Morning mission in Luang Prabang

Today was my 2nd attempt at the dawn alms-giving photo mission. Every day here, at first light, monks pour out of the temples and walk the streets collecting alms from the locals - alms can be money, food, pretty much any kind of donation people want to give, but here it tends to be sticky rice and sometimes bananas and other types of fruit. Buddhists believe in karma; that by doing good, good will come back to you. And if you do good for a good person, the amount of good that comes back to you in multiplied, i.e. giving to a monk earns you more 'karma points' than giving to a regular person. (it's true, I read it in a book about karma when I was in Chiang Mai)

So anyway, this involved a 4am wakeup and groggy start to the day. Last time I attempted this mission I was out on the streets at 5:30am and it was too late, I'd missed them all. This time I was determined to catch them in action. I'd scoped out a cool temple to use as a backdrop and parked myself there at 4:30am, ready to wait it out.

so I waited...

and waited..............


and got bored, so tried shooting creative angles of the temple

hmmmm, 5:15am and I don't see any monks yet? Am I in the wrong part of town? (I was on the main road)

Perplexing. Oh wait, there they are. Only a few though, the other day people said there were like 400 of them. I saw about 7. I moved closer to the market area of town and spotted a few more, but overall the monk-spotting mission was a bit of a disappointment.


By this time it was nearly 6am and I was STARVING. I'd had a mini green banana and a malaria pill for breakfast at 4am but that was it, and walking back through the market seemed like a marvelous idea. A clever thought hit me on the way to the market; on the street I'd seen lots of ladies selling sticky rice and bananas to tourists to give to the monks - there are lots of signs around town discouraging tourists from buying from these street vendors, and urging you to only give rice if it's meaningful to you, they don't want to turn this very serious Buddhist tradition into a tourist circus - where was I? Oh yeah, I had the clever idea of buying a pot of sticky rice for myself for breakfast. Except they were all humongous pots, not single-serve sized, so I gave it a miss for now.

The morning market is one of my favourite places in Luang Prabang. It occupies a small back street parallel to the main road and at 6am is party central. You can buy anything food-related you want here: live frogs, ducks, chickens, sliced fish, bbq'd fish, veges of all descriptions, chillis, other assorted condiments, you name it. Anything except sticky rice, it seems. Bugger! But I found a DELICIOUS bbq meat stand at the end of the road and had the best pork bbq skewer for 5,000 kip (about NZD 90c). Here are some pics from my several visits to the market.






I picked up a kilo of rambutan and some noodles wrapped in a banana leaf to snack on back at my guesthouse (much better for you than a bag of chips and a Kit Kat, which melts anyway). On the way back home I bumped into a few of the monk rice-selling ladies, one of whom had small(ish) rice containers. In my scheming mind I was thinking "hmmm, this could be breakfast, PLUS I get to keep the cool rice container thingy!" I'd been wanting one of those but couldn't justify buying one as a souvenir - bound to be overpriced at a souvenir stall, and how was I going to carry it anyway? Funny how you find creative ways of justifying things. I now have a rice container. Went back to my guesthouse and slept for a good 3 hours and woke up to sticky rice and rambutan breakfast.

Mission accomplished (sort of) :)