I started my travel in Laos with a splurge; I booked a two day cruise down the Mekong on a longboat. It required getting up stupid early to rush to the bridge on the Thai side of the border by 8am,¹ then a rather slow process of exiting border control for Thailand, catching a bus across the bridge, stopping at an ATM for Laos kip, filling out the paperwork for the Laos visa, submitting the paperwork,² and then getting your passport returned and going through border control. It’s about a 90 minute process.

But the advantage of a tour group is you’re walked through the whole process. I just stood in the lines they pointed at and handed over money at the appropriate times, and on the other side I just sat with the group until a van pulled up, and we all got on and were taken directly to our boat.

And it was a really great couple of days. The ship wasn’t luxurious, by any means, really just some tables and comfortable chairs. But the crew was friendly, and kept setting out fresh fruits and fried taro chips and peanuts while you sailed down the river.

We stopped at a couple of small Lao villages on the way,³ and spent overnight at their lodge about halfway along the trip. But really it’s all about sitting on deck just watching the scenery unfold, mountains rising out of the early mists on the river, or passing the small shrines set up on the hillsides. I could have watched them for hours. I did watch them for hours. And if I ever end up in one of those sci-fi style bedrooms where the walls are monitors which can pull up any photorealistic scene you want, I know at least one of the visuals I’m going to want running on a loop.

The cruise ended in Luang Prabang, the ancient royal capital of Laos, and I spent a sleepy couple of days just kind of aimlessly wandering around the city. It’s a very small city — less than 60,000 people — but there’s a beautiful French-influenced Old Town which is rightly revered.

This is the kind of place I wanted Chiang Mai to be. It’s very laid back and relaxed. I could see spending a month or two here, if I were the sort of person who could imagine spending a month or two anywhere. You’ve got the same cafés with Wi-Fi, the same bars open late and bistros with scenic views. But it’s not half as touristy as Thailand was. I expect it’ll get overrun shortly — that’s the way of all things — but at the moment it’s still somewhat restrained.

Laos has a grand and distinctive style of food all its own,⁴ which I quickly discovered is virtually all meat-based. But it’s also incorporated a lot of French influences, so there are a tremendous number of bakeries and pâtisseries everywhere.⁵

And I don’t know if it’s the tourist influence or represents a certain culinary open-mindedness on the part of the locals, but there’s was a ridiculous broad number of cuisines represented for what was, essentially, a very small town. The first night I walked over to a small hole-in-the-wall for Mexican food,⁶ the second I found a full Laotian vegetarian tasting menu, the third I had the set menu at a French place by the river⁷ and I ended my stay there at a place called Secret Pizza, only open Tuesday and Friday nights, and run by a family who just decided to open up a wildly popular Italian place in their backyard.⁸

So that was unexpected. You imagine places like Thailand and Vietnam and Singapore to cater to these kind of cultural fusions, given the sheer numbers of tourists and the way they’re wired into the global economy. But nope, it’s everywhere. Some guy in Northern Laos can go crazy, build a pizza oven in his backyard, and start getting shipments of tomatoes and mozzarella from Tuscany. And if you manage to get to Laos, you can see if he’s any good, provided you show up on a Tuesday or Friday. Oh, and make a reservation, the place gets packed fast.

I’ve finished out my stay here in Vientiane, the current capital. It’s much more decently sized, about 800,000 people, but it has that same kind of lazy feel as Luang Prabang. It’s got a lot more tourists, certainly, but it feels touristy in the way New York City did, in that most places catered to a mix of tourists and locals.⁹

It doesn’t have much in the way of touristy things to do. Pha That Luang is the main temple, a Buddhist stupa covered in gold, so I saw that. And I also visited Patuxai, the local answer to the Arc d’Triomphe¹⁰ and caught a cab all the way out to the Xieng Khuan Buddha sculpture park.

But I also found a cocktail bar a short walk along the Mekong, featuring Singapore Slings and Mai Tais.¹¹ And that’s really what I needed, at this point. A quiet, relaxed bar where I could sip alcohol, finish my book, and watch the tuk tuks zip by outside the window. And Vientiane, all of Laos really, is pretty good for that.

Next: Ho Chi Minh City (SGN) to Phnom Penh (PNH)
Prev: Chiang Khong to Ban Houayxay

Footnotes

¹ I had cleverly arranged to be in Chiang Khong, but uncleverly had booked overnight at a place a 30-minute drive from the bridge, so I was kind of out of it while I slowly woke up.

² I had been freaking out because I didn’t have the passport photos they say you need for the visa, but you can just pay them an extra $1 and they’ll take your picture for you.

Also, don’t sweat having Laos kip on you. They accept baht, dollars, euros, pounds, and a few other currencies.

³ It’s hard to really wrap your head around how interconnected the Internet and associated technologies has made the world. But when you’re in a small Lao village (less than 500 people) and are annoyed you only get good cell phone reception in about half the place, it’s worth stepping back and thinking about it.

There’s a lot of 12-year-old girls tasked with selling their family’s handwoven fabrics to tourists in these villages, only now a solid minority of them are disinterestedly scrolling on their mobile phone, and only semi-paying attention to you.

⁴ Or, given the huge variety of ethnic groups in the country, maybe it’s more accurate to say Laos has dozens of grand and distinctive styles of food.

⁵ As I have come to expect, any former colonies of France can be relied upon, at a minimum, to have fantastic bread.

⁶ You know, the burrito was a little off — I think it could have done with sour cream and better seasoning — but the queso appetizer was spot on and better than I’d expect from any given random tex-mex place in the United States. And yes, they should have had Cholula’s or something along those lines, but they had Tabasco, so there was a sincere effort being made that was downright endearing.

⁷ Is vegetable lasagna really French? They were certainly making out like it was, and there was enough Coq au Vin and Bœuf Bourguignon on the menu to convince me they knew what they were talking about.

⁸ I’m going to fault the crust, which was one of those cracker-thin styles which I will totally admit is a valid style of pizza but it’s not one near and dear to my heart. But they import their tomatoes and mozzarella from Italy, so everything sitting on top of that crust tastes like home to me. Which, okay, yes, is Brooklyn in my case, but the best places there get all their ingredients from Italy, too.

⁹ Example: I headed out to a Buddhist sculpture park on the weekend, and there were a lot of Chinese tourists there. But there were a lot of Laos families with young children wandering around or sitting in the small café along the river. It kind of felt like the sort of thing they’d find themselves doing every month or so.

¹⁰ I really want to know who thought it was a great idea. But somebody did.

¹¹ Technically Mai Laos, substituting the local rice whiskey for the rum.