Shoring Things Up

December 6, 2025

Dear little friends,

Well, our second choice of guesthouses ended up being a bust, too. At 1 am the quiet was shattered by a group of Lao tourists arriving in a well-oiled condition. Yelling, door slamming, screaming laughter, motorbike revving, all the usual. Things can be quiet in Laos until they’re not. In 2005 we were in a tiny village in a thatched bungalow (50 cents, yes, you read that right) in the middle of g.d. nowhere during a harvest festival when the locals drank a lot of lao-lao and started shooting their hunting rifles up into the air and we huddled waiting for the bullets to come back down through the roof.

I just wasn’t expecting this behavior in relatively sophisticated Luang Prabang.

There was no gunfire of course, but it quickly became apparent that this was a mostly local hotel, in the heart of one of the most touristed cities in the world. It’s a good reminder that in Laos, the beauty and chaos exist on the same block. We had said we wanted four nights there but only paid for the first one and by morning we were definitely not going to pay for three more, we were outta there and on the hunt for hotel #3.

Laos has a reputation for being super cheap, both for food and accommodation. Not in December, in Luang Prabang. One can easily go super high scale there if you like. The old hospital, which we both remember as having no glass in the windows and goats and such wandering the courtyards, has been “restored” into a Sofitel hotel to a level of glory never before known in Laos. Super high scale is still around $100 USD, which is less than staying in the cinder block hotel in my hometown in Montana, but still. We ain’t paying that.

But we did find a nice little place along the Nam Khan river. Any new buildings/hotels in LP need to be built to UNESCO World Heritage standards, which is a sort of French colonial/traditional wood hybrid style that is very lovely and appealing. We booked three nights and the kind owner was working every time we saw him. Maid’s day off? He cooked our breakfast, mopped the floors, carried towels upstairs. He was constantly on the phone arranging transport for guests, obtaining helmets for people renting somebody else’s motorcycles. He was a gem, and we loved our new digs.

Our room in Villa Ouis Namkhan which we loved.

The street where Villa Ouis Namkhan is located, all mostly guesthouses.

Along the Nam Khan during the day there was a lot of busy shoreline restoration/preservation going on, with Thai-style rock shoring up. There had been two years in a row with near disaster-level flooding and what used to be little winter vegetable gardens on the banks of the river had all been washed away and it was imperative that they keep it from undercutting it further and endangering riverside buildings. So the clank of equipment was going on every day but it was fine with us. We wished our grandson was there to watch the big machines do their thing with sand and rocks and a lot of satisfying noise.

The Nam Khan river being reinforced before the next monsoon season which starts in June.

We went back to Pomachan’s for coffee where Bruce tried to communicate to the owner that he had known her father back in the day but that went absolutely nowhere. This lady works really hard and keeps a lot of business in her head, she knows what everybody ordered, she has fifteen balls in the air at every moment but we suspect she is illiterate because she merely glanced at Bruce’s Google Translate sentence and then went back to ordering that soup bowl out to that waiting curbside customer. She has no time for sentiment or memory.

On the other hand, we have lots of time for sentiment and memory. We walk the streets of Luang Prabang in a kind of gauzy state of enthrall. Some of those lanes are far more beautiful than the first time I saw them. The family fence of flattened fifty-gallon drums is now a proper wall with the former hovel replaced by a UNESCO-standard guesthouse. Flowers are everywhere. It’s basically Lao Disneyland, with little representing the gritty presence of everyday Lao life. But never fear, a few blocks out of the main peninsula there is enough dusty authenticity for one to rapidly escape back to the gauze. I say this with love.

Like those who can ride a boat on the Mekong for two days without once glancing out the window, you can enjoy Luang Prabang for all it’s charm and natural beauty and history and ignore that in essence, Laos is far worse off than when we first visited. Yes, there is more electricity, and well there should be since Thailand and China stepped in with dams and begrudgingly gave Laos a small share of the vast power they export to their own countries. There are cell phones, better and cheaper coverage than in the United States for that matter. But the roads are absolute crap, and we’ll be talking more about that.

Bruce wanted to stop in at Wat Makmo, to check on the wooden standing Buddhas he’s been documenting for decades. Would they still be there or would they have rotted or been stolen? I’ll let him tell you about that with photos. I spent that time sitting under a gigantic bodhi tree doing what I do in temples, watching the goings-on and counting butterflies.

Wat Wisnunarat or what the locals call it, Wat Mak Mo, which refers to the shape of the Chedi which resembles a watermelon, or, a mak mo.

Inside Wat Aham. These are some of the many illustrations of the Jataka Tales which are stories of the Buddha's life. His first sermon, etc. Often the walls of temples are full of Jataka Tale paintings.

Here’s something that is improving in Laos, however. There are more birds. Mind you, I’d never seen a bird in Laos before unless it was lying dead on a mat at the morning market. No bird was too small or rare that it couldn’t be hunted and eaten, and there were simply no birds, not a crow, not an English sparrow, not a swallow, nuttin’. But we were told that there was a law passed in 2017 forbidding the shooting of wild birds. Butterflies are another story, they aren’t edible and there are enormous, glamorous tropical butterflies everywhere.

A small flock of tiny fluffers dipped around the temple grounds and the bodhi and I rustled our leaves in joy.

20 years ago we were selling Lao silk textiles in the states and sending the proceeds to two very worthy literacy projects in Luang Prabang. Since we were in the neighborhood we stopped in at @MyLibrary, started by our friend Carol and now powered by the locals that grew up under her tutelage. It’s a marvelous place of learning and discovery, with English classes, books on every topic, scientific exhibits, and a thriving film and photography curriculum. Carol wasn’t there and in fact was returning to the states the next day, so we missed her but have such tremendous respect for what she has accomplished there. I messaged her and we had a short text conversation. I feel like we could sit with her for days discussing all the changes in Laos, good and bad.

The other project we supported was Big Brother Mouse, and if you are ever in LP I hope you’ll stop in for morning or evening English conversation time with eager young people. BBM has published over 400 children’s titles in Lao language and has started several schools in far-flung locations using a curriculum radically different from the “call and response” schooling offered in nearly all this region’s schools. It’s no surprise that Pomachan’s daughter is illiterate, that alone is going to hold Laos back for a long, long time.

We found ourselves some dinner away from the tourist area and went back to our sweet room now that the earth movers were done with their rumbling. This time we were going to get some decent sleep, at least until 5:30 am. Stay tuned for that.

Meanwhile, take a little stroll through Luang Prabang with us:

The backside of Wat Xiengthong when the light was nice and kids were having fun.

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