There’s been a buzz recently among the socks-and-sandals set about violence in Laos. Never one to trust information received from a white person with dreadlocks, I poked around online and found some troubling news.
Touring cyclists are probably the most innocuous of all road users. They carry few belongings worth stealing. Local residents often feel sorry for them, assuming they must be paupers or quite potty to opt for such a lowly transport mode. But it didn’t stop bandits opening fire, killing the cyclists, passengers on a local bus and the driver of a farm tractor.
(There is nothing funny about this, but I do admit to being slightly perplexed by the reporter’s characterization of cycle tourists. It’s as though we are the giant sea tortoises of the tourist world, gentle creatures that would really be better off on a reserve somewhere.)
I don’t want to be a paranoid traveler. The facts of the article, if read unemotionally, are pretty plain. Thousands of tourists travel the road between Vientiane and Luang Prabang each year, and now a single incident has occurred. The odds are vastly in favor of a peaceful trip. (Although several years ago this stretch of road was notorious.) I know people who have cycled uneventfully through Colombia. Things are never as bad as they appear in the news.
Nevertheless…I’m leaning away from cycling this stretch of road. The bandits haven’t been captured, and the incident is being billed as terrorism rather than theft. Also, the fact that cyclists were killed makes the story personal in a way that should be irrelevant but isn’t.
