Ten years ago I took a trip down the Mekong River to avoid a road. In taking the slow way, I was struck by the value of a good highway.

Dan’s Laos adventure. Photos courtesy Greg Wolfe

My best friend Greg and I had wanted to go to Vietnam, but we hadn’t applied for the required visas ahead of time. Having to get back to my day job as a spokesman on the Big Dig in Boston, time was against us (note: The Big Dig was not paying for the junket). While hiking in the hills near Chiang Mai, Thailand, our eccentric hotelier, Eddie, advised us to take a trip to Laos, instead. Since there was no road, he insisted that we jump aboard an overused Soviet style airliner.

When sharing our plans with locals, they called us crazy. This was usually followed by laughter accompanied by a gesture of one hand dive-bombing into the other.

Our small jet’s deep, banking turns mimicked the Mekong below, which snaked through the mountain jungles of South East Asia. After a hard landing on a cracked runway in Luang Prabang in central Laos — a remote mountain city hundreds of miles up stream of civilization — Greg and I unbuckled and walked onto the tarmac and noticed that the cabin crew was also the ground crew. Once in customs, the red star on the official’s hat announced my arrival to the first communist country I had ever visited.

The only overland route to our next destination in Laos, Vientiane, which borders Thailand, required a dusty, 12-hour ride in a wooden-benched bus on a “highway,” which was actually a clay-road frequented by thieving rebels that was already a hazard in the rain, and a dust-choking nightmare under the sun. “They’re talking of paving it,” said the sweet owner of our boarding house.

That night, while drinking beers on the bank of the Mekong River, Greg and I toasted our decision to avoid the road. Instead we would burn up the last few days of our adventure floating down the infamous waterway on a slow boat.

I was surprised to see so many Laotians choose the river over the road. Our once-in-a-lifetime-adventure was their everyday hardship — lost time with family, lost income from lost time, the road not taken extracted a heavy toll on locals.

But Laos’ hardship was more livable when compared with its neighbor to the south, Cambodia. When Greg and I were in the region 10 years ago, communist rebels, holdouts from the Khmer Rouge, had taken the nation’s highways hostage. Fighting had left the roads filled with craters. It was too dangerous to perform maintenance, let alone rebuild. Civilians bore the burden as their economy suffered from the lack of a good road.

Today, Cambodia is experiencing a Golden Age of road building. Roads last improved by French Colonialists are only now being paved. Cambodia’s Prime Minister, Hun Sen, has made improving roads (read: pavement) a centerpiece of his domestic agenda, and Khmer Rouge fighters are working on road crews to build a better life. Uniformed explosive experts with the army perform the first work, sweeping the right-of-ways for unexploded mines and ordinances. “Bullet by bullet, workers removed the detritus of Cambodia’s past. They pulled 300 land mines and 30,000 rounds of ammunition from the red dirt and then laid down a thick layer of asphalt. Today, what would pass for a very ordinary road in wealthier parts of the world is precious pavement for a country motoring toward prosperity and trying to leave its bloody past behind,” explained Thomas Fuller of The New York Times in a recent article.

These roads are simple two-lane byways. But one man’s road is another man’s highway. And for Cambodia, the new highways can’t be built fast enough.

Dan McNichol is a highly acclaimed author, journalist, and speaker. He welcomes your comments at dan@danmcnichol.com.