Laos Day One: New Year's Eve in Vientiane

Saturday night started in Bangkok, and we had overnight train tickets to Nong Khai (on the border with Laos). We got to the train station about forty minutes early, plenty of time to stock up on train food and water. The station has a desk with English-speaking attendants and a special window only for foreigners with staff that speaks English--very helpful.

Thai trains have several classes: hard sleeper, second class fan, second class A/C, and first class. For second class, the tickets are divided into upper and lower, lower costs a little more. We had second class A/C upper and lower, and we tried to upgrade to first class, but it was full. We got on the train, and second class looked pretty nice. Each area had four chairs, two on each side, with a bed above them.

We got onto the train with a lot of food and water, but while we were still sitting at the station, a woman came around to take dinner orders. I was glad we had planned ahead, train food does not look especially appetizing.

Sitting in the station wasn't especially pleasant because the train's diesel engine was running, so the car filled with fumes. But once we got underway, it became a lot nicer. I had expected the train to move at a steady speed with reasonably constant noises (good for sleeping), but there were a surprising number of jolts and noises.

Less than an hour after we left, the conductor came through to convert the chairs into beds (the backs fold down). We got into bed and went to sleep.

Or tried, at least. It turns out that Lonely Planet was right--second class A/C is way too cold, and there's no way to turn the air conditioning down. They give you a thin blanket, and even fully dressed and wearing a sweater, it wasn't enough--I was freezing all night. We all wanted to sit together, so we had two upper and three lower seats, and I was one of the uppers. It turns out that upper is much, much worse than lower. The lower beds have curtains that cover the entire bed, while the upper ones have curtains that stop an inch below a large fluorescent light that's never turned off. I had to improvise a blindfold out of a sock. Also, the upper beds are right below the A/C vent, while the lower ones have more insulation. Upper sucks. Next time, second class fan, and only lower beds.

Still, a train isn't a bad place to sleep, and I did get most of a full night. The train is equipped with a shower (though not one I'd want to use), toilets, and sinks, but we were only on for an hour or so after we woke up before we arrived at Nong Khai.

Nong Khai is a small town on the border with Laos. The town itself is supposed to be nice, with a pleasant view of the Mekong River (which forms the border) and some nice spots to sit and eat, but we were eager to get to Laos. We hired a tuktuk from the train station straight to the border, which is at the Thailand-Laos Friendship Bridge (financed by Australia).

The Lao border was fairly unpleasant. We got through Thai immigration no problems, and then took a bus across the Friendship Bridge to the Lao side to get through Lao immigration and customs. We hadn't had time to get visas in advance, so we had to buy them at the bridge, a process that took about thirty minutes. Unlike my fancy Cambodia and China visas, the Laos visa is just a full-page stamp.

Once we had the visas, we had to wait on a very long line (maybe an hour) filled with rather pushy Asians to get to the immigration desk. Finally we made it to the front of the line, got our passports stamped, and we were free--to wait on the next line. This one was mercifully short. It was customs, which in other countries means they go through your stuff to see what you're bringing in (or just wave you by), but in Laos means that you pay them 10 baht. For some reason I was charged 20 baht, but I assume it's because I have facial hair and so am always the target of excess customs scrutiny.

We had a surprising amount of trouble getting a taxi to our hotel, and finally convinced a tuktuk driver to take us. Our hotel, Day Inn Hotel, was great. They didn't have our reservation, of course ("sorry, maybe we no check email"), but they had vacancies. The rooms were beautiful.

Laos has a difficult history. A French colony through the immediate post-WWII period, it became a pawn in the Viet Nam War and North Viet Nam supported a Communist revolution there. It remains a communist nation, controlled by an eleven member politburo. They’ve tried economic reforms with some success, but there’s minimal infrastructure (no rail, minimal telecom). It remains a nation built on subsistence farming. Laos has about five million people, and is slightly poorer than Cambodia. I was in Vientiane, the capital of Laos. It's small, about 200,000 people, and most tourists go to Luang Prabang instead.

Maybe I only have this impression because I was there on a holiday, but from what I saw, Vientiane is a very peaceful, quiet city. There's not a lot of traffic, no loud bars, not a lot of people on the street. It's not heavily developed, no high rises, not even the six story apartment buildings that fill Phnom Penh. It's a pretty lazily spread-out city--so much so that while walking around the city center, we ran into some German tourists who asked us if we could point them towards Vientiane.

We walked to a branch of the Mekong River, which runs through Vientiane, and had lunch on the bank. It wasn't much of a river--it's the dry season, so it was almost completely dried up, and what was left was barely moving. I imagine it's much more scenic during the rainy season.

After lunch we went back to our hotel to use the internet. It wasn't especially speedy, apparently because the government of Laos is determined to ensure that no one is able to dodge their telephone censorship by using internet telephony, and so they block anything that looks like it might be voice traffic.

I then walked to "That Dam" (pronounced "taht dahm"), the Black Stupa. It used to be covered in gold, but their story is that in 1828 the Siamese stole it all. A legend states that a dragon who lives in the Black Stupa rose up and expelled the Thai, but I guess not before they stole the gold from his house. Anyway, now that the gold is gone, it's black.

Then I walked to the market. It was fairly late in the day, and so it was mostly closed, but still interesting to see. Like all the other markets I've seen in Southeast Asia, it was mostly food and clothing, but unlike all the other markets, it was really slow and spacious. The stalls were spread out, it wasn't crowded at all, no one was running or screaming. It was pretty much the exact opposite of the main market in Hanoi.

I went back to the Mekong to watch the sun set, but it wasn't much of a sunset--too many clouds. Vientiane apparently has a bit of a hippie infection--there were people juggling clubs in the middle of a restaurant. There were also a lot of puppies, and lots of people cooking tasty-looking things on grills.

Back to the hotel. Vientiane has a few very fancy hotels, and they were all having New Year's gala dinners. Ours was not--and dinner there sucked. Great hotel, crappy restaurant. It was New Year's Eve, but we were exhausted, so we went to sleep at 9pm (hey, it was New Year's somewhere). Woken up by fireworks at midnight, and we could see them out our window--pretty.

Continue to day two of Arie's trip to Laos.