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Luang Prabang

Luang Prabang is a beautiful old French colonial town set on a peninsula where the Mekong and Khan rivers meet. It is a quiet almost, sleepy place, with lots of temples, classical French architecture, good food and loads of monks wondering about.

It was also the home of the old Lao Kingdom, known as the Kingdom of a million elephants and the white parasol. The kingdom which stemmed from the Khmer empire in Cambodia, it lasted for 600 years through numerous battles with marauding burmese and siams (Thailand). The last photo posted here is of the Villa Santi which is the house the Royal Family moved into for a few years after the King abdicated in 1975.  Now it's a flash hotel run by the old King's grandaughter and her husband.  The sad tale of the royal family is well explained in Christopher Kremmer's book 'Bamboo Palace'.

The history of lao is a sad tale indeed. They seemed to have paid the heaviest price of any country involved in the USSR/China V US battle for Indochina. Lao holds the record for the most bombed country in the world ever. Between 1963 and 1972 the US, in support of the Royals, dropped over 2 billion tonnes (thats one plane load of bombs every 8 minutes around the clock for 9 years) of bombs on northeastern lao trying to stamp out the Phathet Lao - the vietnamese backed communist guerillas and now ruling party. With the US's completed withdrawl from Indochina after the Paris peace accords, the royals were left high and dry.

The Phathet Lao came to power and created a mao like cultural revolution. Allegedly, the royals, anybody who had held a position of power, or any intellectuals were sent to "Re-education camps" some were not to reappear for 15 years, and some not at all.

The government has opened up in the last couple of years and the country has come on significantly. BTW I'm calling it Lao rather than Laos because there was no s until the French misspelt it!

The life of the monks here is really integrated in the city's daily routine.  Monks appear in the internet cafes regularly, in fact there are two sitting beside me as I type.  To skip across town it's often faster to wander through the grounds of the Wat (temple) and the monks are happy for people to do so.  The Wat near our guesthouse seems to be for artistic monks.  This week we have seen them carving little buddha statues from wood.  They've also been restoring a big concrete sculpture of buddha, with a few brick pieces thrown in for reinforcement.

The food here is delicious and we found a restauant called Tamarind Cafe where the owner is Australian with a Laos chef.  The place is all about trying traditional Laos food and we sampled a lot of it, including buffalo jerky which was unusually sweet - yummy! 

Seamus spent a day at a 60 metre high waterfall just out of town.  Another day we hired bikes to explore the district. My cousin Kathy is in Luang Prabang this week and we enjoyed meals and sightseeing together.  One evening we went to the Royal Theatre to see a dance performance with replicas of the traditional Royal costumes used to perform the same old tales the King saw (up until the early 1970s when he and his family vanished).  The masks on the performers were made of paper mache and real sculptures in themselves -  a deer head was especially impressive with huge antlers. 

We spent a day cycling around on bikes and also went on a boat trip up the river to a Cave with thousand of Buddha statues.

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