We could have flown, of course. There would be an orderly line at immigration and a taxi waiting to whisk us to the hotel. The whole trip would’ve taken roughly an hour, and we’d be poolside by noon. It would’ve spared us from a whole lot of my son’s “Are we there yet?” whining. But where’s the thrill in that?
So in the half-light of a hazy winter morning, bleary-eyed after the sleepless overnight train ride from our home in Bangkok to Vientiane, my wife, our five-year-old son, and I crossed the Mekong into Laos on a clattering railway carriage. Aside from a single hotel reservation in Luang Prabang, Laos’s former royal capital, we had no plans nor even a return ticket. We had embarked on this unscripted adventure in the hopes of channeling the halcyon days of our first visit to the country, a free-wheeling backpacking trip more than 10 years ago. It was a way, we figured, to instill our son with a similar thirst for adventure.
But during the years that passed, Laos, too, had moved forward. I recalled the lengthy drives over serpentine mountain roads, both of us piled into pickup trucks with a dozen strangers crammed into rip-roaring minivans with a boxed-up chicken clucking at our feet. In late 2021 a Chinese-built railway began crossing the country from Vientiane, the capital, north into China, traveling at speeds of up to 100 miles an hour and cutting down trips that, before, had taken me a full day to a kid-friendlier hour or two.
With its sloping roof and high ceilings, the cavernous railway terminal on the rural outskirts of Vientiane resembled a small airport. There was a single café doling out bitter robusta brews and a small store dealing in pickled chicken feet and cans of off-brand Pringles. All was calm, until a shrieking whistle rang in the train’s arrival and the station erupted into organized chaos: monks in saffron robes hurrying by, passengers dragging rice bags bulging with watermelons. Southern Chinese city slickers flaunted luxury knockoffs; Germans thumbed through dog-eared Lonely Planet guides. All the while, attendants processed passengers with an efficiency that felt more perfunctory than polite.
For the next 90 minutes Laos’s countryside flashed by in a blur, until it rippled into the jungle-dripping camel-hump mountains around Vang Vieng, our first stop. The déjà vu I had expected never came: The pickup trucks that once transported backpackers for boozy tube floats down the river now had kayaks strapped to their roof; the string of bars playing endless Friends reruns had morphed into smart coffee shops. What was once one of Southeast Asia’s most notorious party towns was now a family-friendly echo of its past.
