Viengxai Pathet Lao Leader Caves

My friend Jim Harris took this video about five years ago when I got a grant to put together a collection of videos about Laos and I was able to pay for Jim and another friend, Sith (Lao) to travel with me to Laos. If anyone wants to gain a better understanding of Laos they need to visit the Pathet Lao Leader Caves in Viengxai and hopefully ready a book about the Secret War first, like Roger Warner's "Shooting Down the Moon." Viengxai is about 45 minutes from Sam Neua and is in a valley filled with these medium-sized limestone karsts that are riddled with caves. The Pathet Lao developed a number of these caves for their leaders to work in safe from American bombing. They worked in these caves from the early 60's to the early 70's. To tour the caves you have to visit a building in the small town of Viengxai to hopefully find an English-speaking guide ready to lead a tour. You cannot tour the caves without an official guide. The guides we've gone with have always been friendly and competent and pretty good English speakers. Bai and I went with her father and mother a couple of years ago and since Bai's dad worked in one of the caves the guide was spending a lot of time asking Bai's dad questions to learn more about what life was like working in the caves during the Secret War. In this video you'll see us walking through several of the caves, I think first starting with Khamtay's cave. If I had a ton of time I would put some captions, but just uploading videos takes a lot of time and I had to edit this so that it fit under the ten minute time limit. The Lao man holding the brief case was the Deputy Director of the National Library of Laos and the Lao woman is the Children's Librarian and I had paid for them to come to Sam Neua to provide a training for teachers who would be receiving book box libraries Jim and I had donated money for (about 15). You can see videos on our channel that show some of the training and one handover ceremony.

Category:

Travel & Events

Tags:

• Laos
• history
• Viengxai
• Sam Neua
• Pathet Lao Leader caves

[sengoku17]

thanks for sharing

[kingkeo]

ຄິດວ່າວັນໜຶ່ງໃນ ອານາຄົດ ເຮົາເອງກໍຢາກຈະໄປແວ່ຢາມ ສະຖານທີ່ແຫ່ງນີ້