Nong Khiaw, Laos — Lisa's (& Steve's) Travels

When I was researching places to visit in Laos, Nong Khiaw kept popping up for its natural beauty. It still has the backpacker feel of a rural village, but with tourist infrastructure starting to come in.

Steve helped me by modifying the following Wiki map to show our destinations while in Laos. Luang Prabang (where we started) is highlighted in green; the red dot is Nong Khiaw, and the purple dot is Vang Vieng, our next destination -

The journey to N-K was quite arduous. I had read that the roads were bad, so we hired a private van, rather than being crowded in a public van or bus. The following video shows the state of the roads and the type of drivers and vehicles we encountered -

As I’ve said before, please open this post in your browser by clicking the link at the bottom of the page, so that you can easily view the video.

The distance between Luang Prabang and Nong Khaiw was 56 miles (141 km) and it took 5 hours! It was bone-crunching. But once we were surrounded with the mountainous beauty, we decided it was worth it.

This was the view from our room’s back porch -

We only had a day and a half to explore, so on our arrival afternoon, we took a short hike - about 1/2 mile (up 500 ft), in 80+ degree temps with 80+% humidity. The next picture was taken on the bridge over the Nam Ou river, and you can see the viewpoint we reached on the hill above the houses -

This was the trail…

… and this was the view -

A view up the river…

… and the town just after sunset -

I wanted to get an early start the next morning to try to see the sea-of-clouds effect I had seen online, but for several reasons, we didn’t start the “big” hike (2.75 mi total, with ~1,500 ft elevation gain) until 0830. This hike was a bit more arduous (there were even ropes provided at times)…

… and we were soon soaked with sweat. We did get to see some clouds…

… as well as a camping platform (bottom left corner in the next picture) -

I had initially planned for us to make a trek up a nearby mountain and camp up top, to be able to see sunset and then sunrise over the sea-of-clouds, but prudence won out as I realized this aging back wouldn’t take kindly to camping under the stars on a wooden platform. :)

You can probably see that we were quite a bit higher on this climb than the previous one -