Luminous Luang Prabang

Some places simply glisten like a lustrous pearl, or a gentle moonbeam. Their radiance gently allures the beholder, their beauty illuminating body and soul.

Luminous Luang Prabang’s glow comes from its uncomplicated charm. Its skyscape is a wide expanse of blue, interrupted only by the peaks of green mountains. Birds and kites fly higher than the ancient city’s buildings — mostly two-story French colonial villas and native timber houses. Gilded temples are the tallest man-made structures — and their heights, too, are within the reach of a delicate butterfly.

Tradition is as thick as a bowl of Lao sticky rice in this city, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1995, seven years after Laos opened its doors to the world. Nothing can be altered in this city without the assent of UNESCO. Our Laotian guide jokes that the men sometimes wonder if they have to ask UNESCO first before they even kiss their wives.

So nothing chokes the city’s tree-lined streets except the night market on Sisavang road and the Sunday fresh produce market. There are no buses or jeepneys, no air-conditioned convenience stores. There is no shadow of Ronald McDonald, Colonel Sanders, Kenny Rogers or even the busy Jollibee in Luang Prabang. There aren’t any noisy beaches near the city.

So what makes Luang Prabang irresistible? Aside from its pristine beauty, it’s the absence of frenzy in the city. It’s the way you can sit in the veranda of a downtown café sipping coffee or wine without inhaling noxious fumes from aging buses or flicking away flies because there are none. It’s the airborne peace and contentment you get from monks young and old in their bright orange robes; it’s the loud silence of the temples, whether lined with colorful mosaics or rough limestone.

Thai Airways, which flew us to Luang Prabang in cooperation with the Tourism Authority of Thailand, has one word for the city: “Mystical.”

What you get much of in Luang Prabang is space — breathing space, space for a spiritual workout, space to revel in the abundance of nature.

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And where are the beaches? They’re nowhere near.

Instead, you can frolic and swim in natural pools from a magnificent waterfall, the Tad Kuang Si. Deep in the forest but not too far from the city, it is multi-tiered, like a wedding cake you sliced in half. The half from where the luminous falls cascade drops some 200 feet to a cluster of clear pools where you can swim anytime of the year. The difference between the Tad Kuang Si and the Niagara Falls of  North America is that the former is nestled in the forest, much like Laguna’s Hidden Valley or Villa Escudero.

You must also take a scenic two-hour boat ride on the Mekong River, which laces Luang Prabang, to the Tam Ting and Pat Ou caves. These caves, one of which you reach after you climb 250 stone steps, has a total of 4,000 Buddha images and statues. Some gigantic, others no more than a few inches tall. Most of them are antique, and they find a natural altar inside the cave. I have never seen so many Buddha statues in my life of varying sizes and textures as I have in Luang Prabang — whether in palatial temples, in crevices in mountains, or in the bellies of huge caves where the only time you can see the images is when someone turns on a powerful flash from his camera.

From the caves, we took another short boat ride on the placid Mekong to a rice whisky distillation village, where you can buy cheap and authentic hand-loomed fabrics as well.

We stayed in rustic villas at the charming Le Palais Juliana. Wooden bridges connected our villas, built to resemble a pre-colonial Lao timber home, to the main lobby. Everything in our villa, including the floor at the shower area, was fashioned from hard wood. Perhaps, only the bathtub wasn’t sylvan.

French wines and Lao beer also flow in the city, for those who want some further unwinding after communing with nature or haggling with the wise vendor at the night market.

You more than just stop and smell the roses in Luang Prabang.

(Thai Airways flies four times a week from Bangkok to Luang Prabang. It is offering USD285 round trip fare (MNL-BKK-Luang Prabang-BKK-MNL) exclusive of taxes for ticketing in December and travel in January. For more information, please contact 580-8421 or e-mail [email protected].)

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