Hello, sorry for the radio silence, we’ve been running around like headless chickens recently, mainly on horrible buses, for which I blame the French, who couldn’t be bothered to build any railway lines here.
We had the journey from hell back from Northern Laos. Even though we took the VIP bus from Sam Neua to Vientiane (apparently to be a VIP in Laos you only need to throw up a great deal on public transport or be a screaming three year old) it took 23 hours, one break down, sixteen bags of sick, 8405 mosquito bites and a ruptured coccyx to travel 600km to the capital.

Our Laos visas were fast expiring at this point so we whizzed through Southern Laos, starting with a brief and lovely stop at Champasak, a gorgeous, quiet town next the to World Heritage listed What Phou, a 12th Century Khmer temple complex which is like a little tiny version of Angkor Wat. The ruins themselves are very, very ruined but the Khmers picked a beautiful site on the hillside looking over the river and the atmosphere in the early morning was sublime. An ancient road links Wat Phou with Angkor Wat, and, although you obviously can’t follow anymore, I started to get a proper idea of the scale of the Khmer Empire, which in the 13th Century pretty much conquered mainland South East Asia, and had a capital of one million when London was a little sprat of fifty thousand people.

From Champasak we sailed down the Mekong to Si Phan Don, an odd collection of tiny, tree covered islands in the middle of the river that straddle the Laos and Cambodia borders, two of which are just big enough to hold guest houses and restaurants. These two, Don Det and Don Khone, are linked by the only railway bridge the French ever got round to building in Laos, (thanks for coming, Jean-Pierre) and the fact that they are tiny, sleepy and don’t have reliable electricity means that there is little to do but get stoned.

We didn’t, but nonetheless there was some high drama the night before we left when we stumbled into a very loud makeshift kareoke wedding reception made up of about twenty family members, two confused Austrian guys who were staying at the next door guesthouse and another Austrian who’d been living there (fugitive?) for ten months. Everybody except the Austrian fugitive was falling down drunk and before long James was being hand-fed rice whiskey while I danced with the seventeen year old bride and her inebriated mother; everything was very jolly until the Austrian’s pet monkey made an appearance.

The monkey, named simply ‘monkey’, had been acquired as security for the Austrian because, according to him, locals are scared of monkeys as they never see them (where this one came from I don’t know) – she was little and innocent looking with big brown eyes, but she had a dark side. Ever seen a monkey neck beer? This one would drink it out of a pint glass, or off the table if you let her, providing she wasn’t stuffing fried chicken into her cheeks or flirting with the various males in attendance. Honestly, it was like watching a Manchester university netball player let loose at the rugby boys’ annual dinner. For this reason I was a bit suspicious of her, but the Austrian fugitive brought her over to play with us and she did look really cute, tipsily snuggled into the crook of James’ arm, so I asked for a little cuddle. The minute she was tipped onto my knee she went mental, scratching at my arms in an attempt to get at my eyes and screeching like a gremlin after a bath. Moral: never trust anything, even a primate, that displays netball player tendencies.