao Tourism, the state tourist organisation, offers through travel agents abroad and in Vientiane at roughly US$150 a day.

Pretty expensive, since the government considers that Luang Prabang is a pearl that should not be cast before skinflints. This hardly squares with its egalitarian principles but it does mean that when you get there, the jewel is almost all yours.