One Foot in Laos
One Foot in Laos by Dervla Murphy chronicles a trip taken in the late 1990s, when she was already well into her sixties. If you love good travel writing, eccentric female adventurers, enjoy experiencing remote, sometimes inaccessible places through someone’s keen eye, I highly recommend it. Heedless of discomfort and danger, she explored and shared views of remarkable places even as some of them were disappearing.
Murphy died in 2022 at the age of ninety, her travels having begun in 1963 when she bicycled from her home in Ireland to India via Europe, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. She later traveled 1300 miles through the Peruvian Andes on a mule, accompanied by her nine year old daughter. She spent months at a time in Ethiopia, Peru, Cuba, Israel, Gaza, Madagascar, Nepal, Tibet, Baltistan, South Africa, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Romania and Northern Ireland.
A taste of her adventures goes like this “When a wolf in Bulgaria was about to attack her, she killed it with a pistol; when [an] intruder bent over her in the moonlight in a hostel room in Turkey, where she was staying, she fired a warning shot into the ceiling and sent him fleeing.” “She broke nine ribs, was bitten by a scorpion in Afghanistan, contracted amoebic dysentery, brucellosis, gout, hepatitis and tick bite fever. She fractured her coccyx, suffered from a triple tooth abscess in Cameroon, and needed a new hip after a fall in Palestine.”
Laos -- not a common destination for any but the hardy or those in NGOs -- is a landlocked country bordering on China, Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar and a small bit of Cambodia. It was the site of a so-called Secret War that is perhaps among the greatest examples of crimes against humanity in the 20th century, which saw its share of them. Beginning in 1958 parts of Laos were occupied by North Vietnam as a supply route for its war against South Vietnam. Between 1964 and 1973, the US dropped two million tons of bombs on Laos. Some 80 million of those bombs failed to explode and remain scattered throughout the country rendering vast swaths of land impossible to cultivate to this day. In the late 1990s when Murphy visited, unexploded ordnance (UXO) maimed and killed many Laotians each year, and it still does! The further criminality of that bombing campaign lies in the two appalling facts: a) they were newer forms of bomb being tested, which accounts for their high failure rate, and b) many others were simply dumped because pilots returning from bombing missions could not land back at refueling depots with any unused bombs. Murphy decries how global power politics has nearly obliterated in Laos entire cultures and ways of life that were eminently self-sustainable. And global “development priorities (exploitation of resources such as water power, mining and in particular forestry) has rendered many areas into sacrifice zones.
Now, let me assure the reader that this book is a not a political screed but an engaging travelogue in which we follow an intrepid woman through forests, mountains, and swamps into tiny villages in remote areas where she is sometimes viewed with alarm, fear, or curiosity. Much of this is done on a bicycle and the state of the roads, trails, or paths gets a lot of attention. She has a fine eye for detail and lauds the beauty of the landscape, but also exercises her sharp powers of observation on locals, and on tourists some of whom are arrogant or clueless. She doesn’t gloss over instances of greed, ignorance, arrogance, or theft. Her camera is stolen, but she is also fed gladly by people who are very poor, her bicycle repaired time and again by people who refuse payment for anything but parts. She admires the resilience and fundamental kindness of most of the people she encounters -- a few educated Laotians, but mainly subsistence farmers now caught in the maelstrom of the rapid imposition of global consumer culture and its discontents.
As you may have gathered, I am torn between the “good book recommendation” I began writing and an equally strong imperative to share what I was reminded of or learned about Laos from this book, particularly since it was the government of the country in which I live and pay taxes to that perpetrated traumas on the people of Laos. In a broader historical context we can say that Laos was hit by a common triple whammy:
— First, a tail-end colonialism in Indochina (by the British but primarily the French)
— Second, the Cold War at its most vicious. North Vietnam pushed back militarily, which made the “Vietnam” war another sort of proxy-war between the USA and China – after Korea and before today’s complex and volatile Taiwan situation.
— Third, by post-war International Development imperatives, driven by multinational capital and often at odds with what people on the ground truly needed.
Woven in with Murphy’s adventures we learn about other facets of the two-million-dollar-a-day Secret War to “halt the spread of Communism in southeast Asia” (which did no such thing.) For example, with the involvement of the CIA an existing, relatively small industry of poppy growing (for local use and a small income through sales) was transformed into yet another node of a vastly profitable international narco-trafficking industry, whose massive profits in no way benefited the people growing the poppies. Subsequent international aid and development schemes seem to swoop in to impose outside values and standards that rarely actually improve the lives of peasants. Forcing the eradication of local, centuries old farming techniques to replace them with methods that require purchased seeds, fertilizer and pesticides transforms once-autonomous farmers with a wide range of skills, into debtors and wage-slaves. Dams approved by the government often do not end up being funded, but only after the proposed flood area has been clear cut, “displacing numerous communities and destroying many square miles of primary forest, home to hundreds of rare species.” Meanwhile, no provision in these massive water schemes does anything to improve the quality and access to clean drinking water for the local people. The one NGO she encounters doing something people truly need is a savvy and frugal British group doing very effective bomb clearance, which is what is desperately needed so that people can once again access fertile land to farm.
Innumerable people were displaced by the war in southeast Asia; in Laos many such victims were the tribal people, such as the Hmong and other “hill tribes”, who were on the one hand encouraged to fight with America against Communists and on the other seen as eminently expendable as soon the wars “ended” (a foretaste of the recent fate of Kurdish fighters in the Middle East or many Afghan employees of the US occupation once it was over.) She tells us about the animist Khmu, one of 37 (some say 45) ethnic subgroups that make up the Lao Theung. They are most numerous at 400,000, while the Numbri, hunter-gatherers from the highest mountains, number in the hundreds, so many having died when forcibly relocated.
Murphy painfully sprains her foot early in the trip, but carries on nonetheless, limping when necessary. That seems to be what the title refers to. She describes in detail menus of meals eaten, some delicious-sounding gourmet, some either very impoverished or overwhelmed by the tide of crap-food the world economy has pushed into a place with tremendous natural food resources, others full of ingredients you or I would have to be starving to eat, such as a soup containing “many interesting small corpses.” Dervla Murphy is a stimulating, even inspiring, guide to how people live on this amazing and ever-changing planet of ours. I plan to check out her other books soon.