Barefoot bowling

After a 10 hour bus journey down windy roads full of people puking (local people here aren't used to traveling and are all given plastic bags to retch into along the way), I am back in Luang Prabang, reunited with my old traveling companions, Edwin and Joe. Traveling with others is such a different experience than by oneself. Aided by my slow recovery and the extreme humidity and heat, most days were spent languidly lazing around, reading for hours at L'Etranger bookshop or cafe hopping. Unlike Thailand, there are few places in Laos to truly escape the grueling heat. No 711s pepper the urban landscape...no shopping malls or cinema complexes offer the heaven of AC respite.

One place, however, did. The Tat Kuang Si waterfalls – a majestic, glorious, breath-takingly beautiful set of waterfalls about 45 mins tuk-tuk ride from the city. Having seen Edwin's photos from a previous visit I knew I had to go...with rushing falls dropping into light turquoise pools in which you can jump, dive, and swim, this place is a taste of paradise. A lushly bordered path leads steeply up to the top of the falls – walking over water-carved stone and ascending through minor falls to the top was an experience in itself, but once you're there...wow. In a curve of the mountain several streams of water thunder and trickle down to several pools, below which is one far deeper with a rock lip looking out to a sheer drop and the various (9 I think) pools of blue-green below, then the river curling off into the green mountains beyond. What a view!

Jumping and diving off rocks into the clear water, the tourists are soon joined by a group of novice monks, young, faces surprisingly serene and, of course, shy in their bright orange robes. They huddle at the edge, hesitating to join in although some fashion their robes into sumo-style trunks in readiness. The problem, I think, is the sheer quantity of scantily-clad women. Monks are not allowed to touch (and in some cases talk) to women; after explaining this to the others the pool is cleared of our offending presence. With complete calm and balance, one young monk climbs a tree jutting out over the pool. At least 15m above it, the view must be vertiginous. He jumps – a figure amidst a swirl of orange, legs behind him like a character from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The splash as he hits the water is soon followed by more as different monks leap, back-flip and dive-bomb into the cool blue.

Interestingly, the monks here shave their eyebrows as well as head hair and, from what I could discern, their armpit hair too. I am not sure why – whether Buddha had impetigo is unknown to me – but the fact that it took someone else to point out the lack of eyebrows (armpit hair was my next, immediate point of research) surprised me: how could I not have noticed? It made me think, bizarrely, of my mother. Her very thin (and short) eyebrows were never noticed by me until my sister told me of a time that a make-up artist painted some in and our Mum suddenly looked unlike herself. Perhaps she was a monk in a past life and those eyebrows are still growing back? :P

Surprisingly (coming from Thailand it is a real shock), Luang Prabang has a midnight curfew. This is probably in place to try and stop drunken hordes of backpackers infesting the UNESCO World Heritage City with their usual clamour and disintegration of local customs and morals. Very good, unless you've just got into the swing of things and start getting kicked out of bars at 11pm. Nevertheless, there is another option: the well advertised (by tuk-tuk drivers) Bao Ling alley. A short ride from the city centre, this fine establishment supposedly stays open until 3am. Packed with a healthy quantity of falang fighting for an alley and a few locals, a game costs only 15000 kip per person, bowling shoes optional. Never has bowling been so much fun: barefoot, rather inebriated people trying to get strikes with a strange assortment of ball weights – lighter ones vastly outnumbered by heavy bomb-like ones. In fact one night I enjoyed watching the perseverance of a tiny Laos woman heaving a 14 ball to the edge of her lane and launching it down towards the waiting pins. Every time she fell over with the effort. To add to the fun, the place must have been leveled by a drunkard or someone with inner ear problems. None of the lanes were even, all had some slight (in some cases rather more noticeable) tilt to one direction or the other, whether right at the end – the most frustrating – middle or beginning. Imagine your ball on a glorious, straight path to the centre region of the pins, only to veer off, often into the gutter, at the very last minute. As it always seemed to be someone's first or last night in the city though, bowling was nearly always on the agenda.

You'd think that we'd have become experts at it in the end... but no, wasn't the case.