Laos food and culture in 11 days: markets, looms and coffee
Lao food is the least known of the great Southeast Asian cuisines and the one most often mistaken for something else. Half the dishes that appear on Thai menus in the West are Lao in origin, laap and green papaya salad among them, and the versions cooked here are hotter, more herbal and considerably
- Duration
- 11 days
- Pace
- Moderate
- Hotel changes
- 4
- Best months
- Nov, Dec, Jan, Feb
- From
- $1,705 per person
This route follows that thread from the north to the south: the market cooking of Luang Prabang, the weaving and natural dyeing that is the country’s other great craft, the food of the Mekong lowlands, and the coffee plateau in the far south where arabica has been grown since the 1920s.
Eleven days, four hotel changes, one rail leg, one internal flight, and five sessions where you are working rather than watching.
Who it suits: people who plan trips around what they will eat, cooks, textile people, and anyone who found a standard Laos itinerary short on content.
Your specialist: Osnat Angerman or Paz Prosianoy, with our Hanoi office on the ground.
Day by day
Luang Prabang, days 1 to 5
Day 1: Arrive Luang Prabang. Transfer, nothing scheduled. An evening walk to the night market for a first plate of Luang Prabang sausage, which is coarse, lemongrass-heavy and unlike anything else in the region.
Day 2: The town, and how it eats. The alms round at first light, briefed the night before, followed by breakfast at the morning market. Then a guided walk through Wat Xieng Thong, the Royal Palace Museum and the Traditional Arts and Ethnology Centre, which is the best hour in Laos for understanding who lives here and why the textiles look the way they do.
Late afternoon: a proper introduction to what you are about to eat. Kaipen, the crisp Mekong riverweed pressed with sesame and garlic, with jaew bong, the chilli paste made with dried buffalo skin. Khao soi, which in Luang Prabang is a rice-noodle soup with a fermented soybean and pork sauce and has nothing to do with the Thai dish of the same name. Beerlao, which is genuinely good.
Day 3: Market to table. The full day. Out to the morning market with a Lao cook to buy: river fish, herbs you will not recognise, sticky rice, banana flower, sakhaan pepperwood. Then a working kitchen and five dishes cooked over charcoal, among them or lam, the Luang Prabang stew whose pepperwood leaves your mouth tingling, and laap done properly with toasted rice powder. Eat what you cooked, at length.
Day 4: Weaving, dyeing and the river. Across the Mekong to a weaving centre for a full session on natural dyes: indigo, annatto, lac, ebony seed. You dye and you weave, badly, and you understand what you are looking at in every market for the rest of the trip.
Afternoon at Ban Xang Khong for mulberry paper, and a stop at Ban Xang Hai, the rice whisky village, on the way back. Free evening.
Day 5: Kuang Si and a village lunch. The waterfall early, before the coaches. The bear rescue centre at the entrance. Then lunch in a Khmu village, cooked by the household, which is arranged directly and paid properly rather than being a scheduled stop on somebody’s circuit. Afternoon free.
Vientiane, days 6 and 7
Day 6: Train south. About two hours to the capital. Afternoon at Talat Sao and the surrounding streets, then Wat Si Saket, whose cloister holds several thousand small Buddha images and which survived the 1828 sack of the city.
Evening: the Mekong promenade, where Vientiane eats outdoors, and grilled river fish stuffed with lemongrass.
Day 7: Vientiane, and the harder history. Pha That Luang in the morning. Then COPE, which makes prosthetic limbs for people injured by unexploded ordnance and which explains the twentieth century here better than any museum. Free, an hour, and we put it in almost every itinerary we write.
Afternoon free. Late flight south to Pakse.
The south, days 8 to 11
Day 8: Champasak and Wat Phou. An hour from Pakse to the pre-Angkorian Khmer temple that climbs a hillside above the plain, listed by UNESCO in 2001, built to a spring that still runs. It is the quiet version of what Cambodia does loudly. Back for a Mekong lunch, then up onto the plateau in the afternoon.
Day 9: Coffee on the Bolaven. The plateau sits at around 3,300 feet (1,000 m) and is noticeably cooler. A full day on a working farm: arabica and robusta, the picking season if you are here between November and February, wet and dry processing, drying beds, roasting, and a cupping that is a real tasting rather than a demonstration. You will leave with opinions about Lao coffee.
Afternoon at Tad Fane, twin falls dropping about 400 feet (120 m) into a gorge.
Day 10: The plateau villages. A walk with a local guide between Katu and Alak villages, arranged with the community rather than around it, where the food is different again: bamboo, mountain herbs, meat smoked above the hearth. We stay on marked paths, without exception, because Salavan and Sekong are among the most heavily contaminated provinces in the country.
Afternoon at Tad Lo, and a last dinner on the plateau.
Day 11: Down and out. Back to Pakse in the morning, a last bowl of something at the market, and the flight home or on to Vientiane, Bangkok or Siem Reap.
What is included
Accommodation with breakfast throughout, the Luang Prabang to Vientiane rail leg in reserved seats, the Vientiane to Pakse flight, private air-conditioned car with English-speaking driver on every transfer and site day, licensed guides on six days, the market-to-table cooking day with all ingredients, the natural dyeing and weaving session, the coffee farm day with tasting, the village lunch paid directly to the household, all entrance fees, a day-by-day document with real drive times, and a WhatsApp group with your consultant and our Hanoi office throughout.
What we would change, and when
- Vegetarian? Workable and it has to be arranged. Fish sauce and fermented fish are the default here, more so than in Thailand, and the cooking sessions are rebuilt rather than adjusted. Tell us when you enquire, not when you arrive.
- Want the north as well? Add three days at Nong Khiaw, where the food is Khmu and Hmong rather than lowland Lao and the difference is real.
- Do not want the flight? The alternative is a seven-hour drive from Vientiane to Pakse on flat, hot road. We fly.
- Travelling outside the coffee harvest? Between March and October you see processing and roasting but not picking. The farm day is still worth it and we will tell you what you will and will not see.
Honest notes
Lao food is spicy in a way that is not adjustable at the market stalls, only in the kitchens we book. It is also built around fermented fish, and padaek is in a great deal of it. Some people find that a wall. If you are one of them, say so early and we will steer the sessions.
Sticky rice is eaten with the hand, rolled into a ball and dipped. There is no polite way around this and it takes a day to stop feeling strange.
The southern half of this trip is quieter than the northern half in every sense. Pakse is a working town rather than a pretty one, and the plateau has almost no infrastructure for visitors. That is the appeal and it is also the reason we do not put it at the start.
Built by Osnat Angerman, our Southeast and Central Asia specialist, and checked by our Hanoi office before it goes out.
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