Vientiane, Laos

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When our plane landed in Laos the air hostess should have said: "Ladies and Gentleman, welcome to Laos. The local time here is 9am...... but that's totally irrelevant as you are now on Laos Time!" Laos works on "elastic time". This means when a bus is scheduled to leave at 9am it will leave around 10. If you ever go to Laos then take a good book!

The one exception to "Laos Time" was getting a visa. We landed in Vientiane airport ready to spend some time arranging our visa (which you can get on arrival). Turns out that there is a whole team of people waiting to help you fill in all the necessary forms, and who all speak perfect English. The whole process took about 10 minutes, after which we walked into the arrivals hall to find a neat row of taxis and an ATM. Given Laos' position as 138th richest country in the world, this wasn't what we were expecting.

It turns out that the whole of Vientiane is almost eerily nice. 4x4 jeeps are the most common vehicle on the roads, the cafe's are all really nice and most people speak English. After asking a few locals, our hostel owner explained to me that the relative wealth of Vientiane is in large part due to import licenses which are given out by the Laos government. Because Laos has hardly any industry itself, everything is imported from Thailand. Import licenses are only given to a select few, effectively creating a monopoly for many products. We found Vientiane (and Laos in general) to be more expensive than Vietnam. The hostel owner suggested, also, that I shouldn't ask too many questions in this area!

Whilst Vientiane is the capital it only has 3 main roads running through it and it takes about 15 minutes to walk from one end to the other. The population is a little over 200,000, but I think this might include the whole province, not just the town. Given its size, we didn't find too much to do here. There was a very interesting looking museum, but when we arrived there was a sign on the front gate explaining that it was closed for refurbishment from 13th August to 13th September. However the "September" had been crossed out and someone had scribbled "October" underneath. There were 2 men asleep on the museum's front lawn. I guess they work to Laos Time!

My favourite part of town was the riverfront. Vientiane stands on the banks of the might Mekong river. The shore is dotted with little bamboo restaurants selling simple Asian food. More importantly, they sell Beer Lao, Laos' national drink. There is more advertising for this product than for all other products in Laos put together. I've even got myself a Beer Lao t-shirt. Watching the sun go down across the river whilst drinking a Beer Lao is a good way to round off the day.

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