Getting Started

With 30-day visas now available to most travellers when they arrive your most pressing pre-departure concerns are finding good books to read up on Laos, working out which route to take and getting enough cash to last you through the trip. Laos is a low-maintenance destination and an easy place to travel that's most rewarding to those ready to embrace the laid-back Lao way of life. Don't expect everything to be on time; do pack a smile and prepare to slide down a few gears

        USEFUL INFORMATION

In a part of the world where trees haven't done too well in recent decades, Laos is notable for its remarkably intact biodiversity. It's an aspect of the country that is being recognised by some as a potentially lucrative natural resource. In 2006, tourism was one of the Lao PDR's largest foreign income earners, and estimates suggest that about half of that money is from visitors who came in large part to experience this natural beauty .However, it's not all sweetness and light. The environment in Laos has long benefited from the country's small population, which has exerted relatively little pressure on the ecosystem. But with a growing population of poor, for whom wildlife equates to protein, those pressures are rising quickly. Add to that the ongoing problems of illegal logging and a renewed desire to sell its rivers to foreign hydropower developers, and Laos might yet miss the rare opportunity it has with such an intact environment. We can only hope not.

Lao food doesn't have the variety and depth of the more famous cuisines of neighbouring China, Thailand and Vietnam, but you can eat well in Laos if you take the time to learn a little about the cuisine while you're there. While few people travel to this country with food as their prime objective, a little experimentation can take you a long way towards appreciating the cuisine and can be very rewarding.

It's little surprise that Lao food is similar to Thai cuisine, given the long interwoven history the two countries share. But while dishes such as liiap (meat salad) and tqm mdak-hung (som tam; papaya salad) will be familiar to anyone with even a basic knowledge of Thai food, there are some aspects of Lao cuisine that are unmistakably Lao. The most obvious of these is khao niaw (sticky rice), which is classed by scholars as being one of the main identifiers of Lao culture.

In the Mekong River valley areas, where Lao culture is strongest, sticky rice is ever-present. During five days of trekking through villages in Cham-pasak Province we ate sticky rice with every meal. That might sound a bit repetitive, but the khao niaw was only part of these meals, and each one was complemented with at least two different and tasty Lao dishes.

Sticky rice isn't so popular in mountainous areas - the Hmong don't eat it at all - and the culinary variety can be pretty limited, too. The limits come from a lack of money and difficult growing conditions.

Health issues and the quality of medical fa­cilities vary enormously depending on where and how you travel in Laos. Travellers tend to worry about contracting infectious dis­eases when in the tropics, but infections are a rare cause of serious illness or death in travellers. Pre-existing medical conditions such as heart disease and accidental injury (especially traffic accidents), account for most life-threatening problems. Becoming ill in some way, however, is relatively com­mon. Fortunately, most common illnesses can either be prevented with common-sense behaviour or be treated easily with a well-stocked traveller's medical kit.

The following advice is a general guide only and does not replace the advice of a doctor trained in travel medicine.

The official language of the LPDR is Lao as spoken and written in Vientiane. As an of­ficial language, it has successfully become the lingua franca (a universally understood linking language) between all Lao and non-Lao ethnic groups in Laos. Native Lao is spoken with differing tonal accents and with slightly differing vocabularies as you move from one part of the country to the next, especially in a north to south direc­tion, but it is the Vientiane dialect that is most widely understood.

Modern Lao linguists recognise five basic dialects within the country: Vientiane Lao; northern Lao (spoken in Sainyabuli, Bokeo, Udomxai, Phongsali, Luang Nam Tha and Luang Prabang); northeastern Lao (Xieng Khuang and Hua Phan), central Lao (Khammuan and Bolikhamsai); and finally southern Lao (Champasak, Savannakhet, Salavan, Attapeu and Sekong). Each of these can be further divided into various subdialects; the differences between the Lao spoken in the neighbouring provinces of Xieng Khuang and Hua Phan, for example, are readily apparent to those who know the language well.

All dialects of Lao belong to the Thai half of the Thai-Kadai family of languages and

are closely related to languages spoken in Thailand, northern Myanmar and pockets of China's Yunnan and Guangxi Provinces. Standard Lao is indeed close enough to standard Thai (as spoken in central Thai­land) that for native speakers the two are mutually intelligible. In fact, virtually all of the speakers of Lao west of the Annamite Chain can easily understand spoken Thai, since the majority of the television and radio programmes they tune in to are broadcast from Thailand.

Among educated Lao, written Thai is also easily understood, in spite of the fact that the two scripts differ (to about the same degree that the Greek and Roman scripts differ). This is because many of the textbooks used at the college and university level in Laos are actually Thai texts.

Even more similar to Standard Lao are Thailand's northern and northeastern Thai dialects. There are actually more Lao speak­ers living in Thailand than in Laos, so if you're travelling to Laos after a spell in Thailand (especially the northeast), you should be able to put whatever you learned in Thailand to good use. (It doesn't work as well in the opposite direction; native Thais can't always understand Lao, since they've had less exposure to it.)

For a more in-depth guide to Lao than we have room for in this guide, get a copy of Lonely Planet's Lao Phrasebook. If you plan to travel extensively in any Lao Sung areas, Lonely Planet's Hill Tribes Phrasebook could also be useful.

Transport infrastructure in Laos is barely recognisable considering what existed a few years ago. Huge, foreign-funded road construction projects have transformed the network of rough dirt tracks into relatively luxurious sealed affairs. The lack of potholes has ushered in a battalion of buses and scheduled services, and getting around Laos is easy and cheap, if sometimes very slow.

Many travellers are choosing to come and go via Laos's numerous land and river bor­ders, something we've acknowledged in this book by giving detailed descriptions of all border crossings that were open to foreign­ers when we researched this edition. While there are many border options, flying into Laos is refreshing in that you don't need to shop around much - only a few airlines service Laos and prices don't vary much.