COPE Visitor Centre, Vientiane, Laos

After seeing some beautiful sites around Laos visiting COPE really brought us back to the reality for this stunning country.

Still dealing with the aftermath of US bombings during the Vietnam war, and still holding the title of most bombed country in the world per capita.

From 1964 to 1973, the U.S. dropped more than 2.5M tons of ordnance on Laos during 580,000 bombings —equal to a planeload of bombs every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for NINE years.

Up to a third of the bombs dropped, around 80 million, did not explode.

Over 5 decades on, less than 10% of these munitions have been destroyed.Read more