Qualla: Khammouane Province

Khammouane Province: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Prince Roy, CC BY 2.0. In 1996 the biologist Robert Timmins was walking through a market in Thakhek when something on a meat stall stopped him: a dead rodent with long whiskers and a heavy, drooping tail, of no species he recognised. It was formally described in 2005, and within a year palaeontologists had reassigned it to Diatomyidae - a family known only from fossils and assumed to have gone extinct around eleven million years ago. One of them called it the coelacanth of rodents. The people selling it had known about it for generations and had a perfectly good name for it: kha-nyou. That is Khammouane in one anecdote. The province keeps things, quietly, in rock nobody has finished looking inside.

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Image: Prince Roy | CC BY 2.0

Khammouane Province: Sixteen Thousand Square Kilometres of Limestone

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Prince Roy, CC BY 2.0. Khammouane covers 16,315 square kilometres of central Laos, wedged between Bolikhamsai to the north, Savannakhet to the south, Thailand across the Mekong to the west and Vietnam over the Annamite crest to the east. Most of it is forested mountain. Between the river and the range ...

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Image: Prince Roy | CC BY 2.0

Khammouane Province: Seven Kilometres in the Dark

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tango7174, CC BY-SA 4.0. At Ban Khonglor, about 130 kilometres north of Thakhek, the Nam Hin Bun river does not go around the mountain. It goes through it. Tham Kong Lo carries the river for roughly seven and a half kilometres beneath Phu Hin Bun, through chambers reaching 90 metres wide and 100 metres h...

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Image: Tango7174 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Khammouane Province: The Caves Became a World Heritage Site

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tango7174, CC BY-SA 4.0. The eastern edge of the province is Hin Nam No, declared a national park by prime ministerial decree in January 2020 and inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2025 as an extension of Vietnam's Phong Nha-Kẻ Bàng, which lies directly across the border. Together they form o...

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Image: Tango7174 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Khammouane Province: The River They Moved

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Aleksey Gnilenkov from Moscow, Russia, CC BY 2.0. Nam Theun 2 is the largest hydropower project in Laos and one of the most closely watched dams ever built. Commissioned in April 2010 at a cost of around US$1.3 billion, its 1,075 megawatts are generated by taking water off the Nam Theun, dropping it 350 metres through the mounta...

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Image: Aleksey Gnilenkov from Moscow, Russia | CC BY 2.0

Khammouane Province: Thakhek and the Railway That Wasn't

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Torbenbrinker, CC BY-SA 3.0. The provincial capital sits on the Mekong looking straight at Nakhon Phanom in Thailand, its centre still lined with French colonial villas, shophouses and administrative buildings going gently chalky in the heat. In the Lan Xang era the town went by Sikhottabong, Muang Kabong an...

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Image: Torbenbrinker | CC BY-SA 3.0