Thailand 16: May 12, 2002

We've continued to do a lot of traveling. Last month to Laos and earlier this month to northern Thailand.

We flew into Luang Prabang in Laos for Lao New Year. In Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Burma, traditional New Year's is in April, at the end of the dry season and the beginning of the rainy season. Its a tradition that came from southern India hundreds of years ago. Depending on the exact location, the holiday lasts from 4 to 7 days. It's the biggest holiday of the year and big cities like Bangkok typically empty out as thousands and thousands of people head back to visit relatives in the countryside. In Thailand, the holiday is known as Songkran, but in Laos, it's simply pii mai, or New Years.

You can tell Laos from Thailand, even from 20,000 feet up in an airplane. The rice fields, neatly tended and well-defined, stop. Roads end. The end-of-dry-season fires used to clear the fields for new planting blow away. The air clears and you look down over miles and miles of hilly forests with the occasional village and red clay path. No cars, no factories. Luang Prabang is situated at the confluence of the Mekong river and the smaller Nam Khan river. The plane flies over the town and you notice a large hill with a temple on top right in the middle of the small city. When we climbed up the 300 steps to get to that temple the next day, we were rewarded with a view of the entire city, the Mekong and the enclosing mountain ridges. The airport gets about 5 flights a day, one from Thailand, and the rest from other Lao cities. The airport was built a few years back with help from the Thai government and is well-kept and contains a duty-free shop specializing in French wines to take back to high-tax Thailand.

We met up with our friends Tak and Kay, who had driven down from Chiang Rai through northern Laos to meet us in the city. Luang Prabang's population is about 30,000 and it had swollen a few thousand more with foreign backpackers and Lao from the region who came in for the holiday. We stayed at a great little hotel right off the main street and around the corner from a few of the dozens of wats (Buddhist temples) in the city. Luang Prabang is famous for the number and the beauty of its temples, and because it is so compact, they seem to be everywhere.

The heart of the festival (at least as it is celebrated by most people today) is water. Everywhere you go, people are throwing, squirting, pouring and shooting water at each other. It does not matter who you are, what you are wearing, or where you are walking or riding. You will get wet. Its all good natured, but on every corner kids set up shop with buckets and squirt guns to get all passers-by. Groups of teens drive around in the back of pick-up trucks engaging in water battles with other trucks. Packs of bearded, patchouli wearing hippy backpackers prowl the streets with super soakers running after local Lao to sop each other. Construction workers pour barrels full down over pedestrians. A novice monk popped out from behind the wall of his temple to dump a bucket over my head. We've got pictures of groups of young monks in their saffron robes splashing moped riders. We saw the staff from perhaps Luang Prabang's nicest hotel set up shop on a balcony and douse kids, grannies and any other unsuspecting bystander.

On one day of the festival, most of the local residents ferry across the Mekong to a sand bar on the other side of the river. There, families build large sand stupas which they cover with white powder and top with colored pennants and flags. The powder also makes for good weaponry and people throw, smear and pour it on each other (and us). Groups of Lao congregate under make-shift tents drinking beer and eating local snacks, including spicy papaya salad and grilled chicken feet -- quite a bargain at 6 cents. Liz took quite a liking to the chicken feet (the normal hygenic concerns stangely not affecting her appetite) and downed 3, claws and all (we have photos).

The next day is the Miss Pii Mai parade, which travels down the main street. We reserved some front row seats in a cafe across from our hotel, ordered a few drinks and settled in. The procession consisted of a few floats, on one of which perched Miss Pii Mai herself, along with her court of honor, all attired in traditional clothing. Following that float came two long lines of other young women, also wearing traditional festival wear. Next came a parade of local monks, most carrying umbrellas, which they needed as the onlookers squirted them all with water. A truck followed with more monks banging a large drum. Then a few senior monks were carried by, with locals squirting them (politely) with scented water to show respect. Several elephants slowly, moved their way down the street. Finally, a large number of Lao and visitors walked by singing and throwing powder and squirting/spraying water.

Luang Prabang is the largest town in the region and several hill tribes come in to sell their textiles and handicrafts in a few outdoor markets. We bought some pillow covers and some gifts and I took pictures of some of the ladies in their colorful outfits. Many of them seemed so old, but were also nursing babies. Outside of Luang Prabang (which may have the highest per capita income in the country), Laos is dirt poor. The emphasis being on the word dirt, because most people live off of unpaved roads, even in the city. People age quickly. The restaurants in town were quite good and we could choose between Lao (including one of the local specialties, fried river algae -- actually very tasty), French, and mixed-European sandwiches, but in most of the country, there is very little to offer.

Every morning, at about 6 am, all the monks in the various wats and monasteries in the city walk around the city and collect food from local residents. I counted over 100 monks, all in their robes, walking in a single-file, quietly in the pre-dawn light, as (primarily) older women, kneeled on mats and dropped sticky rice and other food into their bowls. I had been practicing my Thai with a few of the novices the day before (many Lao speak Thai as the languages are very similar and they get TV programs from across the border) and I nodded to them as they passed.

Tack, Kay, Liz and I hired a long-tailed boat to go up the Mekong about 20 kilometers to visit some caves into which locals had brought their old household Buddhas over the years. The caves themselves were interesting, filled with hundreds of Buddhas of various sizes, shapes and ages, but the best part was the trip up the river. Because Laos is so underdeveloped, we passed only a few villages and a bunch of water buffalos on the way up. In the distance, we saw lots of low, steep mountains rising about 2-3,000 feet up, which reminded me of pictures of southern China. Our boat-driver had worked with the US forces before the Vietnam war and spoke good English. His house was next to one of the nice hotels along the river and one afternoon we sat there, after getting sprayed as usual, and enjoyed a few drinks and some snacks made by his wife. We didn't get the full history of how life was for him after the war, but he is doing OK now and owns a few houses which he rents out in addition to his boat business.

I'm attaching a picture of a few of the monks collecting alms one morning.