ABSTRACT
For your next vacation I do not recommend the River View Hotel in Vientiane, the capital of Laos. A large, dreary concrete block, converted with Soviet help from a warehouse, it is utterly without charm. At the entrance, to be sure, there is a welcoming gesture: two life-size cardboard figures of smiling Laotians in the prayerlike, palms-together posture of greeting, called a wai. But the colors are faded and the cardboard disintegrating, as if to signal what lies within. Whoever designed the bathrooms evidently had had little previous experience of indoor plumbing; how else to explain the quaint decision to place the toilet inside the shower? And I had no idea that electric bulbs of such low wattage could be produced—though the gloom had the advantage of keeping us from looking too carefully at the sheets or deciphering the ominous smudges on the walls. My wife Ellen and I took the liberty of grumbling a bit to Amkha, the Lao Tourism guide who had been assigned to our family of four, but he shamed us by finding our complaints incomprehensible. The hotel is excellent, he declared with manifest conviction, though he regretted that it was enormously expensive—about twenty dollars a night, or half the monthly salary of an office worker or a teacher.
