Luang Prabang to Angkor – Day 2: Luang Prabang

We began our second day in Luang Prabang with a bright and early rise at half past five. After brushing our teeth and dressing hastily, we made our way down to Sisavangvong Road, where the Tak Bat ceremony unfolds every morning around sunrise. Traditionally, the Tak Bat is an almsgiving ritual during which locals give rice to a procession of monks from the temples in the city. In Luang Prabang, however, the whole ceremony has become more of a spectacle for Chinese tour groups: Rice and other foods are sold to tourists, who line the roads for the opportunity to deposit them in vessels carried by the monks. Since the monks are vastly outnumbered, a whole system has been devised whereby they dump the excess food into nearby receptacles, and the food is distributed among people in nearby villages.

We used our early waking time to take advantage of the cool morning temperatures and hike up Mount Phousi. We still ended up sweating a great deal, but at least the hill had a reasonably low number of tourists: most of them swarm it at sunset. Once we descended, we ate breakfast at our hotel and continued to Wat Sensoukharam, also known as Wat Sen. The name of this less-visited temple translates to “The Temple of a Hundred Thousand Treasures,” as it was built in the eighteenth century with a hundred thousand stones from the Mekong River. The ornate golden complex houses several Buddha statues, one of whom stands in a shrine facing the road.

Our second temple stop was Wat Xieng Thong, named after one of Luang Prabang’s old names meaning “Golden City.” The temple was completed in 1560 by King Setthathirath, who successfully defended Lan Xang against Burma. Setthathirath possibly built this temple as compensation for his moving the capital to Vientiane, where it would remain until Lan Xang’s dissolution. The main temple with its low-drooping roof is a well-known symbol of Laos and features on the two thousand bank note. Standing to its left, a small shrine houses a reclining Buddha which dates to the temple’s founding. In 1931, it was shown at the Paris exhibition, and it was kept in Vientiane until 1964.

It was around quarter past eight when we left Wat Xieng Thong and started thinking about what to do next. I figured walking around town would not entertain us for the whole day, so I proposed catching a boat to the Pak Ou caves. One ferryman offered to take the two of us for over a million kips, but we just so managed to catch the regular 8:30 tourist boat for 150 thousand per person. The whole journey took about four and a half hours: the way there was against the current and included a stop by a souvenir-making village. Its inhabitants were weavers, though one man stood out among his surroundings by selling alcohol in bottles with scorpions and snakes. One of our fellow travellers – a tall German man in his early sixties – remarked laconically that this drink was meant to grant “strong health and sexual appetite.”

The Pak Ou Caves stand just opposite the river from a collection of tall, ragged cliffs, their grey faces juxtaposed against gentler verdant hills and blue skies. It is believed that the caves were first used by animists, and that they only became a Buddhist site in later years. Over the centuries, pilgrims brought many Buddha statues, which now fill almost every horizontal surface in the caves.

After returning to Luang Prabang and eating lunch, Barron and I managed to find a currency exchange that would take his outdated 100-dollar bills. We were already down to our last few 100,000-kip bank notes and feared that another meal might leave us bankrupt. The last attraction we visited was the UXO (Unexploded Ordnance) Lao Visitor Centre. Founded in 1996, the organisation has succeeded in destroying over 1.4 million unexploded ordnances from the USA’s War in Indochina, but it still has much work left to do: of the 280 million cluster munitions dropped on Laos, 80 million failed to detonate. The centre houses a few specimens of these ordnances and other weapons, contextualizing their significance through signboards and art displays.

Finally, in the evening, Barron persuaded me to visit a language centre where expats have conversations with local youths to help them improve their English skills. We spoke to a young man who used to work at a non-governmental organisation, and his intelligence on Laos and its culture was quite interesting. For one, we learned that Laotians like to eat blood, though we could not get him to explain how exactly they prepare it. We also learned about the difficulties of village life and of trying to persuade teachers to abandon the cities with all their amenities to promote education in the countryside.