Northern Laos at the speed it works at

Day 1

Arrive Luang Prabang

The airport is four kilometres from the peninsula, ten minutes on a quiet road, and arrivals is small enough that we meet you at the door rather than in a crowd.

Nothing is scheduled. The town sits between the Mekong and the Nam Khan and the whole centre is walkable in forty minutes, which is the useful thing to do before dinner.

Day 2

Luang Prabang, town and Mekong

The run back downstream at 17:00, when the boatman cuts the engine for the last kilometre

If you want to see the alms round, it is at about 05:40 and we will walk you to a place to stand. The rules are simple and our guide goes through them beforehand: stand back on the far pavement, no flash, do not step into the line, and do not buy the sticky rice that traders sell on the kerb to tourists who want to take part. It is a daily religious obligation, not a performance, and a third of the monks in that line are teenagers.

After breakfast, the morning market where the town actually shops, then Wat Xieng Thong at the tip of the peninsula, built in 1560 and the one building here that survived both the Black Flag raids and the century after them.

From 14:00 we take a longboat 25 kilometres upstream to the Pak Ou caves, two hours against the current and an hour and a quarter back with it. The caves hold something over four thousand Buddha images left by pilgrims across four centuries; the lower one is lit and the upper one needs the torch the boatman hands you.

Day 3

Kuang Si and a working weaving village

Out at 08:00 for the 29 kilometres to Kuang Si, about 45 minutes. Arriving before 09:00 means the lower pools are empty; the town starts arriving at eleven. The water sits at around 22 degrees year round, which is cold enough to be a decision rather than a dip.

A steep path climbs beside the main fall to the top, twenty minutes up on tree roots and wet rock, and is worth it if the weather has been dry. At the entrance there is a bear sanctuary holding Asiatic black bears taken from the bile trade, which takes fifteen minutes and is not a zoo.

Afternoon at Ban Xang Khong on the Nam Khan, where households weave and make saa paper. We use this village rather than the ones on the main tour circuit because the looms are still worked on days when no visitors come, and you can tell the difference within a minute of walking in.

Day 4

North to Nong Khiaw

140 kilometres north on Route 13 and then Route 1C, about four hours of mountain road with one stop. It is a beautiful drive and a slow one; the average speed for the whole leg is under 40 kilometres an hour and no amount of planning changes that.

Nong Khiaw is a bridge, two riverbanks and limestone walls three hundred metres straight up on both sides. We arrive in time for lunch. The afternoon is free, and the one thing on offer is the climb to Pha Daeng Peak: an hour and a quarter up, six hundred-odd steps and some ladder sections, and the view is the reason the photographs of this place exist. The alternative is a chair on the riverbank, which is also correct.

Day 5

The Nam Ou, Muang Ngoi and the caves

The stretch of the Nam Ou above Nong Khiaw at 09:00, before the wind gets up

An hour upstream by boat to Muang Ngoi Neua, a village that had no road at all until 2013 and still treats the river as the way in. We walk an hour inland through rice fields to Ban Na, a Khmu village where lunch is cooked in someone's kitchen rather than a restaurant, then come back downstream in forty minutes.

On the way back we stop at the Pha Tok caves outside Nong Khiaw. The villagers of this valley lived in them between 1964 and 1973, coming out to farm at night, because the American bombing of northern Laos made daylight in the open dangerous for nine years. There is a bank office, a hospital cave and a school cave, all signposted in plain language, and it takes half an hour.

Back in Nong Khiaw by mid-afternoon with nothing else scheduled.

Day 6

Across to the Xieng Khouang plateau

The long day, and we would rather you read it here than discover it at breakfast. 285 kilometres from Nong Khiaw to Phonsavan: down to Pak Mong, south on Route 13 over the Phou Khoun pass at about 1,400 metres, then east on Route 7. Eight hours including a lunch stop and two leg-stretches.

The road is paved and the drive is genuinely good — you climb out of the Nam Ou valley and cross ridge after ridge of upland villages — but it is eight hours of bends and anyone prone to car sickness should say so before we book, because the front seat matters. We leave at 07:30 and arrive in time for a late afternoon walk around Phonsavan, which is a plain grid of a town rebuilt after the war and makes no attempt to charm anyone.

Day 7

The Plain of Jars, and what is under the grass

Site 3 at 08:30, walking in through rice fields with nobody else on the path

Three sites, all of them Unesco-listed since 2019. Site 1 is ten kilometres from town and holds around 330 stone jars, the largest over two metres and several tonnes; Site 2 sits on two wooded hills 25 kilometres south; Site 3 is 35 kilometres out and reached by a kilometre of path through working rice fields, which is the one most people remember. The jars are roughly two thousand years old and were almost certainly funerary. Nobody has a better answer than that.

The other half of this day is unavoidable and we do not skip it. Between 1964 and 1973 Laos had more than two million tonnes of ordnance dropped on it, including something like 270 million cluster submunitions, of which up to a third failed to go off. Xieng Khouang is the worst-contaminated province in the worst-contaminated country in the world per head. At the jar sites you walk between concrete markers set by clearance teams: white face means cleared ground, red face means it is not, and you stay on the cleared side. Bomb craters are visible in the grass between the jars.

Late afternoon at the MAG and UXO Lao information centre in Phonsavan, which explains what clearance work actually involves and what it costs to do a hectare. It takes forty minutes and it changes how the morning reads.

Day 8

Down to Vientiane

Lao Airlines flies Xieng Khouang to Vientiane in about forty minutes, usually three or four times a week. When the schedule works we use it and quote the fare at cost. When it does not, the alternative is Route 13 south, 380 kilometres and close to ten hours, and we will tell you which one you have before you pay a deposit rather than on the morning.

Flying puts you in Vientiane by early afternoon. Wat Si Saket, finished in 1824, is the only temple in the city the Siamese army left standing four years later, and its cloister walls hold about 6,800 Buddha images in niches. Then the COPE visitor centre, which fits prosthetic limbs for people injured by the ordnance you were standing among yesterday, and which is the reason we put these two days in this order.

Day 9

Depart Vientiane

Free until your transfer. Wattay airport is four kilometres from the centre, twenty minutes at any hour, and we ask for two and a half hours before an international departure. If you have a late flight, the morning market and the Buddha Park 25 kilometres downstream both fit.