~ JUNE 1 2005

Where can I find a trustworthy travel guide in Laos?

Your best bet would be to visit a travel agency. They have people readily available to give tours. You can easily negotiate and tell them what you need or don't need. Other suggestions include contacting a hotel who will be able find someone or they may have someone on hand to show you around also. You can even visit a temple where you'll probably find some monks who are eager to speak English and show you around town. If you're in a major city area it'll be very easy to find a guide and they're very affordable.

Even if you're in the outskirts, the hotels or travel lodges will have suggestions of where to go, if they don't have a tour guide to offer. In a lot of cases, you might not even need a guide as Lao cities are pretty easy to navigate. Find a city map or use a map from the travel guide books and you're pretty much set. Lao cities aren't that big. Vientiane is large but it's very navigable.

I have done research on the erawan/airavata (Hindu/Buddhist mythological elephant being). What do you think of the possibilities that the former Laos flag could have been a thirty-three headed elephant instead of three?

To be honest, we haven't heard much about a 33 headed erawan. Although, you're correct as some of your research shows Indian artists and mythology used to dictate that the airavata had 33 heads.

The Indian change to a much simpler three headed elephant is simply that. It was simpler to draw and yet still had the odd number of heads. We believe when the former Lao kingdom adopted the erawan that by that point it was typical of erawans to be depicted with three heads. Therefore, for all we know, there was probably little dispute as to how many heads to use in the image for the kingdom's flag. Moreover, it probably would have been somewhat difficult to have a 33 headed elephant on a flag. The detail and size would complicate things.

Nevertheless, your inquiry is most interesting.