Since I last wrote I have been in Champasak and am now on Don Det, a small island in the Mekong river. It is part of a group of islands called Si Phan Don meaning Four Thousand Islands even though there aren't four thousand of them. They don't have electricity here except between 6 and 10PM when they turn on generators but they have several internet cafes who have generators on all day and they have satellite broadband. Obviously internet is more important than light.

Before I left Savannakhet, I went to a restaurant called Mama's Home Restaurant which as the name would suggest, was a restaurant in somebody's mama's home. She had the sitting room all set up for eating and you could just sit on her couch and eat and watch DVDs in her house all night! The waitress was one of Mama's six offspring - a twenty-three year old girl by the name of Nin. Since I was the only customer, after she had got my food she sat down on the couch and watched DVDs with me. She had fluent English though so we spent most of the time talking because she was the first Lao person who'd had enough English and time to have a proper conversation with me. We talked of Lao society and Laos' place in the world and the big picture and so forth. She explained that as a single 23 year old, she was already an old maid by Lao standards and practically unmarriable. I found this rather hard to believe and was unsympathetic and she did conceed that those from her generation who had the opportunity to go to college and have a career were breaking the mould of early marriage and waiting until their late twenties. These career people seem to be in the minority though. Laos has a very young population. Everywhere you look, children are crawling out of the woodwork. On the minibus I got here on, half the passengers were babies. You wouldn't see that at home. Come to think of it I hardly ever see a baby in public at home. Then Nin got out her little cousin and had her put on a little performance for me. She sang songs in English and Lao and did little dances all the while. Then on command, she rattled off the English phrases she learnt at school: "How are you? I am fine thank you. What is your name? My name is (whatever her name was.)" It was unbearably cute.

The next day I got up at 5:30AM as the cocks crowed to go to Champasak and it was nearly 5:30PM by the time I got there eventhough it was less than 300km away from Savannakhet. This is thanks to the inexcusably lethargic public transport system of Laos. They cram a bus way above capacity and then make us squeeze in between boxes, bags and baskets of deliveries. Then the leave us there to suffocate for about an hour. Because no one speaks English (and I'm the only farang there), no one can tell me why or when we will be leaving. Then for no apparent reason, they decide that now would be as good a time as any to leave and we take off at snail's pace. Then we stop every three minutes for ten minutes at a time to drop off some cargo or pick up some more. They seem more concerned with the welfare of the cargo than with that of the passengers. Everytime we stop, we are set upon by poor people who harass us to buy crickets on sticks or other equally unappetizing dead things on sticks. I acquiesce and buy the hind leg off a chicken on a stick. It's cold and there's no meat on it and it's probably full of bacteria. I give it to one of the Lao people on the bus who save it for later. Nobody seems to need to go anywhere urgently in this country., Why does no one need to be anywhere at a particular time? They're lucky that they don't because they'd be screwed. It's frustrating but I know I just need to chill out and adapt to the pace of life here. I need to learn how to be "seriously easygoing" but it's easier said than done. They make Bus Eireann look like a smoothly run efficient organisation!

Champasack is a small one-street town whose one small street is really just a bumpy trail of red dust. I went there to visit Wat Phou, an ancient ruined temple, older than Angkor Wat, 10km south of the village where water buffalo are still ritually sacrificed once a year. I hired a moped and drove out there to see it this morning. It was a bumpy ride in places but where I got a smooth patch I pushed it to the max and the little moped wouldn't give me anymore than 80kph. It was just as well because I wasn't wearing a helmet so the air rushing past my eyes was making me blind anyway. Seeing the old temple was really out of this world. Just walking through a door, I paused and glanced each way expecting a pendulum blade to start swinging at me like in Tomb Raider. It was amazing to imagine what the joint must have been like in its heyday. Probably a load of Buddhist monks sitting around discussing philosophy and not even knowing that there was such a thing as a white man.

Then I hitched a ride with a "bus" - one of those pick up trucks with benches and a canopy on the back - to get to Si Phan Don. Two women on it were breast feeding their babies. One of them had twins and she was smoking away like a chimney while the children suckled! When she saw my big backpack she told one of her babies (the more grouchy one) (in Lao but I got the gist of it) that he'd better cop on because that was my baby bag where I put all the Lao babies I like to eat and that she was thinking of giving him away. She made as if she was going to hand him over and I opened up my bag obligingly. The kid burst into tears much to our amusement. This seems to be a disturbingly common boogie man threat over in this part of the world and the white guy is the boogie man. I'm staying in a windowless hut here on Don Det now and hoping that it won't rain all day tomorrow so that I can go and try to see the rare Irrawaddy freshwater dolphins. I'll probably cross the Cambodian border the day after and then begin the gruelling two day trip to Siem Reap, home of Angkor Wat. New photos including portraits of some Lao people are up at http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/Laos/

 I'm now in the town of Savannakhet in southern Laos. It is the first time I have stepped off the tourist trail and onto the unbeaten path. The results of this are as follows: A: there's not a whole lot for tourists to do around here. B: There aren't any tourists around here. This suits me just fine. Eventhough I've been here for less than a day, I've already seen everything so I'm just going to relax in a cafe with a book for the rest of the day I suppose. The town itself is a really cool place to stroll through. It's all French colonial buildings, but unlike Luang Prabang where everything is kept spick and span for the tourists, this place has been allowed to age gracefully. The buildings are all cheerfully delapidated. Instead of being govered in black grime they're covered in a much more attractive red dust. Everywhere I look I see exposed brick, disintegrating plaster and rotting shutters. I love it! It's like a ruined city that became reinhabited and is now full of renewed life! See photos at: http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/Laos/  They even have a Catholic church here! The first Christian church I've seen since I left Australia. I haven't seen any farang [FEN: white folks] walking around the streets here. The best part about this is that all of a sudden I'm a celebrity. I can feel like da bomb walking down the street knowing that everyone is staring at me because I'm so damn cool. Everyone smiles as I walk by and if they know the word "hello" they use it and if not they us "sabai dii" instead and if they know anymore English phrases they'll use those too. Everyone is insanely friendly and not in a creepy ya-wanna-join-our-ritual-suicide-cult kinda way. And I've never mentioned this before but Laos feels so safe - like way safer than even Cork. I can walk down a strange street in the dark on my own and know that I'm  100% safe. Unlike Ireland there aren't really any dedicated pubs here - all pubs are also restaurants so the clientele is relatively civilised. There aren't really any late night clubs. Everything is closed by 11PM which doesn't give anyone a chance to get drunk and abusive. They have a government-funded tourist office here with five people working in it and when I walked in they were all just sitting around chatting. They quickly got to their feet and offered me a chair and ran to get me a cold glass of water. This was where they justify their salary. This was the first tourist office I had been to where they weren't intent on just getting all your money off you. Instead of pushing me into taking various tours where you have to pay money, they just gave me a free map and marked points of interest on it in fluent English and then gave me some bus information for tomorrow - all with those beautiful Lao smiles to which I have grown so accustomed. I walked past a little primary school which was just some lady's front room with a blackboard on the wall and lots of little plastic chairs on the floor. When the children saw me they all started shouting "hello!" and waving frantically and they ran out to get a closer look at me and then the teacher came out of the back room and ushered them all back in protectively.

As charming as the place is, it's only two o'clock and I have nothing to do for the rest of the day so I'm going to Pakse tomorrow. I don't want to go to Pakse but I have to overnight there in order to get another bus to Champanasak the following day, where I can see an ancient ruined temple that's still used to sacrifice buffalo. With each day I get closer and closer to Cambodia.

So I'm in Vientiane now. This is the capital city of Laos and the largest city in the country eventhough with a population of 200,000, it's comparable in size to Cork. It isn't much of a capital really. There's no buzz at all. They don't even have traffic jams! What kind of a city doesn't have traffic jams. I walked down the middle of a huge four lane street and there were hardly any cars. If New York is the city that never sleeps, Vientiane is the city that never wakes. I actually saw one tuk-tuk driver who had installed a hammock in the back of his tuk-tuk for him to sleep in. There he was smiling away in his hammock as if he hadn't a stroke of work to be doing. Another tuk-tuk driver seemed to have three jobs. Within the space of ten seconds, while I walked past him he had offered me a tuk-tuk ride, drugs and "a lady". Now there's a busy man!

Having said that, I don't actually mind it. It's fairly quiet, plenty of space - it lacks most of Bangkok's flaws but also most of it's attractions. The US government, in a fit of guilt after making them the most bombed country in history, donated concrete to them to build a new airport. They said "thank you very much" and used it instead to build an oriental take on the Arc de Triomhe called the Victory Gate, in a strange tip of the hat to their former colonialists. Then they ran out of concrete and never finished it. The scaffolding is still up there. It is in the middle of a giant roundabout just like the real one. Unlike the real one though, it doesn't have much traffic around it and the equivalent to the Champs Elysee is quite empty. The whole city is quite run down in a strangely attractive kind of way. All the old French colonial buildings have pieces of plaster fallen off exposing the bricks underneath. I'd say most of the buildings haven't been painted since the French moved out. All the streets have names like Avenue, Boulevard and Rue.

I visited the Museum of National History where I wasn't allowed to bring in a camera. There was a map "displaying the majesty and beauty of the Laos country" by putting little pictures of factories and cows all over it. The counter-colonialist uprising and the subsequent communist struggle were well-documented in there although many of they displays were only in Lao with no English translation - some had French translations and no English translations. While they seemed to be historically accurate they were not presented factually as one would expect in a museum but used a lot of emotive language to tell only one side of the story. Everywhere where "US forces and their allies" should have been written, there was "the US imperialists and their puppets". Ouch! Displays of some US machine guns had a caption that read "These are the guns that American imperialists brought over to kill Lao people". This is technically correct. Displays of the Lao People's Liberation Army guns had a caption that read "These are the guns that the Lao people used to defend themselves against the US imperialists." Again note that this is technically correct but this kind of language does not belong in a museum. Perhaps some of the tone was lost in translation...I doubt it though. Then again, I suppose this emotion is understandable after four hundred years of foreign oppression and it's only been about forty years since the US rained a record number of bombs down on their country, many of which lie unexploded just under the ground today waiting for some little child to unwittingly step on it. There was a bust of my old buddy Ho Chi Minh in there and naturally I wanted to get a picture with him but...camera's were prohibited! I've seen everything I need to in this city so I'm going south to Savannakhet tomorrow morning. Cambodia beckons. I hope to sail across the border before the end of the week. Photos of this totally not crazy place now up at http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/Laos/

I showed up at the bus station in Luang Prabang at 9:30 AM to discover that they had decided not to bother running the 10:30 bus to Vang Vieng today and I had to wait for the 12:30 bus. Nice! Three hours later they started loading all the luggage on to the roof of the bus and then they were ready to go get some petrol before they set off. When we finally rolled out of town the bus was crammed way above capacity. There were people sitting on sacks of rice in the aisle, there was a moped tied to the roof, there was a tenacious screaming baby down the back and there was still no air-conditioning. It was nearly worth it all for the views though. Mountains, mountains and more mountains stretching out into the distance until they became nothing more than a bumpy navy blue haze on the horizon. Sometimes the landscape was dominated by long gently-rising mountains with lots of tributary ridges sprouting from it. They were like giant reclining Buddhas, fast asleep and covered in a wrinkled green silk sheets. The little old Hyundai bus crawled up steep mountain trails, it's engine groaning and complaining at the unreasonable task demanded of it. The road unwound slowly ahead of us like a reel of paper from an old counting machine. At one point, one of the Lao lads decided it was too hot for him so he opened a window fully and climbed out (while the bus was still moving!) Then clinging to the side of the bus like Spiderman, he clambered up onto the roof and spent the next few hours up there. This dangerous feat of acrobatics was performed with the promise of certain death if he lost his grip because he wouldn't have just fallen onto the road - he would have fallen right off the edge of the road (to which the wheels of the bus were disconcertingly close) where there was a sheer 500 foot drop!

For most of the journey woefully bad Thai pop music blared loudly and distortedly through the seemingly homemade speakers and echoed from the mountains far away. In every little hill-tribe village we passed through we turned heads and drew gazes. Sometimes the children would run after the bus, and if we were on a slope, they could nearly keep up. These children were delightfully dirty, partially clother children who chased chickens in the dirt and revelled in the glory of life. They gave a whole new meaning to life on the edge. All they had to live on was a strip of land between the road and the edge of the precipice just wide enough to put a hut on. They step out their front door and they're on the road, they step out their back door and they're falling to their death. For this reeason they probably don't have a back door. How can people raise children in a place like this? At one village we stopped the bus in the middle of the road a string of children filed on board to try and sell buckets of little brown corn on the cobs for about 15 cents apiece. One little boy was distradcted from his work by the sight of my tattoo. Around these parts everyone has tribal tattoos but they're drawn manually with an ordinary needle, dot by dot so they look really gammy. This was the most intricate tattoo he'd ever seen and it made him squeal with delight. He cautiously reached out his hand, checking to see if I'd object and ran his little fingers over the characters, expecting them to stand out and he was filled with awe and reverence when he found them to be as smooth as his own backside.

We roared off again leaving a cloud of smoke and this time we went really high - so high that we were actually in a cloud. We passed through another village in the cloud. These people live on a cloud! That's wack! With evening came more clouds and the looming hulks onf the mountains began to recede silently into them like mysterious, benevolent sentinels taking up secluded positions to watch over us for the rest of out journey. Then, an hour later, the rays of sunset managed to pierce their cloak of stealth and illuminated their exposed white flanks, painting them gold and then amber. Then suddenly, the biggest rainbow I ever saw materialized from the mist. It arced all the way from one side of the sky to the other easily eclipsing the humbled mountains and framing them in a colourful bubble. Then came the night like a silent assassin infiltrating everything. The mist swirled menacingly and a thick bank of cloud loitered around the midriffs of the sleeping mountains, leaving their solemn heads exposed. The full moon, shrouded by a thin gauze of mist, shed a pale eerie light on this secret world. If there was magic or mythology anywhere then it lurked amongst these spooky mountains waiting to emerge. As if proof of this were needed, we passed a huge dead tree that looked exactly like the blackened carcase of a giant ugly witch that had been burned at the stake, her features still contorted with agony. This was the last place I'd want to break down... Luckily we didn't and we made it to Vang Vieng by 9PM.

Vang Vieng is just a string of bars and guesthouses all lit up to look like a little Las Vegas in the wilderness. The whole village is obsessed with Friends. It's really really weird. You walk down the street and you will hear the theme tune and the familiar voices blaring out from five different bars simultaneously. There's an episode of Friends showing in practically every bar and restaurant in the village constantly. I really don't get it. The other big thing they're obsessed with here is magic mushrooms. Every restaurant has some so-called "happy" items on the menu. I've got a photo of the entire "happy" menu of one restaurant up in the Laos album http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/Laos/ 

It reads "Happy and Funny For You!" Indeed. It's amazing the things they can put mushrooms into no matter how wrong it sounds. The same restaurant's drink menu is entitled "Let's Get Drunk!" And that pretty much sums up this one horse tourist town. There's really not a whole lot to do here apart from watch Friends, get trippy and get drunk. Well it is a big outdoor place with kayaking, mountain biking and potholing. There are lots of caves to explore and there's this local activity called tubing where you sit into a tyre and float down the river stopping at river bars to buy beer. But unfortunately it's raining and even if it wasn't I've done all this outdoor stuff before and have no desire to waste my precious time here repeating myself so I think I will go to Ventiane, the capital of Laos, tomorrow. It's not supposed to be that nice a city but I have to pass through there anyway to get to the south of the country. The travel in between destinations is more fun than the destinations themselves sometimes and I'm ok with that.

The night before last, after finishing my last blog entry at about 10:30PM I left the cafe and began to mosey back to my guesthouse. I wasn't quite sure where it was but I figured it couldn't be that hard to find because it was only about a ten minute walk. I began to walk in what I later discovered was the opposite direction to my guesthouse. I hadn't really orientated myself with the streets yet having only spent about ten minutes walking in them since I arrived. I was about to turn back and try the other way when all of a sudden, all the street lights went out and it was pitch black. I groaned - I wouldn't even recognise my guesthouse now if I saw it! Then to make matters worse, almost on queue, it immediately began to rain...hard! I ran back the way I had came to ask another guest house I had seen for directions. They were just bolting the doors when I ran up panting like a madman and they opened the door suspiciously. They gave me some vague directions and I ran away again not really having a plan. I saw a pickup truck dropping off some tourists at another guest house and I caught the kid who was driving and asked him to take me to mine. He was a very nice young lad but didn't have much English. He wasn't sure where my guest house was and I tried to show it to him on a map. I didn't have any other options and yet I managed to haggle him down to a one euro fare by clapping our hands and waving fingers. He started the old truck with some difficulty. It was at this point that I noticed that they drive on the right side of the road in Laos which was rather strange after Thailand. I suppose it was a relic of French colonial rule. He spent about 20 minutes driving around asking various friends of his for directions. He would drive slowly down streets and ask "this it?" and I would shake my head helplessly unable to identify anything in the pitch black rain. Eventually he found it himself and actually pounded on the door for me while I waited in the truck. He woke up the lads inside to let me in and they came out with an umbrella to escort me in to the lobby which was lit by a candle. I gave him an extra 2,000 kip because I was so relieved. Apparently, the guesthouses lock their doors at 11PM! I thought the lights going out was a government enforced curfew and that I would get in trouble because I had heard about the strict pub closing times here (about 11 or 12 I think). It certainly would be a very effective way of eliminating antisocial behaviour. When there are no lights anywhere and it's late at night and you can't go to a pub or turn on some music the only thing you can really do is sleep. The electricty came back after an hour though - turns out it was just a run of the mill power cut - a fairly common occurance apparently. It was the biggest scare I've had so far though on this trip. I thought I would be outside shivering in the rain and the darkness for the night.

Despite the bad start, I do love this town. In fact it's my favourite so far. It's clearly the Cork of Laos. It's small, it's really laid back and everyone seems to know eachother. The views are so stunning and they are everywhere. I think they are so spoiled with awesome views here that they would very quickly take them for granted like we do at home. Endless mountains, huge sky, mysterious clouds in the mornings and that magic Mekong river. Yesterday I rented a bicycle and explored the streets with a breeze in my face. The French colonial architecture with all the pretty wooden shutters gives the place a perhaps false veneer of relative affluence. It certainly isn't the poverty stricken place I read about in my guide book but then again, this is one of the most popular towns on the tourist trail. It certainly seems much cleaner than Thailand. The yellow hammer and sickle of communism on the red background flies everywhere beside the Lao flag but there are lots of private businesses making a mint out of tourists. At one point I saw a stressed out goat trotting around the middle of a busy intersection with scooters flying around it from all directions. There are monasteries absolutely everywhere and monks walking around in their robes on all the streets. You wouldn't think it but there is a small Irish presence here because I've already seen three groups of Irish people. I caught a river taxi across the Mekong to the ghetto rural side of the river to climb up a mountain and see some old abandoned temples. It turned out to be much more expensive than I thought. I had to pay to get into each individual temple. I was followed up the mountain by a swarm of cheerful little children who "showed me" a temple and then demanded money before they got bored and ran off to play. I gave them a 1,000 Kip each (8c). Then the real guide (who was only about fourteen) took my on a big hike through the mountains to see all the other more remote abandoned temples. Afterwards I was really peeved that I had to pay him a whopping 7 euro! That's a night's accomodation and a big meal! He wouldn't budge on the price. The temples were a lot better than the hundreds of other temples I'd seen though because they were falling apart and completely deserted and I felt like Crocodile Dundee or something exploring long lost temple ruins that were hidden deep in mountainous jungle. The town is built around a mountain called Mount Phu Si which has a temple on the top so later that day, I climbed up to the top and got some amazing 360 views of the town and the surrounding countryside. Unfortunately, I am now having technical difficulties connecting my camera so I can't show you the beautiful shots I took up there. I haven't a clue how to fix it but I really hope it resolves itself because other wise I will have no way to show you any photos for the rest of the entire trip! The last of the photos that I managed to get up are at http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/Laos/ 

I really hope I have conveyed just how much I really love this town. Families' living rooms open out onto the streets, youths sit outside their shops picking at guitars, little children run around everywhere, people sing little songs to themselves as they walk and everyone smiles at you and says hello. Today I'm going swimming in a waterfall outside of town and then I leave for Vang Vieng tomorrow. I will be very sorry to say goodbye to this lovely town.

I'm in Luang Prabang, Laos! Another country scratched off the list, another visa in my passport! So far it seems like a smaller, more relaxed (dare I say backwards) and more off-the-beaten track country than Thailand, all of which are good things. But I should go back to the beginning. When I last left you, I was about to spend a day with a Buddhist monk in the countryside.

He picked me up in Chiang Mai in a beat up old pick-up truck driven by a friend. It had two very battered surf boards lashed to it and four big bags of fertilizer in the back so I had to hop in with the fertilizer and the surf boards and sit on my backpack, hugging my knees on the edge of the pickup as we bounced out through the countryside down little waterlogged dirt-tracks between rice fields. Everyone stared as we passed. We must have been quite a comical sight. It's not every day they see a little farang [FEN: foreigner - that's me] perched awkwardly on the back of an oul jalopy. Pongsa himself, that's the monk, cuts a rather comical figure himself by a farang's standards in his orange robes, with his little wizened face peering out from under an old-fashioned black umbrella. He's undoubtedly a wise old man though and not in a pop-psychology new-agey kind of way but in a very genuine and obvious way. We spent the evening talking about life and the universe and most of what he said seemed more commonsense than spiritual. A lot of it actually sounded quite Freudian. He talked about the subconscious and emotional triggers of childhood memories and sex being man's driving force for better or worse - he was convinced it was for worse. Most problems are mainly internal and can usually be solved internally by meditating on them and analyzing the causes for them.

We weren't staying in the monastery because Pongsa was staying in his rural retreat which is a small hut in the middle of a mango orchard. He had a spare hut right across the canal from his where I stayed. There was no electricity or running water and it was a very relaxing place to just chill out and think although it's hard to imagine this place being your home. That night I cooked my own supper of tea and rice on a gas stove and ate by candlelight. I felt so self-sufficient I wanted to beat my chest with my fists like a caveman who just killed a sabre-tooth tiger and made a boat out of it. At night there was nothing to see but the strange shilouettes of palms, the long flickering shadows cast by the candles and far away on the horizon, three red blinking lights. There was nothing to hear but the hiss of the falling rain, the shrill chorus of crickets puctuated by the bass croaking of bullfrogs and the soft plog of fish peeking above the canal water beside me and over all this, somewhere far over the rice fields, the faint sound of an old man singing Thai sean nos [FEN: old style traditional singing - the Thai equivalent is actually surprisingly similar to the Irish style - I actually thought I knew the song for a minute.] Eventually there was nothing to do but sleep peacefully.

I got up in the morning and Pongsa and I went out to the orchard to pick mangoes for breakfast, accompanied by his four adoring dogs. He went to great lengths to show me the most efficient way of peeling them. I cleaned out the rice pot from the night before with bamboo leaves and he escorted me through the paddy fields and down little dirt tracks until we got to the motorway where I could hail a bus back into town.

I caught a bus to the Lao border. It was a little old chrome bus with no air-conditioning and I was one of only two white people on the crowded bus. Crammed into the seat beside me were a young couple and their two-year old son who seemed discontented with something. He pouted and whined until his mother said something about the farang beside hime (that's me!) He stared at me with fear and tribulation in his eyes. I'm guessing his mother must have said that if he didn't behave himself the hairy dirty farang would steal him away back to his own barbarian land. Frankly I was tempted. The children here are the most beautiful children in the world. We drove through the jungle for hours. The old bus had to labour up steep mountain roads in first gear with the jungle canopy far below us and right beside the road. Night had fallen by the time we reached the little border town of Chiang Khong and the border was closed until the next morning. I checked into a bamboo guesthouse with a thatched roof. From the attached restaurant, I saw my first glimpse of the mighty Mekong River and of the twinkling lights of the Lao village on the other side - that awesome river rising in Lhasa, Tibet and flowing out into the Mekong Delta beyond Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, a world away. It was enchanting.

I was up earlier than necessary the following morning and after a hasty breakfast of chocolate pancakes, I strapped on my backpack and started walking the last kilometre to the border crossing. The border crossing was essentially a Thai office, a ferry ride across the river and a Lao office on the other side. I changed some of my Thai Baht to Lao Kip on the Lao side. Baht, Kip and US$ or combinations thereof are accepted in most places in Lao but it's better to have all three just in case. There  are about 12,000 Kip in a euro which is quite frankly just silly and quite possibly makes me a billionaire. The biggest note they have is 50,000 Kip or about 4euro. The smallest note I've seen is 1,000 Kip or about 8 cents. I haven't seen any coins yet and I hope they don't exist. What's the point in having an 8 cent note? You can't buy anything with it, even in this country. Having to juggle three foreign currencies in my head is quite taxing on the mind. Anyway I bought a ticket for a boat to Luang Prabang for the equivalent of about 20 euro which I think is a bit much even for a two day cruise. We pulled away from the pier about two hours late. It was worth the wait for the views though. Endless rolling hills of jungle for the Mekong to weave her majestic way between. Banks rising incredibly steeply on either side of the wide wonderful river until they reached the sky where huge billowing tufts of dazzlingly white clouds framed the peaks against a deep blue backdrop like crazy old ladies with really bad perms. Ahead of us lay miles and miles of untouched jungle draped in vines. To see even so much as a lone shack was notable. There were several little riverside hamlets but these were few and far between. At one we saw an elephant being used to haul a boat onto the bank.

We reached Pak Beng shortly before nightfall. This was to be our half-way overnight stop. It was a tiny village with each guesthouse's electricity coming from a generator which was only turned on between 7PM and 10PM. I allowed an excitable youth who went by the name of Pooloo to lead me to his dump of a guest house where I stayed for 2 euro. I told him he had good English but he disagreed saying he spoke good Tourist and tried to convince me to buy some opium. He spoke with great bravado of all the girlfriends he had and showed me pictures of tourists. I bade him good evening and went out to see if I could find a watering hole in this little town. He came tearing after me on an old scooter and I hoped on the back. He took me up the only street shouting "only one street here!" All his friends saw Pooloo with a farang in tow and laughed and pointed. He took me to his friend's bar. His friend was a pregnant 18 year old. He told me that it was normal for most Lao people to be married by 17/18 and to have a child by 18/19. I bought him a beer and he drove me back to my crappy low-ceilinged room with the holey mosquito net and faulty fan where I slept soundly.

The next morning we set sail again and at about 4PM the boat docked at Luang Prabang. I hopped out ignoring all the eager Tuk Tuk drivers and wandered around until I came to a guesthouse that was listed in my guidebook. I checked the room and it was luxurious by my standards. A private double room with a fan and actual walls and a real ceiling and a floor so clean that you could actually literally see yourself in it. For about 3 euro 50cents a night, I was happy to stay there. So here I am in Luang Prabang, not having really explored it yet. It's a real city by Lao standards but is only a bit bigger than Ballincollig with a population of 26,000. Who knows what delights Lao has in store for me tomorrow. The last of the photos from Thailand should be up here now: http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/Thailand/ and the photos from Laos are at http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/Laos/ 

Woah! What an exhausting and rewarding few days! I feel like I've done more in the past few days than I have in my whole life and yet I've also relaxed and enjoyed myself more than I have in a long time. I set out two days ago to explore the jungle. I was picked up in a little saangthaw which is like a pick-up truck with benches in the back and a canopy. On my expedition I was joined by two Canadians, four German girls, an Irish couple, a Dutch couple and four Koreans. Our guide was a happy-go-lucky gaptoothed little guy wearing a bandana and tattered army fatigues that looked like they'd been stolen from a dead soldier's body. He went by the name of Jungle Joe and we all took an instant liking to him. Our first stop was an elephant camp where we were to ride around on the enormous beasts. I honestly never thought I would ride an elephant. I had only ridden a horse for the first time the previous month so this was a big step up. Their excrement is about the size of my head - it has to be seen to be believed. To get onto them, they are driven to elephant docks. You stand on the platform and wait for them to pull in and then you just hop on. We took off but no sooner had we done so when the elepant stopped and reached his trunk back towards me, pointing his huge nostrils at me expectantly and breathing a terrible stench on me so hard that my t-shirt rippled in the wind. He expected to be fed a banana every few steps in return for carrying us. Bags of bananas were available for the equivalent of 50cents each. We gave him a banana, he grasped it frantically in his trunk, flung it into his mouth and immediately swung his trunk back up again for another one. Over the course of the elephant trek we must have fed him about a hundred bananas. At one point the driver switched seats with me and I moved from the chair on the elephant's back to the crown of his head with my legs wedged behind his big flapping ears. With every step I could feel the immense weight of each shoulder blade moving up and down behind me and there was nothing to hold on to I just planted my hands on the top of his head among his sharp prickly hairs and hoped he didn't get grumpy. It was with a mixed feeling of accomplishment and relief that I stepped back onto the elephant dock at the end of the trip.

Then we began a long and arduous journey on foot through the mountainous jungle terrain. We were going uphill most of the way and I sweated buckets. Along the way we saw a veritable cornucopia of butterflies so brightly coloured that they were almost fluorescent. We also saw a big scorpion disappear into his hole and the massivest spider I have ever seen in the wild. It was gargantuan. His web spanned the distance between two trees and when one lad poked it with his finger it didn't break but just bounced back. We also ran into a herd of water buffalo and we sent them running with their little wooden cowbells clacking around their necks. Now and then we would come to a clearing which was planted with rice and there was a shack at the edge of it and some friendly dogs would run out along the ridges of the paddy field to investigate us. Every now and then, Jungle Joe stopped to pick mushrooms and put them in a bag. He heard some of us exclaiming "Oh my God!" now and then as tourists inevitably do and he started saying "Oh my Buddha!" and bursting out into maniacal hyena-like laughter. I'm quite convinced he was a little bit mad. He announced his love for us all and confirmed that his love was "big rike mountain, rong rike river". In the jungle, he was king. He knew all the pathways and all the plants and we trusted him to guide us to the hilltribe village for which we were bound, and that he did.

Our hut was located on the edge of the village overlooking a valley full of paddy fields. It was spectacular. This was a real honest-to-God village full of real hill-tribe folk with their own language and culture. We set out to explore the village. We felt really awkward walking down their street as they peered out at the rich white folk with the flashing cameras from their doorways. We really felt like we were invading. They lived in thatched wooden huts on stilts. Pigs, cattle, chickens, cocks, ducks and dogs all loitered around under the houses and generally ignored us. Many of the houses had solar panels attached for electricity although I doubt they could provide enough power for more than a few light bulbs. These people lived a simple life growing their own rice, rearing their own cattle and pigs and they had everything they needed. They were poor by our standards but they seemed to be happy enough with their meagre existence and sure why wouldn't they be. There was obviously a great sense of community. It goes without saying that everyone in the village knew everyone else. They had their own school up there on the hill where all the children went. We've lost the ability to live like that in Ireland and it's a pity. Once you get broadband you can never go back. Children hid behind their mothers' skirts or clung to their fathers' legs as we passed while the parents smiled welcomingly. They make a bit of money out of us after all. The girls here get married when they're about fifteen or sixteen and have kids by the time they're seventeen so it's a bit like Limerick in a way (I'm only joking Limerick people...take it easy!) Unmarried girls wear white dresses. Some of the village folk helped Jungle Joe cook us up a big dinner of rice and vegetables...I ate a lot of rice to make up for the absence of meat. Jungle Joe taught us all how to say grace in Thai. Afterwards, when night fell, all the village children came down to our camp and lit a fire. They all sang songs in about four different languages and welcomed us in English with a rehearsed chant. They danced around the fire and dragged all of us out to dance with them. Needless to say I got my groove ON! Then they insisted we sing a song. The only song that everyone in the group knew was Happy Birthday. Eventhough it was nobody's birthday, we sang it anyway for Jungle Joe just because he was such a legend. It was sung in English, German, Korean, Dutch and finally Irish! Then it was time for the children to go to bed but before they went, they all formed an orderly queue and lined up to shake everyone's hand, the first child holding a tip bucket. On Jungle Joe's command, they all informed us in unison that their love for us was "big rike mountain, rong rike river" although I doubt they had any idea what they were trying to say. Then we lit some candles and Jungle Joe put on a little magic show for us which was quickly followed by a drinking game. We agreed that it would be better to use ordinary whiskey rather than the acidic "moo chai" (moonshine). If you lost a game a second time, you had your face painted with some soot from the bottom of a frying pan. We had quite a night and Jungle Joe became quite inebriated. I slept like a log under a mosquito net full of holes.

The next morning we were woken up bright and early by half a dozen crowing cocks to enjoy a great breakfast of pineapple, boiled eggs and tea and toast that were made over an open fire. While we ate, an adorable little puppy stood at our feet gazing up longingly at us with his big mournful eyes and wagging his little tail hopefully. Then we began our long trek back down through the jungle to a river where we were going rafting. Unfortunately we didn't have real rafts. We just had a few bamboo poles lashed together with strips of rubber. I was at the back with a big bamboo pole that I was supposed to push us down the river with. I wasn't very good at it so I left it to the professional Thai guy at the front of the raft. We were very tired, wet, dirty and happy when we finally got back to Chiang Mai that evening. That night I explored Chiang Mai's Night Bazaar with the two Canadians. There was so much great stuff there to buy but no way to get it home. All the photos from the past few days are now up at: http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/Thailand/ 

Now I'm about to head off to a Buddhist monastery out in the country to stay there for a day and hopefully extract some pearls of wisdom from the monks there. Then it's off to the Lao border the next day. Laos will involve a big step down in living standards. It is officially a third world or "least developed" country, 85% of which is just uninhabited jungle. The US dropped hundreds of thousands of bombs on it back in the Vietnam war and many of them lie around unexploded waiting to be stepped on. For this reason development is slow and a lot of land is just useless. The government is communist and you can't say anything bad about them or you'll disappear. For this reason I won't be discussing politics or democracy with the locals or on this blog while I'm there. I will only be allowed to stay in the country for fifteen days which should be just enough time to make my way down the length of the Mekong River to Cambodia. Because Laos is technologically slow, I don't know when I will be able to update again. All the major cities will have internet cafes but travel in between them is slow so there could be several days without an update. The next major city I will be in is Luang Prabang and I will probably get there in three to four days depending on bus and boat schedules. Laos is a former French colony so I am looking forward to dining on croissants for breakfast for the next few weeks and I am expecting to see some beautiful sights because the entire country is a UNESCO-listed heritage site. Therefore until I write again...peace out.

There are two things that initially seem very strange about Thailand when you arrive and within a matter of days you take them for granted. One is the overwhelming military presence. Soldiers are everywhere in full formal military regalia. They are usually only armed with sidearms if at all but they do so many unsoldier-like jobs. They patrol public areas, they give directions, they pour drinks at tourist sites, they check tickets on trains - it seems the Thai military is of the "jack of all trades" variety rather than the highly specialized kind. It occurs to me now that since I have arrived in Chiang Mai I haven't seen a single soldier which would never have happened in Bangkok. Maybe it's just a Bangkok thing. The second strange phenomena is the presence of a Buddhist shrine and a framed picture of the King in almost every home, shop, restaurant, hotel and public building. The King is like the Sacred Heart picture at home. It's very weird.

Last night I went to a traditional Thai dinner show where you had to sit on the ground and eat off the floor - well the food was in bowls obviously. I was brought a random selection of Thai food, a surprising amount of which was actually delicious and not too spicy to handle. There was far more than I could have eaten. While we ate, traditional Thai dancers put on a show on a stage while a Thai trad band played. They got random farang [FEN: Thai word for foreigner with variable derogatoriness] up on stage to join in and they looked like complete idiots. Then we went outside to a "campfire area" where they got local hilltribe people to do traditional tribal dances and music and that was actually very cool. They play very unique instruments, some of which are made of bamboo but don't sound anything like a flute.

I spent the whole day today on a Thai massage course. We covered the back, shoulders, neck, legs, feet, head and face. I will now be giving out massages for a tener a go. Visa and Mastercard are welcome and I'm accepting bookings now.

Finally, the one question that seems to be on everyone's lips whenever someone gets back from abroad seems to be "how much is the drink"? Let me put you out of your suspense: beer wavers around the 2.50euro mark and Guinness (if you can get it) is pretty much the same as it is at home - just over 4euro - I have no idea whether it tastes the same so please don't ask me when I get home.

Tomorrow I'm off to the jungle for a long two day walk and I'll be staying in a hut in a hilltribe village overnight so there might not be an internet cafe. Then again...you never know. I heard of a village in Lao that doesn't even have electricity but there's an enterprising young gentleman there with a solar-powered laptop and a satellite phone that he can hook up to it and he charges something like 9euro an hour for internet use. New photos at: http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/Thailand/ That's all for now!

I spent last night on a sleeper train to Chiang Mai and after fourteen hours I finally got here. When I woke up this morning and pulled back the curtains we were deep in the jungle! Wow! This was real untouched jungle. I'd never been anywhere like this before. Right outside the window were trees and plants I'd never seen before. Huge vines clung to tree trunks and bamboo competed with the trees for sunlight. Sometimes the jungle would fall away below us as we wound around the side of a mountain and we could see miles and miles of untamed jungle. Sometimes a little river or stream would meander up to the tracks only to disappear once more into the jungle from whence it came. Every few miles there were little clusters of tin-roofed shacks nestled amongst the tress or clutching to the side of a hill. Some of these even had their own little train station, none of which we stopped at. Eventually, the jungle gave way to rice paddies, some of which already contained straw-hatted farmers, bent to their morning chores. The train startled a few stray hump-backed, floppy-eared cows which lumbered away as quickly as possible.

This is the only way to travel by the way. I was only in a 2nd class sleeper car so it isn't divided up into cabins. It's just two straight rows of bunks on either side of the aisle with curtains for privacy. The top bunk stows away during the day and the bottom one converts into two comfortable seats facing each other with an optional table in between. It was the most comfortable bed I had since Australia. My train buddies were a sullen, bearded, Dostoyevsky-reading English youth and an aloof middle-aged French couple. It was a quiet trip.

Chiang Mai is a great city. I like it more than Bangkok. It seems cleaner and more relaxed although this wouldn't be difficult. It feels like a great city to go to college in with loads of cheap bars and restaurants and indeed there are two major universities here. It's a small city by most standards although it's bigger than Dublin. It's clearly Thailand's Cork and I could actually see myself living here with a bit of a stretch of the imagination. The city center is the "old city" and is surrounded by an actual moat although few of the old city walls are still standing inside it and course there are plenty of bridges going in and out now. The city has sprawled out beyond it's original boundaries and now the moat surrounds only about half the city centre. There are temples everywhere! There's also a lot of backpackers but not so many that it feels like a tourist town. The temperature is a lot more bearable this far north too and you could get away without air conditioning. I'm staying in a guesthouse with my own private room and balcony for the equivalent of 4euro a night. It's the most basic room I've ever stayed in with no frills whatsoever and no attempt to make it look nice but the room and its two-inch mattress and electric fan are perfectly adequate for my needs.

In order to explore the city, I decided to take my life into my hands and actually rent a moped. Now I've only actually been on one of these once before, and on that particular occasion I drove it straight into a wall. Therefore it was quite brave of me to try it out again and this time not on abandoned country roads but on very busy streets in a strange city. Brave or stupid I hear you ask? Well actually it was an ideal place to learn because the Thai rules of the road seem to be more like general guidelines which as fortunate as I didn't know the rules of the road. At one point I was hooted at for actually stopping at a red light so I didn't bother after that. You just have to keep your wits about you and figure out the one way system. Well I didn't crash it anyway but I did figure out how to work it competently and drove all around the city streets randomly having no idea where I was going but just taking it all in. I felt it was ok to do this in such a small city and I did manage to get back to where I started without too much difficulty. No license was required or anything! They're really not that difficult to work anyway. So it all worked out ok, nothing bad happened and I live happily ever after...wouldn't it have made a much more interesting story if I'd caused a ten car pile-up though?

After that hair-raising experience I needed to relax so I got myself a Thai massage from an ancient lady with a saggy face for the equivalent of 5euro. Then I went to eat in a place called U.N. Irish Pub which was supposedly a tribute to Irish UN soldiers but should have been called UnIrish Pub because there wasn't a single Irish person in there. You can't just serve Guiness and call yourself an Irish pub. I was in one in Melbourne that actually went to the trouble of importing Taytos - now that's a real Irish pub. Sin e anois! New photos: http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/Thailand/

What a mindblowing few days! I've crammed so much activity into so short a space of time I think I might get sick! The stray dogs on the streets here seem genuinely unconcerned with all the activity around them and them lie listless in the middle of the pavement. Pedestrians actually have to step right over them. The road workers here are no better. They actually have a big canopy that contains lots of hammocks for them to "work" in...seriously! The county council workers at home could pick up a few tricks from these lads. Anyway, the night before last I went to see the Thailand v Australia Asia Cup match in the national soccer stadium. It was rush hour so getting a taxi would have been a waste of time. I had no choice but to take my life into my hands and catch a moped taxi. These are definately the fastest way to get from A to B in Bangkok but they drive as if they have nine lives! My driver was a complete maniac, he weaved in and out between lanes of traffic with little concern for the fate of innocent wing mirrors. Then to make matters worse, it started to rain. The thing about the rain here in Bangkok is that when it rains, it pours...torrentially...for several hours. And this happens everyday, usually just in time for the 5PM rush hour. Of course the traffic gets even heavier when it rains so if you want to take a taxi and stay nice and dry, be prepared to remain stationary for several hours. The only option is to take a moped and get drenched. By the time I finally got off at the stadium, I was still muttering the Our Father under my breath, my knuckles were white from gripping the bar on the back of the moped and I was soaked to the skin. Surprisingly, since then I have been taking lots of moped rides and I'm quite used to it now. Sometimes I only hold on with one hand - that's how cool I am! I had to walk about a mile around the stadium to find the entrance. I would have walked farther if two Australian lads hadn't stopped me and said I was going the wrong way. By the time I finally got to the gate I just didn't care anymore - I couldn't get any wetter so I just waded through collosal puddles. At least I wasn't cold and I wasn't going to catch a cold because as soon as I got inside I started steaming. The atmosphere inside was electric. The Thais really make a huge party out of a soccer match and the crowd reacted as one to every move that was made on the pitch. The floodlights illuminated the raindrops like diamonds falling from heaven. Australia predictably won.

The following day I got a two hour bus ride out to a place called Ancient City. This is a huge national park of sorts that contains loads of amazing Thai architecture. You're given a bicycle and you cycle around the grounds at your leisure. The buildings are functional and are actually used for their intended purpose be they temples, shops or restaurants. Best of all, the place isn't swarming with toursits. It's practically deserted because it's so far out of Bangkok. I'll say no more about it because I took plenty of photos which I hope do the amazing architecture justice.

That evening, I went to Lumphini Boxing Stadium to see some Thai Boxing. The fighters in the warm up events couldn't have been more than fourteen years old and it was absolutely vicious. In one of the fights, a fighter was knocked out and had to be stretchered off. The guy who did it took no notice, showed no remorse and pranced around the ring with his fists in the air while the crowd cheered. It reminded me of nothing else but a cock fight. Most of the ring side seats were occupied by white tourists such as myself because the ringside seats are outrageously priced (50 euro). In fact there are no other seats - everywhere else is standing which is why I didn't get a cheaper seat. Behind the chickenwire were thousands of Thai men shouting and shaking their fists and placing bets on the spur of the moment. It was like an underground fight pit that you only see on TV or in a beat-em-up video game. The hot Bankok air was circulated by dozens of ceiling fans and you could actually see the sweat flying in all directions. By the time the main event came on, the crowd was mad. They would all roar with every punch and kick and at one point I thought there would be a riot when someone seemed to be angrily accusing a coach of fixing a fight. The amount of money involved in this racket is huge. The admission prices are insane and there's even more money being made in gambling. The fighters themselves see very little of it with half their fee going to their coach. The promoter gets all the money. I feel really bad for these fighters who literally risk their lives for a few hundred euro. After the tense spectacle of the fight night, I retired to a laid-back, moodily-lit jazz bar where I was led to a second floor alcove where you take off your shoes and sit on cushions on the ground at low tables, looking down at the band below.

The following morning I was up before the sun at 5:30 AM. I staggered down the alley and mangy mongrels stared me down as I passed. Several scrawny chickens fluttered out of my path clucking indignantly like a disapproving aunt. Cocks crowed somewhere nearby heralding the imminent arrival of daybreak. What free range poultry were doing in the middle of a busy city is beyond me and irrelevant. I found a yard full of deserted taxis. There was no one around apart from and old woman and two boys, one of whom was on a bicycle with an ugly pug-faced dog in the basket. They didn't speak a word of English but after concerted efforts on my part I explained that I wanted a taxi and the old woman started screaming till a taxi driver appeared. Before he started the ignition for the first time that day, he spent a minute praying with his palms together to the shrine of Buddha on the dashboard for a safe day's driving. I was being driven to the bus station where I would take a two-hour bus ride to a floating market out in a satellite town of Bangkok. The bus was crowded with dozens of uniformed school children standing in the aisle looking like girl scouts with their little scarves around their necks. When we finally got to the floating market I was led to an outrageously priced private long-tailed boat captained by a gap-toothed Thai man with no English. He chauffered me around the canal system. People really do live on the side of canals and I saw a few wrinkly old women squatting on the banks washing themselves in the filthy water. Many of the boats and canal-side stalls were selling craft trinkets and souvenirs which I had no interest in. To me this was a floating buffet and I wanted to eat everything. I set out a spread on the stern of the boat and sat down crosslegged to enjoy it. I had a bag of fluffy red berries of some kind, a box of rice, some fish, a duck egg, satayed pork on skewers and two glass bottles of Sprite at my feet. Everyone who saw me stuffing my face with a big grin couldn't help but smile and ask if I was enjoying myself, which I clearly was.

When I got back to Bangkok in the afternoon, I made my way to a Thai Boxing gym to try my hand at it myself and see what I was made of.  The gym was down an extremely narrow alley and was open plan so that people who got lost down the alley would wander in and watch for a while. I got absolutely soaked in sweat but I wasn't thrown in the ring with an experienced Thai fighter and told to do my best as I had feared. It was a good work out but nothing I wouldn't get at UCC Kickboxing Club! I had hoped to learn some handy moves that I might be able to use in Tae Kwon-Do but any new moves I learned would be illegal in Tae Kwon-Do. And that, folks, is what I have been doing for the past few days. I think I've pretty much seen as much as I can take of Bangkok now so I will probably mosey on down to the train station tomorrow night and see if I can't get a night train to Chiang Mai which is about a ten hour trip into the mountainous jungle of north Thailand. Chiang Mai will serve as a base from which to explore the jungle and I hope to meet some remote hill tribes who have been untouched by civilisation...apart from the busloads of tourists who come to take photos of them. But now I am very tired as I have been up since 5:30AM  so I need to get back to the apartment to sleep. There are loads of new photos up here for your viewing pleasure now: http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/Thailand/