Journey without maps

  The Laos-China train station is about 16km away from downtown, and with little traffic at 06:30 in the morning the journey takes about 35 minutes. The station doors open at 07:00 for the 08:00 service, and they stop selling tickets 30 minutes before departure. I already had purchased a digital ticket (US$ 120), but needed to visit Counter 6 in the ticket office to swap my QR ticket for a paper one. The train is clean and modern, and I settled into Seat 11F in coach number 8. At one end of the carriage there is an ‘Asian’-style squat toilet, and at the other end a ‘Western’-style sit-down one. Next to the carriage attendant’s office tether is a tap to get boiling filtered water. Halfway down the train in Carriage number 4 there is a small cafeteria serving microwave heated bowls of noodles and rice dishes. In Laos the train reaches a bout 160kmh, with the speed show on a digital LED screen in the carriage.  The countryside is beautiful - lush green flooded paddy, and cloud co...

  It has been almost exactly a decade since I was last in Vientiane. The country feels very different. Downtown (near the river) is empty on a Sunday afternoon, the fountain has lost its charm and its restaurants, and there is clearly an increased impact of China.  Nowhere is this more apparent than in the new rail infrastructure that links Laos to China.  The Laos section of the line was constructed at a cost of around $6 billion. The freight and passenger traffic have been growing rapidly since the service opened in 2021. The railway opens up a faster logistics and export route for land-locked Laos to the large Chinese market in the north. More than 20 million passengers have also taken the journey so far.  The company that owns and operates the line is 70 percent owned by Chinese interests and 30 percent by the Laos state. Laos has also guaranteed the $3.6 billion project debt, at an annual debt service cost of around $150-$200m per annum. It is likely that freigh...

I love trains. I have taken hard seats and hard sleepers across Europe, India and China. I have experienced the luxury of soft sleeper on the Trans Mongolian from Beijing to Moscow, and ridden on the roof of a train in war-torn Cambodia. This month I am taking a train from Laos to China, and then to Vietnam.  I had thought I would take the train all the way from Singapore to Laos and onwards, but I have done much of the Singapore to Bangkok journey before. Given the time constraints, and work obligations, I decided to fly to Vientiane for my first meeting, and then take a train to my last in Hanoi next weekend.  As there is no train from Laos to Vietnam, the obvious alternative is the train from Laos to China and then to Hanoi. The latter just reopened last month after being suspended since Covid in 2020. So here we are on day one of this mini trip. 10:00 Scoot from Singapore to Vientiane.