What We Get Asked
These are written from the departures we run, not from a desk. If a month is wrong for a route, or a border crossing eats a day that a flight would save, it says so here.
Written To Be Used
Each guide ends in a decision rather than an overview: this month, this many days, this route, this border. Where the honest answer is that a plan will not work, the guide says so and offers what does. We would rather lose a booking than sell a trip that a season or a closed crossing will spoil.
Dated On Purpose
Entry rules, border status and park closures in this region change several times a year, and most of what is written about them online is out of date. Every page here carries the month it was checked. If you are reading long after that date, ask us and we will confirm the current position before you book anything.
Ask A Person Instead
None of this replaces a conversation. If your dates are fixed and awkward, or you are weighing two countries against three, write to us with what you have and we will tell you which of the two works better — including when the answer is to go somewhere else, or in a different month.
Top Highlights
- When To Go sets out the right months country by country, including the burning season in the north that most itineraries ignore.
- How Many Days puts a realistic figure on each country and on the common two- and three-country combinations.
- Crossing Borders lists every land crossing we use, its current status, and which ones accept which visa.
- Small Group or Private explains what a group of sixteen gets you, and when a private departure is the better answer.
- Responsible Travel is an operating list rather than a statement: day rates, no commission stops, no elephant riding.
- Each country also has a Travel Information page covering visas, money, health and etiquette in practical detail.
Guides
Five
Countries covered
Five
Last checked
September 2026
Also see
Country travel information
Written by
Our own ground teams
Questions
Answered by email
Vietnam alone spans three climates and there is no single month that suits all of it. Laos and the north of Thailand share a burning season from February to April that ruins the views and, in bad years, makes the air genuinely unpleasant. Thailand's two coasts have opposite monsoons.
The guide breaks the year down region by region rather than country by country, and says plainly which months we would avoid. It also covers the shoulder weeks that are usually the best value: warm enough, dry enough, and without the numbers that December brings.
Ten days in Vietnam gives you the north or the centre, not both, unless you are prepared to fly twice and spend two mornings in airports. Cambodia's essentials fit comfortably in a week. Laos rewards a slower clock than anywhere else in the region and punishes a rushed one.
The guide gives a working minimum and a comfortable figure for each country, then does the same for the usual combinations — Vietnam and Cambodia, the three Indochina countries, and the longer runs that take in Thailand.
Every land crossing we use, with its status as of September 2026 and the visa that works there. The important ones: all Thai–Cambodian land crossings have been closed since late June 2025 and remain closed, so that leg is flown. Laos does not accept its own e-visa at any crossing from Vietnam, and only Dansavanh–Lao Bao issues a visa on arrival.
These are the details that quietly break an itinerary booked without them, and they change, so the page carries the date it was checked.
Sixteen is the number at which a group still fits one boat, one room and one guide's voice. Below that you gain flexibility and lose the company; above it you have a coach tour.
The guide sets out what a published departure actually gives you — fixed dates, a fixed price, other travellers — against a private departure on your own dates with the same guides and the route reshaped. Every journey on this site can be run either way, and the honest answer depends on how many of you there are and how fixed your dates already are.
Not a statement of values but a list of operating decisions: guides and drivers on day rates rather than commission, so nobody needs to steer you into a shop; no elephant riding and no performing animals anywhere in our programme; no visits to residential care institutions for children; group sizes small enough that a village lunch stays a lunch.
The guide also covers what we ask of travellers — at the alms round in Luang Prabang in particular, where the visitor behaviour is now the problem.
Alongside these five guides, each country has its own Travel Information page: entry rules and current visa costs, money and cards, the months that work, getting around, health, and the etiquette that matters in temples and villages.
Those pages go into the detail a specific trip needs — which of your passports needs a visa for Vietnam, whether your card will work in Laos, what the Thai arrival card requires and when it can be filed. Start with the guide, then read the country page for wherever you are going.
Guides and journeys
The other guides on this site, and a few of the departures they apply to.
