Laos

Laos is the country people add to the end of an itinerary and then wish they had given more time to. Landlocked, mountainous, thinly populated, and short on headline attractions — which is precisely the point.

Space you can feel

Around seven and a half million people in a country roughly the size of the United Kingdom, much of it forest and mountain. Roads with no traffic. Towns where the main street is the only street. Arriving here from Bangkok or Ho Chi Minh City, the noise floor drops by half on the first afternoon.

Karsts, the Mekong, and a railway that changed the arithmetic

Northern Laos is limestone country, with morning cloud sitting in the gaps between hills. The Mekong still works as infrastructure rather than scenery — the two-day slow boat from the Thai border is one of the great regional journeys. And the new fast train turned multi-day overland hauls into a few hours, which means a two-week trip now covers far more of the country than it used to.

What gets photographed here

River mist at six in the morning, alms collected in silence from a respectful distance, temple roofs that sweep almost to the ground, and a hammock in the Four Thousand Islands where doing nothing is the intended use of the day.