I got into Vang Vieng yesterday about 4 in the afternoon and after a little while trying to get from the bus station to my hostel I was throwing my bags on my bed and heading out to see the small town. After my four nights in the overly touristy Luang Prabang, Vang Vieng was a welcomed sight.
Before I do an entry on Vang Vieng though, I want to summarize my time in Luang Prabang and post a few more photos that I took in the last couple of days.
As I think I noted in my last post about Luang Prabang, the city is very touristy. In fact after the initial fun of seeing some of the sights that I remembered from my time here about five years ago, the thrill quickly subsided. I would say that by the time I was booking my bus ticket to Vang Vieng I was really unhappy with what I’d been seeing in the city. Now I know that this is my opinion and I have every right to make it on my blog, but last night I read a post from someone who said what I’m basically going to say now, and she was slammed for it. I seriously doubt that anyone reads this blog, so I’m pretty sure that I won’t have to deal with what she did, but nevertheless in the back of my mind I know that there is a chance.
My personal view of Luang Prabang is that it has started to believe its hype. The hype was that it is a unique, charming town in Laos with a strong French influence. And indeed on the surface that is accurate, but, and this is a strong ‘but’ the town has gone too far in my opinion. For about three of the four days that I was there, all I could think about was that I was in some section of Disneyland, like Frontierland or Tomorrowland, but in this case it was Laoland. My personal joke was that I wouldn’t be surprised that the next time I come (if I ever do) there will be a fence around the old part of town and the tourists will have to buy tickets to enter. The four main types of businesses in the city are, restaurants, travel shops, guest houses, and mini marts, I guess souvenir shops too. Notice that I didn’t mention grocery stores, hardware stores, personal homes, or anyone of the hundred other places that a city needs to have in order to survive. The reason you don’t see these other places is because, just like at Disneyland they are hidden outside of the tourist areas. Another thing that made my experience less that fun was that all the restaurants, at least many of them, are catering to rich grandma and grandpa, but when I was here before I remember that there was a more of a backpacker’s vibe to it. Now as you walk along the main street there are high-end restaurants, boutique hotels, and luxury mini vans waiting to take grandma to the four star hotel or drop her off in front of the night market. I laughed so hard (mostly inside laugh) when I saw an electric tuk tuk (basically a three-wheel golf cart), yeah I can see how this is a quaint Lao town now. I bet there isn’t another town in Laos that has electric tuk tuks. The funniest thing though was when I saw something akin to an electric tram like you would get on at Universal Studios. I took a photo and will post it.
The final thing that bothered me was the most of the Lao people seem to dislike the tourists. I say most—not all. The guesthouse that I was at had two people working there, a young girl and an older man. For the first three days neither one of them actually acknowledged me in any way. Not a, “hello” or, “Did you enjoy your walk?” nothing. The people in the town were almost as bad except they had to interact for business reasons, but walking through the night market very few of the sellers would even look at me. For the record the man at the guesthouse started to warm up a little by the time I had left, but the girl just acted as if I was a necessary evil that she had to tolerate.
Okay, I know that I’ve been harsh on the city of Luang Prabang and I could go two ways on this, I could apologize and say that it was just unfortunate experience that I had and leave it at that. I could also say that I was expecting too much and my experience reflects an unrealistic view of the city, that the people need the money that the tourists bring in and it is working for them, as well as a great number of rich grandmas and grandpas.
In the end though, I don’t like what the city has become, but I do love the architecture and the winding streets of the city. It is beautiful on many levels, I just would trade a little of it with some authenticity.
