The best things to do in Laos

Travel into the quiet heart of Southeast Asia, where luxury Laos travel whispers instead of shouts. Here, the Mekong sets the pace, carving its way slowly through karst mountains — a world away from the frenetic capitals and headliner ruins of the region.  

Laos doesn't always make it onto the first draft of a Southeast Asia itinerary, and that’s exactly why we’re called to it. It's an exhale first and foremost; a salve for whichever metropolis you first arrived in. And an invitation second: to swim where the current slows, to roll warm sticky rice into a ball in a kitchen you’ve been welcomed into, to sit with monks in an incense-perfumed temple.

Less a place of landmarks, the best things to do in Laos are built around landscapes and the people who call them home. These are the experiences our Asia experts might reach for when designing your private Laos trip.  

Luang Prabang was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site because of its beautifully preserved traditional Lao and European colonial architecture. The ancient capital city was also the center of Buddhism, and today it is the country's main religious hub, where saffron-clad monks drift through silent backstreets at first light.

On a private Luang Prabang tour, your guide will take you to a working temple where they know the abbot, for an unhurried encounter with the resident monks. You’ll sit on cool tiles with your feet tucked away, just like your guide has shown you, while low chanting echoes through a hall filled with the scent of incense. Then the monks teach you the fundamentals of meditation essential to Theravada Buddhism—and all the while, no one rushes in to photograph anything. 

The Nam Song river runs soft and slow past the town of Vang Vieng. On both of its banks, the limestone rises straight up out of the paddies; lush, flora-blanketed towers that catch the mist at dawn and don't let it go until midmorning.  

On a private Vang Vieng tour, a kayaking guide navigates you through this dreamy emerald landscape to reach Tham None, one of the largest caves in the region. Inside this lesser-explored 1,640-foot-long cavern, a tributary of the Nam Song slips underground and springs out of the rock—cold, black, and louder than you'd think. Along the way, your headlamp picks out what the water has spent millennia working on: stalactites dripping from the roof and flowstone draping its way down the walls like cloth, while your own voice bounces back at you off the ceiling above. 

Just outside Vientiane, step inside the improbable world of the artist and mystic Luang Pu Bunleua Sulilat at “Spirit City” Buddha Park.

On a private Xieng Khuan tour, your guide will shed light on this curious, unexplained space, leading you past hundreds of concrete figures that stand shoulder to shoulder in the grass above the Mekong. Imagine: gods and demons pressed together, and a Buddha the length of a Boeing 737 stretched out asleep among them. Your guide will encourage you to climb inside a demon’s mouth, where you’ll find yourself in a great domed sculpture. Climb up to the roof and you’ll see the whole strange congregation lying below you, and past it the river, and past that, Thailand.

All of this is the work of Sulilat, the mystic who created his own fusion of Hindu and Buddhist belief here back in 1958. He fled Laos after the 1975 revolution and started building all over again on the Thai side of the river. 

While there are plenty of places to slow your mind and connect with nature, southern Laos caters to adventurous spirits.  

Hop in a jeep to rumble across the crumpled dirt roads of the Bolaven Plateau, taking in views of mountains and highlands formed by a supervolcano. Nothing on the surface tells you what you're crossing, but this is a plateau of old lava, and beneath it lies the crater of a meteorite that hit the Earth roughly 750,000 years ago. Geologists searched for it for nearly a century until they traced it to this ground in 2019. The lava has been weathering into soil since the meteorite landed, making it deep, rich and red—fertile earth that meets a cool climate ideal for growing coffee. 

On your private Bolaven Plateau trip, Mr. Kham is expecting you at Mystic Mountain Coffee. He walks you through rows he has nurtured since he was a boy, and in the tasting room, the aroma of roasting beans fills the air long before the cup reaches your lips for your first sip of a ground that began as molten rock.  On the return drive, your guide brings you to the secluded Tad Moun Waterfall. A dip in the cool water washes away any dust, and a Lao picnic lunch is laid out in the shade for you.

In the dry season, the Mekong River drops and Si Phan Don surfaces. Translating to "4000 islands," it's a beautiful place to slow down for a few days if you want the feeling of a beach getaway in landlocked Laos. Imagine: soft sandbars underfoot, water warm enough to swim in at any hour, and a hammock strung between sugar palms.

Which sandbars exist at all changes from week to week, so your luxury 4,000 Islands tour is navigated by a boatman who reads the channels by intuition. He knows which have surfaced and where the current is gentle enough to swim. Divide your time cruising the river archipelago and stepping ashore. On terra firma, cycle past village gardens and buffalo lazing in the paddies. Stop at the place where an old narrow-gauge locomotive rests, all that's left of the railroad built by French colonists.

At the end of the day, your boat will drift home through twisting channels that are turning gold, a cold Beerlao in your hand; no one else in sight but the fishermen lifting their traps.

Spend three nights cruising the Mekong River on a private boat for a side of Laos that few travelers get to experience. Gypsy has space for just four passengers, perfect for a family or couple celebrating a milestone birthday, anniversary, or graduation.

The two beautifully appointed rooms come with their own terraces and sunbeds, from where you can watch the riverside jungle go by. Float between sleepy rural villages that are inaccessible by car, catching a glimpse of slow rural life in Laos. In the evenings, indulge in regional specialties and classic cocktails in the dining room and bar, and stargaze set to the murmur of the waterway.  

Forgo the kitschy cooking class. Instead, let your guide make a special introduction to cook alongside a family in their own kitchen. Travel to a tiny village outside Luang Prabang, where you’ll be welcomed into a home where lunch is already being thought about. Pick what’s ready in the garden: chilies still warm from the sun, fragrant mint that lingers on your fingers. Then the sounds start: the pestle working the mortar and rice toasting in a dry pan before it’s ground fine and folded through minced meat with lime, padaek, and torn herbs. This is laap, the national dish of Laos—an auspicious dish served at weddings and on the first morning of the Lao New Year. Eat it as the family does, with sticky rice rolled between your fingers from a shared basket. It’s a wonderful way to connect and to support community-based tourism in Laos. 

In the lush forest south of Luang Prabang, Kuang Si falls as a veil of turquoise tiers. The water really is that color; limestone dissolves into it and settles as shelf after shelf of pale rock, holding pool after pool of improbably blue water.

Most people arrive at the gate by minibus around midday, but your insider guide has a better plan for you. You’ll take the back way: hiking through villages, along back roads, and through paddies and orchards. Arrive at the less-visited upper pools, where the cold is sharper than you expect and there's nobody else around.

On your way, you'll pass a cave where villagers sheltered during the Second Indochina War, when Laos became the most heavily bombed country per capita in history. Your guide grew up with these stories, and this is the place he chooses to share them.

When Buddhism came to Laos, it settled on top of something older. The spirits were here first, in the field, the river, the rice, and they never left. A half-day village visit north of Vang Vieng puts this tradition of animism in front of you: lunch in a Khmu village, with the people who have called these hills home for 4,000 years. On the table sits a tall earthenware jar: that's Lao Hai liquor, fermented in the jar itself and sipped by everyone at once through long bamboo straws. Ask about the rice and the answer won't be agricultural; to these people it has a soul, and when it strays, the family calls it home. Your insider guide translates as you go, so you'll always know what's fair to touch, what's fine to ask, and where to hold back.

Forty-nine ethnic groups, 73 languages, one small museum in Luang Prabang. The Traditional Arts and Ethnology Center exists because there is no such thing as a single Lao culture. On an exclusive, behind-the-scenes tour with the director of the center, you’ll encounter 400 objects from 30 of those ethnic groups: silver headdresses, basketry, ceremonial cloth, indigo so dark it reads black until you turn it to the light. Downstairs, the shop sells the living version of almost everything you've just seen in the galleries—the same crafts, bought straight from the villages that still create them.

The most important decision you'll make about this trip isn't which cities to visit or how many nights to spend. It's who designs it with you. Our Asia specialists aren't just selling travel off the shelf, simply booking hotels and drivers. They're tailor-making your trip, and not just picking what they think you'll like.

Our process starts with a conversation. We want to know: what's the real reason behind this trip? What do you love, resist, or gravitate toward? Do you move fast or linger? The answers shape everything in your itinerary: the routing, the pacing, the guides, the experiences we build around you.

When you're ready, the best next step isn't more research. It's a chat. Tell us what you're dreaming of in Laos. We'll take it from there.