Sidecars at the Lake

I spent the weekend with two friends from School at Nam Ngum.  We stayed at a place I had visited on SALSA.  It was very relaxing, swimming in the dam, reading and general mooching, extremely different than life in the area in the 1070s.

Bikies from Vientiane provided a distraction this afternoon.  The Vientiane Sidecar Club were a slightly surreal portion of the group.

Nam Ngum Dam was built between 1968 and 1971, funded by the US, Thai, Japanese and Netherlands governments. It was part of the US effort to invest in the Mekong Region, with the aim of encouraging development (read: capitalism), and discouraging the march towards communism. At the time Lao was in the middle of a war, the “secret American war”,  or what the locals call the "CIA war" and it wasn’t long after completion of the dam that the US-backed royalist government was overthrown by the Pathet Lao and a communist government came to power. 

Unlike the majority of the dams now causing controversy in Laos, the electricity produced by Nam Ngum Dam is predominantly used for domestic purposes, powering Vientiane and surrounding towns. The majority of the other dams,  are being developed to power the significantly more developed and power-hungry countries surrounding Laos; Laos proclaiming itself to be the “battery of Asia”.

Re-education Camps operated on islands in Nam Ngum during the 1970s and 1980s, and were used to contain the unsavoury types from society, including “hooligans, prostitutes, hippies, playboys, smugglers and bandits” who were rounded up off the streets of Vientiane. The island camps on Ang Nam Ngum were short-term Re-education Camps, where somewhere between 2000 and 4000 Lao Nationals were imprisoned. Three islands were used; Thao Island for men and Thong Island and Nampo Island for women. By 1980, most the of detainees on the Ang Nam Ngum islands were deemed to be rehabilitated and the camps were empty. During their period of operation, they were the only camps made accessible to foreign journalists – predominately because the situation there was very mild – a virtual island paradise compared to other prisons.