A Short Visit to the Lao People's Democratic Republic, November, 1998 After leaving Hanoi, our Vietnam Airlines jet flew over miles of sparsely inhabited dense green Laotian mountains. Only 4.7 million people live in the Lao People's Democratic Republic, in an area similar in size to Great Britain (which has 55 million inhabitants). Laos is strikingly less populated than its adjacent neighbors: Thailand has a population of 61 million; Vietnam, 78 million; and China, 1 billion 200 million. After viewing this expanse of green wilderness, our arrival in Vientiane was a shock. The largest city (133,000) and the Capitol of Laos, Vientiane is an untidy mix of urban and rural, spread over a vast flat area near the Mekong River. The famous Mekong is the twelfth longest river in the world and the main artery of travel within Laos. Guidebooks described visitors sipping beer in a downtown riverbank cafe, watching river boats and gazing across to Thailand on the opposite side. When we arrived, the riverbank was being torn down or built up, or maybe both, by huge bulldozers and trucks. This movement of heavy equipment spewed a constant supply of red dust into the air, and the dust settled everywhere in the city. Every morning, people in the small, hectic downtown section swept piles of fine red dust from sidewalks into the streets, where a constant stream of motorcycles, tuk-tuks (motorcycle taxis), truck-taxis, and regular cars and trucks once again threw it back on the sidewalks. Whenever we hired a tuk-tuk, the driver first wiped a thick film of red dust off the benches in back with a rag. What a disappointment, to land in a major construction zone! In addition to work on the riverbank, major roads were being rebuilt, new buildings going up and old buildings being fixed. Dirt, rocks, bricks and other building materials blocked every sidewalk. The reason for all this construction is to improve infrastructure and services in order to attract more tourists and their foreign currencies. The government has declared 1999 "The Year of The Tourist." Finishing all those projects by 1999 seemed very unlikely. Walking in Vientiane was hazardous with all those piles in the way, but even more dangerous were large open drains along and under each sidewalk. Originally covered with concrete slabs, some of these holes were only partially covered with broken boards, a few shreds of re-bar or chunks of broken concrete. Many four foot sections gaped wide open. The unwary walker could easily fall into a deep pit filled with a black oily sludge. Though the narrow streets were one-way downtown, they were still difficult to cross because of few traffic lights and heavy, steady traffic. Oh, and did I mention it was hot? Our plan was to stay four days. Luckily, we hadn't signed a contract to work here two years! I asked the woman from Pennsylvania who opened the first and only internet business in Laos two months ago, "Where do you go for an outing around here, where is there a nice or interesting place?" "Nowhere," she said. "If I get time off, I fly to Bangkok" Well, they did have an airport to get out. We found a few other pluses, as well. Such as: the city filters and chlorinates the water, so foreigners can eat salads, something we hadn't risked in any other third world country. In contrast to the "hard sell" of street merchants in other countries, smiling salespeople in Vientiane never tried to convince us to buy anything. People were extremely and genuinely friendly. We spent many enjoyable hours talking with anyone who knew something about Laos and could speak a little English or French (actually, Norm kept talking to locals even if they couldn't speak English or French, with dubious results). We practiced the only Lao words we seemed capable of learning ("hello" is "sabaidee," with a drawn-out "e" sound at the end), "thank you" is "kop jai," "thank you very much" is "kop jai lai lai"). Lao script looks to my untrained eye like Thai script, in other words, not decipherable in the slightest. The Lao language is similar enough to Thai that they can understand one another. On a long drive into the countryside, we found the surrounding area completely flat and uninteresting. Because the rice had just been harvested, the fields were brown stubble, not a luscious green. The famous Friendship Bridge over the Mekong to Thailand, the only bridge on the entire length of that huge river, looked just like any nice bridge. Buddha Park, a major tourist destination, contained ugly concrete statues made just forty years ago by a weird guy attempting to unite Buddhism and Hinduism. The internet woman recommended visiting the national museum. The entrance fee was 500 Laotian Kip, or 19 Canadian cents each. It was amateurish and humble, but contained some good displays, with English explanations. Laotian history involves many years of trying to get powerful foreigners out of the country and becoming independent. It was fascinating to see this history from their perspective. A large section focused on the French colonialists (as you will remember, the French occupied Laos for a very long time, as part of Indochina), and then a smaller section on U.S. imperialism (though Laos was officially neutral according to the Geneva Convention, the U.S. secretly dropped more bombs on it during the Vietnam War than on all of Europe in WWII.). If only western governments could realize now that sending tourists works better. If one did have to live in Vientiane, there could be interesting contacts and social interactions within the large resident foreign community. Embassy diplomats are stationed here, representatives of many different agencies (Laos is heavily dependent on foreign aid), and some academics. We talked with an official from the IMF, a Red Cross guy, and a couple from Sweden--an agronomist and a forester--who are doing a three year research project on ethnic hill tribes. There are also a surprising number of American businesspeople. A New York man owns "Uncle Fred's Cafe," catering to travelers longing for hamburgers and ice cream cones; he told us he also has a factory making polo shirts. We visited the studios of an American weaver who employs 45 Laotians. She blends traditional designs with her own to make marvelous silk fabrics for the high end foreign market. I know something about weaving, and this was really excellent. People getting Laotian currency at the bank are handed a brand new gray plastic bag to carry it away. This doesn't mean everyone is getting a lot of money, only that the value of the currency is low and no large denominations are printed. The largest bill available is 5,000 Kip (equivalent to $1.90 CN or $1.25 US).The most common bills are 1,000 Kip notes (.38 cents CN or .25 cents US). To organize these 1,000 Kip notes, everyone keeps them in little bundles of ten: they count out nine and then fold the tenth one over those. I could fit four of those little bundles in my wallet, so the total handy to spend was about $10. The rest we carried in plastic bags in our packs. We carried and used three currencies in Laos. All foreigners (no exceptions) must pay in US dollars for airline tickets and for fees to enter and leave the country. Thai Baht can be used to pay for anything else, from a taxi or boat ride to restaurant meals and hotel bills. Every Laotian is happy to receive Baht or U.S. dollars, both more stable currencies than Kip. Happily, we were soon flying out of Vientiane on our way to Luang Prabang, once again looking down on all those dense green mountains. One narrow, winding road and an occasional river threaded through this expanse of green. Though eighty-five percent of the population lives in rural areas, we saw only a few areas of cultivation and a few scattered villages. We were on a plane instead of riding a bus because travel books and internet information claimed "bandits" plagued the road from Vientiane to Luang Prabang and that the road was terrible, if not impassable. Many of our plans were based on such old and inaccurate information. Bandits were history. The road was fine and would have been a good choice. Lao Aviation does not have computers. They write reservations down by hand in large bound ledgers and somehow this information actually arrives at other offices and airports. We were on the airport ledger as R. Janis and R. Norman. Lao Aviation planes are much maligned in all published reports. Though ancient, these Russian-designed, Chinese-built two-engine prop planes did arrive every day and on time. Age certainly showed in the cabin, which smelled like mildew with a whiff of urine. Missing were any buttons above the seats for luxuries like air vents and lights. The seat backs were not fixed and fell forward when the plane braked or tilted. The seats weren't numbered or allocated, just take your pick. The temperature inside the cabin continued to rise until it was surely over 100 degrees. Passengers mopped their brows and fanned themselves with barf bags, the only item in the seat pocket. Cabin service commenced: one coffee candy each and then one plastic cup of coke. We were very pleased with both, too. After a long, hot half hour, the air conditioning came on dramatically: white fog flowed out of the speakers and vents, steaming up windows and eyeglasses. We were ready for a beautiful small town along a river, nestled in the hills, and we found it in Luang Prabang. Though the second-largest city in Laos, it was really still a town, with no tall buildings (Vientiane has two buildings seven stories high) and almost no cars. A woman (actually, a trans-gendered person) from Switzerland had told us about a nice guesthouse, called the Saynamkhan, next to the Nam Khan River, so we told the tuk-tuk driver to take us there. We did some hard bargaining for a weekly rate and got a small room with air conditioning for $18 per night. The double bed and reading lights were excellent, though the shower, as usual, was just a corner of the bathroom and the "hot" water was created by an on-demand little hot water heater on the wall that spit out only lukewarm. Our guesthouse staff was plentiful, friendly and included one fine English speaker, named Luv. When we returned from anywhere, one of the three very small clerks behind a very small desk would scramble to get our key, and beaming, offer it up to us cupped in both hands. Overall, a great place, one block from the tiny main street, with wonderful ambiance plus the best view in town. Snug in our guesthouse, we were among some of the more privileged travelers. (I must qualify this immediately because Norm doesn't like me indicating that we are rich when we can't even afford a house in Victoria, and so forth. Yes, I know, there are always those who are MORE privileged, and in Luang Prabang, they can spend $40 to $60 US per night and their hotels are larger and have bigger rooms and they hire real car taxis to take them around, too, instead of uncomfortable little taxi-trucks. We are only two star hotel people, or occasionally three star and the more privileged are four star people.) However, I was thinking of the bright and adventurous young people, especially the many terrific young women we met traveling alone, who had much less money and stayed in humble places of the zero star variety. Their beds for 4,000 Kip ($1) would not include AC or even screens on the windows, though sometimes a ceiling fan. As one young woman pointed out, if there weren't mouse droppings in the bed, she was really happy. So, we older and (comparatively) richer folks sat at a small table on the terrace of our guesthouse in late afternoons with our Beerlao (an excellent beer brewed in Laos) or tea or coffee, writing and appreciating the scene. The mountains were covered with palms, banana plants and teak. The small Nam Khan River ran slowly north around the small peninsula comprising our end of town (then it turned west and joined the Mekong, which runs south on the other side of our peninsula four blocks away). Long canoes were tied up along the river by a system of bamboo poles stuck into the bank bent over the boats and tied with thin ropes on the ends. Men threw circle fishnets weighted around the edge with small chains. Kids swam and jumped off the biggest rock. Farmers climbed down to the water, filled two large metal watering cans and carried them back up the bank to sprinkle on each vegetable plant. Their small fields extend lower and lower as the river level drops in the dry season. Every afternoon, during our Beerlao time, an elderly woman from the next door house walked across the road--past two litter baskets--to the riverbank and threw a pink plastic bag of garbage over the edge. It was a common fate for riverbanks too steep to cultivate to be used as garbage dumps. I mention this in case Luang Prabang was sounding like a perfect paradise. Another less than perfect detail were the ugly power poles on every corner, which looked like upended chunks of bailey bridges. Walking down our little road in the sunshine were many young Buddhist monks dressed in bright saffron yellow robes, black umbrellas over their heads. I asked Luv, the hotel clerk, "Why do they carry black umbrellas?" "Well," he says, "because the colors look so nice." The intense black and intense orange were indeed wonderful, but it seemed unlikely to me that the excellent visual effect was actually the reason. (Getting accurate information is often a challenge for travelers. Once I overheard a visitor ask a Victoria local what mountain range it was across the Juan de Fuca Strait and the answer was "The Rockies.") There were many orange-robed monks walking around. Laos is a Buddhist country and it is the tradition for every young boy to spend some time living and studying in one of the many monasteries and temples (in Laos, these are called "wats"). This is arranged by the family, and the time period could be as short as one month. Our taxi driver said he spent two months in a monastery during his summer break from school when he was seventeen. We talked with four young monks from outlying villages who were living in their wat for years while they went to school. Every morning, between six and seven a.m., monks filed out of the monasteries, each carrying a large covered container. They walked silently, slowly, single-file up and down the streets. Women waited on their knees on the sidewalk with bowls full of sticky rice. As each monk filed past, a handful of rice was dropped into his bowl. (We saw this same ritual in Chiang Mai, Thailand on an incredibly busy city street. It looked out of place amidst the traffic noise and fumes. Shopkeepers and believers giving to the monks in Chiang Mai prepackaged rice in little tied-up plastic bags.) Many motorcycles went by on our road, slowly and quietly. Motorcycles are the most commonly owned private vehicles in Laos. Women and girls drive them as often as men and boys; whole families of four go by on one machine, the mother casually holding a baby on her lap as she sits sideways on the back without holding on. Nobody wears helmets. Motorcycles are parked on sidewalks in front of every business. Motorcycles are parked in living rooms. It costs between $1,000 to $2,000 to buy one and might take at least a year of savings by the whole family. Those who don't own motorcycles pile into truck-taxis, which hold twelve small Laotians (but only six huge westerners). There are also motorcycles with sidecars for hire, which carry one or two passengers and a motorcycle taxi with a covered back, large enough for six. Many visiting foreigners, and not just young ones, rent motorcycles and ride around in carefree style on unfamiliar roads with unfamiliar driving customs, no licenses, helmets, insurance or medical care available. Tourists seem to share a belief that Bad Things will not happen on holidays. (Once, a friend told me seriously that people can't gain weight when traveling. I thought that would be excellent: we could drive a certain distance from home into that no-calorie zone for every large meal even when we are at home.) Using that logic, sensible driving decisions aren't really necessary if you are on holiday. A Hmong man from California who returned to visit relatives in the Luang Prabang area, told us he would never rent a motorcycle either. If there is an accident in Laos, you are forced to pay for everything no matter whose fault it is and be deported and, he says, there is no doctor locally, and not even good medical care if you were flown to Vientiane. We did a lot of walking around Luang Prabang. We wanted to walk, everything was easily accessible, and it was easy going with no holes or pits and little traffic, except for chickens. Chickens were everywhere, running back and forth across roads and paths even in the two block "downtown." They were tall, tough looking birds, charging around on extraordinarily long, scrawny legs. Walking around Luang Prabang at night was especially nice. Doors and windows were wide open for air and we could easily see into lighted living rooms and kitchens. Some homes had a flourescent light, others were using candles. Cooking was done on wood fires outside in the yard or on the sidewalk. It was cooler, people relaxed in and outside at the end of the work day. We felt absolutely safe in this peaceful place. We watched several interesting boys games. One of my favorites was the thong-throw. They piled bills of small value (there are actually one cent and five cent bills) on a smooth concrete surface in a school or temple grounds, then, standing about forty feet away, each boy in turn takes off one thong and flings it sidearm, so it slides hard and fast toward the pile. If the thong dislodges bills, the thrower gets them. It wasn't hard finding equipment for this game: everyone in Laos wore plastic thongs. Carpenters hammering on a roof wore thongs, boys chopping with machetes, school kids, people riding motorcycles, monks, farmers, shopkeepers, joggers. The most common ball was a woven reed ball about seven-inches in diameter . A circle of boys kept one in the air with their feet, hacky-sack style. Others played a kick-ball kind of volleyball over a net, heading and kicking the ball. This was a light, very cheap ball to use and didn't bounce as far as a regular soccer ball. Marble games were different than ours. Instead of flicking a marble weakly with one thumb, as we do, they held the marble on the index finger with a thumb and flung it with a much more powerful arm and wrist action. It was fun getting stamps at the post office. Large tables with benches were available in the post office for writing, and on each were little white kindergarten-type glue pots. Because there is no glue on the stamp when you buy it, you must rub this glue on your stamp with a little stick. We soon found a favorite, though humble, restaurant on the Mekong River. The charming women there served good, cheap Laotian food on an open balcony built on stilts over the river bank. Somehow they cooked up complicated dishes for several parties at once in a dark little corner with two burners. Our usual total dinner bill for two, including beer, was about $3. We tried many other restaurants and cafes, but returned there most often. Every morning, we bee-lined it to a Bakery run by a Laotian woman who had gone to Bangkok to take baking classes. She turned out an array that appealed to foreigners, from french toast and baguettes, to croissants. Good coffee and yogurt. Again, charming women were serving. People in Laos do not eat with chopsticks: they use a fork and a large spoon for most foods except for sticky rice. The way to eat sticky rice is to pick up a small fist full with your right hand, make the rice into a ball, press an indentation in the ball with the thumb, and then use it to scoop up other food. Sticky rice is a particular type of rice that is grown in Laos and Northern Thailand, and is considered superior to regular rice. It really is very sticky and is served in a round woven basket with a lid. Menus were often puzzles for us. We had guidebooks describing dishes, but none gave them in Lao script. When there was an English translation, it wasn't often in good English. One restaurant divided the English menu into sections like "Food of Minced" and "Food of Fried". Two choices were pig belly salad and pig stomach soup (we weren't clear as to the difference between belly and stomach). We ordered "spiny rolls" hoping they would be "spring rolls" and they were. Laap is a common Lao dish in the "minced" category. Laap Chicken would be cooked ground up chicken served cold with chiles, mint and lots of garlic. Laap Water Buffalo is similar. Curry dishes were usually excellent, but hard to spot on the menu, since the word "curry" didn't often appear. When it did, we picked it. Because the prices were so low (80 cents to $2 CN per dish), we could order unknown dishes and take our chances. Most restaurant tables had a plastic container of toilet paper on the table to be used for napkins. You pull the paper out a hole in the top. Not elegant, but better to use than the minuscule paper squares sometimes provided. Luang Prabang had thirty-two wats! It seemed there was a Buddhist temple and monastery every block and sometimes, two. Some were quite spectacular and huge. Luang Prabang is designated a World Heritage Site largely because of these wats. A UNESCO sign says it "is the best preserved city in Southeast Asia." (Luckily it wasn't on the Ho Chi Minh Trail or we would have bombed them to smithereens.) Travelers to Laos had better want to see wats. As in most Buddhist countries, wats are the major focus (elsewhere they are usually called temples or monasteries). I viewed them positively as open, public areas somewhat similar to parks (which are nonexistent). One of the best wats in this area was Wat Xiang Thong (Golden City Temple), built in 1560. It was a few blocks from our guesthouse, on the tip of the peninsula formed by the Mekong and Nam Khan Rivers. Steps from the Wat led majestically right down to the Mekong. Anyone can wander around the grounds of any wat, go into the temple or not, sit under a tree, come and listen to the drumming at four p.m. (or at four a.m. if you are really keen). Most wats have a huge drum with a skin cover under a little roof for that purpose, though poorer ones have a rusty car wheel rim hanging from a tree to hit instead. Some wats are splendidly restored with lots of gold paint, intricate murals and spectacular high roofs. Only two in Luang Prabang charged an admission (thirty-eight cents) and unlike wats in Thailand and some other countries, there are no sellers of postcards or anything else to bother visitors. Our first day trip out of town was a boat ride up the Mekong to see two caves full of Buddha statues. I didn't care a whit about the Buddha statue part, but we did want to experience the Mekong and stop at villages along the way. We hired Mr. Sing Kham and his ten year old son to take us in their privately owned four foot wide, forty foot long river boat. It was not a fancy boat, but typical of the type that chugs across and up and down the river carrying passengers and freight. The owner had nailed what we would call kindergarten chairs to the bottom, so we foreigners could sit comfortably and his wife made cushions for the seats. Running time was two hours upstream and one hour back down, plus stops. We picked him because he could speak some English and was a likeable guy. The Mekong was very muddy and seemed to vary between 1/4-1/2 mile across, with a current of perhaps 4-6 mph. It reminded us of the Yukon (unless we noticed the banana plants). The riverbank looked like sand and felt like sand when we walked on it, so I don't know how anything can grow very well, yet all along the banks people planted and tended their little fields in the same way we had observed along our little guesthouse river. Vegetables were planted lower and lower down along the riverbank as the water dropped. Farmers spent a good part of the day walking down to fill buckets and watering cans and trudging up maybe fifty feet to pour water on each plant. The idyllic river scene was marred by hundreds of pieces of torn dirty plastic snagged wherever sticks or reeds grew in clumps in the water. The thicket of plastic shreds looked like forlorn Tibetan prayer flags. Fishermen threw weighted circle nets near these clumps of sticks and tied woven fish traps among them, as well. We could have chosen to roar up the river at high speed in colorfully painted longtail boats (the axle sticks way out, maybe twelve feet behind). But we resented them mightily as we chugged steadily and unobtrusively along, enjoying the scene more slowly. Longtails seemed a macho-showoff kind of transport, like jet-skiis, beloved of young males. I noticed our boatman's son gazing admiringly at the much snazzier passing speeders. Passengers in the speedboats were hunched in these short, narrow boats and most wore motorcycle helmets and visors, though how helmets could save one from injury is not clear. The noise was deafening. Though not a pleasant or safe experience (the week before we were there, a speedboat hit something and several people were killed), it is the way many people get way upriver fast to cross over into northern Thailand at Houay Xai. A speedboat can do the trip in eight hours, while it takes a slow boat like ours two days to chug up the same distance, stopping overnight half way at an undesirable village. The caves, as expected, were ugly and uninspiring to us, though monks visiting at the same time seemed pleased. About 4,000 Buddha images--rows of nondescript little statues donated by believers--are in two caves. Quantity seemed to be the value, here. On the way back, we stopped at a weaving village, teetering from boat to shore on a narrow hardwood plank. Ahead of us, a young girl of about eleven climbed the bank carrying two large buckets of river water hanging on each end of a wooden shoulder yoke. We were puffing just from carrying ourselves up the huge set of steps and stopped to rest while she continued on into the distance. Many women worked on looms set up under their houses on the open first floor. They took little notice of us except to smile, say hello and help their babies wave. There was no begging or efforts to convince us to buy weavings, though I did buy some. A boy came into view climbing large steps on bamboo stilts. Unlike our stilts, the two upright poles were held in front of the body. The feet rested full length on the bamboo footrests facing forwards, not sideways, with no straps. I think he had more control because of bare feet having contact with the whole surface of the footrest. We paid our boatman more than the going rate (it still came to only $10) and we brought him three more customers. Like everyone else we dealt with, he was in business for himself. Though Laos is officially a communist country, every store, restaurant, hotel, guesthouse, taxi, and motorcycle rental business is private. In fact, except for airlines, banks and post offices, everything we bought or hired was from private businesses. The Lonely Planet describes Laos as "a capitalist reality trimmed with socialist ideology." We saw private entrepreneurs earning money everywhere, but didn't see any "socialist trimmings." We hired a truck-taxi owned by a guy who could speak some English to take us into the mountains to visit a waterfall and minority peoples villages. Lao people account for only 50% of the population and the rest is composed of sixty-eight ethnic minorities. Understanding these ethnic peoples is extremely complicated. There are lowland and upland Laos, four kinds of Hmong, several kinds of Thai groups, Akha and many others. Most live in the mountains and many move back and forth across the national borders of Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, China. As we drove 29 km. out of town on an extremely rough road, bouncing in the back, we saw six Akha men walking separately along the road with long-barreled flintlock rifles! The driver said they were hunting for pig, snake and birds. (We saw zero birds in Laos and assume they were eaten long ago.) We weren't expecting the waterfall to be much (very often third world countries think foreigners want to see a river or waterfall and when you get there, it is a pitiful trickle) but it was fine. Huge poinsettia trees all around had perfect red flowers and a good volume of water flowed over unusual formations. There were hillsides full of young teak trees all along the road. Apparently, the government is encouraging people to plant teak on their private land because teak forests are almost gone. It takes at least thirty years to grow, so our driver pointed out "they are planting for their children." We passed many villages, and stopped at two Hmong villages. As we walked around, nobody had anything to sell us or took any note of our passing, except to say hello. The first floor of homes in the villages are open and used for animals, looms, cooking fires, and storage. Many villagers had built their houses entirely out of bamboo. Large bamboo poles formed the structure, and split, flattened long lengths of pliable bamboo (we saw some drying strips at least 20 ft. long) were woven to make walls. The roof was thatch, the floor woven mats. They farmed rice fields nearby and also raised animals to sell. Our driver said the government tries to stop them from cutting trees to sell. Some kids were working together to pick fruit off a tree. One boy was in the tree, pushing at the fruits stem with a bamboo pole split at the end. Below stood another boy with a basket ready to catch it, surrounded by kibitzers. Our driver explained how he bought his truck-taxi: his whole family saved and loaned him money and he gradually pays them back. It was in need of constant repairs, so, luckily, he took mechanics classes in Vientiane. He pays $200 a year to the government for his taxi fee and he might be able to make $1800. He was worrying about the cost of gas, which has gone up drastically. In one month it went up from 750 Kip per liter to 1500 Kip per liter (which is about 57 cents CN, just what we pay). Lao people do not put their money into banks. The California Hmong man said one reason is the bank will only allow a small amount to be withdrawn at a time from a savings account, so if a person is saving to buy a taxi, motorcycle or any large item, he would have to withdraw small sums for months in order to buy it. Also, the value of Lao currency is not reliable. It was recently devalued and still fluctuates, mostly down. If possible, the people exchange Kip for Baht or Dollars and then store the cash in their houses. He also told us that the Lao government is gearing up to formalize ownership of private land next year. At this time, if a family is occupying land, farming it and living in a house on it, they have ownership. He looked up all the current information about this in order to inform his relatives and he was encouraging them to move down from the mountains to the low land right away, to build a house and start farming to establish ownership. After the registry is established and papers are drawn up next year, they will own that land. From then on, people will have to purchase land. Laos is officially one of the ten poorest countries in the world, based on yearly income. However, that isn't quite the whole story. Every Laotian family grows most of its own food. In the rural areas, it is possible to build a house out of gathered materials, as in the Hmong village. They do not pay income tax or sales taxes. Though our yearly income is much larger, we must buy everything we eat and use and we also pay income taxes, sales taxes and other fees. It turned out we didn't have to roar upriver in the hated and dangerous long-tail boats OR chug upriver for two days and stay overnight in a wretched place to reach northern Thailand. A brand new option, a once a week flight from Luang Prabang direct to Chiang Mai, Thailand, began operations November 6. Being one of the (relatively) privileged, we had the $80 each and were on the third flight of this new service. The guy who sold us the tickets, Moune Vorabouth, spoke surprisingly bad English after having spent four years in Chicago learning airline mechanics. His team of five Lao Aviation workers was transferred recently to Luang Prabang. Beds and a stove were right behind the door at the ticket office; they live right there at work. He proudly told us he was a specialist now, "in charge of international flights." Not a big job yet, with one international flight per week. He had sold four tickets for it, counting ours. He said the Chiang Mai plane was a French plane, an ATR 72. "That is a very famous plane in Laos, very good." However, when our plane arrived some days later, it was the same old Chinese built twin engine prop plane. But still on time, and running well. Janis Ringuette