Water Monitoring in Vang Vieng, Laos
Wednesday, March 18th, 2009By Brooke Shull
Brooke Shull is The Asia Foundation’s Environment Program Officer. She can be reached at bshull@asiafound.org.
Only a few hours’ drive from Laos’s capital of Vientiane, Vang Vieng is a small but growing port town, and one of the country’s most popular ecotourism destinations. Here, the Nam Song River is the center of life. People from around the globe travel to Vang Vieng to enjoy kayaking, tubing, fishing, caving, and trekking along the river and its surrounding limestone cliffs. While local tourism and agriculture businesses thrive off the pristine waters of the Nam Song, villagers rely on the river for their main sources of protein: fish and aquatic insects. Local communities’ livelihoods and the success of the ecotourism industry in Vang Vieng are inextricably linked to the river’s health and surrounding ecosystems.
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