Tad Lo

Tad Lo is a name that refers loosely to a village, a waterfall, and a state of mind, and after a few days there I could no longer tell you where one ended and the next began. It sits on the northern lip of the Bolaven Plateau, an hour or so up a winding road from the lowlands, and it exists for one reason: the Xe Set river drops through here in a series of falls, and a handful of guesthouses have arranged themselves along the banks to take advantage of that fact. We rolled in on a rented motorbike intending to stay one night. We stayed four.

Three waterfalls and a river that runs your day

There are three falls strung along the river. Tad Hang is the one the village is built around, a wide low cascade you can hear from every guesthouse veranda, with shallow pools at the base where everyone — travellers, local kids, the occasional monk with his robes hitched up — goes to cool off in the afternoon heat. Tad Lo proper is a short walk upstream, broader and more powerful. And Tad Suong, further up still and reachable by motorbike, is the tallest and most dramatic, especially after rain when it thunders over the lip in a single sheet.

I spent the first full day intending to be productive and instead spent it in the pools below Tad Hang, alternating between floating on my back in the current and reading on a flat warm rock until the words swam. Lia befriended a French couple who had also come for one night and were on day six, which should have been a warning. The river sets the rhythm. The water is cool and tea-coloured and constant, and the sound of it is the background to everything, so that even sleeping you are aware of the falls working away in the dark.

The plateau villages above

What pulled me off the rock eventually was the motorbike loop up onto the plateau proper. The Bolaven is coffee country — I have written about that around Pakse — but the back roads above Tad Lo run through Katu and Alak villages where the houses are wooden, raised on stilts, and the coffee plots give way to terraced rice and small stands of jungle. I stopped in one village where an old woman was weaving on a backstrap loom on her porch, a clay pipe between her teeth, and she watched me with an expression of frank, unbothered curiosity that I have come to recognise as the default registration of the foreign motorcyclist in rural Laos.

The roads up here are rough in patches and gorgeous throughout, red laterite cutting through green, and the air cools noticeably with the altitude. I rode out to a more remote fall, got mildly lost, asked directions in pantomime from a man fixing a fence, and ended up sharing a thermos of bitter green tea with his family on their veranda for an hour, all of us communicating in gestures and laughter. That hour, more than any waterfall, is what I think of when I think of Tad Lo.

Tad Lo is a place that punishes the itinerary and rewards the loiterer. If you arrive on a schedule, it will quietly dismantle it, and you will be better for the loss.

When to go: November to February is the dry season — cooler on the plateau, comfortable for the motorbike loop, with the falls still healthy. The waterfalls are most powerful at the tail of the wet season around October, though the roads are muddier then. Avoid March to May, when the lowland heat creeps up even here.