Yes, Laos, but Vientiane, Not Luang Prabang

I came back from the temple and got a wangsit (a very Javanese way of saying nobody asked me to, nothing prompted it, and I did it anyway) to check our flight booking to Laos.

I had checked my Laos tickets before—several times. But I had only ever checked the things you check: the dates, the times, the spelling of the name on the passport. This time I checked the name of the city.

Vientiane.

That doesn’t sound like Luang Prabang, I thought.

It is not Luang Prabang. It is 340 kilometres from Luang Prabang. Vientiane is also, and I want to be very clear that I found this out in my purple room at 7 pm the night before, the actual capital of Laos, which I had confidently believed was Luang Prabang.

My geography teacher is crying in his grave.

Still Laos

Panic isn’t useful, but it is fast, and I got a lot done.

Firstly, I cancelled the food tour. It was overpriced anyway, which softened the blow slightly, but it was booked for that same night in a city we wouldn’t be in, and the cancellation window closed at 24 hours. So that went first.

Second: Tell Amma. This is the part where I started feeling short of breath and lightheaded, because telling your mother you booked the wrong city is a specific flavour of failure. She took it well. I think because I led with “I am finding a solution” rather than with “I have made a mistake”, which is a trick I learnt from work.

Then, I called Kijang, our local tour operator, who was patient, kind, and genuinely tried. There were multiple flights to Laos, to Vientiane and to Luang Prabang, but not within our schedule, budget, or duration. Every option involved a couple of transits and more hours in the air than the drive would have taken.

So I booked the train. Laos put in a high-speed railway in 2021, and it is the single best thing that could have happened to a person in my situation. What would have been a seven- or eight-hour bus grind through the mountains is now under two hours, mostly through tunnels, said ChatGPT. After many minutes of reviewing timetables, I settled on Vientiane to Luang Prabang at 3.40 pm, and Luang Prabang back to Vientiane at 6 pm on the 10th, a day earlier than planned.

I then booked the last-minute hotel rooms. I found somewhere near the night market in Vientiane, on the logic that if we were going to be in the wrong city, we should at least be able to eat in it.

Lastly, I emailed the Luang Prabang hotel asking to drop a night and refund the difference. They rejected it immediately. Not “we’ll look into it”. Not “let us check with the manager”. Immediately. I am still salty about the immediacy. But well, it all can’t be without hiccups.

At night, once I could breathe again, it turns out I was not fully wrong; Luang Prabang was once the capital. About fifty years ago.

Another silver lining: I’ll get to experience two cities in Laos instead of just one. Yay!

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