Luang Prabang: Wats, river mists and iced cappuccino

The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Sun, 07/29/2007 12:09 PM  |  Life

Kristi Ross, Contributor, Luang Prabang, Laos

If Luang Prabang (also known as Loungphrabang) didn't exist, only a poet or an opium dreamer would dare invent it.

The Mekong and Nam Khan rivers wrap around the ancient Lao capital like a shawl. Steps lead up from riverside jetties to streets shaded by trees whose skirts of roots are as wide as their crowns.

Along the main roads orchids and bougainvillea spill down from French colonial balconies and ground-floor cafes serve espresso, herb teas and flaky croissants.

The back lanes are lined with traditional timber houses, textile galleries and mulberry-paper shops, punctuated by the flaring roofs of the wat (temples).

In the morning market, hill-tribe villagers offer pungent roots, forest greens and fresh-trapped game while town-dwellers crowd the benches of the noodle stalls.

Luang Prabang strides worlds, is ancient and contemporary, Lao and French, Mien and Hmong all at once.

*****

Once, it took longer to travel here up the Mekong than to sail all the way from France to Saigon. Now, flights arrive daily from Vientiane, Bangkok and Chiang Mai, but flying in dilutes the essence.

Better to take the highway from Vientiane, Laos' present-day capital, and wind up through improbable mountain ranges and great tracts of fresh-burnt swidden, deep primeval forests and stands of whispering teak.

Now and then the narrow, potholed road coils through linear villages of timber and bamboo where dark-bristled pigs with low-slung bellies doze in the shade and children set off from one or two-roomed schools, walking back to widely-scattered hamlets that can only be reached on foot.

Often, both highway and villages perch on the edge of nothing, looking as if they are about to tumble gracefully into valleys far below.

Travel through landscapes like these for 12 to 14 hours, and when the first unlikely rooftops appear in the last of the afternoon light, Luang Prabang appears not just as a cosmopolitan fusion, but as a deeper mystery.

Dawn brings brief reverberations from monastery drums, pearly light shimmering on tile roofs, roosters crowing out their territories in villages across the rivers still hidden by morning mist.

All along the narrow peninsula of the old town, men and women slip quietly out of doorways to wait along the pavements as they have done for centuries. Soon the monks will come, long shuffling snakes of saffron, burnt orange and gold, and the laity will lay up merit in this life or the ones to come by spooning handfuls of sticky rice into begging bowls.

At Wat Xieng Thong, loveliest of all the town's temples, the bamboo shingle roofs sweep down almost to the ground, sheltering walls patterned with a mosaic of blue, green and turquoise glass.

While the monks are out on their morning rounds, the courtyard is deserted save for hopping sparrows and dozing cats. A sunbeam splashes through the open door of the sim, lighting the huge Buddha image at one end and all the smaller ones in gold and bronze that rise in a pyramid around him.

A faint breeze stirs the golden leaves of a bodhi tree ornament on the altar. Somewhere, a drum sounds. In the silence that follows, peace oozes out of the ancient walls.

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