The open-air market where we haggled for pineapples and papayas is now a shopping mall, but the glorious That Luang and Wat Si Saket temples are unchanged from my 1971 photos. Then, it was a roundabout with light traffic swirling around its base in clouds of dust (one day I executed a tight turn here on my Honda 70 and skidded off, fracturing my foot) now it sits in a manicured park with fountains and hordes of tourists. The Patuxai Monument, which officially commemorates the country's independence from France Credit: It was in the American airbases, the B-52s overhead, the Royal Lao Army troops on the streets, in Silver City – the US compound where we went for medical treatment and ice cream – in the constant updates from the British embassy on the shifting front line, the growing numbers of our pupils who went home to their villages in the school holidays and never came back, and the CIA station chief (not a very well-kept secret, that) with whom we played badminton.Īnd yet it seemed absent from the British diplomats’ cocktail parties, and the ambassador’s silver-service dinners, and the hotel discos where we bopped the night away to Santana’s Black Magic Woman with good-looking American Fulbright scholars. The Vietnam War was not supposed to be in Laos at all, and yet it was everywhere. Soon afterwards a newspaper item described Laos as the new destination for hippies bored with India, a country where young men walked hand in hand garlanded with flowers.
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