See the soul of Laos on this slow river cruise along the Mekong

The pan-roasted poop of the mulberry tree worm, it turns out, tastes like smoky green tea. This I learn sitting in the shade of a fiery-yellow flowering srisuk ‘happiness’ tree, sipping the scat infused in hot water. “I discovered this when I saw one of my team collecting it,” says Veomanee (Veo) Douangdala. At first, her colleague was too shy to tell her what the droppings were for, but then revealed that they made a medicinal tea said to control diabetes. “It’s an old recipe, from the mulberry-producing area in the south of Laos,” she says.

Tea, in all forms, is big in Laos. There’s delicate white tea, whose small leaves are picked early in the morning, Veo tells me. And ‘butterfly pea tea’, a midnight-blue infusion made from the small purple flowers of the Clitoria ternatea plant, named for its suggestive shape. Always amused by the prurient, I buy a packet at Veo’s family tea shop, where we sample teas while munching on biscuit-toasty fried mulberry leaves. “My dad just passed away at 92. He never drank water,” she says. “He was a man of routine. Eating, gardening… drinking tea.”

Neatly clad in a silk sarong, Veo strikes a quietly impressive figure as she shows me around the rural riverside village of Ban Xang Khong. Co-founder of Ock Pop Tok (‘East Meets West’), a Luang Prabang textiles boutique that works with female artisans, Veo grew up in this sleepy settlement of traditional wood-built houses strung along a steep southern bank of the Mekong. She helped out at her mother’s weaving business, set in a striking teak-and-rosewood house further along Ban Xang Khong’s main street. Her mother’s boutique doubles as a museum preserving intricately woven, naturally died silk tribal clothing, bridal trousseaus and funeral shrouds collected from the myriad ethnic groups found across Laos.

The mulberry tree is central to artisan life. At a hands-on session in the teahouse’s workshop, I make a sheet of traditional saa paper, dipping my fingers into a shallow tray of boiled mulberry bark fibre, white and soft as mist. I then scatter the surface with fishbone fern fronds, srisuk and bougainvillea flowers, all gathered from the garden, before leaving my creation in the strong Laotian sun to dry.

A visit with Veo is just one of the stop-offs enjoyed by passengers of Bohème, a 13-suite riverboat run by Mekong Kingdoms, which made its maiden voyage here in December 2024, travelling between Luang Prabang and the Laotian capital Vientiane. A mountainous country landlocked between Thailand, China, Vietnam, Cambodia and Myanmar, Laos offers up its river like a wide, watery mirage — a sparkling passage through remote backcountry.

Bohème is a beautiful three-deck wooden vessel, somewhere between an old Nile paddle steamer, an ornate Thai rice barge and a floating boutique hotel. It has an almost exclusively Laotian crew and offers experience-rich excursions. It may have a French name — and suites dedicated to the Mekong’s 19th-century French colonialist explorers — but Bohème’s six-day river voyages offer a unique slice of local life.

Colour & comfort

The previous day, we’d set off from Luang Prabang, where the town’s Laotian-French architecture has been upstaged by a branch of the 7-Eleven convenience store. “It’s still a very traditional town,” said cruise manager Nonthavee ‘Asri’ Vichittheerakul as families, four-up on mopeds, arrived to indulge in everything from Thai milk tea to infinite flavours of instant noodle. “This is big news.”

Out by the river, where vegetable gardens are patchworked along the banks, a local village elder came aboard to perform a baci ceremony to bless our voyage. Prayers were followed by village women proffering sweet pandan sugar treats and white saisin — cotton threads which they tied around the wrists of guests and crew “to keep you safe”.

Only a day later, and it seems clear that the Mekong’s mirror-calm waters aren’t going to prove a challenge. “Though it’s not always like this,” says Kyaw ‘Jude’ Nyi Nyi Lwin, Bohème’s purser. He shows me phone footage of this stretch of the river in monsoon season, seething with logs. “It’s literally a river of wood,” he says. “The monsoon clears trees from the banks; nature’s way of getting rid of dead wood.”

Though pleasure cruisers don’t ply the river in rainy season, we do switch to a little boat called Monsoon to reach the caves of Pak Ou, where we find gothic limestone grottoes studded with thousands of Buddha statues. This resting place for retired statuary is in the shallows south of Luang Prabang’s new dam, and Bohème’s bijou sister boat — with its bold-coloured cushions and a discreet little bar — is best suited for these waters, Jude tells me. The Mekong is a river seeing increasing Chinese engineering intervention, with dams littering its length, from its origins high in the Tibetan plateau along its six-country, 3,000-mile route to a sandy delta in Southern Vietnam.

My fellow passengers also take in a broad sweep of countries, having travelled from Singapore, Thailand, Australia, Mauritius and the UK. Catering to this worldly cohort, Bohème delivers a brilliantly balanced mix of local character and international comforts. AC-equipped cabins with ikat textiles and polished woods host plush beds, and there are two spa treatment rooms where powerful Thai massages unknot even the most jet-lagged travellers. Warm, intuitive service builds a familial atmosphere aboard this small ship, and impeccable housekeeping underpins it all. My shoes, for one, apparently followed me independently around the craft. On return from shore landings, covered in sand, I’d switch them for stylish bamboo house slippers only to find they’d arrived in my cabin mere moments later, buffed as new.

Buffalos & Buddhas

As the Mekong takes us south, waterfront buildings give way to sun-browned banks backed by the deep greens of palm, frangipani, teak and bamboo. Mornings arrive with such stillness — sky and river as yet undivided in the dawn half-light, quiet save the puttering of distant longboats and the soft clatter of morning chores from houses tucked into the forested shoreline. In mesmerised indolence, we watch the day drift by. The horned heads of submerged water buffalo poke above the river’s jade surface like fluffy question marks. Purple-flowering waterlilies spin in eddies around our boat. Banks vanish in the haze from slash-and-burn farming, then sandy bays emerge, rising to tabletop cliffs where, suddenly, giant golden Buddhas seem to hover above the horizon, standing sentinel over temples.

“I was concerned I might be a bit bored when I booked this trip,” says my British co-passenger, Tim Taylor. “It’s slow-moving, but it’s fascinating.” He has travelled from his home in Mauritius to recreate an overland journey he and his wife Sarah did here decades before. “I fell in love with Laos, then,” says Sarah, another spry septuagenarian who looks like her backpacking days are far from behind her. “The Buddhist culture, the friendly, gentle people… the food!”

Sarah and I, like many passengers, buddy up to spend mealtimes marvelling at the culinary artwork firing out of Bohème’s tiny kitchen at the hands of young chef, Vongpasith ‘Dam’ Khunsawat. There are lunches drawing on tangy local buffalo mozzarella, garden veggies from riverside farms and delicately curried Mekong river fish. Breakfasts are banquets, from spiced noodles and just-picked mangosteen to the freshest local eggs. Five-course dinners switch between French, Italian and pan-Asian cuisine — anything from elegant beetroot carpaccio to minced Thai pork with crisp shallot and sour pickled fruit. And the cocktails are inspired.

“You can be a software engineer anywhere, but this is different,” says our bartender, Anouluck ‘Nu’ Chanthaphone, spiriting up yet another sundowner creation. Two years ago, the tattooed twentysomething Laotian switched from working with computers to hotel catering and has never looked back. “Hotels are about people and emotions. And being creative,” he says proffering a punchy Mekong gold rush, made with pandan-sweetened whisky, honey and apple juice.

For all its idyllic qualities, the Mekong remains a working river. At its widest points, mid-channel islands host not herds of buffalo but dredgers, their diggers scooping at the water like greedy metallic elephants. Makeshift worker camps of tarpaulin and beach umbrellas resemble scrappy holiday resorts scattered on the sands they will soon remove, either for the gold they contain or the sand itself.

At the Xayaboury hydroelectric dam, our deft captain Houmphan Sihongthong manoeuvres us through a vast lock system that drops some 40 metres in less than 10 minutes. It’s so tight either side, the crew can pass beers to the lock-keepers as a token of thanks.

“Humans should not be this clever,” notes my Singaporean co-passenger Karen Tee ominously as we clear the dam, its mountainous concrete walls bearing down on us from behind. Now, the river’s pull is remarkably strong and for the first time I see fishing boats; the sharp contrast of life either side of Xayaboury is a testament to the impact damming has on the Mekong’s natural flow and ecology. Our diminutive captain Sihongthong, dwarfed by his cockpit chair, pilots like a colossus, manoeuvring our ship around rocks with the ease of a kayaker.

Riding the river is entertainment in itself but Bohème’s itinerary is richly packed, and it’s one of the few cruise ships that goes south of Xayaboury. A visit to the Elephant Conservation Center, a nationally protected conservancy in 23sq miles of forest, reveals a baby pachyderm playing in a lake and learning commands from vet staff to habituate him to medical attention. He and some 30 rescue elephants live among the country’s largest remaining wild population, which number around 50. It’s far from the ‘land of a million elephants’ Laos was once known as, but the centre’s breeding programme does vital work.

There are visits to waterfalls for swims in limpid cool pools, and shore stops to wood-built hamlets where we buy fresh loquat fruit and kiem moo (fried pork rinds). Our welcoming committee on return: kids gleefully using our mooring rope as an obstacle course, swimming under it and leaping off the banks over it.

During a visit to the family-run Lao Pottery House in the village of Ban Chan Neua, I’m taught how to shape a small bowl by Saysana Chitaphon, a young deaf-mute artisan whose non-verbal instruction is the height of eloquence. “He finished school but didn’t find work,” says kiln owner, Khankeo Syaksone. “So we took him on.” I keep the little clay cup, glazed in an earthy, riverine grey-green, with the hope that when filled with butterfly pea tea, I can conjure the Mekong’s magical spirit long after I leave.