Yesterday I got up at 5:15 a.m. By 6, I was a block away on the main street, sticky rice and bananas in hand, to feed the monks.  Locals call this “giving alms.”  It is a type of charitable act, and common in Buddhist tradition.  There are a lot of monks here, and a lot showed up that morning.  They aren’t allowed to look at or speak to women, so it was a relatively quiet process, but still an absolutely awesome one.

After breakfast, I hopped on a small-ish boat for a ride on the Mekong up to the Pak Ou caves, where there are hundreds of Buddha statues and drawings.  I gotta’ be honest, though — while the caves were pretty cool,  the experience wasn’t jawdropping.  It sort of looked like someone collected a bunch of old figurines and put them into the caves to make a buck.  That’s not how it happened, of course, but how it looked to me.

And since this is my catalog of events, here’s my overall take on Luang Prabang:  we’ve got a love/hate relationship.  I love what I’ve seen of the country of Laos.  I love the subtle French influence to food and architecture, and the monks and the children peppering the streets.  I love the traditional Lao dance and costume, the excitement of the multiple markets.  It’s wonderful to discover wats (temples) around every turn.

But there’s a serious downside, and that is the effect that it’s popularity seems to be having.  For instance, I am haggled about the price of, literally, everything.  It really bothers me that, while in line to give alms yesterday morning,  multiple women invited me to buy bananas, at 12x the price.  For the monks.

Now, I get that foreigners greatly support the livelihood here, but I wonder whether LP is turning into a major tourist attraction, not a traveler’s destination; a sort of Disneyland, if you’re not careful.  In turn, while the locals welcome the funds, the disdain that inevitably comes from overtouristing has been all too evident in my interactions with them.  I have, unfortunately, been greeted with more impatience than warmth, more annoyance than graciousness, this week.

It isn’t because I believe that people here are not gracious or warm — quite the contrary.  But tourism, while perhaps the lifeline to the country’s economy, seems to be disintegrating the natural charm of this “major” city.  The good news is that there is a lot of Luang Prabang than I had time to appreciate, and that there is so much more in the country to be explored.