Posts From Laos

Today was a travel day, we left La Folie Lodge for a flight to the Northern Laotian town of Luang Prabang. Thus we spent most of the day waiting either in airports or sitting on planes. However the ever unrepressible Nina was up early getting her last walk around the island. The center part of Don Daeng Island is devoted to agriculture and livestock, as can be seen in the first 6 photos below. Photo 2 is rice fields waiting for the wet season to come to life, photo 3 is a water storage pond that is part of the wet season irrigation system. The final Don Daeng photo is a freshly planted tapioca field. If you look very carefully (maybe with imagination) you can just see short sticks poking up out of the ploughed soil; they are tapioca seedlings that have recently been planted.

Our starting point today was Ock Pop Tok an establishment that combined a restaraunt/coffe shop, souvenir shop with a craft workshop that specialised in spinning, dying and weaving silk and cotton. The dying operation was particularly interesting.

Not much happened worth of comment today. It was a rest day in the sense of no organized activities. We spent the day exploring the town for super markets and backeries, people watching and resting. Topped of the day with dinner at another restaraunt overlooking the Mekong.

There are a number of Budhist Temples in Luan Prabang (something like 15 -- look it up), which means there are a lot of monks, and traditionally the way they sustain themselves is with gifts of food from the local population. In Luang Prabang that process takes the form of a daily procession of monks walking along the streets of the town past lay deciples who are seated on the side of the road with various feed stuffs ranging from a pot of boiled rice to candy bars. The process is called "Alms Giving". The processing is early in the morning, around 5:30, and there for was not condusive to good photograhs.

Before going to the boat this morning to start our cruise on the Mekong, Nina decided to make another try at seeing and photographing the Buddhist Alm's Giving. As you can see from the first 2 photos she got a much better impression of the event.

Today was a noteable day as we had our first ride on the Laos-China Railway. It is a new joint venture between China and Laos and runs a new high speed railway line from the Laos capital Vientiane, via Luang Prabang to the Chinese city of Kunming. Today we travelled the 230km section from Vientiane to Luang Prabang. It was an impressive experience from the enormous new terminal buildings at Vientiane (unfortunately it had holes in the roof so they were mopping up water in various places) to the new station at Luang Prabang. The speed; which regularly reached 265km/h meant we completed todays journey in under 2 hours with a few stops along the way.

We were on our way at 5:30 this morning to watch the walking monks. There are a number of Buddhist monestaries in LB and every morning the monks from these monestaries walk along the local streets collecting food. The locals, and now tourists also, sit on the side of the streets and place food (usually boiled rice) into the begging bowls of each monk that passes by. The monks periodically unload their collection into large communal bowls and then continue their walking. Nina noticed that in a few places the monks actually also distributed food to some local people from their begging bowls. We assumed these receiving locals are identifiable as poor or in some other way deserving.