I jump into a motorized dugout canoe and struggle against the current of the Mekong, arriving minutes later on a bright green island of dilapidated alters and pointy graves, lush rice paddies and more massive foot looms. As soon as I arrive, a woman with a plastic bag full of homemade handmade silk approaches me. I am immediately enamored - captivated by the shiny hand-made fabrics that cover this Mekong jewel.

The next day I head east to continue my hunt for textiles, leaving Pakse on an 8 am bus. The bus is a vibrant affair, with color adorning every possible surface, suffocating the encroaching rust and cracks with the pure joy of gaudy color. It is packed with rice and boxes and bags and people, and for the first few hours I sit on a bag of rice in the isle. We drive for 3 hours through the lowlands before edging up a hill and on to the Bolaven plateau, one of the richest coffee growing regions in the world. The scenery is spectacular – lush greenery shrouded in mist - and it’s noticeably cooler here.

Hours later, after seemingly endless roadside stops for roasted crickets and cokes, we rumble into Sekong town, the capital of one of the poorest and most heavily bombed provinces in the country. The bus drops me at the side of the road at the edge of a universe I have no map for. I wander through the misty town until a truckload of soldiers point me in the direction of a guesthouse.

I drop off my bag and set out in search of weavings, wandering through a town of curious stares to the bank and a restaurant. The Laotian currency is so devalued that changing twenty or thirty American dollars results in stacks of Kip. I shove my stack into a plastic bag and find a restaurant for lunch - eggs with fresh mint, lime and a mountain of green vegetables. After lunch I wander across the street to the supposedly haunted Sekong Hotel, interrupting three or four men and a woman playing cards in a room off the lobby. The woman rises and the men continue, un-phased by the visitor. She leads me up the stairs to a dusty fluorescent-lit room filled with makeshift piles of old weavings and blankets. Brushing off the cobwebs, I find what I’m here for: war weavings. Textiles with images of bombs, helicopters, planes and hospital crosses instead of the traditional motifs of scorpions and elephants. Six American dollars for a piece of history - weavings that tell the stories of the bombs, the planes and the war that most people don’t even know happened.