THE Lao People's Democratic Republic is at last open for business. But only during office hours. Each day at 5 pm sharp the shutters come down at the border crossing with Thailand on the Lao side of the Friendship Bridge.
After a decade and a half of communist isolation Laos may be opening its doors a little, but the security chain is still on.
As a country which has a long history of being pushed around by its more assertive neighbours, it is not surprising the Lao Government acts with a cautiousness bordering on paranoia. A virtual collapse of Lao's centralised economy in the mid-80s, followed by the collapse of its patron the Soviet Union, forced Lao's Communist Party to adopt what it calls chintanakan mai - new thinking.
But like its neighbour, Vietnam, the Laos government remains wedded to socialism - seeing capitalism only as a way of filling in the gaps Marxism was unable to plug. As authoritarian, one-party regimes go, Laos has one of the least offensive. It is a country with only three known political prisoners, former government officials who in 1992 were unwise enough to write to the foreign press calling for democracy.
'The place just seems to float along on a sea of apathy,' one Western observer in Phnom Penh commented.
'It's not that there aren't people who don't disagree with the government. It's more that they can't be bothered to make a fuss.' The capital Vientiane is like no other capital in Southeast Asia, a gentle, charming city in which chickens run in the streets just a few blocks away from what passes as the central business district.
If it seems like a country town, it is because it is. Most of those in power are rural people. Most city folk fled as refugees when the Pathet Lao came to power.