Luang Prabang, Laos: Some vignettes

French architecture in Luang Prabang: (yawn) Yeah, and you can see more of it and better in France.

Big group of beerswiller tourist men all with identical broad-brimmed conical traditional woven-bamboo rice-paddy hats...and beers.

Badly behaved tourists in singlets (USA: wife-beaters), read showing too much flesh for what's appropriate, with water pistols like huge bazookers, so big they need shoulder straps to carry them, thinking they are taking part in Laos culture during the splashing fun of the New YEar celebrations. The idea is to splash each other with water to wash away the yuck of the past year and cleanse for the new one, and you're supposed to get permission from the splashee. These tourists didn't really get it, bashing little boys with high-pressure shots while they were utterly defenseless, turning the whole thing into a violent/fight/dominance activity and setting utterly wrong examples to the local children; and reflecting terribly on the rest of us foreigners.

The Japanese girls wandering around through the bustling floodlit night-market with shorts so short you can see their buttocks. Now, I couldn't complain personally, but it's totally out of order to be doing that in Laos where women don't even consider it appropriate to show their shoulders, let alone their thighs, and god forbid anything more.

A friend's sister who sells French baguette sandwiches on the main street in Luang Prabang, absent one day because she'd eaten barbecued fish from the alley market and got very sick. Damn, that's where we had dinner last night. Suspicious of everything after that.

Wanting sticky rice for every meal and even in between, even on its own, so totally delicious and satisfying, I didn't want any other sort of rice or carbohydrate. I am already missing it so much. It's unprocessed and apparently much more nutritious than most other rice varieties.

Trying strange candies in the market.

Trying fried (or steamed) cicadas, liking them...but not being able to finish the whole bag.
Trying bee larvae....well, I thought it was honeycomb....and I didn't know you're supposed to fry them....not daring to try the ''dried'' squirrel.

Every day, noodle soup. Noodle soup. Noodle soup. But only when the sticky rice has sold out.

Noodle soup with something different in it, a different animal...I eventually discover it's buffalo. And something that looks like seaweed but is too chewy, and turns out to be a buffalo organ...something big, white, with lots of little spikes, and called nyoo or nyoh in Lao. Any ideas anyone? I don't know my cooked bovine organs.

The German drug-dealer who is safe because he sells to the police too, and lives peacefully in Luang Prabang importing from all over the world. And pushing quite insisently on my friends. Yes, try these pills. They are ya-ba. My friend had no idea that that is the local name for crystal meth. In fact, despite having been a regular cocaine taker herself, she hadn't heard of crystal meth. She thought they must be ecstacy. Luckily she didn't take him up on his free promotional offers. But she had a good look in his large briefcase he carries with him, full of opium and skunk. Next time she saw him, he reminded her that 'the shop is open any time'. He is currently importing equipment to begin the cultivation of cannabis in Luang Prabang itself. Contributing to progress and bringing modernisation to the people of Laos, one of the poorest and most traditional countries.

The Chinese want to do that too, but mostly not through narcotics. They are apparently pumping dollars...or RMB...into Laos, of course I'm sure they want it as a satellite state but in the meantime there's a rumour that they are facilitating the clearing of rainforest for palm oil 'biofuel' plantations (which will make global warming much worse...ask my Dad about it) and flooding the food markets with cheap goods...which in Luang Prabang may be helping reach demand or may be ousting local producers, I just don't have the info to say. But it did make me wonder about my joyful feeling that the food was local and organic.

The old British expat who designs and develops hotels in Luang Prabang but cares deeply about what's happening to the place. Says it's all going to shit, greed has arrived now, the authorities will expand the airport (which currently holds 2 propeller planes, and that's it, and you just walk out on the runway) so that it will carry 737s and 747s, yipee, goodbye to Laos feeling different, goodbye to anything traditional or nonWestern that they-and we- might value, hello McDonalds!
Great, let those postcards be all images of the past and mere picturesque, not still how Laos is today. Welcome to the new Thailand, the new America. God. It's so unconsidered. So hurried. So desperately sad. Anyway, without more context I won't go on about that, it starts a whole huge discussion. Just read ''Ancient Futures" by Helena Norberg-Hodge and you'll get the picture.

The expat turned as some boys filed past us along the riverbank towards the bridge, smoking. He nodded in their direction, pointing out that they were smoking at 11 or 12, and would be making their way into town to beg from tourists or learn how to rip them off. Yep. He's right. Well he would know, anyhow, he lives there.

''Is there any hope?'' I asked him directly; "Can you see any way that something different could happen here in Laos, something more positive?"

"No."

We then walked past a beachside restaurant on the Mekong whose owner or tout tried to usher us in; however, it's early enough in the development of the tourist trade here that the fact we were disinterested in his menu but friendly to him meant he was still willing to be friendly back, and I just felt the pain of knowing that in a few years he won't bother to be friendly back if we don't want to buy; I've seen it everywhere along the tourist trail in Thailand, India, South America, you name it. Just past him on the path was an old spirit house in the trees with fresh offerings, and next to it, a big pile of stinking litter and the smell of something dead.

We walked through the ''craft village" now full of mansions and SUVs and little girls who won't give you a fair price on a bottle of water. A group of 5 of them stormed the older girl who was shopkeeper, who had told me 2000 for a water--a fair price-- and prevented her from selling me the water. I knew enough Lao to hear them demanding her, ''say 5000", ''no, 7000!" ''No, 5000"....these are more than I pay in a town-centre store for a bottle 3 times the size. Until the middle-aged owner turned up to see what the fuss was about, I simply could not buy a bottle of water. These girls were 7 or 9 years old. How depressing is that. The next generation.