Industry, Laos style

The first stop of a trek we did the other day in Laos started with a visit to a salt factory just outside Savannakhet. It seems like a pretty big operation for Laos. It employs 80 or so people.




Evaporation ponds


Collecting the salt from the ponds -- the hat is not standard factory issue

The manager at the plant told us that there is a 6-kilometer (square? total?) lake of salt water beneath the plant. Seemed a bit mysterious to us: Laos is a landlocked country, far from the sea, and the manager said he didn't know why the water was there.

But we tried some and it's very very salty, far saltier than sea water.

They pump it up in two spots in pipes (maybe twice the size of garden hoses) and collect it through both evaporation and boiling. The evaporation ponds made me think of those in San Francisco Bay and their varied browns and reds and greens, but these were pure white.

The boiling is done in in big thatched-hut sort of buildings. Astonishingly, at least to me, the fuel for boiling the water is wood.


Boiling building


Boiling vat

Each family is in charge of a vat -- the man collects wood from the forest and the wife keeps the water boiling and collects the salt. The kids and puppies seem to run around helpfully, though the manager said that the kids do go to school. The families are paid by the ton they produce. Their wages are tiny by American standards but pretty good for the area, apparently.

The fires are fueled by big tree-sized logs. It seemed like an awfully inefficient way to make salt. I asked what would happen if they ran out of trees to cut down, but the question didn't seem to make sense to either the manager or our guide. The factory is surrounded by trees now, so maybe it doesn't seem like it will ever be a problem.

Laos still has far more of its forests than other Southeast Asian countries -- this was starkly evident when we flew from Luang Prabang to Siem Reap, passing abruptly from dark forests to the light green rice paddies of Thailand and Cambodia. I hope that in this respect, as it develops, Laos won't go the way of its neighbors.