I usually avoid other tourists when I’m traveling. It seems like their only goals, especially at more popular sites like the Sistine Chapel or Prague’s astronomical clock tower, are to walk in front of my camera and to stand in really long lines. It’s easy to forget that maybe we’re not the only ones with a story to tell, and that maybe the people around us have their own secrets, or are on their own journeys.
A few years ago, my husband and I travelled to Laos, backpacking from Vientiane north along the mighty Mekong River. We spent several days in Luang Prabang along the way, typically considered Laos’s cultural and religious capital and a UNESCO World Heritage city. At the center of Luang Prabang is Mt. Phou Si, the historic heart of the old town and home to several ancient Buddhist temples, as well as breathtaking panoramic views of the city and surrounding countryside. A stone stairway winds its way up the side of the mountain, complete with stone banisters carved into golden dragons and elaborately-painted covered walkways.
Half way up the mountain is Wat Tham Phu Si, a small temple built on a naturally-occurring wide terrace, complete with golden statues and intricate shrines. As we admired the architecture and the view, an older Asian man approached us and asked us if we would mind taking his picture with the city spread out behind him. Noting his UCLA t-shirt, we asked him where he was from. “I’m from here!” he said laughing, “but I live in America now. My son studies engineering!” He gestured proudly at his shirt. We asked him if he was visiting family, and he slowly shook his head. “My family doesn’t live here anymore.”
Unprompted, he explained that he was a member of a Hmong tribe from northern Laos. He and his brother had been among the many young Hmong men recruited and secretly trained by American forces to fight the Northern Vietnamese Army invasion of Laos and their allies, the communist Pathet Lao, during the Vietnam War. “My brother was a pilot,” he told us. “He was killed in the fighting. I was captured and taken to a Laotian concentration camp for interrogation. This is my first trip back to Laos since my escape.”
“How did you get to America?”
The old man’s brow furrowed. “I snuck out of the camp and swam across the Mekong River into Thailand.” He explained that he had lived in a refugee camp with other Laotian refugees for several years, learning English from volunteers, before being granted a visa to travel to the United States. He smiled again, “My wife is an American girl!”
We took a few pictures of him in different places, and then one of the three of us, before parting ways. As brief as that encounter was, and as likely insignificant as it was to him, that conversation has stayed with me. I visited that temple because it was beautiful, and historic, and spiritual. But that man, someone I had mistaken for a fellow tourist simply enjoying the view, had embarked on a much greater and more personal journey, returning home to a nation from which he had fled imprisonment and torture decades earlier. One chance meeting on the side of a mountain taught me more about Laotian history and sacrifice than any museum display, and the ease with which the old man told the story of his personal struggle to two strangers spoke to more universal truths – the resiliency of the human spirit, our endless capacity for forgiveness, and a desire to stay connected to our past.
We climbed to the summit alone. At the top is a second temple with gold-leafed towers and an entrepreneurial Laotian woman selling bottled water, snacks, and tiny birds in tiny bamboo cages. Freeing the birds, we were promised, would bring luck. I set my bird cage on the rocky ledge overlooking the city and pried apart the bamboo bars. The bird hesitated at first, as if unsure of what came next, before bolting out of the cage and, delighted with his new-found freedom, soaring into the city below.
Let’s be fearless,
Jen