In the interest of full disclosure:
We are not riding our bikes every inch, mile or kilometer on our route across Laos. While it can be done, it would take extremely strong and fast bikers to do it. In the rural areas the distance between suitable accommodations is too great. The terrain is very hilly so there is a lot of climbing. We are all biking as much as we can according to our ability. When we have exceeded out limit we ride in the van. Today, I road only about 30 miles but 20 of it was uphill and much of it was between 10 and 14 degrees. That is a lot of climbing and is a serious workout. There is also the time consideration. You certainly want to arrive at your destination before dark. So, we are spending more time in the van than we anticipated but we are certainly seeing and experiencing the country of Laos.
The terrain is challenging and I’m not just talking about bicycling. We see mountains everywhere that are overgrown with vegetation. While Laos is very lush with vegetation it is obvious that farming is a difficult and labor intensive task. There is the “slash & burn” method I mentioned earlier. Sides of the mountain that are scalable are cleared and burned, then farmed. We ride through mountain villages and see “peasants” in the literal sense of the word. For them it is a short life and a brutal life. These are the “hill people” and I’m guessing they are from the Hmong ethnicity or some group similar to it.
We see a lot of children. They are friendly, shout to us and wave. We are a curiosity when we ride through the villages. The more prominent villages have a school and it looks to be the best maintained building in the village. They do value education. We see the children in transit to the school. On the other hand, in the very remote villages it looks like there is no formal education. We see children of all ages on the road at any hour when they should typically be in school. Who knows what kind of life they can look forward to. We are told that some parents don’t want their children to go to school because there are not enough jobs and then they become unwilling to work at farming or other menial tasks. 
Children from a rural village that were walking along the road. Notice that the one boy has a slingshot around his neck and another one has a slingshot on his head.