Still in Louang Phrabang, still like Laos. The people here don't seem to have learned yet that tourists are to be ripped off or taken advatage of in whatever way possible. None of the usual constant sales wherever you turn, just occasional 'sabbadi' (hullo) from friendly people who seem pleasantly surprised to have tourists. This city does have plenty of tourists, mind you, but doesn't feel terribly touristy somehow. Things aren't really aimed towards tourists, mind you. Places tend to have up to 4 different names - and a single street often changes name midways, giving it a total of 8 names. Even the name of this city is spelled differently in various guidebooks and on signs here.
Have just been doing the proper tourist things for here for the last few days. Saw the Royal Palace - rather plain building by comparison with the lush extravagancies of all the temples; the bedrooms were remarkably simple - just big white rooms with a single plain darkwood bed and a couple of wardrobes and pictures. Nothing worth deposing, really. Still unsure what happened to the royal family - listening in to a tour guide, he referred to the royal family as having retired and the prince incumbent as having mysteriously 'disappeared' (magic, no doubt). The lonely planet guide says they were exiled to live in caves, and the rough guide says they died of hunger and exposure. Gone, anyway. One room was devoted to presents from various nations - lots of nice things in crystal and china etc, and the keys of freedom to various cities which had been presented to the king. In the midst of these ornamented keys in presentation boxes from Tokyo, Washington and other such places, there was a single big clunky wooden key frm Knoxville, USA of all places. I still have no idea what connection Knoxville ever imagined it had with Laos, but I'm sure the king was delighted.
Visited a few 'wats' (temples) which go by the most wonderful names, I'm sure they're deliberate - Wat Sup and Wat That, for example. That can't be accidental. I had the same feeling in Indonesia - the misspellings and grammar mistakes have to be deliberate; surely you don't spend thousands of pounds on giant signs for multinational companies or literature etc produced by the government without checking that the translation is accurate? The Indonesian government has decreed that places cannot use English names - maybe they also have a campaign that you can't produce a sentence in English, however short, without at least one mistake. I rather like the disregard for accuracy, though; it can give rise to some amusing mistakes - eg, on a cocktail menu, an ingredient was listed as 'triple sex' rather than 'triple sec' (surely deliberate) - but on the same menu, a mysterious ingredient was listed as 'cheeky cheer'. My guess is that it referred to 'maraschino cherries', but feel free to make your own interpretation. Sounded like a good cocktail ingredient though.
The temples themselves are rather indistinguishable to the untrained eye; I have no idea of styles & influences etc; but all are broadly nice - all sweeping wing roofs, gilt and laquer, with millions of images on the walls - such as Buddhist hell, with murderers being boiled in oil, liars having their toungues pulled out. Or tales from Buddhist mythology, with lots of interesting monsters being slaughtered.
And went swimming in the major waterfall. It was excellent; massive and powerful; since it's the end of the rainy season here, it had burst all its banks and was thundering down onto trees which were normally clear and over seats and tables in the picnic area. Swam slightly in a pool at the bottom; huge currents if you went out too far; climbed to the top of a very steep hill to see - nothing, couldn't get near the top of the waterfall because it the wood had turned into a river.
And today being my birthday, I'm lazing around, drinking icecoffee and eating pastries in the cafes; just finished harry potter #2 in the local bookshop cafe; will explore some 100m deep caves where they store old Buddha images later, and have a massage and herbal sauna this evening (costs all of 2 quid). Oh, and maybe a couple of beers.
Tomorrow, flying east to Ponsavvet (road is impassable, bandits and floods) - to the plain of jars - a wide plain with thousands of mysterious 6 foot tall megalithic jars; no-one knows what they were for or why they're there. The plain, however, is filled with UXOs (unexploded ordinance) left over from the non-existent wars, so have hired a guide with Marianna for 3 days of trekking through the plains and hills, visiting hilltribes, staying in the local Hmong villages, finishing with a trip to some distant hot springs. A bit expensive though not in the least luxurious - about 30 quid a day - but a birthday present to myself. After that, I'll probably head up north east to the Vietnamese border area, where the Pathet Lao (freedom fighters) dug miles of tunnels to live in during the wars and blanket bombings; hundreds of families holed up for weeks on end. And back around by road to here, which is the only possible route. Probably be out of contact for about a week or so. No mobile reception even here, in the second largest city in the country; and I don't think they have email in Ponsavvet - never mind the smaller places I'll be passing through. (Though even tiny remote places like Pakbeng, with only 3 hours of electricity from the local generator a day, have TVs and massive satellite dishes)
For them as ain't up on Laoatian history, fyi, Laos is the most heavily bombed country in the world, with 7 inches of steel per square inch apparently, having been caught in the middle of the various indochine wars, though never really participating - just got used as a pawn between the States and China in the advance of communism. Or something of the sort.