Anthony Bourdain Explores Laos' Food and History.
CABRERA: In tonight's new episode of "PARTS UNKNOWN", Anthony Bourdain takes us to a country he calls magical where the people are some of the most generous he's ever met.</s>ANTHONY BOURDAIN, CNN HOST, "PARTS UNKNOWN": Back to Laos, one of the most beautiful, enchanting, lovely, magical, mystical places on earth. All I can tell you is they are some of the nicest, kindest, most hospitable, food crazy, generous people known. So glad to be back here. So pretty. It's just incredible.</s>CABRERA: I recently sat down with Anthony Bourdain to talk about the food and culture he explored there.</s>BOURDAIN: Laos has opened up to some degree, probably out of financial necessity, you know, like so many of the communist states over time, they had to. The people demanded it. The situation demanded it. But this is a country, the mountainous, very rural, agricultural nation that a lot of people don't know much about, it's also a country that was just, you know, where a CIA funded and managed Secret War persisted from the late '50s up until the mid-'70s and an air campaign that dropped more bombs on this tiny little country than all of Europe and Japan combined during the entire length of World War II when many of that -- a lot of those munitions are still on ground and active.</s>CABRERA: So there's an impact today from that war back in the '60s?</s>BOURDAIN: There is. And the government are -- I would say paranoid about maintaining order. Unlike Vietnam where President Obama was greeted, you know, very warmly and overtly and there were cheering crowds in the streets, I'm told or I was told when I was there when President Obama visited Laos, the shopkeepers, some people were told to stay inside and not display any signs of happiness or encouragement. I think they're very, you know, haltingly entering a new phase, but people were less -- people will talk openly in Vietnam or much more openly. And even Cuba than in Laos where people were very, very careful about how their words might be perceived.</s>CABRERA: Did that sense of guardedness surprise you?</s>BOURDAIN: It's something I have experienced before. I guess I was saddened by it, but I mean, this was -- we employed a lot of Hmong, particular ethnic Hmong tribes, people doing the Secret War to fight other Hmong and other Laotians. And so there's that I guess fear of an enemy within that's always present. And we had to be really sensitive to that. You don't want to get -- you know, I can come back here and say anything I want. I have to think about the people who I was speaking to there.</s>CABRERA: Culturally sensitive.</s>BOURDAIN: Well, how they might be implicated in something that I say.</s>CABRERA: Wow.</s>BOURDAIN: Like I say, you know, I can say what I want and go out to lunch now. They have to live with the consequences of what I say.</s>CABRERA: What defines the food in Laos?</s>BOURDAIN: The ocean cuisine is influenced -- powerful influence in neighboring Thailand, the</s>CABRERA: Don't you just love Anthony Bourdain? A mystical land