The Rawness

4:30 am. Before sunrise, in the last shadows of night before the light begins to creep through the smoky haze that is spread over Luang Prabang, I hear the drums. I open my eyes and let them adjust to the darkness of our hotel room. My hip is sore from the firm mattress but I feel rested, and after three days of waking before first light to the sound of the drums I am growing fond of this morning ceremony. Across the street at Wat Sene temple the drums are vibrating and the earth is listening.

The layers of drum beats are filtering through my morning grogginess. There is the immediate volume of the monks drumming across the street, hitting a large suspended drum and a small black gong with a heavy mallet. The wooden handle tightly gripped between the fingers of a thin Laotian monk. This happens twice a day. At 4:30 am and 4:30 pm the deep boom of the suspended drum, larger than an oil barrel and floating off the ground suspended by thick rope, sends low notes vibrating across the street and through the thin walls of our hotel. The monk playing keeps a steady beat. Standard time eighth notes that overlap and roll like a succession of waves. The sound envelops me until my eyes are fully open and my mind fully aware. It is then that I can hear all the layers of the cacophony onion that is peeling so nicely.

It is like a wolf pack call throughout the dry morning of this Southeast Asian hamlet. In between the fading of one boom and the start of another, I hear softer booms in the distance. Identical drums struck with identical mallets throughout the small city of Luang Prabang. Some are beating in unison but some are far off and the sound is delayed in reaching us on the outskirts of town. This sound delay creates a syncopated beat that feels intentional. The effect is thunderous. A continuous deluge of drum beats dancing through the empty morning streets. The last beat is struck and the final echo is resonating up and down the narrow alleyways and bouncing off the French style store fronts that line the main streets of a small city that feels like it is on the verge of blowing up as the next tourist hot-spot. Some might say it already has, and perhaps we were just fortunate enough to be there during a lull in the zoom lens and North Face onslaught of backpackers and day trippers. But after a week in Luang Prabang, and a week of 4:30 am wake up calls compliments of the monks next door, my sense is that this place is still raw. It may be cooked one day, but for now it is still raw.

There are pockets in the world, pockets of rawness where life does not flower and blossom, it explodes and oozes down the clay packed streets of a balmy Mekong River village; where entire families zoom helter skelter on a 400 cc motorbike along soft river roads. Four deep in a late eighties model Yamaha. Mom up front steering the beast with the youngest child swaddled in soft cloth hung around her neck. The eldest daughter riding behind mom and combing the hair of her grimy Barbie doll. Dad in back enjoying his morning cigarette and gently gripping the bike with his thighs, his beat rubber sandals dangling inches above the ground.

There are pockets in the world where life is not a fluid stream. It is a heavy torrent of water gurgling along ancient silted river banks. Where trees are slashed and burned and the thin sheets of river weed are dried and consumed with a fire-hot, red paste to create some idea of flavor. A thick river of life that consumes everything in its path and spits out wherever that vein meets the sea.

These pockets still exist. These pockets of rawness and devouring creation that make the hermetically sealed and loud mouthed airbag SUVS of the developed nations look like arrogant sociopaths. The rawness is not done for bravado, showmanship or stealthy attention. It is the way life exists in these pockets. It is the way life survives and the way these people eat. The world is raw and the safety and hardboiled eggs of the developed world are shattered into a gooey, stringy mess when you see a twelve year old girl behind the helm of a dilapidated motorbike. Dark skinned, bony arms reaching up to the handle bars. Dirty feet and sandals barely reaching the clutch as she pops the bike into third and glides through a soft right hand turn and then rips the throttle into the straight away sending the wind and sand and haze through her long dark hair. The ground is dropping away beneath her but her heart is cool and pumping blood with normal pressure. Her pupils are not dilated and her brain is not surging dopamine to her nervous system. She is not thrilled by this experience. She has been doing this everyday for the past two years. She is responsible for one third of the family income, and she wants to be to work on time. She glides past the tuk-tuk we have hired to navigate us through the simple streets of Luang Prabang. It seems like something is wrong. Like I should jump out and stop her and take her back to her family, or at the least plunk a helmet on her melon and wrap her up in reflective tape. But as she sails by, I see her younger brother is gripping to her sides and his small hands are barely holding on to her. His shit eating grin is priceless as his head peers out from behind her back, teeth catching grit the whole way. The rawness will continue. The world will spin out of control. The drumbeat of life will continue to follow its own scattered rhythm like a percussion set dropped down a metal stairwell. It’s all racket at first and only after straining do we hear and see and feel the raw beat of life.

Life oozes like thick puss from a fresh wound in these places. Pulsating life, thick with the rawness from living on the fringes, and we, in turn, experience this from the fringe. Photographing and eating and playing and stumbling through the beginning scraps of the language. We get only so close in the seven days we are here, but the rawness is inexorable. It consumes you and gobbles you up in the dense smoke of the suppressing afternoon heat. The bright orange glow of the sun like a pastel spotlight behind a soft veil. All the ambient light is diffused and the smoke sparkles in the air. You can feel the sunburn even though it doesn’t seem like it is there.

There is a rawness in the world that exists on rickety bamboo bridges guarded by a small woman with leather skin and three teeth. Selling passage across the bridge and bottled water and small handmade dolls. When you walk across the bridge you wonder, what would happen if this bridge collapsed? Where I come from, if a bridge collapses, sirens and lights come wailing down dense streets and people jump to the curb and clutch their children and thank an invisible god that the sirens and lights are not rushing towards them. They look with pity and secret relief that the bridge did not collapse while they were crossing, and the unfortunate ones who did feel the first tremors of the structure as it started to go are hooked up to tubes of life and quickly carted off in ambulances and helicopters where surgeons race against the clock to save them from meeting the same god the people on the street are thanking. In the rawness, you walk across the bridge and look down and think to that this might not be the worst way to go. I have lived a good life and travel has its risks. If this bridge does start to quiver, let’s make it quick and painless for everyone involved because I will definitely not hear sirens barreling towards me if it does decide to stop holding itself up.

The world is raw. A raw so deep you see it in every transaction of the day. You see it in every conversation you have with every person in every corner of that raw pocket of the world. A young girl at the night market wearing a money belt stacked with U.S. Dollars, Laos Kip, and Thai Baht. Armed with a calculator and the charm of a seasoned insurance salesman, she greets every customer with seductive English.

“Hello madam. You like jewelry? I have special jewelry for you.”

“How much for this one?”

“Kip or Dollar?”

“Dollar.”

“For you, twenty dollar.”


“Twenty dollars,” we dumbly repeat, playing the role of the curious tourist, and start to look at the jewelry that is carefully laid out on a dark blanket. It looks well made, but twenty dollars will buy us two meals (with drinks) and two one hour massages each. In the rawness the dollar is amazingly powerful, and we are planning on stretching ours as far as possible. We decline and start to walk away.

“Okay madam, for you special discount. Ten dollar.”

It is amazing. Three steps has just saved us fifty percent. We never purchase the earrings but we watch for a few minutes as this scene is replayed over and over as fresh faces pass the tent. The young girl has her routine nailed. Eye contact, posture, tone, and word choice. She would ace the persuasive speech in my Communications class. The dim lights and strong smells of the Luang Prabang night market add to the mystique. A tightly packed bazaar with cramped rows of tents and every night the same people hawking the same merchandise. Intricate tapestries, bed spreads, delicate wood carvings, t-shirts, jewelry, paintings, Buddha replicas, coffee, coin purses, local food, and the usual souvenirs that look cool under the soft lights and red tents but seem cheap and hackneyed once you take them out of your luggage after returning home. If you ask the merchants, everything is either made by them, their grandmother, or a monk that they know. I guess after waking up the city with their drums the monks spend a few hours carving Buddha replicas and sewing tapestries. We are shocked at the affordability of the night market. The rawness is working in our favor. One item in particular catches our attention – handmade slippers with bright patterns and thick cotton stuffing. Each slipper has a colorful elephant patch above the toes. Each slipper is unique. Each possessing a different color scheme and elephant design. We are intrigued. More importantly, we like to give unique gifts and we will be seeing a lot of family and friends this summer. We decide to buy twenty-seven pairs of elephant slippers. This is, of course, ridiculous, but we are not deterred. We make a list of family and friends that might enjoy a pair and set out to find our merchant. We find a small pregnant woman who has a wide selection of elephant slippers. We start to look them over and begin the opening round of negotiations-which is in our favor as we tell her that we wish to purchase twenty-seven pairs of elephant slippers. The haggling is conducted in a manner that will repeat itself every night that we return to the market. The merchants open with a price. They usually type this price into a large calculator and hand it to us. We look at it and look at each other and hem and haw for a few minutes and then type in half that number and had it back. They smile and laugh and look at us and then type in a number between the two and hand it back. This process repeats until a price is settled on that is seems fair for both sides. With elephant slipper lady the negotiations are quick, we settle a bit higher than usual as we eye her belly and picture the motorbike that she her family will need to purchase in the next few years so junior can deliver the cotton to grandmother on the outskirts of town so she can make more slippers, and she is clearly overjoyed as we start to pile twenty-seven pairs of slippers into a large garbage bag. When we pay her she thanks us profusely and takes the money and proceeds to whack every pair of slippers left on the ground. As she hits the slippers with money she chants, “lucky, lucky, lucky.” It turns out she was lucky because she did not return to the night market for the rest of the week. Apparently, twenty-seven pairs of elephant slippers warrants a week off in the rawness, but how long will that equation last?

This place is on the verge of getting cooked. It is still raw, but you can feel the temperature rising and you can sense the future. A time when the morning drums will be silenced due to complaints from the tourists in the hotels. The monks forced to receive their morning alms by special delivery because they can’t walk the streets without being harassed. Not harassed in a malicious way, but harassed by every person with a camera and a Facebook account. Every person that wants to snap a few shots and run to the nearest coffee shop with Wi-Fi and show the world the monks walking in the morning and collecting their meager meal of rice. Uploading photos while they download a double frappuccino and cheesy bacon croissant. It is a mixed feeling to be in this rawness. To be in it but to be a part of the cooking as well. To wake up early and watch the monks from a distance, trying to capture a few candid photos as they walk by, and then relaxing with a morning coffee and planning the events of the day. It is a hard balance to not fall into that alluring and comfortable role of being a tourist. Of spending such small amounts of cash in return for one week of a lavish lifestyle that we could not afford in any other pocket of the world. We embrace the rawness, we sense the burgeoning of a new era for this quaint Buddhist paradise, an era that is perhaps not entirely welcome, and we are adding to the searing of this life. We are adding to the culmination of turning on the television in ten years and seeing Luang Prabang as the number three tourist Mecca on the Travel Channel’s weekend marathon of one-hundred places you must see before you die. We will cringe and bite our lip and watch the fast moving clips of crowded streets that were once empty, of power boats that were once slow boats, of monks on display that were once beating drums and waking the city before the sunrise, of an air-conditioned mall that was once a tented night market, of a local girl handing out life vests for the power boat ride who was once motoring down dirt roads with reckless abandon with her brother in tow, and we will remember the rawness. We will remember the breaking point of this fragile city, and we will try to find the next one. The next raw, undiscovered pocket of life, and maybe then we will leave our cameras and gadgets at home.