Like Indiana Jones. Kind of.

Buddha Park, not a temple

But every Buddhist site needs a huge one of these

Like a small dungeon

Inside a weird little… structure… don’t know what to call it

Not the most comfortable stairs and you have to bend your body in strange ways to go up this path

Is it… an onion?

The way in. You have to be on your knees.

That’s what it looks like from the outside

Some of the statues

Where are we again?

We stopped at a local celebration of… something. Our tour guide didn’t speak Englisch, so we had no idea what was going on.

Donations for the monks. They put everything in the same bowl, including banknotes and cooked sticky rice. Weird.

Victory Gate

Like a tiny Arc de Triomphe, but with water

“[…] it appears even less impressive, like a monster of concrete.” I’m not sure they’re proud of this thing.

“The most heavily bombed country in the world per capita”

I had no idea: During the Vietnam War, there were more than 580,000 bombing mission over Laos, that’s one every 8 minutes, 24 hours a day, for 9 years. Most of them weren’t targeting Laos directly. The fighter pilots were merely ordered to drop off any leftover bombs over Laos on the way back to their base.

During that time, cluster bombs containing hundreds of little “bombies” with the size of a mandarin were en-vogue. And since 30 % of them failed to detonate, they’re still everywhere. Bombies are to villagers in Laos what landmines are to Cambodians. And even though one bombie does less damage than a landmine, the 80 million of them left after the war make up for this.