We tried

As we all know, Isaac and I are terrible tourists, good at cramming ourselves full of food and befriending cats and waiters, but not much else. This problem is clearly not just Isaac’s—I was quite on my own when I went to Cusco, Peru, and failed to see Machu Pichu. So upon our return to Luang Phabang, we determined to do some of the touristy things we had neglected on our previous stay.

First we took a trip up the Mekong to the Pak Ou caves, repositories for damaged and defunct Buddha images from the surrounding towns. On the way to the caves, we were deposited at the “Whisky Village,” famed for its lao lao production but now peddling Beer Lao T-shirts and “silk” scarves from China passed off as local products. On the boat ride back, Isaac and I stopped talking because I called him a baby for wanting to sit on the shady side of the boat. In the half hour in-between, the caves themselves revealed some lovely cracked, flaking Buddhas, beautiful in their decrepitude.

Next, I signed up for a cooking class at our favorite LP restaurant, Tum Tum Cheng. We started out with a tour of the local wet market. Most of the produce heaped up on tarps and tables—the multicolored collections of chillies, mushrooms, eggplants; the knobs of ginger and galangal and stalks of lemongrass; the pyramids of silver fish and buckets of snails—were familiar from trips to other markets in other countries, but some things seemed new and distinctly Lao: the spicy bark of a tree used in a traditional stew; the bags of mak toum fruits for tea; the packets of dried brown things with untranslatable names and purposes.

After the market, we returned to the open-air kitchen to find all the ingredients perfectly prepped for us and a Taiwanese television crew ready to film an episode of “blah blah China”—I can’t remember the name, though I had to toast it twice for the camera, once with real lao lao, and once with water in my shot glass. And so our token shallot chopping and sips of mango wine and turns timidly pushing vegetables around a wok were narrated in Mandarin by hip hop dancer Locking Elmo. If you get a chance to see it, I am the frizzy-haired white girl instructing a cute Asian boy in “Sexxy Tigger” T-shirt how to stuff a spring roll.

Our third foray into organized tourist activities involved a morning of elephant riding. At first, as we ambled along through the teak forest on our little wooden platform, Isaac’s sun parasol shielding our fair skin, the mahout singing to his beast, I felt like we were shooting a sequel to Indochine. But when the mahout jumped off the elephant’s neck, ordered me to take his place, and turned his attention to photographing the two Scandinavian girls in tank tops riding behind us, only occasionally reprimanding our elephant when it wandered off into the bushes for a snack, I was once again another tourist clutching her Stay Another Day propaganda.

Our fourth excursion, a trip to the Kuang Si waterfalls, never happened, our burst of activity at the beginning being more than enough for one month. Instead, we went back to our old ways, drinking coffee all day at Joma and retiring at night to play Uno with the boys at our guesthouse.