The Road to Vientiane
It was pretty exciting to be heading towards our first capital city. Everywhere we have seen so far in Laos has either been variations on an incredibly poor village, or an isolated pocket of ‘city’ which seems to be completely reliant on tourism for its income and existence. We saw two smoke-belching factories in the valley as we were cycling out of Vang Vieng, and it was only then that we realised that we hadn’t seen a factory since leaving China.
We haven’t even seen a sign for a university or college. What society and education system produced, for example, the educated and English-speaking Laos lady doctor that was so kind and helpful in Luang Prabang’s hospital? Presumably she was the product of Laos’ tiny upper class, and most certainly educated abroad. Every area we pass through seems to be going through a population boom, with children of all ages dominating. I wonder what the future holds for them; there certainly doesn’t seem to be enough cultivable land in this incredibly mountainous region to allow them all to be subsistence farmers like their parents, and the numbers of new schools we have seen suggest they will have a higher level of education. Yet the only other jobs available seem to be in the tourist industry, which will surely soon fall victim to its own success, marketing itself as it does on Laos’ ‘pristine and unspoiled’ nature.
Laos has agriculture and it has tourism, and I thought that in Vientiane we would finally see some evidence that this place is actually a functioning country with a chance of pulling itself out of poverty. But we didn’t really. We did see the first traffic lights, and the first traffic jams not caused by cows since entering Laos, but Vientiane itself doesn’t feel like a capital city, rather a provincial town. There is a lot of tourism, and there is the business of government, but not much else in the way of business, commerce or industry.
But then again, I don’t know what else I expected from a the capital city of a small mountainous communist country with only 7 million people. Speaking of mountainous, this part of Laos, which again borders Thailand over the Mekong river, really isn’t. We covered the 160 km from Vang Vieng to Vientiane in only two days, and not particularly tough ones at that. Sadly, they were also pretty dull and not very attractive. It seems in Laos you can have pretty cycling or you can have easy cycling, but not both at the same time. There was also fairly consistent passing traffic most of the way – trucks and buses, but also more and more privately owned cars. So not the nicest of cycling, and not the nicest of scenery. Which explains the lack of photos, sorry.
AW
Photos from this post can be found here
Thank you have enjoyed the update and the new photos now I had better get some work done! x