Flight of the Minivans

December 7, 2025 to December 8, 2025

Luang Prabang

Dear little friends,

Our room at the Ouis Villa Namkhan was cozy, comfortable, and very quiet. Until 5:30 am, anyway. Suddenly the sound of engines humming by woke me out of my deep and happy sleep. What in the what for? I peeked out through the curtains where there was a small lane directly below, and also a view of the river road in front of the guesthouse.

Minivans. They roll at dawn. Actually, it was still pitch dark.

White vans, gray vans, none of them particularly noisy or obnoxious but lots and lots and lots of vans. Like a shoal of fish they passed by for 40 minutes. Where were they going in the darkness?

Alms.

Luang Prabang is a city of temples, and from each temple, every morning, hundreds of barefoot monks in bright orange robes stream out and go down the street collecting alms. It’s a remarkable sight, but we don’t partake of that sight or haven’t since 2007 or so, because it’s turned into a cringe-worthy tourist spectacle. Yes, tourists are told to back off and not get up in the monks’ grills with their cameras. Yes, tourists are told not to pretend to give the monks anything in the alms ceremony but there will be hawkers nearby selling little bags or baskets of stale gross sticky rice and a cloth for you to kneel on alongside the authentically devout Lao residents, so why not pretend you are too, you know, for the optics.

Typically in an almsgiving, the monks stop and bestow blessings on their benefactors, and since most of the monks are young, their voices can be pure and sweet, it really is a striking thing to see and hear.

We just happened to catch the late shift of alms-giving, maybe at the request of the givers who want no part of the early morning spectacle.

We hustled off to a respectable distance away.

So, let’s assume that 95% of these vans are full of Chinese tourists and that they are staying in Chinese-owned hotels at the outskirts of Luang Prabang and were awakened at 4 am by their tour operators, loaded into vans, and scooted onto the main part of LP to see the almsgiving that was most certainly put into their tour itineraries. I honestly can’t even imagine what the scene is up there a few blocks away. So I lay back down and went back to sleep until a decent hour.

Our hotel serves a great little breakfast and we enjoyed that and didn’t even have to pay for it with a blessing.

By the way, while sticky rice is certainly the main staple of Lao food, the monks get other stuff too. Bags of curries, fruits and vegetables, snacks, drinks, money. They get by just fine.

We don't know why this tree has been venerated with little wads of sticky rice but we know it probably deserves it.

Pet birds getting an airing. They really shouldn't do this, and by this I mean put them out where I am tempted to open every door and let them out.

Wat Xieng Thong is very nearby our hotel and we waited for the post-alms crowds to thin out before venturing in. Wat Xieng Thong deserves its own journal post, practically, but Bruce will include many photos of it in his Luang Prabang gallery. It’s the most famous, the most beautiful temple of all, and it is reknown for the colorful mirror-tile exterior murals and lovely stenciled interior murals. It’s just a really cool place.

Boatmen hurrying to watch dancing girls.

And of course it is on all of those same aforementioned itineraries and we would expect that. The days of us ambling in in the late afternoon and being greeted by a couple of shy monks and a happy dog are long over, we joined the crowds and while it’s a much different experience it’s still a very cool temple.

These tourists are from Thailand. There's a shop a few blocks away that rents out traditional costumes. They are posing in front of the famous "Tree of Life" mural.

Most of the tourists only seemed interested in posing in the windows of the mirror tile temple. They didn’t even glance at the murals, which show brilliant little scenes of Lao village life, animals, fish ponds, people plowing and dancing and weaving, the entire scene so vivid and luminous and absolutely delightful. But, you know, selfies are important to a lot of people.

While Bruce photographed, I sat on a bench and observed and thought about non-attachment. I’m so lucky to have been able to walk through Wat Xieng Thong in near solitude. These folks will never have that. But they’re enjoying themselves.

On the temple grounds there was also a puppet theater troupe made up of young people, I’d say in their early to mid teens. It was pretty fun, and especially when a young audience member started dancing around in front of the stage. I love me a toddler improv.

While the plot of this puppet show escaped us it seemed like these birds were giving some valuable advice.

At the curtain call the troupe came out and the little girl in front joined in.

We went back to the night market for dinner. There was some disagreement about which one of the vendors we had eaten from two nights before. I insisted it was “Mom’s Food”. So we waited for them to open and ordered from their menu and realized I was wrong, it was the one next to Mom’s.

While we were eating Mom’s food which was not that good, the tables around us were filling with diners. Small girls work the crowd selling bags of bananas. We casually waved them away but two Japanese men nearby started engaging with these little waifs. “How much?”, said one of them in English. The kid couldn’t have been more than seven years old and froze in the headlights.

“Thao dai?” I asked her. She unfroze and whispered something.

“Sao.” Twenty, for twenty thousand kip, one US dollar.

I told him. He gave her 20,000 kip and waved her off without taking her bananas and she made a terrified wai and scampered off.

Word got out. At least five more banana girls came by, one by one, ignoring us and approaching our congenial Japanese neighbor and each one got their 20k and kept their bananas.

As we stood up to leave I saluted those guys, they were all smiles, having the time of their lives. There’s a lot to say about having children selling in a market full of strangers, basically begging, being told no no no all night long. It’s not right. We knew it, the Japanese guys know it. But there is some small happiness in seeing kindhearted generosity, too.

We took a perfunctory stroll through the night market. We used to buy silk there, believe it or not, but most of the pieces are now machine made and not made of silk, or if they are genuine, they are shopworn from getting packed and unpacked and hung every single night of the year until they are sold. It’s a fun market though, and worth a peek.

Setting up the night market starts in the late afternoon. Eventually the street gets closed to car traffic.

You see a lot of babies and small children sitting in their parents' market booths, night after night.

One of the few market booths with genuine pieces, which should be in air-conditioned shops instead of dragged out of a plastic bag every day.

Now this is how these exquisite pieces deserve to be displayed. I can tell you with twenty years' experience that each of these pieces took many months to make.

One of the ritzy joints on the main street has local musicians and they’re really good.

Some of these hotels are just stunningly elegant.

The next morning we had to face the fact that we need to get out of Luang Prabang and that is much easier said than done.

We have kicked around some very aspirational plans to explore a part of northern Laos that a) has a road, and b) there are guesthouses on that road. But it meant taking a bus to Vang Vieng and onward south of there. And said road had some serious inclines on it, according to Pocket Earth. That and the road to GET to that road was, and let me put this delicately, a complete and total shitshow.

Two of the YouTube accounts we follow had taken Highway 13 in the last several months. We’ve taken Highway 13 to Luang Prabang many times, and while it was always a roller coaster adventure with the bus screaming through villages and pigs and chickens scattering, it was always fun, with some absolutely heart-stopping scenery. You just had to ignore the folks on the bus tossing their cookies all around, and then tossing those plastic bags out the window.

Anyway. The roads in Laos have gone to shit. They have far more heavy truck traffic than they can bear, there were catastrophic floods and landslides this summer which may or may not have been repaired. Looking at Google Maps, the curves of Highway 13 are bright red, indicating spots where the trucks jockey for position, line up waiting their turn, hanging off the edge of a thousand foot cliff. Nope.

So we had to come up with another way out. Wait, you ask. Where are all those backpackers going after Luang Prabang, and why aren’t they on Highway 13?. Because of the train, dear reader. The Chinese built a high speed train line through Laos, which is probably 60% tunnel. You can fly into and out of LP, you can take the train in or out, you can take the boat. Anybody taking a bus or minivan is going to regret that decision.

Well, we weren’t going on Highway 13 but we decided to venture down to Xayaburi province and take a little-used border crossing back into Thailand a little south and west of Paklai. We’ve ridden highway 4, back in 2014. It was a brand new lovely highway then. Not anymore. Bus it is.

So now we had a plan and we needed to verify that it was doable. A ride to the Southern bus station was in order.

You barely have to leave Luang Prabang before the Disneyland edifice crumbles. The bus station had very few buses, mostly minivans or small trucks, all covered with dust. We’ve seen this movie before.

The man behind the Xayaburi window was all reassurances. Yes yes, there was a big bus to Xayaburi, it cost this much, be here by 8 am tomorrow, there will be room for your bicycles, it will take 6 hours. Great! Our plan will work! We’ll get to Xayaburi in the early afternoon with plenty of time to get to a hotel and then catch another bus for Paklai in the morning.

So, now, time to celebrate our last evening in Luang Prabang. We want to spend out our Lao kip because it’s worthless outside of the country, but do we have enough for two more hotel nights and some unknown transport costs and meals? We do. But not enough for a night on the town in Luang Prabang so we changed $20 and went to dinner in the most beautiful restaurant on the main street. There is upstairs balcony seating so we went early and grabbed one of those tables.

The nighttime view. Don’t you want to sit up there with us?

This is probably the most photographed restaurant in Luang Prabang, so we are in lots of people’s photos, eating my pizza and Bruce’s Lao sausage, drinking small draft Beerlaos, lingering over our food. We have a very strict rule about no pizza in Asia, by the way, because we’ve had some traumatizingly bad rice flour no cheese or tomato pizzas here. But I read the reviews and discovered that the owner is Italian so damn the torpedoes. My pizza was awesome. We spent precisely $20.

A Japanese tourist took a table behind us, as pleased as we were to score these seats. As the evening wore on he joined us at our table and stood us for drinks. He speaks perfect English, has a career in tech, has traveled, we had a lot to talk about and he’s a great guy. Always fun to make new friends while traveling.

We were sentimental over Luang Prabang as we strolled back to our room. It really is a special place and I hope if you ever get a chance to go there you will. Just don’t take HIghway 13.

Today's ride: 17 miles (27 km)
Total: 414 miles (666 km)

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