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In April 2023 we took a package tour to South Africa with our friends Craig and Sonia. We flew via Singapore to Cape Town.
Africa
Southern Africa
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- Written by: Richard_McKie
- Parent Category: Travel
- Category: Africa
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The Lao People's Democratic Republic is a communist country, like China to the North and Vietnam with which it shares its Eastern border.
And like the bordering communist countries, the government has embraced limited private ownership and free market capitalism, in theory. But there remain powerful vested interests, and residual pockets of political power, particularly in the agricultural sector, and corruption is a significant issue.
During the past decade tourism has become an important source of income and is now generating around a third of the Nation's domestic product. Tourism is centred on Luang Prabang and to a lesser extent the Plane of Jars and the capital, Vientiane.
When George VI died unexpectedly in February 1952, I was just 6 years old, so the impact of his death on me, despite my parents' laments for a good wartime leader and their sitting up to listen to his funeral on the radio, was not great.
At Thornleigh Primary School school assemblies I was aware that there was a change because the National Anthem changed and we now sang God Save The Queen.
Usually, we would just sing the first verse, accompanied by older children playing recorders, but on special occasions we would sing the third verse too. Yet for some mysterious reason, never the second.
The Coronation was a big deal in Australia, as well as in Britain and the other Dominions (Canada, South Africa and New Zealand) and there was a lot of 'bling': china; tea towels; spoons; and so on. The media went mad.
In my novella The Cloud I have given one of the characters an opinion about 'goodness' in which he dismisses 'original sin' as a cause of evil and suffering and proposes instead 'original goodness'.
Most sane people want to 'do good', in other words to follow that ethical system they were taught at their proverbial 'mother's knee' (all those family and extended influences that form our childhood world view).
That's the reason we now have jihadists raging, seemingly out of control, across areas of Syria and Iraq and threatening the entire Middle East with their version of 'goodness'.