Well, let’s just say I won’t be flying with Vietnam’s national carrier again any time soon.

We lurched and rolled our way through the sky towards Hanoi but at least it was only for half an hour or so, leaving it second best to the flight back from Los Angeles that had me sworn off planes for good on arrival in Heathrow.

Not having much choice for this trip, I’ve got a lot better with flying since that journey back from America, partly through educating myself about the mechanics of the whole thing but mainly from reading Alan Carr’s book on fear of flying which (by the way) I’d recommend to anyone who dreads getting on a plane.

But I still have a few irrational superstitions which I can’t skake off and occasionally obsess over once strapped in. For instance, I don’t like getting on an aeroplane with a lot of old people and never will. Sorry, but I like to hurtle through the sky surrounded by a great deal of tragically wasted potential rather than a lorry load of octagenarians who can go out with a good innings, it’s just bad mojo.

Not only was the plane chock full of them, many were American and history tends to suggest that when God brings out the smiting hammer on aeroplanes, he has a soft spot for the USA.

And for all the money that the airlines spend on maintenance, training and public education on air safety, I can’t be the only person in the world who gets the willies from the permanently illuminated No Smoking signs, right in front of you, one per seat.

I first flew in 1987 and I don’t remember people smoking then – it’s been a no-no for at least 25 years as far as I’m aware and everyone surely knows it by now. It’s common sense, you don’t get signs saying “No Water Balloon Fights” after all so it just begs the question: how old are these fucking things now anyway?

Well, we got there alive and we both really like Hanoi. It’s a hard place to describe but with the lake in the middle of the Old Quarter and the surprisingly freezing English temperature it’s sort of like a mixture of Hyde Park, Soho and Leicester Square. On a cultural level it’s like India without the dickheads and with more electricity – it’s perfect.

The roads are deadly though. There are no gaps in the traffic and the only way to cross 6 lanes of lunacy is to wait for a bike (rather than a coach or car) to get near, step in front of it and keep walking across the road slowly but without stopping. You maintain eye contact with the oncoming traffic who helpfully navigate around you, although the young ‘uns like to swerve into foreigners before steering round, the little tykes.

Tomorrow we’re off to see the pickled remains of Ho Chi Minh. It gets sent to Russia for 3 months of maintenance (oil-check and a pedicure?) every year but we’re in luck – it’s visiting season.

I can’t help imagining and wishing for some sort of flotation tank containing a sort of cross between a Damien Hirst installation and a cryogenically frozen interstellar travller with tubes dangling from it and pads on the head sucking out the last draughts of communist life-force – I suspect my imagination may have the better of me on this occasion though.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

We’re leaving Laos today and flying into Hanoi. We were due to take the backpackers favourite (a 24 hour coach leaving from Vientiane) but decided to chicken out and take a 60 quid flight instead – sue me. I’ve heard too many reports of the bus being some way short of the VIP standard promised and paid for and that the bus takes closer to 40 hours once you factor in breakdowns, police searches and general border-hell shenanigans. To put it crudely, I am not shitting in a gutter for two days when I can fly and be there in an hour. Also, as you can probably guess, I already have enough boat/bus “stories” to bore to death anyone unfortunate enough to ask me – you don’t want any more.

Well, just to recap the last few days before we board (this Quickpad really is the cats pyjamas), Vientiane was very nice to stay in for a litle while although strangely sad at the same time. It’s peak tourist time at the moment and, while they have enough hotels, bars and restaurants to cater for 50,000 tourists, we only saw the same dozen or so faces for the whole time we were there and the place was a ghost town. The city seems to have put everything together in readiness for a tourism explosion and, well, I just hope they get it soon.

Took in a spot of bowling at the local alley and saw the city gateway which is sort of a replica of the Arc d’ Triumphe and at least twice as exciting as the original. The rest of the time was spent (wait for it) eating and drinking. Despite our concerns (related chiefly to the Tet backlog) even the visa application was “disappointingly” easy given the tales we’d heard of the legendary beaurocracy that the Vietnamese Embassies are reportedly fond of employing. Wellllll OK, we did cough up the $5 each at an agency for their urchin to go down there and deal with it all but we were expecting delays even then. We’re a tout’s delight me and Denise….

See you in Vietnam.

TURN YOUR VOLUME DOWN AT WORK

Can’t think of much to report from Vientiane but thought I’d stick this up. No reason, just think it’s fantastic and it kills a days typing

Books, books, books – bored and on another bus to Vientiane with nothing to report so I might as well kill a bit of time with a review, god knows I’ve read enough since we got here.

I’ve worked my way through the last of the John Irvings and I’ve lost the will to get back into my Learning Spanish book so, at the book exchange yesterday, I decided to opt for something good and trashy that I could while away a bit of time with. Any old nonsense would do really.

Well, not quite any old nonsense – I picked up Dreamcatcher by Stephen King and here is a brief summary:

Aliens have crash-landed in a forest and the forest is populated with hunters. They – the aliens – carry with them a virus known by the shadey government agencies involved as the RIPLEY virus. The main character and good-guy is called JONESEY. Once inside the victim, the virus mutates into a VICIOUS WORM-LIKE CREATURE WITH TEETH which then BURSTS it’s way out of the host’s anus. There’s a familiar pattern here, don’t you think?

Worst of all, he actually acknowledges it at one point with a knowing, aren’t-I-a-clever-bastard? wink to the reader. No mate, you’ve run out of ideas. Happens to the best of them. Time to sit back, take it easy and spend the money.

Anyway, Jonesey just happens to be immune to the infection yet finds himself under the unfortunate, telepathic control of a dead alien who’s hell-bent on the mass slaughter of all Earthly weaklings using Jonesey’s helpless body as a vessel for the deed.

The edition I have is 879 pages long. If I tell you that on page 769 the alien body-snatcher is finally subjugated and bought to it’s knees by the telepathic suggestion of a bacon sandwich (a projection boosted by the magical powers of a man with Down’s Syndrome that Jonesey used to know) I think you would have to agree that Stephen King has finally – figuratively and literally – lost the plot.

Now I’ve read most of his books and (while he’s written some really atrocious crap) anyone who’s read, for example, Wizard & Glass from The Dark Tower series would be really hard pressed to deny him quite a substantial gift for genuine, well-crafted literature.

But this constant “meta”-ing of himself or previous stories/characters into new books is getting out of control and now he’s scratching at other people’s work which isn’t cool. It’s always the first refuge of the bored, uninspired writer with a prolific backlog and Stephen King has been at it like a crack-whore for at least the last 5 years.

It’s not just the harvesting of previous work – the rot in general really began to set in with the last few books of The Dark Tower and it reached it’s wretched peak there with an apology for the ending of the final book, delivered out of narrative and just before the final chapter. It urged people to stop reading there in case they didn’t like how it turned out – Stephen, harden the fuck up.

Any more of this meta nonsense in the next book and I swear I’m going to dress up like Pennywise the Clown, kidnap him and dump him in the old Micmac Indian burial ground (just out of town) that the old-timers don’t like to talk about. If he wants out, he’ll have to cough up 10% royalties from the book he’s going to write about it – easy money.

Bottom line is that right now, he could shit in a napkin, fold it in half and sell 10,000,000 of them and that can’t be a good thing.

Nowt much good to report from Vang Vieng I’m afraid – it’s the Benidorm of SE Asia and unless you fancy the company of a couple of thousand self-obsessed, rutting poodles drinking opium tea, watching Friends and providing such legendary chat-up witticisms as: “THASSS WHYYY I LIKE FRIENDS, ITS…COS IT’S BWILLIANT.”, then it’s not going to be your cup of tea either.

And that’s all Vang Vieng is, bar after bar after bar showing Friends episode after Friends episode after Friends episode. I’m being unfair – there is one bar at the far end that boasts “No Friends” on it’s menu, it’ll be interesting to find out how that works out for them in the long run.

At least we’re staying in a guesthouse out of town, that’s something and we had a good laugh going on a bit of DIY tourism knocked together by the locals. As well as watching Friends, you can take part in the local kayaking, tubing and caving scene. Just down the road from our guesthouse someone had knocked together a sign pointing to the Xiom Cave (“Most beautiful, and exciting for tourist) and indicating a 900m walk.

4km of isolated, rural walking later – including traversing some decidedly land-mine looking farmland – we reached a sign pointing through the woods and informing us we were just 200m. We walked for another half an hour or so and the locals told us to just follow the plastic bags tied to the trees to get to the caves.

And when we got there………there was a hole in a piece of rock which we paid 10,000 kip each (about 50 pence) to get walked around. Good for them.

I’ve got 7 hours to kill here on a rickety bus which picked us up from our new guesthouse in Luang Prabang and is taking us down to Vang Vieng. We’re just staying there two days, more to break up the journey and see another Laos city than anything else.

After checking in yesterday I found myself embarking on a near-obsessive day of hunting around the markets looking for my shoes (honestly, they really held the outfit together) but to no avail. We have both decided that a day is enough and it’s time to grieve and move on. A pity really as I was starting to fantasise about describing my casually-mentioned stolen shoes to a stall-holder while standing in front of them:

“I’m fussy about my shoes, I’m really after a light brown pair with a black sole (it HAS to be black), a velcro strap sealing the toes with a Blacks label on it, a similar strap for the ankle and a barcode sticker on the bottom that I keep meaning to take off – I can’t find a pair like it anywhere, I don’t suppose you have anything like that in a size 10 do you? Oh, hang on a minute!”

Bah, anyway the new hotel was not so bad in the end. Clean, quiet and they have the most adorable puppy that looks like a little bear. We watched it skitter about playing with it’s shadow for a while before it hunched down to eat a sanitary towel it had fished out of the gutter.

Well, the hippies finally struck – it was only a matter of time I suppose.

We’ve been quietly enjoying bumming around Luang Prabang, just taking in the scenery and stopping for the occassional meal or beer – very pleasant.

We had also pre-paid for our room until check-out tomorrow (Saturday 9th) but when we arrived back at the hotel last night we were asked to confirm our check-out the coming morning. Aparently a large group of pre-paid tourists (who just happen to have booked out the entire hotel) are arriving and we were being asked to leave to accommodate them.

We’re pretty convinced that the real reason for us all having to leave (other travellers in the hotel were given the same news) is in fact due to the group of Israeli backpackers who can’t handle their drugs and have, for the last four nights, been coming back to the hotel screaming, banging down doors, abusing the other guests and thrashing things about until the early hours and just generally being a pain in the dick to all concerned.

Before we even left I had lost track of the number of times I had been given advice like ‘If a hotel is described as “popular with Israeli backpackers” then avoid it like the plague’ and I’m sorry to say it’s been the most consistently accurate information we were given before leaving. Don’t get me wrong, every country has it’s share of bad eggs here (including Britain) but you really can’t get away from the fact that you could match a battery farm’s output from the Israeli contingent. Loud-mouthed, totally ignorant of the local culture and customs and downright rude to the locals, they seem to travel purely to invade and colonise a destination, get uncontrollably stoned and piss off anyone who happens to be in the vicinity. All delivered with the social grace of an Indian Railways toilet.

Aaaaanyway…to get back to the point, it goes without saying that, regardless of the reasons surrounding our “eviction”, I was a bit fucked off (having paid in advance ourselves) but we clearly weren’t getting them to budge. At the end of the day, it’s their hotel and if we don’t leave, their recourse is to call the police – and if there’s one thing I’m going out of my way to avoid contact with during our stay here, it’s Laos’ corrupt finest.

Just to save a bit of face really, I tried to suggest to them that, normally, when a double-booking occurs it’s sort of tough tit on the last person to arrive and they go somewhere else for one night. We’ve been in that boat before on our last holiday, after all. After a lot of polite and restrained to-and-fro, with them understanding the English they wanted to hear and feigning confusion for the rest, we eventually agreed that rather than refunding us, they would pay the difference on a more expensive room elsewhere in town. Annoying but all’s well that ends well, yes?

NO!

In every hotel and restaurant in Laos, it is usually the custom to take off your shoes before crossing the thresh-hold – fine with us. At our hotel, the shoes were taken off the doorstep at night and put inside the foyer. We had taken to putting ours in the foyer ourselves all the time, partly for security and partly to alleviate some poor bastard from the duty of putting their fingers in my manky size 10s.

As we begrudgingly packed this morning I went downstairs to collect our shoes – not in the foyer, not on the doorstep.

“You are looking for shoes?”

“Well, yes, I left them in the foyer last night.”

“All shoes stolen last night.”

“…….”

“Shoes taken.”

“They broke in?”

“No they climbed over the fence, opened door and took them.”

“So we leave all our shoes here as we’re asked but no-one was on reception?”

“Happened before.”

“………….”

This went on and on – whether the thief was hippy, Laos rat-boy or maybe even deranged Israeli we just don’t know and the hotel weren’t willing to reimburse us for the loss. I had given them a detailed bill with an alternative option to obtain a crime number from the police for our insurance. My hope was that they’d cough up rather than talk to the police but nothing – no apology and no re-imbursement, not even enough to buy a pair of shitty Laos flipflops.

“You want the police, you talk to them. Car is ready now to take you to the guesthouse”

What can you do? I just gave up, but if anyone visiting Laos stumbles across this blog, the hotel is called Xiong’s Inn and, as with Israeli backpackers, avoid like the plague.

God, I really liked those shoes…

Denise had taken a few photos which are worth sharing.

Day One – “The horror…the horror…”:

This is a photo from the middle of the luxury boat from Day Two, taken later in the day after thinning out from drop-offs – for perspective, the first boat was maybe 2/3 the size and stuffed with more people:

If you look very closely at this next one, you can just make out a certain someone on the left-hand side wearing a white-striped dark fleece, hunching over and wishing they were back in Guantanamo Bay:

Craig is standing next to me and taking in the travel experience with resigned but cheerful glass-half-full enthusiasm – what a bastard!

Long one coming up – good God, where to start?

I won’t break it down into individual days but let’s just call it an epic three day journey out of Thailand into Laos.

Day One was quite pleasant and consisted of a six hour minibus journey from our guesthouse in Chiang Mai to the border town of Chiang Khong. Basically, we’d paid about 20 quid each for the standard package journey that everyone takes from Chiang Mai to Luang Prabang in Laos and this was the first leg.

The rain started about halfway to Chiang Khong and, on arrival, we unloaded from the van and had half an hour of faffing around in the pouring rain while we queued up for our room. Once settled and showered the rest of the evening was quite good fun – we hadn’t had rain since Varkala so it was nice and cosy sitting in a tin-roof pub watching Night At The Museum (surprisingly good, Ricky Gervais notwithstanding) and Ocean’s Twelve. In most of these bars, the manager comes around with a huge binder folder containing a hundred or so pirate DVDs and you and your drinking companions come to a collective agreement about which one to watch on the telly – I love that!

The next two days was going to be spent taking a slow boat (eight hours per day) down the Mekon River, first to Pak Beng and then on to Luang Prabang on Day Two. Let me tell you now – after this journey, if I never get on another boat again I will die a happy man with no regrets.

Before taking the slow boat we had to get up at dawn to stamp out of Thailand and then take a canoe across the river in the pouring rain to obtain our Laos visa on the other side. After much confusion, queuing in the rain and fannying about we got everything sorted. Much of the fannying about in the queue came from some people being charged a nominal fee to get the exit stamp and some people being waved away regardless of nationality or circumstances.

Fate being what it is, it goes without saying that I got the stamp charge – while I stood my ground long enough to give him my best Paddington Bear stare (out of principle) it was pretty obvious I wasn’t getting out of it and, for the sake of 5 baht, I’m pretty much prepared to avoid any disagreement with any immigration official anywhere and so I coughed up.

From there, the group took a tuk-tuk to a cafe where we waited an hour and a half before we could board the boat heading down the Mekon.

(At this point, it’s worth noting that it’s 9am, everyone’s pissed off, tired, confused, soaking wet and very aware that the 8 hour journey hasn’t even started yet.)

And so then we got on the slow boat, a boat designed to accommodate maybe 100 people at minimum comfort but which didn’t leave until around 200 were crammed on board, leaving the boat dangerously low in the water. The seats were wooden, covered 1 foot of your arse/thigh and were designed for an infant school’s assembly hall. Each bench for two had a huge gap between the back section and he actual seat, giving your back and shoulders the sensation of being crucified while leaving the knees of the person behind you wedged into your arsehole.

As you might imagine, the next 8 hours passed like treacle through a sieve – the scenery (while very pleasant) was shrouded in rain and cloud but it was the close proximity of such a small but physically and verbally vocal collection of total wankers which really put the icing on the cake.

Call me nuts but, while I smoke, I’m guessing there are still some crazy losers out there who don’t, so I go up to the front and smoke out of the window – a reasonable compromise if you ask me. The problem we had is that because of the on/off driving rain, some people – reasonably enough – wanted the side-curtains down from time to time. So, the curtains would come down, “Oooooh, how cozy”, 50 cigarettes got lit up and the boat got choked out. The curtains were then put back up (accompanied by glaring all round) and the cycle continued for 8 hours.

I really can’t over-emphasise just how claustrophic this boat was already so you can easily imagine the silent recriminations festering in a couple of hundred already pissed off people by the time we were even halfway there.

Take also the things you silently fume about, like a family of Laos people boarding the boat from a village and havingto send their 5 year old daughter to the rear of the boat packed in with strangers because of the two Swedish people who had bagged a bench each to themselves using their backpacks, and were pretending to be asleep so they wouldn’t have to share. I tried to explain to the mother that the girl could use my seat but she didn’t understand and just kept looking for her daughter at the back of the boat wth a look of absolute terror on her face.

And then, you know, you just start to lose the ability to drown out the loud-mouthed Americans trying to bullshit their way into the knickers of any girl forced by proximity to listen to them for 5 minutes. The pair of them had been working the crowd since the night before and we’d all already had a lifetime of sentences like:

“I’m actually a writer but I’m just trying to grow, you know, as a writer….”

“When I was in Cambodia I spent a lot of time digging wells for the orphans there…”

“I don’t actually write for a living or anything – I work for my Dad – but, you know, someday if I grow enough…”

“At the moment, I see myself as a salt-water fish wanting to live in fresh water then perhaps I coud do both…”

“I look at the Thai people and I think they have so much sadness but so much they could be happy about – just, their lives…”

“I think when I find my Voice I’ll have something I can finally say…”

On, and on, and on, and on, and on…

And girls, please, it’s like beggars – if you give in to one, you just encourage the rest and make it harder for everyone else.

I have a suspicion anyway that the people who make it as writers (rather than just liking the idea of being one) aren’t the ones bumming around SE Asia but are the ones prepared to come home from work and spend their precious free time banging their head against a blank Word document that might come to nothing or just be laughed at by a publisher.

The only thing digging camel tracks in Afghanistan makes you better at is digging camel tracks. If you’re still looking for a Voice and the best metaphor you can come up with at the age of 30-something is to compare yourself to a sub-species of fish then it’s time to find a new calling. My opinion…

And so passed the first leg of the actual boat journey but, of course, the best was saved until last…

Our overnight stay for day one was in Pak Beng, a small layover built exclusively for the purpose of housing and then extorting huge amounts of money from spoilt Westerners with overpriced bad food and consumables.

We arrived at the dock in total darkness and pouring rain. Separating the docks from the village was a mountain (no exaggeration) of wet mud, sand and rocks that could only be scrabbled up. At the top of this mountain a man would periodically scream something like:

“Han-GAAAARRRRR, pak dong GAI-YAAAAR!”

menacingly for no particular reason. Coupled with the BOOMING noises coming from the other side of the river it was not unlike the muddy bunker scene in Apocalypse Now where Captain Willard asks the soldiers who the commanding officer is (“Ain’t you?”).

To get off our boat, we had to climb through one of the windows onto an adjacent boat, then walk across a 1ft wide slippery, muddy plank over the river to get to shore – the dock-owners had also helpfully decided to moor one of the boats using a rope stretched across the shore-end of the plank at shin height.

Halfway across I was offered opium, smokie-smokie and cocaine and I had to impolitely explain that at the moment I was a bit pre-occupied with walking across a plank covered in mud that I couldn’t see – if that was alright with him.

While waiting with Denise for the luggage to be unloaded, we overherd a conversation between another traveller and a local:

“Hey you, you got MP3 player?”

“Er, yes?”

“How big you MP3 player, aah?”

“Oh, 5 gig.”

“HA! FUCK you American, my MP3 player 80 gig HA HA HA HA!”

“Oh ok….”

(Laughter)

“So….you wanna buy, $100?”

The best part was that, once everyone was off, we then had to all go back on to retrieve our luggage and walk the plank again. We had a brief panic when we realised that a Berghaus backpack almost identical to Denise’s was the last one left on the boat – luckily the person realised they had the wrong one and came back to the boat having helpfully hauled her luggage up Shit Mountain already.

We’d pre-booked a hotel back in Chiang Khong with some of the other travellers but, because of the luggage misunderstanding, we missed the tuk-tuk taking everyone to the hotel and had to walk for a mile in the rain to get to it.

After a cold shower, we walked down the road and joined a nice couple from the boat (recently deported from China for preaching the Bible) in a restaurant along with our new friend Craig who we’d been travelling alongside since Chiang Mai.

Dinner and drinks were pleasant until 9.30pm when the local government pulled a big lever, instigated a blackout and everyone was forced to trudge home to their bed to sleep until the cockerels woke up at 4am.

As you can imagine, we approached Day Two with no small amount of trepidation and we weren’t surprised to see some of the boat-goers from the day before had bailed out of the second leg.

More fool them, because we ended up on a bigger boat with better seating. The early-risers among us set to work industriously re-arranging the movable benches into leg-pleasing squares. Denise, Craig and I had a pleasant, sunny day watching the Mekon go by and, if that wasn’t fabulous enough, a large group of the wankers (including the “sleeping” Swedes) had spent the night as a group drinking Laos rice-whiskey and generally pissing everyone off. They turned up late to receive benches even more cramped than the day before due to all of our creative arrangements. They moaned at each other and loudly made comments for everyone else’s benefit about their lack of space but, to my barely concealed delight, everybody cheerfully ignored them.

Boo-fucking-hoo, I say.

As well as the improved weather, we all felt a little better on the second day. In amongst all the nonsense of the day before was the awful knowledge that we’d have to do it all again tomorrow but, with the end in sight, the atmosphere was as buoyant as the new boat. It’s hard to explain the scenery but it was like passing through a big Hornby train-set village with low clouds and almost plasticine-like tree-covered mountains all around. Nicer in the sunshine anyway.

On arrival at Luang Prebang, Denise Craig and I hunted out a hotel. We didn’t have much luck until a tout on a bike offered us a room and we agreed that if the hotel was as nice as the pictures looked, it’d do for us. Considering everyone we’ve bumped into today shelled out $20-40 for a crap room near town, I’d say we did well to get our $6 rooms with air-con, television, hot water, big balcony and big bed.

So, was it all worth it?

Yes, I think so

In fact, I would call Laos (and Luang Prabang in particular) the highlight of the trip so far. All the way through Thailand (while we’ve loved it), it’s been slightly disappointing to pass through all the places of interest and find that they have been completely redesigned and overhauled to cater for the tourist life, leaving nothing particularly Thai-like behind. Here, the guesthouses and restaurants sit very comfortably alongside traditional Laos life and architecture and you don’t feel like an intruder.

Originally we were going to race to Vietiane (the capital) to organise our Vietnamese visas at the Embassy before they closed for a week (for the Tet holiday) but we’ve decided to stay here for 7 nights rather than the 2 and drink off the journey.

After the last few days, I think this is a good decision.

Just a quick one – off to Laos now with a couple of days journey down the Mekon River. Not sure what the internet situation is like there either so may not be updates for a while.