After a too-short visit to Vientiane, the capital of the Lao Democratic People’s Republic, I have had to say farewell to this surprisingly beautiful country and its friendly people. (I am writing this from Phnom Penh, Cambodia.)
So here are a few final thoughts about Laos. And here are my photos from Vientiane, which you can look at before you read on, or wait til you’re done reading.
Scenery
We took a high-speed train from Luang Prabang to Vientiane. It’s not a truly fast train; it’s top speed is just about 160 kilometers per hour (100 MPH), and the trip took two hours. But it’s incredibly fast compared to driving, as there is no highway, and the roads go through a lot of mountains. It can take between eight and ten hours to do the trip by car.
The trip went by very quickly, in part because the scenery we passed through was just stunning. Here’s just a sample; more are in the photo album.
As I said, Laos is a surprisingly beautiful country.
Home-Hosted Dinner
One of the regular features of OAT tours is a home-hosted dinner. This is a chance to visit a family in their home and dine with them while we build cultural bridges.
I’ve had mixed experiences with some of these on past tours. The host famiies are always warm and welcoming, the dinners are lovely, and the exchange is interesting and often heartwarming. But I also recognize that OAT pays these families, and they do this kind of thing often. As a result, they sometimes run a well-oiled machine, with the agenda for the evening carefully planned. It can come across as mechanical and rehearsed, like they are putting on a show for us.
With our hosts in Vientiane, it leaned a bit more toward the sincere than the artificial. My visit was with four other members of our tour group. The head of the family (I guess you could say that about him) picked us up at our hotel in a beautiful minivan. The house was modest. He told us it had been in his wife’s family for five generations, added onto as necessary. He lives with his wife, her mother, their two children, and some siblings and their children. The family was very nice, though only the father spoke English, and that made it difficult to engage with the other family members. But we had a very enjoyable evening and a delicious meal, capped off by a traditional dance performance by his daughter and his mother-in-law.
Visit with a Buddhist monk
Our one full day in Vientiane started with what was, for me, the highlight of our time in the Lao capital. We visited a Buddhist monk and had a chance to ask him questions about his life as a monk and much more.
This young man is 24 years old. He has been a monk for seven years; for the first three he was a novice.
Each of us had the opportunity to ask a question, and my fellow travelers had some interesting and insightful things they wanted to ask him about. I felt proud of our group and how we represented the USA.
My favorite moment was his answer to the question asked by Janet: what would he like us to learn or take away from our encounter with Buddhism. He answered in Lao, and Phou, our tour guide, translated so beautifully; I wish I had recorded it. Here’s a paraphrase:
Try to empty your mind and put everything down.
Forget the past, because it is over, and we cannot change it.
Don’t worry about the future, because the future has not come yet.
Be here now, in this moment.
Sisaket Museum
Wat Si Saket, the temple where we visited with the monk, is also the site of the Sisaket Museum. Wat Si Saket was built in 1818 on the order of King Anouvong. In 1827, following an unsuccessful rebellion led by Anouvong against the Siamese, who had occupied Vientiane in 1779, the Siamese army sacked Vientiane and pretty much destroyed the city. Wat Si Saket was the only temple to survive, probably because the Siamese armies used it as their headquarters. The French colonial government later restored the temple compound.
Today Wat Si Saket houses a museum with more than 2,000 ceramic and silver Buddha statues salvaged from the other destroyed temples in Vientiane. It is an impressive display. The photo at the top of this post is one example. Here’s another view, and there’s lots more in the photo album.
COPE
I should probably offer some detail about what was happening in this part of the world in the 1960s and 1970s, but for now I’ll just summarize. The Vietnam War spilled over into Laos (and Cambodia). And Laos also had a civil war. There was a king, but the Communists were trying to take control. And they succeeded, taking power in 1975.
The USA, attempting to save the world from Communism, backed the Royal Lao Government. They dropped lots of bombs on Laos. Part of this was to destroy the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which ran through Laos and Cambodia and supplied weapons and manpower to the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese army. They also recruited Lao citizens as soldiers and spies.
The upshot of all this was that lots of Lao people were injured and maimed. And many of the bombs dropped by American B52s didn’t explode. UXO (unexploded ordnance) maims and kills dozens of Lao people every year. It is estimated that over 20,000 Laotians have been killed by UXO since the end of the war.
COPE (the Cooperative Orthotic and Prosthetic Enterprise) is a local non-profit founded in 1996. Their mission is to help people with mobility-related disabilities move on by supporting access to physical rehabilitation services in the Lao PDR. They do not work exclusively with UXO survivors, but these survivors are an important segment of the people they support.
We had a chance to see what they do at the COPE Visitor Center in Vientiane. We watched a documentary about a UXO survivor who was blinded, and we met a man who was recruited by the CIA to fight the Communists and who lost both of his legs in the fight. There are many sad stories, but their work is truly inspiring.
Phou
This is my sixth OAT tour. Each tour has a TEL (Trip Experience Leader) who is responsible for the day-to-day logistics and operations of the tour. Some of the TELs are also guides, but usually we are joined by local guides in each city or each country.
For our five days in Laos we had the enormous good fortune to be joined by Phou, far and away the best guide I’ve ever had on any of these trips. I cannot begin to express how warm, gracious, helpful, and caring Phou was. Describing any of his myriad kindnesses would sound trivial. It was the cumulative effect of his professionalism matched by his genuine sincerity and his willingness to speak openly with us about anything and everything we asked him that made him such a standout guide. And the word “guide” seems so inadequate. He was an angel.
Back on our first day in Luang Prabang we took a boat ride up the Mekong River, ending in a cave with thousands of Buddha statues that have been left by others. I didn’t write about that in my post on Luang Prabang, but you may have seen the photos.
Here is a video I took in that cave. I hope it gives a little idea of the size of Phou’s heart.
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