noodles | travel blog

As I sat down outside Bangkok airport to wait for the next bus into town, an elderly Thai woman looked up from her newspaper and asked me where I was from. I told her. "That's good," she said. She held up the newspaper and pointed at a headline. I was unsure how to respond, as the paper was in Thai. But then, in between the foreign words in the headline, I recognised the current numbers of the dead and injured in the London bombings. "I thought maybe you were from there," the lady said.

We chatted for a while, and it turned out that she had visited Norway once. I asked her what she thought. "So cold!" she said. "My friends told me it would be fine, but when I stepped off the plane I was SO COLD!". She had to go straight to a shop and buy a pair of gloves. "And they were SO EXPENSIVE!"

Cold and expensive. Norway in a nutshell. I asked her what time of year she had been there.

"This time of year," she said, with a sweeping gesture that took in the time of year.

"July?" I said.

"Yes, July."

We sat in silence for a while. I had a mental image of Karl Johan in July: Street artists. Hordes of Norwegian and Europan tourists in summer clothes. Ice-cream. A tiny, elderly Thai lady wearing gloves.

It turned out that my friend had been to Sweden as well. And Finland. I told her I had never been to Finland.

"Oh, it's the same as your country," she said, with a shrug.

I secretly doubted the veracity of this information about Finland.

"But we saw something there," she said, dreamily. "There was snow on the water. And people walked on it. And they made holes in it and caught fish."

"And this was on the same trip?" I said.

"Yes," she said.

"In July."

"Yes, in July."

Those poor Fins. No wonder they don't talk much.

This happened a good while ago, I forgot to post it at the time. Reading it again, it may well be one of those situations where you had to be there.

* * *

I was sitting with a Danish couple in a sleeper cabin on the night train to Hanoi, waiting for the train to leave Lao Cai station, when some very loud and drunk Vietnamese kids entered the train, piled into the cabin next to us and started partying. A few seconds later a flustered French girl turned up at our door and asked if we had a spare bed. She had suddenly found herself sharing her cabin with a drinks party.

As the train hadn't started moving yet, we didn't know whether our fourth bed was taken, but we invited her in anyway.

The four of us sat there chatting while next door havoc was wrought. In addition to the drunken laughing, shouting and slamming of doors, there were some outlandishly high-pitched shrieks from the lads, like when someone turns off the lights at a kiddies' birthday party and then lets loose a bucket of snakes.

And then our door slid open with a bang. In the doorway stood a tall, broad-shouldered Vietnamese-European guy in a dusty motorcycle suit. A horizontal scar ran across his right cheek just below his eye. He was carrying a transparent plastic bag, bursting at the seams from the weight of a dozen cans of Tiger. He didn't look pleased.

He leaned on the door frame, looked at the four of us and said, not without a touch of menace, "Folks, I've been on the road for a week. My bed's in this cabin".

The Danish girl pointed at the French girl and almost stuttered, "She's just here because her bed....." The guy looked at the Danish girl and her voice trailed away. For a few moments there were only the shrieks and thumps through the thin wall.

The guy then turned to the French girl and said, "Vietnamese guys next door?"

She nodded.

"I'll take it."

A few hundred feet off the beach in Salang, at a depth of about 17m, lies the wreck of a fishing vessel. In February 1983, as the boat was on its way back to the mainland, it was caught in a sudden, fierce monsoon storm off the northern tip off Tioman island. The crew fought to keep clear of the coast, but the wind forced it onto the coral reef near the Salang jetty, and its wooden hull was torn wide open. The boat sank in seconds, and only one of the crew survived. He was rescued by locals who had helplessly witnessed the drama from the beach. Swearing never to set foot in a boat again, the fisherman never left Tioman island. Today, 22 years later, he still runs a little stall near the beach where he serves roti chanai and tea to locals and tourists.

Actually, I just made that up. The vessel was sunk a few years ago by local dive instructors who needed a comfortably shallow site for teaching the PADI Wreck Diving Speciality. But how boring is that?

"I wish there was an interesting story about the wreck," said our Malay divemaster for the day, "but there isn't."

"Does it at least have a name?" said one of the other divers, grasping at straws of adventure.

"A name?" said the divemaster.

"Yes, what do you call it?"

"We just call it wreck."

However mundane its origins, there was something magical about seeing a wreck for the first time. You're swimming through semi-darkness with no point of reference apart from the seabed's gentle sloping towards the beach. Then you see darker water ahead, which transforms into a looming shadow, sprouting detail as you approach.

My God, it's HUGE!

No, wait. It's just really close.

The wreck was about 60 foot long, almost completely intact, and rested keel-down on the sand. It was a busy place. A wide variety of fish were nibbling at the growth on the planks, swimming in and out of the windows of the steering house and circling slowly in the tank below the deck (laughing at death). It was brilliant to behold.

After circling the wreck for a while we headed in the direction of the Salang jetty, a few hundred metres away. Our divemaster was picking up sea cucumbers and using them to make obscene gestures, for the benefit of the lads, who swam in front. For a while there wasn't much to see apart from sand and the odd fish, and I soon fell into a daze.

I then noticed a scattering of recently dead fish on the sand, gleaming like coins in a wishing-well. We passed an anchor and a buoy line, whose other end was attached to a fishing vessel high above us. Then I noticed that our divemaster was making the sign for sea turtle. I looked all around, only to realise that the turtle was right in front of me. A couple of metres ahead it was effortlessly hovering just clear of the sand, grazing on the dead fish from the fishing boat. As we all gathered around, the turtle picked up one more fish - for the road - and floated off into the darkness.

As the pillars of the Salang jetty materialised ahead, the strangest sight was still to come. At the end of the jetty lived a house-sized school of yellow-striped fusilier fish. We took turns swimming into the mass of fish, and rather than swim away, the fusiliers would just circle slowly around you, just out of reach, but so close to each other that at times you saw only glimpses of the other divers, and of the sky above.

My first blog in a while! This happened in Rai Lay Beach, Krabi.

Having spent the afternoon rock climbing (my first physical exercise in months), I was extremely tired and had decided on an early night. As I walked back towards my bungalow in the dark, the resort was full of the nocturnal chatter of insects, birds and reptiles, the rustling of wet palm trees and the drips and trickles of recent rain.

Mixed in with the other sounds, I also recognised a strange but familiar one from the last couple of nights. I imagined it to come from two musical instruments, large wooden horns of some sort, in a Buddhist temple which I imagined to be somewhere in the forest behind my resort. Every three to four seconds, one of the horns would play a short, deep tone, and the other one would respond a split second later in almost, but not exactly, the same tone. I assumed that the monks were accompanying some kind of meditation or prayer ritual.

Minutes later, to the monotonous hum of the ceiling fan over my bed, I was pleasantly drifting off to sleep.

And then, all of a sudden, I was not.

I sat up in bed wondering what the hell I had just heard. At first I thought it had been part of a dream, but no, there it was again. And again. And again.

The wooden horn was now being played right outside my door.

At first I was completely mesmerised by the sound. Not only was the sound impossiby loud, the tone also had more texture closer up than it had had when I heard it through the woods. It sounded like something in between a deep stroke on a cello and a calf. No sooner had I decided that both were highly unlikely to occur in these surroundings, than a new, far more unpleasant image formed in my mind; that of a giant mutant toad.

After about five minutes the sound became unbearable. I knew that as long as this was going on, I wasn't going to get any sleep. I turned the light on, snuck over to the door and tore it open. I'm not sure what I expected to happen, but the noise stopped abruptly. I peered out into the darkness, hoping to catch a glimpse of the fleeing abomination. But in the faint light from my room, all I could see were the small fish pond under my window and the large shrub behind it.

Slightly disappointed at not having spotted the reptile, but with deep satisfaction at the promise of sleep, I closed the door, switched off the light, and went back to bed. Of course, moments later, the bastard was at it again. I concluded that he had to be hidden inside the shrub, concealed from my view.

I got up again and found my two trusted travel companions, the yellow foam ear plugs. I popped them in and returned to the bed. Saying that the ear plugs did not have the desired effect would be an understatement. The hum of the ceiling fan, the chatter of insects and frogs and the trickle of water, all but melted away. The toad, however, was now inside my skull.

I extracted the ear plugs and opened the door again. The toad, like before, went quiet. I lingered, hoping that the mutant would loose patience and move on. I imagined he was watching me from inside the shrub. I stood there for quite some time, trying to look menacing, hoping that the toad didn't realise I was only staring at the shrub. As it turned out, he did. To my dismay, the reptile blatantly resumed his serenade straight to my face.

It was the carol singer from hell.

Right, I thought. This means war. I calmly closed the door, sat down on the bed, and made a mental list of potential weapons in my luggage.

WEAPONS IN LUGGAGE

1. Small knife
2. Multipurpose tool
3. Powerful mounted flash
4. Can of insect spray (almost empty)
5. Cigarette lighter
6. Bottle of alcoholic iodine solution
7. Roll of adhesive tape
8. Handful of malaria tablets (damage potential questionable)

My excitement at the variety of my arsenal was short-lived. These were all close-combat weapons and therefore shared two main disadvantages:

In order to get to the shrub (where I was now confident that the animal was hiding) I would have to wade through a slimy, slippery fish pond in complete darkness, with an almost certainly negative outcome. Also, it seemed highly unlikely that the cunning critter would patiently wait for my arrival. He would probably retreat to a less accessible (but equally audible) location, and nothing would have been achieved.

And then a new thought struck down in me. What if this was a mating call? What if the two monks I had heard earlier were in fact a male and a female giant mutant toad, at a later stage of courting? WHICH LASTED FOR DAYS? The idea of a second monster at this very moment hobbling hornily along towards my bungalow, filled me with panic.

That's when I remembered that there were two empty plastic water bottles in the bin. I fished them out, ran to the bathroom, filled the bottles with water, capped them, and weighed one in each hand with a smug grin.

I now had short-range missiles.

But wait a second. What if the toad was a rare protected species? What if Rai Lay Beach was a national sanctuary for giant mutant monk horn toads? The prospect of celebrating my fiftieth birthday with a bunch of European drug smugglers in a Bangkok prison was not appealing. I grudgingly poured most of the water into the sink, leaving only a little splash at the bottom, enough to give the missiles direction, but too little (or so I imagined) to cause serious injury to the reptile.

The operation was a qualified success. The first missile, although I was able to steer it in the right direction, failed to penetrate the shrub. It got stuck in its branches and hung there until morning. The second one, however, disappeared through the leaves with a thump.

Everything was still.

I waited for a few minutes....

Not a sound from the toad.

I closed the door...

All was quiet.

I went back to bed....

Silence.

Just as I felt myself floating off into sleep, I started worrying. What was that thump? Had I maimed the toad? Was he fighting for his life in the shrub? Had I sent an entire species on its merry way to extinction with a plastic bottle? And for what, for a night's sleep? What kind of monster was I?

When the racket resumed after a few minutes, I was almost relieved. I decided to live and let live. I booted up my laptop, plugged in my earphones, and set the media player to Random. Of course, when the music was sufficiently loud to block out the sound of the toad, it was also too loud for me to fall asleep to. But at least I was back in charge, and I hadn’t killed the toad. I lay there for ages, listening to all sorts of music (that’s what random means), occasionally turning down the volume to check if it was still out there. It was.

About two hours after going to bed for the first time that evening, I turned the sound down during Tom Waits' Shiver Me Timbers (thank you, Enda). The toad was still out there, but this time, to my complete surprise, it sang (almost) in key with the music. I couldn’t believe my luck. I set the media player to Repeat and left the volume low, and minutes later, to the sound of Tom Waits and the giant mutant monk horn toad, I fell asleep.

Three months to the day after arriving in Bangkok for the first time, I’m sitting on a bus outside the airport, waiting to go to the Kho San Road, the city’s main backpacker area. A pale, sleepy English guy sits down in a seat and accidentally knocks his bag into a Japanese guy who's chatting to his friend. The following utterly absurd exchange ensues.

"Oh, sorry mate!"

"No problem. Are you from Australia?"

"No, England, mate."

"England. Oooh."

"And you're from Thailand, yeah?"

"Yes, we're going to Kho San Road. Are you going to Kho San Road?"

"Uh, yes. Are there any, like, places to stay there?"

"First Thailand, and then we go to Australia."

"Uh, right." (Pause) "Travelling the world then?"

"Yes. And then Firenze!"

"Valencia! Great football team."

(Silence)

"Any good football teams in Thailand, then?"

(Silence)

(Louder) "Football. Thailand."

"We're from Japan.“

"Oh, sorry, I thought you were from Thailand.”

"Oooh. We've just arrived from Japan."

"I've just arrived alone. I was supposed to go with this girl, we were going out, yeah? But yesterday we broke up."

"Ooooh."

The seven-hour bus trip from Vang Vieng to Phonsavahn was a winding journey through a landscape on fire. The forests, mountains and valleys were draped in smoke, and the sun looked like a shiny coin at the bottom of a murky well. In some places the flames were right next to the road, and as the bus passed you could feel the heat and hear the crackling through the open windows. Specks of ash swirled around the cabin and got in everyone’s eyes.

During the weeks before the rainy season, farmers all over Laos scorch the land to allow new things to grow when the rain comes. Not great for the environment, but then, neither is my lifestyle. And it's their country.

I was the only falang on the bus. I also belonged to a small, exlusive club of passengers who were able to hold on to their breakfasts.

In the mountains, we would sometimes pass an armed soldier walking alone in the roadside. A few years ago this area apparently used to be the scene of frequent robberies. Across the aisle from me there was a guy in an Adidas tracksuit with a big smile on his face and a machine gun on the floor by his feet. I obviously smiled back.

As we slowed down through tiny villages, the local children ambushed the bus with water pistols, spraying us through the open windows. This was a couple of weeks before the New Year's festival, where the whole country engages in a three-day national water-fight. The guy in the Adidas tracksuit just kept smiling.

The next morning I was sitting outside Mr K's guest house waiting for the minibus driver, who would be taking me on my tour of the Plain of Jars. The sky was a mix of clouds and smoke, and there was a pleasant breeze.

As I was the only new tourist that day, there was nobody to share the cost of the tour with. The local government no longer allows tourists to explore the area alone on hired motorbikes or bicycles, for fear of accidents involving the large amounts of unexploded ordnance which has been lying about in the area since the Vietnam War. During those years, American planes secretly dropped more bombs on Laos than anyone has dropped on any country before or since.

I had decided to splash out and go alone in the guest house's 15-seater Toyota HiAce, on a tour that took in all the three sites of jars around Phonsavahn. The jars were, after all, my only reason for being in town.

As I waited, Mrs K came over and asked if I would be needing a guide for the day (a cool 50% on top of the price of the minibus). From what I've read about the jars, the experts hardly know anything about them. They're not sure how or when they were made, by whom, or for what purpose. They don't know much about the jars beyond the fact that they're there.

"Will the guide be able to tell me much?" I said.

"Maybe not," she said and laughed. "You can take my brother with you for free."

Minutes later, Mr K appeared from the garage, dragging behind him a golf bag not much smaller than himself.

"It's going to rain," he said as he looked up at the sky. "Yes, it will definitely rain. At about 10:30".

He heaved the bag into his car and drove off. I wondered if Phonsavahn had an indoor golf course.

Mrs K's brother turned out to be great company. He also turned out not to be Mrs K's brother at all. A year earlier, Mr K had brought some tourists to my friend's village, and during the visit he had offered my friend a job at his guest house. This, as far as I understood, earns him the title "Mrs K's brother" (possibly as a way of bypassing the problem of having an unmarried man in his early twenties permanently around the house).

My friend belonged to the White Hmong ethnic minority. He was a rice farmer before he started working with tourists. He loved rice farming, especially the growing season, as this was a great time to meet girls. Neighbours take turns helping each other out on the land and apparently there are a lot of water-fights. I've later realised that there must be some connection between the rice and the New Year's festival, but it didn't occur to me at the time.

"Do they grow rice in your country?"

"No."

"No. Why not?"

"Well, uh, I think it's too cold."

"Too cold. What do they grow in your country?"

I mentioned a few things, among them were potatoes. He wanted to know everything about the different ways that potatoes were prepared. He knew about chips.

As I told him about mashed potatoes, we drove past a field where some people were building a small house using six man-sized bomb casings as pillars. It’s one of those things you know you’re never going to see again.

At the first and largest site, my friend showed me a jar that was teetering on the edge of a bomb crater. The jar had been split in two by the explosion, with the half nearest the crater still standing, and the other half lying on the ground where it had toppled. It looked like it had happened yesterday. Along the path there were little signs telling you not to step outside the area that had been searched and cleared for unexploded bombs. (The area outside the markers had been "visually" cleared, so it was all pretty safe.)

The second site of jars was on the top of a small hill. On the way through the rice fields my friend showed me a bomb crater that had been filled with water and was being used as a fishing pond.

The Plain of Jars is a large area containing groups of anything from a few dozen to a few hundred jars standing or lying around on a number of sites, several kilometres apart. The jars are carved out of stone, some are waist-high and some are over two metres. Apart from one or two, none of them have any decorations. One of them has a lid. There are inconclusive findings to suggest that they were used as burial urns. I don’t mean to get philosophical, but the best part of the experience for me was just to walk around and wonder about why people end up doing the things they do. The people who made the jars, the people who made the craters, the people who were building a house from bomb casings.

We were the only people at the third site. The sun was shining weakly through the haze. We had lunch in the shade of some ferns, using an overturned jar as a table. I told my friend that Mr K had said it would rain. I asked him what he thought.

"What do you think?" he said. He had a way of repeating the last thing I said, probably one of the reasons his English was so good.

I looked at the sky. "I don't think it will rain".

"I also don't think so," he said, smiling. He didn't have to look at the sky.

As we returned to the guest house, I met Mr K.

"How was the golf?" I said.

"Not so good," he said. "I only won 27 dollars."

I was impressed. This was more or less the same price as I had paid him for the minibus. "You play for money?" I said.

"Of course!” he said, with surprise. “Golf is far too expensive otherwise."

In my guest house in Vientiane (as in most of the guest houses I've stayed in so far) the bathroom was so small that it had become a habit to move the toilet roll to the next room before taking a shower.

I had done this, but just as I turned on the water, I realised that my bar of soap was still in the toilet bag on the bed. I popped outside, quickly shutting the door behind me so as not to get the bedroom wet. It was when I popped back in, soap in hand, that things went wrong. It was all over in a matter of seconds, but I'll slow it down, hopefully for your amusement.

As I entered the room from the south, I seemed to have completely forgotten that the 150cmx150cm glazed-tile bathroom floor and ditto walls were now splashing wet from the running shower. As my feet made contact with the floor, the left foot did what it's supposed to do. The right foot, however, shot across the wet tiles, only stopping when it reached the side of the (luckily Western-style) toilet, which occupied the north-eastern quarter of the room.

This caused the rest of my body to twirl around until I was facing west. I caught a brief glimpse of my own surprised face in the mirror above the sink, before I started falling backwards towards my original destination, the shower, in the south-eastern quarter of the room.

In an effort to regain my balance, I dropped the soap and grabbed the wash basin with both hands. This change of momentum caused my left foot, which until now had been supporting my weight, to slide the short distance to the south-west corner of the room. All my hopes of defeating gravity were now pinned on the wash basin.

As it turned out, the bloody thing was only resting on a couple of metal hooks on the wall, so it came off in my hands. I was now falling backwards carrying a 7kg ceramic sink.

Less than two seconds after entering the bathroom I was sitting next to the soap on the floor under the running shower with the sink in my lap. Long sprays of water shot out from several fresh leaks in the over-stretched tube that still (barely) connected the sink to the water mains, spraying most of the bedroom and its contents through the open door (though miraculously missing the toilet roll).

In the end, I was saved by the fact that it was a tiny bathroom. Before I had gained any serious speed, my back had hit the wall, and I had slid gently down to a seated position under the weight of the sink. This saved me from cracking my head on the floor or on the ceramic sink or on both.

Half an hour later the receptionist and I had replaced the leaking pipe with a new one and reattached the sink to the wall. I then proceeded to take my shower.

* * *

The next morning, as I came downstairs to check out of the guest house, there was a different receptionist.

"Room number?" he said.

"833," I said.

"833," he said, looking at his books. "Aha. Plumber Man."

On my second night in Vientiane I was fortunate to get talking to a local guy. He took me on a massive pub crawl that ended at around 2 am in the only late pub in town, which was apparently only allowed to stay open late because the owner worked for the police. By this time I had consumed a large quantity of Beerlao, and as the place also had open mic night, I ended up performing Langfredag i Aarhus to a crowd of bemused locals.

The next morning my friend took me sightseeing, and in the early afternoon he brought me along to a party for a friend who was "making monk". He explained that it's customary for Buddhist men in Laos to spend a week as a monk as part of their spiritual education. This can take place any time after the age of 20. We were going to the first day of a two-day party that families throw for their monks at the beginning of the week.

The food was on the table when we arrived. There were three guys making monk, all related to each other. Two of them were in their thirties and married with children, and the third one was just over 20. All three were dressed in white shirts and white sarongs, self-conciously stroking their shaved heads and eyebrows as my friend examined the generous rolls of cash gifts that they carried around in their breast pockets. Canadian dollars from an emigrated relative, and Thai bath from everyone else. We added our own gifts in local currency and helped ourselves to the food.

After a delicious meal we got ready to walk down the road to the temple. The three soon-to-be monks lined up, holding candles, flowers and incence in one hand, and a walking cane in the other. Their mothers, who led the procession, held the other end of the canes. Three mates held umbrellas to shield the new monks' shaved scalps from the sun, the rest of the family held on to the monks' or each other's coat tails, and off we went. There were flowers, fans, candles and camcorders, and someone was banging on a large gong.

As we entered the grounds to the temple I was encouraged to go to the front to take photos. As the proccession circled the temple three times, one woman showered the crowd with sweets and another kept shouting, "Oooooooh?", to which everyone replied, "Eeeeeeeeeh!"

The family then disappeared into the temple, and my friend and I sat down outside in the shade and had a Pepsi. A couple of guys were opening soft drink bottles which they kept carrying in to the people inside. My friend told me apologetically that there is no alcohol during these celebrations, but that this is duly compensated for the day after monk week. I wasn't complaining, given my excesses of the previous night.

According to my friend, this particular temple, Wat Sy Muong, is very popular among people from all over Vientiane, who come there to pray for their wishes to come true. Next to us a hawker was selling little wooden cages containing captured sparrows. The idea is that you buy a bird and release it for good luck. I didn't buy one, as I felt pretty lucky as things were.

At 7 am on Sunday morning I was chatting with a Red Dao (pronounced zao) woman outside my guest house in Sapa as I tried to learn how the gears worked on the motorbike I had rented for the day. Having got out of bed slightly earlier than myself, the woman had just arrived on foot from her village 18 kilometres away, to sell souvenirs to the tourists.

The far north is home to a population of about 5 million members of various ethnic minorities, most of them descendants of people who migrated over the mountains from China thousands of years ago (apparently before the arrival of the Viet themselves). I had decided to drive the 3 hours to Hac Ba village to people-watch as the minorities (mainly a group called Flower Hmong) and other locals did their weekend shopping at its Sunday market.

When I told the Red Dao woman I was going to Hac Ba, she asked if she could come with me. I said it probably wasn't a good idea as I wasn't a very experienced driver and didn't know the road. She agreed reluctantly. We wished each other luck and I set off into the fog.

I started my descent from Sapa feeling a childish sense of adventure. There was little traffic, as it was still early on a Sunday morning. Soon the rain started pelting down, but I was wearing a plastic poncho which I'd bought the day before, so I was laughing. It was a bit like a computer game, with a new obstacle revealed around every hairpin bend. Rocks that had loosened in the rain and tumbled onto the road, a crossing herd of water buffalo, and swarms of large moth-like insects hovering eye-high over the tarmac. Bonus points for waving back when kids along the road shouted hello.

An hour after leaving the guest house, I arrived in Lao Cai, 1000m closer to sea level than I was when I started. I pulled up on a pavement to ask directions. Although the poncho had kept the rain out, my gloves and trainers were soaking wet. I was invited into an office where a few electricians sat around a table in orange boiler suits, drinking tea. Once we had established how old everyone was, who was married and who wasn't, I was served lots of strong green tea and given directions to Hac Ba. (A possible future marriage between me and the only female electrician of their number was also hinted at.) Only two hours to go.

Just outside Lao Cai, the road crossed a river and entered a narrow valley. Massive construction work was being carried out on the road, and the whole valley seemed to have been dug out for this purpose. For three or four kilometres I drove through thick red mud in the lashing rain, my trainers caked with dirt. I had a couple of near misses, and as I passed a local sitting on his backside in the mud next to his fallen motorbike, I thought maybe I should give the market a miss. Just as I was looking for a place to stop safely, two big lorries from the construction site came onto the road, one in front of me and one behind. There was no room to overtake, and I didn't dare drive over to the side, where the mud was even deeper. For what seemed like ages, I was blinking the raindrops away, dragging my feet through the mud, focusing all my energy on keeping my balance. The childish sense of adventure was now gone.

After a few more kilometres the valley opened up and the lorries vanished. It was still raining, but the road here was sealed, and driving was a lot easier. I passed through rice paddies and little villages. As I started climbing up to Hac Ba, the rain was joined again by thick fog. The only scenery I was able to make out were the milestones that marked the last 30 kilometres into Hac Ba. Like a lunatic I shouted loud greetings to every single one through the rain. As I reached the high valley that lead to the village, I passed groups of hilltribes people walking along the road on their way to the market. And then about a dozen tourist minibuses from Sapa honked their horns and zipped past me. So much for being original.

Just as I arrived in town, the sun broke through the clouds, as it tends to do when no longer needed. I felt like one of the characters from Dumb & Dumber, riding into Aspen on a moped, with trails of frozen snot running from their nostrils to their ears.

The market was an exciting mix of food, farming implements, livestock, vegetables, tobacco, clothes and the obligatory assortment of tourist trinkets. But most of all, the atmosphere was created by the women from the various hilltribes, especially the Flower Hmong, who were everywhere in their spectacularly coloured clothes. I only stayed a few hours, as I wanted to give myself enough time to get home before dark.

Back on the road, the surface was almost dry and I was able to relax and enjoy glimpses of scenery through the low clouds. When I reached the construction site after about an hour, most of the water had drained away, and controlling the bike was much easier. That is, until I had a flat tire.

I parked the motorbike by the side of the road and walked over to some workers nearby. I explained my predicament, and one of them took me over to a tiny village, which also seemed to be under construction. I later learned that the people living there had been displaced by the expansion of the road, so the government had built them a circle of about twenty small cement houses. In one one of the houses there was both a phone and a mechanic. We called my guest house, my friend there negotiated a price, and the mechanic took the wheel off my motorbike and drove away with it. I sat on the front steps with the rest of the family and, after a short while, most of the kids in the neighbourhood. One of the boys ran home and fetched his English exercise book, which was used, together with the glossary in my guidebook, to pass the time.

About an hour later, I was back on the bike. The sun set just after I entered the fog during the final 30-kilometre climb towards Sapa, but at least it wasn't raining. Still, I was now quite cold, hungry, wet and tired. Visibility was very low, so I latched on to a slow-moving convoy of motorbikes and fell in to a daze, registering little more than the road and the traffic around me. Every so often, through the noise of the engine and the wind in my helmet, I was almost certain I could hear a pig squealing. At the market that morning, I had watched a piglet being dragged through the crowd by a rope tied around its neck, its tiny rigid feet ploughing through the mud, all the time letting out the most intense, piercing squeals. It wasn't a sound I'll forget anytime soon, but I didn't expect it to be actually staying inside my head.

There was, of course, a natural explanation. When the convoy reached Sapa, the motorbike in front of me pulled over to the side. As I passed I noticed that the wicker cage strapped across the back of his vehicle contained a live pig, which I'm sure would have been a fair bit larger than the basket itself, had he not been inside it.

On the second day of the Halong bay tour, in Cat Ba town, we were unexpectedly given the afternoon off. Although it was overcast and slightly chilly, I took my camera and went for a walk. I was in a slightly better mood after having spent the previous day cruising around the bay among limestone islands, caves and fish farms. Dubious receptionists and not-so-chocolate buns were but a distant memory.

Although Cat Ba town is tiny, it's the main population centre on the island of the same name. Apparently ten years ago it was only a fishing village. Today it has dozens of tall and narrow pastel-coloured hotels, with several more under construction. Our tour guide had told me that the town was struggling with problems of unemployment, prostitution and drug addiction. I hardly saw any tourists. As I walked through the streets, shop owners and motorbike drivers, and even the ushers in the mostly empty Western-style restaurants, only showed a faint interest as I passed by.

I wandered down to the quays, where a large team of workers were sealing a section of a new, wide seafront road. When completed, this road would run along the entire width of the town. Some workers were carrying baskets of gravel onto the road, others were levelling the gravel with rakes. A few were on their hands and knees on the compacted surface behind the steamroller, picking up loose stones one by one with their hands.

I went over and warmed my hands by some metal drums that had been placed on the edge of the road. As far as I understood the drums contained tar, and a wood fire had been lit underneath them to melt the solid contents. I took a couple of photos and two of the workers came over to have a chat. They pointed at one of their mates who was dozing horizontally on a wooden beam nearby. I took a photo of him and showed it to them on the display. They giggled, went over and woke the guy up, and we showed him too.

Then the three of them started singling out other workmates. They pointed and I took photos. The guy on the steamroller drove by, waving and smiling. I took a photo and waved back. The one who was minding the fire splashed liquid tar from the drum straight onto the firewood, creating huge flames and thick black smoke, before leaning on his spade, straightening his cap and looking casually in my direction. Everyone I photographed came over to look at themselves on the display and have a laugh.

At one point a worker came over and picked up a half-metre length of steel pipe that had been lying on the ground next to us. This turned out to be the communal tobacco pipe. The guy squatted, stuffed a tiny ball of tobacco into a hole in the pipe near the end, and placed the other end over his mouth (like you would a digeridoo). He lit the tobacco and inhaled the smoke in one deep breath. Then he exhaled and went back to work. I took some photos as more workers came over to use the pipe, and then, inevitably, I was invited to try it myself. As I blew out the smoke, one of the guys literally rolled around on the gravel laughing. (I know what you're thinking but it wasn't.)

And then, across the new road, I saw the driver of the digger jump out of his cabin and head towards us at a brisk pace. He didn't look pleased. He was wearing tweed trousers, and a white shirt under his sweater. I thought he might be the foreman. I tried smiling disarmingly as he approached, but got no reaction. As he reached our little group, I expected him to tell me off for keeping people from their work. Instead he uttered a simple, succinct sentence in sign language: He pointed at me, he pointed at the camera, he pointed at himself, he pointed at the digger. I nodded. Then he jogged back, jumped in the cabin and waved and grinned as I took the photo.

Finally the workers bummed all my cigarettes and went back to work. My good mood completely restored, I made my way back to the hotel to join the other tourists.

Early the next morning I was on a bus heading for Halong bay. I had been in Hanoi a mere 15 hours, but I was glad to leave.

It wasn't just the episode with the guest house. A string of other little pokes and jabs had conspired to put me in a dark mood. The weather was grey and cold. In the evening I couldn't get my email to work to communicate with my employers. The TV in the reception was blasting away until midnight.

And then, at 6 am the next morning, I woke up to the sound of a loud, metallic voice. I assumed that the TV in the reception had been switched on again. It was a woman's voice, and she sounded utterly bored. She would talk for a few minutes, then there would be a few minutes of silence, and then more talking. It sounded like live television commentary for a state funeral.

After about 45 minutes of this unbearable droning I cursed, got dressed and marched out to the reception. The receptionist raised his hands in apology before I even said anything, but I realised that the TV was switched off and that the voice was actually coming from the street. I walked over to the door and looked outside.

The locals had obviously been up for hours already, and the alley was bustling with buying, selling, talking, cooking, eating, barking. On a lamp-post across the street I saw a large loudspeaker - the source of the disembodied voice. I asked the receptionist what the woman was saying.

"It's Saturday. She's saying that everybody must clean the streets."

"She says this every Saturday?"

"Every Saturday."

"But she's been talking for almost an hour. What other things has she said?"

"Just clean the streets."

"Over and over?"

"Yes."

I looked around. "Nobody is cleaning the streets."

"No."

So an hour later I was sitting on the bus, sleepy and grumpy. In my lap was a bag containing two large, comparatively expensive buns with chocolate filling. I had bought the buns from a woman in a group of street vendors whose communal sales pitch (and answer to any questions about price) was to say "banana inside" and "chocolate inside" as they pointed at the heaps of bakery in their baskets.

I had planned to wait for the announced coffee stop before having the buns, but in my present mood I decided to comfort eat them on the bus instead. I opened the bag and sank my teeth into the first bun. Of course, there was no chocolate inside. There was also no chocolate inside the other bun. And no banana, for that matter. There was just more bun.

To be continued...

On arrival in Hanoi, the driver of the airport bus kindly offered to drop all passengers off at the hotels of their choice. I gave him the address of a guest house where I had made a phone reservation, and an hour later the driver stopped and signalled for us to get off. (I had joined up with a fellow tourist I met on the plane.)

On the street we were greeted by a cheerful receptionist in a white shirt who smiled and said "You made a reservation! Follow me!" and grabbed my bag. (So that's who the driver was calling on his mobile on the way into town.) The name on the hotel sign was similar, though not identical, to the name in my guidebook. This place also seemed to be in a higher price range than I had been given to understand over the phone. I was doubtful. In the reception I showed the man the entry in my guidebook and said I wasn't sure this was the right hotel.

"Same-same hotel," he said. "Different spelling. Confusing for you! I will show you the room."

"What's the address of this hotel?"

"Share room or single room?"

"Do you perhaps have a business card that shows your address?"

"I'll take you to the room."

"Are you the person I spoke to on the phone?"

"Yes, you spoke to me on the phone."

"But I spoke to a woman."

"Yes. Change shifts."

"This woman said her daughter would be doing the next shift. Maybe we can speak to the daughter?"

(Pause)

"Same owner."

"But not same hotel."

"No."

"Then maybe we should go to the hotel where we made the reservation."

"Yes. And first you'll see the room. OK?"

Back on the street we were immediately surrounded by several kids waving business cards for various establishments. We discovered later that the motivation for all this activity isn't merely the prospect of filling up the hotels with guests. Most of the guest houses double up as travel agents, and they go to great lengths to convince their guests to buy organised tours to Halong bay, Sapa and other destinations in the north. I later met other tourists in Hanoi who had been chased from their rooms at 9 pm on the first night, when the owner realised that they weren't going to buy a tour from him.

Anyway, half of the business card wavers claimed that our guest house was full and the other half claimed to represent it. In the confusion I called the guest house again on my mobile. A girl (presumably the daughter) answered, and said for us to come right over. The card wavers lost interest, and we arrived at the correct guest house a few minutes later.

"I'm sorry, we're full."

"Excuse me?"

"All our rooms are full."

"But I made a reservation."

"Are you Darren?"

"No, I'm Steffen."

"Sorry."

"But I spoke to your mother on the phone. I reserved a room."

"When?"

"Around 2 o'clock."

"We don't have any rooms now."

"But I spoke to you on the phone."

"When?"

"Five MINUTES ago." (Losing it slightly, brandishing mobile phone.) "You said you had a room."

"I didn't say I had a room, I said I could find a room. Are you going to Halong bay?"

"We're considering it."

"This man will take you to another guest house. It's only two minutes' walk."

"That's very kind. Thank you."

"Afterwards you come back here and book your tour."

"Somehow I don't think so."

To be continued...

I was amused to discover, as I visited the local pharmacy today, that the cosmetics giant behind the massive advertising campaign promoting spray-on tans to rain-drenched Irish lasses at bus stops in Dublin last winter, is also busy selling whitening lotion to girls in Vietnam.

One afternoon last week, I finished reading The Quiet American. As I was about to make the 600 km journey from to Hoi An by bus, I left my unpacked bags in search of another good read. Nha Trang is full of booksellers, but I was searching for one in particular, who I had met several times during the past few days. He would pop up out of nowhere, grab hold of my book and say, "Exchange?" Every time I told him that I would buy a new book when I had finished the one I was reading, and every time he made me promise that I would buy it from him.

So I was walking through the streets in a bit of a rush, determined to make good on my promise.

My bookseller was easily recognisable with his thick, round, black-rimmed glasses. I found him sitting on his motorbike outside a restaurant, waving at some French tourists. When he saw me carrying my book, he promptly spread his merchandise out on the pavement. The shop was open.

I'm really bad at bargaining. It makes me uncomfortable. The extent of my skills is to pretend to be uninterested in the item I'm about to buy. Obviously this can only go on for so long, and nine times out of ten I give up and just buy the bloody thing at the quoted price. In the present situation two other facts worked to my disadvantage: Firstly, I had problems concealing the fact that I was in a hurry for the bus (I almost ran towards the bookseller). In bargaining situations, time is, literally, money. Secondly, the novel I was hoping to trade in, The Quiet American, is not only laughably thin, but every serious bookseller in Vietnam carries about a dozen copies of it. (The recent Hollywood film even passed cencorship here due to the favourable representation of the Vietnamese struggle against the French.) Not exactly hard currency.

I scanned through the selection of books, moving quickly over the ones I was interested in and dwelling on the more ridiculous sounding ones. (This little trick seemed clever at the time, I only realised later that it makes absolutely no sense.)

The bookseller was making his own preparations for the ensuing transaction. Safe in the knowledge that most Western tourists feel uncomfortable about bargaining, he went for the traditional approach: Making Friends With The Customer. He opened with the universal pre-bargaining question:

"Where are you from?" (Finding Common Ground)

I told him, and he proceeded to reel off the names of the three living generations of the Norwegian royal family; spouses, children, the works. I was secretly impressed by this knowledge, but I wasn't going to take the bait.

"Yes," I said (still browsing), "we're all very fond of them".

It was a lie and he could smell it. He moved swiftly on to the next phase.

"Norway, you say?" He pulled out a thick copy book and started leafing through it furiously.

"Look here!" he said with a victorious grin, showing me some loose handwritten pages. "Letters from my Norway FRIENDS!" (Building Trust)

At this point I had already found the novel I had decided to buy (True History Of The Kelly Gang). I read the blurb while at the same time trying to betray no interest in the book whatsoever. I glanced briefly at the letters he was holding up, shrugged, and continued reading the blurb.

His eyes widened in disbelief. "But the letters are in NORWEGIAN!" he said. "Yes. Not ENGLISH! I gave them a GOOD PRICE!" He seemed genuinely hurt. (Inducing Guilt)

Things were getting awkward. I was forced to look at the letters again. I read a section (in Norwegian):

And he is one hundred percent trustworthy! You won't find a more honest bookseller in Nha Trang! This man is just super!

And so on. Now, some of these letters were rather long. I found myself thinking, who buys a paperback from a person on the street and then writes them a two-page letter of recommendation? Was this someone whose advice I should value? Whose street wisdom I should be emulating?

I snapped out of my thoughts and returned to the blurb, but it was too late. He had won. It wasn't only that I was in a desperate hurry and that I really wanted this novel. Despite the theatrics, by the end of it all I really felt that he was a decent bloke. He had my best interest at heart. He was my friend. (He knows Maud Angelica!) When he quoted me the price I knew that it was the right price. The fair price. It would be a devastating blow to our new friendship if I were to question his integrity by suggesting anything less. I paid up and we shook hands (We shook hands! I'll try that in Eason's.)

With my new book in hand, I popped around the corner and bought some food and water for my trip. The vendor gave me the groceries in a transparent plastic bag, and I slipped the book into it. I walked briskly back towards my hotel, trying to work out how much time I had left for packing. Suddenly, I felt something tugging at my bag. I stopped and looked down. There was my new friend, still on his knees on the pavement, surrounded by his books. His hand was clutching True History Of The Kelly Gang through my plastic bag.

"Exchange?" he said. I was speechless. He lifted the bag up to his black-rimmed glasses and slowly spelled out the title through the plastic.

"Oh," he said. "It's you."

I was sitting at a noodle stall the other day, when a Vietnamese man stopped and said hello. He asked me where I was from, how long I had been in town, etc. so I assumed he was a motorbike driver.

I'm staying in a very touristy street, where a large population of motorbike drivers offer their services with great enthusiasm. They sit on their parked bikes, clapping their hands and waving at passing tourists from a geat distance, occasionally shouting out surprising greetings to turn the head of a potential customer. (The current favourite is "Hellomoto?" - from the ad.) One look in their direction is enough for the most eager ones to jump off their bike and walk with you for a while. If you're already standing still they will sidle up and start a brief polite exchange before offering you a one-hour sightseeing tour around the city. It's a bit awkward. I know that they’re only trying to make a living, but faced with so many people constantly battling for your attention you tend to switch off a bit.

It turned out that this man actually was a motorbike driver. In contrast to the other ones I've spoken to, he had very good English. Sometimes he would close his eyes in mid-sentence, holding his hand up as a sign for me to wait, while he mumbled to himself in Vietnamese. When he was happy with the wording, he would open his eyes and deliver complex and idiomatic sentences with great confidence, followed by a stream of apologies for keeping me waiting so long. I was very impressed and asked him where he had learned to speak the language so well.

He told me that every evening when he comes home from work he has dinner with his family and then, late at night, no matter how tired he is, he sits down to study His wife tells him he's crazy. He showed me a copy book full of phrases and sentences that he writes down (presumably from a dictionary) and then practices in spare moments during the day. I remember this entry:

significant
She gave him a significant nod/wink.

He likes talking to foreigners, as it gives him the opportunity to improve his skills. He said that he was really happy to have met me, as a lot of tourists are very suspicious of his intentions. Given that I was still, up until this moment, expecting the conversation to turn into a sales pitch, I suddenly felt extremely stupid. Not knowing what to say, I asked him how long he had been working in tourism.

"The story of my life is complicated," he said.

In 1975 my friend had just completed high school with the highest marks in his home town. He was due to go to university, and spent his time reading Western classics. When the South Vietnamese government fell that year, his father, who had been working for the government, was sent to jail for more than a decade. His children were refused entry into higher education and banned from any employment in the public sector. When my friend's father was released from jail, he remarried and moved abroad, severing all contact with his family. My friend had various jobs until he arrived in this street around ten years ago and started working as a motorbike driver for the tourists. He's in his late forties now, telling me that you have to learn new things all the time to keep your mind occupied. That's why he studies English. He tells his kids that knowledge is more important than money, and that the life they live is their destiny. Sometimes he's angry with his father, but he doesn't tell them that.

On the day of the Tet Festival (Vietnamese New Year), I went to one of Saigon's flower markets. Flowers are clearly the decoration of choice for the festival, and huge specialised markets appear in the weeks leading up to the New Year. It seems that no matter how modest your shop, house or river boat, for Tet you buy at least one pot of yellow chrysanthemum and place it outside your door. The more money you have, the more decorations you buy. Two, three or four flower pots, New Year banners and flags, baby Buddha cut-outs, dragons decorated with fruit and, in the foyers of the luxury hotels, entire forests of man-sized potted orange trees.

In order to get to the market I had to cross a rather wide and very busy street. Motorbikes are the main means of transportation in Saigon. I've later learned there is one for every three inhabitants. (There also seems to be on average three people on each bike, but that's probably a coincidence.) I soon realised that there wasn't going to be a lull in the onslaught of horns, fumes and faces, and it seemed highly unlikely that someone would stop and wave me across. So I spent some time studying the local pedestrians. As it turned out, it's quite simple. Just step into the traffic and keep walking very slowly until you get to the other side. Don't hesitate, don't stop, and don't start running. (From later experience I would add that you shouldn't cross at a spot where a spectacular and unexpected sight suddenly appears around a corner, as drivers in Saigon are happy to take their eyes off the road for quite some time.)

So, the flower market. Where I'm from, if you leave it until 2 pm on Christmas Eve before you get the tree, you're inevitably going to come home with a real shocker. This was not the case here. An hour before closing time there was a huge selection of top-quality plants and flowers on display. As nervous vendors started lowering their prices, the shrewdest punters pulled up on their motorbikes. I soon realised that the latecomers weren't out to save on the decorations. They just wanted more for their money. Mothers pointed and paid, and sons and dads strapped gravity-defying heaps of vegetation onto the motorbikes. Then the whole family climbed on and swerved out into the street again. That afternoon, all over town, you would see little islands of flowers floating through rivers of traffic.

Almost all the motorbikes you see in Saigon are 100 cc. Many people ride Chinese makes, and there are apparently a few domestic ones. But Honda seems to have the lion's share of the market. That evening I went to an outdoor concert venue near where I'm staying. As the crowd sat quietly on plastic chairs waiting for the New Year's show to begin, a man in traditional costume walked onto the stage and gave a lengthy introduction. You didn't have to understand Vietnamese to realise who was sponsoring the event, as the words "Honda Vietnam" and "Ho Chi Min" ended almost every sentence. A couple of posters on the backdrop read "HONDA - The Power of Dreams", and below them was a spotlit red motorbike. After a while two men in suits came onto the stage. The host talked some more, and then one of the suits handed the other one an oversized cheque. I don't know if the crowd had a grudge against imported motorbikes or if they were just eager for the show to start, but the transaction was followed by the shortest sneeze of applause I've ever witnessed.

Three boy bands and four girl bands later, I decided to leave. I had a meal, checked my mail, and was back on the street just before midnight. There was, if possible, even more traffic than before. Everyone was in their Sunday best, riding home from their family celebrations. Outside every shop (next to the chrysanthemums) there was a little table with food offerings for the ancestors. On the pavements, people had lit fires in little metal buckets where they burned sheets of paper that I've later learned is money (not real) for the ancestors to spend in the afterworld. And then, in a large crossroads about 50 metres down the street, I saw the strangest thing: The traffic had stopped. More than a hundred people were sitting on their bikes in the middle of the street, with the engines turned off. As I walked towards them, other motorbikes zipped past me, horns ablaze, trying to force an opening in the crowd. But then they too slowed down and stopped. As I arrived at the scene, I understood: Booooom! Across town, down by the river, the municipal New Year's fireworks were under way. This was one of the few spots in the neighbourhood that you could view it from.

We all watched, applauding the most spectacular displays, until it was over. And then - another once-in-a-lifetime experience - I heard the roar of one hundred motorbike engines starting in unison.

This one's about rice.

Yesterday I had another great chat with the owner of a tiny cafe where I've been having meals for the last few days. As usual there were no other guests. The owner came out of the back room, where he had just finished watching a nature programme about divers on a coral reef. He was in an excellent mood.

"How can the water be so clear! Like glass! And the fish are so beautiful! I would love to try it!"

After he had prepared my meal, he brought his own supper out from the back room and joined me. Our conversation meandered through a diversity of topics, such as diving, malaria, the weather and the Khmer Rouge, before inevitably turned to rice.

Before he owned a cafe, my friend used to travel around inland Cambodia as a rice merchant. He has previously advised me on the four different qualities of rice (settle for number two, steer clear of number four) and the difference between rice from areas where they harvest once a year (delicious) and areas where they harvest twice (tasteless).

This time he told me about the floating rice. You may already know about this, but I'll tell you anyway.

Some background: The Mekong river starts in Tibet, travels down into Laos, and then follows the Thai-Lao border for a while before it cuts through Cambodia on its way to the great delta in the south of Vietnam. In Phnom Pehn, the river is joined by the Tonle Sap river, a smaller tributary which originates in the Tonle Sap lake a 100 km further inland.

In the rainy season the Mekong gets too big for its shoes. It starts pressing its way up the Tonle Sap river, forcing it to reverse its course. Consequently, the water level in the lake starts rising.

The rice farmers around the lake (who, not surprisingly, live in houses built on very, very tall stilts) have prepared for this by sowing floating rice along its banks. As the water level rises, the rice plants germinate and start growing.

The floating rice always stays, well, floating. As the depth of the lake increases from a few feet to over 10 metres, the top of the rice plant is always above the surface, growing up to 10 cm (!) a day to match the rising of the water level. After the rainy season, the flow reverses, the lake recedes and the rice is harvested on dry land, seven months after it was sown. This is apparently one of the oldest known forms of agriculture.

Today the bus from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh made a stop in a village. As we all got off the bus, some women came over to sell refreshments to the (mostly Cambodian) passengers. Mango, pineapple and fried spiders. That's right. Hundreds of huge black, shiny, greasy spiders piled on a tray.

While we were standing there I had a chat with one of the Cambodian passengers. I asked him about the spiders. He wondered if I might like to try one. I declined politely.

Needless to say, I wondered if he might like to try one. (I was carrying my camera at the time.)

"Oh no," he said, "these ones aren't fresh."

Ah, very clever. Why didn't I think of that. I'm sorry, normally I would ask for a dozen spiders to go and skip the mango altogether. But these ones, well, they're just not up to the standards of freshness that I've grown accustomed to.

Anyway, my knowledge of this culinary oddity is still very sparse. The guy told me that they catch them by flushing them out of their holes in the ground with hot water. I don't know if they come out one by one or in herds. During the short time we were there I didn't see anyone buying spiders, so I don't actually know if they're sold one by one or if you get a whole bag. I also don't know if you only eat the legs and throw away the grape-sized body or if you just pop the whole thing in your mouth.

I do know that I'm losing my audience very fast.

(Sorry folks, this is written in a rush. I've just arrived in Phnom Penh, and I need to do some work before I go to bed.)

On Sunday I crossed the Thai - Cambodian border and got on a bus to Siem Reap, off to see the Angkor temples.

National Road 6 is the worst road I have ever experienced from inside a civilian vehicle. It consisted of a large variety of rocks and potholes covered in fine red sand. At times you couldn't even drink water from a bottle without spilling it all over yourself.

I had made some new friends on the train the night before, and there was a great atmosphere in the bus.

We drove through endless stretches of dried-out rice paddy that the farmers were scorching in preparation for the rainy season. Others were fishing with nets in muddy ponds. In the villages, every house, tree and vehicle within 30 metres of the road was covered in red road dust.

Whenever we stopped, local kids came running out of the shops sell us souvenirs and practice their English. I hadn't got my head around the currency, so I ended up buying a single postcard for the price of one night's accommodation in Lampang the week before. That was one kid who didn't stay to chat. (In fairness, the postcard was more beautiful than the room.)

At one point we picked up some Japanese travellers because the pickup they had been riding in had broken down. An hour later we had a flat tyre. As our driver was changing the wheels, the Japanese quietly hitched a ride with another passing pickup. The rest of us had a wander in the fields or chatted to local kids who pulled up on motorcycles. When the wheel was ready we had to push-start the bus. Ten Westerners screaming "Second gear! Second gear!", each in their own language. Hilarious.

So I was walking through the Old Town the other day, looking for a phone booth that would accept the phone card I had just bought. The girl in 7-Eleven had stressed that it would only work on phones operated by the telecom company TOT. She said this very slowly, while pointing at the word "TOT" on the card. I felt I couldn't go wrong. Half an hour later I had tried four TOT phone booths on three different streets. None of them accepted my card. I was hot, slightly annoyed and slightly dehydrated. When my fifth attempt failed, I approached a tuk-tuk driver who was just waking up from a snooze in the back of his vehicle. He very kindly walked over to the phone booth with me, inserted the card and lifted the receiver. When (again) the card didn't work, he pulled it out and examined it closely. The card had a photo of a yellow butterfly on one side. After a while he nodded, as if in recognition, and said I had to find a yellow phone. I was slightly suspicious. The girl in 7-Eleven, who had been very helpful, had not said anything about TOT phones being colour-coded. Also, I couldn't help thinking that the tuk tuk driver was basing his advice on the photo of the yellow butterfly.

"But isn't this phone yellow?" I said, feebly.

"This phone is orange," he said.

He was right of course. I said I hadn't seen any yellow phone booths in the last half hour, and did he know of any? He said he didn't. (The fact that he didn't offer to drive me to one that he knew of made me even more suspicious.)

"Better you use coins," he said and gave me back the card.

Sound enough advice, when you think about it, but I wasn't ready to give up yet. I thanked the tuk tuk driver and turned randomly onto a very long, deserted side street which, I noticed immediately and to my dismay, had no phone booths whatsoever. Too proud to turn back, I continued walking.

Just as I felt myself getting agitated I saw a little old man waving at me from across the road. His clothes were scruffy and he was carrying a plastic bag. I hesitated, and he nodded (yes, you!). What now, I thought. Twin Peaks? As I crossed the street and approached him he smiled, turned around and walked through a set of tall gates and onto the grounds of a small Buddhist temple. He signalled for me to follow, so I did. I walked with him up the steps, we took of our sandals, and I followed him into the cool shade of the temple. We stopped in front of the altar, which had a few Buddha statues. He sat down and motioned for me to do the same. So we sat there for a while. Then he took me out into the garden, and we sat there for a while. And then he said that he would be needing some money, so I gave him some. And you're thinking, this story is going nowhere, and that may be true.

Welcome to my blog! It took a bit longer to get around to this than I expected, but I'll try to add entries quite frequently. Yesterday I visited the Thai Elephant Conservation Centre in Lampang. The Centre was established after the Thai government banned teak logging in the 90s, leaving lots of elephants and trainers (mahouts) out of work. They have about 50 elephants of all sizes (although they are obviously all elephant-sized).

The highlight of the day was a one-hour elephant ride through the surrounding forest, only me, the mahout, and what turned out to be a rather peckish elephant called Moon-Kah. Apparently grown elephants (and Moon-Kah was that) eat about 250 kg of food every day. How do they find time for anything else, I wondered. As I soon discovered, they don't. Moon-Kah stopped every couple of minutes to snack on weeds and shrubs which he yanked out, roots and all, with his trunk and stuck in his mouth. Whenever the mahout felt that the elephant lingered for too long, he poked the elephant's ear with his iron-tipped mahout staff. Moon-Kah responded not only with grumpy snorts and ear-flapping, but also by breaking wind quite loudly. I found this terribly funny, but the mahout didn't, so I kept my mirth to myself. (It's not that he didn't have a sense of humour, he did find other things - particularly my large, white feet, which he stole glances at through the corner of his eye - worthy of a smirk.)

We also saw a kingfisher. The bird, not the beer.