Laos (group email)

As usual, I have no idea where I last left off, so I'll just start in Laos. Warning, it may become long and rambling.

I've been here 2 weeks, I wish I could stay at least another two, if not more. It is absolutely my favourite place so far - probably mainly due to a combination of beautiful beautiful scenery and the fact that there are so much fewer tourists here than in the other 3 countries I've been to so far. It's so good to go to places with no internet, no phones, no electricity even (except for 3 hours on a generator each evening). I've spent a lot of time sleeping in basic bamboo huts, reading by candle light, taking cold showers in outhouses, and eating a lot of noodle soup and sticky rice.

I started with the Gibbon Experience - essentially a three day jungle trek where you stay in high up treehouses and the only way in is on a zipwire. It is one of the best examples of an ecotourism project I've seen so far, with the local villages fully involved and employed in it and taking real ownership of it. It's also a great experience for the discerning tourist, as you can see a fair amount of wildlife (I'm afraid I only heard gibbons) and it's very very isolated. It got a bit dramatic when one of the lads dislocated his shoulder on day 2 and we had to figure out a way to get him out of the jungle. Nearest car was a 3 hour trek away and wouldn't actually be there for 12 hours, and then it was a 3 hour drive to the hospital. It took a whole litre of 70% Lao Lao whisky, the only painkiller about, to get him to sleep through the night.

The next week was spent travelling with 2 ozzie girls I met on the Gibbon Experience and we headed north through some more touristically deserted towns of Laos. Muong Ngoi was the best - only vehicles there are boats and it's one of the 'three hour electricity' places. I walked a couple of hours to a little isolated village and spent one night there as well, which was a brilliant case of 'how to communicate with people with NO English whatsoever'. Then on to a 6-hour boat trip down the most gorgeous stretch of river in the country.

Culture shock hit in Luang Prabang in the shape of a beautiful but very touristy town after. But they have good homemade cake and yoghurt and exquisite barbequed fish, not to mention a fun cooking course and riverfront fruit shake shops.

And now I'm in the north-east, running out of time but looking forward to coming back. I'm visiting some of the secret war sites (the US secretly and illegally bombed the area in the 60s and 70s, the most bombs per capita dropped ever in the history of warfare) and enjoying a rather brisk (freezing cold) climate before heading back south to Thailand. I'm going to spend Christmas on the Thai islands with an old SAC colleague before an elephant course and then on to Malaysia.