Laos - Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Northern Thailand - page 687

Luang Nam Tha Museum
MAP GOOGLE MAP
(admission 5000K; 8.30-11.30am & 1.30-3.30pm Mon-Thu, 8.30-11.30am Fri) The Museum con-
tains a collection of local anthropological artefacts, such as ethnic clothing, Khamu
bronze drums and ceramics. There are also a number of Buddha images and the usual dis-
play chronicling the Revolution.

MUSEUM

Golden Stupa
(admission 5000K) By far Nam Tha's most striking landmark, the large golden stupa sits on a
steep ridge directly northwest of town. It gleams majestically when viewed from afar. Up
close, the effect is a bit more bling, but the views over town are particularly impressive.

BUDDHIST STUPA

TONY POE: THE HORROR, THE HORROR

Exceptional secret agent or flipped-out crazoid? CIA Special Ops agent Anthony Poe was every com-
munist guerilla's worst nightmare, famous for going native, à la Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now ,
and collecting Pathet Lao ears and dropping heads on his enemy's porch from a Cessna plane. In many
ways he became as savage as the forests where he made his home.
In 1961 Poe was sent to the mountainous north to ignite 'Operation Momentum', an American at-
tempt to repel North Vietnamese forces from Laos as well as providing home-grown resistance to na-
tional communist sympathies. His assignment: to train up a crack force of 10,000 hill-tribe warriors.
He chose the Hmong: plucky, suspicious of communism and eager to make a trade of guns and money
in return for their opium and courage. Poe won the loyalty of his warriors - contravening his paymas-
ters' orders - by fighting beside them and intrepidly attacking enemy-infested strongholds such as
Luang Namtha on the Chinese border, risking China's intervention in the Secret War. Furious, the CIA
considered its man a liability, their prodigy now a Frankenstein's monster. Pathet Lao ears were
stapled by Poe to progress reports and sent to the CIA 'Bubble' in Bangkok. As far as he was con-
cerned: 'War is hell, if you're gonna do it you've gotta do it with gusto.'
After the Pathet Lao victory of 1975 Poe retired to Thailand; a renegade scorned, he would drunk-
enly shoot off his pistol in Bangkok bars, never forgiving the CIA for yanking him out of Laos before
'the job was done'. The precursor and partial inspiration to Coppola's Kurtz, cinema's most enduring
icon of the war in Vietnam, Poe died in 2003.

Tours

Green Discovery

ECOTOUR