Trip Report: Southeast Asia '22

My travels through Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam roughly followed the lower Mekong river, but there were sadly no boat rides.

Reflections

• Vietnam felt richer than Cambodia. Cambodia felt richer than Laos. And the richer nation was more enjoyable to travel.
• Vietnamese food was phenomenal. One of the best cuisines in the world.
• Phnom Penh I would not hurry back to visit.  
• Larb is tasty. Try some with sticky rice when you’re in Laos.
• A tour guide is (almost always) worth the price. They are your translator.
• If you’re going to hop multiple countries, get a global e-SIM. Airports don’t have WiFi.
• When you are travelling, you :clap: need :clap: to :clap: rest :clap:
  If you wake up for consecutive early morning flights, you will be exhausted and hate yourself.
• If you are remote working, rent a desk at a co-working space. It feels good to leave the hotel.

2022-Aug-25 Lao Noises

Singapore’s MRT is just a delight to reach Changi. I myself arrived two hours before my flight, but could have easily gone down to 90 minutes. It depends on your risk appetite. Flight out of Singapore was uneventful, as you’d hope!

Vientiane

I wouldn’t rush out to visit Vientiane again, at least the hotelled part of the south-west where I stayed. It felt like a way-station on the banana pancake trail. You should come here as a launchpad to beautiful Laotian jungles, or hire a day guide to see the key buildings. It didn’t feel like a city you wander to discover hidden gems.

The Mekong Waterfront was bereft of people. Two small horses picked through some carnival remains. One block down river was a park full of new hawker stalls, all shuttered. At one point someone drove a motorbike through the fairgrounds towing a wagon of party supplies.

I ducked into a cafe called La Terrasse. A table of six locals beside me spent the whole time conversing in French. Menus were all in French, Lao and English. The coffee was decent. The fresh bread put lie to the objection of Singaporean bakeries’ that baguettes simply don’t keep in the tropics. The eggs were surprisingly great, nice and buttery.

Most places don’t accept card, only Laos Kip. The sticker price is huge because one Australian dollar is about 1000 Kip. Just think of local prices as expressed to three decimal places. Later on I haggled a tuk-tuk driver to accept 5 USD instead of 50,000 Kip, a generous exchange rate but there’s a price premium because he wasn’t a bank.

I chilled at the hotel to recharge my devices and myself. There was some construction around town but it wasn’t a thrumming hub of development. I had dinner at a pizzeria called PDR and enjoyed one of my few beers since moving to Singapore (seriously, we just don’t drink that much in Singapore).

2022-Aug-26 Laos Day Two: Electric Boogaloo

The hotel summoned a taxi which took me to the airport in no time flat. Check-in was very easy as it was a domestic flight. No store was open at the terminal. We were on our flight to Pakse in no time.

Pakse

Pakse is only 95,000, about a tenth that of Vientiane, but it’s the 2nd largest in Laos and the part I landed in felt nicer than Vientiane. There seemed to be less French influence here. The bank of the Mekong in Pakse hosts a long construction site, unattended when I passed (paused due to Covid?).

The main roads are wide and paved with cement rather than asphalt. All of them are lined with the flags of Laos, Vietnam and the Hammer & Sickle. Vientiane wasn’t like this. Half the vehicles were motorbikes and the other were Hilux. The Lao-Nippon bridge, which crosses the Mekong into Thailand, was built with Japanese investment but there were no Japanese flags.

I stayed at Le Jardin Hotel east of the city centre, but close to MD Coffee where Google Maps informed me there was good Wi-Fi and air conditioning. I got a lot of work done.

In the evening I caught a tuk-tuk from the hotel to the city centre. I had larb duck for dinner at the Pakse Hotel & Restaurant rooftop bar. Larb is the Laos national dish, a meat salad served with sticky rice - Wikipedia informs me that Laotians are often called ລູກເຂົ້າໜຽວ “People of the Sticky Rice''. When the waiter said ‘rice’ in English it sounded like “lye’ because, like Thai, Laotian doesn’t have an R sound. My larb was good, but I think the restaurant attracts people primarily for the view. I got a beer at Cloud9 opposite and waited for the tuk-tuk to return. While I waited, a family on bicycles rode past and the kids laugh-shouted at me “Hello! Hello!”. I gave them a very Australian grin.

2022-Aug-27 A Dayful of Pakse

I set-out from my hotel in the opposite direction as I’d done the day before. I found a place called Coffee Today opposite the Champassak Stadium (Champassak was an old Mandala Kingdom ruled out of Pakse from 1713 until 1904, until the French annexed it). The coffee was great, the Wi-Fi was excellent and I got a lot of work done on some hobbies. A kid selling treats came in from the street and said “Hello!” I said Hello, they looked at me right back then turned on their heels and left.

I walked further north to La Memoire Cafe & Restaurant. It was nestled mid-way into a residential suburb. There were a lot of nice and not-so-nice houses. Not so many hotels and businesses. Google reviews for La Memoire were very good, but the mood was truly sombre. I only stayed for a nice espresso.

2022-Aug-28 Pakse your bags, we’re going to Bangkok

That morning when my bus to Siem Reap was meant to arrive, the company emailed to say that they’d lost my booking. The next available bus was on Tuesday Aug 30. That wouldn’t gel with my plans, so I asked the hotel to take me to the airport immediately. A driver happened to be at the hotel with the engine running, waiting for an Australian couple to finish their breakfast, so they scooted me to Pakse Airport.

I was unsure if there would even be a flight out of Pakse, but if there was, then the only place I could politely insist my way into buying a ticket would be at the airport. I arrived at 08:25 and the departures board said that Lao Airlines flight QV 306 would leave at 09:50. Lao Airways only accepts cash or a finicky QR code unique to Laos, so I went looking for an ATM. There happens to be one on the highway outside the airport (this makes it sound really obvious, I spent a couple of hot minutes searching for it. I’ve uploaded photo directions to Google Maps in protest of how hard it was to find). Technically tickets were no longer purchasable but I was politely insistent and the staff thought, hey, the flight’s only three fifths full anyway.

I landed in Vientiane and had to see where to go from there. My options were Bangkok or Incheon in Korea, so Bangkok it was. The flight left less than an hour after I landed, so it was an absolute sprint to buy the ticket and reach the gate. My Wise debit card acquitted itself handsomely, allowing me to withdraw the needed cash.

Bangkok

I reached Bangkok, where had I sprinted I could have made a flight that afternoon to Phnom Penh. However, the booking closed mid-way through registration. I took this as a sign that I wasn’t going to make it to Cambodia that evening, so I grabbed a late hotel deal on Booking.com and pencilled in a food tour. I rode the airport train into Bangkok and transferred to the metro, which was an uncanny replica of the Singapore MRT. Same rolling stock, similar layout, although Bangkok had metal detectors entering the station.

I dropped my bag at the Mandarin and then linked up with a food tour one block down. The group comprised four Americans, two Canadians, two locals, a Swiss and myself. I was paired with the Swiss. The food tour was an excellent night. The day had been a slog but the evening was an absolute highlight.

Bangkok had changed immensely since I was there in 2007. Major landmarks were illuminated with flood lights. Traffic was busy, but nowhere near as bad. The metro system existed. Bangkok felt every bit the hub of a rapidly industrialising nation that it was.

2022-Aug-29 Phnom-enal, Penh-ultimate Stop

I was up grumpily early for the flight to Phnom Penh. I faffed about trying to find a bus stop en route to the airport train, gave up, went back to the hotel and used their wifi to hail a Grab. I hopped on the airport train and was at BKK in good-ish time.

I arrived just as check-in opened. For the first time, someone asked to see my Covid-19 vaccination certificate. The attendant inspected my vaccine certificate, got lost and opened the rabies page of my yellow card. They asked if these doses (rabies) were Moderna or Pfizer. I said I’d been vaccinated against Covid twice with Moderna, once with a Pfizer booster. They thought that all sounded convincing and gave me my boarding pass. At Phnom Penh Airport, they also checked my vaccine certificate (the correct one). I was never asked to show my vaccine certificate again.

Phnom Penh

Not gonna lie. I was carrying some heavy fatigue by this point. I reposed at the Airport Burger King, bummed their wifi and listened to the latest Affix podcast. After much lounging, I learnt that, amazingly, Cambodia has Grab and I could use my Singapore account to order a tuk-tuk. While I milled about waiting for the driver, many many cabbies came up and asked to drive me into town. This is common in SouthEast Asia, but it was more assertive in Cambodia than Laos and (later) Saigon.

Phnom Penh felt like a richer city than Vientiane. There were more towers, elevated roads, more electric billboards and way more traffic. Unlike Vientiane, footpaths in Phnom Penh existed, but the hexagon pavers were cracked and muddy. There were more ships on the Mekong. Here it was wider, a thick brown snake abutting the city. It was under-developed by global standards, but clearly growing.

The hostel bed was just where I needed to crash. Later I summoned myself to the hostel bar, wrote some blog and drank some beer - cheap as it was tasty. I got a lot of writing done.

I felt glad I came to Phnom Penh, I doubt I’ll ever come back.

2022-Aug-30 Moc Bai the Way

Phnom Penh

At 7am I walked 100 metres from the hostel to the bus station. In that brief walk I was approached by yet more taxi drivers. When I asked them where the Ibis station was, they dropped the act and pointed me the right way. At the station they checked my passport and visa, then left us to wait in the air conditioned office. A cheeky monkey pinched someone's croissant and ate it on a nearby billboard.

Probably twelve of us boarded the Giant Ibis bus at 8am. It was large, air conditioned, equipped with wifi and powerpoints. The staff gave us pain au chocolat and canned coffee.

The countryside had many old houses right beside newer and nicer houses. We crossed the Mekong on the Neak Loeung Bridge, the longest Mekong Bridge in Cambodia and featured on their 500 Riel note. It was opened in 2015 thanks to contributions from the Japanese Government.

Moc Bai

The bus pulled aside the Moc Bai border crossing. We gave our passports and visas to the attendant. Many on TripAdvisor say that their bus asked travellers for $1-2 USD here, but ours asked for nothing. I suspect our $1-2 USD was included in the ticket price.

We were ushered off the bus with all our bags. As we disgorged, a border agent checked our faces to our passports, then carried them into the check-point. We got back on the bus and went to a duty-free rest-stop with a cafe restaurant. They accepted Cambodia Riel, Vietnamese Dong and US Dollars. The exchange rate hadn’t been updated since the war in Ukraine, so the USD/Riel rate was even more favourable than I could get on Wise. Unwilling to pass up such a bargain, I got a Vietnamese coffee and it did me a world of good.

We were ushered back on the bus, onwards to the check-point, disembarked and passed through immigration. No one was stopped except for one traveller who, back in Phnom Penh, said they didn’t have a visa. We put our bags through an x-ray machine and collected our passports on the other side. We boarded the bus in Vietnam and went on our way. The visa-less traveller was not on the bus.

The moment we crossed over, things felt more developed than Cambodia. The wifi on the bus perked up immediately. Roads were paved with asphalt, not cement. Demarcation lines were brightly painted. Concrete bollards dividing the direction of travel were lined with planter boxes. Shops along the road were level, with footpaths out front and they continued uninterrupted from the border to Saigon. When it rained, it flowed through concrete drainage channels. It felt every bit as though we’d passed into a nation which, the IMF forecasts, will surpass a GDP (PPP) of 2 trillion dollars in 2027, the same year as will Australia.

Saigon

Saigon made an immediate good impression. The streets were well laid out, flat and mostly unbroken. Crossing traffic was daunting to begin with, I tagged behind a local the first time I crossed. Before parting way, we exchanged a bromantic thumbs-up. I made it to the hotel, but was pouring rivulets of sweat after a mere twenty minutes.

The hotel set me up in a serviced apartment with an interesting view of a burned out juice bar. I did laundry in the sink and resolved to never fly without a Scrubba laundry bag.

Later I headed out to find an ATM and dinner. Google promised me there were cash machines in a building one block from the hotel, so I headed there and was smacked in the face with a big surprise. It was a luxe shopping mall with designer brands and a Singaporean level of air-conditioning. Despite the billboards venerating Ho Chi Minh, communist uniforms and a Hammer & Sickle in every garage, Saigon was very capitalist. If you were so inclined, you could get a Dyson hair dryer at their brand-name store for 11 million Dong ($660 Singapore dollars). I found an ATM and a smattering of wifi then went out to find dinner.

Walking around Saigon reminded me of Melbourne. The streets were laid out in a grid.  Cafes and restaurants populated the laneways between them. Buildings were faux-Parisian. Workers erected a live music stage in a central boulevard. Cultural landmarks were illuminated by flood lights. I walked around the block a few times and settled on an up market local restaurant. It was expensive for Vietnam, but very cheap for Australia. That night I slept satisfied.

2022-Aug-31 Saigon in 60 Seconds

I worked remotely from my serviced apartment the whole day. I ducked out only to get coffee in the morning and lunch in the afternoon. Opposite the hotel was a fantastic little outlet for Tam Coffee & Tea. They sold bric-a-brac crockery and their signature egg-coffee. I had one and was floored. A revelation. Lunch, by contrast, I’ve had better banh mi in Melbourne and Singapore. I worked all afternoon. Had a great dinner at a vegetarian restaurant and grabbed a beer at Pasteur Road Brewery after.

2022-Sept-01 You’ll Miss Saigon

I checked out of my room at 10 but left my bag at the hotel so I could wander the town unencumbered. I lounged at Tam Coffee & Tea, took in the street life and picked up some roasted coffee beans. Around the corner was the Hotel Continental Saigon where many journalists and diplomats stayed during the war.

I looped around behind the Cathedral, up through 30 April Park to the Reunification Palace, then south east to Phin Xan Cafe. There I had a nice coffee and bought another bag of roasted beans.

I then b-lined to the Saigon Skydeck and enjoyed the city’s panorama. Would recommend the view.  

I ducked back to the hotel, picked up my bag and hailed a Grab ride to the airport. It’s good to end your trip on a high note, so I ordered a Bike and dinked my way to the airport. It was great fun (sorry Mum). I arrived two hours ahead of the flight and was at the gate with an hour til departure. When we boarded the aircraft went a little overboard with the airpurifier and we flew to Singapore in a soup of clean air.

Vietnam was a blast. The highlight of this trip. Would come again. Feeling pretty rough around the edges. Home will be very welcome.