Flow state: navigating landlocked Laos by Mekong River cruise

Testing. Testing.” A village elder wearing a microphone headset kneels before a metal table topped with miniature stupa made of marigolds, a one million kip note and plates of bananas, candied peanuts and fluorescent sweets laid on fine lace. He taps the microphone. Nothing. Four women sit on either side of him, wearing white scarves draped on their shoulders; their faces crease with concern as he fumbles with the recalcitrant microphone. Still nothing. In the absence of spiritual tech support, he launches into the baci ceremony, unamplified but undeterred. In soft, rhythmic Lao, he summons the ancestral khwan to bless us, the departing souls, with good health, prosperity and safe passage. As the ritual reaches its crescendo, the women rise one by one, fastening white cotton strings around our wrists. Baci ceremonies are typically reserved for the blessing of notable life journeys like weddings, births and funerals, but today the blessing is for a very real voyage, down the Laotian Mekong.

While this is my first baci ceremony, this is not my first Mekong cruise. Although I’d like to keep the photographic evidence where it belongs, locked away in a 2021 Facebook album, I have ridden the waves of the Mekong once before in Vietnam. That particular two-day excursion involved shotgunning beer, inebriated swims and the dogged attention of a pack of Australian men. I’m sure if I closed my eyes, clicked my heels three times and whispered the words *beer pong*, I’d be transported back to that fateful vessel. This time around, though, the tides have changed, and with that, have taken a decidedly more luxurious turn as I’m a passenger aboard a 13-suite river boat called Bohème. At 50 metres long, she’s the largest of her kind on the Laotian Mekong and one of the only high-end ways to ply these ochre waters from the Kingdom of Laos’ royal capital, Luang Prabang, to the national capital, the city of Vientiane.

A blue shop front in Luang Prabang

Throwing a bowl at Laos Pottery House

For decades, Laos has been the well-trodden detour pinned onto the itineraries of backpackers gallivanting around Southeast Asia. A place where gap year-goers slurp on cocktail buckets, hike limestone karst landscapes, get ankle tattoos and tube down the Nam Song River in Vang Vieng before ricocheting off to Thailand, Malaysia, or Vietnam as part of a multidestination trip. But the landscape is shifting. Laos, now better connected, better known and with a more tourist-receptive government, seems at the precipice of a tourism boom as a destination in its own right. Often described as the last frontier of Southeast Asia, this landlocked, one-party communist state’s borders were sealed from foreigners until pretty recently, meaning many pockets, like Luang Prabang with its lantern-laced French colonial buildings and gilded temples, feel largely cloistered from the outside world. Not just a spot for hostel hoppers, luxury travel in Laos is on the up as hotel heavyweights like Aman, Rosewood, Belmond and Avani have set up camp in Luang Prabang, alongside Mekong Kingdoms, which owns two boats – the Gypsy and of course, Bohème.

Luang Prabang, with its lantern-laced French colonial buildings and gilded temples, feels largely cloistered from the outside world

“No! Not like aromatherapy. Think Thai massage!” declares a tall woman in a wide-brimmed hat called Susie Martin, who inches closer towards me, examining my finger movements with narrowed eyes. I look up at her, armpits damp, clammy fingers gripped tightly around the teat of a buffalo’s udder. We have made it to our inaugural pitstop on Bohème’s route, moseying south from Luang Prabang to the village of Ban Muang Khay, home to Lao’s first-ever dairy and buffalo farm. Described by Martin as “Uber for buffalos”, the social enterprise rents buffalo from farmers at eight months pregnant for £78 (the average monthly salary in Laos is around £85 per month), initially quarantining and vaccinating them before milking until their production wanes (apart from the crucial three weeks post-calving when colostrum is sacrosanct) then returning them to farmers ready to start the cycle anew. Thankfully, my flimsy urban touch on these udders has no impact on the flourishing business here, which sells everything from yoghurt and ice cream to buffalo mozzarella, burrata, feta and brie, some of which are stocked at the breakfast buffets of Belmond’s La Résidence Phou Vao, Rosewood and Avani+ in Luang Prabang.

A buffalo at Laos Buffalo Dairy

Christy Spring

While these horned giants were once the backbone of Lao agriculture, indispensable for ploughing, they have now been sidelined by the so-called “Chinese buffalo” (which is also known as the tractor). Worth around £900 each, which equates to roughly one and a half times the average annual salary of farmers in Laos, many sold off buffalo to cover school fees, hospital bills, or weddings. Recognising an untapped opportunity, Martin set her sights on buffalo milk – something seldom consumed in Laos, despite its remarkable nutritional profile with 10% more fat, 20% more protein, and 50% more calcium than cow’s milk, along with lower cholesterol quantities and predominantly A2 beta-casein composition, which is notably easier on the guts of the lactose intolerant (of which a significant portion of the Laos population are).

More than just the Neal’s Yard of Laos, this buffalo dairy has become something of a beacon of social progress. With backing from the World Bank, its nutrition programme champions the benefits of buffalo whey, targeting children in a country where chronic malnourishment afflicts 35% of the young. Alongside this, a forward-thinking breeding initiative aims to enhance buffalo’s genetic diversity and longevity, while comprehensive animal husbandry training on everything from goats to pigs empowers local farmers.“When we started, we were renting out only ten buffalo,” Martin says. “Now we collaborate with over 200 farmers, renting more than 150 buffalo. Initially, I think farmers were terrified we’d end up barbecuing them!”

In a turn of events that could be described as reading while eating a sausage sandwich, dinner that evening served on Bohème is grilled buffalo steak. All other meals involve far less moral gymnastics – lunch is served in the same wood-panelled dining room, where we gorge on a cornucopia spread of fish-sauce-slicked mouthfuls. Briny deep-fried river weed, duck laab bright with citrus, salmon-pink pomelo tossed with coriander and thinly sliced red onion and nam khao – a crispy rice salad humming with chilli, mint and fermented pork. I also learn how to make koi pla onboard during a cooking class. It’s a sour, piquant Laotian dish of catfish mixed with aromatics, long beans, mint, spring onions, fish sauce and ample chilli, its fiery kick tempered by fistfuls of sticky rice. I consume vast quantities of this glutinous gold during my time on board Bohème, as is customary in Laos, the largest per capita sticky rice consumer in the world.

Bohème sails down the Mekong

Day breaks the next morning to the caw of roosters, as I pull the curtain from the window to reveal a riverscape steaming like a bowl of hot soup. Even in these tropical latitudes, temperatures plummet in the valley each night, turning mornings into a mist-thick, spectral scene of fishing boats and half-hidden mountains carpeted in teak and tamarind trees. We transfer from Bohème to a small boat for excursions called Monsoon, which chugs us toward the Pak Ou Caves north of Luang Prabang. While Laos’ limestone landscape is riddled with caves, these ones are different from most.

Carved into sheer limestone cliffs, the contents of the Pak Ou’s Caves could be mistaken for a dragon’s hoard, that is, if it had a penchant for religious effigies. 4,000 golden Buddha statues in any pose conceivable perch on every undulation of the cave’s interior. A golden stupa gleams in the middle, catching the light that spills into the cavern. But why store so many Buddhas in a difficult-to-reach cave? This is a sacred repository for old, discarded, or damaged Buddha images, the celestial equivalent of a coastal bungalow where religious icons go to live out their twilight years. The result is a time capsule of centuries of worship.

we pass a large, looming concrete bridge, which the China-Laos Railway has whizzed over from Vientiane to Kunming in southern China since 2023

I meet four monks here who have made the journey up on a field trip from their monastery in Bangkok. All four wear functional sandals and brilliant orange robes, practically pulsing against the shadowy interior. The eldest, a monk of 40 years, lights a stick of incense and leads them in a rhythmic prayer, chanting in Pali into the cavernous void. Below, there’s a wooden construction called a fortune box filled with papers called fortune poetry. I shake a cylinder of numbered wooden fortune sticks called kau cim until one falls out. Picking out a piece of paper with the corresponding stick number, I have my fortune told. The reading is swift and definitive: no enemies, good health, financial prosperity, and – I’m told with some enthusiasm – the imminent arrival of the love of my life. Best not mention that last part to my partner waiting for me back home.

Forest at the Kuang Si Falls

Christy Spring

The Pak Ou Caves

Christy Spring

Laos, a country where two-thirds of the population practices Theravada Buddhism, has long balanced its spiritual traditions with animist beliefs in the forces of nature of its earliest inhabitants. This has helped it maintain a remarkable sense of tranquillity – no small feat given its history as the most bombed nation on Earth during the Vietnam War. The French colonial rule left only pretty architecture and decent viennoiserie, and subsequent decades of outside interference have left Laos among the most underdeveloped countries in the region.

Yet, as I drift down the Mekong, the cradle of life here, past sleepy riverbank farms growing peanuts, aubergines, and pumpkins, change is visible. On the second afternoon on board, we pass a large, looming concrete bridge, which the China-Laos Railway has whizzed over from Vientiane to Kunming in southern China since 2023. Construction of the Luang Prabang Dam, one of a growing number of hydropower projects up and down the river, is also underway. It’s all part of Laos’ grand plan to become the so-called “Battery of Southeast Asia”.

Throwing a bowl at Laos Pottery House

Christy Spring

Paradoxically, our final two pitstops take us back in time, to two different villages where the preservation of cultural heritage has taken precedence over breakneck tourist development. We drift downstream on Monsoon, arriving at Ban Chan, a village renowned for its pottery. For 400 years, this place has churned out whisky jars, mortars, and fish fermentation pots, supposedly at the behest of King Chao Fa Nhum, who, upon uniting Laos, demanded the locals make pots to mark his victory (nothing says conquest like artisanal ceramics). Historically, making money from the earth was almost sacrilegious, but modern necessity has rewritten the rules. Today, just ten families keep the tradition alive, helped by government investment to discourage younger generations from ditching the craft for more lucrative city jobs. We walk up a dusty road to a bamboo building called Laos Pottery House to throw our own pots on handspun wheels using local clay alongside buffalo mud and wood ash for glazes. Unlike other family-run ceramic houses in the village, Laos Pottery House also employs people who may struggle to find work within the cities – those with disabilities, criminal records or battling addiction.

The next village we visit is Ban Xang Khong, recognised by the government for its weaving and paper-making traditions. A woman called Waew, dressed in an intricately woven silk skirt called a sinh, leads us to a garden, under a sun-dappled veranda set with tables. Here we learn how to make traditional sa paper from the bark of the mulberry tree (which silkworms feed off), boiling it for 12 hours before soaking the ball of pulp in water, spreading it evenly into wooden frames and embellishing it with ferns, leaves and petals. Despite my sheet boasting an unfortunate resemblance to a used kitchen towel, I leave it to dry in the sun and we settle at a long wooden table for a final round of tea and snacks – deep-fried mulberry leaf, rice paper rolls stuffed with sticky rice and mugs of white jasmine tea – before Waew hesitates, eyeing us carefully. “There’s another tea, but I don’t think you’ll want to try it,” she says. “My sister-in-law makes it. It’s great for controlling blood sugar.” The tea in question is made from the poo of silkworms, and she prepares a teapot to brew.

Sa paper making

Christy Spring

At the languid pace of the past four days, you’d be fooled into thinking that change in Laos moves as slowly as the Mekong. It’s easy to forget that just a decade ago a journey from Vientiane to Luang Prabang meant an all-day bus ride, but today, a Chinese-built bullet train gets you there in less than two hours. The Mekong, once an untamed frontier, is now straddled by bridges; its waters soon to be harnessed by hydropower dams. Wifi signal creeps into riverside villages, and saffron-robed monks snap selfies on smartphones in ancient temples. Laos may be cranking up the engines of development but it still clings to its ancient rituals, customs and creative traditions like the mist grips the river at dawn – and you’d do well to embrace them while you’re here. It may have taken but two Mekong cruises to understand the difference between visiting a country and experiencing it, and for that, I count my blessings that I’m sipping a mug of poo tea rather than shotgunning a beer.