The Worst Bus Ride Ever and The Buddha Park

Commence The Worst Bus Ride Ever.  We got to the bus station in Luang Prabang, hoping to take the 2 o’clock bus to Vientiane, which wasn’t running until 5 o’clock.  So we sat around at the bus station for hours in the heat.  Then we got on the stifling bus.  It was pretty empty when we got on, so we were hoping to have some room to spread out and get some sleep.  Our hopes were quickly dashed as the bus filled up.  In front of us sat a Lao couple with a baby.  The father sat in front of me.  He is remembered in my journal using choice words that I will not repeat here.  This man wanted everything to be perfect for his bus ride and had very little consideration for anyone else.  He had the people across the aisle close the curtains on their window; he closed his air vent and the air vent behind him (ours, and yes, it was still stifling); and then he reclined his seat to its maximum extent, right into my lap.  These seats were really close together to begin with, and I think his must have been broken because of how far into my space it extended.  I asked him to move his seat up, but instead, he pushed my seat back, similarly crushing the man in the seat behind me.  He sat back down and put his hands behind the head cushion on the seat, leaving his fingers about two inches from my face.  At one point, he even scratched me in the face with his long fingernails.  This all happened before the bus even left the station.  I knew I wouldn’t be able to bear it, so I asked the man behind me if I could sit next to him.  He was very kind, though we could only communicate through hand gestures.

The bus ride continued to be awful.  A woman across the aisle was vomiting the whole ride because of motion sickness.  Babies were crying, Thai pop music was blasting, and we made about one million seemingly unnecessary stops.  We picked up a man with a rifle.  Yeah, he just flagged the bus down from the middle of nowhere, rifle slung across his back, and got on.  (The Lonely Planet guide book said something about watching out for Hmong guerrillas along the route between Vientiane and Luang Prabang.)  I was incredibly nervous the whole ride.  I thought something terrible was going to happen.  I guess the worst thing that happened was that we had to endure the discomfort and windy roads and everything else for about 12 hours instead of the 8 or 9 hours we were told.  We got into Vientiane at about 5 AM on March 1^st.  We took a tuk-tuk into town and looked for a guest house, but couldn’t find one that was open so early, so we ended up staying in a more expensive hotel.  Even though it was so pricey, we were able to stay for the rest of that morning and the following night for the price of only one night.  Needless to say, we hadn’t slept a wink on the bus ride, so we slept for a few hours before waking up for breakfast, showers, and walking around town.  After a mango shake and some noodles, we got on a bus to the Buddha Park.

At the entrance to the Buddha Park was a spherical, pumpkin-like sculpture with three levels.  You could walk inside the open mouth of a giant face and walk up narrow steps to each higher level.  At each level was an inner room with Buddhas and other statues.  As I climbed the levels, I bumped my head on the concrete and then found myself crawling out of a very narrow passageway to get to the outside.  From the top of this structure, however, we could see the whole park.  The sun was throwing some amazing light on it, and the giant reclining Buddha statue was most impressive from above.

We walked back down to explore.  The place was totally bizarre.  It was filled with statues that were pretty creepy.  There was a woman holding a pinwheel embedded with colored glass.  There were small children pointing at each other and brandishing swords, with a robed man standing over them, his hands held up as if to say “Stop!” but with a peaceful expression on his face.  There was a man pulling the leg off a giant cockroach, an elephant standing in a pit of human heads, a monkey and elephant each bowing to a prince and presenting him with scrolls.  There were two characters, one on top with the head of a pig, pulling the hair of the one on the bottom, who was sticking out his tongue.  There was a cupid-like character, a prince and princess holding a serpent, many characters with multiple arms or faces, a three-headed elephant, an alligator, a man with wings, a prince smiling while being swallowed by a fish-like serpent (or serpent-like fish?), a man playing a mandolin.

For some reason, one of my favorites was of a giant standing Buddha-like character, but he had the face of a troll, shoes with teeth, and he was carrying a dead woman who was much smaller than he.  Another one was of a man who appeared to have a snake growing out of the top of his head, and he was sawing it off.  And interspersed throughout the weirdness of this park were totally normal Buddhas, to which people had made offerings of flowers and candles and incense.  I sat in the park, drawing and writing and snapping pictures as the sun shed light all over the crazy statues.

Idyllic

That evening in Luang Prabang, we went to the night market. I thought there would be a million more markets just like this, but looking back, I wish I bought everything there, because we didn’t see any markets like it again! Everything was so beautiful. I did buy paper lanterns with flowers pressed into them, a bejeweled puppet of a prince for friends, and other gifts. During the day, the streets had been filled only with passersby, but at night, blue and red tents sprung up everywhere with goods laid out beneath them.

The next morning, we found four other travelers to join us in a tuk-tuk to the Kwang Si waterfalls. This was another magical place; my pictures from that day don’t even look real—they look photo-shopped or constructed somehow. Even being present there didn’t seem quite real. It was too beautiful.

At the entrance to the waterfalls, we watched the Asiatic Black Bears, or “Moon Bears” that had been rescued. We then walked past gently cascading waterfalls that formed glacial-blue pools. Each level of waterfalls seemed more beautiful than the last, somehow. The vegetation was rich and colorful—it was the first time I felt like we were actually in a rainforest. The small waterfalls led to one extremely tall and powerful one, and we climbed a steep path to the top, where we walked through cool pools to see the view and cross to the other side. The climb down was easy, and we followed wooden steps back to the bottom.

The butterflies were more beautiful than ever. I saw a pair with orange on the wings nearest the body and the deepest, iridescent purple on the outside. There were butterflies of many shades of blue, small orange ones, black ones, white ones. I wished I had a butterfly guide! The place was so idyllic—a monk taking a photograph of a spinning waterwheel, another meditating at the top of a short but wide waterfall, water falling into shaded pools of crystal. When we got back to the bottom, we went swimming in the numbingly cold water and sat in the sunshine.

 
That evening, back in town, we had dinner on a porch overlooking the Mekong, where the sun set and lit the whole world orange.

Luang Prabang

On our last morning in Vang Vieng, the power was out, as usual.  We walked to the bus stop and got on a “VIP” bus to Luang Prabang.  I had to take a Dramamine because the bus was plowing down the windy roads and swaying from side to side like the Knight Bus in one of the Harry Potter movies.  The bus ride was about five hours, and we stopped at a roadside establishment to use the squat toilets and have lunch.  The spicy noodle soup was served with side dishes of lettuce, mint leaves, and cucumbers—cool foods to contrast the spiciness of the soup.  Once in Luang Prabang, we found ourselves a guest house, took out some money (I hadn’t been able to use the ATMs in Vang Vieng and had been borrowing money from Malone the whole time!), had dinner, and went to bed.

After our morning fruit shakes, we set off to explore the city.  The thing that attracted me most about Luang Prabang was the vegetation.  Nestled amongst the wats and French villas were palm trees, banana trees, and trees blooming with all kinds of flowers—magenta, pink, red, purple, white, orange, yellow—and orchids and epiphytic ferns sprouting from tree trunks.  We hadn’t seen flowers like these thus far into the trip, with the exception of the Flower Festival in Chiang Mai, perhaps because it was the dry season.  Nevertheless, I truly felt like I was in a tropical city, and the flowers made the city that much more charming.

Our first stop was at the Royal Palace Museum, where we took off our shoes, locked our things in a locker, and Malone paid 2,000 kip to rent a shirt to cover her shoulders.  Also known as Hawkham or Golden Hall, the Royal Palace was built in 1904 for King Sisavangvong and his family.  The palace was converted to a museum after 1975, when the king’s son, Savang Vathana, who inherited the throne when his father died in 1959, was exiled to the caves of Vieng Xai in Northern Laos following a revolution.  Inside the museum, we saw clothing and ornaments of the king and queen, Buddha statues, gifts from other countries (the US gave a model of a space shuttle?), bronze drums with fish and birds engraved on the surfaces and frogs perched on the edges, portraits of kings, and rooms set up as they were when the palace was a home.  Paintings hung the length of a hallway told the story of a prince who was said to be a reincarnation of Buddha.  The prince left the kingdom, gave away all his possessions and went to live in a cave, then gave away his children as well, and somehow was rewarded in the end by returning to the palace, reuniting with his family, and becoming king.  I’m not sure what the moral of the story is, but it’s a favorite in Luang Prabang and told during religious celebrations.

Also in the palace grounds, we attended a photo exhibit called “The Floating Buddha.”  The photographer went to a retreat with novice monks who were just learning about meditation and photographed them in both black and white and in color.  Some of the pictures were really beautiful—monks meditating on the forest floor with leaves all about, monks crossing an open field, an orange robe hung up and flapping in the breeze.

In the afternoon, we walked to the place where the Nam Khan meets the Mekong River.  We paid 5,000 kip to cross a bamboo foot bridge, from which we had a beautiful view of the Mekong and could see young monks bathing in the river with bright orange cloth wrapped around their waists.  Large boulders were strewn about the confluence of the two rivers and monks tended small gardens along the banks.  We followed a dirt path to the shore of the Mekong, where we walked barefoot on the sandy beach, strewn with lumps of clay, before climbing stairs to a small craft village where colorful fabric hung from porches and banana trees lined the dirt road.  The craft village was filled with stalls selling beautiful fabrics and handmade paper.

 

We visited several wats in Luang Prabang.  Within the palace grounds was an emerald and gold wat with intricate patterns in ruby and gold on the inside.  Wat Xieng Thong, built in 1560 by King Setthathirat, was different from other wats we’d seen because it was built with wooden beams and was very old, but this did not prevent it from being as intricate and ornate as the others.  There were mosaics and murals on the outer walls and flowering trees everywhere.  Wat Pahouak was built in 1860 and covered with murals on the inside.  In that wat, I bought two small pieces of art: one of a gold Buddha painted on a leaf and one of orange-robed monks painted on handmade paper. 

 

We walked a steep staircase to the top of a hill that overlooked the city, where Phu Si stood.  We could see from all directions, both rivers, the mountains, the city.  We walked to the top for the sunset, but it was too cloudy to see it.  Walking down a separate path, we passed more wats and large, gold Buddha statues.  We emerged from the trail near the back of a temple where monks sat, singing.

Magic

I believe it was then in my journey that everything became magical.  The temples in Bangkok and the tiny mountain town of Pai and the ruins of Sukothai had been magical enough, but nothing compared to the Blue Lagoon in Vang Vieng, where we spent the following day.  We walked seven kilometers to get there, first crossing the Nam Song by paying 4,000 kip to walk over the bridge.  We followed a dirt road, through small villages and farms, with chickens and chicks, kids on bikes, puppies, goats, cows and calves, and men on tractors all around.  I don’t know if I’ve ever seen as many babies at once as I did in Laos, both human and animal.  It felt like a springtime storybook where everybody was giving birth.

The walk was long, but the limestone mountains behind the gardens and fields were beautiful in the distance, dark blue against the sky.  Before we reached the lagoon, we stopped at an organic farm for lunch.  I had a refreshing mint lemonade, which was much tastier than the vegetable fried noodles I had ordered, which, for some reason, had been covered with ketchup.  A Siamese cat begged under the table, and Malone fed it some of her fried rice.

 

Another couple hundred meters down the road was the Blue Lagoon, which was, as its name would suggest, blue.  I mean, it was BLUE.  I’d never seen anything quite like it, at least not in the natural world.  Fish swarmed by a wooden ladder that led into the water, there were people sitting on a giant swing that hung in the water from a large, epiphyte-covered tree, and Lao men stood on a bridge and observed people swimming, swinging into the water from a rope, and jumping in from the branches of the tree.

Before we went swimming, we decided to walk up to Tham Phu Kham, a cave within the limestone that stood behind the Blue Lagoon.  The climb to the cave entrance was steep and exhilarating, so entering the cool, damp chambers of the cave felt soft and silky against my hot skin.  Having forgotten my headlamp, we remained in the two outermost chambers, where enough sunlight entered the cave to see its beauty.  The sun beams displayed a small temple with a gold reclining Buddha.  In an opening in the cave’s wall, two trees grew, and the daylight fed the bright green moss and ferns that grew on the boulders there.  The ceiling of the cave was impressively high.  Stalagmites hung near the opening to the cave, but deeper inside, there were just huge slabs of rock holding the ceiling up.  It was amazing to think about the weight of the mountain that rested on this stone ceiling; the top of the limestone was still 200 or 300 meters above us.

Back down at the lagoon, we entered the water, which was very cold, clear, and refreshing.  I swam a few laps under the bridge and back, then sat and relaxed in the giant swing.  When the water became too chilly, we got out and shared French fries and a Beer Lao on a picnic table before finding a mat to lie in the sun and read (Magister Ludi, or The Glass Bead Game for me).  We were living the life, right?

We walked back along the dusty path before darkness and enjoyed sandwiches back in town, only to walk back down the same road the very next day, once the morning rain stopped.  On the way, we stopped at several small caves along the road, each of which charged its own admission.  The caves were not nearly as impressive as Tham Phu Kham, and walking through the fields of butterflies and banana trees in the hot sun was enough to make us crave the Blue Lagoon’s cool waters again.  We continued walking the path, but, hot and exhausted, were thankful when a Lao family picked us up in their mini van and drove us the remaining 2 kilometers.  We tried to offer them some money, but they laughed at us and waved the money away.  The refreshing water got my courage up, and I climbed the tall, epiphyte-covered tree to jump into the water—something I had been afraid to do the day before.  Climbing the slippery trunk of the tree was scary enough—it left me trembling—that jumping off the branch was easy.  Jumping was much easier than climbing back down the tiny notches carved into the wood.

Tired from all the walking we had been doing, we paid for a tuk-tuk back into town.  We ate more street pancakes that evening, and decided to spend one more full day in Vang Vieng.  On our last day, we took a tuk-tuk to the river, this time without tubes.  We chose a bar to hang out at for the day.  It was such a relaxing day, just sitting by the river beneath the shade of a large tree.  The bar we chose had a deck, which we had to ourselves, with a swing, hammocks, a trampoline, and a small table where we ate sandwiches and shared a mojito in a plastic bucket.  I spent the day reading and writing and swimming and relaxing.  I laid on my back on the deck, looking up at the tree and its green leaves moving graciously above me.  The sun began its descent behind the limestone karsts on the western bank of the river, but still sent golden light through the branches and onto my skin.  I watched the occasional dry bamboo leaf, from the cluster of bamboo behind my head, flutter to the ground against a blue backdrop of sky.  So peaceful, so simple.  It reminded me simultaneously of maple tree helicopters at home and the butterflies that clotted the path the day before, all of them aflutter.

At the end of the day, we walked back into town.  Because the mountains get shorter as you walk south along the river, we were able to continuously watch the sun set.  A hot air balloon rose above the mountains, and both were silhouetted against the sky.  Do these pictures at all convey the magic that I witnessed in Laos?

In the Tubing Vang Vieng

When I look back on it, my next two stops in Vang Vieng and Luang Prubang are some of the places I remember most fondly (discounting the bus rides between these places!).  As touristy/backpacker-y as it was, Vang Vieng was truly beautiful.  On the main street, all of the establishments looked very similar.  The places to eat, like most places in Southeast Asia, were open to the streets.  Cushions and low tables were set up on platforms.  This was more like a place to sit and hang out, or even curl up on a comfy pillow, than a place to sit and eat a meal.  And at each restaurant, numerous TV screens repeatedly played reruns of Friends and Family Guy.  That was the part we could have easily done without, but somewhat in our favor, the power went out in Vang Vieng for at least a portion of every day.  (This was fine when we were eating, of course, to avoid the TV shows, but bothersome when we were trying to sleep in our hot room at night and the fan stopped working or in the morning when we wanted to get fruit shakes but none of the blenders worked.)  Various shops sold sunglasses, “In The Tubing Vang Vieng” tank-tops and T-shirts, and beautiful silver jewelry.

Away from the main street was where Vang Vieng stole my heart, however.  After relaxing in town for the first part of our first day, we rented tubes and took a tuk-tuk down to the Nam Song River, which flowed between the tall limestone karsts and just west of the town.  I had heard from a friend about tubing down the river in Vang Vieng: how it was lined with bars, and every year tourists ended up getting wasted and lost out on the river past dark, then drowning.  Because it was the dry season, the river did not pose as great of a threat, and we didn’t have plans to get so drunk that we wouldn’t get back in time to receive back the deposit we had made on our tubes.  When the tuk-tuk dropped us off, we walked about 500 meters down a dirt path beside the river before finding a place to enter the river.  The water was cool but comfortable.  I clipped my shoes and clothes to my tube and we set off down the lazy river.

Bungalow-style bars made of bamboo lined the river.  Each had something to draw tubers in: large porches, rope wings, water slides, zip lines, loud music, trampolines, and of course, alcohol.  Staff members waded into the water, trying to drag people in by their tubes or throwing ropes out to pull people in.  Malone and I avoided these attempts and continued floating along down the river.  The tree-covered limestone mountains were beautiful where they rose high above us against the sky.  The water itself was clear and strangely devoid of fish or much else, other than the floating leaves, occasional stick, and thankfully even more seldom plastic water bottles.  Though the water was shallow, we floated easily along, only occasionally needing to navigate between groups of rocks.

At one point, we rounded a bend in the river, and it was perhaps at this point that the place’s beauty struck me the most.  The mountains were greener, the water looked almost green, perhaps because of this tropical reflection, and the bars had thinned out so the place was more secluded and wild.  It was quiet here and peaceful to float down the river, looking up at the endlessly impressive mountains.  As the sun began to lower behind the mountains and the water began to feel a bit cooler, we exited the river and got a tuk-tuk back into town.  Still in our wet clothes, we stopped on our walk back to our hotel for some warm noodle soup.  From our porch, we watched the sky come alive as the sun set behind the mountains, then went back into town to shop and enjoy an evening snack: fruit shakes and street pancakes.  If I could only live many more days like that first day in Vang Vieng!