The Road To Recovery

A Viet Nam visa was required so I whizzed down to Pakse where I rested up over the weekend for the Consulate to open after the extended Lao New Year holiday. I still felt I in a state of shock not only from the extreme route I had just completed but the extreme contrast within Laos social strata. These folks along the way are so distant from attaining modern life it is a step back into another era.

Visa in hand earlier by several days than expected I took easy rides over the next days going round one mountain range just to keep on the black top to reach Attapeu. I had had enough of rough riding for a while.

These roads have been recently upgraded, some of the best I have ridden, making obvious the recovery and development of the straddling towns and villages. So too in due course will the remote regions gain their access to modern life.

This whole region is further south so the climate warmer, the terrain less rugged and access to infrastructue better. Prosperity shows through widespread land clearing, slash and burn, opening up the land to the riches of its fertile soil.

Up north, one bungalow owner who could not afford the UXO clearance payments, cut the bush and set fire to it, ducking for cover as the Cluster Bombs exploded. Who knows what still lies around his bungalows awaiting unsuspecting visitors. This is but one sample from the entire region which was carpet bombed.

Surely ALL clearance should be paid for by those who laid these atrocious weapons 40 years ago.

In Xepon, I met Tawee and his 80 strong UXO Lao clearance team, delivering more COPE's limb fitting brochures informing them of the District's Pakse office. Where they go few others approach. I saw some of their pics of 4 wheel drive vehicles up to their headlights in the rainy season, reminded me of my 4 day hazardous journey from Vientiane to Luang Prabang in 1989 before the blacktop. And what my recent ride from Nong to Saravane could have been.