Luang Prabang

This is the post I was trying to publish for about four days. The first part was written the 12th of March (Saturday) and the second part was written the 13th of March (Sunday).

I'm feeling slightly nauseated after what was perhaps too much really good food this morning but also significantly better tempered than I have the past two days. One reason might be the food, another might be the fact that I FINALLY got a haircut this afternoon.

One of the main things that I am looking forward to in America is being able to get haircuts from other Caucasians. Yeah, I know that sounds bad but my hair type is strange enough for people to deal with as it is (apparently): I rarely get haircuts I'm happy with in America, in Korea I was just happy it cut. Maybe I'm expecting too much. Anyway, all of my haircuts in Asia (today's being no exception) have ended about the same: The last fifteen or so minutes are spent, by the hairdresser, in a sort of quiet struggle where they try and try in vain, using various methods, to get all of my hair to wave approximately the same direction. Its futile. In America its not much better. There they generally just nuke it with chemicals until it does actually all wave in the same direction, at least for the next 48 hours. I've been strongly considering getting a straight perm for the past few months and just circumvent the issue altogether. I almost got one today but I talked myself out of it last night. Instead I opted for a trim to at least get rid of my very damaged split ends (last haircut: circa August 2010) which turned out to be difficult enough as it was. The hairstylist had to ran across the street to grab a friend to translate for me. I still couldn't quite explain to this fiend the idea of layering anyway. In the end I just said, if its wrong, it's okay, and went with whatever happened. Which ended up being not that bad at all, and at the very least, much cooler. In any case it was worth the 40,000 kip (just shy of $5).

But enough about my hair.

The last time I posted was Thursday morning (I think) and now it's Saturday afternoon (almost evening). After Nicole returned from her volunteer teaching around noon on Thursday we decided to go out to the waterfalls just outside of Luang Prabang. We grabbed a tuktuk that was waiting for more passengers to take us just there. The driver already had a young British couple and set off once he had us.

The drive to the waterfalls took about an hour and was beautifully scenic. We drove past the poorer outskirts of town and then a bit into the surrounding countrysides, the landscapes quickly changing from town to endless fields backed by forested foothills. It's the dry season here in Laos so the roads were a bit dusty even though they are paved. It was a bit difficult to breathe but well worth the view.

Once arrived, we paid 20,000 kip to enter. The first thing we came to was a bear preserve. Apparently this group rescues and then cares for captures Asiatic Black Bears (also called Moon Bears named for the moon-shaped crest on their chests) there were a number of bears living on the reserve, mainly chilling out, and playing with one another.

After the bears we came to the waterfalls. Everyone we have met before this in Luang Prabang had told us time and again that we HAD to see the waterfalls. I always listened to them thinking, in my head, how great can waterfalls be? They can be big, they can catch the light in beautiful ways, they can be multi-layered or something similarly interesting. I felt like I has seen the gamut of what to expect when it came to waterfalls.

These waterfalls were ridiculous. I feel like, now having seen them, that I have seen countless images and paintings, perhaps in some bright, gaudy colors, depicting something similar to this place. Those types of pictures that you look at and think, wow, that's beautiful, but... too beautiful; that's the kind of thing that only exists in some artist's imagination but it doesn't really exist in real life. You think to yourself, this artist went a little too far, this is cheesy. Maybe you expect there to be whales flying in the sky and a rainbow-colored sunset in this picture too, its that kind of cheesy. You think, yeah, okay. Nice. But too nice.

Well these waterfalls were it. I have never seen such blue water. I mean BLUE. I am sure the pictures won't do them justice. The water was absolutely bright blue. So blue it looked as if it had been dyed. The water in the pools was not clear, but instead, slightly cloudy, giving it an even bluer look and making the pools seem considerably more other-worldly. The water fell from one pool to another over short little ledges that connected a series of pools to one another. People just lazed about, swimming in the pools or jumping in from a swinging rope attached to a tree overhanging one of the largest and deepest.

These were all fed by one big, grandiose waterfall from way up a cliff. Nicole and I walked up and then down what was one of the most treacherous paths I have ever taken in my life to get to the top. This was well worth it.

It was clear that, while many people visited the waterfalls, very few people bothered to climb up to the top of the largest one.

~

What I wrote up until this point was written Saturday afternoon before I ran out of time at my internet cafe. Now it's Sunday afternoon.

~

Anyway, at the top of the waterfall it was so peaceful. The waterfall was not fed by any kind of river but instead at the top the floor of the forest was covered in a few inches of water. The water was generally stagnant and flowed so slowly where it did flow at all that you would never have guessed that it fed a waterfall. The water was also perfectly clear and great to step in (which we had to to cross to the other side) though in some places there was something of a path formed from dirt which looked like it had been hardened by hundreds of footsteps. The water cut through the hardened path in various places to leave a little patchwork of organically shaped chunks of path squiggling through the shallow water. Somewhere up there my camera battery ran out.

One the way back our tuktuk driver also carried home a group of two Americans and a Canadian who had actually biked up to the waterfalls. As we drove back over the 27 kilometers of rolling hills between the waterfalls and the town they (and we) kind of marveled at their accomplishment. They also turned out to be ex-English teachers from Korea just like we are. I'm not sure I have mentioned this so far but I think all of the young Americans and Canadians (of which there are relatively few compared to Europeans anyway) have been English teachers from Korea either on vacation or just finished and on their way home. It's kind of ridiculous.

That evening we went to a used bookstore that had advertised free movies each evening. We ate pizza and watched Inception. I think I was the last person in the world to have seen that film. After all the hype I have heard about for the last billion months, I actually wasn't that into it. The pizza was pretty good though.

I went to bed with one of the worst headaches I have ever had, however. The sun here just gets to me sometimes. It's so bright and so constant.

Friday and Saturday we didn't do much. After almost two weeks of a lot of sightseeing and moving around, we took advantage of some peaceful time. Luang Prabang is a good place for this kind of thing. Its so small and so quiet its easy to relax. But the smallness and quietness has another benefit: there really isn't a whole lot to do in all honesty. We spent a lot of time taking walks or reading or just enjoying the scenery.

Luang Prabang is Laos' third most populated city but only has about 100,000 residents (the largest city and capital, Vientiane, has about 800,000 residents; the national population is about 6.8 million). Considering that, its easy to understand how the place is so quiet. It was also declared a UNESCO world Heritage site which means (I believe) that a number of restrictions are placed on the town. There are no chain restaurants or chain anything here (no McDonalds, no Hilton) and building is very restricted. It's all in an effort to preserve the town's unique feel, mainly because of the architecture which is an interesting blend of Laotian and French giving this place a strangely European feel. There are no large streets and most of the lighting at night comes from buildings or occasional streetlights. That means that when you're walking along the river at night and there's a beautiful bamboo bridge lit up with Christmas lights down the road from you, those Christmas lights are the most noticeable thing in your line of sight. With that said, bamboo is a lot stronger than it feels like when you're walking on it. That also means the water in the river is pitch, pitch black and the streets glow moodily instead of shine. It's pretty beautiful.

One thing interesting that we did on Friday was to visit the cultural museum in the center of town. The building was once the palace (and Luang Probang the capital) for the kings and royal family of the Kingdom of Laos until it became a Socalist/Communist nation in 1975 with its capital moved to Vientiane. The museum, which is beautiful, houses royal artifacts and some religious historical relics as well as a great many gifts from other nations to the kings of Laos over the years. What interested me the most were these gifts, most of which displayed were from the late fifties to the mid seventies. It was just strange for me to see things, which really aren't that old, being displayed as they were. While they're not that old they are still relics of a decades-dead government for the Laotian people making them as much a part of history as the little metal-cast buddha statues in the cases nearby which were hundreds of years old.

Another thing that interested me about this exhibit were the gifts themselves. A lot of the gifts were books and most of these books were something similar to a tourist book. There were a lot of pictures depicting famous places or long national histories. What impression I got was that some country or another (some examples included Thailand, Japan, France, USSR, or USA) would send, as gifts, books in some way to teach about their own country. Maybe a history or a set of classic novels or folk stories. It makes me think about that time as it relates to our current time where information runs rampant on the internet. Back then, even though it was just fifty or sixty years ago or less, maybe these books compromised a lot of what the Laotian leaders knew of, say, the finer details of Belgium's culture, or something. Maybe its weird that it's hard for me to conceive of this kind of exchange of knowledge.

Another interesting piece. Apparently one of the gifts from the USA was a miniature model of the lunar landing pod. Another was a tiny Kingdom of Laos flag, under glass, with an inscription telling that this flag had traveled to the moon. With it were some fragments of the moon, under glass. All a gift from R. Nixon and the USA.