OOPS! Derailed!

After cruising around the world in 2023 and seeing a boatload of misadventures among our fellow passengers, Louis and Doris agreed only three things are indispensable for a good trip:

• We don’t get injured.
• We don’t get sick.
• We don’t lose anything really important.

If we check those boxes, we figure anything else that goes wrong is just . . .  c’est la vie. Which brings us to our ill-fated effort to traverse Laos on the Laos-China Railway bullet train.

BACKGROUND: Our original Laos itinerary was three-part. Let’s call that PLAN A.

1. Fly into the exquisite royal capital, Luang Prabang (LP), and stay five nights;
2. Take the snazzy Chinese bullet train one hour south to the adventure capital, Vang Vien (VV), and stay one night;
3. Bullet on from VV to the modern capital, Vientiane, by rail and stay three nights before moving on to Cambodia by air. 

The train was central to PLAN A because it eliminated a torturous 10-hour drive between LP and Vientiane and because we were eager to experience a Chinese bullet train.

GAME PLAN. Doris’s meticulous trip planning before leaving home revealed we could not buy a ticket for the train until 4 days in advance of the ride and would have to be purchased in person because we didn’t have the requisite Lao, Thai or Chinese telephone number for online buying. Alas, the same planning uncovered no hint that, once the tickets became available, they would sell out fast as a Taylor Swift concert, which led to….

MISFIRE. Relying on Doris’s infallibility as a trip planner, we sauntered to the railway ticket office mid-morning on the fourth day before our ride to VV. We congratulated ourselves on having brilliantly read the Laos-China website and remembered to bring cash and our passports for the purchase. To which all we can say now is … pride goeth before a fall.

The railway “no have” tickets for our travel date, we were told. “Sold out.” Or for the day before that. Or for the day after that because those weren’t on sale yet. Hoping one of the dozens of travel agencies advertising train tickets in town might have a secret stash (like Taylor Swift concert resellers), we hotfooted to the nearest office only to hear, again, “no have”! All the travel agencies could offer were minivans leaving LP at 6:30 in the morning and rattling 5.5 hours over the torturous old road to VV. 

NO WAY! Whipping out her TMobile-enabled cell phone from a bench at the travel agency door, Doris tracked down two Lao Air seats to Vientiane on our LP departure day (net cost increase of $80 over the train), cancelled our room in VV without penalty and booked another night in Vientiane (net lodging cost increase of $47). Whew!

PLAN B. Restored to smug confidence and still itching to ride the whiz-bang Chinese bullet train and see the famous karsts of Vien Veng, we concocted a new plan: a day trip to VV from Vientiane. Now well-schooled in the ticket game, we were at the ticket office door before it opened on the day we were eligible to buy seats for our day trip and effortlessly secured tickets to reach VV in time for lunch and return to Vientiane after taking in a scenic sunset over the karsts in the Nam Song River ($55 for both RT tickets).

We told ourselves we liked PLAN B even better than PLAN A because it saved us schlepping bags on and off the train twice in 24 hours and checking into a one-night stay in VV (which, yes, if it sounds familiar, is where six young tourists died downing poisoned shots in a hostel about a week ago). All good, right?

NOPE. Once in Vientiane, we booked a taxi to the station the night before our train and took our tickets from the safe deposit box. The next morning, we ate breakfast early, hopped into our 8:15 am taxi, rode 45 minutes ($14) to the imposing Laos-China Railway, gathered our things from the van, said goodbye to our sweet Lao driver Mout and joined a few hundred Chinese travelers in line to check in for the ride. Who-hoo!

NO GOOD, NO GO. We had reminded ourselves, twice, to carry our passports in the remote chance we needed them for a one-hour domestic ride (think … Los Angeles to Orange County on Amtrak) but, in our anticipation, we had left the documents behind in the hotel safe deposit box. Reaching the head of the queue into the station, we flourished our digital passports. No good. Originals only. We whined, we begged, we argued. No go. No Chinese bullet train, no karsts, no sunset into the Nam Song, not even a refund for our useless tickets because guess what? We needed our passports to get one!

PLAN C. Because Doris had added Mout to her WhatsApp contacts before saying goodbye, she was able to text him an SOS. Ten minutes later, he pulled up to the curb, again, and reloaded us. He gamely offered to drive us to Vang Veng, tour us and return us after sunset just like the train but no passport required ($150). But the fact was . . . we already had mixed feelings about missing a day in Vientiane. We’d found the city far more interesting than expected and the food far more delicious. It didn’t help that the State Department had sent us a STEP warning about drinking alcohol in VV that dimmed our enthusiasm for sipping sundowners on the riverfront.

We declined Mout’s offer and instead recruited him to drive and wait for us at two sites we had been very sorry to miss (a Disneyland of Buddhas and the great once-golden great stupa of Laos), and off we went for hours of sightseeing, no train required ($36.80). 

Our son Greg has a test he applies when considering mutually exclusive options: Would realizing the option be more disappointing or relieving? In the end, we decided we were more relieved than disappointed to spend another day in Vientiane. The mishap ended up costing a couple hundred dollars, a bit of time and a few blood pressure points but, at the end of the day, we were still healthy and well, and we’d lost nothing of real value.

Having checked the essential boxes, the rest was c’est la vie.