All views are my own and based on a 3 week trip to Laos, others may have very different experiences
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Which do you imagine is the most bombed country on earth? Gaza? Ukraine? Vietnam? Germany in WW2? There are plenty of options to chose from in exploring humanity’s bellicose approach to managing conflict, but it turns out that this distinction goes to Laos. Measured across the entirety of the Vietnam war a bomb landed on Laos every 8 minutes. Apparently. Quite how you measure this I’m not sure, I doubt they used a stop watch, but it is their claim and who am I to doubt it?
What you can be sure of however is that there is plenty of evidence of bombing, and a kind of fatalistic grim humour expressed by the people about it. I guess after time a sense of normality kicks in perhaps too well because people are still being blown up regularly in Laos when folks are working in the country side. Wherever we went in areas close to the Vietnam border there were innovative uses of deactivated bomb casings, doorstops, Welcome signs interestingly welcoming American tourists, a fish bowl, notice boards to chalk on, we saw all sorts. Apparently for a country that has not yet entirely depleted its mineral stocks (don’t hold your breath in hope, China is just around the corner) the amount of bombs you can find in the fields has made for a thriving scrap metal market, we even saw some being harvested to make the body work of the weird tractor/trucks that they have.
Given the end result the futility of the bombing is pretty evident. They were bombing the Ho Chi Minh trail that went through the border of Laos to resupply the Communist forces in Vietnam. Lao people are a quick learn and the officials of the resurgent Community Party and the army, the Pathet Laos, took to the many caves there are in that area. One we went to was quite extraordinary, they didn’t shelter there, they lived there, it was a kind of troglodyte like village. There were cooking areas, supply areas, even a printing press all deep into the caves, which were huge and from openings they could watch the bombs landing around them and see any forces coming to get them. Laos got its independence in 1975. Communism won, well kind of. Laos is nominally communist now but other than official signs not so as you would notice. But then again what is communism supposed to look like? Vietnam looks pretty much like Laos, but Vietnam is also communist yet seems pretty close in outlook to Thailand which is resolutely not communist.
“We are a free market Communist Country” I was told, sadly I did not have the Laos for “A contradiction in terms?” But it makes perfect sense if you are Lao. You just don’t mention capitalism, that would be a stretch too far.
Evidence of the war can be seen in subtle and in some cases disturbing and touching ways. Look at the man with his grandson. Apart from his cataracts (and that’s another story about the health system for later) he has a very crude artificial leg. Doesn’t mind being asked about it..
“got blown off in the Vietnam war.”
Apparently not a fighter he was young at the time and just biding his time in a village field. He is very matter of fact, it happened, life went on, he has grandchildren, life has to go on.
The ethnic spread in Laos is quite interesting. 53% roughly are native Lao, 3.4% are Phu Thai and the rest are made up of different ethnic groups; Phu 3.4%, Makong 2.2%, Katang 2.2%, Lue 2.0%, Ahka 1.8%, Hmong 9.3%, Khmu 11%. Other than Lao, it was the last three groups that we visited and saw more of. The Hmong supported and worked with the Americans during the Vietnam war.
“But of course we are all communists now.” Said our guide
“So that makes you equal?” I asked. When he stopped laughing he put me right, there is no way there will be a Hmong President” he said “there are long memories.”
Like many places we travelled, our capacity to look at and differentiate between the different groups was restricted to clothing and in some cases the adornment of their houses. The Akha women for instance have very unique head dresses, the Hmong and Akha are animist rather than Buddhist so they have some interesting adornment to their houses that reflect animist beliefs. I quickly cottoned on to the sensitivities of the Akha, the older members of their community believe that a camera has the capacity to steal and capture their soul, so you ask very carefully before you take a picture.
Our Hmong guide pointed out that some places would have both a Buddhist and an Animist shrine to invoke the support of their ancestors or blessing the houses and keeping evil spirts away. Our guide (who was a bit of character) reasoned that, regrettably, not being God himself, it made sense to have all your options covered, so he knew a bit of Buddhist ritual and was happy to say the words in the Temple …just in case.
Our first and second guides were both Buddhist. The first so far as we were aware exclusively so, he spent 10 years as a monk but found girls and also wanted to teach which he went on to do when he left the monastery. He learned (pretty good) English, loved the history of his country and that mix made him seek out a career as a Guide. Our second guide, a woman was certainly Buddhist but we went with her to experience some blessings from a shaman.
“Is this not an animist ceremony?”
“ Yes, well its traditional too?”
Ok. Do I get it? No not really but I can run with it. When in Laos do as the Laotians do, and can you really have enough blessings? Pick and mix spirituality may have a future.
Our second guide was probably the best, it is she who worked out we are really into cultures and took us along to the massive Buddhist event. She wasn’t the only woman guide, but they were very rare in the Southern part of the country where it is more rural and more traditional. I asked her if it was easy being a woman guide.
“No for two reasons really. First when we travel with clients like you we have a driver and the driver is always a man. Now we get a per diem to stay in a guest house and usually the guide and the driver are both men and they share a room and save their per diems so that’s an issue. But many people think we should stay at home, and it is hard, I didn’t start this until my kids were teenagers, they tried to pay me less than the men and sometimes the best jobs get given to the men. I earn more than my husband but he is the one they expect to call the shots” (A universal story?) Her next group trip was leading 60 American teenage students, we wished her very good luck with that one!
Drugs and sex tourism is less obvious than it is Thailand but still present. Sometimes my photography gets me into trouble, I was walking with my wife one evening and took a photo of a street stall and got temporarily separated from her, a shady man came up to me and whispered from behind his hand:-
“Girls? Boys? Opium? Mr?”
I saw Alison just ahead and said very loudly
“This fella is offering me Opium and Sex what do you fancy tonight?”
He slunk away quickly back into the shadows. The question of course is what was he? A “genuine” crook or the police? The latter are very keen to stamp down on sex tourism, or is that to profit from looking the other way? At the entrance to the night market in Luang Prabang I heard an American man lecturing a group of young Americans
“In the market you will be offered money exchange, sex and drugs, your choice if you accept them my choice to send you home.” Point taken.
As I mentioned before Laos is a communist state, it is also incredibly corrupt, (there goes my next visa but you have to say it as it is.) For example it seemed to be not the slightest bit shocking to someone I spoke with to suggest that sometimes teachers don’t get paid.
“Well you get paid eventually, but they sort of expect you to work for the first three or four years for free then maybe if you work hard and are loyal and don’t make a fuss you will start to get a percentage of your salary. You see the money for education is decided and the national politicians take their dues and the party take theirs, then it comes to the region and they take their cut and so does the regional hierarchy then it comes to the town and the mayor and the officials take theirs so by the time it comes to the headmaster and he takes his due, then, well there isn’t enough money left really, not enough for all the teachers. The real career path is to get into the Party and get up the ladder so you can get at the money.”
He felt that was a natural course of events. Someone else bought a piece of land very cheaply speculating that it would rise in value, held it until the land-prices went up and an official took the land off of him for nothing, just transferred the deeds to himself.
“Can you take him to court?”
He laughed heartily
“Of course, theoretically, theoretically we have laws and are a law abiding country, but in practice I’d disappear and my kids would grown up calling someone else Daddy. People disappear you see…”
Now you could say this corruption is insidious and makes the country repressive but the same man said this ….
“It’s better than the alternative, what we had before communism and look call them what you want, we haven’t had a war since then, we have peace, ok you have to have second jobs some land to grow things to survive, but we make it happen.”
What might seem simply wrong to us, unjust, corrupt is just not that simple, because we are from where we are and they are from Laos, we can comment, but we cannot judge.
He also said “We are communist, but free market and we believe in religions, ironies yes?”
We actually saw that in practice, religious events where the front row was made up of identically grey suited fixed smiling party officials and one of the resorts we went to was owned by a member of the Polit Bureau! (The food was rubbish, but we felt it unwise to complain in the jungle there are plenty of places to disappear)
That brings me to the elephant sat just outside of the room – China.
With a population of 7.7 million Laos is dwarfed economically militarily and politically by China. China is in every aspect of the day to day running of the country and in ways that you might not expect. So for instance there is an excellent arterial railway that goes up the country into China. The “posh” bit are the really rather lovely and fast passenger trains (think Eurostar rather than something UK, I sense the Chinese want to “out bullet train” the Japanese). The Chinese built the railway, they provided the trains they built the spacious and rather lovely train stations, they provided the booking technology, they service and maintain the trains. I seem to remember being told that the Laos Government and the Chinese have something like a 40-60 split on the takings? But that is just rather badly remembered fact gleaned from someone who possibly was making it up. Chinese trains, railways, and Chinese security. Full metal detector tests and passport checks on internal as well as external to China rail journeys, strict bag searches, CCTV everywhere and grim unsmiling officials – all Chinese, not Lao. Great journey not so great customer relations. The message was clear you may be customers but travelling here is a privilege.
In a sense however this is all smoke and mirrors. What’s the railway really there for? In a word -Freight. You see massive train snakes going in one direction full and coming back the other way virtually empty or with cheap Chinese items often sold in the market.
Thousands of lorries feed the rail stations where they offload materials to be hauled by the freight trains back to China, they are carrying tonnes and tonnes of wood, minerals, and huge amounts of food stuffs, mainly vegetables for the markets of China and for processing out of China as a significant profit. I asked what take Laos got from that…token I think was the general gist.
This disparity of relationship you also see in the fields. China is buying huge swathes of Laos, planting it, bringing in their own supervisors to train Lao labourers (mainly, some places are purely Chinese too).
We were introduced to the concept of “Green Gold” the vast poly tunnels you will see in the photos are Chinese owned the farms absolutely colossal the message we had given to us was “they are just getting started.”
We were also introduced to what more than one person described as “revenue free tourism”. Chinese tourists on short breaks coming on Chinese Airlines, being guided by Chinese Guides, staying in Chinese owned hotels, eating there exclusively and being taken to shop in Chinese owned gift shops. The money barely touches Lao fingers. This is resented because while Chinese tourism is still in its infancy (especially at the middle income and thus mass tourism level) this is their largest potential market and should be supporting the Laos economy. But for that to work the revenue needs to stick.
China could walk into Laos at a moment’s notice. But it doesn’t because it doesn’t need to, it has all the; influence, access to minerals and agricultural projects that it needs while playing the part of a good neighbour. Given the exceptionally close links between their respective political hierarchies who would be mad enough to complain?
So that is the negative side, the positive one? Well nearly everything is “made in China” and cheap. What development there is, what industrialisation exists very much relies upon Chinese technology and the existence of a Chinese market. The trick is keeping this in Lao hands. It was interesting to see that at the borders with Cambodia and Vietnam there was a steady stream of trucks going there too, perhaps there is a deliberate intent to diversify markets? Or are entrepreneurs savvy wherever they are?
Perhaps one of the most poignant side trips we took was to see the Hill tribes. Beautiful countryside lovely and welcoming people, but the veneer of self sufficiency was very thin. Anything will grow there so there should be self sufficiency but the options to trade and to profit must be a challenge given the landscape distances and topography.
The two tribes we met with most were the Hmong and the Akha. In one village they had summer and winter houses and it made perfect sense. Brick built for winter and fields materials for the summer, usually next to one another. We met with a village chief who is paid something like $25 a month to bring forward concerns to the regional government, to step in when there are disputes and generally to keep things ticking over. There was some enterprise, a guy who repaired motor bikes for instance and there was also some connection with the cities. I wouldn’t exactly call it commuting because it wasn’t a daily thing but people did come and go. Generally we were told the village would have a truck and if people wanted to go to a market or the city or to a wedding or funeral they would pile into the truck and it would be a communal event.
But the poverty was amongst the most stark I have seen. Large extended families living in small almost temporary accommodation that made wattle and daub look like high technology, if it rained the water would come in. People were kind, they invited us in. Stiflingly hot and often there would be some meat being smoked in the centre of the room adding an unpleasant miasma, flies were everywhere, beds a rag on a wooden platform clearly shared by siblings, sometimes odd pieces of wooden furniture to store things. Above all heat and smoke. In one a single light bulb above a rickety table with some printed paper and a broken biro….
“Homework” our guide said. A distinct absence of Play stations (other recreational tools for privileged Western youth are also available).
Kitchen areas are part of the living space with greasy tools scattered around. Space was shared with livestock, pigs were chased out but chickens allowed to wander. There was no evidence of food shortage however, anything grows up there.
I saw one chicken wobble around the room like something crazy then collapse. Could have been Newcastle disease, could have been bird flu, either way we didn’t hang about to find out. An elderly man who looked close to death looked sadly through an opening from his bed, the door was open they were trying to keep him cool. A grandchild or great grandchild sat by the door.
Kids playing in the dust outside, using the most basic of toys, I saw one game that seemed to consist of a rock and two lads throwing their shoes at it, they were having fun! Many dogs roll in the dust, puppies play, bizarrely a cockerel, very resplendent in his colours is tied by the leg to the window sill.
The schools up there are very basic. Teachers live in, they come up from towns and cities on a Sunday night and stay until Friday night, sometimes they do two weeks up here before going home to their town or city. We have already covered pay, to stay in communal dormitories in order to teach in the hope of being paid takes real dedication. There is no running water, toilets are long drop. We saw kids coming back after the lunch break carrying water. That’s for the teachers as they have no other way of washing or cooking. Look closely at the materials and the water containers. Supplied mainly by Aid agencies, some from America (and that will have stopped now) some from Canada, some from EU Countries or Aus Aid, and where there is any, the electrical systems supplied by Chinese Aid.
But water is a key concern. Which is ludicrous because in the season it rains very heavily in Laos. But it wasn’t the rainy season. In the photos you will see kids waiting around a stack of water containers of all types sizes and states of cleanliness.
This was coming to the end of the dry season but the rains wouldn’t come for another couple of months, the heat would build and build and it would become more and more humid before the rain storms. Yes there are water storage containers up the hill but they are finite and many are empty. In one village there were four water taps, three were dry and the other had a dribble of water, this is where the kids were, patiently waiting their turn to catch the dribble and take it back to their families. But there is water, you can see it. Hundreds of feet down, possibly thousands in the valley there is a stream. There is no road down to it, people, usually women or children have to walk down and walk up heavily laden. Water could be pumped up from it but where do you find the machinery to do it? Who can afford the fuel to feed the pump?
In a Communist country, not all are equal.
Shared amongst 3 different villages with different ethnicities there is a clinic. Apparently child vaccination is available and does happen. They help with maternity issues but you have to pay for medicines. I spoke with someone and asked about the availability of medicines.
“Oh you can get them but from Thailand, they are very expensive. We can’t afford them. The clinics provide advice they dole out the equivalent of a couple of aspirin they do vaccinate kids, but beyond that people have to access the towns that means getting there then paying the Doctors and buying the medicines. It is very expensive.”
Our guide there said
“We use Shamans, and you know there are people who know a lot about herbal medicines and medicines that come from the forests, some are very effective. Many prefer to go to a shaman or a healer rather than than to waste money on medicine. It might work it might not but it gives people hope. Especially with their kids, if they are ill you want to do what you can don’t you?” Indeed. Parental love is universal.
The most heart wrenching health issue we saw was a woman who came up to us asking for help. Her eyesight wasn’t good and she had a grossly gangrenous foot, blackened and oozing pus, she couldn’t walk on it. Through the guide we asked if she knew what was wrong with her, (I had an idea but she confirmed it) Type 1 Diabetes. The clinic referred her, the Hospital diagnosed her, then sent her home. There is no budget for insulin in the Laos health service. She is poor she can’t buy it. She knew what we thought, her foot would probably need to be amputated if she is to have a chance of surviving, her foot certainly looked beyond treatment. Then she would need insulin. Her extended family would need to get together to afford the amputation but there is no prospect that they could afford the insulin. She is 29, otherwise healthy and has two children.
What are you supposed to feel? She wasn’t begging, she just wanted some form of relief from her suffering, a bit of hope she was showing a dignity we did not feel for ourselves. The thought that somehow not being from there we would know of some kind of intervention that was not open to her was evident and desperate. “My children..” Yes we know exactly what you mean. We felt utterly helpless just faced with the bland reality of the situation was crushing. Giving money is pointless because all it does is to temporarily ease discomfort, she’ll still have diabetes and she’ll still be unable to afford insulin.
The only advice we could give her, which was crass frankly was to find an aid agency that might help her. It was gutting. Our guide said to her “see the Shaman” Of course she had and he didn’t to have anything to help.
Back home we complain about our health service, travel can be an eyeopener but it doesn’t salve your conscience. And it shouldn’t.
Looking back
We look back on our trip to Laos with a lot of fondness. We don’t usually think about returning to places we have been to, but Laos feels a bit different. It is a very cheap country to travel within which is why there are so many backpackers and there are areas where you can travel and not find any other tourists, these days such places are increasingly rare.
To say Laos is imperfect would be an understatement, there are many many challenges. But the people are a delight, the landscapes are breath-taking the culture remarkable . It is a place to be a traveller, not just a tourist because there are few places where engaging with local people will be so rewarding.