You know how sometimes when you are in a small, quaint place and leave for a day to camp or hike outdoors, you return and find the village's hustle and bustle overwhelming? This is not true for Luang Prabang.

Yesterday Susanna and I rented mountain bikes -- single-gear mountain bikes, good for flat mountains -- and pedaled furiously but slowly out of town. It seems the main sights around Luang Prabang are a waterfall and caves; we opted for the waterfall. Thirty-five kilometers away, at the end of a dusty road, it turns out to be your basic waterfall with a few small swimming pools at the bottom. There are also bears and tigers behind bars. Susanna and I bailed into the swimming pools, but not the animal cages (deterred by the sign -- translated only in English, natch -- advising onlookers not to put their fingers in the tiger's mouth.) We also hiked up the slope and took a nice walk up the mountainside, which is maintained by a stooped over man with a bristle brush, assiduously sweeping the dirt. It seems the definition of a Sisyphan task. When we returned to Luang Prabang via tuk tuk (it turns out our mountain bikes' chains balk at hills), the city looked no less sleepy or charming.

The best way to describe Luang Prabang's almost-comatose pleasure has to be the disco. The disco, a nightly event that closes at 11:30pm, is about two kilometers outside of the city center, situated behind a restaurant and flanked by bantam-weight bouncers wearing white leather shoes and welcoming smiles. For an entrance fee of US$2, we were ushered through quilted red doors into a hall that is some combination of 1950s prom, community hall wedding reception, and 7th grade Catholic school dance. The live band played Thai and Lao traditional music on instruments plugged into amplifiers, so it seemed like pop but without the kick -- like flat Coca-Cola. Balloons decorated the stage. Every couple minutes, one would pop; Susanna suggested that when all the balloons popped, the dance would abruptly end and everyone would go home. The seating was half-circle beige nagahyde benches, as if we were going to watch a lounge act in a diner, and co-ed groups sat politely sipping Beerlao (alcohol content approximately .02%; apparently there is a Beerlao Lite, which I can only conclude is the native word for "water") and watching the dancers.

The dancers. The dancers! Susanna's and my jaws literally dropped when we saw them. What does it say that the only thing more shocking than prurience is chastity? Young men and women in modest western clothes -- jeans and cotton Gap-ish shirts -- walked in a solemn circle, with whole feet if not yards between them (I am reminded of the nuns saying, "Leave room for the Holy Ghost"; these couples had room for the Trinity, all of the disciples, and several centuries of popes). There was obviously a dance step pattern, but it involved rather more plodding and synchronization than wild abandon -- a Communist horah. The song ended, all dancers immediately cleared the floor, in five seconds a new song started, and the dance floor was flooded again, this time with dancers diligently walking a circumscribed box step, a Macarana for the anesthetized.

This is not to say the disco was not an absolute blast. Susanna and I quickly left our Beerlao and joined the fray (by "fray" please understand "group of gently swaying individuals"), Susanna doing a much better job than I of figuring out the line dance pattern. We were with our friend Jason, an American from Texas (and hence a natural line dancer) who's lived in Luang Prabang for a year or so and goes to the disco every few nights. He's very tall and handsome and white and bald, and he kind of hovered above the rest of the crowd like a benevolent spirit, floating gracefully through the steps. The music changed again, and we all "fast-danced" to "La Bamba," although without any use of hips, hands, facial expressions, bodily contact, or general recognition that we were sexual beings in proximity to other sexual beings. Even our Lao companion wearing black leather pants (it remains a mystery where he managed to buy them) looked more like he was submitting to a dentist than getting it on with a bunch of tipsy girls in a late night out. It was trippy.

Home at 10:30 (the band takes a break at 10:30, only to return again for a twenty-minute finale to wrap up the evening in plenty of time for people to get eight hours sleep and be alert for work in the morning; I drank Beerlao for six hours straight and didn't have a trace of a hang over) and asleep by 11, only to be woken up at 4am by rhythmic gonging outside our window. It seems a fife and drum is the standard wake-up for the monks; only, the monks seem to exercise the "snooze" option, because the gongs went off about every half hour til 6:30, when the monks finally roused themselves for the morning alms-giving.

Minus the early-morning symphony, life remains gorgeous in Luang Prabang -- lulled by two rivers, a tropical sun, a socialist work ethic, a Buddhist belief in infinite second-chances, and a French colonial legacy of chocolate croissants for breakfast, a nap at lunch, and evening gin and tonics on the veranda. In dramatic contrast, the new airport at Bangkok is predicated to burst into flames at any moment; happily for us, Susanna and I may be stranded in Laos indefinitely...