One Foot in Laos by Dervla Murphy

Author:Dervla Murphy [Murphy, Dervla]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780601175
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

By noon next day I was back in Xam Nua, seeking a bicycle mechanic to overhaul Hare’s increasingly unreliable brakes. The young man who spent half an hour on the job, with excellent results, looked shocked and hurt when kip were offered.

At the guesthouse Mr Pheuiphanh and his colleagues were enjoying their two-hour lunch break. I invited them to be my guests for my last supper in Xam Nua but Mr Pheuiphanh wouldn’t hear of this. I must be his guest – he’d already ordered grilled jungle fowl for four. He seemed gratified by my reactions to Vieng Xai but the two younger men, Mr Un and Mr Phraxnyavong, looked puzzled. Although they had grown up on a diet of Party ideology, they had no personal memories of the Secret War. When they were in their teens

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’s influence became apparent and they welcomed it. For them Vieng Xai was not a place of pilgrimage. They didn’t want to think about the past, they were focused on an illusory future that had to be good because of foreign investment and aid and all those experts and consultants coming in to help Laos. Irish people know about the awful consequences of concentrating on the past, keeping sores open, nourishing ancestral grievances. But in Laos too many are making the reverse mistake, failing to understand what the Pathet Lao struggle was all about and accepting as inevitable their country’s again becoming a pawn in a very nasty game – this one economic.

I needed to buy a camera in Xam Nua, having been stupid enough to jam the mechanism by trying to remove a film before it had rewound itself. Mr Pheuiphanh opined that for this momentous purchase an interpreter was essential: Mr Un should accompany me to the large covered market between guesthouse and riverbank.

This is the only dry goods market within a radius of 100 miles but here are no crowds of eager shoppers, as in Vientiane and Luang Prabang. The traders look pleasantly surprised when a potential purchaser of anything comes on the scene and the local demand for cameras is limited; Mr Un had to employ detective skills to track down two in a drapery stall. Outside it sat a young woman and her small daughter, absorbed in a card game. Both these Japanese cameras (

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$100 and

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$150 respectively) were thickly covered in fine dust, having been displayed on top of their boxes. When I rejected them for this reason they were thoroughly wiped with a damp rag, then hopefully re-offered. I pointed out that one had been dropped – a corner was severely dented – but this damage was laughingly dismissed as unimportant. Finally Mr Un found an elderly woman trader just back from a trip to Yunnan and offering a $24 dust-free Chinese camera. It proved not quite up to Pentax standards but served its purpose.

During supper I casually asked Mr Pheuiphanh how many pupils study at the Hua Khang ethnic minority boarding school but he didn’t want to talk about it.

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