Banana Pancake Trail

Alms and the Monks: Luang Prabang

/ Richard Senior / Leave a comment

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The gong sounds at 5am and the monks rise and gather in the prayer hall and chant. As the sun comes up, they leave the temple and walk, barefoot, with alms bowls hanging from shoulder straps towards Sisavangvong Road.

Each of the city’s thirty-three temples disgorges its monks and novices and they converge on the main street and join the long line –a few hundred strong – of bright orange robes, shaved heads and alms bowls.

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The locals, and often Western travellers, kneel along the side of the road to await the procession, shoes slipped off respectfully. As each monk passes, he slides the lid from his alms bowl, wordlessly and without expression. A woman, making sure to keep her head below the monk’s as tradition demands, tosses in a ball of sticky rice and he slides the lid back on. The city is silent except for the padding of bare feet on the pavement and the scraping of the lids on the bowls.

Luang Prabang, with its fairytale name, is embraced by the mountains of northern Laos, and scored across by the broad Mekong River and the sinuous Nam Khan. It is the fourth largest city in Laos but that translates to the scale of a small town in Europe with half a dozen major streets and a population below 50,000.

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It is compact enough to see in a day, but absorbing enough to be worth staying for several. It is calmer even than Vientiane, but not so soporific. The main roads are lined with colonial buildings with porticos, balconies and shutters; the side streets with traditional wooden houses. Bougainvillea bushes explode over walls, palm trees stoop towards roofs.

The monks glide in and out of view. The smell of incense wafts from the temples. The gongs sound, the monks chant. There is a gentle thudding of drums, a clash of cymbals, a howling of lutes and plinky-plunk of xylophones.

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The swooping roofs of the temples are stacked three-deep and topped by horn-like finials formed into the shape of nagas*; the facades are gilded and intricately carved, and there are glass mosaics telling epic stories of birth and death, work and play, town and jungle, hunters and fishermen, elephants and tigers.

Luang Prabang is an established stop on the Banana Pancake Trail, and increasingly on the mainstream tourist trail, as well. But the Western interlopers have not taken over in the way that they have in Vang Vieng.

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There are agents all along on the main street, offering mahout training, bike tours and transport across the border to Thailand. But just a few steps away, there are buffalo sausages drying on racks, chickens scratching in the trash and street markets which make no concessions to tourists with raw fish laid out, right next to vegetables, on sheets on the road, smaller fish twitching in bowls of water and blood running down the street from the meat stall where every bit of the pig but the squeak is piled up for sale.

It is noticeable, though, that quite a few businesses are run by falang** as if they arrived, years ago, with a backpack and the idea of staying two or three nights but could never quite bring themselves to leave. It is that sort of place.

© Richard Senior 2016

*River serpent

**Loosely “Westerner(s)”. Cf. Thai farang and Khmer barang.

Ko Phi-Phi: On Irony Island

/ Richard Senior / 2 Comments

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Phi-Phi was a quiet island of Muslim fishermen, until the travellers arrived.

There were only a few at first, but then their friends came and their friends’ friends and their friends’ friends’ younger brothers, who came with a bunch of people they had met on Samui, and a few crates of beer and a big bag of weed and some music. It is not quiet anymore.

Loh Dalum Beach is still beautiful, so long as you keep looking out to sea. Behind you, there is a line of bars with big sound systems and bigger neon signs. There is EDM at Slinky, dubstep at Stones and reggae at the Chillout Bar.

Sometime around nine, the DJ’s jerk up the volume and bare-chested performers run onto the stage and juggle with burning batons. One swings two burning balls connected by a chain around his torso and between his legs. Then two of them douse a rope in petrol, light it and swing it with increasing speed and invite volunteers to skip with it. Plenty try. Buckets make you do things like that.

When the sun starts to set, every guesthouse and restaurant on the way to the beach brings out a tray of plastic buckets like children use for sandcastles. Each contains a packet of straws, a quarter bottle of Sang Som whisky, a Coke and an energy drink. The idea is to tip all the drinks into the bucket and suck them up through the straw until you are hammered enough to skip with a burning rope.

The Coke and the energy drink keep you alert when, by rights, you should be asleep in a corner and you think you are fine and get another bucket and then it is sometime in the afternoon the next day.

Slinky has a stage on the beach so you can look out to sea as you dance. There is a dead tree in front of it with its trunk stripped, its branches lopped off and two slats of wood nailed to the top to make a platform just big enough to stand on.

Throughout the night, when I was there, travellers tried to climb to the top of the tree to dance on the platform in front of the crowd. A Scandinavian guy powered himself up in three fluid movements, an Irish guy got partway up then slithered to a giggling heap on the sand, and an English girl squeezed herself half onto the platform but could neither stand up nor climb down and stayed where she was, with her arms and legs waving uselessly like a beetle on its back.

It is all good fun and an essential stop on the Banana Pancake Trail; but when the effects of the buckets have finally worn off, you might start to imagine it from a local’s perspective. “It puts money in their economy,” some travellers shrug.

Yet there is disquiet back home if a Polish shop opens on the high street, and outrage if planning consent is given for a mosque. Professionally intolerant columnists write another 2,000 inflammatory words, and badly-spelled bigotry is circulated on Facebook. Meanwhile, in Thailand, the children and grandchildren of the angry people have taken a sleepy island and made it into a version of Ibiza.

It is Leonardo DiCaprio’s fault. The Beach was filmed on Ko Phi-Phi Le, even though it was set in the Lower Gulf Islands on the opposite coast. It is a fifth of the size of the main island, Phi-Phi Don, which itself is only five miles by two, and as stunningly beautiful as the book says it should be.

It is a bit less crowded than Times Square, and slightly more relaxing than the running of the bulls. Boats crowd into the tiny bay, dripping oil into the lovely cyan water. The roar of the motors echoes around the cliffs. Thousands of feet kick the pristine sand into a lunar landscape disaster. Tourists excited to be standing where DiCaprio stood let crisp packets drop and blow about the beach until they get stuck into crevices. They pose for their Facebook profile shots and a wave snatches up their Sprite bottles and bobs them out to sea.

In all the noise and confusion, irony slips by unnoticed.

© Richard Senior 2015

Vang Vieng: The Town Travellers Conquered

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I got the last seat in the minibus going to Vang Vieng. A bossy woman of somewhere around sixty sat in the front with the driver. She scolded him for using his phone at the wheel and told him to put it away, which he did, but drove the rest of the way with his foot to the floor in revenge. We barrelled through villages at motorway speeds, leaped bumps in the road and felt the g-force on the corners as the tyres screamed in panic.

When we stopped for a welcome toilet break, a young backpacker told the woman she should have kept quiet, but she said that it was the height of arrogance to tell people how to behave. Hang on a minute…everyone else thought, but kept quiet.

Sixty years after France lost its Indochinese empire, forty years after the US pulled out of Southeast Asia, travellers have recolonised this sleepy town armed with nothing more warlike than elephant print trousers and back-to-front baseball caps. They have turned it into an adventure playground.

There are karsts to climb, and cave systems to explore, and the rapidly flowing Nam Song River to float along on an inner tube with a Beerlao in one hand and a joint in the other, as if relaxing on a beanbag at home. There are ‘happy shakes’ and ‘happy pizzas,’ garnished with ganja, ya ba or magic mushrooms, and bars where eating is cheating and water is for washing in and drinks are to be downed in one. And this in a nation so conservative that pop music and jeans were once illegal and sex outside marriage still is.

Every fourth building downtown is a guest house; every tenth is an internet café. The stores in between are bureaux de change, souvenir shops and places to make an “over seacall” or buy a “busticker” to the next destination. The locals shop at stores in villages way out of town or at stalls set up on the old Air America runway, unused by planes since the covert war was abandoned in the middle seventies.

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There is an Australian steakhouse, a French bistro, a kosher restaurant and an Irish pub, which does stews and roasts in the tropical heat, and there are dozens of places to go for a burger, or an English breakfast, and to watch an episode of Friends as you eat.

Wherever you go, there is a hubbub of British, American and Australian English, and English spoken with the accents of other rich countries. Sometimes you hear Spanish, sometimes Russian, sometimes Korean, but rarely Lao.

I am no better than the other travellers: I climbed rock faces, crawled through caves and got hammered; I would have gone tubing, as well, if I were more of a swimmer and less of a coward. But it was hard not to feel ashamed to be part of it all.

Yet, if not tourism, what? A third of Laos’ population lives on less than a dollar a day. Just the other side of the river, across the bridges of bamboo and twine which creak and wobble as you walk on them but which, nonetheless, you share with scooters and cars, it is a world away from the imported culture of Europe and North America which dominates downtown: a world of subsistence farming, of thatched huts, children running naked, women kneeling at the river beating clothes on the rocks, and bent old men pushing older carts, which past generations pushed before them.

It is a scene unchanged since long before Vang Vieng was somewhere you Must Go Before You Die, before it appeared in a profusion of odd-numbered lists, before the first travellers discovered it; before the Pathet Lao came to power, before the CIA sought to influence local wars; before the French folded Laos into their Indochinese empire; before the Burmese and Siamese invaded.

This is the real Laos. Travellers see it briefly from their rented scooters as they hurtle out to the further-flung caves.

© Richard Senior 2015