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We arrived at Vang Vieng in the
afternoon, and as we were eating lunch, we noticed some rockets and
explosions in the distance. After eating, we headed upstream to see what
was going on.
What we found was a local festival.
There were all these villagers, with canisters of explosives tied onto
long bamboo poles – giant homemade bottle rockets. The largest
ones were twenty feet long! Some of the teenager boys were dressed
up like women, and everyone was going around comparing who had the
biggest rocket and whose went the farthest and/or highest.
There were two launching ladders,
where they shot off the rockets in some sort of contest, while children
frolicked in the stream below. Occasionally the rockets exploded
right on the stand. It was delightfully dangerous and everybody
was having a good time.
We discovered later that the town
was celebrating the annual rocket festival, to ask the gods for rain.
We really enjoyed watching an actual cultural event (one not staged
half-heartedly for tourists); we were extremely lucky to have stumbled
upon it, as it only occurs during the full moon in May.
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great views at lunch
a boy waits on the bridge while a rocket goes off in the distance |
two men walk toward the festival |
bamboo pole rockets |
cross-dressing in Laos |
whose rocket is bigger? |
the launching ladder |
a rocket heads for the clouds |
a rocket explodes immediately after launching |
children swim in the Nam Xong river |
women watch the rockets |
a girl eats corn at the rocket festival |
rocket festival float |
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We were planning on going tubing down the river the
next day, but alas, the rocket festival had been successful because it
rained all day. We just sat around reading books and enjoying the
magnificent scenery. |
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monks walk through the streets of Vang Vieng |
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Zac reads on the porch of our guesthouse during the rainy day |
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women walking toward town |
crossing the river at a shallow place |
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U.S. airstrip in Vang Vieng |
An interesting thing about Vang
Vieng is that it’s just this little town in Laos, but right in the
middle there’s an airstrip that was built by the U.S. We don’t know why
it was built, but it probably wasn’t a humanitarian effort. Laos, it
turns out, is the most heavily bombed country in the world, courtesy of
secret American efforts to eradicate the North Vietnamese carting guns
down the Ho Chi Minh Trail during the Vietnam war. |
