In which I speak surely too soon…

(Written at 12:00 PM, March 6th, Le Grillon French Restaurant, Vientiane.)

Having whiled away a fascinating morning standing in line at the Thai consulate, awaiting my visa with hundreds of other Westerners who are also pretending not to work and live in Thailand, I haven’t yet seen much of Laos. I did wander a short while around Vientiane, and I’m ready to launch into some surely premature observations on this tiny country.

Someone better-traveled than I, but cursed with a sadly unmemorable name, wrote that “Laos is one of the last quiet countries”. If that’s still true, then Vientiane is surely not the place to prove it. This small capital of about 250,000, a forest of low-rises and small temples, fed by pleasantly broad French boulevards and narrow lanes, isn’t lurking in some silent pre-industrial past.

Ooh, my pizza just arrived! Onion, garlic, pepper, mushrooms, ham and criminally large quantities of respectable French cheese. Looks tasty.

Vientiane buzzes with far more energy than I’d expected. Don’t get me wrong – this isn’t Bangkok or Singapore. Laos is a desperately poor country, near the very bottom of Asia’s economic ladder. The literacy rate here is a disgraceful 58 percent, life expectancy… and the per capita income is much closer to the hardest parts of sub-Saharan Africa than to Laos’ next-door neighbours, Thailand and Vietnam.

But there’s still a world of difference between destitute societies on the way down and those on the way up. In Zambia, Zimbabwe and Nicaragua, for example, the finest buildings were the remnants of old colonial infrastructure, rotteing amidst grinding poverty and gruesome kleptocracy. Especially in the first two examples, there was a palpable sense that the good times (such as they were) were long past, and few people expected growth to reverse their grim fortunes. A side note: A belated Happy 83rd Birthday to Uncle Bob, the feckless thug who personally ruined the most promising country in Africa. May it be his last!

Laos is in the same league as Zimbabwe for poverty (or at least it was until Zim began its sickening nosedive six years ago). But, following the lead of its ideological brethren next door in China, the Lao Communist Party began liberalizing the economy by increments in the late 1980s, without much loosening political restraints. The results have been dramatic. Funded by tourism and a moderate resource boom (whose environmental consequences are not yet clear) the economy is vigorously expanding, at least here in Vientiane. New buildings and infrastructure are under construction everywhere in sight, small businesses are sprouting, and shiny tuk-tuks and quite a few very new vehicles jostle on freshly paved roads. It’s on a very modest scale, of course, but when we consider Laos’ miserable starting conditions, this is remarkable progress. It’s not hard to imagine that this is what much of China looked like 15 or so years ago, when their own liberalization was taking root.

Of course, I’m looking in a very small place in a fairly large country. 90 percent of Lao live in rural areas, and subsistence agriculture employs 80 percent of the workforce. It would be foolish for me to judge the country’s progress based on a walking tour of the showcase city… so I’m heading out of town. I don’t have all the time I’d like to explore the country – that’ll have to wait until July or August – but after I collect my visa tomorrow I’ll head straight out of town. Lamentably, I don’t have time to visit the remote Plain of Jars, but the trip north to Luang Prabang should provide a better opportunity to see the real Laos, even though it runs along the country’s most developed corridor. Until then, I’ll devote myself to walking around town and, more importantly, eating six times a day. More to come.