By Thomas Swick
Travel Editor

The cafe sat on the main street, across from an elementary school, and from my sidewalk table I watched the children playing in the schoolyard. The traditional Lao skirts -- long and narrow, with an embroidered strip near the bottom -- didn't seem to impede the girls in the least. Every few minutes a car passed by. Two men spoke accented English at a neighboring table; the one in trendy, Trotsky-esque glasses I recognized from my Chiang Mai flight.

We had arrived a few hours before, dropping down into a smoky haze and landing at a tranquil airport. Inside, we handed over our passports and visa applications at one window and then formed a line in front of a second. "This you?" the young man asked me, smiling, holding my passport up to the picture page. I nodded and gave him $30. He stamped my passport and handed it back.

The guesthouse I'd chosen from the list in my guidebook had no rooms, but the receptionist -- more like the houseboy -- directed me next door, to the Xieng Mouane. It was a two-story white structure with gray shutters; except for the sign with Lao lettering, it could have been a country house in Bordeaux. A black-and-white photograph of a young Lao gentleman, in knickers and loafers, hung on the wall behind the reception desk. "My grandfather," the proprietress said in resurrected French. "He was a judge in Vientiane. He built this house."

A room was available, she said, for $25 a night. A young woman led me across the back yard and up some steps to a balcony framing three windows and three doors. The second door opened to a whitewashed room with two narrow beds and colorful fabrics hanging on the walls. It seemed odd, in one of the poorest countries in the world, to be paying almost twice what I had for rooms in Thailand. But this room had twice the character of those.

The sign on the back of the door was from the "Immigration and Foreign Management Authority, Lao People's Democratic Republic -- Peace, Independence, Democracy, Unity, Prosperity." (Why does communism always sap language of its meaning?) It contained nine regulations "For social order and safety of domestic and foreign visitors staying in the guesthouse/hotel and to ensure that tourism policy is widely applied nationwide ..." The first was that tourists needed to be in their guesthouses by midnight.

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