We spent several relaxing days in Vang Vieng, once infamous for its dangerous ziplines and waterslides, “happy” pizzas (topped with marijuana), hallucinogenic mushroom shakes, and, unsurprisingly, slew of injuries and deaths among backpackers. Tubing down the river has been a popular activity in this central Laotian town for the past few decades, but many of the bars lining the river have shut down, as have the makeshift water parks encouraging drunk westerners to dive into the shallow, rocky river. Tubing is a tamer, relaxing experience now. Vang Vieng has also become increasingly popular with Korean tourists. They are mostly family groups, and favor upscale guesthouses to party hostels. We said anyong (hello in Korean) to many kayakers who passed us as we tubed past massive limestone karsts. In Vientiane, Laos’s capital, we stopped by a local food festival and viewed our last sunset on the Mekong. We had some Beerlao and sticky rice, essentials on every Lao table. The next day, we visited the COPE Visitor Centre, an educational exhibit on the American bombing campaign in Laos during the Vietnam War. From 1964-1973, B-52’s dropped 2 million tons of ordnance in 580,000 bombing missions, the equivalent of one planeload every 8 minutes for 9 years. Of the 260 million cluster bombs, the smaller munitions inside the larger bombs, an estimated 80 million did not explode, and continue to injure and kill Lao people. People are injured searching for scrap metal to sell or fashion into household items – some homemade prosthetics are even made with the metal from the bombs. The museum was heartbreaking, and we were disappointed to learn that the United States has not joined the Convention on Cluster Munitions, a ban on cluster bombs signed by 108 countries. The COPE (Cooperative Orthotic & Prosthetic Enterprise) organization and others are doing the dangerous and critical work of unexploded ordnance (UXO) removal in villages throughout Laos, as well as equipping victims with prosthetics and rehabilitation. With the $90 million that the United States pledged in 2016, we hope that such efforts will grow and succeed. The documentary “Bomb Harvest” provides an excellent overview of UXO removal. Laos is a rapidly growing and changing, and we wonder what it will look like in 20 years. Everywhere we went, people could not have been friendlier or kinder. We are eager to return for another visit. We left Vientiane on Saturday night for Hanoi, and will share our first impressions of Vietnam in the coming days.
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September 2018
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