Laos is the poorer, ill-fated and largely forgotten neighbour of Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia. It has had a hard time of it: after 200 hundred years of being battered by the Siamese (modern Thailand) it was occupied by the French as a 'buffer' region for Vietnam. Occupation by the Japanese in 1945 pre-empted 30 years of fighting with the French in the Indochinese war. Independence in 1953 sparked a civil war between forces loyal to the (French-influenced) Royal Family and the (Chinese and North Vietnamese-influenced) communist Pathet Lao. As all that was happening, between 1964 and 1973 the Americans were fighting the Vietnam war.
The Yanks took it upon themselves to secretly (and very illegally) drop 1.9 million tonnes of bombs on Laos -a country with which it was not fighting, and over which it had just signed a treaty recognising its neutrality- in order to disrupt the North Vietnamese Ho Chi Minh trail in southern Laos, and to damage the Pathet Lao in the North. We'll come back to that.
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| Patuxai - the local Arc de Triomphe |
We flew to the capital, Vientiane, for our first stop. The comparison to Phnom Penh is stark: where the Cambodian capital is a buzz of vehicles and activity, here it was slow and sedate. Like Phnom Penh, it is tricky to figure out how to cross the road, as the zebra crossings serve principally as decoration, but then you realise that they drive so languidly here that you just stroll between vehicles - the cars'll slow down and the mopeds will dodge you.
The state museum is idiosyncratically interesting. The ground floor starts off with pre-history and exhibitions of archaeology and geology, including a stone jar from the Plain of Jars in Phonsavan (more on these after we go there).
As you move upstairs, the museum gradually takes on a more revolutionary tone. The French do not come out of it looking good:
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| A literal yoke of oppression |
Halfway though, the translations switch from English to French and, post-revolution, the exhibits focus in glorious communist bureaucratic detail on the workings of the modern Laos government. Apparently it's pretty much as corrupt as its counterpart in Cambodia and dealing with all the bribes and nepotism is a daily feature of the Laotian life. That last part wasn't in the museum, by the way.
We visited the visitor centre and museum of COPE (http://www.copelaos.org/ - give them all your money), an NGO based in Laos which provides medical services, rehabilitation and support for Laotians with physical disabilities, very often caused by UXO (Unexploded ordnance) accidents.
Most of the incidents with UXOs are related to unexploded cluster munitions - what the locals call "bombies". Cluster munitions are normally tennis ball-shaped bombs, filled with ball-bearings, which are dropped in canisters and spread over an area in order to thoroughly ruin any people in that area. Thing is, a good 30% of them didn't detonate and are by their nature rather small and unstable. 50,000 people have been killed or maimed by cluster munitions in Laos - 20,000 after all hostilities were notionally over.
The Laotians have shown great inventiveness in re-purposing these and other bombs and their related parts:
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| A lamp made from a "pineapple"-type cluster munition |
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| Machete sheath made from bomb metal |
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| We all need more cow bell |
Mr Singin, in the picture below, lost a leg to a BLU24 cluster bomb. He then made a prosthetic out of wood and some scavenged metal...from a BLU24 canister casing. He donated his leg to COPE after they fitted him with a polypropylene leg.
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| And that, Alanis Morissette, is fucking ironic. |
Like I said, we'll write more about America's gift-that-keeps-on-giving when we cover Phonsavan. Needless to say though, the US objectively murdered and continues to murder people who're just trying to get though their already pretty difficult day. I don't need to see too many pictures of disemboweled children to colour my opinion on the matter. Good job they succeeded in that lofty goal of stopping communism though, eh? Oh.
On to lighter subject fare: We went for a 'traditional Lao' meal at the Kualao restaurant, where we were presented with a platter of all manner of stuff. The food in Laos is broadly similar to that of Northern Thailand - spicy and somewhat bitter rather than sweet. A couple of notable specifically local dishes are Laab Phet- Minced duck salad with spices and lime juice, and Kang Som Pa - a sour fish soup with chunks of lemongrass bobbing about in it.
They did have steamed wasps on the menu, but I was actually hungry so I wasn't going to drop fifteen quid on bugs for your entertainment. There were Laos musicians playing the whole time, with occasional bouts of traditional dancing. Here's who I took to be the frontman shredding a solo on a weird local pan-pipe looking thing:
We picked up a hire car on our last day in the form of a Ford Ranger- which has the road clearance and grunt that I have been craving for the last three cars or so. It turned out that this would be very necessary for the roads through the Laos mountains.
On the way out of town we made sure to stop at Pha That Luang, the building which is the national symbol of Laos. It's a golden three-layered stupa that dates from the 16th century, despite numerous sackings by whomever was rampaging by.
The Laotian-style reclining Buddha nearby, shows that the local representations have been skipping a few meals compared to the Thai equivalents.
It is not somewhere one would walk in a fragile state of mind.
Kurzfassng auf Deutsch: Wir besuchten Vientiane, der Hauptstadt von Laos. Dinge hier sind ganz langsam aber das ist sehr angenehm im Vergleich zu Kambodscha.
