We’ve just spent a couple of nights in Siem Reap – a bustling colonial town in north west Cambodia.  It’s a charming, welcome change from the chaos of Phnom Penh.  It’s still rather hot here but do not fret dear reader, the 30 pence pints of Angkor Beer are proving just the tonic.  However, as Jeannie keeps reminding me we’re not in Siem Reap for the cheap beer and scrumptious food (nor the ‘happy’ massages).  We’re here to visit the temples of Angkor – a spectacular legacy of the once formidable Khmer empire.

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Phew – it’s a whole lot more energetic and frenetic here; from the inexhaustible attempts of restaurants owners, tuk tuk drivers and tour guides to extract our cash (through fair means and foul) to the bonkers traffic that we for some reason decided to cycle through on our first day, we’ve had a bit of a culture shock since we finally tore ourselves away from Laos last week.

The morning after my monkey attack I wasn’t experiencing any rabies symptoms so we embarked on another truly shit thirteen hour journey from the Laos border to Phnom Penh, arriving at about midnight in a stinking mood – getting into unfamiliar cities late at night is always quite unpleasant and Phnom Penh’s cheap guesthouse area is not at its best in the dark – but within ten minutes of getting off the bus we’d been offered opium, hash, coke and speed so we soon perked up again. Actually we didn’t purchase any, we just had a good night’s sleep and woke up to a less scary looking city.

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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. Read the rest of this entry »

North eastern Laos is rugged, mountainous, remote and a bit tricky to navigate – until a few years ago, parts of it had no proper road links with the rest of the country and a couple of provinces were still not entirely safe due to anti-governement insurgency by Hmong guerillas. Also, it’s littered with unexploded bombs, so in recent years it hasn’t really attracted the visitors in droves. The roads are there now though, just about, and the guerillas are gone, and the bombs aren’t under any footpaths, so we’ve been able to spend the past week or so in this gorgeous, peaceful area – an absolute bugger to get to but well worth the effort.

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We’ve just finished a 23 hour bus ride from hell.  I tried to distract myself from deadly boredom by calculating some trip facts, and here they are:

• We’re on day 114
• We’ve visited 6 countries so far
• We’ve covered 5,865 miles by air
• We’ve covered 8,514 miles by bus, train and boat
• We’ve covered 456 miles by foot (thanks Voda friends for the Teva’s, they’re going strong)
• We’ve eaten 4,323 miles of noodles

Ok, one of those stats is fictitious, but the other 5 are correct.  We’ve now travelled a total of 14,835 miles.

Our next stop in Laos is Nong Khiaw, a small rural town set on the banks of the Nam Ou river, nestled amongst jungle covered limestone mountains. Our bamboo bungalow faces west offering amazing views of Nong Khiaw’s spectacular sunsets. It’s the end of the dry season here so it’s hot and the river is still low, but now it’s starting to rain some days. We covered the town on foot before hiring a guide for a few days to explore the countryside further.

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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.

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Another day, another bad-tempered border guard, another medical disclaimer signed to assure the authorities we don’t have swine flu. I’m so bored of this global health paranoia that I thought about following James’ advice and writing ‘Mexican pig farmer’ under the occupation section of my Laos visa form, just for shits and giggles. But I came to my senses and wrote ‘unemployed pork lover’ instead, so we had a smooth crossing from Thailand to Laos, arriving by truck in Vientiane for our first peek at the Mekong River.

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For most people of our generation, Thailand’s Koh Phangan is known for it’s full moon party – where 10,000 revelers descend on the silky silver beaches for an evening of hedonistic escapism.  Now, my dear readers, I’m sure you know that Jeannie and I are not ones to break tradition, and given that we happened to be passing through peninsular Thailand during a full moon we thought it rude not to pop over to the aforementioned island and teach these kids a thing or two about how to p-a-r-t-y.  Oh yes, we’d packed our gladrags and couldn’t wait to give them a jolly good airing.

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James dragged himself away from the technological delights of Singapore last Sunday and we took a short 6 hour bus ride back to Kuala Lumpur – what a great city. It’s bigger and grubbier than Singapore, efficient but not in a scary way, scattered with mosques, towering high-rises, temples, food halls, shrines, markets and museums, with a bit of rain forest stuck right in the middle like a really big lung for the city’s large, multi-cultural population.

We spent four days wandering around and stuffing ourselves with Chinese filth, the highlights being (apart from the food) the National Museum of Islamic Art, the city butterfly sanctuary and a surreal visit to the KL telecoms tower. The museum was showing an excellent photography exhibition – images of Islamic integration in Britain (there was one of an elderly Muslim man tending his London allotment, which is practically on a tube line, who was the first volunteer rescuer to rush down the tunnel and help victims of 7/7) – and a whole load of exhibits demystifying Islamic practises and laws. We should have a museum like that in the UK and everybody should be forced to visit at an impressionable age.

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