Travels in Laos

Laos

December, 2010

Laos is a great place to travel, but it is also one of the twenty poorest nations in the world.  While we were in Luang Prabang, we bought a bunch of children’s books from an NGO that distributes books to children in rural villages called Big Brother Mouse.  The Lao children who are lucky enough to learn to read in school do so with a chalkboard and few of them have ever flipped through a book before, let alone owned one.  According to the Big Brother Mouse, many of the children don’t know how to turn the pages of their new book and are amazed to learn they can do it over and over.  We bought several of the duel English/Laos language books and have given them out to children over the last several weeks.   The children all giggle and squirm when they are presented with the new book, and reading to them, even in English, always attracts a crowd.  It has been one of the most satisfying parts of our visit here.

Tom reading to eager Hmong children

Luang Prabang is an amazing colonial town right on the Mekong River.  It is ridicuously photogenic, as i will try to demonstrate here:

Buddhist Wat

Luang Prabang at night

During our last day in Laos, Tom and I took a tour of the caves along the Vietnam border that the Lao people hid in during the bombing raids.  Laos is the most heavily bombed country in history.  For nine years from 1964 to 1973, the United States dropped a B-52 load of bombs on Laos on average every 8 minutes, totaling 260 million bombs.  That works out to 542 pounds of bombs for every man, woman, and child in the country at the time.  The United States dropped more bombs on Laos than all of the bombs dropped in Europe in World War II.

Lao Countryside

It’s estimated that about a third of the 260 million bombs did not explode and are still out in the countryside.  These bombs, called unexploded ordinance or UXO, still blow the legs off farmers or kill children playing in the forest four decades after the war has ended.  In fact, an average of one person a day is killed in Laos from UXO, most of whom are children.

The results of the war are still visible among the older generation; we witnessed an old man with missing legs hobbling through a village and the guy driving a boat was missing an arm.  Our guide for the cave tour witnessed his parents and grandparents killed by bombs and he showed us scars on his legs from shrapnel.  Pieces of bombs are using in building homes and furniture as scrap metal.  It is heartbreaking to lean about these things, but important nonetheless.

Just like many other counties that have seen immense hardship, Laos has a people that are resilient and warm-hearted.  The country is beautiful, safe and laid-back.  A perfect gap year destination if you ask me!

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