The rain came early this morning, a steady drum on the tin roof of my flat in Sikhottabong, and for a while I just lay there listening, letting the sound do its slow work on the day. It is my last morning in Vientiane, and I have learned by now not to fight the weather but to move with it, to read the sky the way the monks read the hour before tak bat. So I waited, and when the rain softened to a drizzle I pulled on my sandals and went out, because there was one thing I wanted to do properly before I left.
I walked through the wet streets toward Talat Khua Din, the market that has become my morning anchor. The air was thick and green, the way it gets after a storm, and the stalls were already busy under their tarpaulins, women in conical hats sorting piles of mint and morning glory, men stacking dragon fruit and rambutans in careful pyramids. I bought a bag of sticky rice wrapped in banana leaf for about ten thousand kip, that is less than a dollar, and stood for a moment watching the rain drip off the awnings. I have loved this market in a quiet way all week, not for anything dramatic but for the ordinary rhythm of it, the way everyone knows everyone, the way the day starts the same each morning.
From the market I walked to the small noodle stall where I had my first bowl of khao piak sen the week I arrived. It is just a plastic table and a few stools under a corrugated roof, the kind of place you would walk straight past if you did not know. But I know now. I ordered the same as always, the thick hand-cut noodles in a clear broth with chicken and a wedge of lime, and it cost me about eighteen thousand kip, around a dollar. A woman at the next table nodded at me, and I nodded back, and I felt something close to belonging. This is what I will miss, I think, not the landmarks or the sights but the small unremarkable moments that make a place yours.
The rain had stopped by the time I finished eating, so I decided to walk the long way back, past the French villas with their faded shutters, past the little wats I had not yet visited, past the new apartment blocks going up everywhere. Vientiane is changing, that is clear even in one week. I stopped at Comma Coffee Reading Room on the way, a cool, quiet room full of books and the smell of dark roast, and ordered a Lao coffee for about thirty-five thousand kip. I sat by the window and watched the street, the scooters and tuk-tuks splashing through puddles, the monks in their saffron robes walking with slow grace, and I thought about the week I have had here.
It began with paperwork, of course, as all long stays do. The visa on arrival at Wattay International Airport was straightforward enough, around thirty-five dollars, cash and a passport photo, and then the digital form which everyone must file now since September, I was told. The Stay Permit at the Department of Foreigner Control took a morning, the bank account at BCEL took another. I will not pretend it was thrilling, but there is something honest about it, the slow bureaucratic knitting of your life into a new place. And now I have a SIM card that works, a bank card that lets me pay for noodles with my phone, a flat I rent for about five million kip a month, which is around three hundred dollars, and a set of keys that feel heavier than they should.
I have a list of things I wanted to accomplish in Vientiane before moving south, and I am pleased to say I have done most of them. There were the mornings at Talat Sao, the Morning Market, where I bought a piece of woven silk the colour of a Mekong sunset, and a coffee at Agape cafe and space, a name that still makes me smile, and an afternoon at the Lao Textile Museum learning about the patterns and dyes. There was the climb to the top of Patuxai, the victory gate that looks like an Arc de Triomphe that wandered east and went a little native, and the view over the jumble of roofs and palm trees and the gold spire of Pha That Luang glowing in the distance.
But the real lessons were quieter ones. The first day I tried to do too much, to see everything, to move at the pace I was used to. By the third day I had learned to sit still for an hour at the riverside, just watching the water and the clouds, and to feel that time was not wasted. The sabai sabai tempo is not laziness, I have decided; it is a kind of intelligence, a way of living that refuses to be hurried by clocks that have nothing to do with the river or the rain.
Today, though, I wanted to go back to a place that had moved me more than I expected. The COPE Visitor Centre in the Xaysetha district is not an easy place to visit, but I am glad I went, and I am glad I went back. It tells the story of the unexploded ordnance that still lies beneath the fields and forests of this country, the millions of bombs dropped during the Vietnam War, the most per capita of any nation on earth. There are photographs, prosthetics, stories of farmers who lost limbs tilling the soil they were born to. I sat in the small theatre and watched a film about a boy who lost his leg to a bomb while playing in his village, and I felt the weight of it, the long shadow that history still casts over the green landscape I have been enjoying so lightly.
I have been thinking about that shadow all week, and about the way this city refuses to be defined by it. The Lao people I have met are not bitter or angry, or rather, they hold their grief and their joy together, the way you hold a child and an umbrella in the rain. I think of the woman at the noodle stall who told me about her daughter studying in Pakse, of the monk who smiled at me from across the temple courtyard, of the old man who fixed my sandal on the street for ten thousand kip and refused to take more. There is a strength here, a soft-spoken resilience, that I want to carry with me as I travel south.
In the afternoon, I went back to my flat to pack and to sit with the feeling of leaving. I have not done much, this last day, and that is the point, I think. Vientiane has taught me that you can fill a day with nothing and still come away full. I checked the weather on my phone, a thunderstorm with hail forecast for the evening, and I smiled. I will miss the storms, the sudden darkening of the sky, the first fat drops, the way the whole city seems to hold its breath and then release it in a great exhale of water and green.
That evening, for my last dinner, I went to a place I had passed a dozen times and never entered. LAO Kitchen Home made is on the edge of the old centre, a low building with a terrace open to the street, and it felt right for a farewell. I ordered larb with sticky rice and a Beerlao, the national beer that costs about twenty-two thousand kip for a bottle, around a dollar and a half, and I ate slowly, watching the evening settle over the city. The Mekong was close, I could hear the river sound if I listened, and the sky was doing that thing it does here at dusk, turning the clouds to bronze and then to ash.
After dinner, I walked along the promenade one last time. The new embankment that was completed earlier this year, I am told, runs for several kilometres along the river, and it has transformed the evening ritual. Families were out, couples, joggers, old men flying kites, and the air was full of the smell of the river and of grilled meat from the night market stalls. I bought a cup of fresh coconut juice for fifteen thousand kip, and I stood at the railing and watched the last light fail over the water.
In that moment, I understood something I had been circling all week. The Mekong is not just a river to this city, it is the reason it exists, the source of its life, its history, its future. The Chinese cargo boats that slide past with their orange lights, the fisherman casting his net from a wooden boat, the children splashing at the edge, the monks walking home with their alms bowls, it is all one thing, a single slow current that has been flowing here for centuries. And I am part of it now, at least for a little while, one more soul carried gently along on its muddy waters.
I stood there until the rain began, the first heavy drops dimpling the river, and then I walked home through the storm, the streets already running with water. I will leave tomorrow on the bus headed south, down Route 13 toward the Bolaven Plateau, but Vientiane will not leave me. It has planted something in me, a seed of slowness, of attentiveness, of gratitude for the small moments that make up a life. I do not know exactly what the next weeks will bring, but I know I will carry this city with me, the smell of its rain, the taste of its noodles, the sound of its river, and I will be grateful.
Goodnight, Vientiane. Sabaidee.