“After the visa rejection, I wanted to make sure I didn’t face any more visa issues. Both Laos and Vietnam offered e-visas, and Thailand offered visa-on-arrival. Also, these countries are well connected with each other and considered safe for backpackers who are just starting out,” says Daga.

So that’s where they went—a 15-day trip covering Thailand, Laos and Vietnam. On a budget.

For readers seeking to quench their wanderlust, Mint has launched a series capturing the costs and experiences of international destinations through the personal stories of travellers.

Living on a budget

Daga, now 20 and doing a bachelor’s course in business administration, says he managed to keep the living costs in check by staying in hostels instead of hotels. “These were dormitories with 6-8 beds. So the costs were cheap. We also stayed in a capsule-pod hotel in Pattaya, Thailand,” he says.

His overall living cost across the three countries added up to ₹8,000.

“I looked for hostels in areas where there were a bunch of hostels to get competitive pricing and wider options. For example, in Vietnam, we found good hostel deals in Hanoi-Old quarters. In Thailand, I found good options on Khaosan road in Bangkok, and in Pattaya, near the Pattaya beach,” he says. “These hostels are also usually in areas where there are good pubs and street food options.”

Public transport and no-frills flights

Using public transport helped save a lot of money. “We used buses, tuk-tuks. These were a lot more cost-efficient than taking cabs. For example, as I was tired after an evening flight and Vietnam airport in Hanoi is a bit far from the city, we took a cab to the hostel. It cost ₹900. For the same distance, a bus ride cost just ₹150 on the return to the airport,” he says. “We also used the bike-taxi service in Thailand and Vietnam, which cost ₹50-100.”

For flights, the friends opted for low-cost carriers. “We saved around ₹3,000 on most flights since we didn’t opt for checked-in baggage, which is charged separately on these budget airlines. We scanned multiple sites to get the cheapest airfares. We also tried to book some of these flights directly on airlines’ websites to avoid paying commissions. We didn’t opt for a seat-selection facility or gave any seat preference, which had additional cost,” Daga explains.

The overall cost of travelling in those three countries added up to ₹7,100. The flight tickets put together cost ₹51,000 (including visa fees of ₹8,599 for the three countries).

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Street food and one Michelin-star cafe

Daga is a vegetarian, which didn’t make things easy for him in those Southeast Asian countries.

“In Thailand, we largely used up the ready-to-eat packets we carried from India. I was carrying packets worth ₹1,000,” he says.

“There were a lot of Indian restaurants in Thailand, but then I didn’t want to try Indian stuff in Thailand. Also, restaurants would have been more expensive. So I tried desserts, pancakes, mango sticky rice, etc. We also tried a Michelin-star cafe in Bangkok, which cost just ₹200 for their signature dish. We visited another cafe in Bangkok, which cost ₹400-500,” he says.

In Vietnam, though, Daga found plenty of street food vegetarian options. “I tried local food such as Banh Mi (Vietnamese sandwich) and Pho (noodle soup),” he says. “I also found a vegan restaurant in Vietnam, which I visited a lot for my meals. Here, a meal would cost ₹200-250.”

In Laos, Daga’s hostel had a large cafe with many vegetarian options.

Overall, Daga says he spent ₹10,930 on food during his 15-day trip.

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Creating experiences and memories
Daga says some of his most enjoyable activities during the trip were in Bangkok’s Lumpini Park, where he spotted monitor lizards and went boating. He also tried doing Zumba with the locals on one of the evenings in Lumpini Park.

In Vietnam, one of his favourite visits was Ninh Binh city. “As an adventure lover, I enjoyed hiking up the challenging terrain on the Lying Dragon Mountain,” he says.
Daga also enjoyed visiting the ancient capital city of Hoa Lu, boating at Trang An, and island-hopping at Ha Long Bay.

In Laos, he enjoyed visiting the Kuang Si falls in Luang Prabang and taking a bullet-train ride from Vientiane to Luang Prabang.

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The hostel network effect

Daga’s overall trip cost, including attraction visits ( ₹6,020), travel insurance ( ₹1,500), souvenirs and gifts ( ₹2,000), and SIM cards ( ₹1,500), came up to around ₹88,050.

Staying in hostels also helped Daga get more cost-saving tips on the go.

“In hostels, you can easily find a huge community of backpackers. You can easily find good recommendations on public transport options, places to visit, places to avoid (unsafe places), details such as bus timings, etc,.” he says.

Daga is now in touch with backpackers from around the world and plans to go on more such trips, possibly backpacking with his new-found friends.

In 2009, when our team first found a human skull and jaw bone in Tam Pà Ling Cave in northern Laos, some were sceptical of its origin and true age.

When we published a timeline in 2012 for the arrival of modern humans in mainland Asia around 46,000 years ago based on the Tam Pà Ling evidence, the sceptics remained.

In short, the site was given a bad rap. One of the most interesting caves in mainland Southeast Asia was frequently overlooked as a possible route on the accepted path of human dispersal in the region.

However, in new research published in Nature Communications, we report more human remains found in Tam Pà Ling – and a more detailed and robust timeline for the site. This shows humans reached the region at least 68,000 years ago, and possibly as long as 86,000 years ago.

Plenty of evidence, but hard to date

Our team of Laotian, French, US and Australian researchers has been excavating at Tam Pà Ling for many years. As we dug, we found more and more evidence of Homo sapiens at earlier and earlier times.

First there was a finger bone, then roughly 2.5 metres deeper, a chin bone, then part of a rib. In total, eight pieces were found in only 4.5 metres of sediment – which may not sound like a lot, but is huge in archaeological terms.

Surely, we thought, this would be enough for Tam Pà Ling to take its place among the early human arrival sites in Southeast Asia.

But a hurdle remained: the cave is hard to date. This has prevented its significance being recognised, and without a convincing timeline the cave’s evidence will not be included in the debate over early human movements.

Many common dating methods can’t be used

There are a few difficulties with dating Tam Pà Ling.

First, the human fossils cannot be directly dated as the site is a world heritage area and the fossils are protected by Laotian laws.

Second, there are very few animal bones and no suitable cave decorations, either of which might be used for dating.

And third, the entrance of the site is wide and steep. This means any charcoal found in the cave, which is useful for dating, may well have come from outside – so it has little relation to the age of the sediment inside.

This means the backbone of the timeline must be established by the dating of the sediment itself, using techniques such as luminescence dating.

Signals in buried minerals

Luminescence dating relies on a light-sensitive signal that builds up in buried sediment, resetting to zero when it is exposed to light.

This technique mainly uses two minerals: quartz and feldspar.

Quartz can only be used in the younger levels as it is limited by how much signal it can hold. In the deeper layers it can often underestimate the age, so in Tam Pà Ling we only used quartz to date the top three metres of the sediment.

For the lower levels (four to seven metres), we had to switch to dating using feldspar to fill in the gap in the age profile. Below six metres the feldspar grains started to weather and we had to resort to fine-grain dating, using tiny mineral grains all mixed together.

Dating teeth

Tam Pà Ling is relatively poor in animal evidence. Yet, eventually two teeth from a cow-like animal were unearthed at 6.5 metres deep that could be dated using two distinct techniques.

Uranium series dating works by measuring uranium, and the elements into which it transforms via radioactive decay, within the tooth. Electron spin resonance dating relies on measuring the number of electrons in tooth enamel.

Each technique offers an individual numerical age for the fossil. By combining the two, we obtained robust direct dates, which can complement the luminescence chronology.

A closer look at sediment

To make the dating as strong as possible, we used every technique we could, such as applying uranium series dating to a stalactite tip that had been buried in sediment.

We also began to support all our dating evidence with a very detailed analysis of the sediments to assess the origin of the fossils.

Micromorphology is a technique that examines sediments under a microscope to establish the integrity of the layers that buried the fossils.

This is a key component of the new chronology, as it helped establish that there was a fairly consistent accumulation of sediment layers over a long period.

By 2022, we had amassed an array of dating evidence that could be modelled to determine the exact age of each layer and the fossils they buried.

A stop on the route of human dispersal

Our updated chronology revealed humans were present in the vicinity of Tam Pà Ling Cave for roughly 56,000 years. It also confirmed that, far from reflecting a rapid dump of sediments, the site contains sediments that accumulated steadily over some 86,000 years.

The age of the lowest fossil, a fragment of a leg bone found seven metres deep, suggests modern humans arrived in this region between 86,000 and 68,000 years ago.

The evidence from Tam Pà Ling has pushed back the timing of Homo sapiens arrival in Southeast Asia. This suggests the mainland, along with the coastal and island locations, may have also been a viable dispersal route.

Tam Pà Ling is just a stone’s throw from Cobra Cave, where we found a tooth some 150,000 years old belonging to a Denisovan, the now-extinct human relatives otherwise known only from remains found in Siberia and Tibet. This suggests the site may lie on a previously used dispersal route among hominins.

Tam Pà Ling continues to reveal pieces of the puzzle of the ancient human journey across the world. Only time will tell how many more it has in store.

Kira Westaway is associate professor, School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University. Meghan McAllister-Hayward is a PhD candidate. Mike W. Morley is associate professor, Flinders University. Renaud Joannes-Boyau is associate professor, Southern Cross University. Vito C. Hernandez is a PhD candidate. This article is republished from The Conversation.