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Just over a decade ago, Laos was largely unknown to Western travellers. Other than for a brief period during the 1960s, when the country became a player in the Vietnam War, it has remained a backwater – a situation that only intensified after the 1975 revolution and the ensuing years of xenophobic communist government. However, in the 1990s Laos reluctantly reopened its doors to the outside world, after its major source of aid dried up with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The major towns and cities now offer visitors good-value accommodation and a surprisingly diverse array of cuisines, and while conditions in the countryside remain primitive and challenging, travellers willing to brave them are rewarded with sights of a landscape and people not much changed from those that greeted French explorers over one hundred years ago.
Laos's lifeline is the Mekong River, which runs the length of the landlocked country, at times bisecting it and at others serving as a boundary with Thailand. The rugged Annamite Mountains also run much of the country's length and historically have acted as a buffer against Vietnam, with which Laos shares its eastern border. Despite intensive logging, there are still tracts of dense forest inhabited by myriad animal species, including tigers and other majestic cats, all but vanished from neighbouring countries, and new mammals are still being discovered, such as the deer-like soala or spindlehorn. There is even a pod of rare freshwater dolphins inhabiting an isolated stretch of the Mekong.
For such a small country, Laos is surprisingly diverse in terms of its people. Colourfully dressed hill tribes populate the higher elevations, while in the lowland river valleys, coconut palms sway over the Buddhist monasteries of the ethnic Lao. The country also retains some of the French influence it absorbed during colonial days: the familiar smell of freshly baked bread and coffee mingles with exotic local aromas in morning markets.
Laos has relatively few proper tourist sights, but even so, you haven't really seen the country unless you've spent some time aboard some ancient jalopy or slow boat, taking in the rugged natural beauty and witnessing the country's rich ethnic mosaic at leisure. If you want to see something of the northern mountains as well as the islands of the far south, and have enough time to absorb a little of the serene Lao way of life, you really need to be in Laos for two to three weeks. With up to two weeks at your disposal, you can either do a whirlwind trip up the Mekong River Valley or, perhaps better, focus on one region and enjoy it at an easy pace. Internal flights, while unreliable, can speed up an itinerary substantially and are cheap enough not to break your budget.
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• The Lao People's Democratic Republic, whose capital is Vientiane, is Southeast Asia's only landlocked country. Modern Laos covers more than 236,000 square kilometres, yet has a population of just 6.2 million.
• A constitutional monarchy until 1976, Laos is today a one-party dictatorship and one of the world's last official communist states. It is also one of the world's poorest countries, heavily reliant on aid. Despite economic reforms undertaken in the early Nineties, fledgling entrepreneurs and foreign investment have been hindered by official corruption.
• Lowland Lao (Lao Loum) comprise approximately seventy percent of the population, upland Lao (Lao Theung) and highland Lao (Lao Soung) roughly twenty and ten percent respectively; within these broad definitions, there are many smaller divisions. Chinese and Vietnamese are a small but economically significant portion of the population. The national language is Lao, a tonal language closely related to Thai, although the written scripts differ. English is the most popular European language.
• Laos is a predominately Buddhist country and follows the Theravadan school of Buddhism, in common with neighbouring Thailand, Burma and Cambodia. Up to forty percent of the population, particularly in the highlands, follow animist beliefs.
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