As a follow up to my recent post on fashion dos and please for the sake of the children don’ts for touri visiting Thailand, I thought I’d share with you one of the reasons Luang Prabang is not one of Pattaya’s sexpats’ favorite weekend getaways. Besides being a World Heritage City, Luang Prabang is home to about 1,000 wats. There are monks everywhere you look, most of them young and attending school at any one of the numerous schools financed by foreigners. It’s not a party town, nor do the locals want it to become a scene for Girls Gone Wild. Hot and humid as most of SE Asia is, previous visitors, undoubtedly of the backpacker persuasion, have left their stamp on the city and the city has responded by trying to stamp that trash out.

Signs abound, notably in English and not the local language, instructing visitors on the proper decorum for dress. They pop up at the airport to catch touri on arrival, and are prominently displayed throughout town. There are also a large number of signs that explain how not to behave when observing monks making the alms rounds in the morning, which many visitors assume is some local pageant put on for their amusement instead of the integral part of local culture that it is.

Sometimes I think there should be a test required before a passport is issued to people.

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