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By Rolf Potts

July 7, 1999 | Luang Prabang is perhaps one of the worst-kept best-kept-secrets in the world. It is a miracle that it has not yet been overrun with wide-eyed New Age seekers, utopia-obsessed dropouts and profit-crazed resort developers.

Every significant scrap of Southeast Asian travel literature in the last 130 years, it seems, has contained raves about Luang Prabang's sublime wonders -- from Louis de Carne's 1866 Garnier expedition journal ("Luang Prabang has been to us what an oasis is to a caravan wearied by a long march") to Marte Bassene's 1909 Laos travelogue ("Luang Prabang is in reality a love, a dream, a poetry of naive sensuality which unfolds under the foliage of this perfumed forest") to Norman Lewis' classic 1950 travel book "A Dragon Apparent" ("Luang Prabang ... is a tiny Manhattan, but a Manhattan with holy men in yellow robes in its avenues, with pariah dogs, and garlanded pedicabs carrying somnolent Frenchmen nowhere, and doves in its sky"). Even the famed French naturalist Henri Mouhot, who spent his entire 1861 stay there slowly dying of malaria, called Luang Prabang "a delightful little town."

Add to this the 1999 words of an 18-year-old Canadian backpacker I met my first night there: "Luang Prabang is like a Disney creation or something. But the cool part is that it isn't."

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Surrounded by mountains and as isolated from the rest of the world as Tibet or Kashmir (until recently, the only safe and dependable year- round way to get there was by airplane), Luang Prabang was the seat of the first independent Lao kingdom (Lane Xang) in the 14th century, and was off and on a royal capital for 600 years prior to the Communist takeover in 1975. It features wood-shuttered Lao-French colonial architecture, over 30 Buddhist temples, hill-tribe women selling embroideries under peeling Communist murals in the market and pack-dirt streets lined with palms and red dust. UNESCO declared the town a World Heritage site in 1995.

But the appeal of being in the city itself is so visceral that accolades and honors do it little justice. Luang Prabang is a hedonist's city, not in the sexual sense (although it would be a wonderful place to have a love affair) or in the chemical sense (although opium and marijuana are available in the same way that pan-fried chicken is available in Kansas City) -- but rather in a sense of blissful, inspired sloth.

From nearly the moment I stepped off the slow ferry from Pak Beng, Luang Prabang moved me to new heights of inaction. I found myself spending entire evenings there chatting aimlessly with the locals, eating baguette sandwiches, looking for the perfect watermelon shake, watching Orion glitter above the golden stupa on Phou Si ("Marvelous Mountain") or just happily staring off into space at one of the sidewalk cafes on Sisavangvong Avenue.

My one concession to industriousness was to visit the pier each morning and check for freights headed downriver to Paklay, the last major outpost on the Mekong above Vientiane. The customs officer there was a toothless, delightfully gregarious old guy whose voice sounded like a raspy phone connection from some technologically limited Micronesian principality. Sitting in his metal folding chair -- his shock of white hair sticking straight up, a cigarette smoldering in his fingers -- he looked like a Lao version of Samuel Beckett.

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"You must wait for a freight boat," he rasped the first time I visited the customs house. "The water is too low today. The river to Paklay is very dangerous."

"How long do I have to wait?" I asked him.

His eyes glittered mischeviously. "Three months," he said. "Maybe two months if there is good rain."

After some more banter and a few cups of cold tea, Beckett conceded that there was one possible way to find passage downriver. "You can pay a speedboat boy to take you to Paklay," he said. "The river is not safe, but the speedboat boys don't care when you give them money. They are foolish."

I knew what he was talking about. I'd seen the speedboats blasting up and down the river since I'd started my journey at Houay Xai. Light, knife-like and low in the water, Mekong speedboats sport huge long tail engines and sound like jet airplanes. Everyone on board is required to wear helmets, since the boats can reach upwards of 50 miles per hour.

I'd hated the speedboats from the moment I'd first seen them: They were reckless and infuriatingly loud, and they made their helmet-coiffed passengers look like some sort of ridiculous commando squad from the cartoon "Speed Racer." Nonetheless, they appeared to be my only option.

"Can you help me find a speedboat to Paklay?" I'd asked Beckett.

The old customs officer frowned. "The speedboat boys are very foolish. Maybe a bus is better."

The idea of bus travel was to me as aesthetically obscene as tugboat commerce was to Mark Twain: I was in Laos to travel the Mekong, period. "But I am very foolish, too," I said. "Can't you help me?"

Perhaps sensing a bit of profit in it for himself, the customs officer relented. Each morning I would go down to the pier to chat with him and check on speedboats. Unfortunately, the "speedboat boys" were not as foolish as old Beckett let on: Except for one driver who wanted a non-negotiable fee of $200 for the service, nobody was willing to take me downriver at low-water. After four days, I was beginning to get a bit nervous.

It was about this time that I ran into Suki, a Dutch girl with whom I'd shared a hotel room back across the border in Chiang Khong, Thailand. Suki is one of numerous females in my life that I never got to know romantically because I am inherently bad at talking to women.

Indeed, instead of being engaging and flirtatious in the face of a potentially romantic situation, I usually get tied up in pointless verbal displays of existential worthiness. Whereas the true seduction artist can sense the right moment to suggest a moonlight walk or a back rub, I just go on babbling awkwardly about travel experiences, Beat-era literature or how I can run 400 meters in 50 seconds.

In Suki's case, I got off on a tangent about my plans to travel the Mekong -- and at one point suggested that I might buy my own boat once I got to Laos, since I had acquired a bit of river-running experience in the United States. Two weeks later, this inane comment paid off.

"I met an American named Robert who also wants to buy a boat!" Suki had told me when I unexpectedly ran into her at Luang Prabang's central market. "Do you want to meet him?"

Next page | A horrible accident