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Coverage / Laos

Laos

Southeast Asia

A landlocked, mountainous country on the Mekong in the heart of Southeast Asia, built around the UNESCO temple town of Luang Prabang, the limestone karst of Vang Vieng and Thakhek, the northern trekking forests of Nam Ha, and a deeply Buddhist calendar of alms rounds and river festivals.

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What you can do in Laos

Craft Skills (Bladesmithing, Pottery, Glass)

Luang PrabangJan Feb Mar Oct Nov DecLuang Prabang is the centre of Laos's living textile tradition, and it is one of the few places in Asia where you can sit at the loom yourself. Lao silk and cotton weaving, with its supplementary-weft patterns and indigo and lac natural dyes, has been carried down through the women of the lowland Lao and the northern hill peoples, and the town's craft centres turn that heritage into hands-on teaching. In a half or full day you can card and spin, mix dyes from leaves, bark and insects in a riverside dye garden, and weave a scarf on a traditional frame loom with a resident master weaver beside you. It is a craft holiday that doubles as a way into the material culture of the country, and what you make you keep.

Culinary / Cooking

Luang PrabangJan Feb Mar Oct Nov DecLuang Prabang is the best place to learn Lao food at its source. The old royal capital has a distinct northern kitchen built on sticky rice eaten by hand, fiery jeow dips, laap salads, herbs foraged from the riverbanks and fish steamed in banana leaf, and its cooking schools are among the most established in Southeast Asia. A class here almost always starts before the heat, with a walk through the town's morning market to meet the galangal, lemongrass, river weed and buffalo-skin that define the cuisine, then moves to a riverside kitchen for a hands-on session. Because Lao food is still poorly known abroad, the teaching tends to be properly instructive rather than a photo opportunity, and two long-running family schools on the Nam Khan let you work on technique and come away able to cook the dishes at home.

Film Festivals

Blue Chair Film FestivalLuang PrabangDecThe Blue Chair Film Festival, known for its first sixteen years as the Luang Prabang Film Festival, is Laos's window onto Southeast Asian cinema. Founded in 2010, it fills the UNESCO town each December with free open-air screenings shown after dark on a big screen, with the audience seated in the hundreds of blue plastic chairs that gave the festival its new name. The programme is drawn entirely from the ASEAN region, so a few evenings here is a crash course in the films of Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines and Laos itself, a national cinema most visitors never encounter. Alongside the screenings the festival runs a Talent Lab for emerging regional directors and small filmmaker grants, which makes it a genuine industry gathering rather than just a projection under the stars.

Rock Climbing

ThakhekJan Feb Mar Oct Nov DecThakhek is Southeast Asia's best sport-climbing area, a forest of grey limestone karst towers rising straight out of the paddies about twelve kilometres east of town. Climbing here only started in 2010 when a German team bolted the first lines, and the walls have since been developed into more than six hundred routes across a dozen crags, from friendly vertical slabs to overhanging tufa caves that stay dry and shaded through the season. The Pha Tam Kammon walls around Green Climbers Home hold the densest clusters, with routes graded from a gentle 4 to a stiff 8c, so a first-timer and a projecting climber can share the same base. What makes it a destination rather than a day out is the setup: one camp at the foot of the cliffs handles guiding, courses, gear and beds, so you can climb straight from breakfast.

Trekking / Hiking

Luang NamthaJan Feb Mar Oct Nov DecLuang Namtha is the home of community-based trekking in Laos. The Nam Ha National Protected Area begins a few kilometres south of town, more than two thousand square kilometres of jungle-covered hills, rivers and ethnic-minority villages, and the model of guided treks that share their income with those villages was pioneered here in the early 2000s. Trips run from a single day walk to four-day crossings that overnight in Akha, Khmu, Hmong or Lanten hamlets, eating and sleeping in the village and walking with guides drawn from those communities. The forest is genuine, with gibbons, hornbills and dense bamboo, and many operators combine the walking with kayaking on the Nam Tha river or cycling between villages, so the trek doubles as a slow way into the cultures of the northern uplands.

Whitewater Kayaking / Rafting

Vang ViengJan Feb Mar Oct Nov DecVang Vieng runs along the Nam Song, a green river that winds under a wall of limestone karst, and paddling it is the classic way to see the valley from the water. Half-day kayak trips push through gentle wave trains and past caves, riverside villages and grazing buffalo, usually combined with a float or tube through the flooded Tham Nam water cave and a scramble at a swimming lagoon. In the June-to-October wet season the river runs high and fast enough for real rapids, while the cool dry months give clearer, calmer water and long views of the cliffs. The town went through a rowdy tubing era and has since settled into a proper outdoor hub, so the operators worth using are the ones running small groups with trained river guides rather than the old free-for-all.

Witness / Attend

Tak Bat (Morning Alms)Luang Prabangyear-roundTak Bat, the morning alms round, is the oldest daily rhythm of Luang Prabang. Before dawn, lines of barefoot monks and novices in saffron robes file silently out of the town's temples, and residents kneel along the street to place a handful of warm sticky rice into each begging bowl. It is not a performance and there is no organiser or ticket, just a Buddhist practice that has run here every morning for centuries, binding the town's monasteries to the households that feed them. To witness it well is to be almost invisible: watch from across the street, stay seated and silent, keep back several metres, and never use a flash or block the monks' path. If you want to give alms, buy freshly made sticky rice through your guesthouse rather than from the vendors who press stale rice on tourists, or simply sit and observe. Done with care, the half hour of grey light and moving robes is one of the most quietly moving things to see in Southeast Asia.

Best months at a glance

	J	F	M	A	M	J	J	A	S	O	N	D
Craft Skills
Culinary
Film Festivals
Rock Climbing
Trekking
Whitewater / Rafting
Witness / Attend

Upcoming events in Laos