Luang Prabang, Laos (Life): February 12-15, 2007

As monstrously long as some of my posts are, I think the length would be excessive, even for me, if I tried to cram Luang Prabang into just one. So, I've decided to chop it in half. This post will deal with stuff like where I stayed, what I ate, and the various animals and religious figures I encountered around town.

To begin with, Luang Prabang's airport is tiny! I guess that should not surprise me, since I think the town only has about 20,000 people living there, and the airport seems to mainly serve tourists. When I was waiting to fly on to Cambodia, they had flights departing from the airport every hour or two. From the international departures room, I didn't see more than one or two planes on the ground at a time. For all of that, the place was well-run, and even when a planeload of tourists (including me) arrived needing to purchase visas on arrival, everything proceeded in an orderly fashion. I got to ride into town (and back to the airport when it was time to go) in a tuk-tuk, which is essentially a little open-sided truck that ferries passengers around.

I changed a few hundred dollars into Lao kip, which instantly transformed me into a multi-millionaire. I figured that, at the least, I would probably pay for my lodging in kip, and I needed cash for food and the like. Alas, I paid for my guesthouse in dollars, and now, stashed away in my computer desk are over a million kip which nobody will exchange.

Laos, you see, is dirt cheap. I had to try really hard, and order dessert and a couple of drinks at one of the nicer restaurants in town one night, to crack the ten dollar mark for a meal. You can get an hour massage for under five dollars. Potato chips, interestingly, were not all that far off of U.S. prices. It cost 8,000 kip for one bag, which works out to a little over 80 cents.

I stayed at the Senesouk Guest-house, which was, conven-iently, right across the street from Wat Sene. The guesthouse was clean and quiet, perhaps in part because everyone has to take their shoes off before walking inside. They store everyone's shoes in a big cabinet by the front door. I was on the second floor, and had a balcony! It was as glorious as it looks. I was able to sit there in the mornings and watch the monks go by. In the late afternoons/early evenings, I could sit there and listen while the monks did some chanting at their nearby wats.

Every morning, around sunrise, the monks of Luang Prabang walk in procession down the street with wicker baskets and collect alms from the faithful in the form of sticky rice, which they have for breakfast. The pictures aren't the greatest, because I didn't want to get down in the monks' faces and hassle them during a holy time, though some tourists apparently did not share my qualms.

And there are a lot of monks because Luang Prabang has a lot of wats (temple/school complexes where a number of monks make their homes). So, after the morning procession, when I was out and about, I saw lots of monks, and many of them were very young. A fair number of them seemed to gravitate toward Internet cafes, and the ones that I passed by when I checked my e-mail often had English dictionaries with them.

Luang Prabang also has a number of chickens wandering the side streets. This one in particular was not a fan of me; he kept giving me the evil eye while I observed his antics. The roosters of Luang Prabang, by the way, are noisy as all get-out. They start crowing around 3 a.m. and just keep going until nightfall. I'm not sure why they crow so long before sunup, but maybe they've adapted or something, because the monks often start chanting around 4 a.m.

Also present were dogs and kitties. The cats were especially noticeable (I think there were more, but maybe I just notice them because I am a cat person). Since most restaurants aren't entirely indoor, sometimes a cat will just saunter in, sit by a table, stare at the diners, and meow for a while. Then, if it doesn't get fed, it will move on to another table and repeat the process. Nearly every cat I saw in Luang Prabang (and, actually, nearly every cat I saw in southeast Asia) had a clubbed tail. I thought maybe it was a genetic thing, at first -- Luang Prabang isn't that large, and maybe the cats I saw were mostly related -- but further research indicates that it's a common practice. I felt a little sad when I found that out, though I have to say, this cat seemed to be pretty content in his sunbeam:

The food in Laos was wonderful, far better than I expected. I had some great chicken and basil dish along with some fried morning glories as my first meal there. I also tried some papaya salad (not my favorite, but a local specialty), drank about a million fruit shakes, and, for breakfast one day, had sticky rice in coconut milk (which I have tried, with varying level of success, to replicate at home) coupled with coffee sweetened with condensed milk. I'm not a breakfast person, but I totally enjoyed that. I also tried Beer Lao, the national beer which gets a lot of raves. It was...OK. It was lighter than I usually enjoy, but I can see why, if a person goes to Laos knowing nothing about the place, they would be very pleasantly surprised.

Next up: lots of pictures of wats.

New York City to Luang Prabang, Laos: February 10-12, 2007

As I have been going on about ad infinitum on this blog, I took a trip to Southeast Asia last month. In case you are not as geographically nerdy as some, Southeast Asia is essentially located on the other side of the planet from New York -- there is, in fact, a 12-hour time difference, and it takes virtually the same amount of time to fly there whether you go west or east.

Naturally, it takes a long time to get there. When I was shopping around for tickets, the shortest itinerary was also the cheapest -- Thai Airways flys non-stop between New York and Bangkok in about 17 hours. So the flight to and from New York was pretty much a no-brainer. My first real "stop" on the trip was Luang Prabang, Laos, but in the absence of any direct flights there from the United States, Bangkok seemed the logical connecting point. At noon on February 11, I took off from New York.

The good things I heard about Thai Airways turned out to be true. There was plenty of leg room in economy class (for me, at least -- I make no promises to Shaquille O'Neal), and they served three meals. In the interests of excruciating detail, my first meal was cucumber salad with marinated baby shrimp, followed by grilled marinated chicken with teriyaki sauce, and chocolate cake. My second meal was a mixed green salad, pork in pa-naeng curry sauce, and a strawberry chocolate confection. The final meal was Pad Thai with prawns. They also went around offering wine (and after each meal, cognac) to everyone, and cup-of-noodles were available at the rear of the plane if you got hungry between meals.

The in-flight entertainment was pretty voluminous. I watched a movie and an episode of America's Next Top Model, but, as is my tendency, I read for most of the flight.

I can't prove it, but I suspect the guy next to me may have been going to Thailand for shady purposes. My proof? (1) He was middle-aged; (2) he appeared to be travelling alone; (3) he watched "Titanic"; (4) he said all of two words the entire flight (one of which was a grunted "sorry" when, in his sleep, he slammed his elbow into my ribs); (5) he had a little white canvas duffle bag as his carryon; and (6) he chose the fish for one of the meals, proving he never saw the movie "Airplane" and thus has lived in some sort of bubble his whole life. Creepy.

Among the flight's other delights was the Skymap, where you could track the plane's progress as the flight went on. I was taken a little by surprise, as the map on Thai Aiways' website suggested the flight would go eastward. When the pilot got on the intercom at the beginning of the flight, however, he mentioned that we would be flying over countries such as Sweden, Afghanistan, and India, none of which are located between New York and Thailand if you're flying westward. Anyway, the flight, though long, was without incident.

When I landed and got through customs, around 5:30 p.m. or so on February 11 (the magic of timezones!), someone from my guesthouse (the owner's son) was there with a sign to meet me and drive me to where I was staying. I know the new Bangkok airport has gotten reviews that are almost universally bad, but at least at this point, it looked fine to me.

I stayed overnight at the Sanawan Palace Guesthouse, which had a nifty-looking pool, though the rooms were a little shabby for the price. As they are a little closer to the new airport than most of the guesthouses in town, I suspect they can charge a bit more. However, other than a big roach in the hallway on the way to my room, my stay was relatively creepy-crawly free (and I killed a mosquito with my bare hands!). As would be the case with most places I stayed, I had hot water and a shower which was really just a shower head and a drain in the bathroom. It did its job. I slept like the dead, and early the next morning, headed for the airport for my flight to Luang Prabang.

Once again, I saw few problems with the new airport (though, the woman at check-in, a trainee, got pretty confused about my e-ticket, necessitating some trips back and forth between counters while we all politely tried to fix the issue). Once I got through the first security check, I really should have gotten coffee, but foolishly, I went right to my gate. Since this requires another security check, and there are no restaurants after the second check, I was pretty much out of luck, and at the mercy of caffeine withdrawal, until I got on the plane.

As near as I can tell, the Bangkok to Luang Prabang route is essentially held by two airlines: Lao Airways and Bangkok Airways, so you can't really get a cheap flight there. I flew Bangkok, which was perfectly nice, and once I got my coffee, I even started to enjoy the experience. They had us on a little prop plane with vibrant fishies painted on the fuselage. The flight itself took about two hours.

I Swear, The Next Post Will Be About Thailand

I fully intend to start updating about my Southeast Asia trip this weekend. Because I am nothing if not impatient, though, I am already thinking about the next trip, even though it will certainly not happen for over a year.

I know I want to go somewhere in Africa. I have, for a while, been working under the assumption that I will be going to Namibia. Of course, now that it's the next big trip to be planned, I'm having all sorts of second thoughts about other places I could go. The most appealing options, as I see them at this point, would include:

• Namibia -- Actually, I have long had my eye on a camping safari that would take me around to most of what I'd like to see in Namibia (Swakopmund, the dunes, Etosha National Park), plus a bit of Botswana (Chobe National Park, the Okavango Delta), winding up at Victoria Falls.

• Tanzania -- I'd spend the first week on safari up north (Serengeti National Park, the Ngorongoro Crater, hopefully Lake Manyara), then head down to Zanzibar and end up on the beach there. Alternatively, I could take a week and trek up Mt. Kilimanjaro, but I don't know if that trumps the beach and other cool things on Zanzibar for me. It might be nice to take a long trip that doesn't involve vast amounts of climbing. Maybe I could just, you know, drive by and look at Mt. Kilimanjaro.

• Ethiopia -- The historical circuit, some wildlife. Except, while Ethiopia has wildlife, I don't think it has WILDLIFE quite like Tanzania and Namibia/Botswana.

Or somewhere else entirely. I hear Malawi is nice, though it's hard to adopt as a foreigner unless you are Madonna.

Maybe I should take a poll or something. If I could arrange to win several million dollars, enabling me to take a year away from work and travel around the whole continent, that would also be an acceptable solution.