If Kampot, Cambodia was the surprise hit town of
my travels, then Laos was certainly the surprise hit country of my
travels. When I was traveling around
China five years ago, I had heard a fellow traveler laud Vang Vieng, Laos as
the Holy Grail of SE Asia Party Capitals (more on that later), I knew that I
was eventually somehow going to make my way to Laos.
Five years later, it became a reality.
Visualize and actualize! That should be my motto, as it has become a
recurring theme of my life for the past five or so years.
Anyway, after traveling through
Cambodia on my own, and having only a couple of “hostel buddies” in the last
couple weeks, I was more than ready to meet my travel buddy for the next few
weeks, the wonderful and wild Mary! I
taught English with Mary in Daejeon for two years. We arrived in Korea at the same time and had
the same orientation. Mary and I had
been acquaintances for a while, but developed more of a friendship during our
second year in Korea.
After collecting my luggage in the
spookily-close-to-being empty airport I found one lonely tuk tuk driver just
outside the terminal’s parking lot. At every other airport I’ve been to, a
flank of taxi drivers is available to take me anywhere I please (within reason,
of course). It wasn’t as though I had taken a red eye flight and arrived in the
middle of the night. No, this was 7 p.m.
If it had not been for that lone
tuk tuk driver I don’t know what I would have done!
Mary was waiting in the foyer of
the hostel when I arrived, and we were, of course, super excited to see each
other. We went out to dinner and had some beers to commence our 3 or so weeks
of travel together.
The next day we rented bicycles to
take in Vientiane. The central part of Vientiane has retained some of the
aspects of its French colonial period. This includes, most visibly, the
architecture. Colorful French apartments and mansions line the streets. There
are also some cafes and restaurants that style themselves (atmospherically and
gastronomically!) after the traditionally haughty French equivalents.
Among the highlights of our bike
riding was Vientiane’s very own Arc de Triomphe, Patuxai. Ironically, the
Patuxai was built to memorialize the Laotians who fought for independence from
the French. We climbed up to the top to get a panoramic view of the city.
Besides that, we biked around a
temple complex. Because Mary was wearing shorts, she had to wear a sort of
improvised dress: I can’t for the life of me remember what they are called, but
they are essentially very large, rectangular pieces of patterned cloth. Many of
the temples in SE Asia provide them; sometimes they are of a lighter material,
sometimes a heavier material. Unfortunately, they were made of wool at this
particular temple, so Mary felt quite uncomfortable with it around her lower
body in 80-degree weather.
By far the best part of our time
in Vientiane was visiting the COPE (Cooperative Orthotic & Prosthetic
Enterprise) Center.
Before I explain what the COPE
Center actually does, it might help to provide a little background information.
The following is an excerpt from the Lao Rehabilitation Foundation:
From 1964 to 1973 more than 580,000 bombing missions were
launched over Laos by the U.S. Air Force, in a war that most of the Western
world didn’t know about. As a result, more than two million tons of ordnance
fell on Laos. The most widely used types of bombs were anti-personnel cluster
bombs filled with 670 bomblets that were intended to explode on or shortly
after impact. These bomblets, about the size of a tennis ball, are known as
“bombies” in Laos. Each bombie contains around 250 steel pellets, which were
meant to fire in a 2 to 4-meter radius when detonated, thus crippling but not
killing enemy soldiers. The theory was that an injured soldier cost the enemy
more than a dead one.
The biggest issue is not
only are people accidentally stepping on some of these unexploded bombs and
thereby getting severely injured or dying as a result, but some people
(including children) actually seek out these unexploded bombs and “bombies”
because they are worth quite a bit in scrap metal.
The primary mission
of COPE is to provide prosthetic limbs, as well as medical supplies like braces
and slints, to victims of these latent bombs. The other main thing is that they
have direct involvement with teams made up of primarily Laotians being trained
by bomb experts from Australia and elsewhere to find these bombs and disarm
them.
If you feel inclined
to donate to their cause, go here to do so!
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