We’ve just come back from a day-long cooking course which was definitely a trip highlight, although I’m almost hallucinating through excessive chilli and garlic intake and I weigh about three stones more than I did this morning.

Ingredients-wise, Lao food is rather exotic, especially when it comes to proteins: parts of the country are so poor that anything on two, four or eight legs (or wings, or no legs at all) is added to dishes as a protein supplement. Walking round the early morning market yesterday we saw deep fried rats and bats, live lizards and frogs ready to be bought and cooked, blocks of congealed sheep’s blood for flavoring soup, buffalo skin, whole pig heads and huge vats of pa dek – an extremely pungent fish sauce made by rotting down small fish in a barrel with salt and water for about a month. According to our teacher Lei, you are truly Lao if you can dip a green bean into a bowl of pa dek and enjoy the taste…I’m not quite there yet but it tastes fine mixed in other foods.

The cooking lesson focused on slightly less exotic ingredients – pork and chicken mainly – with lots of chilli, garlic, coriander, fresh Asian vegetables and sweet and salty sauces. During the course of the day we went shopping at the local produce market, learnt about Lao culinary traditions and cooked five local specialties that we then got to devour.

All the dishes we made were local to Luang Prabang which is, by a mile, the prettiest and most laid back city (it’s technically a city but it looks and feels like a sedate little town thanks to the minimal traffic) we’ve visited, nestling on a peninsular between the converging point of the Nam Khan and Mekong rivers. It was the home of the Laos royal family until 1976, when they were ousted and sent to live in a cave by the triumphant communists, and it is also an important spiritual site, with 36 Buddhist temples and hundreds of monks who, unlike the royal family, made a come back after the initial communist clamp down on religion in the seventies.

Two days ago we got up at 5am to watch the tradition of tak bat: every morning monks from each temple walk through the streets to receive alms, in the form of rice, biscuits, fruit, vegetables and more rice, from the residents of the city – hundreds of local people, many of them not very well off, get up every morning to donate. It was a lovely bit of human generosity to witness, but it did convince me that I’m not cut out to be a monk – all the good stuff from my pot would have been covertly scoffed by the time I got back to the temple.

We also visited the former royal palace which is now a museum – the most entertaining room was the one containing diplomatic gifts from other countries – talk about reconfirming national stereotypes: the Chinese gift cabinet was full of carved ivory, delicate porcelain bowls and tiger’s teeth. The US had sent a piece of moon rock, a model space rocket and some expensive looking gilt-edged stationary (for the king to write his thank you letter perhaps). The Thai stuff was all gorgeous Siamese silverware and delicate china bowls. The Russians had sent a massive bronze hammer and sickle sculpture and assorted other expensive communist trinkets. And the Australians had sent a boomerang.

We’ve been in Luang Prabang for five days and we could easily stay longer, but we’re heading northeast tomorrow, to the remote regions near the Vietnam border that were most heavily affected by the US’s secret bombing campaigns in the mid-sixties (secret bombing must be a contender for the world’s biggest oxy-moron. Have you ever seen a secret bomb? Not so secret if it lands on your house). Then we’ll gradually head back down south before we decide whether Cambodia or Vietnam is next on the agenda.

In other news, Charlie has returned to Vang Vieng to witness a slightly different kind of cultural milestone (Champions League final) so we are back to a pair.