Boten
Boten (ບໍ່ເຕັນ in Lao, 磨丁 Módīng in Chinese) is a border town at the north edge of Luang Nam Tha Province, Northern Laos. Its counterpart on the Chinese side is Mohan.
Understand
Boten is a rough and ready border town. In the 2000s, the town went through a brief casino boom with Chinese punters flooding across the border, but the Laos government clamped down in 2011.
Get in
By train
Boten is the northern terminus of the Lao side of Lao-China Railway from Vientiane and Luang Prabang. There are two trains, both leaving in the morning, traveling to the length of the line from Vientiane, taking about 3.5 hours. See Laos#Get in for details.
The railway continues on the Chinese side from Mohan to Kunming via Jinghong and Pu'er. International trains stop here for 90 minutes for completion of immigration and customs formalities. The border crossing between Laos and China at Boten and Mohan is also open to road traffic. It costs 60,000 kip or 20 RMB to take a shared taxi about 4km from the Boten Railway Station to the Boten border crossing. Expect waiting in line for over 30 minutes to get past immigration at the Boten border crossing. The Chinese border crossing at Mohan is several hundred meters away (for 5 RMB golf carts can take you a lousy few hundred meters between the border crossings). The Mohan border crossing is staffed by border personnel who ask non-citizen travelers a lot of additional questions so expect a delay of up to 2 hours.
By road
There are direct cross-border services from Mengla in China via Mohan/Boten to Luang Namtha, the nearest major Lao town. Buses to/from Luang Namtha take about an hour.