A fine night of traditional Lao dance and drunken backpacker bowling

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In comparison to Thailand, Laos seems to shut down shockingly early at night. Many guesthouses have curfews, the latest of which seems to be 12 AM (as ours was), though some are as early as 10:30 PM. The waitstaff at seemingly hip little bars and restaurants in Luang Prabang start making gestures of closing as early as 10:30 and 11. I was concerned about this situation. It's not that I like to go out every night by any means, but every once in a while I do like to go out to the bars or better yet, dancing, til late and then have a good sleep in the next day. Would it be possible in Luang Prabang??

On Wednesday night Courtney and I went to see some traditional Lao dance, which, like traditional Thai dance, is based on the ancient Sanskrit epic called Ramayana. All the episodes of the epic (25,000 verses, I think), if danced from beginning to end, would take several days to complete, but one performance is just a few episodes of the larger tale. The rough outline of the story is that Prince Rama (incarnation of Hindu god Vishnu) falls in love with Sita whom he marries, but very shortly afterwards Sita is kidnapped by the evil Ravana. Prince Rama, along with Hanuman the Monkey King, rescue Sita and fight a big battle against Ravana to restore peace and order. The costumes are really ornate and beautiful. The women wear those special pointy gold crowns (see photos) and the monkey men all wear elaborate masks. We weren't able to take pictures during the performance, but the dancers posed afterwards. The 'monkeys' all seemed young and also really proud to be up on stage. It was a pleasure to see how happy they seemed with their performance.

After the performance, we continued the night with a movie and drinks at a bar where we met up with Dominic, and we eventually made our way to 'THE' late-night place in Luang Prabang- the infamous bowling alley. There were backpackers galore and also a few local people. You ended up bowling with whomever was up for a game and the best part is that you could bowl barefoot. It was quite a good time and ended up being a late night (for Laos, anyway). When we arrived back at the guesthouse, we found it padlocked. I told Courtney and Dominic that we should just hop the fence so we didn't have to wake the people up, but as I was doing so the fence rattled and woke them up anyway. I suppose they might be used to it, but I still felt badly!

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Comments

[Courtney]

Oh what a night...