City Life | 2 August 2008

Paul Theroux, in The Great Railway Bazaar, paints a louche portrait of the capital of Laos. ‘The brothels are cleaner than the hostels, marijuana is cheaper than pipe tobacco and opium is easier to find than a cold glass of beer,’ he wrote in 1975. When Theroux finally got his beer, the waitress told him sex was on the menu too. Gosh, if only I’d know about Vientiane in my gap year. It might have taught me more about the real world than three months at the British Institute in Florence and a lost week in Fez. These days, of course, Laos is firmly on the gap-year trail, but Vientiane (one hour from Bangkok by air or 11 by train) has cleaned up its act. If you want a cold beer and a smoke in a pristine hostel, it’s not difficult to arrange. If you want to relax in a brothel with an opium pipe, well, I suspect you need to know the right people.