NEXT STOP: WHO KNOWS?

We wanted to do a once-in-a-lifetime trek in northern Laos. Just getting there became the adventure

BY Bonnie Munday

I recently read that a new high-speed train route had opened in Laos at the end of 2021. The Lao-China Railway can get you the 150 kilometres from the ancient capital of Luang Prabang north to the Chinese border in just 90 minutes. It carries more than 1.5 million passengers a year, a game-changer for a country with very little transport infrastructure. As someone who has visited this remote corner of Laos, I wondered: what fun is that sort of speed when you can take three days to do pretty much the same trip by boat – never knowing if you’ll actually get there? It was the spring of 2017, and my husband, Jules, and I had just spent two weeks travelling around Laos. We had poked around the humid, sprawling capital,…

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Reader’s Digest New Zealand (Digital) - 1 Issue, June / July 2024

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