I've been meaning to post about this for a while but forgot until yesterday when I saw it happening again! Somehow I thought that what I'd seen may have been an isolated incident, but nope, just the norm.
The Lao Kip is not worth very much on the international market. One US dollar will get you almost 11,000 kip, and you can't exchange it outside the country, in fact you're not legally supposed to even take it out of the country - not that you'd want to, since it's worthless and all.
The depressed (or hyper-inflated, I can never remember which one it is) state of the currency means that you end up carrying around wads of the stuff, since you can't buy much for less than a few thousand kip. The lowest denomination bill is a 1,000 kip note and the highest is the new 20,000 kip note.
Every couple of weeks we change some money and to save time and effort we usually change about US$100, which turns us into instant millionaires. The only problem is we have to carry all that paper around in our pockets until we can get home to stash it. Still, while we think we have problems transporting money, we're nothing on the banks.
About a month ago I was siting in line in a Thai bank downtown when the door opened and two guys in uniform walked in carrying large rice sacks (you know the kind that sit about knee high when full - my knee, not Cristy's). They dumped the sacks at my feet, turned around and walked out again, only to come back a minute later with another two sacks, which also landed unceremoniously at my feet. No one in the bank, other than silly old me, was paying the slightest bit of attention to this process. It took me a couple of trips to figure out that the sacks were full to bursting with Kip and that these guys were the money delivery boys.
Not that I'm advocating bank robbery as a viable career path, but if you were looking to get into it it would be worth starting in Laos. Not that you'd get millions of dollars out of those sacks, but as long as you were planning on staying in Laos you'd be pretty well off from one heist.
The "guards" who were responsible for delivering the cash weren't carrying guns and when I looked out the window there was a pile of cash sacks lying in the car park that the two guys were slowly moving inside. No one was watching it and no one seemed perturbed in the slightest.
It seems this was nothing unusual.
The delivery guys finished hauling the cash into the bank and, leaving it in the middle of the floor, mostly at my feet, they left. The cash was still lying there when I'd completed my transaction and left the building. Quite amazing really, when you compare it to similar activities in other parts of the world. Australian money delivery companies are armed to the teeth and particularly paranoid. They never let the cash out of their sight and, as I understand it quite a few of them are ex-cops with itchy trigger fingers. They've got nothing on China though. When we were in Shanghai we saw an armoured truck, almost a tank, painted military green roll up to a McDonald's in the heart of downtown (don't worry we weren't in the fast food behemoth, just walking by). Several men in full riot gear, including bullet proof vests, armed with machine guns jumped out of the tank and proceeded to unload several small bags of change for the store. Overkill? Maybe, but I wouldn't have wanted to be thinking about robbing them.
Yesterday's episode was even more impressive for its relaxed nature. The bank we normally change money at sits on a fairly main road that is always busy, it's also quite narrow and generally fairly crowded. I was walking back from lunch when a ute (truck) pulled up in front of the bank and two guys (not in uniform this time) got out and started tossing cash sacks from out of the back of the open air tray onto the side of the road vaguely near the bank. They then set about hauling the sacks inside one by one, leaving the pile outside unattended. Once again on one even blinked.
I wonder if the fact that bank robberies seem to never occur here is testament to the honest nature of the locals or to how terrified of the government they are. I must confess that with the amount of poverty and desperation there is here I'm surprised no one tries it. This city could do with a Robbin Hood type figure. Not sure if the green tights would help them blend in though...
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