Luang Prabang

LUANG PRABANG

Meals

Outside of juicing a few oranges and boiling water, I haven’t cooked a single meal in three months. From (in my opinion) five-star chestnut ravioli to pork fried on a street cart, all I’ve eaten has been prepared by someone else. This isn’t the reason food tastes better than it has ever tasted. At least the only reason. I’ve had some of the best and some of the most unusual food of my life, but almost everything tastes good. I recently had a tuna sandwich on a Lao Airlines flight. The white bread was like a damp sponge and the crusts were gone, yet I could hardly bare arriving at the last bite, it was that good. I won’t even speak of a steamed perch casserole wrapped in banana leaves. The only time food becomes unpleasant is if I order too much (greed or ignorance). To overeat feels punishing and I only do it avoid leaving the impression I didn’t like the food (seldom if ever the case). Naturally, each taste comes with other sensations: the color of the walls, the music, the temperature, and one’s own mood. Last night I ate in an outdoor restaurant. The fish took forever and when it arrived was fried to a crisp, with a slice of lemon so thin it added nothing. Mosquitoes swarmed at my arms and boys ran along the Mekong River carrying burning branches. The fire lit the sky and I could smell its smoke. The fish was delicious. Not the first bite, but the third or forth; by the time I’d surrendered to it. To what it was. Out of, say, 260 meals (three months worth), I’ve had about 240 of them alone (in a restaurant with other people, but at my own table; on a sidewalk with hundreds of others, but still by myself). It’s not a preference - I love eating with people - but simply part of traveling alone. Conversation is better with food, but food is better without conversation; this equation has some truth to it. Our taste buds need our awareness. I’ve had to make my meal my dinner partner. For six nights in a row I ate in the same restaurant (it was that good) and usually at the same table. With my meals I watched the other people and celebrated with them (wine helped), silently. Artichokes, walnuts, pecorino Romano, olive oil, lamb, octopus, lime juice, porcini mushrooms, tomatoes, pepper and cream. The restaurant produced its masterpieces with these ingredients. It was a simple restaurant with only a local reputation. The staff was professional (in the best sense). They knew they were good, but they didn’t know how good. You travel for three months to six or seven countries. You get a better idea of the scale of sacrifice. Countless sea bass, herds of steer, endless pigs and infinite chickens dying every hour to feed us. But not just them: all the creation, preservation and destruction that go into producing a few acres of rice or corn. I don’t know why food tastes so much better these days, but it does.

Yes

In Lao, yes is “uh.” You can’t approximate in with letters on a page. It is a pure sacral sound. A groan. Someone saying uh can easily be mistaken for expressing the pleasure of sex. Or of eating a delicious mango. While I was getting a massage my masseuse was asked a question from the other room. She replied uh. Her reply entered the room like a butterfly or gust of wind. I’ve been studying the smiles of people in the countries I’ve visited. The Thai smile is immediate, effortless and winning. The Laotians smile a bit differently. They wait a moment after eye contact, after the smile sent their way, as if in a moment of primordial discrimination. If one’s own smile is adequately wide and sturdy, you can bet it will be returned, but if it is half-formed or hesitating, the Lao might look the other way. The Lao smile is lovely, but there is a bit of scrutiny in it. Perhaps it is simply a matter of not being in a rush, not a need for the confirmation smiles can be used for. Whatever it is, it is there: the momentarily delayed smile. Lao is being modernized but what strikes one is tradition and its continuity, its survival even now. Cooking buckets suspended over a front-yards fire is one expression of tradition. Offering food to the monks at sunrise is another. The rice, fish, watercress and other ingredients of the Lao diet is the essence of tradition. But above all, tradition is in their bodies. Not the middle-class Laotians; they seem on their way to becoming Japanese, German or American, more interchangeable parts in the machinery of stress and fabricated needs. It is in the body of the ordinary Lao, the ones who work all day but don’t hold nine to five jobs. Just say uh a few times (it is soft and comes from the belly). Uh, uh, uh. You begin to get a feeling for the body, for the primordial elegance of people like the Lao, who are say yes from the core of themselves.

Luang Prabang

Luang Prabang lies on the south bank of the Mekong River. Old women clean rice in bamboo baskets. French Colonial vestiges in architecture and food. A sublime mayonnaise dressing. Twenty-seven Buddhist temples, stupas age-blackened and mute in the sunlight. Gongs at four a.m. Boy monks in orange robes, identical to those before them, a 2,500-year old procession. They beg for rice at dawn - some e-mail and play computer games at the internet café. Children find the heat, sand and the river adequate ingredients for paradise. Plunge into the water, encircle themselves in inner tubes, give cries of glee that mix with the screeching cicadas. Two young women, side by side, hold blue umbrellas and drive small motorcycles. A canopy of palm trees. A sunset mixed with wood smoke, hyacinth petals, a bit of diesel exhaust and moisture off the Mekong. Indolence of movement yet the endurance to work positioning bricks all day in the sun. VISA cards and the uniformity of tourist shopping including pizza invade much of the main street but for now remain contained. Tolerated. Regulated. The influence of tourism grows a middle-class of Lao who drive SUV’s and drink Scotch. Most homes put the family stove, a fire-bucket, in the front yard (because who, in tropical heart, would bring it inside?). Hmoung hill tribe woman sell there fabrics in an outdoor night-market grotesquely swollen with identical booths. Gay bars and pizza. Soap operas from Thailand. Buildings painted an indescribable yellow that in the afternoon sun become luminous like interplanetary butterflies. Full-body massage given six to a room. Television sets on all day though no one is necessarily watching. Smoke from the fire pots creates a permanent haze. The surrounding mountains appear simulacrum like. The river disappears into it. Old men fish. Young men fish. Moving in block to block serendipity amalgamation sights of beams, walls, blooming trees and wood as if it was whale-oil stained are as beautiful as Venice. The Mekong is slow moving and clear, almost warm to the touch, with a long way to travel before it reaches delta.

Service

Xieng Mouane Guest House, Room #4: Like all the rooms I’ve stayed in, the fan is adequate for comfort (air-conditioning unnecessary). Today there is even a breeze, almost a wind. It is blowing through the room. Two shutters have slammed shut, then open again. The walls are thick (I’ve never heard the other guests) and the ceiling tall. The floor is long planks of exotic wood, very hard with knot holes that swirl around like whirlpools in a flooding creek. When I arrived the little bar of soap hotels offer you was wrapped in a tiny zip-lock bag. There was a backup roll of toilet paper, half empty. Ironically, this is the only guest house where the shower actually produces hot water, but it becomes too hot and there is no cold-water faucet. The tiles on the floor cool your feet. The window by my desk swings open, French style. I can count twenty-five telephone or power lines intersecting the sky, and beyond them branches of a palm tree, always in motion. Across the street is Wat Sieng Mouane and next to it, two other temples. Yesterday morning I met a young monk in the shrine. Anxious to practice English, he invited me to his room, a cell of corrugated sheet-metal walls and ceiling, with a window (without glass, just a board) that swung open and pages of French newspaper (Le Monde?) pasted to every wall. A bed, a desk, photographs glued to the newspaper, and a florescent light bulb, naked and glaring. Hardly anything else at all: a rice bowl, two gallons of water, a fan, a change of monks robes and an orange sheet. His name was Novice On Ìa Vat and had been a monk for three years. One of his eyes turned out. He moved slowly and very gently. He was eighteen years old and he taught me phrases in Lao, Jou sa bei dè bõ, “How are you?” Now a tuk tuk has arrived, I can hear it below my window, the inadequately muffled sputter of an ancient motorcycle strapped to a sidecar and covered with dust, fare negotiable. The door of my room is swung open to the second floor landing. On the landing there is a traditional bed, covered in Lao silk and above the bed a window, but without glass, just open to let the night air or the breezes come through. With the door open I can see the window and what is beyond: the tile roofs of the rooms in back and the plants in the garden. The garden is tended to and prosperous to a degree bordering on a small paradise, with a fountain in the middle flanked by two cement egrets with red beaks. Out one window the foliage of the trees in the wat looks old, a bit dusty, apropos to the wat itself, whereas the trees in the backyard of the guest house have bright green leaves that look newly washed. It’s hard to imagine the French once setting up rule here, or the Americans dropping more bombs on another part of Lao than anywhere else on earth. Colonialism aside, its not hard to understand why the French would surround themselves with tall ceilings, ice cubes, Bordeaux and the best cooks they could find. Now this building, French Colonial style, sits next to the wat across the street with its whitewashed stupas and dusty courtyard. They sit together in aesthetic brotherhood. I don’t love this room as much as some I’ve been in (though I’m not sure why), but that doesn’t mean I don’t love it. There is an historical collision of eras than makes staying here seem timeless or out of time. I don’t know if it is the room, but my schedule has slowed to something simplistic, a pale semblance of sightseeing. The other guests are up and gone by nine a.m., trekking to outlying villages or boating up the Mekong river, whereas I sit around and write all morning, do some meditation, have my meals, a couple of walks and then go to bed. As if I’m a minor official in the French foreign service with little to do.

Need

My intestines began purging at three a.m. Proliferate journeys from bed to bathroom, like running laps. So much water expelled; where did my body find it all? I couldn’t drink fast enough. My system cleaning itself like hosing down the sidewalk. Nausea, cramps, exhaustion. I slept off and on for thirty-two hours. I saw no sunlight on the Mekong or tangerines in the market. I turned my pillow a hundred times. What made me sick: an ice cube, lettuce or the steamed pork bun? The rib couldn’t have done it, though it was exquisitely greasy; a slab of bacon on a bone, six-months worth of saturated fat. I ate it and watched Lao boys play soccer in the afternoon sun as I bit into the pig fat like an Eskimo into whale blubber. Then I understood. They were giving me a chance to have thirty or forty dreams, to see no further than the side of my pillow. The water carried me to the edge of the fears I needed to see. I got sick just when I needed to.

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