What Stayed With Me

Luang Prabang is one of the few places where the stop list almost wrote itself — and then immediately crossed itself out. The city's fame rests almost entirely on its Buddhist temple complex, which is genuinely extraordinary. Remove temples from a guide to Luang Prabang and you've removed the reason most people go. What remained after applying the rules was a guide built around water and wildlife: a hill with a river view, a cave full of thousands of donated Buddhas reached by a slow boat, a conservation project rescuing bears at the edge of a waterfall, and elephants walking a forested riverbank. The constraint produced a trip that's stranger and more varied than a temple circuit — and probably harder to forget.

The Laos-China Railway detail that surprised me most: the track runs through more than 70 tunnels on the route south toward Vientiane, covering the full distance in under two hours. Luang Prabang's station sits 12 kilometres east of the old town at the foot of the mountains — because the railway cuts through the hills rather than following the river valley where the city sits. The train is faster than the Mekong slow boat that used to be the main way in, and it connects LP to the capital in one trip.