Looking Back: Luang Prabang

Wat Visoun

Luang Prabang (July 6, 2002) — I went out this afternoon and walked through the streets of Luang Prabang, shored up by a lunch of pho (noodles and vegetables), and into the Talat Dala—a market smelling of peanuts and burnt rice. On a hill above rose the “That Chomsi”—a two hundred year-old stupa, shining in the sun like a pregnant lotus blossom. All around lay French colonial edifices—interspersed with more traditional Lao architecture—and beyond that, silent and melancholy, the Mekong rolled on towards Vientiane, carrying with it fractals of the afternoon light. But there’s nothing to connect Luang Prabang with Vientiane. They belong to different worlds. Luang Prabang exists as, writes Marthe Bassene, “a delightful paradise of idleness . . . the refuge of the last dreamers”. At dusk, motorbikes buzz lazily through dirt avenues, lit from above by fluorescent bulbs that flicker onto the street through insistent moths; the sky glitters like gold-leaf and pink clouds hang low over the shoulders of the mountains that surround the city.

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