Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Brief history
It was near Attapeu, the capital of Laos's southeasternmost province, that the Ho Chi Minh
Trail diverged, with one artery running south towards Cambodia and the other into South Vi-
etnam. But despite being the final staging point in Laos for North Vietnamese supplies, At-
tapeu somehow eluded the grave effects of war that wiped other southern cities off the map.
That the town remains an oasis among rugged mountains perhaps reflects what some Amer-
ican military advisors mocked as the reluctance of the Royal Lao Army, which controlled At-
tapeu in the late 1960s, to engage their opponents in battle - a trait that prompted the Americ-
ans to nickname the Royalist troops “the Fastest Army Running”, a moniker derived from the
army's old French acronym FAR. When the Pathet Lao announced that they intended to take
the city in April 1970, Royal Lao troops lived up to their reputation and fled. Five years later,
the Pathet Lao made the entire province a
re-education camp
, resettling political enemies
and forbidding them to leave the province for years. The Pathet Lao perhaps thought it only
fitting to punish opponents with a dose of what they had had to endure, living in the coun-
try's remotest areas during their Thirty Year Struggle; what better place than one which, even
by nineteenth-century Lao standards, was known for its “extreme unhealthiness”, as reported
by French explorer François Jules Harmand, who visited Attapeu in 1877. This reputation
festers to this day, with Attapeu registering one of the country's highest rates of malaria.
Such tumultuous history lends new currency to the old legend surrounding Attapeu's name.
When the first lowland Lao immigrants to the region asked the indigenous people what the
name of their town was, the latter thought the Lao were pointing to a pile of water buffalo
dung, or
itkapu
in their language, and responded accordingly. With a slight change in pronun-
ciation to accommodate the Lao accent, the town of “buffalo shit” was born.
