Chapter 23

The Lesson of the Buddha Cave

Luang Prabang, Laos

June 28

After two witheringly hot days in Siem Reap, we flew back to Phnom Penh. We had a quick lunch in town, then zipped back to the airport to say good-bye to Devi’s father and catch our own plane to Vientiane in Laos. The check-in line was long and excruciatingly slow, and eventually, I struck up a conversation with a slight blonde fellow in his thirties who was standing behind me. He was some sort of aid worker, originally from Wales, and I asked him if he lived in Phnom Penh.

“I live here,” he said, “but my family is staying in Vientiane.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“Oh, with things the way they are here, I thought it might be best to get them out of harm’s way for a while.”

That didn’t sound too good, but since we were leaving anyway, and he assumed I knew what he was talking about, I didn’t pursue the matter. But then I ran into another American family who’d just arrived in Phnom Penh. We’d only been comparing notes for a few minutes when their guide approached with a very somber look on her face. I excused myself reasonably quickly, but they seemed to be deciding whether they should even go into town at all or just return to Bangkok. Finally, by the gate, I met another American man. He looked like a cop on vacation, but he turned out to be a U.S. military officer.

“This is one crazy country,” he said, making conversation. He apparently thought I lived in Phnom Penh.

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“Oh, I’ve been flyin’ around in a Cambodian army helicopter with my buddy over there, and those guys didn’t have the slightest idea where they were goin’. All they had was a road map like you’d get from the AAA. And I’ll tell you what, they got completely lost. They put us down in some little podunk village, and flew off somewhere to get directions. No kiddin’. I thought they were going to just leave us there.”

I thought it might be indiscreet to ask what American military officers were doing flying around in Cambodian Army helicopters. Anyway, at that point, Kara and Willie ran up and asked me for some money.

The soldier looked at them somewhat confused and said, “You here with your kids?”

“Yea,” I replied, “we came up from Australia last week.”

“What are you doing here?”

“We’re tourists. We came to see Angkor Wat.”

He stared at me as if I were the craziest guy in Cambodia, and said, “You plannin’ on leaving now?”

“Yea, we’re going up to Vientiane for a while.”

“Good thinkin’,” he said. Then he walked off to tell his buddy about the lunatic he just met.

Less than twenty-four hours later, I was watching CNN in our hotel room in Vientiane, and sure enough, there was breaking news from Phnom Penh. The Khmer Rouge had deposed its leader, the infamous Pol Pot and defected to one of the two major government factions. That, in turn, upset the delicate balance of power between Cambodia’s two co-premiers, and they settled their differences in the usual way—with rocket attacks and gun battles in the streets of the capital.

“Hey, you better come see this,” I said to Devi. “It looks like all hell’s broken loose in Phnom Penh.”

Devi watched the screen for a while with a concerned expression and said, “Well, so much for Phnom Penh being safe. At least we got out in time, and it doesn’t look like anyone blasted the Intercontinental.”

Those fine distinctions were lost on my mother, who didn’t know precisely when we were pulling out of Cambodia. I thought she might have seen the news reports, so I called her as soon as I could.

When I got through to Pittsburgh, I said, “Hi, mom. I just wanted to let you know that we’re safe and sound in Laos.”

“Oh, David, you’re going to give me a heart attack,” she replied. She’d obviously seen the same reports I had.

“Don’t worry. It’s perfectly calm here.”

“Who goes to Laos?” she replied. “Get out of there and come home.”

“We’ll be probably home in less than a month,” I replied.

“Take care of my grandchildren,” she said sighing. “And please don’t go anywhere else where there’s a war. I don’t think I can stand this anymore.”

Fortunately, that wasn’t a problem, because Vientiane seemed like one of the most serene cities on earth. It still retained many of its old small-town charms—just as I hoped—but its backwater days were clearly numbered. We stayed nearly two weeks in all touring the city’s small handful of tourist attractions, shopping for hand-woven textiles in the sprawling Morning Market and dining at sunset on the banks of the broad Mekong River. Early on, we were befriended by a talented American silk-weaver named Carol Cassidy, and we spent a delightful evening in her home. Over dinner, her Ethiopian husband, Dawed, told us how he fled Addis Ababa during the civil war there, and spent two years walking from Ethiopia to Rome, sneaking across borders without a passport, visas, or travel papers of any sort.

We also spent an enlightening afternoon in Vientiane’s dilapidated Revolutionary Museum. There, Kara and Willie learned how the United States secretly decimated Laos during the Vietnam War, dropping more than one thousand pounds of explosives for every man, woman, and child in the country (not to mention a few hundred thousand gallons of carcinogenic Agent Orange). The kids saw faded black-and-white photographs of the carnage America wrought on this poor little land, and old wire photos of Lyndon Johnson and his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, captioned, “U.S. imperialists plotting the destruction of Laos.” Kara, in particular, seemed shocked that her own country could commit such despicable acts.

Despite these past aggressions, the Lao people didn’t seem to bear us any animus. They were invariably kind, polite, and charming, and if anything, they were delighted to meet visitors from far-off America. This was especially true when we flew to the remote northern town of Luang Prabang. Flying to Luang Prabang was a breathtaking experience. To get there, our Lao Aviation turboprop had to pass over a fourteen-thousand-foot mountain range, and the pilot didn’t waste fuel flying higher than necessary. After we scraped over the peaks, we dropped into a verdant jungle valley where the sparkling Khan River wound its way past golden stupas to join the broad muddy Mekong. At the confluence of these two rivers stood Luang Prabang, ancient capital of Lan Xang³⁷, a once-glorious kingdom that antedates modern Laos.

If the goals of our journey included travelling to the far ends of the earth, showing our children exotic cultures, and turning up hidden Shangri-Las, then Luang Prabang was a wonderful place to end up. A town of less than 16,000 people, it boasted a compact but very elegant royal palace, a holy mountain in the center of town, and more than twenty Buddhist wats occupied by hundreds of saffron-cloaked monks. It was a lovely, peaceful place where run-down French colonial buildings lined the riverfront and colorfully clad Meo tribeswomen descended from the hills to sell their handicrafts.

As we strolled down the main street, which was practically devoid of cars, people actually came out of their homes and motioned us inside. Although the gentle residents of Luang Prabang are pretty well used to Western backpackers, foreign children—especially children as young as Lucas—were apparently a rarity. On our first evening in town, we accepted an invitation to step inside a little two-room house where a circle of ten or twelve men, women, and children sat on woven mats. The women blushed and giggled whenever I looked at them, but they enjoyed playing with Lucas. The men chain-smoked cigarettes and graciously offered us beer and water. After a while one of the men broke out his guitar, and the whole group sang lilting Lao folk songs as dusk fell. I couldn’t imagine a friendlier, sweeter, more joyful group of people. Though we as far away as possible, we all felt completely at home.

On our last day in Luang Prabang we visited Wat Xieng Thong, a peaceful sixteenth-century Buddhist compound set at the junction of the Mekong and Khan rivers. We ogled the wat’s famous reclining Buddha and its huge funeral carriage. Then we discovered a long staircase that led down to the Mekong. Near the top of the steps we were approached by a man—remarkably forward by Luang Prabang standards—who offered to sell us a boat ride to the renowned Buddha caves of Pak Ou, about thirty kilometers upriver. It seemed like a pleasant enough day for a river trip, so we all piled into a rickety green long boat and cruised slowly up the mighty Mekong.

Since it was the dry season, the water level was low, and we had to zigzag back and forth to avoid sandbars and shallows. Along the way, we could see children bathing, women washing their clothes, and men bringing their muddy oxen down to the water to drink. Occasionally, we passed little villages consisting of rough wooden houses set on stilts. Everyone we passed invariably smiled and waved.

In two hours, we came to a place where the wide river ran between high forested hills. There, off the port bow, we spotted a large round cave set forty feet high on a limestone cliff. A steep whitewashed staircase ascended from the riverbank to the cave. The captain docked his creaky old boat by the foot of the steps, and we all climbed the stairs. Inside the cave, we found what must have been a thousand bronze and wooden Buddha images set cheek-by-jowl on a series of natural and man-made stone shelves. The statues ranged in size from a few inches to several meters high, and nearly all of them were the lithe, standing Buddhas typical of this region. The cave was relatively shallow, and the roof was high, so most of the statues were illuminated by daylight. From the back of the cave, we could gaze out over the river and the forested hills beyond, with countless Buddhas standing in the foreground in fluid silhouette.

After a while, we found another set of steps leading even further up the cliff. There was a second cave at the top. This one was dark and deep, and it was lit only by the occasional flickering candle. Inside, it was damp and still and the further we walked, the darker it got, until eventually we were just stumbling around in the gloom. I didn’t have a flashlight, so I fumbled around in my camera bag until I found a pack of matches. When I lit a match, it formed a small circle of light around us. In that circle hundreds of tall thin Buddhas stood sentry. Each time I lit another match this gentle army sprang to life, and each time it flickered out, we were plunged back into darkness.

It was a remarkable effect, very spiritual, and it made me consider how far we’d come in the last year. It was almost a year ago, exactly, that we were living a pretty ordinary life in the suburbs of San Francisco. Now we found ourselves 1,500 miles up the Mekong River, igniting matches, one after another, in a pitch-black cave surrounded by a thousand carved Buddhas. It all went by so quickly, this journey of ours—just one brief luminous scene after another.

We lit a match, and we were in the mountaintop forests of Costa Rica watching the clouds fly by. We lit another, and we were in the hills of Sardinia enjoying a sumptuous feast. A flash of light and Devi and I were standing hand-in-hand under a crescent moon on the banks of the Golden Horn in Istanbul. Flash again, and we were travelling across the sere plains of Africa. One flash of light after another and we were in the vivid Rajasthan desert, the desolate Nullarbor plain, the crumbling ruins of Angkor Wat.

Then it struck me that life was like that, too. You light a match, and you’re just a child. Light another, and you’re married with children of your own. A few more brief, bright flares, and your babies have left home. A few more after that, and your pack is used up. That might be why, at the end of our journey, we found ourselves standing in the Buddha caves of Pak Ou. To learn that we only have one pack of matches. To understand that we have to be in the best possible place when we light each one. To know that we must make each brief combustion a bright, shining moment that pierces the darkness and illuminates a thousand gods.

It was time to go home.

³⁷ Literally, the Land of a Million Elephants.