Laos forum

I’ve got stuck and keep changing my mind, so thought I would ask you guys.

My wife & I are travelling from Northern Thailand to Northern Laos later this year. We have a total of 18 nights from arriving on the night train in Chiang Mai from Bangkok to flying out of Vientiane to Saigon.

When planning this part of our trip the first thing we put on our scheduler was the trip down the Mekong to Luang Prabang. We had watched on TV a British travel journo do the trip from Houei Xai on a boat, stopping at little villages on the way. In my memory the boat was a local boat, but on which you could sleep. When I started my research and found that the ‘local boat’ was in fact the slow boat you all know and love, I was disappointed, but undeterred. Further research found the Nagi of Mekong, which although was the same kind of boat, at least had some comfort and wasn’t overcrowded. I had also been influenced by Tiziano Terzano’s book ‘A fortune teller told me’. The writer, an Italian journalist, is warned by a fortune teller not to fly one particular year, so he does his job as correspondent for Das Spiegel without flying. He travels around SEA by land and uncovers so much by not flying.

Now the no fly plan soon hit the dust due to huge distances, which is a shame, but there you go.

Anyway, I digress. Here is our dilemma.

At present our plan is as follows:

2 nights Chiang Dao
3 nights Chiang Mai
Bus to Chiang Khong and overnight
Trip on Nagi of Makong, overnight PakBeng (2 days on boat)
3 nights Luang Prabang
3 nights Nong Kiaow
We the have 5 more nights in Laos we wish to keep flexible before flying out of Vientiane.

Sitting in the UK doing research on where to go it is easy to want to do EVERYTHING, to go EVERYWHERE. But in practice, I know we will really want to slow down a bit.

So, should we skip the bit from Chiang Mai to Chiang Khong to LP ? Its 3 days travelling pretty much non-stop. Is 3 nights Chiang Dao, 3 nights Chiang Mai, flight and 4 nights LP a better option ? Is the trip down the Mekong a must – do, or should we forget it. After all we can go by boat up to Nong Kiaow.

Your thoughts would be much appreciated and apologies for the ridiculously long post.