They meet in front of the new train station.
Mothers from the capital, with babies in their arms and small children in their hands, on whom they put little caps to protect them from the sun, and who are setting out on their first journey together.
Workers visiting their distant families who have never ridden a train in their lives.
Retirees from Thailand who have packed their suitcases for the long weekend and now, at around seven in the morning, are getting off the bus that took them across the border to the neighboring country, Laos.
Late July, just outside of Vientiane, the capital of Laos.
Here, in the middle of nowhere, is the station of the Laos-China Railway Company.
The building with the flat, elongated wing roof is the waiting room for the new high-speed train between China and Laos.
The station in Vientiane is the provisional start and end point of the railway.
Construction work started in 2016, and almost six years later, since December 2021, the train route has been in operation;
over 414 kilometers, 167 bridges and 75 tunnels, through valleys and mountainous forests, the rails stretch from the Chinese province of Yunnan across the border to Laos down to the capital
Vientiane, where Thailand begins just over the border.
A Laotian woman in front of the ticket counter says the old joke Laotians used to tell themselves about themselves no longer applies: that the abbreviation "PDR" from the "Lao People's Democratic Republic" is actually an abbreviated description of Lao leisureliness - »Please don't rush«.
Since the express train has been around, she says, you have to come up with something new.
Because the people in Laos have recently been traveling across the country at breakneck speed.
A new train through Laos is not just a new train through Laos.
It is the first real railway line that the country, which is said to be one of the poorest in Southeast Asia, has ever had.
Communist Laos, with its seven million people, is thereby transformed from an isolated country to one connected to its neighbors, more easily traded by rail, with Thailand to the west and much larger China to the north.
However, critics see the train as a project Laos cannot afford and looms large in an economic crisis similar to that in Sri Lanka.
For them, the railway line is another successful move by China to force neighboring countries into its dependency.
Imposing construction projects and loans on them, thereby luring them into a debt trap from which they can no longer free themselves.
Four long rows form in the station hall.
ticket control.
The bullet train, which seats 720 people, departs Vientiane station northbound twice a day.
On this day is the train with the white-blue-red stripes,
the colors of the Laotian flag, sold out.
The control goes quickly, the passengers get on.
Rows of three seats on the left, rows of two seats on the right, the writing in Chinese, then in Lao, then in English runs across a display board on the ceiling.
7:30 a.m., departure.
Announcement: "Whoever is seated incorrectly pays a surcharge of 30 percent." "Please do not throw toilet paper down the toilet." "This is a non-smoking train."
A Chinese couple takes a seat.
The two say that they have lived in Laos for a long time and are waiting for the border to China, which has been completely sealed off since the pandemic, to finally open again.
They haven't seen their relatives for so long.
They believe the train will bring many benefits to Laos.
Import and export.
Compared to its neighboring countries, Laos does not have access to the sea, which is a geographical disadvantage that the railway line can offset somewhat.
They believe many Chinese will come to invest in Laos.
Outside, heading north, the scenery sweeps upstream of the Mekong.
Green valleys with rice paddies and jungle, in between fish ponds, muddy brown fields and crouching isolated houses.
The hills to the left and right of the route are getting higher.
After an hour, the train keeps disappearing in the next darkness, almost half of the route is in tunnels through the mountains.
For China, the high-speed train through Laos is another crucial step in its Silk Road project, a broader development program begun in 2013 through which Beijing is expanding its influence.
It opens up markets, trade corridors, access to resources worldwide via infrastructure projects – in Africa, Central Asia, Europe.
Chinese influence is particularly strong in Southeast Asian countries, especially in Laos.
For Laos this means first of all: With its »New Silk Road«, China offers the country the possibility of a highly modern train, which the country could never have built and operated on its own.
Japan, Vietnam and Thailand are also investing in Laos.
Overall, however, China is the largest lender - Chinese money is used to support hydroelectric power plants and dams on the Mekong, projects in agriculture, mining and rubber production.
The express train route, the most expensive infrastructure project to date, was built by the Laos-China Railway Company, a joint venture largely in Chinese hands.
The plans, the machines, the workers, the material: almost everything from China.
China has cut a swath through another country with the express train - and thus connected its economically weak west;
initially as far as Thailand, and potentially beyond: there have long been concrete plans to continue building and connecting the railway down to the south, to the economically strong Singapore with its large container port.
If you ask the people on the platform what they think of the train, they say that before they had to travel from one city to another they had to rely on buses and cars.
Four hours by train instead of 15 hours by bus
For example, Noi, a Lao woman and mother of two young children, says that before the train existed, she used to travel on bad, dangerous roads, often washed out by rain, impassable by landslides, potholes and floods.
She was hardly ever able to visit her family, especially not with the children.
The ticket prices are a bit expensive for Noi, only recently there was another increase.
She paid the equivalent of 16 euros for her ticket and earns just over 100 euros a month.
In addition, tickets are difficult to obtain.
The online system still doesn't work, you have to stand in line at the counters for hours and hope that there is still one left when it is your turn.
But Noi wants to be able to afford the train journey a few times a year in the future, she says.
Another says the journey from Vientiane to the Chinese border can take 15 hours by car, something he's seen more than once.
The train, with a maximum speed of 160 kilometers per hour, covers the distance in less than four hours.
A group of young men hopes that the recent freight traffic that has started traveling back and forth on the rails between China and Laos will mean an economic boom for their country and, above all, more jobs.
But you also have to say: China is pushing Laos into a big problem with the train.
The cost of construction was initially calculated at $6 billion, which was about half of what it was at the time
gross domestic product of Laos.
Both countries contribute to the costs.
Nevertheless, the financial obligations for Laos are overwhelming.
Laos took out a loan of more than 400 million US dollars for the project from the Chinese Export-Import Bank and also gave the Chinese client a strip of land
left and right of the train route.
If Laos can no longer service its loans, the train and the route will be in Chinese hands.
Some observers are predicting a possible economic collapse in Laos, fueled by the pandemic, the Ukraine crisis and Chinese investment in the country.
The inflation rate of the Lao currency kip is at its highest level in two decades, hitting just one fifth of the population living below the poverty line.
As a result, fuel deliveries were stopped in May and long queues formed in front of the petrol stations.
The country's national debt was $14.5 billion in 2021, half of which is attributable to China, according to the World Bank.
At 8:25 a.m., you can get off for the first time when the train reaches the first stop, Vang Vieng, a small town that before the pandemic was full of backpackers drifting down the Nam Song River.
You can remain seated until the final stop in Boten, the northernmost city of Laos, which the train reaches at eleven o'clock and after more than 400 kilometers.
For the time being, only freight trains will cross the border to China.
Boten used to be something like the last Laotian village before the Chinese border, with a few hundred inhabitants.
20 years ago the place grew;
Chinese investors have turned it into a city of casinos and hotels, a Chinese-owned economic zone where clocks are set to the Chinese time zone, where Mandarin is spoken.
The new train is intended to give messengers, which have meanwhile been run down, new splendour.
Or, like most people on this day, you get off at 9.24 a.m. in Luang Prabang.
A hilly place right on the Mekong, where 30 temples are lined up in some streets.
The Wat Xieng Thong, where Buddhist women and
Buddhists in traditional clothes donate sticky rice, boiled eggs and rice cakes to the monks in the morning processions.
The woman with her baby gets out, the Thai pensioners group, also a few backpackers from Europe.
Luang Prabang, which is listed as a Unesco World Heritage Site, is a good place to talk about the new railway line's opportunities and the dangers.
The employee at the tourism authority, where only the Chinese newspaper China Daily is available, says, for example, that he hopes that soon, when China opens its borders, many Chinese travelers will come by train.
For two corona years, Luang Prabang was a lonely place, many people had to give up their shops.
But then he says, and that's why he wants to remain anonymous in this text, that he's worried too.
That he was born in Luang Prabang and wasn't sure how well the small town would cope with the future crowds of tourists.
He tells of a dam on the Mekong, financed by third countries and built on Laotian territory.
In 2018 the dam collapsed.
There were deaths, there were thousands who lost their homes.
Since then he has had the feeling that it is bad if Laos has so little say and control in all these projects.
When other countries use your homeland like a field whose harvest you can bring in.
The next Mekong dam, says the tourism official, is planned just 25 kilometers from Luang Prabang, and the donor is China.
He often asks himself now: Who is responsible if an accident occurs on the railway line?
According to the Laotian Ministry of Construction, the railway should be out of the red after just 23 years.
But, the man asks himself, the details of the contracts are not transparent, and nobody in the Laotian population knows any more details.
What if the calculation doesn't add up because the pandemic strikes again, the Chinese border remains closed and travel becomes impossible again?
Or when people can no longer afford the tickets?
Has anyone calculated this?
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