Lao PDR: Little Commie Visa Factory

Last night my camera battery died at a Mon Festival here in Sangkhlaburi. Just before it died, I had been racing through the photos on the chip, deleting and trying to make space for new ones. I passed photos of pagodas and puppies, Christmas trees and cluster bombs. The photos spanned 2 countries and at least 2,500 kilometers.

It's times like these when I realize it'd just be cruel to jam it all into a single blog post.

So here goes part one!

Tigo, Laos' main cell phone company, must have given these bumper stickers to every single man, woman and child (and dog) in the country.  They are everywhere!

It was once again time for a visa run in mid-December. When I first entered Thailand I had a double-entry visa (hastily obtained from the Chicago Consulate just days before my flight). After wrapping up the trip to Cambodia in October, my return signaled the start of my second entry. Thus, on this trip I needed a whole new visa, double-entry preferably. Legions of expats in Thailand know all the drills of visa running. There are whole companies thriving off of the relative inconvenience (by making it more convenient). Everybody knows that of the surrounding countries, the easiest place to get a double-entry visa is Laos.  "It's a visa factory," whispered a fellow expat conspiratorially as we extended our passport pages in the US Embassy in Bangkok. [Be forewarned that you need plenty of passport pages if you'll be traveling in SE Asia for awhile. Countries here like the full-page sticker visas, plus a half page for the entry and exit stamps. Not that I'm complaining, I'm proud of my newly pudgy passport!]

Though Nezar and I had discussed going somewhere else for the holidays, long story short, we ultimately decided to stay in Thailand. I still had to do my visa run though, so I took a short 3 day trip to Vientiane, capital of Laos, to stay legal. The original plan was to take a bus or train, but last-minute brilliance struck, and I was booked onto a round-trip flight in and out of Udon Thani, a Thai town about 50 km from Thai-Laos border. After flying in, I made the acquaintance of an Australian who has been living between Bangkok and Vientiane for well over a decade. He ushered me through the Laos visa process, and soon we were puttering toward Vientiane in his tuk-tuk, him all the while giving me life advice on how to really be happy. Perhaps the best actionable advice he gave me was about the Thai visa process. He explained that I wouldn't be able to start that day, as it was already too late in the afternoon. He said I would need to begin the next morning at the Thai Embassy as early as possible. I thanked him for his time, advice, and tuk-tuk, and he dropped me off right in front of "the fountain," essentially the center of the city, where I was on my own.

Coming from a city like Bangkok to a city like Vientiane can be a pleasant surprise or rude awakening, depending on your preferences. How can they possibly both carry equal weight as capital cities? Where's the traffic?! Since I now had an afternoon to fritter away, what was I to do?

If you find yourself with a free afternoon in Vientiane, here are the essentials you must know: BeerLao, baguettes, and kaow niaow. 

The kaow niaow is sticky rice, cooked inside of the small woven basket to the left.

In fact, the most important thing you should probably know about Vientiane is food in general.  Being a former French colony, they've got baguettes, coffee, and even wine aplenty, and the food scene seems to be the most happening part of the city. And just as Angkor Wat is the symbol of Cambodian pride, Laotians boast of their beer. You say that's not a cultural monument? Well, depends on your perspective, I suppose. My theory as to why BeerLao is so popular, and so tasty, is that (to me, anyway) it really kind of tastes like a toasty baguette. All the better to compliment the street cart sandwiches made with...toasty baguettes! LBC (Lao Brewing Company) claims that they have 99% of the market in Laos. Though not a big drinker by any means, I was happy to do my small part to maintain their market monopoly while visiting. If curious, here's a New York Times article on BeerLao and its cautious spread to new markets.

La Vache Qui Ri cheese and baguettes--the foundations of a good Laotian street sandwich.

Sticky rice baskets for sale in the market. Sticky rice is a super-glutinous form of rice that is particularly popular in Laos and northern Thailand. It is difficult to pull apart with utensils, so a favorite way of eating it is rolled into a ball and dipped into some sort of spicy curry sauce. It can also be put into patties or onto kabobs and grilled. There are few kabobs on the street for vegetarians, so I love coming across these!

Another bonus of the food scene in Vientiane is the plethora of cafes with wi-fi and good coffee. Since I was doing some remote work during the visa run, I spent a lot of time in cafes, rotting away over a coffee and some online news. There's not all that much to "see" in Vientiane, it's not the most touristy place in SE Asia, let alone in Laos.

The one thing that I saw that will continue to stand out in my mind and my conscience is the COPE Visitor Center. COPE is the Cooperative Orthotic and Prosthetic Enterprise, started in 1997 to assist people with physical disabilities, about 30% of whom are victims of unexploded ordinance, or UXO. Unknown to me until just a few months before my visit, Laos carries the title "The Most Bombed Country on Earth." To be technical, it's actually the most bombed country on earth per capita--others have unfortunately received worse. During the Vietnam War, the Ho Chi Minh Trail passed through Eastern Laos, into Cambodia, and then on into South Vietnam, providing supplies for the war effort. The US, in an attempt to break the supply lines, sent particularly fierce and relentless bombing campaigns up and down eastern Laos for years. Despite multiple presidents claiming they had no presence in Laos (or "Lay-os" as Kennedy called it), the US certainly had enough presence to send refugees fleeing toward Vientiane and to cause psychological and physical damage that persists to this day. Here's a drawing and its description, made by a refugee in Vientiane in 1970:

"In the earlier times of my village we had good fortune and there was nothing to cause us fear or danger in the lives of the Laotian rice farmer. In our region like in other regions the same. But in 1965, the airplanes began to come drop bombs on the people of Xieng Khouang. Until it caused deaths and injuries to the people."

Many of the UXO that remain today are "bombies." Bombies are the small bombs inside of a cluster bomb.  A cluster bomb, from the outside, looks much like any other bomb, the pointy nose, the thick body narrowing into a pronged tail. They differ, however, in that while in flight the outer shell splits open and a rain of hundreds and hundreds of bombies pours out, like a gun shooting buckshot pellets. The aim, of course, is to hit as many things as possible by spreading the impacts over a greater range. This obviously works against any sort of accuracy, and doesn't seem to consider collateral damage a risk.

A (fake!) casing filled with bombies is on display at the entrance to the visitor center.  A cluster bomb of this size would have spread bombies over approximately 3 football fields. Bombies are just the right size to be a fruit or, if painted yellow (as they sometimes were) a tennis ball. Most UXO injuries at COPE come from bombies--and many of the injuries are to children, who think they look like toys.

According to COPE's website, approximately 2 million tons of explosives were dropped on Laos from 1964 to 1973. If we imagine that the average Asian elephant weighs 4 tons (8,000 pounds), then we can envision that 500,000 explosive elephants, or 50,000 fully-loaded 18-wheeler trucks, were dropped from the sky onto people that we ostensibly weren't even fighting. Given that the Laotian population was not much over 2 million at that time, that's nearly a ton of explosives for each citizen. What's more, when this ordinance was dropped, it was known that ideal detonation rates were about 70%. This leaves an estimate of about 30%, or 80 million sub-munitions on the ground in Laos. Any really heavy ones dropped during the rainy season had a good chance of sinking into the ground, explaining why so many are still being discovered today (sometimes near schools or right in the middle of villages).

Groups have been formed to find and safely detonate these sub-munitions, but they can't fight them fast enough to stave off this statistic: there are 300 new deaths every year in Laos from UXO. And for all of those deaths, there are equally sober statistics of handicaps caused by UXO. This is where COPE and other survivor assistance programs kick in. COPE has an enlightening and engaging display of its work in prosthesis. One of the more thought-provoking is a mirror box for phantom pain (the painful sensations that a person may feel after losing a limb).  By putting your hand/foot/etc. into the box, you simulate that the body part is still there and that you can interact with it--it's been proven to help reduce the phantom pain.

Though blessedly still in possession of both of my arms, this is how the mirror box works.

I don't know about you, but learning all of these things about UXO and America's role in generously littering them across Laos was quite shocking to me. Horrifying, in fact.

The Cluster Munition Coalition works to advocate signing and ratifying the Convention on Cluster Munitions. So far, 108 countries have signed and 50 have ratified. Of all the countries in the world, only 15 have ever used cluster bombs in combat--yes, the US among them of course--and there are 35 countries still producing or stockpiling them--yes, including the United States. Given that we're moving toward a targeted drone program in so much of our combat: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, etc., what good are these to us now? Why are we still producing or stockpiling bombs to carpet football fields at a time? Why were we doing it to begin with?

If you are interested to read or learn more, please check out COPE's website, or some of the articles here, here, and here. Though the bombing obviously left deep impressions on the country's psyche, it is not something that is immediately evident in interactions with the people. Just as in Cambodia, people are warm and friendly. They want to practice their English and eat together, or to help you when you look lost (though it's evident sometimes how much they enjoy watching you fumble around like a child with the language or with directions).

Despite US best efforts, or worst efforts I might say, Laos remains firmly in the red. It's a relatively rosy red, however, one that won't make the US pull out domino theory anytime soon. Though the Hmong minority in Laos suffers crackdowns and persecution, dogmatic communism and extremism are tempered by Buddhism and a general fumbling of socialist ideology. It's like the little Commie country that could...except...yeah, there are just a lot of things in the way and it's easier to let them go.

Somehow the hammer and sickle looks so much less sinister when not representing tentative global domination.

If only the unacceptably high number of bombs could be switched out for more baguettes or beer, then Laos might have it made. Though I didn't have much time to explore in this round, I expect to make it back again sometime in the coming year. For now, however, I leave you with a few more photos from Vientiane, and I'll catch you again soon with installment number 2: Chiang Mai and Mae Hong Son!

A wat roof in Vientiane. I love the temple architecture in Thailand and Laos!

A "naga," a mythical snake-dragony-thing of Buddhist mythology. They are frequently found guarding the stairs of the temples. Their mortal enemies are "garudas," big bird-man things and, incidentally, my favorite word in Thai. Garudas are a symbol of the Thai Monarchy.

A dilapidated French villa in the center of town

A monument wholly unbefitting the size of its home city, the Patuxay or "Victory Gate" is a monument to Laos' soldiers. And why exactly did Vientiane have so much concrete on its hands? The American government gave the cement to the country to build a new runway (or perhaps as a small apology for the simultaneous bombardments of its citizens). The government decided to build this instead, prompting the monument's nickname: "The Vertical Runway."

Street stall chic

Catch you again soon!! Ciao for now : )