Heide and I bid Thailand goodbye.  The short visit reminds me of my dad driving into the corner of Wyoming once so we could all say we had been there.  We caught the afternoon ferry across the Mekong River back into Savannahket, Laos.  This time the Laotian border guards only stamped my passport ten times. Most of the pages in my passport have been overrun by the stamping maniacs at the border from my four trips through Laos. 

Laos and for sure this strange town of Savannahket can best be described as Orwellian.  Here in this town is abject poverty, yet some business people have private vehicles other than scooters.  The POV of choice is pickup trucks.  Some young Laotians have their trucks decked out with boom speakers like in America. 

There is an overabundance of loose dogs.  They don't seem to have any one owner.  Some bark, none have seemed to want to bite me (although the biters may be used for dinner). One just stops in from time to time at the cafe we use and plants himself on the floor under the ceiling fan.  There are cats as well, but they are a thin Rex type breed and seem to always look sad.

There are buildings that still look Soviet.  There is a supposed-to-be nice hotel, but it is attached to an abandoned warehouse and the swimming pool has not worked since the Russians left in the 1980s.  There are whole blocks of wood and tin buildings in disrepair with a smattering of residents. The sewers are open. There are huge building is fairly good shape that sit abandoned, yet people live next to them in tin shacks. The government removed the green, garden-like, flower-pot abundant town square I photographed last year, and replaced it with utilitarian bricks.  Even new buildings that have just been put up look like they are about to fall down.  The buildings in the whole town either half finished or half torn down. 

Just down from our hotel a mile, the big new trans-South Asia bridge across the Mekong collapsed last year just before it was to open.  It is still being put back together.  The big cargo trucks wait for hours across from our hotel to cross on the couple ferry boats that hold two trucks per trip. 

The working class here is even younger than Vietnam.  In 'Nam, everyone working looks 20, here they look 17.  The smell of burning char col is every where.  There is one street that could be out of "Willy" street in Madison or some street in New Orleans (before it flooded) as there is a dozen Internet cafes and a dance club.  In amongst it all is the ubiquitous Tuk-Tuk motor cycle cart taxis. They are adorned like Christmas trees and haul every thing from people to computer parts to fruit to contraband. 

There is a run-down Buddhist training school for monks just down the street from a just-holding-together large Catholic church with a beautiful garden court yard.  On the corner down from them both is a seedy looking Karaoke bar with nefarious girls on staff. 

There is a hotel on the edge of town that has been the base of operations for the U.S. military looking for downed U.S. plane wreckage from the Vietnam war.  It is rather well known now that many of the planes lost in Laos were of CIA operations (we were not officially at war in Laos - wink, wink, nod).  I visited the place today but no sigh of the U.S. military this afternoon.  I am not sure the salvage operation is still in the budget these days.     

If any of you are science fiction fans you may be familiar with Philip K. Dick.  This place is right out of a scene in Blade Runner. In my unscientific opinion, this is a place that once you see, you will never see the world the same again. 

Tomorrow we head back to 'Nam and civilization again.  Now there is a commentary.  I am not sure many Americans place Vietnam high on the modernized pecking order of nations. Yet, when you return to 'Nam from Laos one feels safe again.