COPE visitor center | trying to travel light

More than 2,000 or 10,000 buddhas?

We opted for the mini-bus from Vang Vieng to Vientiane, even though all the min-bus drivers think they are Michael Schumacher! Fortunately this was only a short drive of about 3 – 4 hours and included time for us to blow a tyre and get it fixed. For some reason the tyre blew right next to a tyre repair place – how convenient! While we waited for the tyre to be fixed we used their toilet and I took pictures of their excellent darts board.

Vientiane is the capital of Laos, even though you don’t feel like you are in a big capital city when you are there. It’s quite small and easy to get around and after visiting the market and a few temples, there isn’t much to do except eat yummy food and drink Beer Lao – so that’s pretty much what we did!

We went to Wat Si Saket, which is the oldest temple in Vientiane and the cloister walls are full of little niches containing pair of buddhas. We heard one guide tell a group there are more than 10,000 (Wikipedia says more than 2,000) which I can totally believe. We also found a fascinating pile of broken buddhas.

We also went to Pha That Luang, which is the most important religious monument in Laos. It is also giant and golden! A small group of Laos tourists asked us to have our photo taken with them at the monument and we tried to add to our collection of ‘monk with a…’ photos. This time we captured monks with a mobile phone (taking photos) and monks with umbrellas. The star prize of our collection would be monk with an iPhone 4 (seen but not yet photographed). Rebecca adopted a stunning building next door as her new house and I took photos of its beautifully painted ceiling. On our way back into town we found n old London taxi. Unfortunately our budget only stretched to a ride in a tuk tuk.

As if we hadn’t had enough of temples and buddhas by this time, we headed out the next day to the Buddha Park, which is a bizarre outdoor collection of huge concrete sculptures of Buddhist and Hindu gods with a particularly large reclining buddha. As it’s not a temple, you can have a lot of fun taking silly pictures with all the statues. Once again Rebecca got her photo taken with some local tourists.

Me and Rebecca at the temple of bling

Becky's new pad and the painted ceiling that I loved

The bus ride to the park was particularly memorable. We took a local bus and we were packed in like sardines, even being told where to stand to even out the weight on the bus! The bus also had a sophisticated door system, which consisted of a folding door rigged up to a piece of string. As the bus driver put his fut on the accelerator (he also thought he was Michael Schumacher) the string would pull the door shut by the force of the bus moving. To open the door the driver simply braked heard enough for the door to slide open again on the string – genius!

COPE Visitor Center

Two of the most memorable things about visiting Vientiane (apart from the giant breakfasts I ate each morning) were visiting the MAG information stand at the night market and visiting the COPE Visitor Centre.

MAG (Mines Advisory Group) is a is a not-for-profit organisation clearing landmines, unexploded ordnance ( UXO) and other remnants of conflict for the benefit of communities worldwide. More than 2 million tonnes of ordnance was dropped over Laos during the Second Indo-China War and Laos is the most bombed country in the world per capita. An estimated 30% of the ordnance did not explode on impact and UXO still affects more that 25% of villages in Laos and remains a key cause of poverty. As in other South East Asia countries such as Cambodia and Vietnam, collecting scrap metal is a major cause of UXO accidents. Forced into the trade by poverty, people risk their lives using primitive detectors to hunt for scrap: normally what they find is harmless, but there’s always the risk it could be a deadly bomb. Organisations like MAG are working to help clear the UXO but people are still killed and injured – since 1964 more than 50,000 people have been killed or injured as a result of UXO accidents.

COPE Visitor Center (Cooperative Orthotic and Prosthetic Enterprise) is an organisation in Laos that works with the National Rehabilitation Centre (NRC) run by the Laos Ministry of Health. COPE has five rehabilitation centres across the country to provide access to orthotic/prosthetic devices and physiotherapy and occupational therapy. People affected by UXO, traffic accidents, polio, leprosy, club foot and children with disabilities are just some of the reasons why people might need access to COPE’s services.

The COPE Visitor Center has a series of really excellent and engaging displays about the UXO problem in Laos and how people are still affected today. There were some particularly moving displays about children that had been injured or killed when playing with UXO they had discovered in their villages, or how a woman was killed when the heat from her fire stove heated the ground too much and a UXO under her house exploded. We also watched an interesting and moving documentary about COPE’s work in Laos and they had a whole list of films and documentaries to watch (but we got there late and didn’t have time to watch more than one). There was also a shop where you could buy gifts or make a donation to support their work.

Visiting the MAG stall and COPE Visitor Center made me realise how little information we get about Laos in the UK press, whether good or bad, and I was glad we were able to find out more about the history of the country and support the work of these two excellent organisations in even a small way.

Buddha Park

Of course, we found time to eat more yummy food and drink a few Beer Lao. We also bought our flight tickets to Siem Reap (Cambodia) as we were running out of time and didn’t have 34 hours to spend on the bus to get there as we planned to celebrate Becky’s birthday at Angkor Wat!