A few weeks ago I published a story about Luang Prabang, Laos in the SF Chronicle.  Thrilling, I know - I've been bragging about it ever since.  

But here's a secret:  the article that appeared in the Chronicle isn't the story I originally wrote.  I had to fluff and cut and tailor my original narrative to the audience of a family newspaper.  The real story, the one I like best, is more personal, with more pretty girls and booze.

Matador friends get the real story.  

.....

The Flaming City, The Golden City

April, 2007

Tim Patterson

Luang Prabang, Laos

My first hour in Luang Prabang was magical.  The electricity was out, and in every wooden house, riverside café, market stall and temple window, townspeople were lighting candles.  As night fell the streets became a flickering web of shadow and firelight, each circle of illumination a window into another world – first old women with lined faces squatting on blue tarps by pyramids of oranges, then middle-aged men throwing petanque balls on smooth sand courts beside the Mekong River, next novice monks huddled in front of a golden temple fresco.  Only the Internet shops were dark and still. 

I walked along the riverfront avenue totally entranced, floating between pockets of light, still drunk from a long day on an overcrowded slow boat, a day I spent sweating in the engine room and playing cards for bottles of Beer Lao with two Glaswegian university students and a burly bodhisattva from Alaska, who as the game progressed, began to share his history of gambling addiction, bad acid trips and previous incarnations.  “Once I was a Roman warrior and I killed Celts,” he explained.  “Then I was a Celt and I killed Romans.  It all comes around.” 

 Exploring Luang Prabang by candlelight felt like walking into the first chapter of an historical romance novel.  From time to time my fellow boat passengers would float past on the sidewalk, each similarly spellbound, their lips hanging open in half-smiles of wonder and delight.  Idly, I wondered where the two pretty Danish backpackers I had met at the ferry dock were staying.

Turning a corner I came upon a river of candles, a night market where women from the mountain villages sat cross-legged on blankets, displaying intricately woven straw baskets, silk scarves and packets of highland tea.  I bent down to pick up a delicate old pipe and held it close to a candle to examine.  Here was an exceptional antique, perhaps a relic from the French colonial days, but I only held it for a moment when – FIZZ/CRACK - the spell broke, florescent lights went on and radios and blenders hummed to life.  Blinking in the sudden white glare I was pushed against a rack of T-shirts as a Japanese tour group went chattering by, and when I looked into my hands the antique pipe was gone, replaced by a mass produced novelty.  In fact, glancing around I saw identical pipes for sale at several market stalls.  Somewhat sheepishly I put mine down and trotted off to find a guesthouse. 

……

Luang Prabang is not a flawless fantasy world, but I’m falling for it nonetheless.  Like all romances, the relationship began with brief, idyllic infatuation that, as I get to know the town, is being replaced with deep-hearted affection.

Luang Prabang is a real place, venerable and vulnerable.  It is an ancient habitation consecrated by 34 gilded Buddhist temples on a peninsula at the confluence of two rivers in the North of Laos.  It is a city whose original name was Sieng Dam, Sieng Ton; The Flaming City, The Golden City.  Today it is a World Heritage site and tourist boom town in one of the poorest and calmest corners of Southeast Asia, a land of isolated mountain villages that, incidentally, was once a free fire range for millions of tons of United States bombs and chemical weapons. 

I’m falling for Luang Prabang because I’ve never experienced a town so serenely beautiful before, but also because it feels like one of the most fragile places I’ve encountered in my travels.   There is a calm sense of peace and acceptance here that feels under siege, threatened by the demands of an explosive economy and the addictive habits of an increasingly frantic world.  Most of all, the peace and gentility of Luang Prabang feels vulnerable because Laos is one of the poorest countries on earth, a fertile, tropical land with clean rivers and tremendous bio-diversity where most people survive on less than $2 per day.  Traditional Lao folk songs speak of contended rice farmers, but today the sons and daughters of those farmers dream of Thai pop stars and Honda motorbikes. 

 I love to sit and watch orange-robed monks cross the bamboo bridge over the Khan River and then amble through temple grounds across the peninsula, where I can sip a mango shake under a mango tree by the languid Mekong River.  I love to smile at the achingly beautiful young Lao women, straight-backed and slim-waisted, who ride past me on their motorbikes one-handed holding sun-umbrellas.  Sometimes I catch their eye and smile and when this happens they invariably giggle.  I take these giggles as good omens. 

……

This afternoon I climbed stone steps beneath frangipani trees, past a Buddhist stupa and an anti-aircraft gun to the top of Phousi Hill.  The sun was only a bloody glimpse in dry season smoke that hung thick over the river valleys as mountain forests burned.  I was the only one on the hilltop, apart from a woman selling drinking water and a British man, recently retired by the looks of him, who was taking photos with a brand new Canon SLR.  First he photographed the gun with the stupa in the background, then he walked behind the stupa and took photos with the gun barrel pointing out behind.  When he finished we stood together at the railing and watched a Lao Airlines plane come in low to land at an airport next to a military base.

“It’s difficult to imagine war in a place so peaceful,” I said.  

“One can’t help but think,” replied the man after a moment’s pause, “that 500 pounds of high explosives for every man, woman and child was perhaps a trifle excessive.”

The British man took one last photo and went down the hill.  For the next hour I talked with a local in his early 20s who had been sitting alone under a tree.  His name was Soukha, and he and I soon discovered that we have a lot in common.  We’re the same age, to start with, and we’re both thinking of going to law school.  More coincidentally, Soukha and I have each mastered an assortment of cheesy Japanese pick-up lines.  After I taught him how to say, “You’re more beautiful than the first cherry blossom of spring,” he stood up and took off his jacket to show me the white T-shirt he was wearing underneath.  On the back of the shirt, in black marker, he had written the characters for Waterfall, Love and Japanese People. 

“Does that actually work for you?”  I asked.

“Sometimes,” he told me.  “I want to go to Japan.” 

In the evening I saw the two cute Danish backpackers going into an empty restaurant with pink tablecloths on a terrace overlooking the Mekong.  I followed them inside and we had a short conversation about our plans for the next few days – a traveler’s village upriver called Muang Ngoi seems appealing, we agreed.  In the end they didn’t invite me to sit down so I went to a stall near the night market and drank two papaya milkshakes.  

……

Today I went on a tour with the White Elephant Adventure company.  White Elephant is owned by a Canadian man named Derek who collects classic motorbikes and looks like he just stepped out from the pages of a Banana Republic catalog.  Derek and his Laotian wife are marketing White Elephant as the boutique ecotourism agency of Luang Prabang.  My one day tour cost $35 and encompassed a trek to a village of a minority people called the Khamu and an afternoon kayak excursion down the Khan River back to town.

    My companions for the day were David and Anne, a pleasant young married couple who both work for investment banks in London, and Souvan, our 29 year old local guide.  Souvan was professional and earnest, but did not seem particularly enthusiastic about walking uphill through slashed smoky fields during the hot season.  As we sweated along, Anne peppered Souvan with cheery questions and David and I agreed that while we both enjoy a round of golf, it’s damn difficult finding the time for it these days. 

The Khamu village was very…nice, about 100 bamboo huts with neat thatch roofs and new numbered address plates gathered at the base of a slender limestone mountain.  Souvann ushered David, Anne and I into the schoolhouse, where the children jumped to attention, folded their hands together and greeted us with a polite chorus of “Sabaidee.”  Next we walked to the center of the village and sat at a shaded bamboo picnic table adjacent to a bamboo store that sold tubes of Pringles and bottles of Beer Lao. 

I’m not saying the village was fake – real Khamu people were living there, and living relatively well, maintaining their traditions.  It was simply a village visited by wealthy tourists, and the income from that tourism had had a sanitizing effect.  Sanitation isn’t a bad thing – most settlements in Southeast Asia are in dire need of more of it.  It was somewhat refreshing to wander through a village where no dog tried to bite me, no alcoholic tried to befriend me and where every packed earth yard was swept clean.

After a riverside picnic lunch of green curry, sticky rice and glistening orange lobes of fresh papaya we walked over to the kayak put-in and set off down the Khan river.  Anne and Souvan took one kayak while David and I teamed up in the other.  Early April is the height of the dry season in Indochina and the river was low in its banks, a series of placid dark pools broken up by riffles and small rapids.  In the fast currents local families were sieving gravel from the river bed to sell to construction companies in town.  Wide-eyed water buffalo stared from the banks.  “I’ve never been anywhere so quiet before,” said David.

It soon became apparent that David and I had divergent philosophies about river kayaking.  Well-schooled in the principles of risk management, he tried to stay as dry as possible, while I got a kick out of bouncing through the biggest waves and dropping into the deepest holes.  Unfortunately, since David was sitting in the front of the kayak, he bore the brunt of each collision.  As we approached a bend in the river and heard the dull roar of rapids ahead he made a request:  “Let’s aim for the gentlest bit this time round.”

The quickening current swept us around the bend and into a white-water rock garden.  There was probably a safe channel through the boulders, but I never saw it.  I never even looked for it.  My entire attention was consumed by the sight of a stunningly gorgeous Lao woman standing on a rock in the middle of the river.  She wore a traditional close-fitting blue silk dress with a high collar and golden embroidery at the ankles and wrists, and incredibly, inexplicably, she was singing.  I couldn’t hear her voice over the white-water, but it was clear from her eyes and the graceful way she moved her arms that the song was about love. 

Needless to say, I completely forgot I was steering a kayak until a strangled yelp from up front brought me back to reality - a fraction of a second before we slammed head on into a rock.  The boat buckled and David was buried beneath a cascade of water.  We crashed sideways through the rapids, directly beneath the beautiful singer and past the camera crew that was filming her from the riverbank.  When we finally emerged into the eddy below we were soaking wet but otherwise unscathed, our hapless descent preserved for posterity in a Lao karaoke video. 

The moment seemed emblematic of my affair with Luang Prabang.  Rushing down-river, for a moment I had been captivated by a made-up beauty stranded on a tiny island of tranquility, singing her heart out under a camera lens.  My presence was only a brief and inelegant intrusion, a few awkward frames before the current carried me away, but the impression of such beauty will stay with me for a long time.