Vientiane, Laos

Vientiane is not a very pretty city. There's really nothing charming or picturesque about it except for several gignatic and remarkedly ornate temples. An arch modeled after the Arc de Triumph was never fully completed and a sign on the wall there says "From a closer distance it appears even less impressive, like a monster of concrete."

There is an enormous night market along the Mekong waterfront, but unlike the night market in Luang Prabang which is all crafts, this is all retail and knock off luggage and handbags. It is very cool however, that just across the river, like looking across at Hulll from Ottawa, is Thailand. That close..

For some reason, the hotel upgraded us to a suite. It could be an apartment.  French provincial furniture, hard food floors, marble bathroom....so big there's an echo! We feel like royalty. 

Living room in the palatial suite. 

Living room and bathroom.

Today we went to the COPE centre, an organization that makes prosthetics for land mine victims.  We learned some very sobering things. Laos was never officially in the Vietnam War but the munitIons route used by the north Vietnamese (Ho Chi Minh Trail) ran through here and the US bombed the shit out of it - 260 million cluster bombs dropped over Laos between 1964 and 1973. 80 million of them failed to explode and continue to threaten farmers and their families who have no idea where they might be. 

Curiously, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird visited the centre just a few hours before us. I sure hope Canada will be contributing to the work of this group and to the organizations that are going into the countryside to find and detonate the land mines.

The red areas show where bombs were dropped and still remain.