Mar 13, 2025
After another breakfast on the rooftop looking at the swirling clouds through the nearby mountains, we headed off in yet another direction for a walk around the outskirts of the town. After a nice coffee at one of several bakeries with French heritage, we headed back to the room, checked out and caught our EV taxi to the train station.
Whilst the trains and the station are lovely, the Chinese didn’t bother mucking around with putting a station near the middle of the town, and so all the train stations on the high-speed line are well out of the way and require some form of transport to get there. The train, of course, was on-time to the minute, which is a pretty neat trick when it’s come all the way from China, and off we headed to the capital.
A very agrarian economy with fields everywhere you look, planted with a variety of trees, fruit, and grain. Cattle amongst it all, and many of the fields being prepared for the oncoming wet season.
I was about to say that I haven’t seen one set of traffic lights in the whole of the country but, just as I thought that, we came across one. However, they’re extremely rare and we’ve only ever seen them in the center of the capital.
Took a fixed price taxi from the train station to our hotel, which is nice but you wouldn’t say it’s teeming with business. Bless his cotton socks, but it was funny having the Lao concierge trying to explain to us how to use a shower tap in broken English. When he turned it on with a flourish to demonstrate, the cleaner had left the spout directed at the door and he got an absolute drenching.
I’d say the hotel was grand in its day but is now facing stiff competition. We’re not the only guests in the place but there aren’t very many. The restaurant has an extensive dinner menu, but we found it’s only open for breakfast. Sure enough when we went for a walk around the corner there is the Doubletree by Hilton, Hard Rock Cafe, and a dozen other well known hotels. Went past a restaurant offering a dinner menu for 1.4 million Kip which is about $100 in Australia, and bear in mind that this is Laos where I paid 70c for a can of Coke, so we are certainly in the expensive and up market part of town. Only a block or two from the city centre, palace, cultural centre and the rest which we will get to explore tomorrow.
Vientiane reminds me of Saigon – vibrant, some cosmopolitan areas, some traditional areas, and lots of haphazard street wiring. There were hundreds of options for dinner, and ours was a lovely restaurant for $8 each. Afterwards we wandered down to the Mekong (where else) and strolled through the night market. Probably the biggest I’ve been to. Think Queen Vic market at night. There was a whole additional section for food, and a third separate section set up as a sideshow alley.
Back to the hotel past the park with the fountain lightshow.
New Rose Boutique Hotel
Evening fountain lightshow
Sideshow alley
New Rose Boutique Hotel