Ni Dieu Ni Maitre

My Swedish friend Moten, well informed but he thought that black people in the USA couldn’t vote! Appalled, as are most westerners I meet, over the antics of D. Trump.

OVERSTAYED A BIT IN LUANG PRABANG

The layout here is fairly simple. The tourist section of the city rests between two rivers, the smaller of which runs into the mighty Mekong, making this area surrounded by water on 3 sides. The Western end features expensive small hotels (mostly everything here is colonial or faux colonial), chichi shops and restaurants and several temples. Older western couples are the tourists here.

The middle ground along the Mekong itself has inexpensive hotels and river sunset view places to eat. Budget tourists, Laotian and westerners make up the small off-season crowd here. Still in the official rainy season, it actually rarely rains and not for long. Chinese tourists, in groups of 8 to a dozen or so, troop through in the cooler mornings, although they stay outside the old city in Chinese run hotels and eat in Chinese restaurants, putting little or no money into the local economy, according to my hotel keeper.

It is a bit of a problem being a vegetarian (although I eat fish) as the local diet is very meat heavy. Can’t imagine what a vegan does. There are Indian places as well. The backpackers stay… somewhere else, out of the old city. The beer is Beer Lao, a passably good light lager, and they make 5 varieties including a dark, a wheat and a surprisingly hoppy and full flavored IPA. Coffee, especially espresso drinks, is quite popular and available everywhere.

The money? Lots of zeros. The smallest bill, a 1,000 kip bill, is worth 4.5 cents, while the largest, 100,000 kip is worth $4.45. Without constantly putting on my reading glasses at every transaction, it is quite difficult to distinguish the 5,000 from the 50,000 and so on. Easy to be a millionaire here. There is no coinage.

A wonderful place for breakfast where they roast Laotian coffee beans and provide a great cappucino.

And so I paid $1 per day to extend my visa for another 30 days… quite the adventure finding the immigration office well outside the town. I had the map on the mobile, but this area was uncharted territory and my tuk tuk driver ran us around in circles on bumpy dirt roads until we finally got lucky. This process can be repeated once more for a total of 90 days, until quite recently the length of stay in all the countries in this region. The authorities in Laos are toying with the current line in the region, which is to go after the big money, short stay tourists while cutting visa lengths.

The sacred Volkswagen… you figure it out.

Attempting to get a train to Vang Vieng, the once notorious backpacker haven ( riots, deaths from poison homemade booze, drownings as drunken tourists hit sharp rocks in their tubes and so on) I discovered that I would have to wait 5 more days as the train is all booked up. I was in Vang Vieng while cycling around the country in the 90’s as it was just getting started. Laos was closed to tourism until the early 90’s. Evidently as time went on, things got way out of control in this town, but the Communist government finally stepped in and things are much calmer now (and it is, naturally, the off season) My friend Jay in Chaing Rai described Laos as ‘communism lite’ and so it is.

This is part of the night market in LP, I assumed that this would be food carts, but it is arts and crafts, and extends for a quarter mile every night. This town must get quite crowded in season.