That Luang Festival

We arrived in Vientiane in time for the nations only real (certainly biggest!) annual festival, the That Luang festival! We couldn’t believe our luck! And we couldn’t believe how many monks we saw – I think that we must have seen all of them!!

SEE PHOTOS AT http://s136.photobucket.com/albums/q164/erinfearn/SE%20Asia/Vientiane/?start=all

We rose long before the sun and pedalled our bicycles to the national monument of Pha That Luang where the festival was held, and arrived before the carnival rides were operating. The entire district was decorated with stages, market stalls, food tents, rides and games, and the already huge number of people there was growing by the moment. Monks were everywhere. On everything. There was nowhere to look where monks weren’t.

At this festival, almost everyone that lives anywhere nearby, heads to Pha That Luang were they sit on the ground with small baskets of sticky rice and ornate bowls containing any number of treats - chocolate bars, packets of chips, fruit, money – and they all sit facing a long line of monks and nuns that surrounds the enormous groups of people, and stretches on as far as the eye can see. This is all taking place before sunrise. Soon after the sun has risen, everyone is united in collective prayer, led by someone with a loud speaker, and this carries on until some magic moment when people begin rising to their feet and making their way with their basket of delights, over to the beginning of a row of monks and nuns who have all been waiting patiently with their own empty bowls, and one after another, deposit small gifts into the monks’ empty bowls, and the monks in turn, empty their soon-over-flowing bowls into huge plastic garbage bags and wait for their bowls to fill up again. At the end of the day, monks of all sizes could be seen lugging themselves and their bags into the backs of trucks.

There is no set amount of time that a monk must commit to their religion. Many people spend a month or two as monks when they are adolescents or young adults. If you were going to spend only one day as a monk, I think that this would definitely be the day to choose.