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Published: November 18th 2006
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two buckets of snake whiskey
(Thanks to Mike Morgan for the picture.) What can I say about Luang Prabang that hasn't already been more-eloquently phrased in the guidebooks by a thousand gushing travel-writers?
Uhm...
The snake whiskey totally kicks ass!
At The Spiritual Center of Laos I made it into Luang Prabang after two crazy and hectic days on the Mekong river. Coming in on the evening of the 17th, it looked to me like a civilized shelter from the wildlife and wilderness and scams and wide world of sports of the days preceding.
Mike and I and the two Canadian kids and the Swedes decided we'd all shack up together somewhere, but we were tired and we shared the feeling that having left our backpacks sitting in the engine room for two days had made them a lot heavier. In reality, though, they were lighter. We found out before nightfall that quite a few things had gone missing, including my Mom's pricey digital voice recorder (which I had been loaned) and all of Paul's new boardshorts.
Haggard and exhausted, we had a look around. The old part of town where we'd been dropped was cool and cultured: lots of remnants of colonial French construction alongside
the flavor of the river-banks. There was also something of a hip backpacker-scene here--and a crap-load of temples. Paul and I managed to find our group the entire top floor of a newly-remodeled guest house: four double beds, three singles, three bathrooms (with HOT showers!), and a couple of balconies, all for only US$15 per night.
Though the group frayed a bit at the end, I stayed for a few nights and days and I guess I got a good look around the place. This is the heart of Laotian Buddhism, with dozens--if not hundreds--of temples and shrines and highly-revered artifacts. And there were more monks than you could shake a primate-abusing, old shiester's walking-stick at.
Religious Sites When encountering other cultures and hearing new languages, you often come across words that sound similar to a word in your own language, but that have absolutely no relation. It is more rare to discover entire phrases or place-names that--when properly pronounced--evoke words or phrases in your own language, but it's these multisyllabic resemblences that can be the most amusing and entertaining.
In the middle of the old part of Luang Prabang, adorned with temples, you have
Phu Se Mountain. The first few times I read it out loud or pronounced it in conversation with a Lao person, I said something like, "poo say mountain". In the middle of our second night in town, however, Canadian Mike and I learned from a local monk that the proper pronunciation was, "pussy mountain." Like what you'd call a cat...
Needless to say, all kinds of amusement followed.
When I went to the top of Phu Se Mountain, all I found was one pimply Russian girl. The mountain itself is more of a hill, with a mediocre temple at the top and the remains of a Russian anti-aircraft gun that is glowingly described in the guidebooks, but is rather dissapointing in person. I only took one lame picture from up there, but trust me when I tell you that the view was fantastic.
This mountain forms the visible center of the spiritual center of Laos. Down one side you have the monks' residences and a handful of incredible buddhas, including the famous missile-shaped Buddha that gives the town its name. Down the other side you have a few hundred stairs that lead out to the street in
front of the Royal Palace and the town's main Wats.
The Royal Palace used to be the home of the King of Laos, but the royals abandoned it a few decades ago when the Communist Party took over, and they were never heard from again. Now it's a museum containing some very precious artifacts that we didn't get to see because the damned place was closed when we tried to go there.
The main Wats around there contain a few more inestimably-precious artifacts. After wandering into one of these monastaries a little past midnight one night, an English-speaking monk who had attended college in San Diego tried to explain the stories of all these famous statues to Me and the Canadian named Mike. I didn't retain any of it, but I did take some pictures at these places which are posted up elsewhere. One of these central monasteries also became the home of our erstwhile companion Cornelius--which is something else that I've posted about elsewhere.
And I guess that's pretty much it...
...except for the most moving religous sight of the whole bunch, which came while watching dozens of young monks fly off the top of
a waterfall with their billowing orange robes glowing in the sun. We took one of the highly-recommended and totally cheap waterfall tours and ended up spending the better part of an entire day swimming in jungle pools and leaping off of waterfalls with the monks. Talk about HIGHLIGHT, we were playing side-by-side with these holy men for hours: competing for crazy-dives, swimming into the cave behind the falls, and doing some synchronized diving to entertain our less-adventurous fellow tourists.
On the trail up to the falls, we also happened to pass an Asian Black Bear sanctuary and the rescue-home of a gorgeous wild Tiger named Phet. When we showed up she was asleep, but we disturbed her and she was
fiesty. Paul got to feed her some water buffalo, which calmed her right down. Then we actually had the oppurtunity to sit and pet Phet, to the sound of hurried whispers of, "this is so awesome."
Night Life By law, most of Laos has to shut down at 11pm, so common sense would say there isn't much of a night life. Luang Prabang even has a midnight curfew in effect in order to keep the place
quiet for all the monks--who, conventional wisdom holds, need to sleep whenever it's dark. The fact that we spent most of our daylight hours asleep gives evidence that there is actually quite a bit to do, however. We also found several monks that stay up all night talking and looking for English-speaking foreigners to entertain, so the conventional wisdom about Lao is essentially B.S.
The hip spot in town is Hive Bar, which all the guidebooks and the stickers in all the taxis will proclaim. I won't differ with them, but the one night that we went to Hive Bar saw us quickly leaving in favor of some soothing Laos massage. We all much preffered to stick to the bars and restaraunts and dodgy tents down by the river, where we found a lot more adventures. One of these adventures had a monkey in it, but two nights earlier the same old bastard that was mistreating Cornelius had a different racket running: snake whiskey.
The Lao people love Lao Lao, which is their version of make-you-go-blind moonshine. What we found that first night in Luang Prabang was far more intense. There's plenty of Lao Lao in the recipe,
but all of that is then mixed-in and fermented with the fresh corpses of giant venemous snakes, huge lizards, foot-long centipedes, and jet-black scorpions. And I guess they never distill the stuff again, since the glass I drank came straight out of the bucket.
I wasn't gonna try it at first. We were walking down the street just after dinner, buzzing with the excitement of a new place at night, and we saw the buckets sitting there. We didn't know what we were looking at for a while, just that it looked intense. Then the potbellied old curmudgeon dipped some shot glasses in and offered them up. "No way!" We laughed and shook our heads, 'cause what kind of fools did he take us for? Then he got the books out. These were thick autograph books, filled with rice-paper page after rice-paper page of rave reviews written in every language of the earth. It seems we weren't the first backpackers to be offered this stuff, not by a long shot, and it seems he'd learned a long time ago the persuasive power of testimonials.
I read a few reviews in english and said what the heck. Gladly taking
my 3000 Kip (30 cents U.S., the price of a shot), he handed me a glass. Up for a sniff and I almost hurled, then it was down the hatch. Woo! It burned and stirred-up bile like nothing I could describe. Then one of the local drunks handed me a bottle of Lao Lao for a chaser, and the homemade rice liqour actually tasted smooth and sweet coming after that other stuff.
And that's probably my strongest memory of the town.
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Aaron Brown
non-member comment
you'll have to find out the recipe for their fermented snake/centipede/scorpion/lizard whiskey is- what fermenting agent and such, if you don't already know. Awesome picture of that waterfall(2nd to last pic). Was that a touristy area or a bit off the beaten path?