I Explored the Lesser-known Parts of Laos on a New High-speed Train — Here's What to Know

As the twin-engine prop plane from Bangkok began its descent into Luang Prabang, the former royal capital of Laos, I saw through the pearly dry-season air a wide river, one of the mighty Mekong’s many tributaries. Along one bank ran glinting steel track that arced like a shot arrow and pierced the mountain in its way — the path of a new high-speed train. The river and the rail: one representing Laos’s past, the other its future. 

A landlocked country threaded by waterways, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic was once a densely forested Buddhist kingdom called Lan Xang, known as the land of a million elephants. More recently, it was a revolutionary communist state bombed to smithereens during the Vietnam War, when the United States rained down some 2 million tons of explosives on its jungle-clad hills. 

Today, Laos’s future is unfolding in the shadow of the colossus to the north. The multibillion-dollar rail system, part of Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road initiative, was engineered with Chinese expertise and financed by Chinese capital, and on any given day its first-class compartments carry mainly Chinese tourists from Borten, on Laos’s northern border, to the modern capital of Vientiane, with sightseeing stops along the way. 

The river and the rail framed everything I saw during a 10-day tour of northern and central Laos — the temples, palaces, rice paddies, monks, bamboo footbridges, tribal festivals, mountain villages, long-tail boats, caves, backpacker cafés, elephant preserves, waterfalls, foreign-owned luxury hotels, local markets full of river fish and bushmeat, archaeological sites, forlorn guesthouses, sugarcane plantations, silk-weaving workshops, and roadside noodle shops.

It was a fast-moving trip. Indeed, the idea was to test the promise of the high-speed train in a country notorious for slow going. Laotian roads are measured in rattles and jolts. Even the main national highway, a paved four-lane that leads from Vientiane to the north, is tortuous — a “snake road,” one local told me. “Lotta curves.” Now what was once a full day on the snake road whooshes by in half a morning. 

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The day I passed through the supersize pagoda that is Luang Prabang Station, sleek trains arrived and departed with Swiss punctuality. Young attendants in pressed uniforms scanned tickets with laser readers, and a group of soldiers made a fine show of keeping the peace among first-class passengers in their spiffy clothes. Announcements came in Lao, Mandarin, and English. All was gleam and polish, video screens and QR codes. “Fancy,” said my guide-translator Bounxai Xaivanthone, a member of the Tai Dam ethnic minority who was raised in a village up north. “Chinese style.” 

The itinerary I followed on this trip, my first to Laos, was designed to be train-dependent: a luxury hotel stay in Luang Prabang, then stops in remote hill towns up north and in scenic Vang Vieng followed by a night in Vientiane and, finally, a short flight to the archaeological enigma of the Plain of Jars. 

Laos remains largely a place of villages, of tradition, folklore, and handicrafts. It is one of 45 nations on the UN’s list of “least developed countries,” and some of the experiences I had would be nearly unimaginable in most parts of the world today. Near the Myanmar border, I drank tea with the young chief of a mountain village that had never before received a white visitor. Yet only a few miles from the same village, I saw towns that have undergone astonishingly rapid changes as they detach from old ways — subsistence farming and a barter economy — and fling themselves into the global commodities marketplace.

The countryside had been transformed by cash crops: rubber-tree plantations have devoured hillside forests and sugarcane has conquered ancient rice paddies. Laos’s northern provinces exist in what is essentially a neocolonial relationship with China — exporting raw materials, importing cheap manufactured goods — and at times the entire country seems nearly a vassal state.

The river and the rail also came to symbolize for me the dualities of 21st-century travel: the tensions between tradition and change, cultural heritage and economic development, “authentic experiences” and modern conveniences. “What happens in the future?” asked the manager of a silk-weaving workshop I visited in Vientiane, where the master weavers are aging out and their daughters, city girls, don’t want to learn village handicrafts. “That is the question for all Laotian people.”

The dry season comes to Laos in the winter months. It is a time of dust and ash, of noontime haze and bloodshot sunsets. Fires smolder across the countryside as farmers burn their fields to clear stubble and return nutrients to the soil. In Luang Prabang the smell of smoke greeted me, lurked about, and stowed away in my luggage. 

After landing at midday, I checked in to the Rosewood Luang Prabang, a plush resort set among streamside gardens, then met Xaivanthone, who goes by Xai (said like “sigh”). I asked him to suggest a regular local place for lunch, and he took me to perfection: a no-frills restaurant on a terrace above the mighty river, which he pronounced as “may-kung.” 

Lunch consisted of fried river fish and a rich pork stew made with forest mushrooms, green beans, watercress, lemongrass, and chiles. The signature flavors of Laotian cooking are earthy, murky, and swampy. Instead of the saline-sweet tang of ocean seafood, tastes familiar to me from Thai or Vietnamese cooking, the impeccably fresh wild-caught Mekong fish transmitted a memory of muddy river bottoms, adding a basso profundo note beneath the citrus crackle of fried lime leaves. The next morning, at the food market, I saw everything I’d eaten and much else besides: yard-long fish with ribbon fins, twitchy frogs, giant snails, jungle bugs, slick eels, wild game, diabolical chiles, and fruits I’d never imagined — an extreme example of the omnivore’s dilemma. “Lao people eat everything,” Xai agreed.

But the heart of Laotian cuisine is rice, a fact I learned a few days later when I sat down with Laos-born chef Ann Ahmed, who happened to be in Luang Prabang to gather inspiration for her latest project back home in Minneapolis. The new restaurant, Gai Noi, takes its name from “little chick” rice, newly harvested around the Plain of Jars, her family’s home region. Sticky rice, or khao niew, is not just a vehicle for other flavors, Ahmed explained; it is a cultural essence. “There’s a saying in Lao, ‘children of the rice,’ ” she said. “We are all children of the rice.”

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After lunch, Xai took me on a tour of Luang Prabang’s central historic district to see French-colonial storefronts and royal palaces wreathed in clouds of bougainvillea. At Wat Xieng Thong Temple, a group of novices in orange robes filed into a small pavilion filled with drums, the largest three feet across. Their performance reverberated through the temple grounds — part of a twice-monthly ceremony conducted at full moon and “dark moon,” as Xai called it, to ward off bad spirits. 

A bit later, one of the novices, a graceful boy of 15, padded past, and Xai snagged him for an interview. The novice said he was born in a village three hours away, and had come for the temple’s free education, which included the same classes as a state-run school but with an extra course in Buddhism. His plan was to go to college. Had he been one of the drummers? His face lit up as he told us that he liked drumming not only from a musical perspective but also because “it is how we Buddhists do things.” 

By now the shadows were lengthening, and jet lag was catching up with me. Xai steered me back toward the hotel through the gathering night market. He pointed out old currency for sale: a one-kip note printed with the portrait of the last king, who was deposed in 1975 by Pathet Lao communist revolutionaries. Today, the bill might as well be wallpaper. After a currency free fall during the pandemic, one kip is worth about 1/20,000th of a U.S. dollar. A visitor withdrawing even a modest amount from an ATM receives a sheaf of 100,000-kip bills — an instant millionaire. 

Over the next few days, my tour of Luang Prabang extended beyond the town’s cindery outskirts to MandaLao Elephant Conservation Camp, where a small herd of forest giants, mostly rescued from logging camps shut down by government bans, are fed bananas by tourists, who can also trail along as handlers walk the animals through the private preserve. Only around 400 of the country’s namesake million wild elephants remain. Not far away, a tiny parcel of the primordial forest they once ruled survives at Kuang Si Falls, a park popular with Laotian day-trippers. The road back to town conveniently passes an ice-cream stand, the storefront of the country’s sole dairy. It was founded as a nonprofit to teach rural families to give buffalo milk to undernourished children — an alien idea in dairy-averse rural Laos.

A Mekong cruise is a standard feature of any visit to Luang Prabang. Xai and I chartered a long-tail boat to reach the Buddha Caves, two hours upriver at the confluence with the Nam Ou River. Heavy smoke filtered color from the morning light and flattened the landscape into two dimensions, a grisaille painting of mountains stacked in ranks above a polished-silver river. The caves’ interiors glinted with gold. Also known as the Pak Ou caves, the natural rock shelters in a limestone bluff above the river safeguard a host of golden statues. Lao kings and their followers first left behind icons as part of a Buddhist New Year ceremony, and, later, during the civil war, temple guardians hid more for safekeeping. The Buddhas now number in the thousands.

By the time we descended to the boat launch, the midday heat had raised a rich smell of decomposition and rebirth from the river’s depths. The captain turned the boat and sluiced downstream to Luang Prabang in half the time, passing people foraging for algae on the rocky shore. Back in town, I crossed a side creek via a bamboo footbridge, its poles almost as thin as dried spaghetti, to take in a view of the sunset over the Mekong. A modest crowd had arrived before me, and together we pointed our phones toward the orange light. 

Laos is a multicultural country with 49 officially recognized ethnic groups and many subgroups. More than half the population are Lao Loum, or lowland Buddhists. In the mountains of the north, you meet the Hmong, who make up roughly 9 percent of the population, along with other ethnic minorities known collectively as hill tribes. Many practice animist religions. Their daily world teems with local deities — forest spirits outside the village gate and ancestor spirits within. Different groups take a neutral view of each other, and intermarriage is accepted. One parent might be Buddhist, the other animist, and the children will belong to both traditions.

After disembarking from the northbound train at Natuey, near the regional hub of Luang Namtha, Xai and I set out by car to Phou Van, a mountain village of the Akha people. We followed clay roads uphill for miles, first through forests with six-foot ferns, then, closer to the village, through rubber-tree plantations. To me, the scene outside our car windows looked like the destruction of a way of life — a forest people stripped of its forest — and I felt deeply disheartened. I asked Xai how it made him feel. Happy, he said. When he was a boy, his village had no electricity and shamans still used plant medicine for healing. He told me that he never could have dreamed that one day he would be talking to a white person. 

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When we reached Phou Van we walked though the village, and seemingly back in time. Xai explained that when a boy from the Akha tribe suffers the pangs of adolescence, he builds a sleeping cabin on stilts, hardly larger than a double bed. If its construction is sound, he is considered qualified for marriage. When he finds a girl he likes, he persuades her to spend the night with him there. If in time she gets pregnant, thus demonstrating her fertility, the village will bless the union, they will marry, and he will build a permanent family house, passing his bachelor’s quarters on to a younger brother. Another name for it is the “loving hut,” and in Phou Van, Xai and I admired a well-built example in a clearing at the edge of the village. 

The next day, Xai introduced me to his tribe, the Tai Dam. By sheer good luck, several thousand members from across the district had convened outside Luang Namtha for a harvest festival. Handsome youths on stilts danced in formation to pounding drums while hordes of costumed girls cheered them on. The music was joyous, insistent, a celebration of young blood.

I asked Xai the same question as the day before: How did it make him feel to be here? “This is my tribe,” he said, as if nothing could be better. I felt buoyed by the communal spirit, like that of a county fair, but with better food and much better clothing. Women old and young were outfitted in their finest and were happy to stand for as many pictures as I requested, accepting the camera’s attention as a compliment.

That afternoon we drove north to Muang Sing, nearly to the Chinese border, passing through the magnificent old-growth forest of Nam Ha National Biodiversity Conservation Area as if through an oxygenated tunnel of greenery. Muang means district, and the name Muang Sing applies to an archipelago of villages scattered across a pancake valley ringed with mountains. In one of these, an embroidery village called Pou Donthanh, a middle-aged woman complained to me that the pandemic had ruined business. With no free-spending tourists to sell to, the village embroiderers had to offload their wares for cheap to a Thai trader who sent them through a series of middlemen to Laotian communities in the U.S. 

“Tell them COVID-19 is gone,” the woman called after us as we walked away. “Please send more tourists.”

The next morning dawned cool and drizzly. Xai was tense. Rain in the dry season meant muddy roads. And our destination was high in the hills along the border with Myanmar. We drove west from Muang Sing, following unpaved roads through sugarcane plantations for two hours. Because sugarcane cuttings are planted through a protective plastic film, the entire landscape looked as if it had been cling-wrapped — an aesthetic and environmental nightmare. The region’s previous crop was bananas, also grown for export to China. Before bananas, corn. And before corn, farmers were all “children of the rice.” Now they are sugar junkies.

The reason — rational economic self-interest — became clear when we stopped to talk to a farmer working in his fields. The previous year, the man reported, he harvested nearly 200 tons of sugarcane. His total income approached $10,000, an important sum. Money like that paid for the two-story stucco houses I saw replacing bamboo huts along the road. The largest houses, villas really, likely belonged to local traders allied with Chinese speculators. One residence was three stories tall and topped with a domed cupola — truly a sugar palace.

We stopped to pick up Xai’s local contact, a fixer who had arranged our visit to a blacksmith village. From the main road, we followed a jeep track up one ridgeline to the next until, at last above the sugarcane tide, wild forest raked both sides of the SUV. The driver grimaced and spun his wheels. 

Finally, we arrived at a clearing. Children and young men came running to gape at me. One introduced himself in Lao as the chief’s translator (the people in Muang Long speak the Kouy language) and invited us to sit on a covered porch. He told us that he was 18 years old, married with one child, and had only once before seen a white person. None had visited the village. Soon the young chief arrived. He was only 24. Formalities completed, tea poured, he invited me to ask questions. We talked for a while about growing rice with seed stock handed down from his great-great-great grandparents. His ambition, however, tilted toward the future. He aspired to plant sugarcane in the village’s growing plots but had not yet persuaded allof the families to go along with him, and such a decision could only be made through consensus.

By now a large crowd of spectators had gathered around the porch, some even peeking up through slats in the floor. They listened intently to their charismatic chief. When I asked if a pale white man like myself would be too ugly to find a wife in his village, the spectators roared with laughter. The chief, amused, considered briefly, then replied with a deft diplomatic touch that the language gap would make it very difficult for me to propose.

One effect of speed is disorientation, a thought that occurred to me the next morning when I boarded the southbound high-speed train at Natuey and, before I had time to finish transcribing my notes, was spit out in muggy, crowded Vang Vieng, where the clamor made my head spin.
The spectacular karst landscape and its handy location, midway between Luang Prabang and Vientiane, make it a favorite stop on Southeast Asia’s backpacker circuit. The hotel I’d found online was like one of those overwater resorts in the Maldives, except here the freestanding pavilions were built not over coral reefs but above electric-green rice paddies. Flocks of birds cruised past distant limestone outcroppings, creating a scene that looked as if it had been art-directed. The room itself, if not quite at the luxury level, was ripe for documenting on Instagram.

The next morning’s light hypnotized me as I ate an early breakfast of rice porridge and fruit from a beautifully arranged tray on my private porch. When I set out for sightseeing, I discovered that my guide, Thongkhoon Sayalath, was using the same checklist as everyone else. First stop: the rocky overlook trail to a motorcycle mounted at cliff’s edge for social media posts. Second stop: the Blue Lagoons, where you can leap from a high platform into turquoise water, then make a solemn pilgrimage into the Golden Crab Cave, a truly spectacular grotto containing a recumbent Buddha statue. Third stop: some other place where you stand in lines to buy tickets with other tourists. My solo dinner at the hotel, a mediocre fixed-price menu with a beer, cost an astonishing 300,000 kip, or $15 — a princely sum by Laotian standards. I hightailed it to Vientiane, and from there swiftly on to the Plain of Jars.

The Plain of Jars, a UNESCO-recognized heritage site, is a long drive or a short flight from the capital. I opted for the latter and touched down in Phonsavan, the hub for visitors to the plain, where hundreds of prehistoric megaliths lie scattered across three main sites. The carved stone “jars,” some of them eight feet high and five feet across, were perhaps storage vessels or funerary urns. They are the inscrutable leavings of an unknown people who were motivated by forgotten gods to create monuments of enigmatic beauty. Lidless and hollow, they stare at the sky, each a cyclops eye. 

It was appalling to see the plain pocked with bomb craters, still gaping after 50 years or more. I scrambled into one, then couldn’t reach back up to ground level — it must have been nine feet deep. American bombers split open the skies above Xieng Khuang province between 1964 and 1973, raining down some 270 million bombs — one of history’s most intense bombing campaigns. Perhaps a third of them didn’t explode, and these bombs still claim victims today. 

The casualties are farmers who accidentally detonate unexploded bombs with their plows, women who set them off with cooking fires, or children who mistake the tangerine-size cluster bomb parts for toys. Since the end of the war, some 20,000 civilians have been killed or injured by unexploded ordnance, or UXO, according to the Cooperative Orthotic & Prosthetic Enterprise, or COPE, a nonprofit for UXO-maimed Laotians. Teams of bomb sweepers funded by the U.S., Europe, and New Zealand continuously search the countryside with metal detectors. Tourists are warned not to wander off established trails.

Despite the legacy of horror, the Laotians I met showed almost no anger toward Americans. That night in Phonsavan, I had dinner with Mark Steadman, an Australian expat whose nonprofit Lone Buffalo teaches English to Laotian children, and asked if he knew why this was.

“It’s a long time ago,” he answered thoughtfully. “Buddhist culture teaches people to forgive. That was then, and it was war.” He mentioned Barack Obama’s 2016 visit, the first by an American president, as a crucial step in the reconciliation. The president’s speech in Vientiane reckoned with the 2 million tons of bombs dropped on Laos, and acknowledged “suffering and sacrifices on all sides of that conflict.” Residents cheered him as “Laobama.”

The next morning, I took Steadman’s suggestion to visit Mulberries Organic Silk Farm, established in 1983, to see how the countryside had slowly recovered. The English-speaking guide who showed me around explained that many rural women know how to weave, but there they learn everything else they need to run a cottage enterprise, such as how to raise silkworms and process the cocoons. In stark contrast to the neocolonial sugar economy I saw around Muang Sing, the silk farm offered a model for sustainability: leaves from organic mulberry orchards feed the silkworms, their droppings go back to the fields, traditional dye plants produce color used in the workshop, and proceeds from the gift shop return to the women. “Tourism done responsibly is beneficial,” Steadman had told me the night before. “What people should do is come, spend, and then tell others the story of what happened here.”

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That advice echoed in my head at Ban Naphia, the “spoon village” not far beyond the silk farm. In an open-air shed stood a modest metalworking studio run by the village teacher and her husband. Here they smelted aluminum in a wood-fired forge and cast spoons in hand-carved wooden molds. The matte-silver metal, the teacher explained when she ran over from the school to greet us, comes from bomb casings stripped from UXO. I bought a handful of spoons to take home as souvenirs, moved by the thought of implements of war recast as eating utensils — and made by a schoolteacher, at that. 

On the way to the airport, Sayalath and I stopped at a roadside noodle shack for a quick last bowl of khao soi. When the proprietor placed my order on the oilcloth table covering, she also laid down chopsticks and a matte aluminum spoon — a bowl of noodles to be eaten with a spoon of peace. I looked up and realized everyone around me was using one, too. 

Where to Stay and Eat in Laos

Luang Prabang

Rosewood Luang Prabang is a luxury retreat in a lush garden just outside of town. The restaurant Le Calao has wonderful food and terrace seating. No-frills lunch spot L.P.B., on Khem Khong Road, serves local specialties at tables overlooking the Mekong. Farther afield, MandaLao Elephant Conservation offers forest walks with the resident herd, and Laos Buffalo Dairy provides the novelty of a roadside ice cream stand in a region where dairy products are rarely consumed.

Luang Namtha

The town of Luang Namtha is the gateway to the hill-tribe villages of northern Laos. Pou Villa (book through a third-party site such as agoda.com) is a tidy guesthouse with good breakfasts. Modest restaurants such as Zuela Guesthouse have rustic but generally excellent food. 

Vang Vieng

This popular backpacker destination is geared toward a budget clientele. ViengTara Vang Vieng Resort (book through a third-party site such as agoda.com) is a little more upscale, and the guest villas are on stilts and connect to the main lodge via wooden boardwalks over rice paddies. 

Vientiane

The stately Settha Palace Hotel offers high ceilings and arctic air-conditioning. The Slow Food restaurant Doi Ka Noi serves superb Laotian cuisine prepared with conscientiously sourced ingredients.

What to Do in Laos

Plain of Jars

Reach this enigmatic archaeological site via a short flight from Vientiane to Phonsavan. Expect rustic guesthouses and simple open-air restaurants. An essential stop is Mulberries Organic Silk Farm, for handwoven textiles.

How to Book

Given the language barrier and the limited tourist infrastructure, an English-speaking guide is essential for all but the most intrepid travelers. Asia specialist Catherine Heald at Remote Lands can supply guides and arrange an itinerary that includes village visits and bookings on the new high speed railway.

A version of this story first appeared in the March 2024 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline "Land of Gold."