Off-the-beaten-track and not so off-the-beaten-track tours of Southeast Asia

Off-the-beaten-track Tours

We like to describe our small group tours to Southeast Asia as off-the-beaten-track tours as it sounds exciting and something a bit different. We of course believe they are genuinely exciting and even the tours to better-known parts still include plenty of lesser-visited sites. The Southeast Asian subcontinent is huge and while certain destinations receive huge numbers of visitors – Samui, Phuket, Bali and so-on being well-known examples – much of the region sees few or zero foreign visitors. Certain itineraries then, by nature of the region travelled, lead to significantly more off-the-beaten-track tours than others.

Thailand for instance recorded some 33 million visitors for 2025 however 90% of them visited the same half dozen or so destinations. Even on a regional basis, while north Thailand’s Chiang Mai and Pai receive plenty of tourists, much of the remainder of the northern reaches of the kingdom see minimal numbers of foreign arrivals. (Which is why we chose to name our north Thailand tour Hidden Thailand.)

Neighbouring countries such as Laos and Cambodia see substantially fewer visitors than Thailand, although they are even more concentrated in fewer destinations.  Approximately 75% of visitors to the former travel to Luang Prabang while at least an equivalent proportion of tourists to Cambodia visit Angkor and not much else. (Having visited the two tourist epi-centres, they can then tick Laos and Cambodia of their lists.) Travel an hour from Siem Reap or Luang Prabang and you will find yourself in uncharted tourist territory. Note that even Siem Reap or Luang Prabang are of course very outside-of-the-box destinations if one is used to popular European destinations, but the former today features upmarket air-con cafes and bakeries, restaurants offering any World cuisine you can think of, myriad boutique hotels with English speaking staff and spotlessly clean streets so few visitors ought to feel too far outside of their comfort zones.)

Half of the annual foreign visitor numbers to the vast Indonesian archipelago visit just the one, relatively small, island of Bali. With the exceptions of Jogjakarta’s Borobudur, Lombok’s Gili Isles and to some extent Komodo, much of the remainder of the country remains stubbornly off-the-beaten-track.

The aim of our tours is – as the blurb frequently points out –  to combine the well-known spots with the lesser-known, ‘hidden places’. While we can easily avoid Phuket et al we can hardly run a Cambodia tour without including Angkor Wat, Laos without Luang Prabang, Java with no Borobudur or north Thailand without Chiang Mai. While all remain delightful destinations – especially with a dose of insider knowledge – they all come with well-developed tourist infrastructures and international creature comforts and few visitors to such destinations will experience much culture shock.  However, not every region of Southeast Asia is fortunate to possess such well developed, key sites and those, for want of a better word, ‘fluffier’ destinations are not the norm.

If you’ve travelled on a Vietnam tour to Hanoi, Hue and Hoi An, a Sri Lanka trip taking in Galle, Kandy and Negombo or KL, Penang and Melaka (Malacca) in Malaysia you might be forgiven for considering yourself an experienced Southeast Asia hand but when you find yourself in the Sumatran jungle, the Plain of Jars in remote northeastern Laos or crossing the border into rarely visited northern Cambodia things are not quite the same. You’re not in Kansas anymore – or even Krabi, Kanchanaburi or Kampot – and even frequent visitors to the region may well find themselves somewhat out of their comfort zones. We will however point out that when travelling to remote parts of say West Malaysia or Thailand, you’ll still be driving on European standard highways, stopping at air-conditioned convenience stores and eating great food in hygienic cafes. (Even though on off-the-beaten-track tours such as our Thailand, Isan tour, once past Ayutthaya, you’ll encounter very few Westerners.) Meanwhile, northeastern Laos, northern Cambodia, or Sumatra for instance also only see a trickle of visitors however the road infrastructure goes from ok to awful, while accommodation and eating choices are often very limited.

Another important difference that is easily overlooked by relative newcomers to Southeast Asia is that while Thailand, Malaysia and Bali have all experienced decades of mass tourism, large numbers of foreign visitors is still a very recent phenomenon in Cambodia, Laos and even Vietnam. When we first visited Laos in 93 or 94 there was no sealed road nor public transport, (apart from flights), connecting Vientiane with Luang Prabang and it took us 2 days in the back of a truck with an armed guide.

The civil war in Cambodia didn’t officially end until 1998 at which time the country possessed no sealed roads outside of Phnom Penh and a sporadic electricity supply. When we started running Cambodia tours in 2000-2001, Phnom Penh to Siem Reap was a 2-day journey on a dirt track. Conditions were, to say the least, basic. Vietnam only opened to foreign tourism in the early 90s.

Today you travel to Siem Reap on a 4-lane highway while the Chinese built bullet trains take less than 2 hours from Vientiane to Luang Prabang. World Heritage status for the latter, as well as Siem Reap’s Angkor, provided a huge shot in the arm for tourism and, as we said, both destinations, along with Phnom Penh and Vientiane are now comfortable, very user friendly and highly popular destinations. However, trickly down effects to regional, further flung sites is a slow process.

Before you criticise dead leaves in the pool or the receptionists’ poor level of English in a remote Cambodian town, please bear in mind roads, electricity, running water and even schools are very recent recent phenomena in those parts. There are then, as we said, less off-the-beaten-track tours and more off-the-beaten-track tours of Southeast Asia.

The latter style can take people by surprise but in many ways this is the most exciting travel precisely because there are no Western fast food outlets, upmarket wellness resorts, banana pancakes for breakfast and you don’t have to share viewpoints with hoards of other tourists. These less developed regions remain in many ways the real Southeast Asia with all that entails. But, you can’t always have the best of both worlds and issues can occur when guests like the sound of remote, lesser-travelled parts but are disappointed when they get there by the lack of power showers or poolside cocktails. It is of course a matter or preconceptions but bear in mind some far-flung spot such as Laos’s Sam Nuea will likely have a complete absence of boutique resorts or fancy eco-lodges and Kratie is never going to be the fine dining capital of Cambodia. Perhaps to better illustrate our ramblings we’ll run through some of the more off-the-beaten-track tours on our Southeast Asian menu on a one-by-one basis.

Hidden Thailand

We’ll begin with the aforementioned Hidden Thailand, one of our Thailand off-the-beaten-track tours. This combines well-known Bangkok, Sukhothai, Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai with the much less visited destinations of Lampang, Phayao, Chiang Saen and Mae Salong.  Relatively affluent Thailand has, as we said, a well-developed transport infrastructure and well-developed domestic tourism set-up so, just because foreign tourists don’t reach those parts, doesn’t mean that locals don’t and decent accommodation and eating options are found pretty much everywhere. Little English may be spoken in some of those parts and you’ll find yourself in some truly exotic spots. If one’s previous experience of Thailand stretches to a package hotel in Samui or island resort in Krabi then some of it will take you by surprise but on the whole, few guests ought to feel too far out of their comfort zones. We’ll give it 8/10 on our fluffy scale.

Thailand Isan Tour

Our one week odyssey through northeastern Thailand’s Isan region certainly reaches parts few other Thai tours reach and after a detour to Ayutthaya and exploration of World Heritage Khao Yai National Park, foreign visitors are very few and far between on the subsequent Buriram, Surin and Ubon Ratchathani section. As with the above tour, plenty of adventurous local tourists do visit those parts so decent accommodation, great roads and, as is always the case in Thailand, excellent eateries are nonetheless available.

Laos, Mountains and Hilltribes and Unexplored, The Far North

The above two tours take you from Laos’s tourism epicentre of Luang Prabang east to the remote Plain of Jars and east again to the even more remote Sam Nuea and Vieng Xai. (The former is simply a shortened version of the latter.) This is the far northeastern corner of the mountainous country where few foreign tourists venture. Roads vary from bad to appalling, accommodation choices are limited and tourist-orientated restaurants few and far between. We do of course endeavour to find the best available options in both categories but both will remain simple. This however is, to use a cliche, the ‘real Laos’ before mass tourism hit the more accessible regions.  It is an adventure, which is part of the attraction for many guests. The now UNESCO-listed Plain of Jars and the former Pathet Lao ‘secret city’ of Vieng Xai are remarkable sites that few get to see but getting there, compared to the case of neighbouring Thailand’s modern highways, can be rough. (We avoid scheduling these tours for the rainy season when conditions are at their worst while we would also point out that we’re in no way responsible for road conditions and indeed any tour operator choosing to include those parts has to use the same route to get there.)

Once you’ve crossed the Lao-Vietnam border you’re still in the middle of nowhere however the enterprising Vietnamese – and better funded highways department – means much improved roads and some surprisingly fancy accommodation, (A major difference is that Vietnam, like Thailand and Malaysia have large populations with well developed local tourism whereas less affluent Laos and Cambodia have far fewer.) These Laos and Vietnam tours then go from an 8/10 to a 3 back to a 8 again on our fluffiness scale.

South Laos – Far North to far South and Mekong Adventure

These off-the-beaten-track tours begin in Luang Prabang and Vientiane respectively and take you overland to the Four Thousand Islands in the far south before crossing the border into northern Cambodia. Vientiane, the capital and the picturesque archipelago are two of the country’s biggest draws however much of the region in-between sees few visitors. The good news here is that, unlike the far north, the main highway follows the Mekong Valley and is flat and straight for much of its course while towns en route such as Savannakhet and Pakse are large and busy enough to come with some mod cons. The popular Bolaven Plateau, World Heritage Wat Phu and aforementioned islands make a well trodden path allowing for off-the-beaten-track tours in relative comfort.

Crossing into northern Cambodia can then come as something of a shock as this is remote territory. When we first began such itineraries we had to include some fairly hairy boat rides down the Mekong for much of the route as there were no sealed roads while finding decent accommodation and eateries was a tricky task. Again, good news is that the Cambodian road network has vastly improved in recent times and far flung towns such as Kratie and Kampong Cham are beginning to see a trickle of visitors. Hotels and restaurants catering to visitors have correspondingly increased. You’ll finish the tour in a plush boutique hotel in Phnom Penh with a rooftop infinity pool so, while nobody could describe the hectic city as fluffy, it is certainly more than comfortable.

Beyond Angkor

Logically, talk of remote parts of Cambodia would bring us on to our Beyond Angkor tour although at present certain areas – namely Preah Vihear and Anlong Veng close to the disputed Thai border – are too outside of the box for the UK Foreign Office. For now we can’t run the tour as normal although tweaked versions are still available and we’re even running one next month. (We’ll put this one aside for now, until the dust has settled.)

Sumatra and Java

Outside of Yogyakarta and the capital Jakarta, most of Indonesia’s most populous island of Java sees relatively limited numbers of foreign visitors. Sumatra even less so. Java has a poor road system but excellent rail infrastructure while Sumatra has even worse roads and near non-existent railways. The former is famously one of the most densely populated parts of the planet so you’re never far from a larger town with decent restaurants, bars and accommodation however, in contrast, outside of its largest city Medan,  Sumatra remains largely rural with  extensive remaining tracts of forest.

There’s plenty to see on Sumatra but being a large island with frankly rotten roads that would entail several internal flights so, for now, we limit the main sites to Bukit Lawang and Lake Toba.  (We first visited nearly 30 years ago and there don’t seem to us many more foreign visitors around now than there were then so tourism has sadly stagnated to some extent.) The former is a remote, small settlement on the edge of World Heritage Gunung Leuser National Park which is well-known for its sizeable and relatively accessible orangutan population. We say relatively accessible but the primate’s natural habitat is of course rainforest so in reply to a recent mail from an apparently hot and sweaty guest, the Sumatran rainforest is by nature hot, sticky, muddy and overgrown but, if you want to see orangutans in their natural habitat then…

The above are just a few examples of some of our more off-the-beaten-track tours, or rather itineraries which include particularly off-the-beaten-track sections. However, as mentioned, even the most well-trodden routes also take in some remote sites while travel to least-visited parts invariably start and/or finish in busier, more frequented destinations.

Traditionally, it has been accessibility that has kept Kratie’s Irrawaddy dolphins, Laos’s amazing Konglor Cave or Vieng Xai ‘Hidden City’, Cambodia’s spectacular World Heritage ancient cities of Koh Ker and Sambor Prei Kuk or the orangutans of Sumatra’s Gunung Leuser under the radar. All fantastic destinations that few visitors get to see but don’t forget – you will occasionally find yourself right off-the-beaten-track.