We took a slow boat up the Mekong river the other day to visit an unusual site. This is something akin to a burial ground for old Buddha images which have become damaged and for some reason are no longer displayable. But Buddha images are never destroyed. In this area (Luang Prabang), they are instead brought to this pleasant cave overlooking the river and set in amongst their breatheren to await…who knows what.
There’s one large cave near the bottom with hundreds upon hundreds of little statues all looking over the river, and there is another, much deeper and darker cave at the top of a long flight of stairs, which has some more interesting and somewhat different images. It was difficult to take any decent pictures in this second cave but we did manage a few interesting shots with an extended shutter opening and by using a flashlight for illumination.
The trip on the river was nice as well. There was the obligatory stops at a couple of tourist oriented villages, one making paper and silk and the other making lao-lao rice “whiskey”. The first village actually had a very good shop tucked away further than most of the people on our boat went, where we found some great deals on silk fabrics that were woven right there.
At other parts on the river we saw people netting for freshwater shrip, trawling for some kinds of fish, and even panning for gold in a couple of places. Three times we got buzzed by one of the speedboats that cut the 2-day trip time from the Thai border down to something like 6 hours. Apparently these boats are fairly dangerous, as evidenced by the funny crash helmets that we saw some of the passengers wearing and the terrified look that was on a number of their faces.
This was definitly one of the more touristy things to do around here, but we had a good time so it was well worth the day.
Rand Wacker 
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