Beauty in Slovenia: Skocjan Caves, Lipica Horses, Predjama Castle

Posted on November 17, 2014 by lisafindley

Driving a car in another country makes me more nervous than it probably should, so I generally try to avoid it, which is how I found myself on a daylong tour in rural Slovenia rather than driving myself through the countryside. Slovenia, as a couple friends had told me, is absolutely beautiful, and it’s not quite popular enough yet to be overrun by tourists, so each place we stopped at was gorgeous and not very crowded.

Light hiking outside Skocjan Caves

Stunning Slovenia, outside the Skocjan Caves

I joined four guys from the hostel in a van our gregarious tour guide drove around his home turf–a loop from Ljubljana to Predjama Castle, to Škocjan Caves, and Lipica stud farm. Later, a new friend and I from the hostel rejoined the guide to visit the town of Celje and the nearby lake for sunset. It was like a one-day advertisement for Slovenia–and it worked, we were all hooked.

Lovely countryside

Predjama Castle

The approach to Predjama Castle looks like just a path up a hillside, with no castle in sight, and then you turn a corner and voila!–a castle built into the mouth of a cave. It’s an impressive construction, and looks about as impregnable as it is. Back in the 15th century, the baron who owned it came under siege but suffered no hardship for a year and a day because of the secret passageway through the caves that allowed him to bring in fresh supplies. A servant betrayed him and he was shot by cannon out of his toilet–an ignoble but also kind of awesome way to go? The castle underwent extensive changes in the next hundred years, and has remained in the Renaissance style ever since the late 16th century.

I think that little door on the bottom left is supposed to be the location of the infamous toilet

Skocjan Caves

Škocjan Caves are a World Heritage site, a massive system of underground karst canyons (karst being the type of rocks found here). Reka River flows through some of the largest underground caverns in the world, and you can visit a couple of these caverns on a guided tour. Photos weren’t allowed, because apparently the flash can damage the rock, so we all took a bunch when we saw daylight again and our guide said it was okay. But go ahead and Google some images to get a sense of the size of these caves. They were breathtaking, and the water rushing through was at a magnificent strength and volume as well. I’d say that this is probably the only caving tour you can go on if you’re claustrophobic, since even the smaller areas were pretty comfortable. It’s just a whole city of stalagmites and stalactites and river rapids down there.

Aboveground but still in a valley, outside Skocjan Caves

After the caves, you can take a pretty direct route back to civilization, or you can do a mini hike through the hilly woods atop the caves. Our guide had scheduled in time for the hike, so we set off, and of course I took the longest. I’m just a slow walker, and I take a lot of photos. I warn people of this, but they always seem surprised anyway.

The karst landscape of Skocjan Caves

I was aware that I wasn’t the only one on the tour, so I kept moving, although the scenery was absolutely gorgeous so I was tempted to dawdle. After one last look at the castle across the valley, we got back on the road to our last stop before Ljubljana.

Looking across the valley

A close-up of that view

The famous white horses of Lipica

Lipica stud farm is where the Lipizzan horses have their start. These white horses have been bred for centuries to be raised in the Spanish Riding School style of dressage, which is a very specific purpose, and apparently a very expensive one, as these horses are highly prized and the stud farm a place of pride for Slovenia. You can take tours of the grounds, or you can do what we did, which was stop partway up the private drive, get out and stand at the fence and gaze at the horses from there. They were mostly shy with us, but lovely to watch from a distance as they grazed and sedately walked around the huge grounds.

We stopped at a lookout point to get this view of Trieste in Italy, just across the border, and what little is left of the Slovenian coastline after Croatia and Italy took most of it.

The town of Celje is about an hour’s fast drive northeast of Ljubljana. We walked along the Hudinja River as kids played in the last hours of daylight, we admired the 3/4-life-sized bronze statues scattered around town, and we had a drink in the shadow of buildings in the Viennese style.

In Celje

Statue of Alma Karlin in Celje, her hometown

One of the statues is of Alma Karlin, a Slovenian traveler and writer who knew over TEN languages. She often wrote in German, until the rise of the Nazis, at which point she stopped writing in German in protest. She traveled around the world for a decade and established a language school, and is clearly someone whose writings I need to read immediately.

Celje Castle on the hill

We ended the day at Šmartinsko Lake, a manmade lake with irregular borders so it looks more natural. Aside from slapping away mosquitoes, which let’s be honest has been part of every summer evening for me in the Midwest, I sat and had a totally peaceful experience, watching the sky turn pink and the distant hills blue, and seeing it all reflected in the still waters of the lake. Our guide talked about how proud he is of his country and how much he loves Slovenia, and we just nodded along. Look at this place–how could you feel any differently?

Goodnight, Slovenia

The Majesty of Iguazu Falls: A Photo Essay

Posted on June 23, 2014 by lisafindley

Dearest fellow travelers, I have been to many amazing places and seen many incredible things on this trip, like Uluru and Angkor and Machu Picchu, and while those all awed me, none filled me with joy the way Iguazu Falls did. I walked a lot the two days I visited the falls, but my sorest muscles are in my face, from the non-stop grinning.

GRINNING

The week before I visited, there were such heavy rains that the subsequent flooding at the falls set records. This meant that a couple of the cool walks were closed on the Argentinian side–the bridges over the falls in those areas had been swept away–but there was still plenty to see.

Here, let’s look at a bunch of photos together:

The water levels were the highest they’ve been in decades

Mesmerized

Looking down was a rush

And then there was this

Dozens of rainbows

I got pretty soaked standing in the shadow of this one

Dos Hermanas–the two sisters–at the end of the Lower Trail

Looking down from the Upper Trail

And more wonders

The island in the middle of the falls; it was too dangerous to approach when I visited, because of the water levels

That would be part of the Upper Trail. That section is currently closed.

I went on a boat ride to get up close and personal. This is before we went farther in and got completely, 100% soaked.

There was a lot of mist in the late afternoon, when I went, so the falls didn’t translate as well on camera, but they looked really cool from the boat

River-level view

And now a break, in which I show you pictures of raccoon-like animals that you might think are kind of cute but are actually vicious little food thieves and biters. Coatis are wild animals native to the area, and although the ones outside the tourist areas keep to themselves (as wild animals ought), the ones in the tourist areas have figured out that they can get food a lot more easily by begging and outright taking it from tourists. I had food in my bag, and when the bag was hanging by my side while I took a selfie, a coati pounced on it! I won that fight, but yikes.

They creep up on you

With their little anteater-like faces

And their indignant raccoon-like tails

The Brazil park had this guy running around taking photos with kids, which I think sends a confusing message: Don’t touch or feed them! But also, cuddly friend!

Back to the beautiful, this time on day 2, when I went to the Brazilian side of the falls:

I mean, this is an pretty good introduction to the falls

I mean, this is a pretty good introduction to the falls

Good job, Nature

Now you’re just showing off

More grinning

You can walk out in the middle of the falls in the upper level on the Brazilian side

You might get a little damp doing so (people heading out on the ramp looked at me, aghast, as I headed back in–one woman grabbed my arm and said something in concern, and one man laughed out loud at my bedraggled state)

Right in the middle of the action

You can also go up an elevator for a view pretty high up

Which was a cool perspective

The Brazilian side

The Argentinian side

Architecture and Austen in Bath

Posted on May 6, 2014 by lisafindley

I hope we shall be in Bath in the winter; but remember, Papa, if we do go, we must be in a good situation. (Persuasion, p. 29)

I hadn’t seen my parents in nine months of travel, so I was excited to meet up with them in Bath last May. We were in a very good situation–they’d found a great bed and breakfast for us to stay in, and I settled gratefully into my own bedroom with en suite bathroom after months of shared dorms and bathrooms down the hall. I mean, the woman who owned the house we were staying in made her own soaps. I was using handcrafted soaps in Bath, which actually fits my image of that town perfectly.

Well situated, indeed

In Jane Austen’s time, it was a playground for the rich, a place for fashion, gossip, and soaking in the thermal baths that give the town its name. Today, it mostly trades in tourism, for the baths themselves and for the Georgian architecture that dominates downtown. It’s not the fashionable spot that it once was, but it’s still pretty expensive.

The abbey, as watched by a warrior at the Roman baths

The Roman Baths

We visited the Roman baths on a blustery day, but the surface of the large green pool barely rippled in the wind. This seemed right to me, because for all their atrocious laws and conquest-hungry power moves, the ancient Romans were fine architects, and they built things to last. Why shouldn’t the very water of the place be as still as the columns and statues surrounding it?

The baths of Bath

Of course, as with most things the Romans stumbled upon, the local people had been aware of the baths for hundreds of years. The Celts built a shrine to local goddess Sulis, and when the Romans built up baths here in about 60 CE, they folded her into their conception of the place, and dedicated the baths to Sulis Minerva. The audio guide and educational texts posted around the baths emphasized that taking the waters was a religious experience for the Romans and locals. They were immersing themselves in sacred waters overseen by a wise and stern goddess.

Some of the curses in the baths

That doesn’t mean very human concerns didn’t have their place here. The museum displays dozens of curse tablets that were unearthed here–mostly requests for the goddess to inflict severe pain upon whoever stole the supplicant’s clothes while they were in the baths. Some people even helpfully provided a list of names of possible culprits, an extra step which I’m sure the goddess appreciated.

Coins from earliest Britannia

The baths were a marvel of construction, of course; there were steam rooms and smaller pools in addition to the great pool, and an elaborate system of pipes and drains underneath kept it all in working order. No one uses these pools to bathe in anymore, although there are pricey places in town you can visit if you want to take the waters. Apparently people even drink the water sometimes, in an attempt to access those healing powers the sulfuric stuff is known for. I had a sip at the museum and can’t recommend it.

Foundations from one of the steam rooms

Jane Austen

She disliked Bath, and did not think it agreed with her; and Bath was to be her home. (ibid, p. 9)

Jane Austen could have been writing about herself with that line. She disliked the bustle of Bath, but she had to live there a couple different times in her life. I’m willing to call it ironic that the center dedicated to study and appreciation of Austen’s works is based in the town she loathed. Ah well, she might appreciate that irony if she knew.

The ceiling of the abbey–I love that design

The Jane Austen Centre is just up the street from Queen Square, so that’s where Mom and I left Dad when we went in to see the exhibition (my dad is an enlightened modern man, but we still haven’t convinced him to like Austen yet). We were ushered upstairs and sat in a Regency-period drawing room, where we listened to a college student in costume give us a few quick facts about Austen’s life in general, and her time in Bath in particular. Then he fielded questions, which was a little tricky, as the audience ranged from people who have only seen the Pride and Prejudice movie, to amateur experts with very particular questions.

The Assembly Rooms; I did geek out a little about standing in the same place as one of my favorite fictional characters

The next stop was a too-crowded set of rooms downstairs, which acted as museum display. Our guide said he’d be available for questions, but I didn’t see him again. The focus in these rooms was on Austen’s life in Bath, and on the bits about Bath that appear in her novels. One corner contained a rack of dresses and a box of hats and fans; I have never played dress-up at a museum for adults before, but it was kinda fun.

The music room of the Assembly Rooms, ready for a concert that night

I liked the last couple rooms the best; in one, the only known painting of Austen was hung, and right next to it, a modern painting, taken from descriptions in letters and journals. The official portrait (by Austen’s beloved sister Cassandra) is, frankly, ugly, and the artist who made the new one justified it by pointing to letters from Austen’s relatives who complained that Cassandra’s portrait didn’t capture Austen’s liveliness or prettiness.

Melissa Dring’s portrait of Jane Austen

The last room holds some photos from the movie version of Sense and Sensibility, and a charming handwritten letter from Emma Thompson. Also, an inkstand and paper so you can try writing like they did back then. It is hard. You have to write in the tiny, cramped script you always see in original documents; writing any larger just dries the ink out of the quill and leaves a mess.

The abbey and entrance to the baths

Georgian Architecture

There are a few independently designed places in Bath–Robert Adam’s Pulteney Bridge and the 16th-century abbey in the center of town come to mind–but for the rest of the city, it’s all John Wood. John Wood the Elder and John Wood the Younger, a father-son team of architects who designed the Royal Crescent, The Circus, and other grand residential places in a neoclassical style. (Apparently, the correct term is Palladian, after a particular architect who revived Greek and Roman styles in the 18th century. The more you know.)

Royal Crescent, which looks out over a large park

In what had to be a parody of rich kids, these teenagers stumbled out of one of the Royal Crescent apartments, jumped the fence to their private lawn, and started glugging champagne in the afternoon sun.

It’s this consistency of design that got Bath listed on the UNESCO World Heritage list, and while I think I would go a bit crazy if I had to live in a town this uniform in style, it is striking to see, and I can appreciate the harmony of the local yellow stone forming row after row of columns. After all this uniformity, it was all the more surprising to see two front doors on the Royal Crescent painted a different color than all the other front doors. Surely there’s a fine for such an affront to the 250-year-old look!

The Circus, created so that wherever your front door was, you always saw houses just like yours when you stepped out

The ? Bridge, apparently based on rejected plans for the Rialto in Venice

The Pulteney Bridge, apparently based on rejected plans for the Rialto in Venice

Upon my word, I shall be pretty well off, when you are all gone to be happy at Bath! (ibid, p. 29)

Yes, Mary, we were all very happy at Bath, indeed.

Working in a Coal Mine, Going Down Down

Posted on March 31, 2014 by lisafindley

It’s hard to overstate the importance of coal mining and iron production in the history of Wales. With these, Great Britain mined and smelted and powered its way into the Industrial Revolution, and the world has never been the same.

The Big Pit

Blaenavon Ironworks

One of the most important places in the world for iron production was Blaenavon Ironworks, a massive blast furnace built in the hills of southeastern Wales in 1789 and in use until 1900. It was such an important part of human history, in fact, and is well preserved enough, that it’s on the World Heritage List. Liz and I made it our first stop after Cardiff last May.

Blaenavon Ironworks

Remains of the furnace, with the company housing in the background

There were half-hidden stands with audio guides scattered across the complex, and when we were able to find them, we learned a little about how the furnaces worked–workers shoveled coal like fury at the top of the hill, fueling the steam-powered furnaces that turned iron ore into usable iron. A tall water-balance tower was used as a counterbalance when lifting the tons of metal. Eventually a railway was built to get materials to and from the site faster, although I didn’t see remnants of that.

Newsprint of the 1830s-40s covered the walls. Fascinating stuff!

Strict rules at the company store

The company store, which, like all company stores everywhere, overcharged

Right next to the remains of the furnace was a small collection of buildings, which is where workers were housed for at least a century. The tiny rowhouses have been turned into museum sites. One set of rooms showed what it likely looked like early on, around 1790, when the company-provided accommodation was used by generally well-paid employees, who were maybe a little higher up on the chain. Another set of rooms showed how the houses were used about fifty years later, when the better-paid employees moved into the growing town of Blaenavon, and only people too poor to move out lived in the tiny rooms on site. In the first set of rooms, maybe a middle-aged couple lived, but in the second, a family of seven or eight crowded into the same small space. Apparently the BBC shot a popular series here, so yet another set of rooms was done up to look like it did in the 1960s.

The tidy 18th century version of company housing

Times were harder fifty years later

Nature’s creeping back in on the site

The Big Pit

The Big Pit is the splendidly named coal mine just a few miles from the ironworks, and included as part of the World Heritage site, as together they show the full cycle of mining, smelting, forging, and shipping out metals that built up the country and the world.

Big Pit elevator

The mine was operational up til 1980, and it re-opened as a museum in 1983. Before you go down in the pit, you have to remove anything metallic, anything at all, because some of the conditions that made it dangerous to mine down there make it still dangerous today. Yes, we’re not chopping away at the walls to get at coal, and we’re not carrying lamps all over, but there’s still a lot of flammable methane gas down there, and metal creates sparks. So off came watches, jewelry, belts with metal buckles, and of course cameras, and they were all put into lockers with many jokes from the former miners about selling it all on eBay while we were gone. (I did note that they let those of us with glasses keep them on, though, and my plastic glasses definitely have metal hinges. But I wasn’t going to say anything.)

Methane monitor

Our guide mined in the Big Pit right up until it closed, and you could tell he missed parts of it, though maybe not others. He showed us where the horses who pulled the carts of coal and debris lived, and told us how once they were brought underground, they were never brought back to the surface for the rest of their lives, until sometime in the 20th century, when they were allowed a two-week vacation aboveground every year. Yikes.

I like the graphic. No messing around.

We had to duck our heads as we walked from section to section, and one older gentleman could never seem to remember to do that, so we heard him hit his head at least 10 times. As someone who regularly gives herself concussions, I sympathized. Our guide was a joker, keeping us entertained with jabs at Americans (that’s fine) and eyebrow-waggling innuendos. But he was always deadly serious when he talked about how dangerous mining is, and the many precautions they took to keep their workers safe down in the mines. We all carried methane detectors on the belts they strapped around us aboveground, along with the battery packs for our headlamps, but our guide said that most miners still prefer the reliability of that poor little bird, the canary in the mine.

Liz and I are ready to go down the mines

Hoi An: A Town Suspended in Amber

Posted on October 10, 2013 by lisafindley

World Heritage sites are meant to protect and preserve sites of cultural and natural beauty around the world–that’s a given. But I was surprised by Hoi An, a city near the coast of the middle part of Vietnam, whose old town is a World Heritage site. Although people live and work there–bustling about selling food and trinkets, ushering tour groups through historical houses, calling out to children down the street–I somehow still felt as if the place was stopped in time, like an insect suspended in amber, mid-flight.

Boat rides in Hoi An

The buildings are a combination of Chinese-style shophouses and French colonials. Almost every single one is painted a bright yellow, decorated with hanging lanterns, the occasional flowering vine, and not much else. Simplicity seems to be the decorating byword here, and it works really well. Everyone took photos against the backdrops of yellow houses and magenta flowers, sometimes with an old-fashioned bicycle as a prop. I’m no exception.

I won’t wear shoes that are anything less than a dozen Franklins

But that’s what the whole “ancient town” felt like–a prop. My mom asked me if a town that was so carefully preserved felt like a display at Disneyland, and it kind of did. Part of that was due to the restrictions on vehicles; only human-powered vehicles were allowed, so the usual crush of motos, cars, and buses was missing, and only cyclos (bicycle taxis), bicycles, and handcarts rolled through the streets. This made me less fearful for my life, but it also made it eerily quiet. There was so much space; although the buildings were all full of businesses, somehow the streets weren’t as full of people visiting them as they were just a few streets away, on the other side of the UNESCO sign.

Most of those businesses seemed to be for tourists only, and I guess that’s the basic point: I’ve never been anywhere else that’s had such a sharp tourist/local divide, where locals only venture to make some money off tourists. Except for maybe Navy Pier in Chicago.

Which is not to say the houses and their contents weren’t beautiful, or historical, or worth preserving. They were all of those things. But the liveliness that surely accompanied the building and decorating of those houses had faded away.

Carrying different loads–the locals and the tourists

The beautiful, but oddly empty, streets of Hoi An

The Japanese Bridge

Hoi An was a trading town for centuries, and both Chinese and Japanese merchants settled here and had a large influence. One of the main sights of the town is the small, lovely covered Japanese bridge over one of the estuaries of the river. It was built centuries ago, connecting parts of town where different ethnicities lived, and for a while was called the Friendship Bridge. You can pay to see the tiny altar in the center of the bridge, or you can just walk on the wooden structure, admiring the curlicued beams above and the solemn dog and monkey altar statues below.

At the Japanese Bridge in Hoi An Ancient Town

A small shrine on the Japanese Bridge

A collections box

A war memorial

I lucked out on the first day I went down to the old town. You have to buy a multi-ticket packet and use one ticket per attraction. I wasn’t sure where to buy a ticket when I got down there, so I asked a couple of Canadian women outside the Tran Family Chapel where to go, and they said, “oh actually, we’re done for the day, take the rest of our tickets.” Excellent!

The Tran Family Chapel

The Tran Family Chapel is one of the names for this 200-year-old building, constructed in the style of a Vietnamese garden house. The central entrance was only used on very high holidays, and normally men and women enter from different side entrances. The altar was surrounded by small, thin boxes that I believe contained the ashes, or perhaps the mementos of deceased members of the family. You can’t walk through the place by yourself; a guide gives a short speech on the architecture of the building (Japanese-style three-tiered wooden beams; a door sill that trips you up if you’re not careful, so you are forced to look down when crossing it, thus showing respect for the ancestors as you cross into their space) and then brings you into the back room, which is full of ceramics, coins, and trinkets you can buy as souvenirs. It wasn’t too hard a sell, happily.

Tran Family Chapel

Tran Family Chapel waiting room

Part of the large collection of ceramics, coins, and statuary for sale

The Tan Ky House

Mother-of-pearl inlay in the Tan Ky House

The Tan Ky House is the most visited Chinese house in Hoi An. It’s over 200 years old, and it’s been owned by the same family that whole time. An older woman, sixth generation of that family, handed out tea to visitors and smiled serenely as each tour leader pointed out her importance.

One of the major reasons the town is a World Heritage sites, these old houses are all built in the same way: doorway, opening foyer with altar, outdoor courtyard, back room/kitchen. Sometimes beds were set up in the back, but it looked like most bedrooms were upstairs (we were only permitted to see the downstairs in each place). Guides pointed out the Chinese elements (the writing, the shophouse layout), the Japanese elements (the three-tiered wooden beams in the foyer), and the Vietnamese elements (the building materials and particular family touches) that appear in each house.

Markings of how high the floodwaters rose over the years

The river has flooded many times over the last few decades, and one wall of the Tan Ky house was chalked up with how high the waters rose during various floods. The houses looked good for how many times they’ve been submerged.

Coins for the future

The lacquered woodwork found in the Tan Ky house and the Quan Thang house (another place I visited), and mother-of-pearl inlay in the former, were beautiful. The inlay looked like calligraphy, and some of it even made Chinese characters out of “brush strokes” in the shapes of birds, which was just lovely. The woodwork in all the houses shines from polishing, revealing pastoral scenes of flowers, animals, and twisting plants.

Old House of Quan Thang

Lacquer woodwork

Fukien Assembly Hall

The Fukien Assembly Hall was built in the 17th century as a temple and was also used as a gathering place for the Fukien Chinese people who built it. It’s a long approach, past a fountain and through a triple gate, past two large paintings depicting heroic stories, through the open courtyard hung with giant prayer coils, red and smoking, and finally into the main room containing the large altar and another small pond. The altar room had some beautifully carved and painted pillars, and a feast laid out for the ancestors and gods on the altar. This was a great reminder of the huge Chinese influence in Vietnam, and how strong that influence still is.

Fukien Assembly Hall

Offerings at the altar

Lovely detail

Tailors

Hoi An is the main tailoring hot spot in Vietnam. I am not exaggerating when I say that out of eight storefronts on one street, seven of them were tailor shops. I had some silk I’d bought in Thailand, and I had it made into a skirt for my cousin, which turned out beautifully. I had almost decided not buy any clothes for myself, but I succumbed to a different shop owner’s persuasions. She made a long-sleeved black linen/cotton shirt, which I generally like although it can be a little shapeless, and a pair of cream linen pants, which pilled after two wearings, and which she hemmed too short. I should’ve stuck with my original plan!

In the tailor shop

Plumeria

Along the river in Hoi An

Hoi An was picturesque as any town I’ve been to, and it was a relief to walk around in a mostly pedestrian-only area for awhile, relaxing into the bright colors and quiet atmosphere, eating cao lau noodles and running my hands over rich fabrics in the shops. But even though I wandered at night under the lanterns strung across the streets, a part of me still thinks that maybe they shut the whole set down overnight, then open up this peculiar theme park again the next day.

Hoi An by night

Oh yeah, I took model shots

A Day in the Gardens of Kew

Posted on July 18, 2013 by lisafindley

The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew are almost as large as their name is long. They run along the River Thames in the southwest of London, taking up about a half mile square (121 hectares, in case the hectare is a unit of measurement that means something to you). They’re on the World Heritage list because they’ve maintained their size and purpose for over two centuries; they do a lot of plant research here, and have one of the best orchid collections in the world, for example. When my friend Sessily and I met up in London, we decided to pack a picnic and make a day of it at Kew. We spent a lovely day in the warm sunshine, admiring the trees and flowers, gazing out over the pond, having an ice cream, watching kids run around excitedly, listening to the sound check for the Human League concert taking place there later that night… You know, normal gardens stuff.

I don’t know the names of plants, and a lot of plants didn’t have labels (or none that we could find), so I can’t name most of these for you. Feel free to educate me in the comments!

They have their own tube stop.

The oldest tree in Kew, planted in the early 18th century. It's a sweet chestnut--that one I did find out!

The oldest tree in Kew, planted in the early 18th century. It’s a sweet chestnut–that name I did find out!

We bought sandwich fixings from a Portuguese deli. This was a very good sandwich.

Treetop walk

The treetop walk featured hilarious plaques noting plant facts. We loved this one because the artist decided to put in the male and female symbols (see where our fingers point), just in case you missed it in the text.

Palm tree in the Temperate House

I think this was a rhododendron–cool star pattern

Giant Japanese pagoda. The gardens also contain a small wooden house, called a minka, which was transferred piece by piece from Japan in 2000.

Pink and blue

I was really into this plant. It was so airy! It looks like something the fairies might live in.

I was really into this plant. It’s so airy! It looks like something the fairies might live in.

Kew Palace, the smallest royal residence in Britain. George III lived here during one of his bouts of madness.

They’ve restored the inside of the house.

Do do do, it’s a chair in the house. What’s that little placard say? Ahh! It’s the chair Queen Charlotte DIED in, back in 1818. I jumped away from that chair like the dead woman was still in it.

They make their own ice cream here. This mint chocolate chip was fantastic.

Orchids

In the Princess of Wales Conservatory

The Temples and Night Markets of Luang Prabang

Posted on June 25, 2013 by lisafindley

UNESCO put Luang Prabang on its World Heritage Sites list because it’s a town with a well-preserved mix of Laotian and French colonial architecture. After the jumble of rowhouses and tiny shops of Chiang Mai, it is striking to see the long, broad buildings of Luang Prabang, painted a colonial yellow and set at a dignified distance from the brightly decorated Buddhist temples.

Colonial architecture

Colonial yellow

Dignified, stately, slow-moving: these are the words I kept coming up with as I wandered the streets of Luang Prabang. A little in keeping with that stately feeling (and certainly in keeping with its colonial history), there were a lot of fences and walls; more space is cordoned off in this small town than I saw walled away in all of Thailand.

Every evening, vendors set up outside those walls for the night market. In Thailand, the markets are set up on card tables, but in Laos, the goods are laid out on tarps and blankets on the ground. If you want to inspect the goods at a particular booth, you have to squat down, or use one of the tiny plastic stools the vendor whips out for you. I would gingerly lower myself onto these unstable pieces of plastic and smile genially as all the women selling quilts and table runners laughed. Just about every stall has a woman holding a baby, and some stalls are staffed by men or teenagers. I saw one little boy playing on an iPad while his parents sold handicrafts–it’s a shrinking world, indeed!

The tents of the night market

Bombs to bracelets

I picked out wedding presents and souvenirs from various stalls, but my favorite spot was the bombs-to-bracelets stall. The US waged a secret bombing campaign on Cambodia and Laos in the late ’60s and early ’70s, as part of its campaign against the Communist bogeyman. The villagers of Ban Napia in eastern Laos took the aluminum from the thousands of bombs dropped on their homes and, in their words, turned it from “something that kills into something that feeds,” producing spoons. They later added bracelets and charms to their collection, and the number of bombs dropped can be guessed at by the fact that they’re still making jewelry today, nearly 40 years after the bombs stopped falling. I chose to support the artisans, although there is some controversy in doing so, because villagers have to collect scrap metal to make them, and there are a lot of accidents and sometimes deaths with the UXOs (unexploded ordnances). As with so many potential purchases, it’s complicated.

Meat on a stick–a lot of it

The much-lauded buffet (I never tried it)

Of course, there’s food. One woman sliced watermelon with a machete while another flipped sweet potatoes on a small woodfire grill. A narrow alley of food vendors included pork and fish on sticks, dumplings, grilled sticky rice, and two giant all-you-can-eat buffets. I had really good veggie and pork dumplings, and a non-spicy lemongrass sausage (a specialty of the area).

Wat Xieng Thong

Gold painting everywhere

Luang Prabang has dozens of Buddhist temples, and a high concentration of monks and novices (those under age 25 are called novices). The temples, or wats, are painted in elaborate, intricate scenes, sometimes both inside and outside. The grounds are spare, with just a little greenery carefully confined to a few areas, and the rest tiled courtyards between buildings. Monks and novices move around on the edges, running errands, doing homework (many boys enter the monastery to get a good education), making adjustments in the temples.

Seriously impressive

Probably the most famous wat in Luang Prabang is Wat Xieng Thong, sometimes called The Temple of the Golden City. Since Luang Prabang is on the World Heritage list, there’s a lot of upkeep work going on at various temples, funded by various countries–and this temple is no exception. The US Embassy is supporting efforts to reinforce the structural elements of the temple, and scaffolding was set up around the buddha when I visited.

Unfinished renovations

The main building was painted a maroon color inside, and then gold leaf designs were painted on top of that, on every available surface–ceiling, columns, walls. Inside, a long wooden pipe sat along one wall, and at the end of it sat a small buddha in a glass box. During a water-based festival, water blessed by monks travels through the wooden pipe and washes the buddha. My favorite part of this temple was a separate building, which housed a giant dragon boat. The back wall was red, covered in intricate, colorful mosaic scenes and accented with sparkly glitter. There was no way to get a decent picture to show just how big and full of life it was, but I tried. Exteriors of some other buildings were dotted with similar mosaics.

View from Mount Phousi

Buddhas in various positions

Mount Phousi rises above the center of town, and a small temple sits atop it, with various buddha statues and shrines scattered below it, so each step of the climb to the top takes you past a holy site. At the top, if you can balance yourself between the edge and the dozens of fellow tourists, you can see a beautiful sunset over the Mekong. On the walk up, off to the side is the Imprint of the Buddha’s Foot; it’s a large, vaguely foot-shaped indentation in the rock that someone decided was a holy sign. (In that way, it reminds me of the Virgin Mary water spot under the bridge on Fullerton in Chicago.)

Indentation of the Buddha’s Foot

The foot is just past a pavilion with a view of the Nam Khan River to the east, and on this pavilion stood a young novice. His name was Tip, and he was doing homework. He clearly stations himself here most nights in hopes of practicing English, because he was eager to ask and answer questions with me. He was 17, he’d been a novice for many years, his wat was across the river, America sounded interesting… I didn’t have time to ask for a photo or chat with him further, because a couple teenage Laotian boys entered the pavilion, and Buddhist monks aren’t supposed to be alone with women. I didn’t want him getting in trouble, so I said goodbye and he said, “I hope you have many happinesses in your travels in Laos.”