Find out more about where to stay and what to see in Laos.
The prop jet drops from the clouds, cruising low over green serrated mountaintops and outcroppings that swirl upward with the grace of court dancers performing tales from the Ramayana. Here and there the verdant mountainsides bear terrible scars, the desiccated, lifeless brown gashes left by loggers and slash-and-burn farmers. The plane load of tourists peer out blurred windows, awed by the beauty but anxious about the flight plan. Suddenly we clear a peak and below us winds the legendary Mekong River, its wide rust brown waters hemmed by red banks and rocky cliffs. And finally there it is: Luang Prabang, the ancient capital of Laos, its temples, French colonial houses and former royal palace occupying a narrow finger of land where the Nam Khon tributary meets the Mekong. As we rush toward the runway, passing the gold stupa atop Mount Phou Si, I hear people gasp at the sight. And I think, Yes, here we are at the Shangri-la of tourist books, at the exquisite city guarded warily by UNESCO since 1995, when it became a World Heritage site.
It’s been nearly fifty years since I last flew by that gold stupa, on a day trip from the capital, Vientiane, with my parents and some of my father’s colleagues from USOM, the U.S. Operations Mission, one of the many incarnations of the U.S. Agency for International Development. In those days Vientiane, where we lived, was bucolic to say the very least, with as many dirt streets as paved ones and few sidewalks, but it was also home to white and gilt temples, ocher colonial villas, arching rain trees, flamboyants and splashes of fuchsia bougainvilleas. The open-air morning market was a foreign child’s cabinet of mysteries, a place of endless discoveries of new possibilities in dining, from catfish to grasshoppers to tiny frogs on satay sticks. It was a city surrounded by rice paddies; in the rainy season, the flooded fields mirrored the immense sky, then turned pale yellow-green with new shoots that darkened as the rice grew to maturity. After the harvest, the air filled with pungent smoke as the farmers burned the detritus. Water buffalo grazed beside the roads. There was no school for me to attend, so I spent whole days pedaling my crude little bicycle with gum-colored wheels down jungle paths. I loved Laos. So did my mother, but my father came to believe, despite a promotion and the extra “hardship” pay, that he had, in fact, been exiled.
This wasn’t a far-fetched notion. After the battle of Dien Bien Phu, in 1954, the French relinquished their Indochinese colonies — Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam — and the Americans moved in, full of Yankee optimism and can-do spirit. Southeast Asia had to be “saved” from Communism, and while small, landlocked Laos was definitely a backwater, the domino theory held that if a single nation fell to the Reds, all of Southeast Asia would topple. At the end of the fifties, the small group of Americans we had joined were dazed, living without reliable electricity or water and with no air-conditioning. Few spoke Lao or French, and all were deeply perplexed by Lao culture, which they viewed as lackadaisical. In their frustration, the Americans began to turn on one another.
So it was a kind of R&R to fly north to Luang Prabang, the exotic riverine temple town where the king lived in a white palace built by the French in 1906. On the trip I took with my parents, we ate lunch in an open-air restaurant by the river and went through so many temples that I remember the day as a dream bathed in gold leaf, vivid murals and slender Lao-style Buddhas with drooping earlobes, their arms hanging straight at their sides, fingers pointing downward, calling for rain.
These days, the cities of Southeast Asia where I spent my childhood are nearly unrecognizable to me, and as I return, I fear this will be true of Luang Prabang. It’s arrogant and paternalistic to wish underdeveloped countries to remain frozen in time, but it’s hard not to yearn for the lovelier, gentler cities that have been overtaken by progress or the cultures now slipping into homogenization. Much as I love booming, chaotic Bangkok, I know which streets were once canals, which gleaming shopping centers have replaced neighborhoods of teak villas and gardens.
For better or for worse, Laos spent the last decades of the 20th century isolated and slumbering while Thailand, its neighbor to the south and west, became an economic powerhouse. Inevitably, despite all the Americans’ efforts, the war in Vietnam and the more than two million bombs dropped during the “secret” war in Laos — dwarfing World War II’s bombing campaigns — led to the Communist group Pathet Lao’s ascent to power, in 1975. Ten percent of the population fled, including most of the professional class. Many who stayed were sent to reeducation camps — including, in 1977, the royal family, who died there of malnutrition and medical neglect. But the Lao People’s Democratic Republic gradually grew less rigid. Efforts to collectivize farming failed, as did those to suppress Buddhism and Lao culture in general (for a time, the government even tried to replace the formal Lao greeting of a bow, palms clasped to forehead as if in prayer, with a more democratic handshake). In the early nineties, after the Soviet Union collapsed, abruptly cutting off a major source of assistance, the country’s leaders decided to reopen the economy to private enterprise and property ownership. Foreign investment trickled back in, along with foreign aid, which had made up the lion’s share of the economy since the French took over in the 19th century (and were so frustrated by the cost of maintaining Laos that they resorted to supporting the opium trade).
We travelers spill off the plane and line up for visas in what will be the last overt reminder that we’re in an authoritarian, albeit benign, state. Frowning uniformed functionaries armed with stamps slam them from ink pad to passport as if auditioning for a Cold War spy thriller. Then I’m escorted away in an air-conditioned van equipped with a cool lemongrass-scented towel and a chilled bottle of water, a definite change from the rattling Peugeot of my first visit. My hotel, La Résidence Phou Vao, is on a hilltop across the valley from Mount Phou Si, and from my broad balcony I can gaze over the frangipani-strewn infinity pool and a sea of green treetops to the glinting gold stupa. At night the hotel is lit by hundreds of candles, a three-strand necklace of which floats across the swimming pool. I dine at a poolside table, choosing, among other dishes, a delicate coconut-milk curry flavored with lemongrass and galangal. The young French chef, Yannis Amarantinis — who arrived in February, took one look at Luang Prabang and signed up for five years rather than the two years of the usual contracy-- emerges from the kitchen with a worn, stained photocopy of Traditional Recipes of Laos. It’s a compendium of the recipes of Phia Sing, who was chef to the royal family until his death, in 1967. With his Lao kitchen crew assisting, Amarantinis is dedicated to teaching himself Lao cuisine the royal way.
The next morning, I’m off to see Luang Prabang with a wisecracking guide whose Chinese-born father was an opium merchant before the civil war. Aside from the tuk-tuks, with their three wheels and tinny roar, traffic is sparse on the three main streets, two of which front the rivers. The entire length of the city peninsula can be strolled in fifteen minutes, crossed at its widest point in five. Thirty-two wats (temples) occupy the old part of town, and saffron- and khaki-clad monks, their shaved heads shaded by black umbrellas, blend with tourists, shopkeepers and the occasional distinctively garbed hill-tribe woman arriving for the night market. Along the river are the two-story homes built by French colonialists, who were described somewhat dismissively by their more urban colleagues as “the lotus-eaters.” It’s the same mix of shade trees and scrupulously cared-for temples that British travel writer Norman Lewis complained in 1951 might profit greatly from a year or two’s neglect.
None of the temples is more beautiful than Wat Xieng Thong, built in the 16th century by King Setthathirat. It was one of only two wats not destroyed by marauding Haw bandits from China, who sacked the city in the late 19th century. The multilayered roof of the main prayer hall ends in eaves that descend nearly to the ground. On the rear wall is a mosaic of the tree of life, and in the dim interior, the gilded carved-wood ceiling represents the wheels of dharma. Everything is sculpted and painted, and behind a gracefully reclining Buddha, the altar is a cluster of smaller statues.
In Laos, there are no beggars, none of the packs of hungry, postcard-selling children who swarm tourists in the rest of the former French Indochina, causing uncomfortable dilemmas of conscience. There is no litter in the gutters and alleys of Luang Prabang. Even the dogs, who seem to be melting into pockets of shade on the sidewalks, look healthy. This is in part due to the culture, and in part because the cities here have not experienced the mass migrations from the countryside seen elsewhere in the region, thus avoiding the accompanying desperate poverty.
Luang Prabang was the capital of the empire of Lan Xang, which included huge swaths of what is now Thailand. The empire lasted only a few hundred years, from the mid-14th through the 17th centuries, when it broke apart into three weak kingdoms. In 1520 the capital was moved to the bend in the Mekong occupied by Vientiane, where it was less vulnerable to Burmese and Chinese attackers. Then as now, most of the country’s citizens were poor subsistence farmers. Today 78 percent of the population, which numbers 6.4 million, is concentrated in alluvial valleys along the Mekong River. Until recently, even the wealthy, educated class lived modestly by international standards.
