Good maps of Laos are difficult to find. The best all-purpose country map available is GT-Rider.com's Laos, a sturdy laminated affair with a scale of 1:1,400,000. It's available at bookshops in Thailand and at many guest­houses in Laos, as well as online at www.gt-rider.com. At the time of research the latest edition was published in 2005. The Reise Know-How (www.reise-know-how.com) map also gets very good reports, though it's almost impossible to find outside Germany.

The National Geographic Service (NGS; Kom Phaen Thi Haeng Saat in Lao, or Service Geographique National in French; at 8-11.30am, l-4.30pm Mon-Fri) has a series of adequate maps of Laos and certain provincial capitals. These can be purchased direct from the National Geographic Service, which is on a side street to the northwest of the Patuxai in Vientiane.

Detailed topographic sheet maps labeled in English and French and often seen on the walls of government offices are based on Soviet satellite photography from the early 1980s. The National Geographic Serv­ice has many of these maps and will usually sell them to foreigners even though they're marked En Secret. However, place names are often incorrect and roadways not up to date.

The NGS' l.500,000-scale topographical number 11 in all, although they're not all available. Other topographical maps in the series decrease in scale to as low as 1:10,000, but anything below the 1:100,000 scale maps (for which it takes 176 to cover the whole country) is overkill unless you plan to drill for oil. Furthermore the NGS usually won't sell maps of 1:100,000 or less to foreign­ers unless they bring a written request on company letterhead - or get a Lao friend to make the purchase for them. For all maps produced in Laos, including rare city maps, the lowest prices are available through the NGS.

Chiang Mai-based Hobo Maps has pro­duced a series of good, if often excessively large, maps of Vientiane, Luang Prabang and Vang Vieng. These are available in book shops and some hotels in the relevant destinations. The Lao National Tourism Administration (LNTA) has also produced a few city maps in recent years, though ac­tually finding one is only marginally more likely than winning the lottery.

Map collectors or war historians may find American military maps from 1965 - now rather rare though they may still be avail­able from the Defense Mapping Agency in the US - of some interest. These maps seem fairly accurate for topographic detail but are woefully out of date with regard to road placement and village names. The same goes for the USA's highly touted Tactical Pilot age Charts, prepared specifically for air travel over Laos and virtually useless for modern ground navigation.