What is going on in the world?

Admittedly, it is not easy to stop a person like me, and that was something that my mother used to say to me quite often. Sometimes positively, some other in a not so positive way, particularly for her, who wished me to be quiet at least for an hour.
However, this time my blog will come to you a bit earlier, and that is because I will leave tomorrow early in the morning to the first part of my holiday.

I will be once again exploring Italian beauties and places that are less usual, in the hope to find those little, hidden gems that do not just escape the tourist's eyes, but also the eyes of those people who live there day after day, ignoring them and spending their lives close to amazingly beautiful places.

Next month, instead, I have another holiday coming up, and the premises started to look quite challenging.

We planned to go on holiday to Vietnam and spend some time also in Laos. Initially, the plan was very roughly designed this way:

We will spend a little more than a couple of weeks before coming back to our everyday lives. As most of the times happen, we have booked only the first part of the journey, that is the hotel in Saigon for the first three nights, the flight to Pakse in Laos and the first few nights in the hotel in Pakse (route 1). From there we'll see what will happen, but the routes 2 and 3 are on our main idea of the journey to see the most.

I do not know if you have followed the recent news, but on the 28^th of July a part of a hydroelectric dam system has collapsed, discharging on the nearby rivers over  5 billion liters of water. The effects have been devastating for the people who have lost their houses, or loved ones. It is a disaster when these calamities happen in the region where the preparedness is low, and the infrastructures are inadequate to protect the population from similar tragedies. There have been recorded at least 29 people dead, over 1000 missing and over 6000 households lost in areas where slight or no mobile telephone coverage exists.

https://instant.com.pk/hundreds-missing-in-laos-after-hydropower-dam-collapse/

The fact seems that because of the heavy monsoon rains the "Saddle dam,"(1) which was already suffering from structural problems became overcharged. 

That was the last straw, and within a couple of days it failed and flooded the villages located downstream (4):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Laos_dam_collapse#/maplink/0

Of course, in these kinds of situations there is always the final question: "could this disaster be avoided?" 

This is a kindof answer we (outsiders) cannot give, and we need to remember that to evacuate an area where there isn't any mobile phone coverage, you need more than a couple of days time.

The situation seems to get stabilized day after day, but there will be quite some time before people will be able to have their houses back and for sure they will never have their loved ones back. With this in mind, it is not going to be a sweet holiday, but as usual, my target is not much to enjoy the sun in a five-star resort, but to discover new realities, understanding this world better, one travel at a time.

So far, my wandering has brought me to experience many different realities that allowed me to understand fully how lucky I am. For all the troubles I have been through, it seems less than a small fraction of what people in other countries are going through in their daily lives. Many of the places and the people I have met there have changed my way of seeing the world and will stay in my heart forever.

I will be back next week with other topics I hope you will find interesting.

Until then, I wish you a great weekend!

Stay safe and stay tuned!