Laos Travel Quotes

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.

A good traveler leaves no tracks. Good speech lacks fault-finding.

The skilful traveller leaves no traces of his wheels or footsteps

A sage traveling all day is never far from the supplies in his cart, and however spectacular the views he remains calm and composed.

Sometimes when I get up and emerge from the mists of slumber, my whole room hurts, my whole bedroom, the view from the window hurts, kids go to school, people go shopping, everybody knows where to go, only I don't know where I want to go, I get dressed, blearily, stumbling, hopping about to pull on my trousers, I go and shave with my electric razor - for years now, whenever I shave, I've avoided looking at myself in the mirror, I shave in the dark or round the corner, sitting on a chair in the passage, with the socket in the bathroom, I don't like looking at myself any more, I'm scared by my own face in the bathroom, I'm hurt even by my own appearance, I see yesterday's drunkenness in my eyes, I don't even have breakfast any more, or if I do, only coffee and a cigarette, I sit at the table, sometimes my hands give way under me and several times I repeat to myself, Hrabal, Hrabal, Bohumil Hrabal, you've victoried yourself away, you've reached the peak of emptiness, as my Lao Tzu taught me, I've reached the peak of emptiness and everything hurts, even the walk to the bus-stop hurts, and the whole bus hurts as well, I lower my guilty-looking eyes, I'm afraid of looking people in the eye, sometimes I cross my palms and extend my wrists, I hold out my hands so that people can arrest me and hand me over to the cops, because I feel guilty even about this once too loud a solitude which isn't loud any longer, because I'm hurt not only by the escalator which takes me down to the infernal regions below, I'm hurt even by the looks of the people travelling up, each of them has somewhere to go, while I've reached the peak of emptiness and don't know where I want to go.

A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving. A good artist lets their intuition take them wherever it wants to.

But I have heard that he who is skilful in managing the life entrusted to him for a time travels on the land without having to shun rhinoceros or tiger, and enters a host without having to avoid buff coat or sharp weapon.

Tomorrow will be like today, and the day after tomorrow will be like day before yesterday," said Apollonius. "I see your remaining days each as quiet, tedious collections of hours. You will not travel anywhere. You will think no new thoughts. You will experience no new passions. Older you will become but not wiser. Stiffer but not more dignified. Childless you are, and childless you shall remain. Of that suppleness you once commanded in your youth, of that strange simplicity which once attracted a few men to you, neither endures, nor shall you recapture any of them anymore. People will talk to you and visit with you out of sentiment or pity, not because you have anything to offer them. Have you ever seen an old cornstalk turning brown, dying, but refusing to fall over, upon which stray birds alight now and then, hardly remarking what it is they perch on? That is you. I cannot fathom your place in life's economy. A living thing should either create or destroy according to its capacity and caprice, but you, you do neither. You only live on dreaming of the nice things you would like to have happen to you but which never happen; and you wonder vaguely why the young lives about you which you occasionally chide for a fancied impropriety never listen to you and seem to flee at your approach. When you die you will be buried and forgotten and that is all. The morticians will enclose you in a worm-proof casket, thus sealing even unto eternity the clay of your uselessness. And for all the good or evil, creation or destruction, that your living might have accomplished, you might just as well has never lived at all. I cannot see the purpose in such a life. I can see in it only vulgar, shocking waste.

If a country is governed wisely, its inhabitants will be content. They enjoy the labor of their hands and don't waste time inventing labor-saving machines. Since they dearly love their homes, they aren't interested in travel. There may be a few wagons and boats, but these don't go anywhere. There may be an arsenal of weapons, but nobody ever uses them. People enjoy their food, take pleasure in being with their families, spend weekends working in their gardens, delight in the doings of the neighborhood. And even though the next country is so close that people can hear its roosters crowing and its dogs barking, they are content to die of old age without ever having gone to see it.

Without going out the door, Know the world. Without peeping through the window, See heaven’s DAO. The further you travel, The less you know. This is why the Sage Knows without budging, Identifies without looking, Does without trying.

Fate causes the old soul to forget all the many regions it has traveled over time, and all the punishments it has endured along the way. This forgetfulness becomes the body that surrounds the soul. It pretends to be the soul, but it is a false spirit.

Without going abroad, you can have knowledge of the world. Without gazing at the stars, you can perceive the heavenly Tao. The more you wander, the less you know. The wise explore without traveling, discern without seeing, finish without striving, and arrive at their destination without leaving home.

We tend to expect great things from “seeing the world” and “getting experience.” A Roman poet remarked that travelers change their sky but not their soul. Other poets, untraveled and inexperienced, Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson, prove Lao Tzu’s point: it’s the inner eye that really sees the world.

In ancient times, as today, many people thought they could become enlightened by traveling to places they considered sacred. They visited holy lands; they went on pilgrimages. Unlike them, Tao cultivators recognized that spirituality came from within, and so they did not feel the need to search frantically all over the material world for enlightenment.

The skilful traveller leaves no traces of his wheels or footsteps; the skilful speaker says nothing that can be found fault with or blamed; the skilful reckoner uses no tallies; the skilful closer needs no bolts or bars, while to open what he has shut will be impossible; the skilful binder uses no strings or knots, while to unloose what he has bound will be impossible.

The brahman concept also contains the concept of rta, right order, the orderly course of the world. In brahman, the creative universal essence and universal Ground, all things come upon the right way, for in it they are eternally dissolved and recreated; all development in an orderly way proceeds from brahman. The concept of rta is a stepping-stone to the concept of tao in Lao-tzu. Tao is the right way, the reign of law, the middle road between the opposites, freed from them and yet uniting them in itself. The purpose of life is to travel this middle road and never to deviate towards the opposites. The ecstatic element is entirely absent in Lao-tzu; its place is taken by sublime philosophic lucidity, an intellectual and intuitive wisdom obscured by no mystical haze—a wisdom that represents what is probably the highest attainable degree of spiritual superiority, as far removed from chaos as the stars from the disorder of the actual world. It tames all that is wild, without denaturing it and turning it into something higher.

A good traveller has no fixed plans,’ says the Chinese sage Lao Tzu, ‘and is not intent upon arriving.’ There could be no better way to make the journey.

Once during the protests before the World Economic Forum, a kind of junket of tycoons, corporate flacks and politicians, networking and sharing cocktails at the Waldorf Astoria, pretended to be discussing ways to alleviate global poverty. I was invited to engage in a radio debate with one of their representatives. As it happened the task went to another activist but I did get far enough to prepare a three-point program that I think would have taken care of the problem nicely: - an immediate amnesty on international debt (An amnesty on personal debt might not be a bad idea either but it’s a different issue.) - an immediate cancellation of all patents and other intellectual property rights related to technology more than one year old - the elimination of all restrictions on global freedom of travel or residence. The rest would pretty much take care of itself. The moment the average resident of Tanzania, or Laos, was no longer forbidden to relocate to Minneapolis or Rotterdam, the government of every rich and powerful country in the world would certainly decide nothing was more important than finding a way to make sure people in Tanzania and Laos preferred to stay there. Do you really think they couldn’t come up with something? (p. 79)

A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.” - Lao Tzu

A small country has fewer people Though there are machines that can work ten to a hundred times faster than man, they are not needed. The people take death seriously and do not travel far. Though they have boats and carriages, no one uses them. Though they have armor and weapons, no one displays them. Men return to the knotting of rope in place of writing. Their food is plain and good, their clothes fine but simple, their homes secure; They are happy in their ways. Though they live within sight of their neighbors, and crowing cocks and barking dogs are heard across the way, Yet they leave each other in peace while they grow old and die. Lao Tse- Tao Te Ching. Ch. 80

The Safari Club’s secret alliance achieved successful military intervention in Zaire in response to two invasions from Angola, and provided weapons to Somalia during the Ethiopian conflict. An estimated twenty percent of the international arms sales to non-Communist countries were negotiated by Khashoggi, who amassed a fortune from brokering billion-dollar defense deals. Khashoggi had close ties with the Central Intelligence Agency, whose associate deputy director Theodore Shackley was in charge of spy missions in Germany, Laos and Vietnam – countries where Holden had also traveled.

What happened at Novgorod was not entirely George Killingworth’s fault, although Danny Hislop afterwards blamed his beard, which he claimed had a life of its own like Chang-kuo Lao’s miraculous donkey, which could travel thousands of leagues a day, and then at rest could be folded like paper.

This point was driven home for me for the first time when I was traveling in Asia in 1978 on a trip to a forest monastery in northeastern Thailand, Wat Ba Pong, on the Thai-Lao border. I was taken there by my meditation teacher, Jack Kornfield, who was escorting a group of us to meet the monk under whom he had studied at that forest hermitage. This man, Achaan Chaa, described himself as a “simple forest monk,” and he ran a hundred-acre forest monastery that was simple and old-fashioned, with one notable exception. Unlike most contemporary Buddhist monasteries in Thailand, where the practice of meditation as the Buddha had taught had all but died out, Achaan Chaa’s demanded intensive meditation practice and a slow, deliberate, mindful attention to the mundane details of everyday life. He had developed a reputation as a meditation master of the first order. My own first impressions of this serene environment were redolent of the newly extinguished Vietnam War, scenes of which were imprinted in my memory from years of media attention. The whole place looked extraordinarily fragile to me. On my first day, I was awakened before dawn to accompany the monks on their early morning alms rounds through the countryside. Clad in saffron robes, clutching black begging bowls, they wove single file through the green and brown rice paddies, mist rising, birds singing, as women and children knelt with heads bowed along the paths and held out offerings of sticky rice or fruits. The houses along the way were wooden structures, often perched on stilts, with thatched roofs. Despite the children running back and forth laughing at the odd collection of Westerners trailing the monks, the whole early morning seemed caught in a hush. After breakfasting on the collected food, we were ushered into an audience with Achaan Chaa. A severe-looking man with a kindly twinkle in his eyes, he sat patiently waiting for us to articulate the question that had brought us to him from such a distance. Finally, we made an attempt: “What are you really talking about? What do you mean by ‘eradicating craving’?” Achaan Chaa looked down and smiled faintly. He picked up the glass of drinking water to his left. Holding it up to us, he spoke in the chirpy Lao dialect that was his native tongue: “You see this goblet? For me, this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on a shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ But when I understand that this glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.”5 Achaan Chaa was not just talking about the glass, of course, nor was he speaking merely of the phenomenal world, the forest monastery, the body, or the inevitability of death. He was also speaking to each of us about the self. This self that you take to be so real, he was saying, is already broken.

She wasn’t my type, though I really don’t have a type. I’ve spent my entire life traveling overseas. My parents worked for a charitable foundation in places like Laos and Peru and Sierra Leone. I don’t have any siblings. It was exciting and fun when I was a kid, but it got tiresome and difficult as I grew older. I wanted to stay in one place. I wanted to make some friends and play on one basketball team and, well, meet girls and do teenage stuff. It’s hard to do that when you’re backpacking in Nepal. This

I Am a lamp, so that you might see Me. I Am a path for you to travel.

The Divine Feminine Tao Invites Us to Act The Lao-Tzu’s Tao Te Ching portrays the Tao as “mother,” “virgin,” and “womb.” She is the “immortal void” who endlessly “returns to source” to renew life again and again. Quoting from my own translation of Poem 6 (Anderson, in press), the Tao is The immortal void Called the dark womb, the dark womb’s gate From her Creation takes root An unbroken gossamer That prevails without effort. From her “dark womb,” all life flows. To align with the Tao as mother, virgin, and womb is to discover her path to peace and wellbeing with ourselves, each other, the earth, and the natural world. At a time in history when human greed and aggression are out of control and threatening life as we know it, her message to us is also a warning. The great message of the Tao Te Ching is the ordinariness of peace and wellbeing that arises from spontaneous action that seeks no gain for the self. This is to enact the path of wei wu wei, meaning to act without acting or do without doing. Wei wu wei does not mean doing nothing, not thinking, not traveling, not initiating projects, not cooking dinner, not planting a garden in the spring, and so on. To the contrary. For in leaving self-gain aside, our actions arise naturally and spontaneously to meet concrete situations and events without plotting or maneuvering in advance or expecting to be liked, appreciated, or rewarded for what we do. Aligning with the Tao is to seek what is lowest and most needy like a mother might act naturally and spontaneously on behalf of a child in danger. Quoting from my translation of Poem 8 (Anderson, in press): The highest good is like water Bringing goodness to all things without struggle In seeking low places spurned by others The Tao resembles water. In so doing, we attend to what matters most—not tomorrow but right now. Per the situation, our actions may be swift or slow, but they will in time resolve obstacles at their source in the same way that water carves out canyons and moves mountains. What matters most will vary for each of us. This is wei wu wei in action. Over time, enacting this feminine path to peace will impact all our relations with others, including animals and other species, each other, our families and communities, the conduct of governments, relationships between nations and peoples, and with planet Earth. The wisdoms of the Divine Feminine Tao may be applied to our personal initiatives and our response to personal and modern crises, including meeting the challenges of the current coronavirus pandemic. Wei wu wei invites us to act spontaneously and naturally like water, determining its own course and leaving self-gain aside.

I am a beacon of light to those who see Me. I am a mirror to those who look for Me. I am a door to those who knock on Me. I am a Way for you, the traveler.

An estimated 30 percent of the bombs dropped on Laos failed to detonate. These and other UXOs [unexploded ordinances] remain in the ground and continue to take lives and limbs.

Plain of Jars is a collection of thousands of massive limestone cups whose origins remain unknown, scattered over a wide area of Laos’s Xiangkhoang Province.

If my family had crossed the river two months later, they would have been massacred. Thailand was no longer taking Hmong refugees from Laos; there were too many coming in because of the continued influx of North Vietnamese soldiers to help the Pathet Lao kill the remaining Hmong. Jane Hamilton-Merritt, a journalist from America, recorded the deaths of two hundred Hmong people, families with small children, on the Mekong on July 27, 1979. The group was on a sandbar gathering vines to weave a bridge to Thailand. They built fires and boiled water in old U.S. Army canteens. The women took off their shirts to put over sticks to shelter their babies and the old women. They fed their hungry children. Many of them were little more than skeletons. The adults didn’t eat. They saved their rice for the children. Thai soldiers appeared on the Thai bank in jeeps with a machine gun bolted to the front hood. In two Thai patrol boats, the soldiers traveled to the island. The Thai soldiers slashed the vines that tried to connect the people to Thailand. Thailand had had enough Hmong refugees. On August 2, 1979, Hamilton-Merritt learned that a group of thirty to forty Pathet Lao soldiers had landed on the river island and the Hmong were massacred.*

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” Lao Tzu

I KNOW HOW THIS is going to sound, but Anthony Bourdain was the one who hooked me on Laos. Over the previous year, I had slipped further into insomnia—the accumulated effect of Benghazi stress and a hungry newborn keeping me awake for long stretches of each night. I’d fill that time lying on my couch in a darkened living room plowing through every episode of Bourdain’s various travel shows, over and over. I felt a sense of recognition in this guy wandering around the world, trying to find some temporary connection with other human beings living within their own histories. I’d been vaguely familiar with the story of Laos. Hillary had visited in 2012, and I remembered that we cobbled together some money for UXO clearance—a few numbers on a budget sheet. But the Bourdain episode that showed human beings on a television screen in the middle of the night, struggling in a place that was still a war zone, forty years after a war that I’d never learned about in school, woke my interest. I added two items to the bucket list for my final year in the job: Get more money for Laos, and get Obama to tape an episode of Parts Unknown with Anthony Bourdain.

Even the rickshaw coolie, given, to be on the safe side, double his normal fee, takes the money in grim silence and immediately looks away. It is most uncomfortable to feel oneself as an object of this universal detestation , a mere foreign-devil in fact.

(The pastor) was concerned only with the natives' spiritual welfare, and their material conditions were no interest of his whatever. One thing could be said in favour of the plantations, in fact, and that was that a man working there was at least put out of the way of temptation. His view was that it didn't really matter what happened to a man in this world so long as he had acquired the priceless treasure of Faith. When Jesus said that 'He that believeth in me shall be saved' he was not referring to this life.

For all the sickening stuff one finds below the surface, Japan is a very safe, civilized place. Maybe they had something figured out. Maybe it's better to recognize such taboo subjects and create a space to contain them, rather than suppress them to the point to where they burst out in more harmful ways. Maybe the Japanese are just more honest about our dark sexual impulses, and their seemingly lax attitudes reflect a more realistic approach to the problem-a kind of societal harm reduction-like experiments in drug decriminalization.

The horror the Japanese have of the unexpected and the decisions is requires. The Japanese will become the most aesthetic people in the world. Six Buddhist sects have sprung from the interpretation of the scriptures and on ceremonial days, their priests wear tunics of raspberry, saffron, pistachio or violet, which create a lovely effect on the gray-brown-green of the Japanese landscape. The cemeteries are the fish ponds for the temples. These foreign visitors demand that before they leave Japan, someone should wrap up the "soul of Japan" for them. What do they want? Suddenly, through a simple mental process, their ignorance should be transformed into knowledge, clear-cut and precise, please, so that they can discuss it when they get home. I judge them, but I too, would sometimes like to find my meal set in front of me and fast. We come to this thin and frugal country with our greedy metabolisms: the whole West is that way. The golden dishes, the maharajahs, the rubies as big as the duck eggs, that is what struck our first explorers, not the frugality that is truly one of the marks of Asia. Have you ever drunk a good bottle of wine with a connaisseur? It is a form of torture. Because of the rhythm of Noh, travel is so slow that winter always overtakes travelers en route. They travel in tiny steps across a sort of mental Tibet. Japan: a self-sustaining island, rich in gold and in solver, excellent products, a disciplined and frugal population that carries cleanliness to the point of fanaticism, an always-appropriate alternation between honesty and hypocrisy, in short, the best governed state in the world. Walking does help to support the insupportable. When things turn bad, rather than expecting too much from people, one must sharpen one's relations with things. The tao ( the philosophy of Lao-tzu, sixth century B.C ) taught that our mind is a troublemaker that interferes between life and us, that we are victims of our categories. What exactly is Zen? For some it is a religion, for others a form of therapy, a means of liberation, a guide to character, a reaction of the Chinese spirit against the Indian spirit. True saints are not always on hand for writers who are passing through, people who don't need what one knows. In the Orient, knowledge is given spoonful by spoonful to the people who are truly hungry and the word "secret" means nothing here. In old Chinese Zen it was traditional to choose the gardener who knew nothing to succeed the master rather than one who knew too much. In this style of decor, as in the food, there is an immateriality repeated again and again: make yourself small, don't hurt the air, don't would our eyes with your terrible colored shirts, don't be so restless and don't offend this slightly bloodless perfection that we have been tending for eight hundred years. A crane preening his feathers, this elegant bird, so inexpressibly white, posed in the middle of the reeds, like a Ming vase.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving

It must be said that the Japanese are notorious perverts.

The Philippines is a one-beer nation and San Miguel is the brand.

Travel is often compared to a drug, and though it is a cliché, the analogy is a strong one. Traveling, like a mind- or mood-altering substance, is often exhilarating; it gives you a rush, and can be absolutely addictive. And like drugs, the more you do, the bigger dose you require to hit that special receptor in the brain-the place that made the experience feel so good the first time. In a way, you're always chasing that first hit.

In one life she was a travel vlogger who had 1,750,000 YouTube subscribers and almost as many people following her on Instagram, and her most popular video was one where she fell off a gondola in Venice. She also had one about Rome called 'A Roma Therapy'. In one life she was a single parent to a baby that literally wouldn't sleep. In one life she ran the showbiz column in a tabloid newspaper and did stories about Ryan Bailey's relationships. In one life she was the picture editor at the National Geographic. In one life she was a successful eco-architect who lived a carbon-neutral existence in a self-designed bungalow that harvested rain-water and ran on solar power. In one life she was an aid worker in Bostwana. In one life a cat-sitter. In one life a volunteer in a homeless shelter. In one life she was sleeping on her only friend's sofa. In one life she taught music in Montreal. In one life she spent all day arguing with people she didn't know on Twitter and ended a fair proportion of her tweets by saying 'Do better' while secretly realising she was telling herself to do that. In one life she had no social media accounts. In one life she'd never drunk alcohol. In one life she was a chess champion and currently visiting Ukraine for a tournament. In one life she was married to a minor Royal and hated every minute. In one life her Facebook and Instagram only contained quotes from Rumi and Lao Tzu. In one life she was on to her third husband and already bored. In one life she was a vegan power-lifter. In one life she was travelling around South Corsican coast, and they talked quantum mechanics and got drunk together at a beachside bar until Hugo slipped away, out of that life, and mid-sentence, so Nora was left talking to a blank Hugo who was trying to remember her name. In some lives Nora attracted a lot of attention. In some lives she attracted none. In some lives she was rich. In some lives she was poor. In some lives she was healthy. In some lives she couldn't climb the stairs without getting out of breath. In some lives she was in a relationship, in others she was solo, in many she was somewhere in between. In some lives she was a mother, but in most she wasn't. She had been a rock star, an Olympics, a music teacher, a primary school teacher, a professor, a CEO, a PA, a chef, a glaciologist, a climatologist, an acrobat, a tree-planter, an audit manager, a hair-dresser, a professional dog walker, an office clerk, a software developer, a receptionist, a hotel cleaner, a politician, a lawyer, a shoplifter, the head of an ocean protection charity, a shop worker (again), a waitress, a first-line supervisor, a glass-blower and a thousand other things. She'd had horrendous commutes in cars, on buses, in trains, on ferries, on bike, on foot. She'd had emails and emails and emails. She'd had a fifty-three-year-old boss with halitosis touch her leg under a table and text her a photo of his penis. She'd had colleagues who lied about her, and colleagues who loved her, and (mainly) colleagues who were entirely indifferent. In many lives she chose not to work and in some she didn't choose not to work but still couldn't find any. In some lives she smashed through the glass ceiling and in some she just polished it. She had been excessively over- and under-qualified. She had slept brilliantly and terribly. In some lives she was on anti-depressants and in others she didn't even take ibuprofen for a headache. In some lives she was a physically healthy hypochondriac and in some a seriously ill hypochondriac and in most she wasn't a hypochondriac at all. There was a life where she had chronic fatigue, a life where she had cancer, a life where she'd suffered a herniated disc and broken her ribs in a car accident.

The Forest Temple In the heart of a dense forest, there stood an ancient Buddhist temple run by a wise monk named Lao Chen. The temple was renowned throughout the region for its peace and tranquility. One day, a group of curious travelers ventured into the forest and reached the temple, captivated by its aura of serenity. The travelers hailed from different parts of the world and belonged to various cultures and religions. They wanted to know the secret behind the temple's peace. They asked Lao Chen how it was possible for people with such diverse beliefs to coexist peacefully within the temple. Lao Chen smiled and led the travelers to a wide garden filled with colorful flowers. "Look at these flowers," he said. "Each flower has a unique color, shape, and fragrance. Yet, despite their differences, they bloom together in the same soil. So it is with different religions and beliefs. Each has its beauty and uniqueness, but all can peacefully coexist in our minds and hearts." The travelers were struck by Lao Chen's words and asked how they could apply this wisdom in their daily lives, even in situations of conflict. Lao Chen guided them to a small pond in the woods. "Look at the water," he said. "Water is formless, yet it can adapt to any container. If we want to resolve conflicts, we must be like water, flexible and adaptable, so that we can blend harmoniously even in the most challenging situations." The story tells us… The story underscores the importance of embracing diversity and finding harmony among different beliefs and cultures. The analogy of the flowers in the garden illustrates that, like diverse flowers coexisting peacefully, people from various religions and backgrounds can live harmoniously together.