Jan 27th Luang Prabang

Jan 27^th Luang Prabang

Well at least it’s stopped raining, although it’s still unseasonably cold. As arranged Ken met us at 08:30 and we started a tour of some of the 32 Wats that are in Luang Prabang. The first one, Wat Xieng Thong  was completely different from anything we’d seen before, it’s very colourful, almost blingy in their brilliance. The tops of the temples and the stupas have bright green, blue, silver and gold mirror tiles adorning them, which is quite surreal.

The amazing glass mosaics

Here they have the Buddhist equivalent of a Popemobile. It’s a trailer, complete with rudimentary steering on which a stupa is mounted. This is wheeled into the courtyard for special occasions, although I doubt this has happened for a while. As this is an active Wat we couldn’t go into all the little shrines as these are reserved for the monks. The most fascinating thing was that there were more mosaics on some of the buildings that depicted stories of Lord Buddhas life.

We continued walking and visited a further 3 Wats including Wat Sene. Wat Sene Souk Haram or literally "Temple of a 100 000 treasures" is one of the most beautiful temples in Luang Prabang, singular by its restored painting of a deep ochre colour, flamboyant and glittering with gold. Constructed in 1718 by king Kitsarath with 100 000 stones from the Mekong river.

Noi was waiting for us and we boarded to visit the Kuang Si Waterfalls. These are a series of three falls that have a total drop of 60m. Before we got there we visited two villages. The first was a Mhong village. The significant thing here is that the houses are built directly onto the ground, obviously these people don’t expect flooding. As we wandered around the village we saw some of the silk crafts that we’d seen in the markers being made. Kim bought a scarf.  The other notable thing was that a lot of the people wore their traditional costumes, which were just gorgeous.

Traditional Lao house

We continued towards the falls stopping at another village, this time a Lao one. These houses are built on stilts. This is for two reasons; one in case of floods or wild animals and two as they were on stone plinths to stop termites. Most of the women did weaving and had their own looms under their houses.  Tamsin and Kim both bought scarves. Outside this village we could see layers of paddy fields. As we were standing discussing this Tamsin was approached by a rather drunk local and invited to a funeral!!!

Weaving loom

Rice nursery in the paddy fields

A sun bear in a wonderful sanctuary

We arrived at the waterfalls and started walking through the woods towards them. The first thing you come to is the “Free the Bears” animal sanctuary.  Most of the bears arrive at the rescue centre as very young cubs having been confiscated by the Lao Government from illegal poaching and trading.  It is likely that they would otherwise have been destined for a life of torture in a "bile farm" outside of Laos. All 23 of our bears are Asiatic Black Bears. I bought a t-shirt where the proceeds went towards funding the bear sanctuary.

Between each fall there are large shallows pools that you can swim in and despite the low temperature some people were.  The water is usually a clear blue which is caused by the limestone that the waters flow over. As it had been raining a lot of sediment had clouded the water and it looked more like a milky green.

Stuffed lemon grass without any bits of fingers in them

Ken had re-arranged our cooking course for this evening. We were picked up from the Tamarind Restaurant and taken back out of town. In our tuk-tuk there were 12 of us, our teacher Sit followed us on his motorbike. The course takes place next to the river and was a bit on the cold side. Sit introduced us to what we would be cooking and then some of the vegetables. Fortunately the first part was scorching some tomatoes, onions, garlic and aubergines on the fires, this warmed us up a bit. From this we made two pastes, one with tomatoes, onions, garlic, lemon juice and chilli with fish sauce and the other using the aubergines, spring onion, chilli, garlic and fish sauce. The paste was made by crushing them in a mortar. We then learnt how to steam fish in banana leaves, Tamsin has tried this before and we realised why the leaves tended to split – you need to soften them over heat first. The next item was stuffed lemon grass. This involves carefully cutting the lemon grass using a sharp knife. At this point the lights failed and we had to do this part by torch light – not fun. However, the lights came back on as we crushed and splayed the lemon grass before stuffing it with a mince chicken mix. This was then cooked in oil. When all this had cooked we then ate it together – yum.