Every morning at sunrise, the monks of Luang Prabang line up to beg for their day’s food. In a sign of respect for the monks (most Laotian boys spend time as a monk—a service that lasts anywhere from six months to a lifetime), locals kneel on mats and offer up small handfuls of warm sticky rice to the procession of hundreds of Theravada Buddhists. With over 30 temples in a few blocks’ space, Luang Prabang is a town permanently awash in saffron, no time more than in those brown pre-dawn moments. Despite the fact that every hotel in LP supplies a list of rules about respecting the alms service, most farang (the term used for westerners throughout SE Asia) simply can’t help themselves. They break out the video cameras and telephoto lenses; they sharpen their elbows and dig in their claws; they exercise those itchy trigger fingers at point-blank range, turning what is supposed to be a silent, deeply spiritual experience into a circus act. (I hid behind a tuk tuk to snap this flick, so maybe I’m only half-guilty…) Travel photography can bring out the worst in people, and in general, the eternal quest for the perfect shot has some pretty damning implications for the world’s more fragile destinations. As incredible as it is to witness the monks’ extraordinary daily sacrifice, we left the alms service feeling pretty bummed out for mankind. This city has changed a lot in the two years since I was here last, and with an airport expansion, a golf course, and dozens of new luxury hotels in the works, I’m afraid it’s on the brink of irrevocable “advancement”, as I heard one foreign entrepreneur refer to this development as. I hope I’m wrong, that somehow the forces of change conspire to bring out the best in Luang Prabang, but it so rarely works that way.
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Every morning at sunrise, the monks of Luang Prabang line up to beg for their day’s food. In a sign of respect for the monks (most Laotian boys spend time as a monk—a service that lasts anywhere from six months to a lifetime), locals kneel on mats and offer up small handfuls of warm sticky rice to the procession of hundreds of Theravada Buddhists. With over 30 temples in a few blocks’ space, Luang Prabang is a town permanently awash in saffron, no time more than in those brown pre-dawn moments.

Despite the fact that every hotel in LP supplies a list of rules about respecting the alms service, most farang (the term used for westerners throughout SE Asia) simply can’t help themselves. They break out the video cameras and telephoto lenses; they sharpen their elbows and dig in their claws; they exercise those itchy trigger fingers at point-blank range, turning what is supposed to be a silent, deeply spiritual experience into a circus act. (I hid behind a tuk tuk to snap this flick, so maybe I’m only half-guilty…) Travel photography can bring out the worst in people, and in general, the eternal quest for the perfect shot has some pretty damning implications for the world’s more fragile destinations. As incredible as it is to witness the monks’ extraordinary daily sacrifice, we left the alms service feeling pretty bummed out for mankind.

This city has changed a lot in the two years since I was here last, and with an airport expansion, a golf course, and dozens of new luxury hotels in the works, I’m afraid it’s on the brink of irrevocable “advancement”, as I heard one foreign entrepreneur refer to this development as. I hope I’m wrong, that somehow the forces of change conspire to bring out the best in Luang Prabang, but it so rarely works that way.

I first came upon Mr Chang and his snake-liquor shack two years ago after a spirited exchange of emails with my brother Rusty. He had blazed the Laotian trail a few years before me and sent along the dark secrets he had uncovered in short electronic bursts along the way. On the morning of my last day in the country, after numerous failed attempts to track Chang down, a detailed description of his exact whereabouts arrived in my inbox, along with a few haunting words of encouragement. To wit:

“Jesus Christ the implications and consequences of the erroneous batches of yesteryear still hide in the shroud above the Mekong and haunt us till this day. Tell that humble alchemist Rusty sent you and that we share bloodties …Caution beware of getting jammed up.”

Wiser words were never spoken. The hotel manager found me jammed up at a table smoking cigarettes and pounding snake liquor with a local contingent of troublemakers. He was sweaty and agitated—even more as he slowly took in the messy mid-afternoon scene. He informed me that I was on the verge of missing my flight back to Vietnam. Indeed, when we made it to the airport in Luang Prabang the plane was waiting on the tarmac; a security guy opened up a gate and let us drive directly to the foot of the aircraft. The stench of rice whiskey and cobra venom elicited not a few stink eyes amongst the pink-faced passengers kept waiting by my indiscretions.

Naturally, the first guy we went to see upon return to Laos was Chang, who I’m happy to report is alive and well, though his drinking habits seem to have set the aging process into hyperdrive. After a few failed attempts at communicating the fact that I had tussled with his potion before, we skipped the pleasantries and got down to business. Three quarters buys you a 4-ounce pour of some of the fiercest hooch you’ll ever come across—essentially moonshine distilled from cooked rice into which a few dozen cobras, lizards, and unidentified reptilian matter are set adrift. Chang catches the critters himself, adding them to his batch, because—like nearly every oddity consumed in Asia—they are believed to increase a man’s sexual prowess.

We made this an afternoon habit (well, I made it an afternoon habit while Laura looked on with a mixture of disgust and mild concern), a way to ease out of all the temple-gazing and monk-gawking that consumes the robust population of foreigners that descend upon Laos’ most sacred city. 

Before bidding farewell to Mr Chang, I took a spin through his stack of notebooks, which capture the drunken ramblings of hundreds of international patrons over the years. Just before peeling away, I found a note I left two years ago to the day, a love letter to a man who has touched the Goulding boys deeply. 

Our first meal in Laos: roasted baby eggplants mashed into a garlicky babaghanoush-like state, grilled green chilies laced with sawtooth cilantro, water buffalo jerky, Mekong River seaweed chips, and padek, the ubiquitous Laotian table condiment made from long-fermented river fish. A pile of sticky rice is never far from reach in Laos, which serves as both a filling starch and a vessel for bringing sauces, curries, and stews from bowl to lips. A lemongrass-and-lao lao (Laotian whiskey) cocktail or two to wash it all down and suddenly the haze of sadness following our Japan departure is starting to burn off.
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Our first meal in Laos: roasted baby eggplants mashed into a garlicky babaghanoush-like state, grilled green chilies laced with sawtooth cilantro, water buffalo jerky, Mekong River seaweed chips, and padek, the ubiquitous Laotian table condiment made from long-fermented river fish. A pile of sticky rice is never far from reach in Laos, which serves as both a filling starch and a vessel for bringing sauces, curries, and stews from bowl to lips. A lemongrass-and-lao lao (Laotian whiskey) cocktail or two to wash it all down and suddenly the haze of sadness following our Japan departure is starting to burn off.

Sunrise on our last morning in Japan. Truth be told, we left Japan more than two weeks ago, but we’ve been too busy drinking snake liquor and bribing border police to keep up with the recent goings on. Also, Japan is stuffed so full of incredible edibles and oddities that it’s nearly impossible to stop writing about it. In fact, this was originally intended to be just a page filled with a bunch of pictures and deep captions, but Japan made that impossible.
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Sunrise on our last morning in Japan. Truth be told, we left Japan more than two weeks ago, but we’ve been too busy drinking snake liquor and bribing border police to keep up with the recent goings on. Also, Japan is stuffed so full of incredible edibles and oddities that it’s nearly impossible to stop writing about it. In fact, this was originally intended to be just a page filled with a bunch of pictures and deep captions, but Japan made that impossible.

Not your grandma’s pear cobbler. The candied pear shell is filled with pear sorbet that’s been frozen with liquid nitrogen at -196 degrees Celsius. Diners are instructed to crack the pear open before a server spoons warm chunks of pear marmalade over the top. The contrast of hot and cold is pretty special stuff. (Flip through to see the evolution.) This was the last of 10 courses at Tokyo’s Ryu-Gin, a modern kaiseki spot in Tokyo that, according to Restaurant magazine’s semi-official rankings, is the best restaurant in Japan. It’s not, but it’s damn good and probably deserves a few thousand words of explanation, but it’s just not happening. 

Tsukiji fish market, 4:47 a.m. Picture here is the star of the market, the bluefin tuna, beloved by sushi chefs the world over for its generous marbling. Flown in from every corner of the planet, bluefin is traded each morning in a fabulous 45-minute frenzy. The record sale was recorded earlier this year when a 342-kilo tuna was sold for 32.5 million yen, or about $390,000. Tsukiji tourism has run rampant in recent years, such that they’ve actually banned tourists from the market between 4-9am, the only hours that matter. We managed to elude security long enough to snap some flicks and film some video, but eventually were escorted out of the market. 
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Tsukiji fish market, 4:47 a.m. Picture here is the star of the market, the bluefin tuna, beloved by sushi chefs the world over for its generous marbling. Flown in from every corner of the planet, bluefin is traded each morning in a fabulous 45-minute frenzy. The record sale was recorded earlier this year when a 342-kilo tuna was sold for 32.5 million yen, or about $390,000. Tsukiji tourism has run rampant in recent years, such that they’ve actually banned tourists from the market between 4-9am, the only hours that matter. We managed to elude security long enough to snap some flicks and film some video, but eventually were escorted out of the market.