{"id":3060,"date":"2010-05-06T22:54:05","date_gmt":"2010-05-07T03:54:05","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=3060"},"modified":"2010-05-07T07:35:00","modified_gmt":"2010-05-07T12:35:00","slug":"pi-mai-lord","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asiawheeling.com\/?p=3060","title":{"rendered":"Pi Mai Lord"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My bag was safe and sound back at the guest house and in celebration, Motta  and I decided to take a quick nap. Scott, bless his soul, was still  under the weather, and still in the deterioration  phase, which we were crossing our fingers would soon transition to the  upswing. So for the time being it was once again Mr. Motta  and I who heaved out on the Speed TRs. We ordered a couple of  fancy banana coffee drinks at a nearby cafe, still in celebration mode,  and, fueled by those, we wheeled over to a pharmacy and picked up some  electrolytic salts for our dear Mr Norton.<\/p>\n<p>Pi  Mai Lao was in full swing by the time we hit the streets, and were it  not for the plastic bags that mercifully protected our cell phones, our  robots would have been completely destroyed during the first few  minutes of the wheel.<\/p>\n<iframe class=\"aw-video\" loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Travel video\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube-nocookie.com\/embed\/FPIls17CBs0\" allow=\"fullscreen; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\"><\/iframe>\n<p>As we wheeled north in search of  sandwiches, we were repeatedly soaked to the bone. In fact the entire  street on which our guesthouse was built, which ran along the water, had descended  into an anarchy of water warfare.  Everywhere, music was playing, people were screaming, and water and  powder were flying. Crowds of young people in black-face rode around in  the backs of pickup trucks, jumping up and down until the trucks bounced  on their springs like careening jack-in-the-boxes.<\/p>\n<p>It was all we  could do to keep our sandwiches dry as we scarfed down lunch at a  street stall. Great parades of people were marching through the streets  with hand-painted paper banners, displaying the creatures and gods that  represent the new year. The winners of last night&#8217;s beauty contest  were riding on great floats through the streets, still looking gorgeous,  though in my estimate overly painted and uncomfortable. Children roamed  the streets with water guns, and it seemed like every hose in the city was  running. We were soaked and re-soaked and powdered with  tapioca. Each subsequent drying left my shirt starchier and starchier,  slowly turning it into a kind of crusted armor, which repelled water for  a moment before giving up and capitulating to new levels of  water-logging.<\/p>\n<p>Foreigners were participating too. Many of the  visitors had brought their children, who seemed to be thoroughly  enjoying the huge water fight. Older, twenty-something foreigners were  also participating, many of whom had bought giant $10 or $15 squirt  guns. I found their propensity for spraying a bloke in the eyes to be a  little much.<\/p>\n<p>We stopped once more for another cup of coffee from Stew&#8217;s favorite coffee fellow in Luang Prabang.  For a little less than a dollar, that man will whip up a large paper  cup filled with a mean blended coffee drink, made from ice, startlingly strong Lao coffee, and sweetened condensed milk. Quite tasty  and invigorating.<\/p>\n<p>As we wheeled on, we started to notice that  the streets were emptying of merry makers. This meant that everyone was  headed to this large sandy island in the middle of the Mekong for the  sand stupa (a structure that houses Buddhist relics) and the Bosi  ceremony, the traditional Lao ceremony of well wishing. The island was a new addition to the Luang Prabang  landscape. With this 50-year drought, the river had fallen so low as to  create a new land mass. The people of Luang Prabang  had decided to take advantage of this during the festival. The  Vietnamese president was even flying in for the occasion. The people  were gathering to continue the party, build sand stupas, and complete the Bosi ceremony, at the end of which white cotton threads are bound around the  wrists of the  participants.<\/p>\n<p>We  piled onto a longboat along with a whole bunch of locals and putted  across the Mekong.<\/p>\n<p>On the sand island, we found ourselves once  again immersed in a giant crowd, while some water was still being thrown  (for instance, I found it impossible to buy a bottle of water and drink  more than a third of it before a beautiful woman would come up to me  and dump my bottle over my head or down my back). But the weapon of  choice here was the white tapioca powder and the black-face. They were  selling bags of the white powder everywhere, and I was soon covered with it.<\/p>\n<iframe class=\"aw-video\" loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Travel video\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube-nocookie.com\/embed\/WTAwWjauLqE\" allow=\"fullscreen; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\"><\/iframe>\n<p>We ran into Stewart&#8217;s interns on the island. They had  bought some powder and were completely covered in a starchy  encrustation. Now in a larger group, we began to roam the island, taking  in the many stupas being  constructed on the shore, and craning our necks to see into the Bosi  ceremony. It seemed the ceremony was closed to the public. Inside, we could  barely see a decidedly stuffy procession taking place, while well  dressed dignitaries looked on or dozed, decidedly not covered in white powder.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, outside that strange vortex, the party raged  on. They were firing homemade rockets into the air, smearing each other  with black make-up, and jumping into the Mekong to cool off. We did all  of the above, save the rockets.<\/p>\n<p>There were also many traditional  music groups marching around the island playing Lao music. Along with  these, there was usually a fellow wandering through the surrounding crowd  with a gourd  filled with some kind of homemade firewater, doling out drams by  pouring them into a little length of horn, out of which passers-by could  drink.<\/p>\n<p>Having thoroughly enjoyed the sand stupa party, we  headed back to the other side of the river on another longboat.<\/p>\n<p>Back  on the other side, the madness was in full swing again, with giant  speakers pumping deafening music into the streets, a savage upping of  the water fight, and even impromptu stripping poles erected in the  streets.<\/p>\n<iframe class=\"aw-video\" loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Travel video\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube-nocookie.com\/embed\/TRIXECwwsQA\" allow=\"fullscreen; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\"><\/iframe>\n<p>The extremes of experience, to be sure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My bag was safe and sound back at the guest house and in celebration, Motta and I decided to take a quick nap. Scott, bless his soul, was still under the weather, and still in the deterioration phase, which we were crossing our fingers would soon transition to the upswing. So for the time being [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,10,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lao","category-wheeling","category-woody"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiawheeling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiawheeling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiawheeling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiawheeling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiawheeling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3060"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/asiawheeling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3060\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3194,"href":"https:\/\/asiawheeling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3060\/revisions\/3194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiawheeling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiawheeling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiawheeling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}