Laos

So Laos anyway. Really not a very stressed out place. I had two itineraries planned for this country. One was going to be a bit of a mad dash, but would mean that I could take in the mysterious Plain of Jars. More used to less mysterious but equally tempting Jars of Plain, I decided that I would take the slow route. The decision was really made for me, since I'm finding it hard to get up the motivation to do anything. In the afternoon, the people here lie down in their places of business and just point to whatever you want. It's bit like a siesta, and it is pretty warm here, though it's not as humid as Vietnam, so a fan works wonders and I don't have air conditioning for only the second time since leaving Dublin.

I flew from Hanoi to the capital Vientiane, but boarded a connecting flight from the domestic terminal, which looked more like a bus station than most bus staions, to Luang Prabang, and it's here I have been. An interesting thing happened on the way here though. Perhaps because I was in transit no one got the opportunity to tell me, but the plane first flies 200 kilometres north of here, to a place that looked like the end of the world, called Udomxai. So, upon arriving in Udomxai, I got out, wandered around and figured that I was in the wrong place. Now, I could say that my heart sank, but that would be a very mediocre sort of metaphor, so let me get something clear. I know, as a student of the human body, that the heart can not feasibly escape the chest and end up somewhere around one's kdneys, but, I swear, my heart sank at the prospect of being 200 km from my rucksack and the 12 hour bus journey I would have to take to get it back. But then a Japanese man who was in an identical situation asked someone where he was and I overheard the helpful air hostess telling him to get back on the aircraft and that it would be departing for Luang Prabang shortly. So I grabbed my passport back from the guard who was taking my details down in a large ledger and ran back to the plane.

Luang Prabang is the laziest little town I have ever had the good fortune to come across. I've been here a while, but I don't remember much of what I've done. I started off realising what it was that was amiss from my trip from the airport. The minivan, upon coming across a slow motorboke simply followed at that speed. No honking of horns or radical overtaking manoeuvres, commonly involving hairpin bends and large trucks coming the other way, that was the specialty in Vietnam. Nope. We were getting where we were going and were bound to get there eventually and in one piece - a guarantee often missing from the Vietnamese equivalents.

The second thing to realise is that there are loads of Wats (Buddhist temples) about, and so there are loads of novices around - teenagers with shaven heads dressed in garish orange. A bit like parts of Dublin really. The are two next to me right now, checking their email. It's quite a sight.

I get a bus in the morning to Vang Vieng, which has a reputation as being a backpacker stopover between Luang Prabang and Vientiane and little else, but if I'm going to stop over somewhere, it may as well be there.

And if it's anything like here, it'll be hard to leave there too.

The hill station of Sapa.

The major ethnic minority in Northwest Vietnam is the Black H'mong tribe, so called because they dye their clothes black with indigo. See how they're black? And not blue, as I thought at first? You'll get used to it. And becuase the dye isn't set, they're skin always has a vague azure hue, and they wash their clothes only once every few months. Delightful.

Same same but different.

Stairs. These hill stations are always littered with stairs.

This is an indigo field without a man in it. And if you don't know why that's important, you probably never will.

I can say, without a hint of hyperbole, that I took about a squillion pictures down hill-sides and that they just didn't capture what I saw. Above this was Mt. Fansipan (3143m) disappearing into the clouds and below was the river that had carved the valley. Across the river were, as far as the eye could see, terraced fields being tilled by locals, and, every now and then, one could see a lone house or school or village hall. And this is the best picture I could come up with because... wait for it... this one has cows in it. Wow.

Here I am stopped for a well-earned rest.

The water pours in to a little bucket at the far end. When it is too full, the arm it pivots around the middle and pours the water out. That raises the arm at this end, which then comes crashing down and crushes the grain in the bucket. That happens about once every five seconds, so by hand is quicker, but you have to admire their resourcefulness.

You were kept awake by the crickets until 04.00, woken by the rooster at 04.30 but the worst was when, at 06.00, these lads thought that the one thing this already virtually impassable road needed was a good old-fashioned noisy hole-digging. Can't beat it.

This the family we stayed with on our first night.

Black H'mong girls.

The familiar five-fingered leaf of the hemp that grows in field around Sapa. They don't ingest it, but exclusively use the plant to make clothes.

Women of the Dzao tribe.

Here we are descending into Ban Ho where we would spend the second night.

I went swimming near the waterfall, but couldn't shake from my mind the knwoledge of what I had just contributed to the river about 500m upstream...

The village of Ban Ho was a bit of a menagerie.

On the way back up the hill we met this pair. They were sheltering from the rain as Mum and Dad built a fence aound a field. The boy on the left said bye-bye as we approached. The girl, on the right, waved and said hello and burbled adorably if you reciprocated.

When we got back to the train station at Lao Cai, I realised just how close we were to the Chinese border, so I took a taxi to see it. This is me attempting to walk into China without a visa. They didn't see the funny side.

I've been sitting in the internet cafe for 6 hours and can't think of a quippy title. Answers on a postcard.

I said goodbye to Deirdre at Hanoi airport and found my way back to town. I was to leave that evening for a three-day trek in Northern Vietnam.

Upon arrival in the travel agent's that evening, the lady behind the desk informed me gleefully that I was a very lucky boy. The balance of my group of six was to be made up of five pretty girls. I was aware that this was going to go one of two ways. There was that slim possibility that the five pretty girls would be of the ilk that drinks ambitiously and plays strip poker into the night, but the more likely scenario, and the one that did indeed present itself 15 minutes later, would be that they were quiet and a bit dull.

They were three Singaporean girls, one of whom was outgoing enough to chat away to me.

There was a Manchunian woman in her thirties called Jo, who had recently given up managing the McVities factory in Manchester.

(Aside: she confirmed for me that Jaffa cakes are in fact cakes and not biscuits. Firstly, she informed me, one is made out of a dough, the other of batter. But there have also been a couple of court cases over this issue, since there is no VAT applicable to chocolate on cakes but there is to that on biscuits. McVities saves three million pounds per year on VAT on chocolate based on the fact that Jaffa Cakes are cakes. If I've had this argument with you before - you know who you are - then let us never have it again, safe in the knowledge that I was right all along.)

She was pleasant and talkative but just a bit dim, and would, at the end of a conversation, say with confidence that which was a basic precept upon which the preceding conversation was based. For example, upon discussing the virtues of different types of massage available (Thai, Chinese, Turkish etc.), she announced at the end that she thinks it's "quite nice to get a massage out here". No shit.

Maybe it was the Manchester accent. Maybe it was the hard trekking that had me tired and irritible, but for some reason this grated on me terribly.

The last member of the group was an American. She too was in her thirties and was obviously well-travelled. Her saving grace was perhaps that she was quiet, because that which spilled from her mouth was often the sort of touchy-feely crap in which Americans specialise. It's just that they speak in terms that I simply, through no lack of trying, fail completely to understand. Deirdre blames my medical training, but I'm pretty sure my mind was constructed in too straightforward a manner to understand their pinko nonsense long before I started university. I find it very hard to come up with an example of this tosh, but I think I can sum it up by saying that I meet beautiful people and have amazing experiences where these people meet amazing people and have beautiful experiences. If anyone knows what I mean and can articulate it better than I, feel free to leave it as a comment and I'll incorporate it later.

She had one more annoying trait where she would be self-aggrandising in confusing ways. When she was buying something from one of the locals, our tour-guide (a lovely and sensible Vietnamese woman called Nu) told me to tell her that she should haggle. The guide reckoned the locals might be offended if this advice came from her. The response from the American, and I'm still not entirely sure what it meant, was:

"I know how to bargain - my ex-husband was Mexican."

She also, at one stage, said the poor locals, who were trying hard to sell their wares, didn't know that they were dealing with a stubborn Swede. I knew exactly what she meant, so delivered my usual response when colonials hint at atavistic traits from their perceived homeland, and said "That's funny, you sound American". Nauseating.

So they were the people. I usually give out the URL to this blog to anyone who'll take it, but I decided not to give it to them so I could bitch about them. And it felt great. Thanks for listening.

We set off from the travel agent's in Hanoi on a bus, arrived at the train station, caught an overnight train to Lao Cai on the Chinese border, and from there got a bus up a mountain to Sapa. The town reminded me very much of Darjeeling, with its colonial architecture, steep streets and cool climate. We had a bite to eat and then set off.

The trek took us down along a road for about one kilometre, at which point we turned right and down into the river valley that we were to follow for the next three days. At times there was a well-worn path but at others we were walking along dried-up riverbeds or picking our way tight-rope style along the parapets at the edges of paddy fields. We stopped for a picnic lunch in a shed that seemed designed for such things and then continued on to the house in which we would be staying that night.

Our guide made the dinner, which was some of the best food I've had since arriving and was far too much for us to eat. It consisted of rice, a pork dish, a beef dish, tofu and a bamboo and noodle concoction, with fruit for dessert. We slept soundly in the attic of the big house that night and woke at seven for breakfast.

We were soon off again. We covered roughly the same distance on the second day, but the going was undoubtedly tougher. We made it down to a road and the most friendly of the Singaporeans was chatting to me as we strode ahead of the others. We turned back after a few minutes and realised there was no sign of them. We backtracked some way and eventually found them stopped and the English girl had a dressing on her head. Apprently, she had felt nature call, gone and squatted behind a shed that was beside the road, and, just as she was coming up, she was struck in the forehead by a rock thrown innocently by a youngster. She was very pragmatic about the whole thing and was thanking her god that it wasn't an eye or a tooth that was injured. Just her head. It could have been worse.

I thought it hilarious, but kept this to myself.

Lunch was similar to the previous day and we did the last 5km after eating. This was probably the hardest bit, since, after we left the road, it was quite a steep descent into the village. It took us about an hour to amble down. We rested, we ate, we went to the local 'bar' which even had a 'pool table' of sorts. We were overcharged for beer and got rained on on the way home.

Indeed, it hissed rain all night and the steep slope that we had desended the previous day was now muddy and slippery and we were being picked up from the road at the top. After a hearty breakfast of banana and chocolate pancakes (I had five so as not to appear rude), we set off.

It was a bit of a muddy climb up the hill, and I was the only one who hadn't brought hiking boots, but we scaled the hill in about 90 minutes, climbed aboard two 'jeeps' and I was just congratulating myself on not getting too muddy when this Ford Everest, which for some reason didn't appear to have four-wheel drive, got stuck in the mud. It's seldom that I'm the biggest or strongest in a group, but the Vietnamese are a somewhat diminutive race, so I was in the prime position to push this thing up the road and get simultaneously splattered with mud and have my leg turned black by the exhaust fumes.

I showered in Sapa. I put on the same t-shirt I had worn for the first day's trekking, using the few dry corners of my other t-shirt as a towel.

I felt much better.

I finished my book in time for the bus ride back to Lao Cai, where I took a trip to the Chinese border for a look, and persuaded a couple of friendly Germans to do likewise. We then sat and ate good food and drank good beer and generally had a splendid time until the train came to take us back to Hanoi. We bought some more beer in the station, I drank them, fell asleep and awoke with a decpetively clear head; I shared a taxi with the friendly Germans, picked up my rucksack, went back to my hotel, had a sleep, went for a walk, had some lunch, bought a book and have been on the internet for a long time now. And some people say travel is stressful.

I have really enjoyed to opportunity to read something other than medical texts on this trup. In the last three weeks, I have read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, Captain Corelli's Mandolin (which is truly excellent), The Adventures of Sherlock Homes, Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island, and have just bought Homer's Oddyssey (for some reason).

I am now going to go and have my last taste of Bia Hoi, which is the world's cheapest beer at 10-25 cent per glass. It's tastey, not very strong and is served to tourists and Vietnamese who sit on small plastic furniture that is just hard enough to sit on that the first time you fall off indicates when it's time to go home.

And tomorrow I fly to Laos.

Deirdre says we don't have enough pictires of Hanoi on the blog, so I took a walk around with my camera this morning.

More motos.

This is the rather pleasant lake that sits in in the Old Quarter of Hanoi.

Communist propaganda by the lake, lest the red flags that adorn the city are too subtle.

This is me, having just bought a wee tripod for my camera (for about a quid) and am trying it out having just eaten a rather good pizza.