I am proud of my parents.

I can't believe it's time to leave Laos! :o( It turned out to be the prettiest and friendliest place by far. I would definitely go back there for a holiday. The people were great - so happy and always smiling. Even the language was fun, it's really springy and easy to learn. Well, clop struggled a bit with the numbers which was a shocker, but I thought it was a doddle. Vietnam next. Neither of us are wanting to leave Laos really, we've both fallen in love with the place which means unfortunately that it's putting a bit of a downer on Vietnam.

Only three weeks to go until I head home. It's gone so quickly. It's going to be a bit of a rush through Vietnam and Cambodia, so a lot of travelling days ahead. Let's hope our travelling isn't as disastrous as Adrian and Cally's.

Yesterday morning an intense stinging pain woke me up at 4:40am. It felt like somebody was sticking a hot pin into the top of my shoulder. I frantically flapped myself with my sleeping bag liner and leapt out of bed. My shoulder was still stinging but there was no mark to be seen in the bathroom mirror. I turned on the bedroom light and woke clip up, worried that whatever had bitten me was still in the bed. We were gingerly moving the sheets and pillows about, not really knowing what we were looking for, when a chunky, three and a half inch centipede ran across the mattress and disappeared behind the headboard. It took us twenty minutes of dithering with a torch, a big cup and a tupperware box to catch it, after which neither of us felt like trying to get back to sleep. The bite area went red and bruised, and the stinging pain got progressively worse throughout the day, peaking around 7pm. Today it is weeping fluid from the two fang puncture holes and the surrounding skin is starting to blister and slough. For the love of God, what wirrig are we going to get next?

Further post by clip below...

Well, it's taken almost a year but at last her patience has been rewarded - clip has finally managed to get her hands on some fresh dong.

Ha, ha, ha. More rubbish jokes about Vietnam's currency later.

Before leaving Vang Vieng we made the mistake of walking around the local open-air market. This is what we saw: a bucket of live frogs with their legs tied together, dozens of live bats with their legs tied together, bowls of live fish bubbling in an inch of water, neat rows of pared skinned barbecued rats with the tails still on and various other feathered and furry, live and dead, raw and crozzled morsels, some of which we couldn't even identify. Like clip said, "Lao people don't eat Milky Ways between meals, they eat rodents."

After one more lovely day of river-tubing on the Nam Xong we took a posh minibus south to the Lao capital of Vientiane. Heh heh, well Vientiane does not look like a capital city - it is about the same size as Horsforth! How cute. We spent most of our only day there arranging bus tickets to Hue in Vietnam.

We were both very sad to be leaving Laos and both very worried that Vietnam might turn out to be another Lieland. Laos had been a refreshing change compared to the rest of Southeast Asia; an utterly gorgeous landscape with a primitive infrastructure and the people friendly, genuine and honest without exception. I would highly recommend northern Laos as a holiday destination.

Our first impressions of Vietnam were not encouraging. We had chosen to take a direct, long-distance (23 hours) bus from Vientiane to Hue, a service provided by a Vietnamese bus company. When we purchased our tickets we were shown a photograph of the bus we would be travelling on - a nice-looking VIP model with reclining seats, air-conditioning and a television.

A courtesy sawngthaew delivered us to the "bus depot" at 6:15pm, where it quickly became apparent that we, along with another English couple and three travelling Malaysians, had all been duped. The bus depot was a dark yard with one bus in it. The bus was an utter wreck. Plastic and metal, loosely-mounted seats positioned so close together that even my stumpy legs would not fit between them. The only seats that reclined were directly in front of us; one permanently in recline and the other sometimes in recline and sometimes not, depending on how jerky the road was. No air-conditioning and, of course, no television.

The Vietnamese driver shouted, "Hanoi! Hanoi!" and lobbed our bags in the back. Hanoi is in the opposite direction to Hue which was a bit worrying but nobody could speak any English to let us know what was happening. clip started crying. With some difficulty we gathered that the bus would take everyone as far as Vinh, where the Hanoi-bound passengers would change buses and our bus would continue to Hue.

At 6:40pm the bus filled up with chain-smoking Vietnamese people and we set off. The bus lurched and crashed and rattled loudly all the time. The driver was obviously in a hurry. For the most part he drove down the middle of the road with the airhorn on. All oncoming vehicles had to frantically flash their headlights to make him move over for them.

At 9:45pm the bus stopped somewhere in the dark. The bus staff spent ten minutes loading sacks into the storage compartments. We set off again at 10pm.

At 10:15pm the bus drove down a dark alley and stopped in a yard. This time the bus staff spent fifty minutes loading sacks into the storage compartments and onto the roof. We set off again at 11:15pm.

At 2am the bus stopped outside a shack in some mountains. The bus driver walked down the aisle and said, "Leave." Everyone got off and went into the building. We were served tea and super-sugary coffee, which we made the mistake of drinking, and were over-charged for. The bus driver pointed to the bus and said, "Sleep." Everyone except the driver, who slept in the house, got back on the bus and tried to sleep, which was impossible because the Vietnamese were chatting and chain-smoking and gobbing out of the windows all night and the door was left open and it was freezing cold and the seats were too small and uncomfortable and there was nowhere to lie down.

At 5:45am everyone got up and got washed and weed outside the bus. A few of the Vietnamese were vomiting without ceremony. We set off again at 6am.

The road winding up to the border crossing turned into a dirt track - the kind of rubbley cloggy muddy thing you might expect to see running through a quarry. We arrived at the Laos checkpoint at 7:15am and had to wait until half past for it to open to have our passports stamped, then we walked through the drizzle to the bureaucratic nightmare of the Vietnam checkpoint.

First we had to fill in arrival cards and health cards. We were charged 4000D (about 16p) for filling in the health cards, though the other English couple didn't fill them in and didn't get charged. The immigration official checked our visas, checked our arrival cards, signed them and stamped our passports. He placed our passports on the desk in front of him, looked coolly through the security window at us and said, "Stamp Fee, one dollar." There is no such thing as a "Stamp Fee" but there was no point in arguing. Basically we had to pay a bribe to get our passports back. Then we had to go back to the bus and bring our rucksacks in for the customs people to inspect. After everything had been x-rayed the customs man signed our cards, then they were signed again by the man operating the x-ray machine, then they were signed again by the customs supervisor. Then we had to take everything to the customs declaration desk where the cards were signed again and stamped again and we were given the top copies to keep. Everything was re-checked by an official at the exit.

Meanwhile the bus was being emptied and searched. A bottle of whisky and two hats were stolen from the overhead racks, presumably by border officials. The bus was reloaded and everyone got back on. An official boarded the bus and inspected everyone's passports. The bus drove across the carpark. Another official boarded the bus and inspected everyone's passports. The bus drove into an inspection bay. The storage compartments and the sacks on the roof were searched again. Another official boarded the bus and inspected everyone's passports. Finally, after an hour and a quarter, we left the checkpoint and started down the long steep road towards Vinh. The narrow road, which was cut into the mountains and had an abyss on one side, was still under construction, so we had to stop every few minutes for the scores of JCB's and bulldozers scooping mud and rubble in the middle of the road to get out of the way and flatten the surface enough for us to drive over it. The bus was boarded and searched several more times.

We arrived in Vinh around noon. The Hanoi-bound passengers got off. We continued south towards Hue, stopping at a transport cafe partway for dinner. We were served boiled spinach, plain rice, an omelette and a dish of raw beansprouts and plant leaves.

My first impression of central Vietnam, other than the ridiculous amount of bureaucracy and mild corruption, is that it is very flat. Route one south was flanked by endless plains of rice fields with herds of water buffalo strolling around in them.

Twenty three hours after leaving Vientiane we arrived in Hue in the pouring rain at 5:30pm, sick with tiredness and suffering from smoke inhalation. After walking around for an hour and getting soaked to the skin we managed to find a nice quiet room for 2.65ukp in a hotel next to a dogmeat restaurant. And we've got satellite television! Yey!

Sadly, it is almost time to leave Laos and go to Vietnam. Now decisions, decisions, decisions - which border crossing shall we use? We have a choice of two well-established checkpoints, one across the mountains to Vinh and another further south to Hue, or one recently-opened, dodgy-sounding crossing further north at Nong Het, east of Phonsavan and the Plain of Jars. This last crossing would be a very handy shortcut for access to Hanoi but the logistics and transportation sounded unreliable and vague. Which should we choose? We cunningly sent ahead two Nong Het route-testing guinea pigs in the form of our trekking friends Adrian and Cally. This is the email they sent us when they arrived in Hanoi...


To clip and clop

Our route:
Laos - Louang Phabang to Phonsavan to Nong Het to Nong Can to
Vietnam - Muang Xen to Vinh to Hanoi.

Do not take the new border crossing, especially if it's only two of you.

We left Phonsavan and headed for the border on the public bus at 7:30am which cost peanuts. They drop you off at Nong Het and from there you take a songthaew for the last 23km. The driver tried to rip us off.

Then we waited at the border for two hours before it opened. They stamped us out and we crossed over to Vietnam. The Vietnam checkpoint wasn't open for business yet so we waited another hour before starting the lengthy immigration process. After a quick geography lesson about the existence and location of Ireland they proceeded to empty our bags, completely, guffawing at Cally's underwear and such.

All this was quite daunting as we were alone, but just as we were about to leave, along came a bus of Swedes and Israelis. We waited around for them so we could all catch a bus together. But there was no bus, only ten motorbikes to take us the 25km to the nearest town. They drove fast and Cally had an accident. The drunk driver in control of the bike didn't see a dog sitting in the middle of the road and they took a tumble. She is ok, a few grazes and a few bruises. She was a bit shocked for a while.

After the hair-raising ride we were again ripped off but in the light of Cally's shock we were unconcerned, paid up and we were delivered to a tailor shop. The tailor shop owner was a frantic lady who insisted on encouraging all the hick locals to surround us and offer us a cheap bus to Vinh, twenty times the price of the local bus. We declined politely and continued on down the road.

We found the public bus and agreed the price of US$5 to Hanoi. They told us the bus would be leaving at 10am and that we were to leave our bags on the bus. At this stage there were only five of us. We did as we were told. Then we went for some food, valuables in hand.

On return, no bus. Two hours later, no bus, no bags and nobody with a clue. Nobody in the town could speak English. One of the Swedish guys lost the plot and started banging on doors, which attracted a crowd. Luckily the crowd consisted mostly of kids, who through gestures told us the bus would be back. Then they hung around for an hour using us as climbing frames.

When the driver eventually showed up the angry Swede forced him to show us our bags. The bags were in the tailor shop with the Israelis who had just come on the scene and through powerful negotiation arranged a fantastic price, US$2 each more than our arranged price.

All aboard and off we go at 11pm, sixteen hours after we set off from Phonsavan. We picked up more passengers and a few tons of rice.

After half an hour the bus stopped. The man in the passenger seat stood up. We all recognised him as the chief immigration officer from the border crossing. The news he delivered was that the price was now double for everybody. Right there in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere they gave us an ultimatum: pay now or go back. After a lot of shouting, and threats, we convinced the driver to turn around, much to his disbelief.

Under these circumstances everybody decided that the bus staff were not to be trusted and we were better off sleeping on the dusty road of the one-horse town. The money wasn't the issue - it was our safety and the integrity, or lack thereof, of the driver and his assistants.

We arrived back at the town and got out of the bus, and with a few unsavoury words hit the road to who knows where. Who knows where arrived in the shape of a thirty-seater bus with recliners in the back! They agreed to take us half the distance (Vinh) for US$5 each. They bauked when they heard that we were promised the complete trip to Hanoi for that price. We all got in, followed by the driver of the first bus who was intent on having a price war with the big bus driver, by which time we were chanting for him to get out. Israelis, Irish and Swedes all shouting... and Cally snapped.

She demanded that the immigration officer leave the bus, who in turn threatened to arrest her but that wouldn't really have gone down well. So we won. They left and our driver went to get petrol. We began our journey at about 1am. Each with a cigarette given to us by the driver, which in Vietnam seals any deal. And off we went. Only to be stopped by the other bus pulling in front of us with its cargo of dickheads and a few scooters to boot. Eventually, after a heated debate featuring our driver and the old driver and the immigration officer, they drove off, but insisted on stopping us threateningly a few more times. Our driver decided to do a lap of the town and picked up a few more locals and a policeman and off we went again. Uninterrupted for five hours of off-roading with Vietnamese ska gracing the airwaves and a bus full of weary smoking and spluttering non-smokers deprived of sleep.

We got to Vinh and caught a bus to Hanoi at 9am. We arrived in Hanoi at around 2pm.

Adrian and Cally




Riiiight... so we've decided not to use the Nong Het crossing after all.

The other day I had my hair cut in a wooden shack. Then we watched "Matrix: Revolutions" on a television set in a bamboo hut bar.

Yesterday we went tubing on the Nam Xong river. A tuk-tuk took us, and two bright pink tractor inner-tubes, 5km upstream of Vang Vieng and dropped us off near the riverbank. We spent the next three hours floating lazily back downstream in the sunshine, avoiding submerged rocks and stopping off occasionally to buy beer at floating wooden platforms. It was the most relaxing thing I have done all year.

Everywhere we go in Laos there are people, some wearing camouflage jackets and some in normal tatty clothes, wandering around the countryside carrying dangerous-looking automatic weapons. It's not clear what they are doing or why they are there. I doubt they're hunting animals because there are even more people carrying hunting rifles. Fortunately, they have all smiled and waved back at us so far.

Recently someone told me that when a person stops wanting material possessions they lose their personality.

Louang Phabang is Laos' second-largest city but that doesn't say much. It is about the size of Market Weighton and sprawls dustily along one side of the Mekong River immediately downstream of the confluence with the Khan. As usual in Laos, most of the population lives in little wooden huts and cooks on open fires. Louang Phabang attracts hundreds of Western tourists - the scenery and ancient temples were spectacular but the town is rapidly losing its Lao identity.

I've noticed that many backpackers spend a lot of time complaining about "tourists" and "touristy places." The way they talk you'd think they were some kind of incredible superior race of travelling beings who consider it beneath themselves to mix with "tourists" or visit tourist hotspots. Oh and of course they went to so-and-so years ago and oh yes wasn't it beautiful but oh no now it's all touristy and spoiled and there are so many tourists and we can't get away from them they're taking over god it's just so touristy. These are the same sort of twerps who think they're cool because they liked a band before anyone else had ever heard of them and now oh they're so mainstream and popular and everyone likes them and I'm so cool because I used to like them before anyone else had ever heard of them and for the sake of the lord why don't you shut your stupid whining gobs.

In actual fact, these backpackers are tourists too, only arrogant.

But what luxuries! Louang Phabang had mains electricity (though prone to three hour black-outs) and, more importantly, a reliable telephone exchange which meant we once again had contact with the outside world.

We visited an impressive waterfall at Kouang Si. We spent a day cycling around the town on rented bicycles. clip was poorly for two days with a bad cold. We looked at the town's ancient temples. We ate a lot of Indian food (Lao food is rather dull).

Filthy snobs that we are, we splashed out 10ukp on minivan tickets south to Vang Vieng. We spent most of the journey staring open-mouthed out of the windows. The scenery in Laos is beyond comprehension. It is by far the most beautiful place I have ever been. clip described it as "absolutely nuts." It is emotionally-moving. In every direction there are severe knobbley 2000m-high craggy limestone mountainous towers with white cliffs and velvet-like tree cover. And behind those mountainous towers, the greyish silhouettes of more knobbley mountainous towers. And behind those, the black silhouettes of more knobbley mountainous towers. And beyond those, yet more of them fading away right out to the horizon. And the sun shines severely through the gaps and lights up the valleys like distant searchlights beaming through mist. And rivers race along the gaps between the hills. And the little roads through the little hut villages wind up and round and over everything. It is amazing.

Vang Vieng is a Lao version of Haad Rin. The whole town is geared towards backpacker hedonism. There are quite a few drugs available. Many restaurants sell "Magic Shakes." On menus - "Add 10000kip to any pizza order if you want to get stoned." Accommodation is very cheap though - our fantastic double en-suite hotel room is 1.76ukp per night!

Yesterday we hired a motorbike and rode it around the hills with no helmets on. Fifty kilometres away from Vang Vieng, in the middle of nowhere, in the scorching heat, we stopped for a rest. And heard a loud hissing noise. And the front tyre deflated. And no traffic came past. And we pushed the bike for a kilometre, wondering what to do. I thought I was dreaming when we came to a tiny ramshackle bamboo hut with a motorcycle workshop inside. An old sweating lady in a sarong who couldn't speak a word of English levered the front tyre off, found the hole in the inner tube, stuck a bit of grass in it, filed it, glued it, clamped a patch on it, lit some kind of pyrotechnic backing strip, removed the clamp, replaced the tyre and re-inflated it, all in about ten minutes. She charged us 10000K (59p) but we were so relieved we paid double! :oP

Why do tourists in Asia insist on buying and wearing complete wardrobes of ill-fitting, half-mast, itchy, threadbare, toggle-necked ethnic clobber which gathers uncomfortably around the crotch, interferes with their normal gait and makes them look like a cross between Worzel Gummidge and Coco The Clown, despite the fact that not a single one of the ethnic people selling the gear ever ever wears any the stuff themselves.

OK, I was wrong. Laos is probably the prettiest place I have ever been to and the people are great.

Hello from clip.

After spending a month somewhere you begin to think of it as home. That is how I felt about Thailand. I know clop wasn't too enamoured with the place, but overall I thought it was rather nice. The people were very smiley, especially the kiddies, and the food was great. The licensed tourist offices were very cheeky, constantly trying to get more money out of us, but compared to them we are extremely wealthy and they just want some of it. In the end I just began to accept their blagging as part of Thailand. So when it came time to move on again I was kind of sad. For some reason Laos really worries me. I can't give you a good reason, it's just a feeling I have. clop is really looking forward to it. Maybe it's because it's going to be real travelling. The guide says getting around takes forever, is uncomfortable and to expect many punctures and breakdowns wherever you go. Hmmm... Oh and they eat dog! In all the guide books they give you useful phrases in the various languages, usually things like Hello, Do you have a room for two people for tonight? etc. For Laos one of the useful phrases is Help I've been raped!??? Great eh!

Further post by clip below.

Greetings from Laos!

First, let's catch up... Back in Lieland we caught a bus along a circuitous route from Chiang Rai to Chiang Khong and walked 3km along the south side of the Mekong River to the border checkpoint, the only Thai/Lao border crossing open to Westerners within a radius of over two hundred miles. There was nobody else crossing the border. Alone, we clambered down the bank and traipsed across the dry mud to a small wooden boat at the water's edge, and were taken across the wide brown river to Houayxai in Laos. Once there we sat at a picnic table and filled in our arrival cards in the sunshine, had our passports stamped by an immigration official, circumvented the fast-boat touts and checked in at a very nice hotel up the road (3ukp).

The Lao currency is the kip. There are 17000 kip to the pound and there are no coins in circulation. We changed just over 20ukp and received a stack of 390 1000K notes, two and a half inches thick. No wonder there are no ATM's in Laos - the money slots would need to be a foot high and in any case the machines would run out of money every ten minutes.

From Houayxai we decided to take a bus north to Louang Namtha. There are no set departure times so we arrived at the bus station at 7:45am to make sure we didn't miss it. In fact the bus wasn't a bus at all, it was a small sawngthaew - a 4WD truck with a couple of short benches facing each other in an open cage on the back. The "bus" wasn't leaving for a while so, after buying our tickets and loading our rucksacks on the roof-rack, we had a look around the morning market nearby. We bought twenty bananas for 30p. We didn't buy any whole shaved gutted roasted guinea pigs. We saw a woman urinating in full view. At 8:30am we crammed onto the "bus" along with six other people, a 36kg gas bottle, a bucket of water, two huge sacks of rice and a sack of bamboo shoots.

Northern Laos is like a gigantic hilly farmyard. It is much less developed than Thailand. The "road" was a very rough and dusty, unsurfaced cart track which wound up and down mountains, through rivers and across partially-collapsed bridges made from tree trunks laid lengthways. Some passengers wore bandanas to avoid breathing the dust; everyone else had to cover their mouths with their hands, screw their eyes up and cringe forwards behind the cab. The track was busy with buffalo, boar, pigs, ducks, cows, turkeys, goats, chickens and dogs. The most popular mode of transport in Laos (other than moped) is a wooden cart pulled by a tiny tractor engine mounted on a wooden chassis. The wilderness scenery was absolutely stunning with blues, greens and browns everywhere. Laos beats New Zealand hands down in the scenery stakes. It's difficult to appreciate that this region produces the vast majority of the world's supply of heroin.

We stopped for one of the passengers to buy a stickful of raw fish from a group of boys carrying homemade wooden harpoons. The bus driver bought a harpoon.

Later we stopped for everyone to have a wee. There are no public toilets in Laos so everyone just ran off into the bushes. Not too far into the bushes though - 25% of Laos villages still have unexploded mines, bombs and mortar shells in them, left over from the Second Indochina War. There are currently two hundred accidents per year.

We passed through numerous ethnic hilltribe villages of rustic bamboo huts lit by candles. More people with more huge sacks of rice climbed onto the bus. Eventually they had to lie on the sacks down the middle. The bus was searched at various police checkpoints; drug smuggling is rife in the area and Lao people need permits to travel.

After eight hours of banging and lurching through potholes, painfully squeezed together on an unpadded bench with our legs trapped under the sacks of rice and the edges of the metal cage bruising our backs, we arrived in Louang Namtha having covered just eighty miles.

And then we got straight onto another bus for the two hour journey across a mountain range to Muang Sing, a small town just eight miles south of the Chinese border which started life as an opium weighing station. Muang Sing is located in the middle of a wide flat valley, 650m above sea level, and is surrounded by mountains containing scores of hilltribe settlements populated by Akha, Tai Leu, Hmong, Tai Dam and Mien people, most of whom moved into Laos from neighbouring countries. Only one company is allowed to organise trekking in the area and they have only been operating since 2002. Just forty people went trekking in this entire region during the last month so we thought it would be the ideal place to do it ourselves. We signed up for a two day trek with Adrian and Cally and our guide, Ay.

Our trek started with a couple of hours easy walking across rice fields on the valley floor followed by dinner in the headman's hut of a low-altitude Akha village, then a four hour climb to another Akha village on the grassy summit of a 1400m-high mountain. Along the way we met a group of traditionally-costumed Akha children carrying baskets of goods back up from Muang Sing market 12km away, and feeling sorry for them we offered to carry their baskets. The baskets had shoulder boards and headstraps - clip looked like a crazy witch in a pillory.

The mountaintop village was straight out of Populous. It contained sixty raised wooden huts with bamboo flooring and thatched roofs, each housing an extended family of around eight. There was no electricity and all water had to be carried up the hill from a stream. Cooking took place over open wood fires inside the huts. Hundreds of cockerels, hens, chicks, pigs, piglets, cows, dogs, puppies and goats wandered loose around the village. Beneath each hut lurked a large wooden pedal-powered rice-pounding machine. There were no toilets - everyone went wherever they liked. Rice and cotton were laid out to dry on big woven bamboo squares.

We entered the village through the spirit gate (the Akha believe that the gate keeps out evil spirits) and were immediately mobbed by tatty Akha children, some hand-spinning cotton onto spindles, many with babies slung across their backs, all screaming "sabai dee!" (Lao for "hello!"). White people are evidently still something of a novelty here and we soon had a large group of people standing around us, staring silently with expressionless faces.

A fourteen-year-old boy called Noi was put in charge of our visit. Whilst we attempted to communicate with the staring Akha throng (they don't speak Lao, never mind English), Noi got a fire going, swept our hut, brought twenty litres of water up from the stream, caught a chicken, killed it, plucked it, then helped Ay butcher it and cook us a fantastic meal of sticky rice, chicken broth and vegetable omelette.

Whilst everything was cooking clip and I decided to go for a "shower". A group of Akha children led us out to the bathing waterhole and watched silently as I stripped to my boxer shorts, stood in ankle-deep mud and attempted to wash myself properly using a scoop made from half a plastic tub lashed to a wooden stick whilst struggling to retain some decency. What fun.

Back in the village a swarthy Akha guy came over and offered us some ya baa - pink pills of methamphetamine manufactured in Burma and smuggled in across the border. We declined his offer.

After we'd eaten our tea, by candlelight, again with an audience, Noi laid out our beds on the bamboo floor of our hut and we all received traditional massages from village girls wearing their Akha costumes. The massages involved a surprising amount of bottom manipulation. Meanwhile the assembled onlookers took the opportunity to investigate our belongings, squeezing suncream on their hands, putting toothpaste in their mouths, playing with our torches and painting each other with insect repellant.

It was difficult to sleep in the cold hut with pigs grunting and chickens clucking directly beneath our heads. The raucous cockerel cacophony began at 4:30am. At 5am Noi stomped in, lit our fire and kicked Ay to wake him up. At 5:30am the rhythmic thumping of the rice-pounding machines started up. By 6am most of the villagers had left for the market, the fields or to go hunting.

During breakfast a major argument broke out in a neighbouring hut. A man had done something terribly wrong (we never discovered what it was) and was being thrown out of his home. There was an awful lot of shouting. Suddenly an older bloke ran out brandishing an extremely large knife and chased the man away.

After a furtive wash in some bushes we set off down and around the mountain to the next Akha village. Ay had not guided this trek before so we had to hire some machete-wielding children to cut back the undergrowth and show us the way. We ate our dinner in an Akha hut then continued to a Hmong village before returning to Muang Sing.

The trekking experience affected us a great deal. The hilltribe people lead a simple life but it is a life of pure survival. It was very humbling to see young children coping effortlessly with huge responsibilities as part of their everyday life.

From Muang Sing we caught a sawngthaew to Louang Namtha and spent the night there with Adrian and Cally. They had a rat in their room. We were kept awake by the rats nibbling inside our bamboo walls.

In the morning we caught a bus east to Oudomxai (four hours including searches) and then a sawngthaew to Nong Khiaw (another four hours). The roads were surfaced but rough; progress was slow due to all the sharp bend and steep hills. We stopped at a road-side "butcher shop" stall selling dead parrots and roasted squirrels. The sawngthaew had no headlights so when it got dark one of the passengers had to hold a torch out of the window to light the way.

We spent a couple of relaxing days in Nong Khiaw, a dusty village on the Nam Ou River surrounded by towering misty mountains and massive blue-green limestone escarpments. We visited some caves and wandered about in the sunshine. Lovely. Then we chartered a slow-boat with Adrian and Cally and sailed south down the Nam Ou for five hours to Louang Phabang. The scenery along the way was gobsmackingly beautiful. The steering system on the boat (a wheel with old ropes attached to a flap of metal via bent hooks) fell apart halfway through a set of particularly dangerous rapids and we almost smashed into some rocks. Once in calmer waters we pulled in at a muddy shore where the driver spent quarter of an hour banging nails on rocks to straighten them, hammering the rudder and cobbling together a repair. Later we stopped at the "Buddha Caves" - a couple of subterranean grimey-Buddha-statue graveyards. They were absolutely rubbish.

Laos is much poorer than Thailand but in eight days nobody has lied to us or tried to cheat us. Bus prices are the same for everyone. When we've accidentally overpaid for things the Lao people have just laughed and handed the money back. There is no atmosphere of taking advantage of travellers. The scenery is by far the best I've ever seen. As a former French colony Laos has retained much of the French influence - cars drive on the right, French is taught in schools, Lao people play boules and accordian music is very popular. The lack of mains electricity and not having a telephone system is a bit of a problem but I love Laos so far.

Further post by clip below.

Oh, woe is me. Tomorrow we leave Lieland. I'll share my thoughts on this tragedy later.

In the UK it's generally considered desirable for white people to have a sun tan. A nice healthy glow. Attractive and sexy. Well here in Southeast Asia it's the other way round - it's considered more attractive to be whiter, partly because a darker skin is associated with field labourers who work in the sun all day. The pharmacies are full of skin-whitening ointments and make-up. It's not uncommon to see Asian people with unnaturally white faces, like oriental Pierot dolls. It's an interesting slant.

We took a normal (hot and crowded) bus from Sukhothai north through the mountains to Chiang Mai, Lieland's second-largest city and set in a two-kilometre-square walled moat next to the Ping River. Chiang Mai is Lieland's hilltribe-trekking capital and though we had planned to go trekking there, the high number of trekking tours (100+) operating in the local area put us off. Our plan is now to go trekking in Laos or Vietnam where everything is a bit quieter.

We walked 3km to look at a temple but in the opposite direction. Quite annoying, that.

In the evening we went out for some food. Unattracted by the utterly gross fried Giant Water Bugs we ate raw whole green chillies instead and suffered the most horrific untreatable mouth pain for three-quarters of an hour. We met up with Matt (who had spent the week following the Full Moon Party on an island with bacterial dysentery), got drunk and ended up locked out of our guesthouse at 2am.

And then even further north on a cockroach-infested bus to our current home in Chiang Rai, high up in the mountains near the Laos border on the banks of the Kok River. Funnily enough, there is a Wang Come Hotel here. As towns go, Chiang Rai is excellent. Small enough to walk round easily and lots to see and do. We've been to a temple of concentrically-arranged colourfully-ribboned stone penises and visited the Hilltribe Museum to learn about the local ethnic mountain peoples. At the night bazaar we saw piles of pig intestines coiled on trays of ice.

The lifestyle in Asia highlights certain aspects about the way we live in the UK. In Asia people always seem to be really enjoying their day. Four people on a moped. Musical bells on trishaws. Flowers hanging in cars and buses. Policemen playing with puppies on the floor of a train station. It makes the actual second-to-second life we lead in the UK seem very very dull. We often think that having fun has to involve shopping, going to the cinema, eating out, watching television or getting drunk. It's as if we've developed past fun, to the point where we've introduced so many rules that we've cut ourselves off from the simple enjoyment of living.

My thoughts on Thailand are mixed. It is a relatively poor country and this has badly affected the way Thai people see Westerners - we might as well have signs glued to our foreheads saying "MONEY! KERCHING!!" With very few exceptions the Thai people have been friendly to us only when they've been trying to get money out of us. Being seen solely as a source of income is depressing. Walking along the street means being constantly beeped at, hassled and shouted at by taxi drivers, tuk-tuk drivers and shopkeepers, none of whom beep or shout at any Thai people.

The Thai people call foreigners farang and we are treated differently. Admission prices to national parks, temples and attractions have been up to ten times higher. We have been overcharged on buses and then seen the conductor pocketing the money whilst Thai passengers smirked. We were moved from our seats midway through a journey on a full train by a ticket conductor who made us sit apart in another carriage under the pretext that we were in the "wrong seats", despite the fact that there were no seat numbers allocated, so that two Thai people who had just boarded the train could sit together. Shopkeepers have told us the wrong prices. So-called officials have simply lied to us.

Having said all that, every single Thai person we have smiled at has smiled back at us. Try smiling at strangers on a bus between Gipton and Holbeck! Cynically, maybe they're smiling because they know we're in their country being scammed. Sadly, my overriding impression of Thailand has been of people lying and cheating us. Being relatively poor isn't an excuse for blatant dishonesty.