I still remember the first time I saw Vang Vieng, in Laos. It was many years ago, before the Chinese began pouring money in (such is the scale of Chinese investment, Laos now has high-speed rail). I was driving one of the very few rentable 4x4s in the country, picked up in the sleepy capital of Vientiane. I was on the main road connecting south and north Laos.
When I say main road, I mean a road that sometimes narrowed to a single track, and that single track was commonly blocked by hens, dogs, playing children, and soldiers sleeping on the roofs of their cars under posters carrying the hammer and sickle (Laos was, and still is, theoretically communist).
It was the Wild West meets Alex Garland’s The Beach set in a famous Chinese landscape painting
The combination of poverty, rural remoteness, quasi-communism, and squawking fowl blocking the most important arterial road, did not therefore prepare me for Vang Vieng.