Exploring Laung Prabang

- Chad Merchant

 

With the smallest population of any ASEAN country bigger than a postage stamp – sorry, Singapore and Brunei, we’re looking at you – Laos is about as close to being the region’s undiscovered country as you could imagine. It doesn’t have ancient temples like Angkor Wat or Borobudur to draw history and archaeology buffs, there are no beaches (as it’s ASEAN’s only landlocked nation), and there are no glitzy cities or shopping meccas anywhere within its borders. You might think tourism would be a hard sell in a place like Laos, and in some regards, you would probably be right. And yet, this little-known land pulls in visitors by the planeload, with the country’s nascent tourism industry recording impressive double-digit growth year-on-year in every year since 2010 except one. In less than one generation, the tourism sector has mushroomed exponentially, from just 80,000 international visitors in 1990 to over two million in 2010. And since 2010, that number has continued to soar, with the latest data showing a whopping 4.7 million tourist arrivals in 2015, a staggering increase of nearly 60-fold in just 25 years.

CITY OF HERITAGE, CRADLE OF COMFORT