Longboat Down the Mekong and Luang Prabang

We are now in Luang Prabang, the Santa Fe of Southeast Asia.  It is a jewel of a town -- an expensive jewel (by southeast asian standards) but a jewel nonetheless.  The town sits on a pennisula shaped like a finger, all of which has been designated world heritage.  One side of the pennisula is the Mekong and on the other a tributary called the Nam Khan.  Both are lazy rivers which, in combination with the palms and bamboo gently swaying in the light breeze, lend the town an intoxicatingly, soporific air.  Like Chiang Mai, the town is studded with Buddhists temples, and the old, french colonial buildings and villas, the little cafes along the streets and tree-lined lanes, and the easy-going and friendly Lao people create an atmosphere conducive to what we were looking for: relaxation.  We hope to spend at least a few days here.

Unfortunately the longboat trip from Chiang Mai to Luang Prabang has become a well-beaten path.  The stampeding herd are mostly europeans (and some americans) in their early twenties traveling on the super-highway that is the southeast asian circuit.  Over the past few years small parts of Laos have been coopted by the young and the brash in hot pursuit of yet another exoctic, untouched location where they can imbibe mass quantities of alcohol and smoke gonj and opium with impunity.  I'm sounding like an old man.

The longboat trip was really a two-day booze cruise for the young runts.  With their crates of BeerLao, they coelesced at the front of the boat, led by a couple of ragged californians with a guitar and a harmonica, neither of whom could play a chord in tune, and composed a host of campfire-like sing-alongs that seemed to last as long as a Grateful Dead set.  We were treated to stellar renditions of Stand By Me and Hotel California on both days.  A group of drunken Thais got into the action late on the second day and played their own Thai rendition of Hotel California.  Very poignant.

Despite the sideshow, the boat trip was well worth it.  The muddy, roiling Mekong cuts through jungle-clad hills sprinkled with small, remote villages of bamboo and thatch huts.  Fisherman wander down to the elegantly-straited sand beaches on the banks of the river to check their nets that are tied onto the ends of bamboo poles set into the cracks of rocks the color of pewter and plum and that rise from the water like the barnacled heads of humback whales or the grinning snouts of a pod of porpoises coming to the surface for a sneak peek at terra firma. 

One the second day I saw a fisherman wearing a conical "non la" hat crouched like a tiger on the aft deck of a longboat pulling up a net near the bank of the river.  As we passed by -- the prow of our boat cleaving the turbid waters and sending a wave towards shore which the man rode out like a gentleman bullrider -- as we passed by, he looked up and stared at us quizically - a boat load of tourists, many of us snapping photographs, others brandishing a bottle of beer and yodling at the tops of their lungs.  I was in a reverie at the time, having already consumed a lukewarm BeerLao myself, and thought that while I was only 20 yards away from the crouching man our lives were worlds apart.  I was just passing through, a voyeur, a spectator, nothing more, watching, like a movie reel, a snippet of a the day in the life of a man whose simple-but-hard means of subsistence, which at times I naively admire and sometimes envy, was inscrutable, incomprehensible, illegible. It was no different in Nepal or Georgia or Armenia.  I sometimes mistakenly paint their lives with a patina, probably because many of their villages are so ridiculously idyllic in setting it makes you want to cry.  Or maybe I ascribe to every one of them the same words once uttered to me by my soft-spoken guide, Portfilio, in Boliva.  I stupidly asked him if he would ever like to go to New York City. He said in his very broken spanish, while pointing at the snow-capped peaks of the Cordillera Real:  "No.  Que tranquilo!  Que linda!"  But I've learned that not everyone living in a beautiful village in a developing country feels that way.  Alot of them are outwardly happy, most of the kids are laughing in the sun, riding on their dad's backs, rolling down sand dunes on the banks of the Mekong.  I'm sure some if not most of them are quite content where they are. Others want to come to the USA-- we've been tod as much.  I wondered as I passed the crouching tiger if he envied us -- if he wanted what we had.

Sorry, this is getting long and trite.

We'll be in Luang Prabang for a few more days.  I'll blog again once we see more of it.