We had obviously arrived in Luang
Prabang later in the day than most people as we had to catch up with
a visit to the National Museum first thing in the morning. Previously
used as the Royal Palace in the city it had been turned over to the
State after 1975 and later converted into a Museum. Interestingly it
is now mainly a Museum of the Royals. Not sure how that aligns with
the current political landscape in Laos but I'm not going to argue
the matter.
This was followed by a lazy 2 hours
boating up the Mekong as we headed towards the village of Ban Xanghai
which specialises in the production of rice whiskey – a rather
potent brew of about 40% alcohol by volume.
The distillation process
is rather rudimentary, most likely unregulated and is basically an
old-fashioned still. The end product isn't so bad however. The
equivalent of about $3AUD got me a small bottle of around 125ml,
which should be enough to amuse my whiskey drinking friends.
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| Mekong river boats |
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| The still in action |
Robyn picked up a few scarves as well
in the village and then we were off to the Pak Ou Caves. These caves
are filled with thousands of golden statues of the Buddha, placed
there by local people. It reminded somewhat of the Hill of Crosses
we saw in Lithuania last year. Not as extensive but with the same
sort of foundation behind it.
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| Pak Ou Caves |
Lunch and then a quicker one hour trip
back toward Labang Prabang (downstream this time). By the time we got
back to our hotel we only had time to change our shirts before
heading off to the the second of our cooking classes.
The drop off point for this class was
just around the corner from our hotel although the class itself was
held some 25 minutes out of town. It was much more complicated that
our Hanoi class, and required a lot of chopping, slicing and
pounding,. I succeeded in slicing into my thumb which I had never
done in one of these classes before so I am guessing I learned
something from it at least.
The course was very good with a lot of
charcoal cooking so I was impressed. So much so that I decided that I
needed to buy one of the charcoal burners when I got home.
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| Charcoal burners |
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| The cooking class gets ready to eat |
Standard night-time arrangements
followed: hotel, bed, sleep, all in very short order.
Even more so as we had a 5am start
coming up in the morning.
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