Hello Laos. Hello tourists.

Laos – a country few people seem to know a lot about, and that’s somehow portrayed as a backpackers dream. Seemed enough reason for us to visit it.

For lack of better planning, we decided to fly into Viantiane, the capital of Laos. It was the smallest plane we’d used to far, and we had a stopover in Pakse, a small town in the South of Laos. Even though we were just changing planes, we were told that we needed to get our visa and pass immigration here. Seemed straight forward – except for the fact that they don’t accept their local currency. Now, that did make sense in Cambodia, where US dollars are more frequently used that the local currency, but in Laos? Dollars aren’t used in Laos, which is why we didn’t bring any. The cashier at the visa desk seemed confused we didn’t have dollars, and once they could agree on how much our visa was (price varies from country to country), he proposed an exchange rate that was plain robbery. They allowed me to go find an ATM, which I did – but it only spat out LAK, no USD (a full 1 million of it…worth about USD 120). I then proceeded to wake up the lady asleep on the desk called “money exchange”, and told her I needed USD. She didn’t seem to understand, but after 10 minutes I walked out with 70 USD for 2 visas, and still about 400’000 LAK.

We later arrived in Vientiane on what seemed like a local airport, walking on the runway and all included.

We only stayed a night, for we were not keen on spending time in big cities, but rather go to Vang Vieng, a small town up north which had been recommended to us. 10 bucks each got us a ticket for the 5h bus ride the next day, which went on smoothly as expected.

One of the first things we noticed in Vang Vieng was – again – the “airport”. At least that’s what it’s called on Google Maps. In reality, it’s just a huge empty field, which is used for anything but planes, it seemed.

The rest of the town was not as empty. Vang Vieng reminded us of Pai (which we loved): A small place, pretty much one main street and some side alleys, and a generally relaxed feeling. The river flowing through gives the city nice touch, even though it’s quite popular for tubing and getting drunk doing that.

We spent a pleasant few days in Vang Vieng, doing the must-dos in scooters and bikes that were for rent at every corner. One thing that we could not help but notice was – once again – the amount of tourists in town. Now, this has been a subject of our discussions for a long time (and will probably lead to a separate blog post one day), but it was hard to miss in this place. On one hand, you’re greeted by signs like this upon entering the town:

Then, the next second, you see stuff like that:

…and she was by far not the worst. While we’re fully aware that we’re tourists ourselves, we could not help but to think what tourism had done to this place. Looking around, an estimated 90% of all stores fell into the 4 categories of restaurants/bars, massage parlours, guesthouses and souvenir shops. There are literally hundreds of them, in a town smaller than Steffisburg (the place to be, btw). None of the roads except the main streets are even paved, but there’s an abundance of ATMs to make sure tourists never run out of cash.

What would Vang Vieng look like without tourists? What would the locals be doing? Would it even exist?

These are only the first of a whole set of questions that lead to endless discussions about the point of traveling the world in the first place. We’re aware that only these tourists put the town on our map (we’ve heard about it from another tourist…), but where’s the actual Laos-experience here? (There is an organic farm, where we could possibly have gotten a bit more of an authentic experience, but that didn’t happen for a number of reasons.)

We did do some nice activities in and around town, got caught in the mother of all rain storms while riding bikes on a dirt road, but at the core of it, what really sets us apart from the typical exchange-rate tourist, who loves the cheap beer and magic pizzas and spends hours watching the same episodes of “Friends” in some filthy guesthouse?

That’s the million-dollar-question. And I’d be happy to engage in a discussion on that with anybody willing to get into the subject…