The Market Economy

It is said that Dr Goh Keng Swee liked walking through cities to look at their shops.  Not for purposes of shopping, mind you, but because he felt that this gave a good sense of the state of the area's economy.

I was reminded of this when I visited the morning markets in Vang Vieng, and Luang Prabang.  For us in Southeast Asia, the morning market is where all the housewives go first thing in the morning, to buy the food to be cooked later in the day. So it is a good place to find out what people eat.   

In Vang Vieng, there were lots of vegetable stalls.  There were also a few stalls selling meat - I really do not know what type of meat and I did not want to ask.  There were a few stalls selling a few fish each.  But there were many people seated on the ground, with a small pile of food in front of them - some vegetable stalls but others sold more "exotic" products, including a basin of insects, of live frogs each tied by the leg with a little piece of string, and bats.  These were women from the nearby villages, who had gleaned a few vegetables from their gardens, or who had sent out their children to see what could be caught, to sell or trade at the market. 

My friends bought duck eggs, to be boiled in the guesthouse and eaten for breakfast, rice cooked in banana leaves and a huge comb of gigantic bananas. 

By contrast, the morning market in Luang Prabang had more stalls selling meat and fish, in addition to vegetables.  One stall had a large tank of fish, in fact. Others sold crabs, tied together with rattan.  There was the one stall which sold what looked like maggots (or worms?).  There was also one stall selling some 6-7 types of rice - ordinary slash-and-burn rice (referring to the mode of cultivation), early harvest rice, sticky rice, black rice, brown rice, amongst others. The Laotian people really know their rice.  A number of stalls sold ready-cooked food- my friend bought a few packets of mixed black and white sticky rice, which we would eat with a little coconut and sugar (it was delicious). In short, the signs of a more vibrant regional economy.

For more photos on Laos, see my Flickr page.

By the Nam Song River

The Nam Song river wends its way through mountainous terrain; these limestone karsts tower over the river and continue beyond it.  We were on our way from Vientiane to Luang Prabang, from the new capital to the ancient capital.  Much of the journey would be spent driving through these mountains.  And we would be spending one night on the road, in Vang Vieng, a little town nestled beside the mountains, by the river.

Vang Vieng today is a sort of backpacker paradise.  It has many restaurants and guesthouses for backpackers, with the restaurants essentially comprising raised seating areas with lots of cushions.  There the backpackers sit, snacking and drinking and watching TV - largely reruns of American sitcoms.  We would be staying somewhere else - in one of the older guesthouses, which had been redeveloped a few times and catered to (ahem) a higher class of tourist.   Right by the river, it had fabulous views of the mountains and was within walking distance of the toll bridge and small tribal village.

We visited the village briefly (it was getting late, and the cows were already on their way home).  After a good dinner (pork ribs, papaya salad, a soup of young bamboo shoots, fish, and vegetables),we returned to the guesthouse.  There, we were greeted by the strains of "Blowing in the Wind".  The owner of the guesthouse was no mean guitarist and singer - some folks in our group knew him. We spent the evening by the river, singing away.

The next morning, we woke early and after a visit to the morning market visited a series of limestone caves (filled with stalagmites and stalagtites), again by the river.  We were early, so had the caves mostly to ourselves.  Then, we continued on our journey through the mountains to Luang Prabang. 

Spectacular, majestic scenery was all around.  The winding road took us up and down the mountains. It was an exciting journey, though a little worrying at times, particularly after we had to stop because one driver, going too fast, had gone off the road into a ravine and the car was being winched up.  Fortunately, we also had a good driver who didn't speed, kept his eyes on the road and tooted his horn every time we rounded a corner.  We arrived safely at Luang Prabang that evening.

To end off, here is a little video of the singing session that evening in Vang Vieng.  I asked for a traditional Lao song.  This one, is about the national flower of Laos - the frangipani.Here he is singing it together with others in our party. 

Temple-Hopping in Vientiane

Big and small
Originally uploaded by Taking5

I had been looking forward to visiting Laos for some time, after my classmate invited me over. Finally, 4 years after our first invitation, we made it over! I've decided that I'm not going to do the day by day updates which I used to do after my previous holidays. Instead, over the next few posts, I hope to share a few highlights of our stay.

Laos is a deeply religious Buddhist society. Like Thailand, Burma and Cambodia, young men go through the rite of passage of becoming monks for a while. My friends called this the equivalent of national service for them!  Indeed, there is merit for all of us to take a few months off to pray, reflect, and to learn what it is to depend on the charity and compassion of others. This can only inculcate these virtues in one's own life.

According to my friend, we had arrived the day before a major festival - when 450 monks would gather at Wat Ong Teu, a major monastery, to celebrate Vientiane's 450th Anniversary as the capital of Laos.  Indeed, when we arrived, the temple was crowded.  Large containers had been set out for people to "make merit" and donate to the temple.  The central prayer hall, or "sim", was also filled with groups of people dressed in their best - praying, checking on their fortunes, and taking photos of themselves before the altar on this important occasion. 

The large crowds were thankfully missing from the next two temples we visited that day - Wat Impeng, Wat Sisaket - and the Ho Phakeo temple.  Presumably, every one was at the big festival.  Wat Impeng is just next to Wat Ong Teu, and the sim was opened whilst we were standing there taking photos of the exterior. My friend told me that the brightly coloured murals on the front wall of the sim had been restored through donations, as were the two smaller shrines facing the temple. But beyond just helping preserve and maintain the buildings, the temples receive other forms of support from the community -  each household is also assigned to a particular temple and they will support it financially and with food. 

Later, we visited two other temples - Wat Si Muang, where people pray for their requests to be granted, and the Pha That Luang, the majestic stupa which is a symbol of Laos.  Wat Si Muang (as would be expected) was crowded.  A number of children were there (my friend says that they are praying for good exam results!), parents with a newborn, and so on.  For those whose requests have been granted, they return to the Wat, buy a marigold-decked "tree" from one of the stalls outside the sim, to offer it at the foot of the Buddha in thanksgiving.

But the highlight of the day was definitely Wat Sisaket, the oldest wat in Vientiane - because it was the only one left standing by the Siamese following their invasion of the city in 1828. The old sim was being restored whilst we were there, and we could not take photos of the murals in the interior.  But the cloisters were amazing - they were lined with statues of the Buddha, with small niches in the walls each containing 2-3 miniatures (see starting photo). Altogether, there were over 10,000 statues of the Buddha in the whole temple complex with over 6,000 in the cloisters alone.  The sim and cloisters were surrounded by a quiet, green park which hosted its own large shrine as well as a number of stupas, some containing the relics of some Laotian dignitaries.

We had just visited a handful of the many wats in Vientiane but all of them were well-maintained and cared for.  For a nominally Communist country, the deep religious roots of the society and the people of Laos are evident for all to see.

More Laos photos on Flickr.