Laos: Land of Om

Laos is the only country on Partout’s current itinerary that neither of us had been to before arriving. We hadn’t even read a lot about the landlocked nation. That made it essentially terra incognita for us both. 

Nine days is not nearly enough to call any place cognita, but it was long enough to give us a distinct feeling about the country, almost a sensation.

Laos made us feel peaceful.  

Some of the peacefulness came from the inevitable out-of-sight-out-of-mind effect of travel. There’s nothing quite like 8,000 miles to reduce “Breaking news!” to a muted sonic boom exploding far, far away. But there was more to the serenity that Laos fostered than mere distance. Lots more. Like tens of thousands more – all of it in a shape of the Buddha. 

Siddhartha Buddha famously taught followers how to live with and even be liberated from suffering. In Laos, where there has never been a shortage of suffering and the majority of people are Buddhist, the Buddha was everywhere we turned – sitting, meditating, standing or lying down but always, in any position, reminding people to cultivate inner peace regardless of their everyday circumstances.

The Buddha popped up in unexpected places, like on a mountainside, teaching acolytes.

Images of Buddha – sometimes numbering in the tens of thousands – filled temple niches and altars. In the picture below, there are two miniatures nestled under every single arch.

In the nation’s capital, we visited Buddha Park, a 1950s theme park containing a 131-foot-long reclining Buddha and more than 200 other statues representing Buddha and Hindu gods.

There’s even a Buddha retirement cave at Pak Ou near Luang Prabang. There, more than 6,000 worn-out or broken Buddha statuettes have been respectfully put out to pasture (out to cave?) rather than discarded. Pilgrimages are made to honor them. 

Beyond Buddha statues, Laos’s city streets are brightened by the saffron robes of Buddhist monks who literally feed off public respect for the great teacher. In Luang Prabang, around 200 monks from 33 temples process through the streets before sunrise every day collecting edible alms from laypeople. The gifts are the only food they eat all day. 

Even the landscape celebrates Buddha, with swooping temple roofs peeking around city skyscrapers and piercing the skies above villages, constant reminders that the path to enlightenment runs through Buddha’s teaching.  

We couldn’t help wondering if the Buddha’s influence explains how Laotians manage to appear so, well, peaceable, despite suffering grievously from centuries of foreign invasions and for the last 60 years from being collateral damage of the American/Vietnam War.

Laos being terra incognita to us, we don’t know. What we do know is that being surrounded by these gentle people of Buddha who manage to model calm and kindness in one of earth’s least privileged countries rendered the sonic booms of our own land all but mute.

WHO KNEW?!?

When you’re watching Teslas glide past and eating croissants that could stand their own in Paris, it’s easy to forget Laos is officially classed as one of the least developed countries in the world. But then you’re sitting in a shopping mall, sipping a passionfruit smoothie, watching shoppers glide up and down the escalators between floors, and you wonder: When did Laos get its first public escalator?

2013 –120 years after the first in the US began lifting riders at Coney Island.

NEXT STOP: Cambodia