On the Mekong

This morning I had an elephant’s ear and a frothy latte at a streetside bakery in Luang Prabang, the old capitol of Laos. No kidding! When the spirits are with me, life can be so exotic. (Oh yeah, an elephant’s ear is a large flat crispy sugar cookie.) I’ve been on a roll since getting to Laos. The people, the towns, the weavers — they’re all to my sensibilities. The entire town of Luang Prabang (with 70 or so Buddhist temples) has got good feng shui. Despite being heavily touristed. It’s at the conjunction of the Mekong and Nam Khan rivers and these last few days, after some rains, the temperature has been perfect.

Yesterday a Frenchman and I took a boat upriver to see the Pak Ou Caves and also to visit two riverside villages. The caves — again heavily touristed — contain 4,000 Buddhas of various sizes, and the upper cave has a powerful feeling of serenity, maybe due to old Buddhas in it, that I looked at by flashlight.

The villages each had many stalls selling silk weavings, and I made contact with two weavers (I’d stop at stands where there was a loom) and I bought a bunch of scarves and a few shawls. The villages were clean and airy, the kind of place where you could spend serious time in a hammock looking out at the river.

The Mekong is almost as powerful as the ocean. It’s said to support a million people along its thousands of miles journey through Asia. Water and topsoil for agriculture; boats for transport; fish and seaweed for food, playground for village kids. On the way back to Luang Prabang yesterday I got the skipper to pull into a sandbar and stripped down to shorts and went swimming. It felt so great, was maybe 72 degrees, refreshing, swift moving, deep. I bonded with the river. If I’d had a tent I could have stayed there on the banks for a few days, swimming, beachcombing, lying in a hammock (that I would string) between two coconut trees.