But Lao New Year is also good clean fun. On the second day of the festival, I watched a colorful procession of parade floats flanked by dancers, musicians and monks. The crowd was merry, and although many spectators were drinking beer and shooting water guns, I didn’t observe a drop of ill will. The spectacle seemed, if not exactly sacred, then at least no less wholesome than a Fourth of July blowout.
Lao New Year, or Pi Mai in the Laotian language, is also an occasion for family gatherings. Erin and I found that out when some Laotians I met invited us to a house party on the outskirts of Luang Prabang.
In the garden, plates of traditional foods covered the picnic table, and we were encouraged — practically forced — to scarf sticky rice and laap, a spicy dish of mint leaves, chili peppers and shredded meat or fish. I noticed that most of the guests’ wrists were adorned with the delicate white strings traditionally exchanged at the basi, a ceremony thought to restore health and well-being that’s held at weddings, homecomings and other landmark events.
After entering the house, we sat cross-legged on the floor and accepted glasses of Beerlao, the partly state-owned brew that Laotians regularly guzzle at home and in restaurants. Soon we were toasting with Pa, a 72-year-old man, as elderly women boogied to the Laotian dance music rattling through black subwoofers.
Where were we from, Pa asked me over the racket, and what is the New Year’s holiday like in our country?
Different, I said. I’d spent my Western New Year’s Nordic skiing in Vermont.
Baths for Buddha
Feeling partied out and moderately hung over, Erin and I pedaled out of Luang Prabang on rented bicycles, hoping to spend a few quiet hours in the surrounding countryside.
The road turned to dirt and wound past tropical foliage and corrugated roofs. A few miles on, we stopped near the entrance to a Buddhist temple and walked our bikes to a bluff overlooking the Mekong.
For a moment we stood silently, listening to the river’s current and gazing at a cloudless sky. Then we strolled into the temple courtyard and inspected a free-standing apparatus that looked a bit like a storm drain. A knee-high gilded Buddha sat beneath it, suggesting that the chute was a device for pouring ceremonial water on the Buddha’s head.
The teenage monks who were sitting nearby smiled at us encouragingly, so we unscrewed our bottles of mineral water, tipped them into the chute and watched as drops fell gently, one by one, upon the gilded recipient. The monks kept smiling, which I took as a good sign. I’m not religious, but it was satisfying to connect with their tradition, if only in a tiny way.
In town the next morning, I joined a crowd of perhaps 300 to watch monks and Laotian officials carry the Phra Bang Buddha statue to an outdoor podium for a ceremonial washing, a.k.a. “lustration.” This and other washings are meant to restore the statue’s magical properties and officially mark the beginning of the next Lao year.
“Look,” said my friend Khamon Phengsakhone, a student at a local university whom I’d befriended on a previous trip to the area. “The Buddha’s having a shower.”
Buddha might have been the only one. In the course of Luang Prabang’s three-day New Year’s bash, getting anything out of the faucets and spigots in my guesthouse bathroom had been hit-or-miss. Now, although I’d been caught in the crossfire of a dozen water fights, white and green powder was firmly caked into my hair and beneath my fingernails. In photographs from that day, I look vaguely like a circus performer.
Khamon and I walked to a French-style cafe and ordered breakfast. The town was quieting down at last, and our croissants tasted Parisian. But the restroom was bolted shut, with a sign on the door saying — as if we couldn’t guess — “No Water.”
Luang Prabang, Laos: How to get there, where to stay, what to do and more
Ives is a writer based in Hanoi.
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