Vientiane for Digital Nomads
A major city right across the border from Thailand, Laos' capital Vientiane is the obvious place to go when your Thai visa expires and you need to get out the country, especially if you have plans to go back. That is why many people come here (that was why I first came here in 2011), but Vientiane is a destination in its own right.
Having not been here since 2015 I was excited to return, this time as a digital nomad. And while it's a city with a lot of potential, there's a lot that makes Vientiane not very digital nomad friendly.
While many nationalities can get a visa on arrival in Laos, that is only for 30 days making it a hard place to come with any long-term plans. That visa can be extended by up to 30 days, but the combined costs mean to stay here for 60 days will be over $100 USD and you'll twice have to deal with immigration.
Unofficially, according to a long-term resident I met drunk one night, a one year working visa can be obtained for $400 USD without too much trouble, although I can't vouch for how easy this is.
The Internet in Vientiane in shockingly bad considering Thailand is just over the river and has some of the fastest Internet in the world. Some more unverified drunken information I obtained is that Laos relies on Thailand for its Internet and it used to be much faster here, but after a spat between Thai and Laotian officials, it mysteriously got slower. Whatever the reason, Vientiane has the most unstable Internet connections I've used in modern times.
It's also not really a fun city to get around. I'm someone who likes to walk everywhere and Vientiane is very unfriendly to pedestrians. Perhaps an indicator of wealth disparity, there aren't many sensibly-sized cars here. Almost anyone who has a car has a 4x4 or a pick-up truck, and in Vientiane they use the pavements as car parks. To walk anywhere you have to continually go out into the road to get around them. This is frustrating and not very safe as many drivers prioritise shorter journey times over the safety of others. The pollution is also very noticeable.
There are plenty of tuk-tuks hanging around, but as Vientiane attracts a lot of gullible tourists, tuk-tuks often won't take you for anything less than an exorbitant rate. For example when I moved to my second hotel in Vientiane, to go between the two rooms was a 25 minute walk; about a mile. As I have a wheeled suitcase and the pavements are so uneven, this was a rare occasion that I tried to take a tuk-tuk. Firstly I went onto Kokkok, which is a ride-hailing app, and the quote on there for this trip was 7,000 kip. There were no available drivers, so I instead went to the first tuk-tuk I saw on the street, and for this same trip he quoted me 100,000 kip, more than fourteen times the price. And he refused to budge when I tried to negotiate.
I can't blame him either, because he won't have to wait long until a tourist shows up who is willing to pay, but unless you're willing to pay grossly inflated fares, getting around by tuk-tuk as a foreigner isn't really viable unless the unreliable ride-hailing apps have availability. I ended up walking to my new hotel.
There is a bus network in Vientiane, but it seems pretty sparse and almost unused, even by locals.
As well as being unpleasant to get around, there isn't really any green space in Vientiane. No parks of note within the city, and nowhere nice to run. I couldn't tell you anywhere outdoors in Vientiane that's pleasant to be.
It's also very poor for a major city from a social perspective. There aren't many events going on, and going and sitting in the bars alone took a bit of trial and error before I found places I liked.
That's the bad. It took a little while, but I did eventually grow to like Vientiane because it does have some very good things going for it. Firstly, it's a great city for food and is very vegan-friendly. I'd spent three weeks in Isaan in northern Thailand before coming here, and there if you want vegan food you're pretty much limited to Thai food. Neither will appreciate me saying this, but Thai food and Laotian food are exactly the same, so I was very thankful that there are a lot of other cuisines available here, including western vegan food.
Apart from the tuk-tuks, it's a very affordable city where you can get a comfortable hotel room for less than $600 USD a month, and it's one of the safest places I've ever been. To steal the Mongol quote, "a maiden bearing a nugget of gold on her head could wander safely throughout the realm." There really are no safety concerns here.
And the best thing about Vientiane is the people. I found it to be a really, really friendly place. The locals here are some of the nicest and most welcoming I've met anywhere in the world. That in itself is worth a whole lot.
I guess the best way to sum it up, is if you're someone fairly inactive who likes to spend their afternoons in cafes and coffee shops, then you'll probably like Vientane. It's slow-paced and there's no shortage of places to laze away the day. If you're more active and you like to be outdoors a lot, then it's not so great. I really hated that there was nowhere outdoors that I could get away from the traffic.
By the time I left I was lamenting that I had to leave, hoping I can make it back again one day soon, but it certainly took a while to get me to that point. Give it some time to get used to being here and you'll realise it's a nice place to be. Had I written this article after staying for two weeks, I wouldn't have said that.
Vientiane is an incredibly safe city, even at night, leaving you to appreciate its beauty. This is Ave Lane Xang, which is the road that leads you to the Patuxay Monument.
Where I stayed
CS Apartment
| Room | $270.80 USD |
| 7% Tax | $18.96 USD |
| Total |
$289.76 USD
($18.11 USD per night)
|
CS Apartment is both cheaper and more highly-rated than any comparable rooms that you can find in Vientiane, which begs the question, when I decided to stay in Vientiane beyond my booking and CS Apartment had availability, why did I opt to move elsewhere?
Firstly the good. It's an apartment rather than a hotel room. The twelve (I think) apartments here are all on the ground floor and have private entrances, and inside each one you have a good-sized living room, a bedroom, a semi-equipped kitchen and a bathroom. This is much more than you get in a typical hotel, although given how good the restaurants are in Vientiane, for me the plug-in wok and the microwave, the only cooking equipment in the kitchen, stayed unused.
The location is close to perfect, being an easy walking distance to the riverside and to a load of great restaurants, but also being down a quiet side-road. There's a Big C Mini at the end of this side-road (a thirty second walk), and opposite this is a newly opened D-Mart.
From the outside D-Mart looks quite small, but go in and it's a huge, very cheap supermarket spanning two floors. I believe it's Chinese because it reminds me in look and smell of the supermarkets I went to when I lived in China. Regardless, you can get almost anything you need here.
The staff at CS Apartment are absolutely lovely. So friendly, and they will often invite you to have a beer with them in the evenings. To the point I feel bad writing anything negative in this review, but I will be honest.
The main reason that I didn't really like staying here? Daylight.
I'm someone who needs daylight. I always sleep with the curtains open, and I wake-up everyday as the sun comes up. Anytime that's taken away from me, for example if I'm in a room without windows, it really messes me up. It'll mess up my body clock, I'll start sleeping late and feeling groggy and lethargic all day, and my mood just plummets.
The apartments at CS Apartment are long and thin, with the living room being the room you enter, and the bedroom being after that, in the middle of the apartment with no window to the outside. It has a window to the living room that is tinted meaning that even if you leave the living room curtains open, virtually no light gets into the bedroom.
If you're someone who uses black-out curtains and who likes their room to remain dark, even after sunrise, then firstly fuck you, and secondly you will probably love it here. If you're someone like me who struggles to function when their circadian rhythm is thrown out of sync, then this is not the place for you, despite all the positives.
The living room lacks a sofa to lounge around on, only having a couple of rather uncomfortable armchairs, so mostly when I wanted to relax, I'd lie in bed. It also doesn't really have a viable workstation, just a small coffee table, so often I'd work in bed too. I absolutely hated spending so much time in a room void of daylight.
The Internet here was very patchy as well. I mostly just used my data, although this was also unreliable. On a couple of occasions I found myself unable to get a connection stable enough to even watch a YouTube video.
A lot of people love this place, hence all the positive reviews (9.0 on booking.com, 9.1 on Agoda at the time of writing), and it does have a lot going for it so you might love it too. It's not for me though. I need daylight, and this apartment doesn't get enough of it.
The apartments are long and thin. The first room you go into when you walk in is the living room, which has a small TV and a fridge. Behind the TV, you can see through the window into the bedroom.
Patuxay Place
| Room (including taxes and fees) | $390.00 USD |
| Total |
$390.00 USD
($30.00 USD per night)
|
Moving to Patuxay Place saved my visit to Vientiane. I was getting so depressed by the lack of daylight in CS Apartment that I contemplated leaving Laos altogether. I'm so glad that I decided to stay, because within a couple of days of moving to Patuxay Place, with their east-facing windows in all rooms, I was getting so much morning daylight that my mood picked right up.
I was staying in the superior double room, which at 18m² is the biggest type of room on offer here, and it was perfect for my needs. There's just space between the bed and the TV to do yoga and other exercise, although the TV isn't that big, so I tended to only use it for workouts. Using my phone was better for Netflix. The desk was right next to the window, which I love. It was big enough to use as a workstation, including having a comfortable chair, and it had a healthy house-plant on, which is always welcome.
Underneath the desk is a fridge - great for keeping your smoothie fruit fresh, and the room comes with a very fancy kettle. An LCD display tells you how hot the water is, and an unnecessarily long spout lets you pour the tea like a posh person. My favourite thing about this hotel though? The refillable water bottles.
Included in the room are two metal, refillable water bottles, and in the hallways on each of the hotel's three floors (including the reception) are water coolers of filtered water that you can use without limitation. Not only does this save you the time and money of having to go to the shops and carry your water home, as is typical in this region, but it's much better for the environment. I really appreciated the convenience.
If you look on any booking sites, Patuxay Places's lowest score comes for its location, and it's true, it is a bit away from the city centre, instead nearby to the Patuxay Monument. I actually really liked the location though. There's a local vegan restaurant very nearby, so getting food doesn't require you to go all the way into town, I usually did anyway though.
It's about a 20 minute walk from the hotel to the town centre, and while it's not the most pleasing walk (nowhere is in Vientiane given the lack of greenery), I liked getting the exercise.
What I would say about Patuxay Place, is it's an absolutely lovely place to be if you want to stay somewhere uneventful. The staff are incredibly friendly when you speak to them but are also rather meek, and won't bother you otherwise. There is very little in the way of facilities so there's little reason to spend time anywhere in the hotel other than your room, and by being here you're away from most of the city's tourism. You can easily walk to the centre when you want things to liven up, but to be away from it and peacefully exist, here is perfect.
The room gets lots of daylight and it has a nice kettle. Do you really need anything else in life? I'd gladly stay again.
Look at all that lovely daylight. All six of the rooms at Patuxay Place have east-facing windows so you can be sure of a nice bright room in the mornings, or if you're into self-harm the windows have blackout curtains. Between the TV and the bed is enough space to exercise.
Where to get vegan food in Vientiane
Second only to the friendliness of the people, food is the best thing on offer in Vientiane. While there are plenty of great restaurants selling local vegan food, there are enough selling other cuisines, primarily western, that you don't get fed-up with it.
On the flip-side, the supermarkets are not at all vegan friendly. Rimping offers a very, very limited number of intentionally vegan items, such as vegan cheese slices, but they're expensive. This was all I found.
What does that mean? Well it means that you're far better off eating in restaurants than cooking for yourself, even if you have the facilities. While there are many places in Vientiane that I'd consider vegan-friendly, these were my favourites.
Reunion Cafe
The closest thing I had to a go-to in Vientiane, I came to Reunion Cafe on pretty much every other day. It's a fully vegan restaurant selling local food at fair prices, and it's open everyday until late (9pm). What more can you ask for? And unlike many other restaurants in Vientiane, it's realiably open.
I arrived in Vientiane on Christmas Day. Reunion Cafe was open until 9pm. On New Years Day it was open until 9pm. While other restaurants in the city had spotty opening hours, with many closing for the entire Christmas period, Reunion Cafe remained open.
It is, I assume, a family run place. I say that because most of the service is done by four younger girls and a slightly older woman, all of whom look pretty much the same. It would be weird if someone had hired five different people who all looked alike.
Very little English is spoken, but the picture menu is in English so pointing at what you want will suffice, and despite the inability to speak to the staff, I found them to be very friendly.
The service is very fast and the food was always high quality and fairly priced.
Reunion Cafe do vegan variations of typical Lao dishes by using mock meats, such as this stir-fried basil with pork belly, which costs 75,000 kip.
The Greenhouse
While Reunion was my go-to for local food, The Greenhouse was where I came when I tired of Laotian cuisine.
It's less reliable than Reunion, having been closed for the entire Christmas period, and it's not a vegan restaurant either, selling many items containing meat, although vegan items are at least marked on the menu.
They have vegan variations of several cuisines including tacos and burritos, bao buns, hummus and poke bowls. They seem to have most continents covered with that. With one exception where they seemed to be having a bad day, the food was always fast and high quality, and the prices reasonable.
Most of the seating is upstairs, so don't worry if you can't see any space downstairs.
Forget sunsets on the beach or romantic dinners or dolphins or any of that. The key to my heart is hummus. Just good quality hummus. Here it cost 50,000 kip.
House of Fruit Shakes
The vegan choices at House of Fruit Shakes are somewhat limited, so you may be wondering why I'm recommending it.
I value having fruit in my diet so much that I carry a blender, chopping board and knife in my suitcase just so I can make fruit smoothies everyday. If every city had a place like House of Fruit Shakes, I wouldn't bother.
Their large fruit platter, priced at 55,000 kip is a big fuck you plate of nothing but fruit, and this alone would keep me coming back. As the name of the restaurant indicates, their speciality is fresh fruit shakes. I asked what they put in these, and was told it's simply fruit and ice. Fresh fruit as well, not frozen. They have a big display of fruit at the front of the shop, and this is where they take the fruit for their fruit platters and shakes.
There are some other vegan items on the menu, such as a tofu and veggies baguette. In truth, these aren't really worth coming here for. The fruit though? One of the best places I've been to in the world to get your vitamins.
Getting enough fruit is so important to me that I carry a blender, chopping board and knife in my suitcase specifically to make fruit smoothies every morning and evening. I hope you can then appreciate my excitment at finding a place that offers no nonsense fruit platters like this. No fancy bowls, no sprinklings of things on top or sauces, just fuck you, here's a giant plate of fruit. That'll be 55,000 kip please.
Vegan Center Cafe
I didn't come here as much as I did Reunion, partly because it has a less convenient location, but I'd equally recommend Vegan Center Cafe as the place to come in Vientiane for local vegan food.
The menu is huge, and I didn't really scratch the surface of it with my few visits, but the various teriyaki bowls that they offer (like the teriyaki beef bowl) represent amazing value at 45,000 kip each, despite not being in bowls.
It's a fully vegan restaurant, as the name suggests, with mock meats being used to good effect to make some delicious and healthy dishes, and it's a very pleasant place to sit. You get given a free cup of tea which they refill for you even after you've finished eating, so you're really encouranged to relax while you're here.
This is called the 'Duck volcano red curry sauce.' Yeah, I think that's just what Google translate gave them, no idea what it's supposed to be called but I really liked it. It costs 70,000 kip.
Oon Jai Marketplace
The menu at Oon Jai is a little limited and the food a little hit-and-miss, but I thought the good food here was so good that it warrants recommendation.
They've made a peculiar decision to include honey in just one of the drinks on the menu. This is the only thing that stops Oon Jai from being classified as a vegan restaurant, and as they could equally use agave nectar or another substitute, it's a strange decision as seeing a vegetarian restaurant registers far less prominently in the mind of someone like me than seeing somewhere fully vegan.
The food is all vegan though, and comes in four categories: Mexican, burgers, sandwiches and bowls. The burgers are their biggest strength, and probably the main reason to come here (it's a little out of town, so unless you're going to the nearby Thai embassy, you're likely to be making a special trip). The cheapest of them, 'The Cheeser Burger', only costs 70,000 kip with a small side of fries, and it's also the best. Add on a smoothie for 40,000 kip more and you've just had a great lunch.
Worth the trip out here if you're tired of what's on offer in town.
While Vientiane offers a good selection of vegan foods, you can't beat a good burger, and this was the best one I found. It's called 'The Cheeser Burger' and comes with fries for 70,000 kip, which is very reasonable.
Where to run in Vientiane
Partly due to a lack of motivation, which in turn was partly due to a lack of enjoyable places to run, I only did three runs in Vientiane. The reasons that make Vientiane an unenjoyable place to walk around are amplified when it comes to running.
The unnecessarily large cars park on and completely block the pavements, they spew-out stifling pollution, and coupled with the motorcycles, the roads can take a long time to cross. All of this makes running on the streets of Vientiane unviable. Instead you have to settle for one of the meagre alternatives where these aren't issues.
In my research I found that That Luang Lake is the most popular place with locals, but being about 4km out of the town centre it's only suitable for someone who has their own transportation or a willingness to take a tuk-tuk. I have neither. Instead I made do with what I could find in the town centre.
Along the river
The first place I ran was along the riverside. I went straight down to the river from my first hotel in the late morning one day and ran west along the pavement until I got to 2.5km. I turned around and went back to make it a 5k.
This wasn't a completely awful route, at this time of day at least. Being in the middle of the day there were very few other people around, and the bars that occupy parts of the riverside pavement hadn't opened yet. There were no roads to cross, the pavement was fairly even, and while there were some cars on the road next to it, there weren't so many that pollution was an issue.
I hadn't run-out of pavement when I turned back, so I could have gone further west, as well as going who knows how far in the other direction.
Despite the pavement getting a little narrow in places, I'd say that this was the best place I went for slower runs. I wouldn't recommend it in the evenings because the bars open and it gets a lot more crowded with tourists, but coming in the late morning/early afternoon it's decent.
Patuxay Park
This was my least favourite of the three places I ran. Patuxay Park is the mostly concrete not very big park that surrounds the Patuxay monument; Laos' most recogniseable tourist sight. It was only a short walk from my second hotel, and I hoped that coming here in the late morning it would be a quiet enough time of day that I could run unhindered.
The park is wide at both ends but has a narrow section in the middle, like a bone or a double-ended dildo. The narrow section is to make space for cars to park, just to make the only vehicle-free part of Vientiane even more pathetic. And while the ends are fine for running around because the tourists and hawkers are all on the inside, the narrow section becomes a bit of a bottle-neck.
There were dozens or hundreds of tourists in this park, with many locals trying to get their money. I was the only person here exercising, which I didn't really enjoy. I much prefer exercising alone or at least with other people who are exercising, so I felt little motivation to come back.
One lap of the park is about 900m, so it's a little over five-and-a-half laps to do a 5k.
Chao Anouvong Stadium
Chao Anouvong Stadium sits fairly centrally in Vientiane. It's a worn-down old football stadium that has a slightly torn-up 400m running track going around the pitch. So long as you don't mind going around and around in circles (I hate it), then this might be your best bet for running in Vientiane, and is the only place I found suitable for sprint or interval training.
There's a caveat though, because why should doing exercise be easy? The stadium is closed until sometime in the early afternoon. I did ask around but couldn't find-out when exactly it opens, but it was always closed in the mornings but did seem to be open by 3pm everyday.
There's another caveat to this caveat. While the main entrance on Rue Nokeokoummane is closed in the mornings, someone's cut a hole in the fench around the other side, on Rue Le Ky Huong. I didn't ever go through this hole, but on the afternoon I did run here it was being used by school kids who couldn't be arsed to walk around, and I would guess with 99% confidence that if you went through this hole at a time the stadium was closed, you'd face zero consequences.
Don't hold me to that.
On the afternoon I came here I managed to completely miss-time my run so that I was here right as the schools were coming out. A lot of local teens were using the stadium as a place to hangout. Apart from some saying hello, they left me alone but as I said above, I'm not a fan of exercising somewhere when everyone else there is doing something else.
By the time I'd finished my run a few other people had shown-up to exercise, but Laotians are scared of the sun and at this time half of the track was shaded, and half wasn't. To a man, each of these people just ran back and forth on the shady half of the track while I was the weirdo running full laps.
It's worth noting that they don't turn the floodlights in the stadium on. I came here after dark one evening while scouting places to run, and the track was pretty much pitch-black. There were three people on it running at that time, and being a flat running track, you don't really need to be able to see where you're going, so it is still viable after dark, but something to be aware of.
The riverside is the best place for long, slow runs. You can go much farther than this and if you come in the late morning or early afternoon, there aren't many other people.
Being sociable in Vientiane
In other major touristy cities in this region you'll find a debaucherous area of bars where the foreigners go to hangout and get drunk. In Ho Chi Minh City you have Bui Vien Walking Street, in Phnom Penh you have 130 and 136 streets, in Bangkok you have many different areas, and even in smaller cities, if there's so much as a modest foreigner presence, areas pop-up to meet their alcoholic needs.
In Vientiane that's not true. It's a major city with a major tourist presence, yet there's very little in terms of foreigner-aimed nightlife.
In terms of organised events, there's not much going on. You'll find a Blabla language exchange group on Facebook, and they have weekly meetups. I joined the attached WhatsApp group, and before I'd even had time to send a message I'd been banned. That was a bit weird, but it put me off attending the event. Hosts of such events can get a bit of a God complex, especially when there's not much else going on in a city, so I opted to steer clear of this. Instead I found myself going to bars on my own. Even this though, is not Vientiane's forte.
The town centre isn't well built for people going out alone. It's mostly cafe-style bars where you sit at tables with friends. That's great if you're here with other people, but not very many places offer a bar that you can sit at and chat to other lonely people. There are exceptions, and within the town centre, the best bar I found was No Name Bar. It's a very, very friendly place where you can't fail to meet people.
My first time coming, I was on my way home and just wanted one more beer. I had no intention of talking to anyone, but they kind of made me join in with the fun, the bastards.
There are a couple of other traditional bars in the town centre, but I don't recommend them. The clientele are far less amenable.
Where I spent most of my drunk time was down by the river. There's a new cluster of riverside bars that, as I was told had been there for about four months when I visited, and these were proper bars with seats around each bar and lots of lonely people. That's what I'm looking for.
The clientele is mostly Asian. Some local people, but also a lot of Chinese and a curious amount of Koreans. I asked one of the landladies why there were so many Koreans there, and she had no idea, but did at least confirm I wasn't imagining it.
Regardless, I found most people here pretty friendly and fun to talk to, no matter where they were from. Almost all have sufficient English to hold a conversation.
There's a line of five outdoor bars on the riverside. My favourites were 368 Bar and Aloha Bar, but they're all pretty much the same, so just pop yourself down at whichever one you fancy.
Walking along the river, there's a small number of places between these bars and the city centre. There was one I went in that I really liked, but it's not on Google Maps. It was called something generic like 'Good Bar' or 'Great Bar', so if you see something along those lines it's worth a visit.
Don't come to Vientiane expecting the usual debaucherous nightlife that you'll typically find in this region; it just doesn't exist here. Once you've explored a bit and you've found the places that you like, it can still be a really fun city to go out in.