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Published: January 22nd 2010
A collection of unrelated and completely subjective observations on Luang Prabang, Laos to enhance your keen understanding of the locale:
Everyone with a bit of money here has a maban, or a maid, who does all their cleaning and some of the cooking and comes to work six days a week for about $30 a month. For those who own a business here life is easy and relaxed, others can be paid to do the menial work, and one can just hang around their guesthouse or restaurant all day, directing the staff, going out to shop or socialize. For those without money, life here is hard, very hard, with work six or seven days a week for a very low monthly wage. My maban, (the maid who works at my guesthouse) is 24 and has three kids, aged 9, 6 and 4. She was married at 15, speaks no English and makes more money doing this than she would by working in her village.
There are two fabulous markets here, one is the fresh fruit, vegetable and meat market happening in the morning, while the other is the handmade craft market in the evening. Locals work extremely hard to
prepare for each market; for the morning market, many sellers arrive at the market street around 4 or 5 in the morning to get a good spot and to begin setting up their wares. Before that, most of them had to travel in to town somehow, and before that, all of them had to either grow food to sell, forage for vegetables in the forest, pick fruit from trees, catch fish in the river or hunt animals or eggs in the forest.
This market features about 100 mostly female sellers, offering fresh eggs, noodles, chickens, live fish, pork, beef, frogs, ducks, all variety of fruits and vegetables, clothing, as well as oddly enough, frozen seafood and dry goods. The wares are laid out on individual tarps upon the ground and sellers stay from around 5 AM to 11 AM. Each day offers new surprises, sometimes turtles are available, sometimes large jungle cats, squirmy lizards, birds, hairless underwater animals, rats, moles. Many of these animals are still alive at the market, just tied up like prisoners. The bloody area where already butchered meat is sold is quite smelly, though these sellers do work from tables. This area is quite fascinating
to walk through, as every animal part is offered for sale, buffalo faces, pig tales, intestines, pools of blood. Some women celebrate the end of their workday, around 9 or 10 AM by drinking beers together, by their empty tarps at the market.
The evening market is just as impressive, with about 150 vendors selling primarily handmade, handcrafted wares, upon tarps on the ground from 4-11 in the evening. Blankets, stuffed animals, purses, paintings, lighting-covers, skirts and jackets are just a few of the handmade items on offer. Unfortunately, more and more, factory made items are being brought in to sell from China, Vietnam and Thailand. These items are sadly often nearly indistinguishable from those locally made, as the factory made ones are designed to “look” homemade. Among the items for sale one finds a lot of repetition, dozens of stalls of t-shirts, hundreds of similar-looking blankets, etc. But the competition also breeds ingenuity and if one looks closely, they see that amidst all the repetition there is constant evolution in creativity and design.
As most people here drive motorbikes, children and babies are also transported by motorbike. Babies are wedged between adults, held on the drivers lap
with one hand, expected to hold on to an adults shoulder while standing on the seat or best, sat in a special baby seat that can be installed just behind the wheel. I think people in other countries might see this un-secure baby transport as a bit dangerous but here it is the norm. Helmets are worn spottily; it is the law that all drivers and riders wear helmets but this law is erratically enforced. For instance, few people wear helmets at night or in the countryside because there are no police then and there.
The other day my friend and I were stopped by the police while I was riding on his bike. The police fined him because I wasn’t wearing a helmet. He was able to negotiate the fine from $12 down to $6. Although one rarely sees passengers wearing helmets here, the police were concerned about injury to a foreigner, which could cause the country problems. Injury to Lao people is not an issue and thus he would not have been stopped if the passenger had been a local.
In the US, if you violate a traffic law, they probably won't let you drive away,
still violating that law. Here, no problem. After the fine had been paid on the spot, we got back on the motorbike, me still without a helmet, and we continued on our way, to Kuang Si Waterfall, a fabulous picnic spot about 15 miles out of town in the countryside. Most motorbikers honestly drive about 15-20 mph max, at any time, so although wearing a helmet is safer, it's not as if we are riding 80 mph on some American highway helmet-less. The ride out there is all jungle, mountains, tiny poor villages and incredibly green terraced rice fields, currently being planted, back-breaking work but beautiful to watch.
There are loads of great hiking trails up to the top of this waterfall, all of which I wanted to hike, but I was with Lao friends, and they wanted to relax. It was their day off work and they wanted to do nothing. I think this dates from village life, where they grew up, working very hard. But all of these friends now work jobs where they sit, doing nothing all day, at reception or waiting at a restaurant. So, we bought a little picnic at the poor-quality restaurants in
the parking lot by the waterfall, some beers and wine-coolers and sat at a picnic table right by the foot of the falls. Just a lovely spot. My least favorite part of the picnic was the tiny birds, grilled whole on skewers, and smelling oddly sweet. Their little bones are so tiny and their meat so stringy and limited, that the entire bird is just eaten. My favorite part of this day trip was the outfit my friend's girlfriend wore. To go to this spot, in the jungle, in nature, she wore: pink patent-leather high heels, tight, white jeans, a long frilly white and pink shirt and a tiny pink jacket that tied in a bow at the chest. Also a pink hair-clip. It was hard for her to hike the half-mile up to the picnic-spot, if you were wondering. Did I mention Lao women, aged about 15-25, like to dress really femininely, almost sickly-sweet? Flowers, bows, pink...it's all hot here. In a way it's like 1950s America, when many more women still wore dresses and dressed very romantically to go out, even on a picnic.
Over the years numerous foreigners have come here and stayed, many starting businesses
or fabulous development projects. Among the projects started have been a library, a children’s book publishing company, numerous businesses to market the traditional weaving of locals, an orphanage and cooking schools and English schools. There are also dozens of fabulous foreign-founded restaurants, run by Lao staff, offering everything from fine French pastries, to brick-oven pizza, sushi, fine Italian and tapas. These restaurants attain their goal of creating these types of foods to various degrees of success. The foreigner living here, the ex-pat, knows which Italian place serves spaghetti with ketchup-sauce, and which Italian place serves fettucini with authentic tomato sauce. Unfortunately for the transient tourist, just passing through, they have no idea where to go to eat foreign-food.
In the center of town is a high white cement fence, surrounding the large grounds of what used to be the Royal Palace, now the National Museum. The Palace is small for a palace, maybe only the size of a mansion in the United States, a hut compared to the White House. It is fairly modern as it was last renovated by its royal inhabitants in 1959. Unlike most museums in the world, you must remove your shoes upon entering,
as is the custom in most Lao homes. You are greeted by staff sitting on the floor, as they are apparently tired and there are no chairs for them to sit in. The Museum consists of only about 8 rooms, with very limited information on the building and almost no information on the royal family and their history. Just a few photos of the last royal family, their bedrooms perfectly preserved, a note saying this is where the queen received guests, this is where the king received guests, a full room of gifts they received from foreign dignitaries. Maybe a full page of information, in total, is on display throughout the whole museum. It’s a lovely place but definitely the least lavish or royal palace I could possibly imagine. No photos are allowed inside.
Foreigners are not really supposed to have sexual relations with locals, but this law is largely overlooked unless a child is born. Then the police come and demand a huge fine to the local for having sex with a foreigner. That is, if the baby looks half-foreigner. The fine can often be negotiated down to perhaps $300 from some ridiculous sum like $10,000. If the
couple marry before the baby is born, everything is kosher. Foreigners who visit local prostitutes can also expect an unwelcome surprise in the morning when the police knock on the door of their hotel and demand the foreigner pay a fine for their illegal activity. It is a small, densely populated town where people love to gossip so nobody should really expect to do anything in secret.
The town boasts three or four “steam-baths”, fabulous home-made saunas, created by building a fire underneath an elevated floor, making a small, confined room with a hole in the floor just above the fire, and covering the hole with herbs like lemongrass, so the steam comes up through the herbs. This process creates a wonderful herbal sauna, priced reasonably at $1.25 per visit.
As tourism has grown here, an incredible number of downtown residents have turned parts of their homes in to guest houses, hotels, restaurants or massage shops. The residents live either upstairs, downstairs or move out of the home all together, making so much money from their new business that its better for them to live just out of town. On some streets there are five massage shops in
a row, offering hour-long massages, regular, oil, hand or foot, by various levels of “trained” or often untrained masseuses, for about $5 an hour. A night at a guest house or a hotel can set you back from $5 per night all the way up to $1500 per night, at the new Amantaka, an ultra-luxury resort with a swimming pool and many servants on-call. Locals call it the “Old Hospital Hotel” as it was built on the grounds of the Old Hospital. Ironically, a local family across the street from the Old Hospital Hotel has just begun letting backpackers camp in tents set-up on their lawn for $3 a night.
Most teenagers and young people in their twenties work in the tourism business, at a restaurant, massage parlor or guesthouse, and spend most of their day bored, doing nothing at all, just waiting for guests. For their employers, they are cheap labor, about $40 a month, for work six days a week, 8 hours a day. Unfortunately, the more stimulating work: medical, legal, governmental, is extremely poorly paid and thus undesirable. A friend working for the government actually makes $22 a month for full-time work. (Although government perks are
many, including a 2 ½ hour lunch break, 11:30-2, and a measure of protection for one’s entire extended family.) One of the better paying jobs is tour guide, for which one must take an expensive course and be fully certified to do. The way kids in the US dream of being a basketball player or a rapper in the US these days, the kids here dream of being a tour guide or owning their own guesthouse one day.
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Neal
non-member comment
following your blog
Great to follow your observations on your recent travels. It's a pleasure reading the clarity and interesting details in your words. Looking forward to more. Best to you for safe travels.