Why Bother with Laos?

Average American Tourst, Plain of Jars, circa 1968

A casual boning up on things Lao is hardly reassuring – the US Government advises against traveling by air within Laos and sometimes by road, the CDC cautions care because of malaria and dengue fever, and the average life span of the nation's inhabitants is well below 60 years. As icing on the cake, the Lao government remains solidly communist, without any hint of the liberalization one sees in Laos's neighbors, China and Vietnam. Not, in other words, the Bermuda of Southeast Asia. So much for the glass-half-empty approach to Laos.  All of the aforementioned is completely true. One does need to exercise care to avoid a variety of unpleasant mosquito-born diseases, and flying on a Laotian airplane can be, without elaborating, an alarming experience.

Well, so what? In New York City, you'd better be careful crossing the street, and there are other ways to get to Laos besides Lao Aviation...

View of Central Limestone from Nakorn Phanom

Let's look at the other half, the half of the glass that's sloshing with refreshing Lao goodness and magic.  Many of the six million Lao are friendly beyond belief – relaxed in the presence of the unfathomable alien being from the industrialized world, welcoming, and simultaneously curious and accommodating. A visit to Laos is an eye-opening experience in two ways. Most obviously, it provides an opportunity to see how a very different people live their very different lives in a very different kind of world.  A huge portion of Laos is mostly vertical, green mountains rising and falling any way you care to look.  The river valleys and plains provide only the exception that proves the rule.  The best roads aren't that great, and the worst can hardly be identified as roads– this is not an industrialized nation, nor is it urban.

Central Laos Limestone

Vientiane and a handful of other towns, again are exceptions that prove the rule. Most of the population lives either in and amongst nature, in countless tiny villages that hide in the Lao jungle, or else in small towns along the tertiary highways with nature, wild in tooth and claw, no further than the edge of the backyard. After a few days spent in the Lao countryside, without electricity, telephones, email, running water, cars and cafés, one simultaneously begins to appreciate, rather than simply take for granted, the many things that make modern life in the first world as pleasant as it is, while at the same time bringing into question the need for, or wisdom of, pursuing a life of hectic rushing, ruled by the clock, the soccer practice schedule, the need for a new car and its payments, and the rest of the package most of us have bought. 

Don't get me wrong, I'm writing this on a laptop computer in an industrialized city with a population four times that of the entire nation of Laos. I'm not about to give up my car (though my wife wishes I would, and buy a minivan in its place) or my computer, or most of the rest of it. 

Lanten Girl

But after visiting with and living among the Lao for some time, I find myself rushing less. I don't answer the phone during dinner. I am less anxious about getting to places in a hurry. 

And I am grateful to be living my life. It's not that visiting Laos is to see ‘People Who Mostly Do Without', though it's true on the surface, but more, it is a glimpse of a ‘People Who Make Do With Different Things'. It is to visit a place where grown middle-aged men can stop what they are doing and give up a big part of their day to take a group of strangers, who can't even speak their language, to see some hidden caves and share with them a meal of rice and chicken, cooked over an open fire, under a sky mostly obscured by dense jungle foliage.

Hmong Hilltribe Girls

A Frenchman once said, having tromped over a considerable amount of Southeast Asia:  

The Vietnamese Grow Rice
The Cambodians Watch Rice Grow
The Lao Listen to Rice Growing

Receiving Alms at Dawn

To be able to spend time with people who live their lives at a pace so leisurely that it nearly defies description, and to get even a faint idea of how these people live – how they spend their time, and how they manage to make do perfectly well with such a staggering paucity of capital resources – is a gift given to anyone who takes the time and makes the effort to visit Laos, and it is a gift which will endure and continually enrich the life of the bold traveler who takes the road less traveled to this very fair land.