Blogs from Laos, Asia

On the 7th of October, just prior to my solo return to Laos, we witnessed Hamas slaughter and kidnap, crazily initiating what was sure to be, and was/is a terrible retribution. As heinous as the Hamas action was the Israeli response has justly seen world-wide condemnation, including many Jewish voices, who simply cannot condone the flippant disregard for the thousands of collateral innocent lives lost and the hundreds of thousands displaced, their livelihoods and homes destroyed, with starvation a very real threat. It is difficult not to view the Israeli offensive as a genocide of the Palestinian people and even harder not to consider the Palestinian scattering an ethnic cleansing. There again, the latter is hardly novel as what little was left of Palestine after the creation of Israel in 1947 (and the subsequent land-grabs of ... read more

Heute sind wir mit dem chinesischen Zug von Luang Prabang nach Vang Vieng gefahren. Das ist Teil der neuen Bahnlinie von Kunming nach Vientiane, wofür 6 Stunden benötigt werden. Das Gleis ist einspurig und erlaubt Geschwindigkeiten bis 160 km/h. Die Strecke ist Teil des Seidenstraßenprojektes. Am Ziel angekommen besichtigten wir die Elefantenhöhle und die Tham Chang Höhle. Außerdem spazierten wir durch das Stadtzentrum und überquerten den Nom Sang Fluss.... read more

Gestern checkten wir in Hanoi aus und fuhren zum Flughafen. Dort bestiegen wir das Flugzeug nach Luang Prabang. In dieser laotischen Stadt angekommen, besichtigten wir den berühmten Wat Xieng Thong Tempel. Dieser ist mit der für das Land typischen Architektur erbaut worden. Abends aßen wir dann noch in einem Restaurant.... read more

It's landlocked, it's Asian, it's a 'land of smiles', it's a non stress-inducing nation, it's something of a well-kept secret among travel destinations.....it's Laos! The first visit to Laos back in 2012 intrigued me, as here is a nation where a gloriously unhurried pace of living really tries its utmost to make sure that you are also part of that mindset no matter how busy you think your travel schedule might be! The first port of call this time around happened to be the only familiar part of the nation, the capital city Vientiane, which has a few cultural features but, for the most part, is also part of the entire nation's laidback charm. The French colonial era might have some relation to Patuxai, one of the city's more prominent landmarks, an elaborate-looking arch, possibly best ... read more

In our last missive I decried the residual resistance to vaccine uptake in parts of the wealthy west, as well as its hesitant roll-out to their juveniles. Even more pertinently we worried about the limited availability and constrained distribution of vaccines within developing countries. Such outcomes were likely to see new, potentially more threatening, variants emerge. And sadly so it proved. Most of Africa trails far behind the rest of the world in terms of vaccination rates, whilst several countries there still have outrageously high numbers of individuals infected with (non-retrovirally controlled) HIV whose defining immunocompromising nature enables other co-infecting viruses to multiply to horrendous densities, thereby, mathematically, increasing the probability of new mutations arising. Thus, from somewhere in the soup, we saw the emergence of mega-mutated Omicron that, whilst it... read more