Get 20% off DeleteMe by going to https://joindeleteme.com/PLACES and use code PLACES to protect your privacy!

We visited Laos a few years ago. It is a pretty and quiet country, but VERY strange. Roadways would be paved, then the pavement abruptly ends, only to start again a few hundred meters away. You can get a local sim card for your phone, but they need to search though your phone for restricted apps. VPNs are banned. The railroads were totally taken over by China. Access to stations and rail transport (which were built several Km away from city centers) is within a Chinese exclusion zone - a land area where only Chinese business are allowed to develop. Trains are built by China, staffed by Chinese and secured by China.

Funny how the WORKERS parties always ban non-state (read controlled) unions, organized by the WORKERS. It's almost like communist, socialist, etc parties aren't for the WORKERS, but just for a rebranded authoritarianism that make them the elite instead of capitalists or aristocrats.

"No hes not!!!... Hes Laotian." - Cotton HIll

We Vietnamese loved Laos so freaking much, but when i was there, half of the country was funded by China and is heavily in debt

My neighbors growing up were Laotian Hmong, some of the nicest people you’ll ever meet

The Pathet Lao have imitated their Vietnamese overlords by combining market reforms with tight political control.

I guess you don't get "King of the Hill" in Prague.

I went to Houayxay in December of 2025. It seemed very strange and very VERY poor. I nearly had a heart attack when they gave me the bill. Millions of kip plz sir. Then I saw the exchange rate and laughed.

2:00 - Mid roll ads
3:35 - Chapter 1 - LAOS
7:15 - Chapter 2 - The Cold War
11:25 - Chapter 3 - Laos 1975
14:05 - Chapter 4 - A new Laos
17:50 - Chapter 5 - Crash & burn
21:05 - Chapter 6 - The leading nucleus
23:10 - Chapter 7 - Repression
26:35 - Chapter 8 - The chinese connection
31:15 - Chapter 9 - The people

I got the visit Laos last year when I was on vacation with my family last December. It is certainly a beautiful country. One of the interesting things we saw where Chinese-owned stores while we were visiting Luang Prabang (beautiful town btw). He explained that because a lot of tourists from China visit Laos, Chinese-owned businesses were allowed to set up shop. These shops apparently do not pay taxes to the government of Laos and compete with shops owned by Laos citizens. I asked if it was possible to advocate without being seen as dissenters and from what I understand, it is almost impossible.

Visiting a Communist country was certainly on my bucket list. And it's from that trip where I can say that I am grateful to live in the US. That being said, I would definitely love to visit Laos again in the future. There is just so much to see.

There are 8 buildings ovsr 8 stories in Pakse, 7 are unfinished, 1 is an inaccessible hotel. If you google it, 90% of those businesses are closed, purposefully. The few businesses there are, inside they are filthy. The middle of no where Ubon on the Thai side is a world of difference.

Hank Hill’s neighbor was from here.

Hi I’m British and my parents are African (Ghanaian & Sierra Leonean). When I was a teenager my parents thought it would be good if I did uni in Sierra Leone. A week after being in SL my mum had a stroke. Now up until then she did all the heavy lifting for the family, so once she was gone everything fell apart. Money stopped, Dad disappeared, and I quickly found myself homeless in one of the poorest countries on the planet. After being robbed to my boxers it took 8 years before I was even allowed in British High commission (the security wouldn’t even look at me for years until I luckily bumped into the vice ambassador) then another year to get back to the UK. I owed the government £800 for “saving” me and was restricted from having a passport until I paid. My life is much better now and I’ve started my own family, but it would be nice to have a platform to speak about this. There isn’t a day I don’t think about the horrors I endured. I don’t even know how I’m alive and well. I shouldn’t be, and If I lost hope for one second I probably wouldn’t be.

One of my friends is the daughter of the former Governor of Luang Prabang - her brother returned from officer training in the USA just in time to help evacuate the family to Thailand......their property was taken over by Pathet Lao - who were also related to them!  Today their properties have been bulldozed and replaced by a tourist resort owned by a French company and managed by the children of the same Pathet Lao that expropriated them........Communism - hah!

China is actually very misunderstood in that people say they're not communist. They absolutely are communist but they're not isolationist... they take advantage of their power in global capitalism because they know the rest of the world isn't communist. So they engage in capitalism on their own terms, but they're still communist. Basically they're adding excess funding to their national budget by abusing foreign capitalism, while still being socialist inside their own borders.

My Hmong friend: "Oh, we could never go back. They wouldn't just kill us. They'd tear us to pieces."

About 8 years ago I lived for 1 year in Laos. Having many years experience living in SE Asia, my experience was pleasant. It’s chill, mostly peaceful and infrastructure in Vientiane is similar to Cambodia and perhaps Vietnam about 20 years ago. As a foreigner, it was easy to enter and get a 90 day visa, live there, teach online, and live simply and comfortably. Side note: Laos has the cheapest or nearly the cheapest electricity rates on earth.

0:52 If you are delulu you can also add Transnistria (in Moldova) to the list. They are proud of that.😂

The hammer and sickle is everywhere there. oh and there Songkran festival on the Mekong is rad! 😁😁