Everything moves slower in Luang Prabang

We've been enjoying Luang Prabang and the surrounding areas for a few days now. The city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, notable for its colonial French architecture and beautiful temples (wats). The downtown historic core of Luang Prabang is situated at the confluence of the Mekong and Khan rivers. So it's a rather thin and long city consisting primarily, from a tourist's point of view, of a riverside avenue, a main street, and a few lateral streets and alleys that branch off the two big streets in either direction. The town is quiet in comparison to Thailand, even the hawkers in the night market wait patiently until you approach them and show sustained interest.

And the food, as everywhere else we've been, is just terrific. Good baguettes with vegetables and cheese, tuna, pork, or egg are available for no more than $1. You can get a filling and vegetarian (but rather greasy and bland) meal in "food alley" for about 50 cents. If you're willing to pay $5-6 for a meal, you're eating very well indeed.

Besides "chilling out", the primary activities for a tourist in Luang Prabang include buying handmade cotton and silk textiles, elephant riding, visiting the local waterfalls (friends have told us that they are just stunning, and we've scheduled a visit for today, so hopefully they will feature in the next update), and of course, trekking.

Needing to rid ourselves of the memory of our last "trek", we signed up for one here, and spent the past two days in a rural district no more than two hours drive from the city. This trek was worlds apart from the Pai experience. Our guides, Sompon and Ni, were young, energetic, fun, and communicative. And the trek itself was slow-paced and lovely. The whole thing happened in a river valley, with stunning mountainscapes as the backdrop for everything and a slow moving river below.

Interlude - Apropos of Landscapes

When we find the time and a decent connection, I want to post an album of landscape shots - there is a fantastic landscape ecology story to be told about Laos. We have tons of pictures of natural resource use - logging, teak plantations, fishing, slaughtering animals by the riverbank, slash and burn agriculture on the hillsides, and other shots besides. One of the more interesting moments on the slow boat for me came when I sat next to someone who commented on how wild the mountains looked. I couldn't help think that they looked anything but - it was a completely human managed landscape. The ridges of the mountains look relatively untouched, complete with mixed hardwoods, but from the ridgelines to the river it's all human intervention. I grilled our guides on land use policy - the short version is that in river valleys with any villages, outside of conservation areas (and sometimes in them) the land is all in use for agriculture, hunting, and logging. Despite the communist past most land is owned privately, not by village councils (of course, this is not coming from authoritative sources) and farmers practice slash and burn on a three year cycle. In areas that have been fallow for two or more years bamboo takes over pretty quickly, and when you look at the mountains you notice definite habitat patches in very clearly human-made shapes. The bamboo, of course, is also used as a building material and food source. In and near the villages (on the rivers) farmers plant rice and small teak plantations. That seems to be the main purpose of the forestry and agronomy schools that we see everywhere.

Back to the Trek

The first day involved an afternoon bike ride (great, except for the last half hour when my seat broke and I did a very awkward last few k's). The roads were rutted and rocky, but the trekking company chose a good stretch of road with quite a few downhills and only a few bad uphills. They didn't provide helmets so we couldn't cut totally loose, but we still hit some pretty wild speeds. We stopped halfway through for a nice lunch in a local Khmu (pronounced Ka-moo) village. According to our guides there are three major ethnic groups in this part of Laos: the Lao, the Khmu, and the Hmong. We saw villages of all three types on our trek.

After our ride we arrived at a large Lao village that housed the local boarding school, which drew students from many surrounding villages, including Khmu and Hmong villages. The first thing we discovered, as we biked in over a bridge, is that the villagers had built small dams in the river to create run-of-river micro hydro installations. The next day I went down to inspect the small turbines and discovered that none of them were operational (which explained the diesel generator we had heard the night before). I was hoping for an explanation but never got it. I can't help but wonder if it's not just another failed development project, and why this one failed. Oh well, the grid is scheduled to get to the village next year.

And the villagers didn't seem to mind. When we arrived there was already a small drinking party underway. Some friends had dropped by from another village so a family whose house was located 10 metres from our "guest house" had us over to drink lao whisky and eat pork cracklings and grilled fish that they had just caught, seasoned with galangal and ginger. It was terrific! After some drinking we went to inspect the local school. 80:1 student/teacher ratio, no lighting in any classroom, and the kids couldn't care less - they were having a fantastic time and seemed to be learning either algebra or physics, hard to tell from a cursory look at the blackboard when it's written mostly in Lao. We then went back and had a great dinner, and slept soundly.

I woke up in the morning and swore I could hear a pig screaming. I went outside, and sure enough, a pig was being slaughtered just down the way from us.

STOP HERE IF YOU DON'T HANDLE GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS WELL.

The pig, a big 50 kilo sow, had its feet bound and was being held down flat by two men, one of whom was also pressing a large bamboo pole into its middle. By the time I got there another man had already slit its throat and was draining the blood into a blue bucket, which he swirled continually with his left hand while occasionally widening the throat incision with the knife in his right. When most of the blood had been collected they left the pig to go through its final spasms. A metre away they had a large pot of water and leaves boiling away over a cooking fire. When the pig was quite dead they took a few thin metal spoons, and ladling boiling water over its skin they began to scrape away all of its hair. This took about 15 minutes. After all the water had been used and the hair was nearly all gone, the pot was removed from the fire and the pig was thrown on top of the pot-stand, to singe away the remaining hairs (and presumably make the skin easier to work with. After a 15 minute singeing session the pig was trussed up on a sturdy bamboo pole and the three man slaughtering team moved down to the river. At the river we watched as they scraped down the carcass a final time before slitting it open from belly to ribs and extracting all the internal organs. The small intestine was cut off first, and its contents emptied into the river. After flushing the waste out of the intestine one man cut a thin bamboo rod which he ran through the entire length of the tube to ensure it was clean. Then this procedure was repeated with the large intestine. The whole spectacle attracted hundreds of fish, which nipped at the intestines, the spilled waste, and the small bits of flesh or whole glands that the butchers threw downstream. The rest of the internal organs were also cleaned and the head was severed. The remaining carcass was cut in two and then the meat was brought up to the women for cooking. Unfortunately, when cutting off the head one of the men had noticed small white ovals, looking very much like eggs, throughout the brain and in some parts of the pigs flesh. When the women saw the eggs they had a quick conference. Our guide explained that the pig was diseased, and that they would not eat it. All of the meat was thrown out, and then another pig was butchered, following the same method. This time we didn't stick around.

GRAPHIC DESCRIPTION IS OVER. COMMENCE READING.

After breakfast we headed out for a lovely and slow day of rafting. The river is quite low as the rainy season is just ended, so the most we could hope for were some class 2 rapids. Basically, Jenna and I got splashed a few times, but essentially we spent the day drifting, sleeping, and swimming our way down a gorgeous river. Time was moving as slow as it could, and it looked like little had changed around the river in a very long time. Old women were making bamboo fences to keep water buffaloes out of their vegetable gardens. Young boys were fishing with hand woven nets and trapping shrimp and crabs with traps made of woven bamboo. Even the boats we saw were being made largely by hand - the boards were cut with a two man saw. With the exception of some steel knives and one electric sander, the entire process was done as it had no doubt been done 200 years earlier. The whole thing was magic. We eventually pulled out of the river in the afternoon, and headed back to Luang Prabang. Fortunately, it's a city that works on slow time too, so it wasn't much of a disruption to head back in. Now we're here and luxuriating again - electricity, a great shower, and internet cafes. Hope you've enjoyed reading, expect another update here, or from Cambodia.

We've made arrangements to fly from here to Cambodia (via Bangkok) on Sunday. Our next stop will be in Siem Reap to allow us to visit Angkor wat, ancient and ruined home of the Khmer empire.