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Coasting in Cambodia

I left Phnom Penh a week ago and travelled by bus to Kampot, a small town that used to be Cambodia’s main port before the construction of the port at Sihanoukville / Kompong Som in the 1950s.

Thankfully, this meant that I was not in Phnom Penh when a stampede during the Water Festival resulted in over 375 deaths and many injuries.  The latest news around here suggests that the stampede may have been caused by the police inexplicably using a water cannon on the crowds crossing the bridge.  Other rumours suggest that it was sparked by electricity cables coming loose and electrocuting a number of people on the bridge.  Whatever the cause, it is a real tragedy and a lot of the people that I was with at the time the news broke (a mix of Phnom Penh resident expats and Khmers) were very shaken, upset and angry.

Kampot is a rather sleepy little place, with very little going on other than tourism only it isn’t entirely clear why tourists go there…  There is no beach as the town is actually a little way up an estuary.  There is some interesting colonial architecture but it isn’t particularly special.  I guess the Lonely Planet people needed to fill some pages…

I only stayed a couple of nights and spent my only full day in the area at Bokor National Park.  Interestingly, much of the national park is currently a construction site.  A huge swathe of the land has been bought up by a private investor who is bulldozing the primary forest to build hotels and golf courses…  The French had built a hill station at the top of Bokor mountain in the 1920s for colonialists to take a holiday from the heat and experience cool weather similar to that of their home country.  You can now visit the derelict remains of a hotel/casino, the Bokor Palace Hotel, and an abandoned Catholic church.  It was really interesting walking around in the empty shell of the hotel (straight past the ‘danger, do not enter’ signs), imagining what it must once have looked like. 

It is strange to think of people wanting to go somewhere cool/cold for a holiday (other than, of course, a skiing/snowboarding holiday).  I can’t say that I particularly want to head back to London weather right now.  I see they are forecasting temperatures around the zero degree mark.  Today, I was scuba diving in water 29 degrees warm.  It was in the mid-thirties out of the water.  I’m spending tomorrow on a beach.

From Kampot, I went to Kep for a four day yoga retreat.  I’ve been trying to take yoga classes when possible on my travels and when I went to a drop-in class in Phnom Penh they were trying to fill the last couple of spots on a retreat.  We stayed at the Vine Retreat, a lovely little hotel set on a farm which produces vegetables for the hotel kitchen and fiery Kampot Pepper.  I did between 3 and 5 hours of yoga a day, lazed around in the shade, ate really good khmer food and met lots of really interesting people:  an Australian novelist (her book, The Danger Room will be released in the UK early next year), UNIFEM’s country coordinator for Cambodia who had previously been the country coordinator for Afghanistan, a Norwegian dietitian working on a research project in Cambodia (where she had actually been born before her Cambodian parents fled the Khmer Rouge as refugees when she was only a couple of years old) and people working for various NGOs.  The yoga teaching assistants were two young girls that had been rescued from sex trafficking and were being cared for, taught English and trained as yoga instructors by an NGO… It really was fascinating speaking to them all and once again I am reminded that one of the best things about traveling is the people that you meet.

I’m now in Sihanoukville, Cambodia’s third biggest tourist centre.  I haven’t made it to the beach yet.  Instead, I went scuba diving.  The visibility wasn’t great and the coral is pretty badly bleached, but there was plenty to see.  Countless little fish and large sea urchins, giant anemones, sea cucumbers, a cuttlefish, a crab, several nudibranches and scorpion fish, loads of lovely soft corals… It really was great to be underwater again.  As mentioned above, I’m spending tomorrow on a beach but at the weekend I’m heading out diving again.  I cannot wait.

Phnom Penh

I’m not sure what I think about Phnom Penh.

Part of the problem is the contrast with Don Khon.  Arriving here was quite a shock to the system.  Don Khon probably only has a hundred or so permanent inhabitants.  Rush hour involved two mopeds and a bicycle slowly tootling past.  It could not get more more laid back.  Phnom Penh has over 2 million inhabitants and the traffic is sheer chaos.  Cars, mopeds, bicycles and pedestrians pushing hand carts vie for space on congested roads.  No-one seems to bother with one way systems.  No-one even seems to care which side of the road they are on.  Trying to cross a road seems impossible.  It would probably be easier blindfolded.  Walking around town also involves huge amounts of hassle as you are constantly asked whether you want a motorbike or a tuk tuk.  The drivers don’t seem to understand the concept of a foreigner wanting to walk…  The drivers also don’t seem to know their way around town.  Virtually every time I have taken a bike or a tuk tuk, I have had to give directions myself… I’ve only been here a couple of days!

Phnom Penh also contrasts with itself.  One moment it’s drowning in rain.  The next I’m worried about heatstroke.  One moment I’m visiting an outstandingly beautiful monument.  The next I’m looking at a collection of mass graves.

I arrived in town late evening on Sunday and it was pouring with rain.  Properly pouring with rain.  Torrential rain.  The kind of rain that soaks you to the bone in minutes even when you are wearing a waterproof.  And when the local version of a black cab to your hotel involves hopping on the back of a moped, this means that you get wet.  I got very wet.  My backpack also got very wet and I learned that it is not very clever to ride the back of a moped with a heavy backpack on.  Getting off safely requires a lot of balance…  To give you an idea of how bad the rain was, at one point the water was so deep it came up over my ankles.  Given that I was sat on the back of a moped at the time, that’s a good foot or so of water flowing in the streets.  For a city subject to tropical rains, you would have thought that they might have installed some storm drains.  But no.

The next day, I woke up to searing sunshine.  There was very little sign left of the previous night’s downpour.  It was hot.  Very hot.  I got very wet.  This time it was sweat not rain.  Even less pleasant.  That evening it started to rain again.  I had just left my hotel for dinner but, as the rain got heavier, I decided to forget my plans for food and to take refuge back in my room.  The rain just got heavier and heavier as I ran back to the hotel…  The next morning, I again woke up to blazing sunshine.  It hasn’t rained since.  But I don’t trust it.  It’s just waiting for me to be outside again, somewhere a long way from the safety of my hotel room.

There isn’t a whole lot to see in Phnom Penh.  A bit of colonial architecture and a few unimpressive wats, and then there are the four must see sights.  The National Museum contains a collection of Khmer sculpture.  My guidebook states that it is the best collection of Khmer sculpture in the world, but that is a bit of an obvious point really:  where else would there be a world class collection of Khmer sculpture?  The Royal Palace and the Silver Pagoda are amazing buildings and contain a collection of royal regalia, silverware and other golden stuff.  Again very impressive.

The last two sights show a very different side of Cambodia’s history.  The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum is a former school that the Pol Pot regime used to incarcerate its enemies whilst they were tortured before being executed.  The banality of the empty class rooms is haunting.  The Choeung Ek Genocidal Centre (more commonly referred to as the Killing Fields) is where most of Tuol Sleng’s ‘guests’ were taken to be killed and buried.  They have exhumed almost 9,000 corpses from the mass graves at Choeung Ek and about a third of the graves still have not been opened.

Both places are utterly depressing sites and contrast strongly with the National Museum and Royal Palace.  Nearly every visitor at both sites walked around in complete silence.  The ‘no smiling’ signs (I’m think that’s what they meant) at Tuol Sleng seemed utterly unnecessary.  The ‘Please do not walk on the mass grave’ signs at the Killing Fields were quite disturbing.

So there you go.  Phnom Penh is quite a depressing place in many ways  but it is charming in its own way too.  I can’t make my mind up about the place at all.

Still, I’m leaving tomorrow.  I’m not quite sure what I think about that either, but it’s time to go.  I’ve been here 3 days already and there isn’t much more to see.  I’m heading down to the coast.  Hopefully it’ll be a little quieter.  I think that I could do with some quiet again.

Lazing in Don Khon

Don Khon is a great place to laze. There isn’t really much to do here.  And you don’t have to go very far to do it.  In fact, you can’t go very far.  It’s a small island in the middle of the mighty Mekong.  Cycling the whole way around takes less than an hour.

My first day on the island, I didn’t bother doing anything.  I checked into a bungalow by the shore, had a late lunch and then lazed in my hammock until the sun went down.  I wandered over to a riverside restaurant for a light bite of supper and a beer lao, before heading to bed for an early night.

My second day wasn’t much more active.  In fact, it was probably even less active.  I woke up late and walked along the one street for a few minutes, before sitting down with two Belgian girls I had met in Pakse as they were just finishing breakfast.  They had energetic plans involving cycling.  I passed and went back to my hammock.  At around 4pm, I wandered downstream a little way to see the Li Phi waterfalls.  The locals think that the spirits of the dead get trapped here as they drift downstream.  I would describe the falls as rapids (very impressive rapids, but still just rapids) rather than waterfalls, and think that any spirits floating downstream would struggle to get stuck here.  But there you go.  Having achieved my one goal for the day, I wandered back to my bungalow, chilled out there for a little while, then headed out for dinner with the Belgians.  It was amusing to find out that the 50p “Small Lao Lao” on the menu actually meant a pint sized bottle of the lethal stuff.  We quickly scaled back our order for a Lao Lao each…

The Belgians had been out to see the (endangered) Irrawaddy dolphins early that morning and after hearing their enthusiasm, I decided to that day 3 would involve a half day of activity.  I woke at 6am, rented a bicycle and headed down to a small bay where some fishermen keep their boats.  One of them ferried me across the river to Cambodia (“no visa, no problem”) and then down to a conservation area where every so often, you would catch sight of a dolphin surfacing for air.  There is a total population of just 68 Irrawaddy dolphins in Cambodia and Laos, so I felt very lucky to see as many as I did.  We spent about an hour in the conservation area, with the fisherman cheerfully pointing out surfacing dolphins that I had missed, before returning to the bay.  I cycled back into town, had a banana pancake for breakfast and crawled back into my hammock.  A few hours later, I got out again, cycled once around the island, booked my ticket to Phnom Penh, had lunch, and climbed back into the swaying hammock… I’ve only just got out again.

It’s going to be tough to tear myself away tomorrow.  Don Khon is blissfully chilled.  I could easily stay here until the money runs out… (Which could take a few years given prices here!)

Tough choices

It has just dawned on me that I only have about five weeks left out here and that that means making some tough choices about what to do.  I know.  I know.  I shouldn’t complain and yes, I too can hear a quartet of the world’s smallest violins playing in the background.  However I do face a bit of a dilemma.

I’m currently in Pakse, with plans to spend the next few days in Si Phan Done - a group of (supposedly) 4,000 islands in the Mekong by the Cambodian border.  After that, I’m heading on into Cambodia.  So far, it is all very easy.  The issue is that I would love to spend the last couple of weeks of my holiday scuba diving in the Andaman Sea and/or relaxing on a tropical beach somewhere.  If I do that, I will have less than three weeks in Cambodia which means making some tough decisions about what to do and, more importantly, what to skip.

On the one hand, I will probably never get another chance to visit the Eastern provinces of Cambodia whereas it wouldn’t be too tough to visit the islands of the Gulf of Thailand for a week or two sometime.  On the other, I really do want to spend some time diving, sunbathing and generally chilling out before I head home.

Oh well.  Lying in a hammock on Don Khon with a bottle of beer lao seems like a good place to mull it all over.

Vientiane and Photos

There is not actually that much to see in Vientiane and after only a couple of days here, I felt that I had seen everything that I needed to.  The guidebook describes pretty much every Wat in the city but, aside from Haw Pha Kaeo and Wat Si Saket, they aren’t really worth visiting.  Whereas there was a certain chilled out vibe to Luang Prabang that I really liked, there just does not seem to be anything special about Vientiane.  There’s nothing wrong with the place but I’ve decided to move on quickly and am getting an overnight bus down to Pakse this evening.

Here are some photos from the past week.

Sunset on the Mekong - Luang Prabang.

Alms giving in Luang Prabang.  Early every morning the monks leave their monasteries and walk in a procession around their neighbourhood collecting alms (mainly cooked sticky rice) from the local inhabitants.  It has become a bit of a tourist attraction, and the morning that I went there were almost as many tourists as monks…

A pile of UXO outside the Tourist Information Office in Phonsavanh.

The Plain of Jars - Site 3.

That Foun - a crumbling stupa in Muang Khoun.  Chinese marauders tunnelled into the stupa over a century ago searching for treasure buried inside.  You can still walk through the middle but it looks like it will fall down very very soon, so you might not want to.

Monks at a museum.  These guys were visiting Haw Pha Kaeo at the same time as me.  Tourists.

Patuxai - the Lao Arc de Triomphe.  It is nicknamed the ‘vertical runway’ as it was built with US-purchased cement that was supposed to have been used for the construction of a new airport.  It looks ok (ish) from a distance, but up close (and particularly from the inside) it looks more and more like a multi-storey car park.  A description of the monument on a sign affixed to the Southwest corner includes the following classic line: “From a closer distance, it appears even less impressive, like a monster of concrete.”

Sunset on the Mekong - Vientiane.

The Buddha Park (Xieng Khuan).  This shot was taken from the top of a what looked like a three storey concrete pumpkin.  The Buddha Park is a very weird collection of mid- 20th century concrete sculptures representing Hindu deities and scenes from Buddhist stories, in a field on the outskirts of Vientiane.  It is all very odd.  Especially the concrete pumpkin.

Another bus ride

Today I took the bus from Phonsavanh to Ventiane, the capital of Laos.  The timetable showed buses at 6.45am and 7.45am.  The hotel staff told me 7am and 8am.  I arrived at the bus station at 7.30am to be told that the bus was at 9am.  I would have to wait outside in the freezing cold.  It was a ‘regular’ bus -the lowest class- a rickety old thing with bits visibly falling off.  No scooters on the roof at least, but the luggage hold was stuffed full of 40kg bags of rice and a green plastic bag full of live ducks.

The first half of the journey was pretty uneventful.  Aside from a brief stop at a roadside stall where the driver and three passengers bought firewood, we mainly just ploughed on down the winding mountain road.  Like all of Laos’ intercity roads, road number 7 was a simple two lane affair, sometimes dropping down to one and a half lanes and occasionally falling into a category that Choy, the Laos guide  on the cycling tour, described as ‘broken’:  the usual (lightly potholed) tarmac being replaced by a rutted stretch of dirt track.

The bus pulled to a halt in Phu Khoun, the town where my previous bus had stopped for lunch.  As before, no announcement or explanation, but I knew the drill now (or so I thought) and was about to follow a few of the other passengers off for noodle soup when the driver got back on board (with a bag of herbs and potatoes from a roadside stall), honked his horn a couple of times and started to drive off.  One of the passengers that disembarked in Phu Khoun hitched a lift and caught us up further down the road.  I’ll never know whether the others had intended to end their journey there or not. 

We did stop for lunch a couple of hours later.  Another bus was already at the rest stop.  It was a VIP bus.  All of its passengers were Westerners.  I hadn’t seen another Westerner all day.  It was strange to suddenly be surrounded by tourists.

After lunch the bus drove on into Vang Vien province.  I’m running out of time on my Laos visa, and decided to skip Vang Vien and to keep on heading South.  Vang Vien is known to be backpackers’ party central with bar upon bar selling cheap beer, showing old episodes (is there any other kind?) of Friends and serving Western food with ‘Happy’ additives.  Vang Vien is also supposed to be beautiful and a great place for kayaking, tubing, cycling and rock climbing.  From the bus, I got some great views of huge limestone karsts soaring up from the riverside, but I’ve seen a lot of beautiful countryside in the past few weeks and am becoming a little jaded.  “Oh look, another spectacular jungle valley.”  Around 85% of Laos is mountainous terrain and most of the country is forested.  The whole place is stunning, and you get used to it.  (Interestingly, Laos’ forests are mainly deciduous, but instead of shedding their leaves during the winter, many of the trees shed them over the dry season in order to conserve water.)

Midway through Vang Vien province, the bus pulled to a halt.  We had a flat tire.  The driver and two other bus company employees spent ages trying to change it.  A lot of their time was spent hitting the tire with a metal pole.  I couldn’t figure out quite what they were hoping to achieve by that.  They were eventually successful and we go on our way. 

I very quickly noticed that the bus was travelling faster.  The driver swerved around the road at full pelt dodging potholes (unsuccessfully) and other road users (successfully), his fingers constantly on the horn to warn people that he was coming through.  He was clearly trying to make up for lost time.  I could no longer read as the hurtling bus’ non existent suspension bounced us around.  I felt sorry for the ducks still holed up in the luggage hold.

At first, I found it all quite amusing.  I assumed that this was fairly normal, that there was nothing to be afraid of and that there was nothing I could really do but laugh and turn the volume on my iPod up.  So that’s what I did.  Then I noticed the other passengers’ faces.  Apart from two Lao girls in their early twenties who somehow managed to sleep through it all, all of the locals were sitting bolt upright in their chairs, looking very very tense.  Particularly after the sun set and our frantic journey continued in the pitch black.  The anxious looks soon turned into looks of horror when repeated bounces off potholes knocked loose one of the panels forming the aisle’s floor by where I was sat.  For the rest of the journey, I kept one foot on the loose panel trying to stop it from jumping out of place again and I too started to look a little tense.

But we got to Ventiane eventually.  Feeling relieved to be off the bus, I grabbed a tuk tuk from the out of town bus station.  The driver took a turning that, from my brief look at the map, I hadn’t expected and I began to worry that we were heading out of town.  Then he turned down an unlit dirt alleyway and I began to really worry.  After surviving the bus journey was I about to be mugged or killed?  No.  The tuk tuk driver was just heading home to pick up his wife and kids.  Can you imagine a London cabbie doing that?

Phonsavanh :: Jars and UXO

I took the bus to Phonsavanh yesterday. My guidebook promised a ten hour journey, but we made it in eight. Laos’ buses are pretty comedy. You have the choice between ‘ordinary’, ‘express’ and ‘VIP’. I say the choice, but I wasn’t given one: Luang Prabang to Phonsavanh was an express only route. Which was ok. I guess. The comedy started before we left when the driver scrambled up on the roof of the bus in order to hoist up two passengers’ mopeds. Seriously. They stuck them on the roof for the journey. It continued with the bus’ stereo being used to play loud Laotian pop music (for the full eight hour journey) with the TV screen showing the karaoke videos. Luckily no-one sang along. I’ve got another long bus journey tomorrow and will be praying no-one decides the bus is actually a karaoke joint…

The driver made pit stops (a) to buy several large pumpkins, (b) to hand a mysterious package to someone on the roadside in exchange for a large wadge of cash, (c) for various passengers to take loo breaks by the roadside whilst the driver repeatedly hit the engine with a wrench, (d) for lunch -no announcement or explanation, but everyone got off for noodle soup and I followed- and (e) for a further attack on the engine. But eventually we got there. Or here rather. I’m still here.

Today, I went on a tour of various local sights. I had a mini-bus, a driver and an English speaking guide to myself. Money goes a long way in this country. The main sights around here are the various Plain of Jars sites. It is very strange to see all these huge granite or sandstone jars, some weighing several tonnes, just lying around on the ground.

Local legend has it that the jars were giants’ drinking cups for an epic binge on lao lao (the local rice whiskey), and we also visited a hut where the whiskey was being distilled. I now know the recipe if anyone wants to try it at home. Personally, I recommend sticking to quality spirits. Lao lao is lethal. Western anthropologists and archaeologists seem to think that it is more likely that the jars were used in burial ceremonies. Either to store corpses before a subsequent cremation, or possibly as a kind of coffin.

I visited Plain of Jars sites 1, 2, 3 and 4. There are about 58 sites in total, but only 7 have been opened to the public. The others are still too dangerous with large amounts of unexploded ordinance (UXO) known to be in the area. Walking around the various Plain of Jars sites, and driving between them, I saw countless bomb craters. The countryside was covered in pock marks.

The Xhieng Khuang province was very heavily bombed during the so-called ‘secret war’ (when America bombed Laos and Cambodia to pieces without informing its own population between 1964-73). Laos is (per capita) the most heavily bombed country in the world. The Americans have records of dropping over 1.3 million metric tonnes of explosives on the country, including very large numbers of cluster munitions. Large amounts of these explosives are still around today.

My guide seemed to have mixed feelings about the bombs.  Obviously it was quite terrible, but at the same time he pointed out that selling war junk as scrap metal had made a lot of people in the area rich (by Laos’ standards).  He also took great pleasure in pointing out houses held up on stilts made from cluster bomb casings, and bomb shells being used as plant pots.  Of course, gathering live UXO to sell for scrap metal isn’t a particularly safe job…  There are still dozens of casualties every year, mainly young children.

One of the most interesting things that I have done today was to visit the local headquarters of the Mines Advisory Group who are working to remove mines and UXO around the world.  I watched a video of their work training local Lao staff in UXO removal, and read about their efforts to help communities. MAG has been instrumental in removing UXO from the Plain of Jars sites (over 170 UXOs were removed from Site 1 alone) in order to allow the development of tourism (and thereby allow the development of an economy that had been devastated during the secret war). Even now though, when you walk around the sites, you are asked to stick to designated paths that are known to be safe. It is strange to think that there are still bombs scattered so close to one of the world’s most important archaeological sites. It was also strange to see MAG teams working in fields by the side of the road as I passed…

Having seen the work that they do, I really encourage you to make a donation to this charity.  It’s easy, you can do it online: http://www.justgiving.com/mag

On an unrelated note, Xhieng Khuang province is on a plateau 1,200m high and, by local standards, is very cold.  I spent most of today in shorts and a t-shirt, the weather approximating that of a warm summer’s day in London.  I felt like laughing at the locals wrapped up in winter coats and wearing gloves.  They wouldn’t last five minutes in a real winter.  Then the sun went down.  It’s freezing out here. I didn’t really pack for this…

Photos

Photos have been requested.  Here are some of the (raw) highlights from the 1,000+ that I have taken over the past month.

The famous Buddha-head-in-a-tree at Wat Mahathat, Ayutthaya.

Sunset over Old Sukhothai.

Laos valley view (on the road from Udom Xai to Nong Khiaw).

Night fishing (deserves a quiet night), Nong Khiaw.

Khamu kids in a village near Nong Khiaw.

Sunset over Nong Khiaw.

Spot the snake (photo taken from Alan and Martine’s balcony, Nong Khiaw Riverside Resort).

Divers at the Kuang Si falls.

Sa Bai Dee

Leaving Chiang Khong the next day, we took a small boat across the Mekong and into Laos at Huay Xai.  After passing through immigration, and laughing at the two young children who were helping out in the very bureaucratic office passing passports and visa application forms around, we transferred to a bigger boat and headed slowly downstream to Pak Beng.  The scenery was spectacular, but after a while, most of us settled down to read or to doze our way through the eight hour journey.  Others, especially Aum (our former Thai guide who was joining us in Laos as a tourist) hit the local beer, Beer Lao.

Our cycling in Laos started from Pak Beng the next day with a mamouth 145km / 90 mile ride to Udom Xai.  Laos is a mountainous country, but the route was relatively flat, especially in the morning when the gently undulating road passed through corn fields and rice paddies.  The journey was on a good tarmac road and, knowing that there was a long way to go, we maintained a pretty high speed.  Our Laotian tour guide, Choy, was a less accomplished cyclist than either Aum or Ant and struggled to keep up with the fastest amongst us and once we realised that there wouldn’t be a single turn until the very end of the day, about half of us overtook him and cycled off into the distance.

After lunch the route was more hilly, and Choy soon joined Diana, Eileen and a few of the others in the support van.  The largest hill came right at the end of the day.  It was a tough climb and I hit the (figurative) wall about midway up.  I have been through the wall before, during the Berlin marathon, and started to talk myself through it.  Help came from an unusual source: I heard a scooter spluttering behind me and, thinking that it was struggling to overtake me on the steep hill, I decide to race it to the top of the hill.  The burst of speed made me completely forget how drained I had felt only seconds before.  As I pedaled faster and faster, the driver laughed and pulled up along side me.  His bike hadn’t been struggling at all, he had just been trying to draw level for a chat.  In broken English, he asked how many of us there were, where we were going and where we had come from. He was pretty shocked that we had cycled from as far away as Pak Beng.  After a few brief exchanges, he pulled away, disappearing over the crest of the hill, where he was soon followed by Carl and Emily who overtook me at full speed.

I had been told about the Lao peoples’ friendliness before I left England, but wasn’t really prepared for it.  Every time we rode through a village, we would be greeted by cries of ”Sa bai dee”.  It means “Hello”, or so we’re told (see below).  Young children would run up to the side of the road, waving wildly and shouting “Sa bai dee!  Sa bai dee!” or, slightly confusedly “Good bye!  Good bye!”.  In some villages, the children would spill out onto the road, holding their hands out to high five us as we went passed.  The friendliness was infectious and very soon we were all waving back, our own cries of “Sa bai dee!” being greeted with peals of laughter and yet more shouts of “Sa bai dee!”

Living in London, I am really not used to such friendliness and the cynic in me didn’t trust it.  Given the laughter that greeted our responses, I kept wondering whether “sa bai dee!” meant something rude when subtly mis-pronounced or whether there was some kind of national competition with a points system based on foreigners’ response: one for a wave, two for a “sa bai dee!” and five for a high five perhaps. 

The happiness was infectious and I really enjoyed every moment of cycling in Laos.  I had had a great time in Thailand, but Laos was really special.

Luang Prabang

This morning I sat on a leather armchair in a coffee shop called Joma in central Luang Prabang.  The cafe’s furniture was contemporary, the walls were plain grey concrete and hung with paintings by local artists, and the staff were attentive and efficient.  I had a cream cheese bagel and a cup of coffee for breakfast, and read a couple of chapters of the Blind Assassin on my e-reader.  I was surrounded by Westerners sipping on lattes and cappucinos, many of them typing away on laptops logged into the free Wifi.  It could have been New York or London.

It all felt very different from the past week or so of cycling.  Aside from the others on the tour, I have hardly seen a Westerner and there has been no prospect of eating Western food.  Arriving in Luang Prabang two days ago was a bit of a shock to the system.  There were tourists everywhere and for our final meal of the tour we were taken to a fancy French restaurant.  (Three of us rebelled and ate upmarket Lao food instead.)

Despite the initial shock, I love Luang Prabang and plan to stay on for a good few days.  There’s plenty to see but it is also a great place to just kick back and relax.  I’ll probably cycle out to some nearby waterfalls one day.  I may go for a ride on an elephant.  I’ll definitely have a massage or two.

I’ll also find time to fill you in on the past week or so of cycling.  It’s been really good fun, an amazing way to see Laos and I’ve got a few stories to tell.