Yesterday (June 16) was a long travel day, so I am catching up from Phnom Penh.  June 15th was probably our longest and hardest day, but also extremely rewarding.  We woke at sunrise and met our guide and driver at 5:30 a.m.  We drove down to the village in Luang Prabang to give morning alms to the monks.  Our guide took us to a side street in the village, where we sat on a bamboo mat with bowls of sticky rice in front of us to wait for the monks.  We were appropriately dressed in long skirts, with white scarves over our shoulders.

In a short time, we saw them.  Lined up single file, the monks walked by in their orange robes, a bright color in the dawn light.  The monks wore simply their robes; the novices wore belts, red or yellow, around their robes.  Several lines of monks passed us in silence.  As they passed, we put sticky rice in their collection bowls.  This is a daily ritual in the village–the community provides sufficient rice to feed the monks their two meals, breakfast and lunch.  The monks line up from oldest to youngest–some of the novices looked like they could not be more than 7 or 8 years old, but women are not permitted to look at the faces of the monks as they pass, so I am guessing age based on my perception of their height and the aging of their hands, and on photos taken by our guide.

I noticed that some of the alms bowls had money as well as rice in them–the Thai visitors apparently give money rather than rice to the monks.  The monks walk quickly by, and it was difficult to get the sticky rice ready in time to put into the bowls.  We would try during short breaks between lines to get sticky rice portions ready for the next set of monks, but we were not always successful.  I’ll admit to dropping some sticky rice, and once I hit the lid of a bowl in my haste, which almost made me giggle, but that is NOT something that is done in this particular ritual.

We returned to the Kiridara Hotel for breakfast, then met our guide to head to the Mekong River.  We boarded a boat and headed to Xieng Mien to walk through the village and to see three temples.  Although it is the rainy season, there has not been much rain to speak of at this point, so the river is low.  This necessitated climbing up fairly steep river banks before climbing very long flights of stairs.  I owe huge thanks to Delaney and Kendall for helping me manage the stairs!

The first temple, Wat Xieng Mene, is right in the middle of the village.  It is a very active temple–a beautiful building.  There is a drum at the temple that is used when important announcements are made in the village.  From this temple, we walked through the village to Wat Chomphet.  The walk was not a difficult one, but the climb to the temple, well, that’s another story–143 steps straight up!  This temple was built in the 1700s–UNESCO has taken over preservation of this temple.  While some monks are still in residence there, it is much less active than Wat Xieng Mene. The temple is quite bare, no paintings, little gold, but beautiful in its simplicity.  Our last temple of the day was Wat Long Khoune, which I’ll describe as “in between” the levels of activity of the prior temples–many monks in residence, beautiful paintings on the exterior of the temple of scenes from the life of Buddha.

We visited Ban Jan, described as a “pottery village,” but we saw a sum total of two people making pottery.  What was interesting about it was that the woman was turning by hand the wheel on which her husband was creating a pot.  Between the two of them, they can make a very large pot in about one hour.  They (or their strong son) then carry the pot to the “kiln,” which is a large hole in the ground for firing their pottery.  We purchased two small pottery vases, then headed back down about a thousand steps to our boat.  By that point, the girls and I were hot, tired, and ready for lunch (we had, after all, been going since 5:30 a.m.).  We lunched on the boat–hallelujah, no steps for that–then a chief from one of the fishing villages floated up by the boat to take us to check his fishing traps.  I sent the girls out on the longboat.  There was simply no way I was going to fit in it comfortably, not after several stairmaster-trips-from-hell that day.  Mr. Khamla, our guide, was quite sure we would be lucky and find tons of fish.  This was not the case–no fish, and all returned empty-handed.

Next stop: Ban Xing, the Lion Village.  We again walked up one million steps to the village to meet the elders.  This is a very old village.  Unfortunately, we arrived before they were expecting us, so we had to cool our heels for a while in someone’s house.  We believe we were in the home of the grouchy old man who turned out to be the village wise man and in charge of the Lao baci ceremony performed in our honor.  This wasn’t readily apparent, although he walked down the hall and changed his clothes in front of us in preparation for the ceremony.  He then gave us small glasses of water from a bowl in the house–we were extremely nervous to drink the water, since it did not come from an unsealed water bottle, but Mr. Khamla, by now our very questionable guide, assured us it had been boiled.  How he could possibly know this, we have no idea.

That being said, when the elders of the village joined us in a circle and chanted a prayer for us, we were honored.  Each elder then tied a string around our wrists while chanting an individual prayer for us.  It was quite touching.  They offered us what they had to give:  boiled chicken (yes, we had to eat a bite, and I am pretty sure that chicken had been running around the yard as we walked up to the village), sticky rice, a new bottle of water (thank goodness), sun-dried rice cakes, and bags of pretzels (go figure).

Following the ceremony, we visited with the elders–really loved the chief and his wife.  The chief had been elected six times by his village and had served for about ten years.  His wife had a beautiful smile, and all had many questions for us, particularly for Delaney and Kendall and particularly relating to when they planned to marry.  Mr. Khamla translated, somewhat reluctantly, but we had a good visit with them all.  They largely wrote me off when they learned (after asking) my age:  “over fifty,” heads shaking, too bad.  They enjoyed looking at my photos on my iPhone!

After the baci ceremony, we headed back up the Mekong River–according to the itinerary, we were supposed to enjoy the sunset on the river, but honestly we could not take another step, and we returned to town for dinner and an early bedtime.  Our fullest day of the trip!