Vientiane - Its Capital!

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The first good news was that Valerie felt much better. Just as well since we had to fly Laos Airlines to Vientiane, the capital of Laos, its a short hop but not great if you’re under the weather.

Before that we visited a museum specialising in the Customs and Costumes of the various sub-cultures that make up Laos. Valerie was certainly enthralled by the textiles and I dutifully set about photographing as many of the items as possible. This stop also resulted in the purchase of our first Christmas decoration of the trip!

Our flight to Vientiane was really good despite warnings from some travellers with older guide books that Air Laos had a poor safety record! In fact, they’ve modernised their whole fleet recently and worked with Thai airlines to dramatically improve skill levels of pilots and ground crew. (Phew!!)

We had a pleasant surprise when we dropped our bags at the Family Hotel in Vientiane - it is brand new, is well-placed for most of the sights, has a great wireless access, and breakfast is included!

However, we were soon off to a centre called Project Cope which focuses on helping people who have been injured due to landmine-type accidents and latterly birth defects, providing wheelchairs and prosthetics. They run a small museum highlighting the problems Laos faces from UXO (Unexploded Ordinance). Like most people I suspect, we had not realised that despite Laos being officially neutral, the Americans dropped one bomb, on average, every 8 seconds, every day, during the whole of the 9 year Vietnam War. To put that into context, it’s more bombs than were dropped in the whole of WW2 - and has made Laos the most bombed country in the world. There is so much debris still lying around that huge tracts of land can no longer be farmed, leaving the people in poverty. That’s bad enough but, as a significant percentage of the bombs dropped never detonated, many people are still being killed or injured each year even. Being such a poor country means the clean-up is not the government’s highest priority.

Unfortunately high scrap metal prices have driven many to view the debris a natural resource to exploit, resulting in many poor people taking the risk and going out searching for UXO - many of them children. A vicious cycle which if not broken will be around for the rest of this century. What shocked us most of all was the American’s lack of assistance in clearing up the problem. We even saw footage of Nixon 5 years into the Laos bombing campaign clearly stating that there was no American presence in Laos. I suppose he was telling the ‘truth’ as politicians see it - they weren’t ‘in’ Laos, only flying over it, dropping their bombs.

It was a heartrending experience.

On to brighter topics, we had a chance to update the blog and Skype any family and friends that were online, then out for dinner - a top notch green chicken curry and some fabulous grilled chicken and fish served in an open market area beside the Mekong. A bit more time Skyping before retiring for the night. Unfortunately the Skype thing isn’t working too well - mainly because everyone here seems to want to go on-line at the same time, and in the evenings we regularly get thrown off! However, we shall prevail!

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