Discover the blissful peace of Laos

There’s a company I came across the other day called Value Added Travel. And despite the horrible name, it seems to be doing good business — which got me thinking. If I were starting a travel business I’d be tempted to name it something along the lines of Guaranteed To Make You Feel Better About Life — a mouthful, I grant you, and a little twee, but doesn’t it describe the reason we go places?

Even the great Patrick Leigh Fermor’s epic walk from the Hook of Holland to the Golden Horn was underpinned by an innate sense of optimism. In a word, hope. Which is why I have no wish to revisit Vegas and little desire ever to drink beer on the strip in Magaluf.

But give me a regular dose of Luang Prabang and I promise to help old ladies across the street for ever more. It’s that kind of town: sufficiently far away to pack up your troubles without ever feeling unduly remote. Easy on the eye, and easy on the equilibrium too. Designated a Unesco World Heritage Site in 1995, it’s ranked right up there with other great treasures such as Angkor Wat and the Great Wall of China. That might be stretching things a little, but Luang Prabang does have 33 temples (at one time there were 62) and 111 historic Lao-French buildings, thanks to the French presence that lasted from 1893 to 1954. Unesco deems it the best-preserved traditional town in South-east Asia.

But that’s not the half of it. If there were a Unesco equivalent that monitored gentleness and humility, then the people here would be held up as shining examples to the rest of the warring planet. Once described as ‘a holy grail for shoestring backpackers seeking higher truth’, Luang Prabang now does chic with a Buddhist twist and it’s impossible to leave without a spring in your step.