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The car rolled along at a snail's pace of 30km per hour although the road ahead was clear of traffic. As we were running late, my colleague the lawyer decided to do something about it. "Can you go faster?" he urged the driver.
From the backseat, I could see the speedometer needle inch up to the 35km per hour mark where it hovered for several seconds before dipping back to what was apparently our chauffeur's equilibrium speed. Under ordinary circumstances, we would have put up more of an effort to egg on the driver but we were in Vientiane and in the land of a thousand elephants, so we figured we ought to get used to moving at the pace of a thousand elephants. It may be a bit of an exaggeration to describe Laos as a place where time stands still but it certainly does move a lot slower. Vientiane may be the capital of this country of six million inhabitants but it could easily pass off as another Indochinese town where sixty years of French rule left little other than a smattering of pastel buildings and baguettes in the local diet. Free of the stress of city life, there is a particular contentment in Laotians' lives that makes meaningless the GDP statistics churned out by development agencies. Here is a country consistently ranked among the poorest in the world but it certainly feels nothing of the sort. The homes are humble but well kept and the streets free of beggars. Another indication is that while Laos receives the highest per capital level of development aid in Southeast Asia, it is also a net importer of labour from neighbouring Vietnam. "They are lazy?" the lawyer questioned a diplomat that we met. "No, not exactly," came the answer. "They have few material wants. Most Lao are happy as long as they have enough to live on." Being this laid back has its benefits and drawbacks and Lao history has very ample proof of it. A long strip of land wedged among powerful neighbours, Laos suffered a severe blow when French gave away a large chunk of its territory west of the Mekong to the Thais. In the 1950s, Vietnam funded the Pathet Lao, a communist movement that became central to a 25-year civil war. As the staging ground for a complex proxy war between Communist North Vietnam and the United States-backed Saigon government, the Americans dropped more bombs here between 1965 and 1973 than on Germany during the Second World War. Present day Laos still bears the scars from this period. After decades of isolation, the economy is propped up mainly by foreign aid and repatriations from the thousands of Lao who found refuge in the West during the years of turbulence. With mine-clearing activities proceeding at a painstaking pace, local farmers still risk being maimed every day as they till the land. Most tragic of all, a state of hostility continues between the government and the Hmong tribes for the role they played as US allies more than 30 years ago. For all that, Laos is still very much an oasis of calm and serenity. For those who have ventured here, few leave without being infected by its pace of life. Some are tourists like the hippy youths hoping to find the meaning of life through 50 cents-a-glass beer. Others have grown more permanent roots like Vincent, an archetypal Englishman with a gin-drinking habit before lunchtime, who has been advising the government in various areas over the past 10 years. There is also Chris, a Singaporean hotel manager who has lived here for the past 13 years and enjoys nothing more than a dinner by sunset at his favourite restaurant on the banks of the Mekong known as the ÔMoon the Night'. It doesn't get more Graham Greene than this. On my last night in Vientiane, I was invited to dinner by a young Malaysian who first arrived a decade ago to assist his businessman uncle. The uncle has since fled after a few botched deals but Leong stayed on, married a local lady and started a restaurant in the grounds of his vast garden compound. Some time after 11pm, Leong's cheeky five-year-old son and two-year-old daughter appeared to play around the garden. "There are no bedtime rules for my children. I don't have to worry about letting them run around and I get to be with my family as much as I want. Why would I change this life for anything else?" said my Ipoh-born host. In the midst of the quiet laughter of fellow diners, the fragrant smells of dinner and the soft haziness induced by several glasses of Beer Lao, I had no answer for him.
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