Luang Prabang, Laos – February 19, 2000
At 4am, the drums started. The cymbals started about twenty seconds later.
For the three days leading up to every month’s full moon, the Buddhist monks beat a giant drum at 4am and 4pm. Our guesthouse was located right across the road from a wat, or temple, and we had a ringside seat for the proceedings.
For about 15 minutes, the drums and cymbals clanged along. I managed to get back to sleep until about 5, when the roosters all started greeting the day.
What the hell, I thought, and got out of bed early. I showered and walked up to the “Fresh and Healthy Bakery,” where I treated myself to fantastic Laos coffee and a cinnamon roll. My enthusiasm for travel, dampened by my Malaysia trip and various illnesses, was back. My enthusiasm for Southeast Asia, nonexistent until this morning, was all for Laos.
Luang Prabang by day was still friendly and atmospheric. The cafes were cheap and tasty and the local market barely sold anything for tourists. It was all cheap plastic housewares, sold by locals to locals. There were tourist shops and a small tourist bazaar to sell weavings and intricate pillowcases.
At 10, Mr. Chiang took our group on a tour of the Royal Palace Museum. It was the home to the royal family from 1904 to 1975, when the royal family was exiled to Northern Laos, never to be heard from again. The Museum was filled with treasures, all gifts from other countries. The gifts from the USA were pretty tacky – plastic models of Apollo and whatnot.
I wandered around the town for the afternoon, enjoying a delicious tuna sandwich and coconut square for lunch. At 2:30, six of us chartered a jumbo for a trip to some outlying villages.
A jumbo is basically a really big tuk-tuk. It’s a three-wheeled mini-pickup. The bed is lined with benches. Six of us piled in and the driver took us out into the countryside.
Our first stop was this ridiculous “weaving village.” It was a big tourist spot, and the local women acted like a rippling wave as I walked by them.
Every woman I passed raised from a sitting to a squatting position, waved a weaving at me and said, “Madame.” It would have been laughable, but I carefully kept my humor under control so as to not be misunderstood and insulting.
We were done with the “weaving village” in about eight and a half minutes and proceeded down rural dirt roads to the “bamboo village.”
The bamboo village was the real thing. Locals didn’t actually sell anything – they lived in houses on stilts and made baskets from bamboo, which they walked to town and sold in the market. We walked around, causing a stir with our presence. The highlight was a band of screaming children, all playing peekaboo with their big bamboo baskets.
The final “weaving village” was a nice, small shop with better stuff than the first. I made our group wait while I made a few purchases, and silently cursed them for their lack of interest and patience. I could’ve spent more than 15 minutes in the store.
It was 4pm and our jumbo was driving past a wat. The drums and cymbals started and we pulled over.
The “monks” were about 14-years-old. They were dressed in their orange robes and beating the drums and cymbals persistently. All kinds of local kids watched, their amazement as obvious as ours. We all snapped photos, of course.
Back in Luang Prabang, I left my new Laos skirt with a sewing lady for adjustments. I ran into Tom from Missouri and Wolfie the German and we all went to the night market to hunt for rat-on-a-stick.
The night market is a food market, featuring a variety of strange fruits and vegetables. Wendy had seen the locals selling and eating fried split rat-on-a-stick before and I was determined to see this.
It must not be rat season because we saw no rat-on-a-stick. But we did see a variety of hideous red congealed blood products, pig faces, intestines, livers, chicken pieces covered in flies, fried fetal pigs, and strange black furry bits. I inquired a few places about the rat-on-a-stick, but there was no one who knew any more English than “pig” and I didn’t know the Laos word for “rat” so we had no luck.
One man offered me “first rate grass.” I declined, instead asking if he knew where I could find barbecued rat-on-a-stick. He giggled and nopped me. A nop is a slight praying gesture. The man put his hands together and lowered his head slightly towards me and wished me good luck.
Slightly sickened by the night market experience, we went for dinner, which turned out to be wildly mediocre. We had to appease our tummies with more banana pancakes, flan and pineapple juice. We went off to find a bread-making ceremony but instead all we found was rather slow party with a lot of beer and no patrons. Wendy asked the proprietor of Cafe des Artes to find me a rat-on-a-stick. Amused, the proprietor promised to do so but then went to the disco instead.
When I returned to the guesthouse, I thought that I heard someone rustling around in the bushes outside my window. I attributed it to paranoia and changed into my t-shirt and went to sleep.
