Whistle Stop Tour of Bago

The morning after our pilgrimage to My Kyaiktiyo we jumped on a bus heading west, to Bago, a dusty town along a busy highway. With only one afternoon to see all that Bago had to offer we happily accepted a tuk-tuk tour of the sights with a young man named Tupee.

Tupee was 23 and an economics student. He told me that in order to pay for his education he alternates between one year of study and one year working as a tuk-tuk driver and tour guide.

He whizzed us around the city’s temples, most of which were not worthy of note. The one stupa offering a panorama of the city was only open to men, so Ric went up for the view while I cursed the backward government from under the shade of a tree. We visited a monastery where a 17ft long python is worshipped as the reincarnation of a monk. Crowds of locals were throwing money at the oversized snake while we looked on in amazement.

Shwemawdaw Paya Pagoda, the bricks on the right are part of the dome that collapsed in 1930.

The lucrative python.

The tour ended at the central market, which was the highlight for me. I’ve seen a lot of markets around the world but none compare to the market scenes in Burma. The sights, smells and sounds are so overwhelming that I felt dizzy after a few minutes walking around: brightly coloured flowers and vegetables, unidentifiable beige things frying in a wok inches off the ground, stale stagnant puddles of fish guts, splatters of the red beetlenut juice men spit out along the muddy path, babies sucking on the dirty nipples of mothers sitting amongst sacks of rice, shouting, motorbikes squeezing through impossibly narrow spaces, half-naked children drawing in the dirt, women balancing huge heavy baskets on their heads… it was pure sensory overload, fascinating, and very photogenic.

Girls with faces painted with sandalwood paste walk through Bago market.

Tupee proved himself quite the economist by helping us avoid paying the government fees that tourists must pay to visit Bago… and then asking us to give the $20 directly to him instead! Along with the $10 he charged us for the tour he made a tidy profit from us in just a couple of hours but I don’t hold it against him. I’d much rather our dollars went towards Tupee’s education than into the hands of a military junta.

We finished the day with chicken biryani from a roadside café and ice cream from an up-market tourist restaurant where Ric tried the local ABC Stout, which is 8% proof!

We Stayed At…

Emperor Hotel; one of the better hotels in town according to the Lonely Planet but it was dark, dirty and a rat went into my backpack and ate my apple!! £12/$20 for a double en suite, rat included. 

The Golden Rock (Mt Kyaiktiyo)

I was a bit worried that the Golden Rock (Mt Kyaiktiyo) would be a bit like the Plain of Jars: an excruciatingly long journey to the middle of nowhere, for an altogether underwhelming sight.

Fortunately, the journey – although long – was not so excruciating and the sight was quite impressive.

We left our hotel in a taxi at 6am and drove to an office on the edge of town. Here we were transferred into a pick up truck along with 20 others and were ferried even further out of town. Finally arriving at the bus station, we settled in for the three hour journey to Kinpun. After lunch in Kipun we climbed onto the back of a huge lorry, sitting on narrow wooden planks that served as benches. We thought the lorry was fully when 30 of us sat waiting, shoulder to shoulder, but more passengers kept on arriving and somehow the Burmese people on the benches seemed to get smaller and smaller, creating space for the new arrivals. For forty minutes we bounced up and down on the back of the lorry, higher and higher up the mountain side, knees wedged firmly together, hanging on for dear life. 

Trucking.

The Golden Rock is a large gilded boulder that balances on the top of a mountain, seemingly defying gravity. According to legend, the boulder balances in its precarious position thanks to a precisely placed hair of the Buddha.

On arriving at the top of the mountain I first noticed the foul smell of rubbish. It was like standing on a landfill. A quick look over the edge of the railings revealed the source; the entire mountainside was a sea of plastic food containers, bottles and carrier bags. A depressing find in such an otherwise beautiful spot.

Kyaiktiyo is one of the most popular religious pilgrimage sites in all of Myanmar and thousands of Buddhists flock here to watch the sunset over the magic rock. We visited during peak pilgrimage season (November to April, the cool months) and the plaza surrounding the shrine was packed with worshippers, whole families, camped out under blankets and bed sheets like kids in pretend fortresses. The pilgrims alone were an unusual enough sight to maintain my attention, especially the children who followed us around giggling and saying hello.

Annoyingly, women aren’t allowed close to the rock, or in certain areas with the better views. As a tourist and a feminist I was mildly disgruntled by this, I can’t imagine how outraged I’d feel if I’d travelled hundreds of miles on a pilgrimage to be told I could only worship this holiest of rocks from within a 50m radius from behind a tree! Gender segregation is not common of Buddhism, I haven’t seen it anywhere else, it’s something the government has imposed.

Kyaiktiyo itself is indeed impressive, glistening in the sun, threatening to fall at any time. The views over the surrounding valleys are also stunning; it’s just a shame about the litter.

Men apply gold leaf to the rock for good luck while women stay behind the railings.

We Stayed At…

Emerald Villa Hotel: Not a villa, just a shabby room full of ants. Convenient location for the bus, terrible attached restaurant. £12/$20 for a double with shared bathroom.

Taman Negara

Kuala Tahan is a horrible little town. The accommodation is poor and expensive and the five floating restaurants on the bank of the river must surely be competing to see who can produce the most revolting food. It's one redeeming feature is it's location on the edge of Taman Negara National Park: home to the oldest rain forest in the world.

View of Kuala Tahan and the horrible floating restaurants.

While we didn't like the town, which was a shame after such a long journey to reach it, we absolutely loved trekking in the rain forest. Around 40% of flora and fauna in the world can be found in Taman Negara, as well as more than 25% of insect species. The sheer size and density of the plant life was incredible.

This tree is MASSIVE.

We shunned the offer of an [expensive] guided tour and set off alone to explore one of the more accessible treks up to a jungle canopy walkway and down a mountain past some nasty leeches.

The walk along the canopy was not for the faint hearted, it was high, narrow and wobbly. As we shuffled from tree to tree, grasping at the thin ropes, we occasionally got brave enough to look down at the dense undergrowth, or up at the towering emergent trees.

From the canopy we continued up to the top of a small mountain (800m) and then started our descent down the other side. While the way up was a popular tourist path with a man-made walkway, the way down was much more natural and saw us climbing over felled trees, slipping in muddy bogs and being attacked by leeches. 

Descent into the jungle.

Leeches are horrible things that look like very fast, agile slugs. They stick to your legs and suck your blood and are really difficult to remove. Ric found six around his ankles while I only managed four. 

In addition to leeches we saw some fantastic wildlife in the jungle. This tapir was snoozing just a meter away from our path:

Tapir

I've never seen a tapir before, let alone a wild one, so it was a fantastic spot. It looks like a pig crossed with an elephant and coloured like a panda, such a weird looking beast. 

Also a short distance from our path was this poisonous viper which we would have walked straight past had a local guide not pointed it out to us. After seeing him we were much more wary of where we put our feet:

We saw monkeys jumping from tree to tree above us and a monitor lizard run straight across the path in front of us. I thought we would have had to go much further into the jungle to see so much wildlife but we were really lucky.

The trek took about four hours in total and was very easy, even in the intense humidity. 

We Stayed At...
Tahan Guest House: one of the cheapest places in town at 40ringit (£8) and also one of the nicest, set back away from the town in a quiet garden, rooms have balconies and en suite bathrooms. 
How To Get To...
Taman Negara: We travelled from Melaka to Kuala Lumpur (3hrs, 13ringit) and then changed onto a bus heading to Jerantut (4hrs, 18ringit), where we spent the night. The next day we took a local minibus to Tembeling Jetty (20 mins, 5ringit) and from there we took a boat upriver to Kuala Tahan (2.5hrs, 35ringit). 

A Food Tour of Singapore

As we spent most of our time and money on food in Singapore, it seems only right that I dedicate a post to Singaporean cuisine. The city state is a melting pot of different cultures, religions and people, and this is reflected in the endlessly exciting and delicious local cooking.

First and foremost, chicken rice. If this is not the national dish then it should be. We made sure it was the first thing we ate in Singapore. It sounds so simple but it tastes so good. The rice is cooked in the chicken stock with herbs, the melt-in-your-mouth chicken is served in a sweet jus. I could eat it everyday.

A chicken rice feast with couchsurfing friends.

While in Singapore we met up with two old friends, Weizhao and Xiu Wen, who we first met in Arequipa, Peru, three and a half years ago. Weizhao and Xiu Wen, native Singaporeans of Chinese heritage, took us on an eating tour of some of the finest, cheapest and weirdest dishes around.

We started in Old Airport Road Hawker Centre. A hawker centre is essentially a food court, a sprawling, covered dining area with hundreds of stalls, selling thousands of dishes. We spent a lot of time in the Old Airport Road centre trying to eat as many local delicacies as possible but we barely scratched the surface. With over 200 different stalls each selling a minimum of 5 different dishes, it would take years to sample everything. But we did try.

As we sat drinking our morning coffees waiting for our friends, a local lady started talking to us and insisted we sample her lunch. Her husband joined the conversation and soon hurried off to buy more food to share with us. This was to be a continuing theme in Singapore; the locals love their food, talking about food, and encouraging willing tourists like us, to eat it. Our first course with these friendly strangers consisted of:

Cuttlefish, bean curd and veggies in hoi sin sauce

Cockles with vinegar-chilli sauce (not even Ric enjoyed this one)

Jellied pork knuckle

Not your typical breakfast.

Breakfast.

Weizhao and Xiu Wen joined us in the hawker centre and brought a seemingly endless supply of weird and wonderful Singaporean-Chinese dishes to our table. Just as most Chinese restaurants in England sell a hybrid of English-Chinese cooking, Singaporean-Chinese food has its own distinct style and flavours. Our second breakfast comprised:

Pig stomach, large intestine and small intestine in a sweet soy sauce

Hokkien Mee - Thin noodles with prawns in a creamy seafood sauce

Flat noodles with cockles in dark soy sauce

Wide noodle soup

The dreaded intestines course.

Admittedly I wasn’t too keen on most of the fishy dishes but Ric loved them. This was my second time eating pig intestine and although our friends assured us it was the best in Singapore, and the queue for the modest stall confirmed this, it still didn’t win me over. I’ll stick to pork chops from now on. Fortunately, next up was the dessert course:

Red rice pudding and coconut milk

Sea coconut and jelly over ice

Cendol noodles (which are sweet and green) with beans and coconut milk

Ric chosing dessert.

After a heavy and offaly breakfast we left the hawker centre in search of something more to my taste – gin! The Raffle’s Hotel, founded in 1887, is the birthplace of the famous cocktail, the Singapore Sling, invented in 1915. The hotel was once the epicentre of cosmopolitan life for wealthy British expats during Singapore’s 140 years as a British colony. Today it remains one of the most prestigious hotels in the city, although fortunately for us, the infamous Long Bar is open to the riffraff public.

At S$35 (£17.50) a cocktail, to say that the drinks are overpriced is an understatement. The mix of pineapple juice, cherry purée and gin was indeed delicious, and the bar, with its colonial mahogany interior and old mechanical fans, was an enjoyable place to spend a couple of hours rubbing our sweaty shoulders with the upper echelons of society. Nice, but far too expensive to repeat the experience. We made sure we upheld the bar’s centuries old tradition of throwing our discarded peanut shells straight onto its five star floor, much to the astonishment and discomfort of our friends, who proved far too Singaporean to concede to dropping litter.

Singapore Sling.

We moved on to Long Beach King Restaurant for our next feast, a Singapore speciality:

Chilli crab

And for non seafood lovers (me):

Beef and blackbean noodles

The enormous crab, which it turns out is from Sri Lanka rather than Singapore, is cooked in a sweet chilli, tomato and egg sauce, with hot bread buns for dipping. It was delicious, as were the noodles.

Chilli crab.

As the evening progressed Weizhao and Xiu Wen shared a conspiratory smile and lead us to eat the so-called “King of Fruit”:

The durian

With a smell of sulphurous rotting fruit mixed with sweaty socks it’s no wonder that most tourists steer well clear of these oversized beasts. You can smell them from 50m away and they are banned in hotels and on public transport across Asian. Yet all Asian people love them. With plastic gloves to protect our hands we gave it a try. The taste, unbelievably, is worse than the smell: an overpowering flavour of overripe onion, rotting fruit and feet, with a creamy, slimy texture. It was worse than the intestines. After our first and final taste we watched in fascinated horror as Weizhao and Xiu Wen polished it off, savouring every morsel. If I ever start to enjoy durian please instruct the embassy to have me evacuated out of Asia, it’s a sign I’ve been here too long.

The King of Fruits.

Finally, for a late supper and for something to rid us of the stale-fart durian taste, we went for dim sum:

Century old egg in rice porridge

Pissing beef ball soup

Fried pork and celery dumplings

Steamed bbq pork rolls

Fried prawn rolls

Chicken wings in hoi sin sauce

The black runny eggs in the rice porridge were fortunately not a century old but the real reason they’re black is surely worse: they’re dipped in ash and then soaked in horse urine, yummy! On the other hand, the pissing beef balls were urine-free.

Dim sum.

The next day Ric and I returned to Old Airport Road to continue our gluttonous food tour alone, valiantly ploughing through an obscene amount of food:

Lor Mee – noodles, chicken, pork and egg in a thick meaty gravy (a local favourite, the queue is ten people deep at all times)

Carrot cake (neither carrot, nor cake! An omelette made with white radish)

Kaya toast (coconut jam and a thick slab of salted butter on toast)

Beef on rice

Mango cheese mousse

Carrot cake omelette.

For lunch we went to Tekka Hawker Centre in Little India to sample some Indian-influenced Singapore specialities:

Curry puff (a curry pasty)

Tulang

Mutton masala

Aloo gobi (vegetable curry)

Naan breads

Burfy (Indian sweets made from milk and clarified butter)

In Little India we were once again surrounded by friendly locals who were happy to meet foreigners enjoying their local food. Everyone wanted to present their favourite dish to us, tell us what to eat, where to eat and how to eat it. The tulang is a special Singaporean-Indian dish of mutton bones in a bright red chilli sauce. To eat it you use a straw to suck the marrow from the bones. It’s a tasty, rich, high-cholesterol, messy affair that left us with stained orange fingers.

Messy tulang.

Tekka hawker centre, Little India.

To complete our eating extravaganza, our couchsurfing hosts prepared a meal for us the night before we left. Philippine host Charlene cooked a traditional meal from her country while Indian host PJ made lemon and ginger ade and rotis.

For us Singapore was a blow out of interesting new foods from many different origins. In a way, the diversity of the food, the kindness of the people and fun we had eating with the kind people pretty much sums up Singapore. 

Phillipine meal with our couchsurfing friends.

Chiang Mai: White Water Rafting

About an hour and a half out of Chiang Mai is a lush mountain valley which I will refer to as Tourist Valley. I don't know the actual name of this area but it runs along the Mae Tang River.

Here you can do just about any and every activity offered by the tour agencies in Chiang Mai: trekking, bamboo rafting, quad biking, white water rafting, elephant trekking/riding/bathing/feeding, hill tribe visit, home stays, purpose-built village visits, zip-lining... It's like Disney World only there are dozens, if not hundreds, of different tour companies that operate in the valley. The valley has been completely transformed into a tourist zone, there's even a fake village where 'long necked' women sit around posing at looms waiting for visitors to come and take pictures of them. Another tourist pointed out that concentrating all these activities to one area is probably better for environment than having tourists run amok over a wider expanse of jungle.

Inevitably, with eight days in Chiang Mai and nothing much to occupy us, we found ourselves being transported by minibus to Tourist Valley.

We booked to go white water rafting with Chiang Mai Adventures. The trip promised grade four rapids; previously Ric and I have both rafted up to grade three rapids so we were excited by the prospect of a more exhilarating trip. It did not disappoint.

The rapids were great; throwing us into the air as we plunged down waterfalls, bouncing us up over rocks and soaking us with crashing waves of river water. The scenery was beautiful too; tropical jungle of both sides, we even saw an elephant crossing the river in front of us, close enough to touch.

The agency even provided photos for us: 

Cost: 1,200 Baht each (should have been 1,400 but we asked for a little discount). Includes: transport to and from hotel, lunch, safety talk, photos, experienced guide.

Chiang Mai: Siam Rice Cooking Class

Thai food is without a doubt some of the best in the world. Spicy, creamy and full or fresh crunchy veg, I never get tired of eating it. We've been planning to do Thai cooking class since the start of the trip and found some quality, cheap courses in Chiang Mai.

Ready to cook up a storm.

We started with a trip to the market where our guide-come-chef talked us through the piles of exotic herbs, spices and unusual vegetables. Then we arrived at Siem Rice, a quiet open air kitchen just outside the center of Chiang Mai.

We selected the dishes that we wanted to cook. Our chosen menu was as follows:

Starters:

Springrolls (Steph)

Spicy Papaya Salad (Ric)

Noodles:

Pad Ki Mao (Steph)

Pad Thai (Ric)

Soup:

Hot and creamy (Steph)

Hot and sour (Ric)

Curry:

Green curry (Steph)

Penang (Ric)

Stir Fry:

Chicken and cashew (Steph)

Chicken and ginger (Ric)

Dessert:

Mango, sticky rice and coconut milk (Ric)

Pumpkin in coconut milk (Steph)

Ready to be rolled springroll.

We were lucky to be in a small group; just me and Ric and a German couple: Jan and Marcia. The four of us got on great and enjoyed a leisurely day of cooking and lots of eating. 

Tucking into soups and noodles.

What I learned was that most Thai dishes have the same base: holy basil, chili, garlic, galangal (Asian ginger) and lemon grass. You add more chili to make it spicy, coconut milk to make it creamy or lime to make it sour. 

Things got a bit heated when it came to making my noodle dish, Pad Ki Mao, which translates as 'drunken noodles'. Thanks to Jan for the video.

The day included a lesson in the classical art of carrot carving. I'm glad to have mastered this life skill, it will surely increase my employability back home...

From left: Ric's disaster, the teacher's example, my interpretation.

It was a great day and we left with bags full of leftovers for breakfast the next day. We even got a certificate proclaiming our competence and a book with all the recipes we'd made.

Cost:
A full day cooking course (10am-3pm) cost 800Baht (£16) per person (should have been 900 but we got a cheeky discount). Includes: all ingredients, drinking water, tea and coffee, carrot carving, transport to and from hotel, market tour.

Chiang Mai: Loi Krathong Lantern Festival

The problem with Chiang Mai is that everyone we have met has raved about it; they loved the "hippy vibes", it was a "bohemian paradise"; so we arrived with high expectations.

What we found was that really, Chiang Mai is a big city with an unusually high percentage of vegetarian restaurants. As far as big cities go, it's a very nice one, but within the city there isn't really that much to see or do and the 'hippy vibes' are shrouded in pretension.

We arrived with the intention of staying for three weeks and volunteering somewhere. First we found that volunteering was a lot more difficult than we'd expected. Back in South America every hostel we stayed in had a wall full of posters advertising volunteer opportunities but here in Asia it's different. There are two types of organisation: the first are those affiliated with international volunteer recruiters that charge exorbitant fees to students for all inclusive "volunteer holidays", meaning that they're less inclined to welcome folk like us that rock up at the door with empty wallets and good intentions. The other kind are the serious organisations that require a minimum commitment of three, sometimes six months, and prefer 'skilled' volunteers that specialise in certain fields such as medicine, IT and so on. The moral of the story is: we tried to find somewhere to volunteer and failed.

Without anything meaningful to do in Chiang Mai we decided to move on after a week, but first we planned to celebrate the Loi Krathong lantern festival that happened to fall on my best friend Jenny's birthday. The festival comes at the end of the rainy season and has similar origins to the Lai Hua Fai lantern festival which we attended in Luang Prabang, Laos. Candles are lit to honour Buddha and the act of sending a wreath or float sailing down a river represents letting go of anger and negativity. 

Lanterns fill the river and to the skies.

We took to the bars to jointly celebrate Jen's birthday and the festival, starting with cocktails in Chiang Mai's seedy Night Bazaar. It took us quite a while to find a bar that wasn't full of dolled-up Thai ladies looking for some "company". Once we were suitably imbibed we walked through the night market stalls to the river where all hell was breaking loose. Fireworks were going off left, right and center, kids were pointing bottle rockets at each other, lanterns were floating, crashing and falling into the river all over, all the while traffic was still passing over the bridge - it was crazy fun. Someone thrust a handful of sparklers at us while another drunk tourists handed Ric a lit firework. British health and safety officials would have a field day. 

Enjoying the madness on the bridge.

We set off our own lantern with a birthday wish and watched the parade of elaborate floats file through the city. Atop the floats were local beauty queens on their way to be judged. 

Birthday lantern for Jen.

The festival lasted two days, during which there were concerts, fair ground rides and endless lanterns clogging up the sky. The festival here was much bigger than that in Luang Prabang and ten times more chaotic. Personally, I preferred the Laos version, which felt more intimate and traditional, although we did enjoy the excuse to get drunk and play with fireworks!

From Si Phan Don to Bangkok, 24 Hours On The Move

873km 

24 hours 

One boat, four songthaews*, one minivan, one train.

*A songthaew is a flatbed truck that has been converted into a bus. Benches and a roof are welded onto the back making it possible to transport 30 people in relative comfort, or 50 people in relative discomfort. Usually songthaews are piled high with people, livestock, sacks of rice, bicycles and anything else they can cram in. 

On our last day in Laos we woke at the crack of dawn to get an early start on our long trip to Bangkok. We shimmied down our last muddy bank and boarded our last narrow, long tail boat, saying goodbye to the 4,000 islands. We landed at Nakasang and walked through the town as it was coming to life in the early morning; people buying fresh fish next to the boat dock, vegetables laid out along the road, bicycles and motorbike zipping up and down. At the end of the town we boarded a songthaew and settled in for the three hour drive to Pakse.

As far as songthaews go, this one wasn't nearly as full as it could have been and we sped towards Pakse with the wind in our hair. At my feet was a humongous catfish, its gills still flapping, its mouth making silent O's as it gasped for its last breaths. The fish died long before we arrived in Pakse but its glassy, yellow eye stared at me accusingly the whole way.

Every now and then we'd stop and vendors from roadside street stalls would run down the road and climb into the songthaew; boarding us like pirates. Their wares were barbecued cockroaches skewered onto sticks, tiny roasted sparrows and bags full of chicken feet. Not my idea of road trip snacks.

We changed songthaews 15km outside of Pakse and then again at the morning market in the center of town and made it to the border.

The Vangtao (Laos) - Chong Mek (Thialand) border is a big one. To get to the immigration offices you first have to walk for about a kilometer through a narrow, covered market which serves as the perfect place to spend your left over currency. Duty free whiskey, cigarettes and electrical goods are your last sight of Laos before you reach the grand building that houses the Thai immigration desks.

A storm had been brewing as we prepared to depart from Laos and the sky was a menacing black flickered with the occasional flash of lightening. As we exited the building into Thailand the clouds parted momentarily to reveal a patch of clear blue sky and a dazzling sun, it was a symbolic welcome back to the land of smiles. 

Another symbolic icon welcoming us into the country was the green, orange and red glow of the 7 Eleven mini-market. 

Now I know that multinationals are the devil, that they are responsible for putting local shops out of business and generally bringing about the apocalypse through globalisation BUT, for me, the 7 Eleven represents a return to order, to civilisation. In Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia there are no brand shops, no mini-markets. You buy your toiletries, snacks and drinking water from markets where the products are arranged haphazardly on a stall and the prices depend on how lucky the vendor is feeling about ripping you off. Haggling is fun, some of the time, but there's nothing like walking into a blindingly bright 7 Eleven, the air-con set to freezing, and seeing everything neatly in its place. Best of all are the small white pieces of paper with black writing displaying the price. 

One thing multinational mini-markets are good for is changing large bank notes, so we popped in, did a celebratory lap of the isles and broke a 1,000Baht note with a couple of toasties and a chocolate bar. An unconventional first meal in Thailand.

A long walk down the road later and we boarded a minibus bound for Ubon Ratchathani, the closest city. I was very excited to be back in Thailand and I spent the 90 minute drive soaking up the strange familiar sights from the front seat of the van: tarmacked roads, painted lines to mark the lanes, traffic lights; and we were driving on the left! 

Another songthaew took us from Ubon bus station to the train station where we were in for some bad news. The train was almost full and we would have to spend the 12 hour over-night journey in third class, which meant hard upright seats that didn't recline. After a full day travelling we were tired, grumpy and sweaty. Our hair was standing stiffly on end from the dust off the roads and our shoulders ached from carrying our backpacks from bus to bus and through long border crossings. We'd hoped to get a bed on the train, maybe even splash out for a two berth, first class compartment. Instead we'd be sitting straight backed all night long. We were not happy. 

As it turns out, the third class trip wasn't that bad after all. As the seats were old and broken and kept falling off the frame I decided to remove mine and built myself a makeshift bed on the floor. Ignoring the cockroaches that crawled around me, I managed to get a half decent nights sleep and awoke to find the train creeping through the suburbs of Bangkok.

It's good to be back.

Reading a book about globalisation from my third class bed. The irony is not lost on me.

Biking Around The 4,000 Islands

With seven tourists crammed snugly into a narrow barge we set off along the Mekong, rocking and swaying, weaving around sandbanks and overgrown, uninhabited islands, to Don Khon, right on the Cambodia border. 

Don Khon has countless clusters of wooden bungalows built overlooking the river, each one offering beautiful views and a balcony complete with hammock. Ric and I, in search of peace and serenity, managed to book ourselves into the one place on the island hosting a 48 hour party for dozens of the owner’s friends and family. The loud, grainy music wasn’t too much of an annoyance compared to the revolting smell that came from meat left rotting in the sun. By the afternoon of the second day all the cooking had been done and everyone was too drunk to clean away the animal remains strewn around the yard behind our bungalow. The nauseating smell was accompanied by party guests who occasionally joined us on the balcony to spit or vomit into the river, and gangs of small children who thought our room was part of their playground and who tried to steal my ice-cream. To say we chose unwisely is an understatement. The party was in order to bless the house, which had been built exactly one year ago. The only respite from the Laos folk music straining over the speakers was when a group of monks and family elders performed a Buddhist blessing, chanting in a monotone only slightly less offensive than the music, and lighting enough incense to mask the stench of the meat.

Despite the poor choice of accommodation, Don Khon was a lovely place to spend a couple of days; it is a small island with a population of a few thousand people, somewhat overrun with tourists. Palm trees line the river, as do hippy cafes where travellers pass the day sitting on cushions on the floor, sipping fruit shakes and comparing notes on various sleepy destinations around Laos.

Grazing on the Mekong.

A single home perched on a river island (right). Don Khon bungalows (left).

Over a breakfast of surprisingly good omelettes, we joined forces with a girl from Sweden and another from France and set off on bicycles to find the rapids that slice across the Mekong. We found the first set of rapid with ease, 1.5km from the town. Somphamit falls, although they’re more rapids than waterfalls, crash over a landscape of black, volcanic rocks that would look more at home on the moon than on the edge of this peaceful, flat island. The bar overlooking the falls provided a perfect place to hide from the sun for a few hours and eat a local lunch of spicy papaya salad and sticky rice.

Invigorated after lunch, we decided to extend our bike ride and do a loop of the entire island. This proved to be more challenging than any of us had expected. The island had severe storms every night we stayed there and the roads were a mud bath; we were constantly getting the bikes stuck, having our flip flops swallowed by brown ooze, and occasionally falling off. 3.5km from Somphamit we reached the eastern tip of the island where we climbed to a view point overlooking the river. From here it is possible to see rare irrawady dolphins, but we weren’t that lucky.

Somphamit Falls.

Proceeding along the south side of the island the path got narrower and increasingly overgrown until we had to dismount to duck under trees, dense plant life surrounding us on all sides. When it came to crossing a collapsed bridge we were all questioning whether or not we’d taken a wrong turn, but eventually we emerged and crossed a wobbly suspension bridge onto a tiny island, surrounded by more rapids. Ric and the two girls stripped down to bathe in the Mekong and I was feeling a little jealous for I couldn’t bring myself to swim in my thong in front of the curious local fisherman. I had the last laugh though when I spotted a buffalo shitting into the water just meters away.

We made in back to our noisy, smelly bungalow, covered in mud, just in time for sunset. The loop around the island is entirely flat and easy enough to cycle of a bike with no gears, I imagine it’s much easier in dry season when there’s less mud around.

Tour De France; Lucy crosses the fallen bridge.

Across the river from Don Khon is Don Det, which translates as Ghost Island because of all the dead bodies that float down the Mekong from further upriver and get washed up onto the rocks that surround the island. Don Khon and Don Det are home to a curious railway built by the French in 1893. In search of greater colonial power the French wanted to establish a trade route along the Mekong to China, starting in their flagship colony, Vietnam, and traversing Cambodia and Laos. However, the formidable rapids around Si Pan Don made this impossible, so the French built a tiny, pointless railway which crossed Don Khon and Don Det. The idea was to use a special vessel that would be dismantled at Don Khon, loaded onto a train, transported to the north side of Don Det, reassembled and dropped back into the river.

The railway was abandoned at the start of the Second World War and France lost its colonies in Asia soon after. Today the only evidence of the railway is two rusting steam engines on display and a sturdy concrete railway bridge connecting the two islands. I found it very peculiar that the small island I cycled around in a matter of hours had once had a railway.

Concrete gantry on Don Det, once used to lower boats back into the river.

We Stayed At…

Don Khong – Pon’s Guest House: 50,000kip ($6.25/£3.75) for a large, basic double. Has a nice second floor veranda to relax on and the owner is super friendly and helpful.

Don Khon – Bouphane Guest House: 50,000kip ($6.25/£3.75) for a river front bungalow and hammock, avoid during family parties!