Luang Prabang, at its own pace

The old town sits on a finger of land where the Nam Khan runs into the Mekong. It was a royal capital, it has been a protected site since 1995, and the protection has held better here than in most places: the buildings are still one and two storeys, still timber and lime-washed brick, and the monasteries inside them are working ones with novices living in them rather than museums with ticket desks. The whole of it can be walked end to end in half an hour, which is a large part of why it works.

The town has changed in one specific way that is worth saying plainly. Sisavangvong, the main street, becomes a night market from about 17:00 to 22:00, and most of the ground floors along it are now cafes, boutiques and travel desks. Rents pushed a number of families off the peninsula and out to the newer districts. It is still a town rather than a stage set, but the peninsula is the part where a visitor economy has clearly won.

The alms round is where honesty matters most. Before dawn, monks from the monasteries walk the streets collecting rice, and it is a daily religious obligation rather than an event. It has been damaged by the way it is watched: coach parties, flash photography at close range, vendors selling sticky rice of poor quality to tourists who then offer it, and cameras a metre from the faces of teenage novices. Several monasteries have asked visitors to keep their distance, and some have shortened or altered their route. Watch it from across the street, without flash, and do not offer food unless a monastery has arranged it for you. If that sounds like a lot of conditions, the correct response is not to go, and that is a perfectly good answer.

What the town is good at: mornings on the river, the textile workshops, which are genuinely skilled and not a demonstration; Wat Xieng Thong, which is the best single building in Laos; the walk up Phousi, three hundred and twenty-eight steps, worth doing at 07:00 and not at sunset when it is shoulder to shoulder; and the fact that everything closes early, which forces a kind of day most travellers have not had in years.

Prices are quoted in kip and in dollars. The kip has lost a great deal of value in recent years, so any figure you read in an older guidebook will be wrong; ask the current rate on arrival and expect the dollar prices to be the stable ones.

Luang Prabang gets three nights on the Classic Indochina route, placed after central Vietnam and before Angkor precisely because it is the slow middle that makes the rest survivable.

If Laos is the whole trip, the nine-day northern Laos route uses the town as a base and then goes upriver to Nong Khiaw, which is where the country stops being a stop on someone else’s itinerary. Walkers usually pair it with the northern Vietnam walking route across the border.

• Your dates fall in March or April and you cannot move them. Weeks of smoke haze take the views, the light and some of the air quality, and nobody can plan around it.
• You want a busy evening. Most of the town is closed by 22:00 and the bars shut not long after; this is the opposite of a nightlife destination and it is not apologising for it.
• You have two nights in Laos and want to see the country. Two nights here is one choice between the waterfall and the river, and Laos will read as a pretty stop rather than a place.
• Steps and heat are a problem. Phousi is 328 steps with no lift and the monastery thresholds are high; the town itself is flat and easy, the two best viewpoints are not.
• You are collecting sights rather than time. There are about six things to see here and the value is in the hours between them, which is exactly the wrong shape of trip for someone on a tight schedule.