Nine days in Laos: the least hurried country in Asia, now with a fast train through it

The Royal Palace was built for King Sisavang Vong in 1904 in a style half Lao and half Beaux-Arts, because the French were paying for it. In 1975 the royal family were taken to a re-education camp in the northeast and never seen again, and the building became a museum with the rooms much as they were left.

Walk the length of the peninsula afterwards to the temple everybody comes for, finished in 1560, whose roof sweeps almost to the ground in three tiers. Then climb the hill for sunset, which is the one thing the whole town does at the same time.

Kuang Si is 30 kilometres south, about 45 minutes in a shared tuk-tuk, and it is the best thing in northern Laos. The water comes off a limestone shelf and falls through a staircase of pools whose colour comes from dissolved calcium carbonate. The pools are open for swimming and the water is cold enough to be a shock.

Just inside the gate is a sanctuary for Asiatic black bears rescued from bile farms and the pet trade, which costs nothing extra and takes twenty minutes. Come back for the afternoon, and spend an hour in the museum that explains who actually lives in this country.

Set an alarm for quarter past five. The procession starts as it gets light and lasts about half an hour: two hundred monks and novices walking in single file along the main street collecting sticky rice from people kneeling on mats. It has happened here every morning for six centuries.

Then take a boat upriver. Two hours up the Mekong, at the mouth of a tributary, two limestone caverns in a cliff hold several thousand Buddha images, left there over centuries by people who could not bring themselves to destroy a damaged one.

Back in the afternoon, half an hour at the visitor centre that explains the other thing about Laos. Between 1964 and 1973 the United States dropped over two million tonnes of ordnance on this country, and about a third of the cluster submunitions failed to go off.

An hour on the train, plus the transfers at either end. Vang Vieng appears out of the window as a wall of limestone towers on the far side of a river, which is the whole reason to stop here.

Do nothing much on arrival except climb one of them. Pha Ngeun is a half-hour scramble up a fixed rope and steps, it is genuinely steep, and the platform at the top looks straight down the valley with the Nam Song curling through it. Go up at half past four and take a torch for the descent.

The limestone here is full of holes and the water that comes out of them is the colour of a swimming pool. The best known lagoon sits at the foot of a tower six kilometres west, with a cave above it that you climb into by a rough staircase, and a rope swing over the water that has been there for years.

The other thing to do is get into an inner tube. Tubing on the Nam Song is what made this town famous and infamous; the bars along the bank are gone and what is left is a two hour float down a river between cliffs, which is a great deal more pleasant than the reputation suggests. The water cave upstream is the same idea underground, pulling yourself along a fixed rope in the dark.

An hour south and you are in the capital. In 1828 a Siamese army razed Vientiane and carried off its most sacred image, the Emerald Buddha, which is still in Bangkok. One temple was left standing, apparently because it had been built in a Siamese style and the soldiers took it for one of their own, and its cloister walls hold several thousand small Buddha figures in niches.

Across the road is the temple built in 1565 to house the Emerald Buddha, now a museum with an empty pedestal in the middle of it. Then walk up the boulevard to the arch, which Vientiane built in the 1960s using cement the United States had supplied for an airport runway, and which locals still call the vertical runway.

Twenty-five kilometres downriver, next to the bridge into Thailand, a self-taught priest called Bunleua Sulilat spent the late 1950s filling a field with enormous concrete sculptures mixing Buddhist and Hindu figures. There is a forty metre reclining Buddha, a three-storey pumpkin you enter through a demon's mouth, and about two hundred other things nobody can fully explain.

In the afternoon, the counterweight: the centre that fits prosthetic limbs to people injured by unexploded ordnance. Then go out to the national stupa for the end of the day, a gilded three-tiered pyramid rebuilt in the 1930s to sixteenth-century drawings, which appears on the national seal.

Wat Si Muang is the busiest religious site in the capital and almost no visitors go. It holds the city pillar, and the story is that when it was lowered in 1563 a pregnant woman named Si Muang threw herself into the hole as a sacrifice. People come to have new cars blessed, to ask for children, and to be tied at the wrist with white cotton thread, which anybody may accept.

The textile museum north of the centre is a compound of teak buildings where weavers and dyers work in the open, and it is the best place in the country to understand what all those patterns mean before you buy one.

Finish on the Mekong. The far bank is Thailand, the promenade fills up at six, and the sun goes down into another country.

Buy coffee before you go. Lao coffee comes off the Bolaven Plateau in the far south and the beans sold in the market here are the cheapest good ones you will find anywhere.

Wattay airport is ten minutes from the centre. If you are heading into Thailand instead, the shuttle train over the Friendship Bridge takes fifteen minutes and connects to the overnight sleeper for Bangkok.