Vang Vieng

Vang Vieng began as a Lao village on the Nam Song, a staging point on the route between Vientiane and the northern mountains where the river cuts through a belt of limestone. The caves in the surrounding karst have been used for shelter and as shrines for centuries, and several still hold Buddha images.

The war in Laos changed it. In the 1960s an airstrip was cut through the middle of the village as part of the network of small airfields used by American aircraft and by the aid and supply flights that supported the Royal Lao side; the flat strip of land through the town centre is the remains of it. Fighting and bombing in the Cold War years drove movement between the valley and the hills, and the town remained small and poor after 1975.

Backpackers arrived in the 1990s after Laos reopened to independent travel, drawn by cheap rooms and the karst scenery. Through the 2000s the town became known across South-East Asia for tubing down the Nam Song between riverside bars selling buckets of spirits, with rope swings and slides into shallow water. The town's hospital recorded 27 tourist deaths in 2011 from drowning and diving injuries, and in the third quarter of 2012 the Lao government pulled down the riverside bars and regulated the river. The town rebuilt itself around outdoor activity and a largely different visitor: climbers, kayakers, cyclists and, since the late 2010s, large numbers of Korean, Chinese and Thai travellers. The Vientiane–Boten Expressway reached the town in 2020 and the Laos–China Railway opened a station here in 2021, bringing weekend crowds from the capital.

For all its visitors, Vang Vieng remains a Lao market town with monasteries, an alms round at dawn and a Buddhist calendar that sets the year. The valley and the hills above it are mixed: lowland Lao along the river, with Hmong and Khmu villages on higher ground, some of them resettled from more remote areas, whose dress, language and spirit beliefs differ from those of the town. Village life turns on rice, maize, cattle and, increasingly, work in tourism.

The big festivals are the national ones. Pi Mai in April fills the streets with water, and the end of the rains retreat in October brings offerings at the monasteries and candle-lit floats on the Nam Song. Boun Bang Fai, the rocket festival before the rains, is kept in the villages around the town, with home-made bamboo rockets fired from the fields.

The town's older reputation for drunken tubing is a sensitive subject, and residents point out that the bars were closed and the river regulated more than a decade ago. Local expectations about behaviour are conservative: swimwear belongs at the river rather than in town, modest dress is expected at temples, and the police enforce closing hours. Hot air ballooning, paramotoring, rock climbing on the limestone and kayaking have become the town's public face, and a generation of local guides and climbers has grown up with them.

Vang Vieng is a district capital of modest size: the town itself can be crossed on foot in a quarter of an hour, and most of the district's people live in the farming villages of the valley around it. Tourism is the economy — guesthouses, hostels, resorts, restaurants, tour offices, motorbike and buggy hire, and the guides, drivers and boatmen who work for them — set against rice farming, maize, cattle and market gardening in the valley behind.

Development has come fast. The railway station, the expressway and a run of new hotels have changed the scale of the place in a few years, bringing visitors from Vientiane for the weekend and tour groups from China, Korea and Thailand. Land prices along the river have risen, construction is constant, and rubbish disposal, water quality and pressure on the caves and lagoons are live local concerns. Cement works and quarrying in the limestone also employ people nearby.

The rhythm of the day is early: monks on the alms round and the market at first light, activities through the morning, a hot and largely idle afternoon, then the riverbank at sunset and restaurants until the bars close. Power cuts and dust in the dry season, mud and flooding in the wet, and the seasonal swing between crowded and empty months shape how residents plan the year.

Vang Vieng eats what the Lao countryside eats, with a long menu for visitors laid over the top. Sticky rice, khao niao, comes in a woven basket with every meal and is taken by hand. Laap, minced meat or fish with lime, fish sauce, herbs and toasted ground rice, and tam mak hoong, green papaya pounded with chillies, lime and fermented fish sauce, are the everyday dishes, alongside ping kai, charcoal-grilled chicken flattened between bamboo sticks.

The river supplies fish, grilled whole with lemongrass and salt as ping pa or steamed in banana leaves with dill as mok pa. Breakfast is khao piak sen, thick rice noodles in chicken broth, or feu, the Lao version of pho, or a baguette split and filled with pâté and pickles as khao jii — the bread a survival of the French period. Evenings often mean sin dat, the tabletop charcoal barbecue and hotpot that groups cook over for hours.

The visitor trade has added its own layers: Korean barbecue and Indian curry houses, pancake and sandwich carts on the main streets, smoothie stalls and a run of cafés serving Bolaven coffee from the southern plateau. Beerlao is drunk with ice, and lao-lao, the clear rice spirit, is poured at village celebrations in the valley.