Travel Review: Backpacking South East Asia on an Adventurous Route
After spending a few days in Luang Prabang you could do a side trip up north, exploring the small northern villages of Laos for a few days, or just head down to the chilled-out town of Vang Vieng by bus or air. The road route to Vang Vieng is sometimes the target of bandits, so be sure to check what recent activity has been like, and then make your decision - but the safety record of air travel may not be much more inspiring!
Vang Vieng is full of fun kayaking, biking and caving opportunities, so you’ll want to plan for a few days there before moving on to the capital city of Vientiane. It doesn’t seem too exciting for a capital city, so I wouldn’t plan to spend too much time there, other than to visit the strange, but interesting Buddha Park.
Take the bus from Vientiane to Hanoi via the mountains and the Cau Treo border crossing into Vietnam. Hanoi is a very interesting place with lots to do and also offers a few interesting side trips: Sapa is a beautiful village set in the mountains, and Halong Bay, a Unesco World Heritage site, offers amazing views of thousands of mountainous karsts jutting up from the ocean waters.
In Hanoi, you can buy an “Open Tour” bus ticket that gets you all the way south to Ho Chi Minh (Saigon). It has a standard set of stops, but allows you to purchase add-ons for a few dollars each, two of which I highly recommend being Ninh Binh and Dalat. From Hanoi, the first stop will indeed be Ninh Binh. Not a particularly touristy town, but the launching point to visit the spectacular Tam Coc park and/or the Cuc Phuong National Park.
