Luang Prabang, Day 1

This trip is probably one of my worst planned solo trips yet. It doesn’t mean that it’s bad - it’s anything but! It’s just that I feel more unprepared than usual. My solo travel mishaps, I feel, have been quite minimal: there was the one time I booked the wrong date for my hostel in Austria, which I managed to rectify quickly without extra fee. Or that time I almost missed my flight to Alicante, because I forgot that security lines exist even for domestic flights. Or that time where I injured myself when hiking Machu Picchu. Or that time when my Galapagos flights didn’t get issued until the next 24 hours and nearly gave me a heart attack. But other than that, things usually go pretty smoothly, because I usually over prepared myself.

I was actually planning to hike Mt Kinabalu sometime this year. Upon research, I realized that this time is monsoon season in Southeast Asia, which is probably not the best time to hike a mountain. So no Mt Kinabalu, but hey, what do I do with this four-day weekend in August? Well, let’s go to Laos, which is another country in Southeast Asia, and do some chill hikes! Brilliant logic.

Although I had a four-day weekend, four days might not be enough for Laos, so I decided to take two days off on Thursday and Friday. Now, I actually wasn’t going to do much planning - I thought I could just wing it like I did Bangkok. It is definitely a terrible idea, and I should have known, because 1) I was only in Bangkok the whole time 2) Bangkok and Thailand tourism seems to be more mature in general.

Two days before I left for Laos, I didn’t really have anything to do, so I thought I could use this time to do some planning. At that point, I only had a rough outline of how my trip will be: I’ll spend the first two days in Luang Prabang, the next two in Nong Khiaw, and the final day in Vientiane. I’ll use the train to travel between Luang Prabang and Vientiane, and take a public minivan to travel between Luang Prabang and Nong Khiaw.

My first and probably biggest mistake is that I didn’t know that buying Vientiane - Luang Prabang train tickets is a whole ordeal in itself.

To get to Luang Prabang from Vientiane (and vice versa), there are several options:

• Bus. It will take 7 hours. I’ve done night buses before from Yangon to Bagan and vice versa, so this does not seem to be a terrible option. But the pandemic has aged me by 10 years - a night bus sounds adventurous but now I’d rather opt for comfort wherever it makes sense. Later on the trip I’d meet someone who took the bus from Vientiane and she told me it was a sitting bus and it was so uncomfortable she ended up flying back instead of taking the bus, so it seems like I made a good call.

• Plane. Straightforward but more expensive. This option would set me back for around SGD200. My roundtrip Singapore - Vientiane flight ticket cost me roughly the same!

• Train. There is a new train that runs from Vientiane all the way to the Laos-China border, passing by common tourist destination towns such as Vang Vieng and Luang Prabang, the latter of which  is one of my stops. The price is just as cheap as the bus (for now) but instead of 7 hours, it will take you just 2 hours! Sweet, seems like a no-brainer.

The last time I purchased a ticket in an offline ticket counter was probably when I took the DMZ train in Seoul, and that was only because I had a hard time navigating the website. So I wrongfully assumed that I could just buy the train ticket online, because isn’t that what everyone does nowadays? But if there is one thing I learned here, it is that analogy thinking is definitely NOT a good idea when traveling. Every country is different.

Apparently this is how buying a train ticket works in Laos at time of writing: no, you cannot buy online. You have to buy the ticket at the train station. Here’s another catch: you can buy it ONLY 3 days in advance. You can’t book it far ahead. Bummer.

This probably wouldn’t have been such a big problem if 1) the train station was in the city center, and I could just walk in and buy it, 2) the queue wasn’t so long. But both LP and VTE train stations are SO FAR from the city center, and the queues are terribly LONG. I only knew this because I saw someone posted a picture on Twitter and tha was the moment where it hit me that this is not going to be as simple as I thought it would be. If I had two months in Laos, sure I’d gamble and queue. But I only have 6 days, and I’m not spending an entire day lining up for a train ticket.

The first thing that I did was of course, PANIC. After that, I did some more research - surely I’m not the only person who has gone through this predicament? I’m surely not a special tourist snowflake. Some people in various forums mentioned that they typically ask their hotel’s help. More specifically, the hotel would send someone to the train station to line up and buy the ticket for them, for an extra fee of course.

Another option is to buy the ticket from a third-party website. It actually works pretty much similarly, it’s just that it’s much more expensive. You book it online, and someone from the third-party agent would get the ticket for you during the 3-day window. They usually close the booking during this period, so in contrast to how the offline booking works, if you book online, you need to do it before the 3-day window.

Okay, I thought, I’m starting to get the hang of it. The online booking for Vientiane - Luang Prabang has already closed, so my best bet is to ask my hotel to buy it for me for an extra fee. But then I came across another problem: on my first day, I’m not staying anywhere in Vientiane. My plan was to catch the train right after I land in Vientiane. Assuming that I can buy a Vientiane - Luang Prabang ticket from any train station, I asked my hotel in LP if they could buy it for me. They said that sure, they can. But the next day they said that I have to buy it from Vientiane. This is kind of annoying because if I had known, I would have just ordered it online, ya know.

Desperately, I asked my hotel in VTE to buy a train ticket for August 4th, although I would only be checking in on August 8th instead of August 4th. They kindly accommodated me although I wasn’t checking in that day. And for the LP - VTE train, since I will be arriving from Nong Khiaw the same day I take the train, I booked my ticket through a third agent website, which is usually my last resort since a) it’s hella expensive, even with the service fee taken into account, b) unlike asking your hotel’s help, you don’t know these people! But at this point I feel like I have no option. I got a confirmation email immediately, saying that they will give me the ticket on the day of my train. Okay, fine, I trust them.

So that’s all sorted out, I hope (narrator: it’s not).

I left Singapore for Vientiane on Thursday. When in Vientiane, I went straight to my hotel to pick up the ticket, and that surprisingly worked out great. My next stop would be the railway station, which is located waaay outside of town. I ordered a car through Loca - a Grab-like app in Laos - and the driver was a kind, chatty young woman.

“You’ve got your ticket, right?” I nodded. “Good, because I’ve had people who think they can just walk in and buy. If you don’t have your ticket I won't be taking you to the station.”

She proceeded to tell me that if we arrived too early, I probably wouldn't be let in, so she said she’s not going too fast otherwise I would have to wait outside in the brutal heat. “Maybe they are saving AC,” she quipped.

It really was such a long way to the railway station, and it pains me to say this but Vientiane in itself is pretty boring, and the surrounding was dry, literally and figuratively. Thankfully throughout the ride I had a great conversation with my Loca driver. She talked about how there are so many developments from Chinese companies going on in Laos right now, the railway being one example but there are many others  too. I mean, it was pretty palpable from the buildings I passed by. One of the first things I noticed was how, for all buildings, the store names are usually written in Lao script and English, but a lot of them in Vientiane were also written in Chinese characters. The government buildings, such as ministry buildings, are usually written in Lao, English, and French.

The train to Luang Prabang took about 2 hours, and the view was magnificent. I can see why people would rather take the train than the bus, especially since they are around the same price, though my Loca driver told me that they might increase the price soon. I felt like the train journey was reminiscent of the Jakarta - Bandung train journey that I usually take, except that more recently I feel I was seeing more and more settlements crop up here and there. In contrast, much of the Laos countryside just looked completely untouched, which probably can be explained by the fact that Laos is really sparsely populated compared to the rest of the region.

Once in Luang Prabang, we were all ushered to the exit as if we were a flock of ducks in a military camp. Next, I had to figure out how to get to my hotel in the city center of Luang Prabang. I remember I did ask my hotel in LP about how to get to the hotel and they said there is a bus. Learning from my whole train ticket fiasco that I should be as detailed as possible, I inquired further: “bus number?”

“You’ll see it, don't worry about it,” he replied, which wasn’t very reassuring but he was probably pissed off already, so I just let it go.

At first I couldn't find it - I swear there were no buses at all in my vicinity. All of the vehicles there were either tuk-tuks, cars, or minivans. None of which looks like a bus to me, unless I’ve been wrong about what I think is a bus my whole life. I walked around the parking lot, trying to find what I think is a bus, until I spotted a tent with people crowding around it. Oooooh. The bus in question, it turns out, is a public minivan.

The public minivan ride cost 35,000 kip per person, which was not too shabby especially when you consider that you’ll get dropped off literally at the doorstep of your hotel (or so I thought). How it works is pretty straightforward: you just let the ticket guy know where to be dropped off. He would write it down on the ticket (which was pretty much a black and white form on a piece of white paper), give the ticket to the driver of the minivan, and the minivan will take you there. At first all passengers randomly sat based on the order we arrived at the minivan, but later on the driver would arrange our seats based on where we would be dropped off.

From behind the driver’s seat, I saw the driver with a handful of tickets that he collected from us earlier in his hands. I watched him with fascination as he started rearranging them and lining them up on his dashboard as if there were restaurant tickets. My guess was he was trying to figure out which one of us should be dropped off first. How does he even decide on which one is the most optimal route? Now that I think about it, this is one instance of the traveling salesman problem. It’s interesting because the driver would always get a different combination of drop off points for every single ride, and oftentimes there would be a very last-minute shoo-in like me, so he had to make his mind up about the route on the fly, minutes before our minivan ventures out of the station and into the Luang Prabang city center.

Interestingly, I kind of found the answer at the end of my trip. During this trip one of the books that I read was Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy (another one is Natasha Lunn’s Conversations on Love, which I read during my flight from Singapore to Vientiane, in which I shed a tear or two upon reading it. Well no, I sobbed, but that’s another story). The last chapter of Arriving Today, which I read on my flight back home, discussed last mile delivery. If you order a piece of a USB drive from an ecommerce website, how does that piece of USB drive get from the sortation center to your front door? While a large part of your USB drive’s journey all the way from its manufacturer to you has actually been automated, the last mile delivery part is still pretty much done manually. And of course you cannot talk about last mile delivery without touching on the traveling salesman problem. What fascinated me was this passage: “a large body of research shows that humans are remarkably good at solving the traveling salesman problem on their own. Scientists aren’t sure why, but something about the way we process visual information makes us pretty decent at finding a nearly optimal route through even a dense thicket of potential stops. Add to that a driver’s local knowledge, and it makes sense that the best possible way to accomplish a given delivery route is to give experienced drivers some amount of discretion in how they accomplish their drop-offs.”

I was the first to get dropped off - maybe because my hotel is slightly out of the city center, unlike the rest of the hotels. I’m totally okay with it as I enjoy being away from the hustle and bustle and plus, it gives me an excuse to walk.

My first order of business in Luang Prabang after checking in was to drop by the Tamarind Restaurant. I booked a cooking class for the next day, and they asked me to drop by the day before to pay a deposit. I did not mind at all - I understand that since Laos has just recently opened and this is a low season for Laos because of the monsoon (which, I didn’t discover until days later…) - they probably need to be really sure that there will be someone attending the class for the next day. And again, it gave me an excuse to walk and get to know the area, which is what I always do when I’m in a new town anyway.

The restaurant is located overlooking the Nam Khan river, which branches from the Mekong River. The Mekong River itself is super fascinating to me; it is the longest river in Southeast Asia, running pretty much from East Asia (Tibet, China) through the entire mainland of Southeast Asia (Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam). I’m aware that country borders are man made constructions, but the fact that this river connects a lot of different countries is still mind blowing to me. This very same river is actually connected to Tonle Sap, the lake that I visited in Cambodia back in 2018.

In the area, there were a lot of other restaurants and coffee shops too. By “a lot”, I was referring to “a lot” by the Laotian standards, which is pretty much just “three to five”. It was supposedly dinner time, and anywhere else in the world these restaurants would be packed to the brim. But in contrast these restaurants were totally empty save for one or two groups of diners. I wouldn’t call it a ghost town per se, since I still saw people out and about. “Sleepy town” would be a more accurate description.

In the restaurant, I was greeted by Joy, the owner of the restaurant and cooking school (I later discovered that he did a TV show episode with Gordon Ramsay!). I signed up for the daytime cooking class, but he asked if I’d consider moving to the evening cooking class instead, because there were only me and one other person so far and they booked the evening cooking class. I was totally fine with that, it’s not like I had a busy itinerary anyway, so I said yes.

The reason why I chose the daytime cooking class was because it involved a tour to the morning market. I love, love, love markets with a capital L. The evening class definitely didn’t have a morning market visit (duh).

“Which market do you usually visit in the daytime class? There are two markets” I asked him.

“So there are two markets here,” he said. “First, there is the morning market. Here you can see people selling bugs, insects. This is where tourists usually go. The second market is a bit out of the city center, it’s where all people even from outside of Luang Prabang come to shop.”

The reason why I asked is because I wanted to check out the markets myself, but before I had the chance to explain myself, he kindly offered to take me in the morning to one of the markets - whichever I wanted. “As a gesture of thanks, for moving to the evening class.” That was very kind of him, and honestly was just a start of the many kindnesses of the Lao people that I encountered during my trip. I took on the offer, and we planned to meet up at the restaurant at 9 in the morning.

I haven’t really had any real food at this point, so I headed to Sisavangvong Road which is also often referred to as the main road in Luang Prabang. It’s where all the action is, but as you can probably guess already, there is not much going on here except for the evening market ahead. While I kind of missed the usual buzz, the good news is I didn’t have to push through other slow-walking tourists, and after a while I did get kind of used to the quiet. It felt like being in an alternate universe of some sort - maybe a universe where ¾ of the world died in a zombie apocalypse and you’re all the people left for now, and somehow you all decided to spend your last hours in Luang Prabang, which is honestly not a bad idea.

Anywho.

My restaurant of choice for tonight was Tangor Restaurant Bar & Lounge, which is kind of a local and western fusion restaurant. The decor in the restaurant was very Indochina inspired; there were more than three Wong Kar Wai posters I could count from where I was sitting alone. When I got there, there was just another couple sipping drinks on the patio. I ordered a fish filet dish and their signature cocktail, both of which came rather quickly. The fish filet was served with rice and plenty of cilantro, and anyone who knows me knows how much I love cilantro, so this felt like a good omen.

I checked out the evening market which was located not so far from the restaurant. They were selling a wide range of stuff - street food, bags, clothes. I kind of wanted to get a throw for the sofa in my living room, but I thought I’d just come back the next day. I bought a cup of smoothie instead because I saw a lot of people holding a cup of smoothie in their hand so I didn’t want to miss out. Next to the smoothie stall, there was a stall selling this kind of coconut cake called khao nom kok which smelled heavenly, so of course I had to get some of those too.

When I walked around, I passed by a barbeque place which seemed to be pretty popular. There were a lot of groups sitting around the round barbeque grill just having fun and eating good food. I could only imagine - while I don’t often encounter issues eating alone when I’m traveling solo (or even at home), there are certain places that I still feel a bit weird about eating alone, and one of them is barbeque places. I know I probably shouldn’t care, but I ended up walking past it anyway.

The food court in the night market was surprisingly packed with people, and honestly this is the time where I was experiencing those waves of sadness of being alone in a foreign city where I know no one. Which is weird, because I usually crave being by myself in a foreign city, otherwise I wouldn’t be doing all of this solo traveling thing would I? Ugh. I don’t know, sometimes feelings just don’t make sense, and as I walked past the evening market instead of trying to rationalize everything like I usually would, I couldn’t help but feel a tad bit sad. But at least I've got some khao nom kok and a mango-pineapple smoothie. I headed home, really looking forward to munching on my khao nom kok while watching Netflix.