Where is a place where two rivers meet and the riverbanks are ablaze with fire trees? Where golden shower, calachuchi trees (the national flower called doc champa), and bougainvilla adorn private gardens and city streets, not even to mention all the other trees and plants that green the City… A small city, about the land area and population numbers of Dumaguete.
There, too, motorbikes are ubiquitous and tuktuk, their (more comfortable) version of tricycles, are the usual public transport.
But low and behold, the streets are quiet, without the roar and rumble of motorbikes, or the loud snort of motors revving up, and without smoke-belching! Like the king of Siam said (in a musical), “Is a puzzlement!”
More surprises: No men spit or urinate in the streets! Sidewalks are not strewn with plastic bags or garbage! Not a single tree has plastic advertising posters tacked on it — not one! No plastic bags float in the two rivers circling the City. No pounding disco sound is to be heard. No advertising billboards.
No, I am not making this up; this place, the size of Dumaguete, exists and it is Luang Prabang in Laos.
I just spent a week there, in a state of delight and wonder that it can be done; after all, dirt and noise and ugliness are not inevitable.
It helps that Unesco declared Luang Prabang a heritage site in 1995, preserving 34 ancient Buddhist temples and lovely French colonial buildings, and also keeping out some crasser manifestations of global mass culture (no McDonalds there.)
But it can’t be all Unesco’s doing; that the place is clean, green and quiet must also owe to governance that cares about these things, and to a local culture that does, too. People planted all those flowering trees long ago, caring about future beauty.
And it certainly isn’t about financial resources, the usual excuse we get here for why things don’t get done.
Laos is a poor country, with 80 percent of the population in subsistence farming, and a per capita income considerably lower than in the Philippines.
And no, I didn’t spend a week wearing blinkers, I learned of many problems, too. Most touching for me were the young people struggling for an education, and seeking out opportunities to learn.
Everyday, young students and young novice monks go to the small and poor city library between 1 and 3 pm for English conversation practice with native speakers, most of them visitors like myself.
I chatted with a 15 year-old girl whose dream was to become a doctor, a heart surgeon! A 17 year-old boy’s ambition was to study engineering in Moscow. A 16 year-old novice monk hoped to go to Thailand one day for higher studies in Buddhism. My heart went out to them, all of them children of farmers living far from the city.
Buddhist temples provide boys from the age of 8 on, with a chance to get an education. They leave their families to live very simply in one of the many temples, and go to school in the city.
Everyday after early morning prayers, the novices and monks walk the city streets with their alms box into which the people of Luang Prabang drop food, and sometimes money. This will provide them their two meals of the day.
I want to go back there one day to the beauty and quiet of the city, and to the cottage by the Nam Khan river (that flows into the Mekong) where I watched people grow vegetables on the river banks and cast their nets to fish, and where, marvel of marvels, there were no plastic bags or garbage in the river.
After just a week in Luang Prabang, re-entering Dumaguete reality was a minor shock to the sensibilities, and I have to admit to briefly losing my cool as I was driving a few days ago.
Plastic advertising posters on every tree! I stopped every few meters, and in a rage, pulled the damned things down, surely a hundred of them.
I would have rushed to deposit them on the Mayor’s desk (hey, we have a City ordinance!) had not sanity returned.
What explains this contrast of cultures? I suspect that people here, including public officials, have by now lived so long with garbage in the streets and visual pollution that it’s become an accepted natural environment that no longer jars.
Well, the example of other places is needed to re-awaken awareness of better ways to manage public space.
