Luang Prabang: Day 3

Compared to the Monk’s Trail leading up to Wat Pha Lat, Phu Si Hill was a breeze. Well, more like a wheeze; I did have to take a couple of breaks. The views of the surrounding city were more than enough dessert for eating my hiking vegetables, though. There’s only so many different ways to describe mountains and rivers and cityscapes, so I’ll save you the repetitiveness and say this: there were good reasons all the tourists had their cameras out. 

But Phu Si Hill isn’t just a vantage point, it’s also a temple. Aaron and I got in our ten minutes of mindfulness in the small shrine enclosure at the top. 

For those who don’t know, mindfulness meditation tries to ground you in the here and now, usually by having you pay attention to your breath. You may do it as follows: take a few seconds to find a comfortable position, set a timer for however long (if it’s your first time, I recommend just 3 minutes; you may quickly work your way up to 10 or 15 from there, but people often find 3 minutes with nothing but their thoughts, and the awareness of how scattered they are, uncomfortable enough) and close your eyes. Take a few deep breaths, and try to find the place it’s easiest for you to feel your breathing (for some, it’s the rising tummy or diaphragm, others feel the coolness in their nasal cavity, the Buddha chose his nostrils). Now, stay with the breath. You may say “in” and “out” as you follow your inhalations and exhalations, or you may count them, going up to 10 and then starting over. If you are in a truly peaceful mind-state, you may even try not to have your mind verbally assert itself, and instead just stay silently with the breath. This is literally all you will attempt to do until your timer goes off. I say “attempt,” because you will inevitably fail at this. You will be concentrating on your breath, counting your way up to 10, and suddenly find that you have actually spent the last 30 seconds thinking about the next item on your to-do list, or the embarrassing thing you said at the dinner party last night, or the cute co-worker you’ve been flirting with. This is ok. This is good, actually. This is your chance to practice what mindfulness actually is, by gently noting the distraction, labelling it “thinking” or “feeling,” and returning to the breath. As Jake from Adventure Time says, “sucking at something is the first step to being kinda good at something,” and never was this more true than for meditation. The more you suck at it, the better you’ll get at noticing and returning to the breath, which is the real practice (at least, at first). As you get better, try to stay with the breath second to second. Try to notice when the breath first enters, the interim before its exhalation, and the second it’s exhaled. There was a time in my life– recently, even– when I found this easy to do. But on this trip, every meditation has been a jumbled mess. I usually count my breaths, and I don’t think I’ve made it to 10 once without getting distracted. But this time, 100 meters up on Phu Si Hill, I ironically found myself a bit more grounded. 

As we walked back down Phu Si, I noticed I was starting to feel a bit faint. The quick climb and lack of food was making my metabolism all wacky. We bought some chicken-kabob-flavored chips (because that’s a thing, apparently) and made our way to a cafe. I gulped down a very sweet chai latte and split a scone with Aaron. And then I felt very, very not good. Apparently, when your blood sugar is low, it’s actually not best to drink a cup of basically sugar water, because then your insulin gets very confused. At least, I think that’s what happened. I’m not actually 100% sure where I went wrong. All I knew was that both my brain and body felt very off. 

Despite this, we made our way to Bouang Asian Eatery, with the understanding that I might not eat anything or hold in what I already had eaten. Once we ordered, I was feeling well enough to have a plate of mashed potatoes. That was it. That was all I could actually eat. Aaron got a cheeseburger that I had one bite of before deciding it was too flavorful. Slowly, though, it got better. By the time we went to sleep, I was almost normal again. 

The drive to Tat Kuang Si, the noted and notable waterfall of North Laos, took about 50 minutes. We rode in a tuk-tuk down some bumpy roads, but Aaron and I both managed to avoid car-sickness. On the walk in to the falls, we passed by a bear rescue center. Moon bears, absurd little ursines with giant fur collars, are hunted for their parts, which are used in traditional medicine. I’m not sure what they’re supposed to cure, but I can’t imagine looking at one of these guys and thinking it was worth it. They’re panda-like, both in size and inherent comedy. We watched a couple of them struggle to fish treats out of a tree trunk and baby-talked them through our teeth. 

Just a bit further on, we encountered the falls. The semi-opaque water was colored bright jade by the limestone rocks it cascaded over; note that none of our photos were put through a filter. It pooled on many levels of the upward hike to the source, and some of these pools were swimmable. Hypothetically, they were swimmable, but Aaron and I discovered they were actually as cold as they were turquoise. We both took short dips, though, just to say we had. We meandered through the falls for a bit, stopping every now and then to take another 100 photos of her majesty, until it was time for lunch. 

Our tuk-tuk driver had already proved that his English was non-existent on the drive over (I’m not judging; he still spoke better English than I spoke Lao). We used google to translate that we were walking over to our lunch spot, and would be right back for the pre-arranged trip to Laos Buffalo Dairy. He looked at us confused, and waved over a friend. “Yeah, you pay him 100 thousand,” said the friend.  “Oh no, we already paid. Our lodge told us we paid for him for the day,” we responded, jovially. Always negotiate with a smile here. “No, you pay for him to come to Kuang Si. Now you pay more for him to wait for lunch and drive to Buffalo Dairy,” he said. “No,” we said, “there must be some mistake. Our lodge specifically said the amount we paid would get us to Buffalo Dairy as well, and that we had him for the day.” It went on like this until neither side was smiling. There were a lot of tongue clicks and rising “ooh”s, which, I gathered, was the Lao version of “I don’t know about all that.” Three things could have been going on here: 1) Our lodge screwed up in ordering him, and we way underpaid. This seemed unlikely to me after some googling of what it should cost. 2) He knew we were a bit stuck with him, and was trying to screw us. 3) What we paid was fair, but the plan had not been communicated to him ahead of time. Maybe he had made plans for the afternoon, and wanted a little extra to break them. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, we went with 3. It was not a very pleasant interaction, but we finally convinced him to at least wait for us to have lunch. As a sort of olive branch, he drove us the 1 mile to Carpe Diem Restaurant. 

The restaurant is right by a portion of the falls. In fact, one of the decks was built over the water, with a cascade right beside it. This is where we were sat. If you ever find yourself in Luang Prabang, here’s a travel tip: make reservations– they are never necessary, but you will always get the best seat in the place. We sipped rosé and ate shrimp ravioli in a parmesan cream sauce followed by tofu green curry. The curry was a bit flavorless (sometimes they automatically hold the spice with westerners), but the ravioli was a revelation. It was not mentioned in the menu, but they served it with a dollop of a sweet, Thai-spiced, tomato chutney that really added something exciting to what would have otherwise been a standard, cream-sauced ravioli dish. The air was pleasant, the waterfall was pleasant, the conversation was pleasant. By the end, we were in good spirits and had decided to just let the driver take us back to the lodge like he wanted to and we’d figure it out.