dh » luang prabang http://danielharr.is/read travelogues Sat, 12 Feb 2011 16:40:27 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 December 24, 2006… from here on in I type without a script http://danielharr.is/read/2006/12/25/december-24-2006-from-here-on-in-i-type-without-a-script/ http://danielharr.is/read/2006/12/25/december-24-2006-from-here-on-in-i-type-without-a-script/#comments Mon, 25 Dec 2006 03:25:46 +0000 dh http://worksforfood.com/read/2006/12/25/december-24-2006-from-here-on-in-i-type-without-a-script/ The slow boat trip up the Mekong from Luang Prabang to Huay Xai (theoretically via Pakbeng) is hard to capture in words or images. The brown (yet glistening) river, the magnificent mountains and rock formations (on the shore and mid-river), the dazzling sky above the mystery village where we had to put in for the night, the generosity of the villagers who put us up and the jolt of their Lao coffee in the morning, the hard wooden benches and the columns of sunlight breaking through the green-hued forests and jungles onto white sand beaches with colorful markets, the terraces next to those beaches, the bitter cold mornings and seeing my breath in the tropics, the hot soup, the wads of torn-up kip notes that changed hands… yeah, pretty hard to pin down.

Merry Christmas. Peace on Earth.

(and now cutting away from paper and into the present:)

I made it across to Chiang Kong from Huay Xai this Christmas morning, passing Thai immigration (my last major hurdle of the trip, I hope) easily. I bought first-class bus tickets (because that’s how I roll on the glorious sealed roads of Thailand) for this evening, so I’m taking care of errands here for the day. There’s some sort of race in town; I might try to catch it.

My hour of furious typing is ending, so it’s time to hit the town for a bit under six hours.

]]> http://danielharr.is/read/2006/12/25/december-24-2006-from-here-on-in-i-type-without-a-script/feed/ 0 More Laounging in Luang Prabang http://danielharr.is/read/2006/12/21/more-laounging-in-luang-prabang/ http://danielharr.is/read/2006/12/21/more-laounging-in-luang-prabang/#comments Thu, 21 Dec 2006 11:27:54 +0000 dh http://worksforfood.com/read/2006/12/21/more-laounging-in-luang-prabang/ Luang Prabang is my favorite part of Lao, my favorite country on this trip. I’ve been exposed to some more scamming recently, but overall it’s still very low pressure. Not quite Vientiane’s food variety, but still plenty of baguettes and laughing cow cheese and all the other French leftovers (I suppose they could have left roads, a working bureaucracy, or other things the British liked to leave instead, but you can’t win them all). The scenery (augmented by some karst formations around Vang Vieng enroute) is much nicer, though it won’t come out so well in pictures—it’s hard to capture the number of different shades of gray from the distant mountains.

Today I saw a flier for drop-in English teaching and spent an hour and a half trying to help a monk distinguish the ‘l’ and ‘r’ sounds—a hard job, but that’s what he wanted to work on. I think we made some progress… he has “pray” vs. “play” vs. “pay” down pretty well, though “word” vs. “world” is not so easy. Consonant clusters like “ld” and “ts” and “sk’d” are understandably troublesome.

Someone with a CELTA was trying to get across tenses, using irregular verbs. I hope she had fun with that one… heh. Kept doing some cringe-worthy things like asking monks what they have for dinner (nothing) or if they like to play [soccer] football (they would love to but they aren’t allowed)… not so cringeworthy except she kept trying to get them to pretend instead of just asking what was for breakfast. So much for the CELTA.

I have been asked to blog more about food, but I really can’t do it justice as I don’t even properly understand it thanks to the dominance of Chinese and Thai knockoffs (and delicious French leftovers) which dominate the English (or French) language menus here. There is a (Western-owned, oddly) place called Tamarind which has a lovely menu insert explaining everything, but I can’t remember it all. More herbs, less soupy stuff, more sticky, less steamed rice. None of the uniquely Lao food I’ve tried has been a fantastic revelation (like my first Thai red curry in Hong Kong) but it’s all pretty good. The one Lao dish I’ve had a couple times is laap, a mortared-and-pestled bunch of meat and herbs and lime that tastes pretty good. And of course, Beerlao (and the Tigerhead drinking water also produced by the Lao brewing company) are good to the point of being unavailable in Thailand for fear that they’d destroy the Singha and Chang markets.

Enough writing about food, it’s time to eat some. See you in a long while… possibly after Christmas, as I doubt the slow boat to Huay Xai / Chiang Kong via Pakbeng (which I expect to board on the morning of the 23rd) will have Internet access).

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