Safe as Milk

Sekong was a nice little town with not much in it save the UXO museum, which took all of five minutes to explore. The peculiar thing about the UXO museum was, well, you would think, if you were the United States and you were illegally and unofficially bombing a foreign country you might not want to stamp “US Bomb” on the side of your bombs, and yet there it was: “US Bomb.”

Of course the bomb in the photo below is probably fake, but plenty of the real ones lying about (disarmed and hollow of course) still had paint flakes that clearly read “US” on the side of them. Obviously somebody didn’t think things all the way through, especially given that roughly one third of said bombs failed to explode.

Sekong province was the most heavily bombed area in all of the “Second Indochina War” as it’s referred to around here. Indeed everyday we were in the Bolaven Plateau area we saw at least one U.N. UXO jeep either coming or going somewhere off in the countryside. That said, the threat to tourists is small, the major towns are clear (or simple relocated in the case of Paksong) and even the villages are for the most part no threat. Still Sekong province is not a good place to live out those cross-country bushwhacking-over-the-mountains-to-Vietnam fantasies you’ve been thinking about for years. If you are planning to travel off the major roads it’s a good idea to hire a guide who knows where is safe and where isn’t. And keep in mind that UXO is not just a problem here, the same trucks are scouring the hills of Bosnia right now as well, and as Matt and Debi told me even London still turns up the occasional German bomb when somebody digs a new foundation deeper than they should. The tragic reality of war is that it doesn’t end when a truce is signed.

One thing I did not know until I got to Sekong was that there were major ground battles in this area and in fact a U.S. led collection of Thai, Laos, and South Vietnamese armies held the area for a while before being driven out by the NVA. Most of the evidence of such activities, abandoned tanks, jeeps and downed warplanes, has long since been chopped up and carted off to Thailand or Vietnam for sale as scrap metal. Still one does see rather odd things like a thousand-pound bomb sawed in half length wise and turned into a planter for flowers, or a water trough for livestock. The hotel where I am writing this has chopped smaller bombs in half and turned then on their fins to use as ashtrays.

But the reason we spent an extra day in Sekong has nothing to do with scrap metal or UXO; it was the people. I have written before about how friendly the Lao are, but the farther south we go the friendlier they get. Nearly everywhere we went in Sekong we attracted a throng of people just curiously following along, some stopping to practice their English or find out where we were from (and no they didn’t seem to hold it against me that my country bombed the living hell out of them for ten years).

The very first night, after we met up with Debi, we were all headed out for dinner when two teenage Lao girls riding by on a bike stopped to talk to us. For the most part they talked to Matt and Debi and I continued on ahead not thinking too much about it, people always stop to talk to you on the street. When Matt later joined us, he said that the girls wanted to show us around the town. Again we didn’t think too much of it, people always want to show you around, sometimes you let them sometimes you don’t. But then the next morning the girls were knocking on the hotel door at ten in the morning. At this point Matt began to get a little nervous thinking perhaps he might end up in Lao wedding if he wasn’t careful. So when we ran into them again down at the market and they helped negotiate a cheaper price for our tuk-tuk ride out to see a local waterfall, it seemed only polite to invite them along. I think Matt may have actually started sweating for a minute when we had to stop by the girls’ house and meet their parents. It did seem for a while like Matt might be going on a date and of course I did nothing to discourage him from thinking that (hey what are friends for?), but at least half of his suspicions were unfounded. Or maybe a quarter of them. Actually, looking back on it now, he was probably right, he was on a date with a girl and her sister.

Whatever their intentions were the girls were very nice and spent the afternoon with us at the waterfall. The waterfall deserves mention if only because the pool below it is apparently home to fresh water pufferfish with, and I quote from The Rough Guide, “a piranha like appetite.” The locals claim the pufferfish seems to have a penchant for biting off the tip of a man’s penis and we didn’t see anyone venture into the lower pool the whole time we were there. Between UXO, penis eating pufferfish and teenage girls chasing blond Londoners through the countryside, we had an interesting afternoon. Speaking of blond I never realized how fascinating blond is to the people of southeast Asia; Matt gets stared at wherever he goes and sometime children will come up and try to pull the hair out of his arms as if checking to make sure it’s real. Any westerner who travels to the smaller towns and villages will get stared out, but the attention you get if you’re blond is easily double what I get.

In spite of the pufferfish we swam for a while (in the small pools above the falls rather than the big one below) and even sat in the middle of the falls and let the water cascade over us. Eventually it began to look like rain and thunder rumbled off in the distance (or possibly that was the UXO teams at work you never know), so we headed back to Sekong and had a late lunch.

The next morning we left for Attapeu but not before the girls stopped by and gave us presents, some polished gourds whose purpose we weren’t exactly clear on, but they were very nice. Debi and I couldn’t help laughing when we noticed that Matt’s gourd was larger, had been more ornately decorated and had a couple extra woven baskets attached to it.