Luang Prabang the Second

Luang Prabang is an odd town. Sometimes you can feel that there's nothing in it but tourists and people working for tourists. But then you wander a little, and you get off (gasp!) the Sisavangvong Road, and you stumble on a street full of Laotian boys singing karaoke...

My hotel was quite a way from the main tourist street, and the lane in front of it was occupied not by chic French cafés or backpackers wearing Phuket t-shirts, but by a couple of tiny, dark houses where the inhabitants lived towards the back of a large ground floor room and sold essentials from a glass case at the front. To buy a drink, I stood at the door and called inside "Sabaidee! Hello! Sabaidee!" for about five minutes, until the lady heard me from her bed, then came to charge me smiling for the can I already had in my hand.

While my friend did the tourist route for her first time, I simply wandered about the streets, drinking coffee, watching people, and, yes, shopping. I found one tiny shop with a cat on the doorstep and a weaver within, and couldn't resist buying my cousin's birthday present from there.

One day, I dropped into the library.I admit, my main reason was entirely selfish: I was wilting in the 32-degree heat, and there was a little cafe attached to the side of the building. But once I'd downed my cold drink, I got talking to a volunteer at the door who suggested that if I had nothing better to do, I might like to step into their back room, where at that very moment their afternoon conversation club was running. I did indeed have nothing better to do, so I let myself be guided into the room, where around 20 foreigners were chatting to Lao counterparts. I was assigned to a young monk, Phoung, which I was thrilled about. I'm not a religious person, but if I were seeking an answer to life, I think Buddhism would probably be the route I'd choose. Yet I know next to nothing about the lives of the thousands of saffron-clad men who'd populated my train window scenery since southern Thailand. 


Phoung was extremely chatty - perhaps the most driven student of English I've ever met - and so I just let him talk for the next hour about his life in the monastery. Actually a novice, he was just 16, and had come to the monastery in Luang Prabang from his rural village at just 12. So young, I though, but then I know people who went to boarding school at 5, and this seems, in many ways, quite similar to a religious school in the west. He's up at 5am for chanting, then he goes on the walk for morning alms-giving before spending time with an older monk who tutors him in religious and secular matters. Later he does chores - that morning he'd been painting the temple, and then, because it was a full moon, he'd been called to shave the abbot's hair off - he would have his own head shaved later that afternoon. After that it's lunchtime, and then he's free for 2 hours - this is the time everyday when he comes to the library to practise his English with tourists. When that's over, he returns to the temple to carry out religious duties and to wash before the evening chanting. Later in the evening there's time to attend his English course with an American volunteer before bed at 11:30. Replace the chants with mass or chapel, and it's very close to any Christian boarding school in the west. At 18, they are given the choice of taking vows and becoming full monks, or making their way into the world. Phoung wanted to be an IT technician.

After a while, we were all evicted from the library but outside I sat a little longer to chat with the librarian, Phoung and his friend, and a Swiss woman, Jutta, who recently left her job and instead of finding a new one packed up and moved to Laos, intending to start up English classes for women (boy, do I wish I was her.) She's ended up having a lot to do with the temples, though, and knew Phoung well. She invited me to visit one of the temples she works with, explaining on the way that today was a full moon. That meant shaved heads, but also some rather special drumming. We sat with a novice called Keo just outside a small pavilion on the temple grounds. Other novices came jogging up, some running hands over heads shaved moments ago. They gathered inside the pavilion and one started the beat with the huge, hanging drum. Others joined in at the sides with smaller drums and cymbals. 

The afternoon heat - even at 4pm - meant that every minute or so, sweat streaming off his head, the drumming novice would make eye contact with another novice who would take up the mallet and continue, without missing a beat. It was pretty hypnotic stuff, and before I realised it, 20 minutes had gone by and the novices were slowing down, pausing, stopping for good.

Or at least until the next special day - a full moon, half moon, new moon, old moon, time for blessing... the novice sitting with us said with a laugh, "Many festival days for Buddhists!"

Jutta and I went into the temple next, where, thanks to the full moon again, buckets of water had been brought by villagers to be blessed. The hall was full of women sitting on their heels, soles of their feet carefully pointing away from the golden Buddha statues at the front. The monks came in - not the novices this time - and sat in a semi-circle at the front just before a line of the only four men in the hall. They held a piece of string as they chanted; my eyes naturally followed the string along its course, through the clasped hands of the monks, around the buckets of water, through a small circlet of marigolds, and out through the window, where it was looped around a brand new pick-up and motorbike - obviously two of the men had been doing well recently... The chanting rose and fell, and as I sat on my heels I quickly learnt to do as the other women did, leaning forward and swiftly slipping my feet from side to side. Several times I wasn't fast enough and my feet fell heavily asleep. The chanting was faintly soporific and went on for nearly 90 minutes (to Jutta's surprise, who attends it regularly, despite being an atheist) but the women certainly didn't just sit in reverence; they joined in from time to time, quietly spoke to neighbours, placated children, and came and went from the hall as needed. Towards the end a teenage boy came in on his knees and handed out cups of sweet, icy tamarind juice, and my neighbour, who had been grinning at me and Jutta and setting us right when our hands drooped or we didn't move in time, forced one into my hands, saying "You welcome! Drink!" The men started to pass forward gifts to the monks - banana leaves wrapped into cones and decorated with marigolds and cash. With more novices and monks owning mobile phones, apparently, money is becoming a more welcome gift than the traditional food and clothing. 

Right at the end, a monk gathered together all the buckets of water - they would remain in the temple overnight and during the morning chanting, then the villagers would be taking them home to sprinkle around their houses and thus keep their families safe from spirits a little longer.

Outside the temple I said goodbye to Jutta, but with every intention of seeing her again here before she leaves - each day I spend in this little town makes me love it more. It's terrible that so many people never see past the shiny veneer of tourism; Jutta and I were the only foreigners in the temple, and although there were a few other tourists at the drumming, they didn't hang around, just got up close, took their photos and left. I asked Jutta and Keo what they thought of all these tourists; Jutta told me that they're mostly intensely shy young men, embarrassed by attentive paparazzi. Keo said he'd had tourists at the almsgiving pushing their cameras into the line of monks and using the flash; the day before, a woman had said loudly, "Well, I think they all look like beggars - they don't even have the respect to wear shoes." He told me that he and many others don't like non-Buddhist foreigners to take part in the almsgiving, although discreet photos are okay, and  I promised to pass it on, while flushing at the memory of my last trip to Luang Prabang, when I allowed myself to be easily bullied into offering food. So this is me passing it on: should you ever go to Laos, watch the almsgiving, and enjoy an ancient cultural tradition, but don't treat them like they're in a petting zoo, and there for your entertainment. Okay. Lecture over. Learn from my mistakes.

So the next morning, I was woken at 5:45am as on every other day, by the temple bells. When I lived in Coimbra, Portugal, my house was opposite a Catholic cathedral that tolled the bells early every morning - I have to say, I do kind of prefer the Buddhist version. I blearily came out onto the balcony, and down below me saw the women waiting to offer rice from their traditional baskets. 

Bearing in mind the friendly pleas of the novice, I didn't join the hotel staff who were also making offerings, but I did crouch next to the gate (being careful to keep my head below theirs) and take a few photos. I was rewarded by a big smile from one of the monks (they are the ones with both shoulders covered), and was left feeling slightly less of a sponging tourist! 

It was on my last evening, the night of the full moon drumming, that I went for a walk through the town at 10pm, unable to sleep. Probably because of the 11:30 curfew, there was barely a soul out. The full moon made it all a bit eerie and I was turning back for the hotel, and that was when I passed the street full of karaoke singers. It's a remarkable town, this Luang Prabang of mine.

Bangkok to Thanaleng (Laos)

We boarded our train at 8pm, about 30 minutes after a foot massage which at first made me feel like I'd just undergone major surgery, but by the time I reached our platform had me walking on air and looking forward to my cocoon.

Train from Bangkok to Nong Khai. Obviously.

Our train carried us north through the bulk of Thailand to the border with Laos - a 12-hour journey, according to my ticket; but the minute the train left the station an emissary from the restaurant car told us it would be at least 14, and would we like breakfast at our seats at 8am? Although she'd charge us a little more than we'd pay if we walked down to the restaurant, we both thought it would be worth it, and so it was. At 8am she peeked around the curtain and interrupted my scenery viewing to say she would serve breakfast now. She'd set it up at a couple of spare seats at the end of our carriage, and as we ate, another attendant removed our bedding and turned our beds back into seats. Certainly the most efficient attendants we'd had on the journey so far.

We rolled into Nong Khai nearly 3 hours late, but as it was 3 extra hours of daylight to window-gaze by, the tourists weren't complaining, and I assume the locals were used to it as they were quiet too.

The sleeper train waiting to return to Bangkok

At Nong Khai, we officially left Thailand, the exit stamp filling up the last space of the first passport page to be used up by this trip - the Lao visa would complete the second. From the passport booth we were granted access to the end of the main platform, where a short train waited - just two carriages of simple, suburban train seats and slot-down, wood-framed windows. 

Train to Thanaleng on the left, the sleeper from Bangkok
on the right.

It didn't look much like a grown-up, worldly, border-crossing train at all, but that's what it was. It's a great, big, new train, just three years old, that twice daily makes the 3.5km journey across the Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge over the Mekong River, and back. On this Friday morning it was almost empty - perhaps around 20 passengers, mostly foreign, spread out over the carriages. I sat right behind the driver, giving me a good view of the tracks, which ran down the centre of the empty road.

At the other end of the bridge, about 40 cars and trucks waited behind a guardpost for us to pass. Just a couple of minutes later we pulled into Thanaleng Station - there are plans to extend the line further to Vientiane, the capital city, but for now the tracks we've been travelling for nearly 2,200km end in an unceremonious bit of scrub bush. Which I didn't take a photo of. Yes, I was a little exhausted by the journey, and I thought we'd have another chance later on the return trip. But here's the view looking back to Thailand:

Laos immigration was pretty down to earth - despite lots of forms to complete, and a process which is fast becoming rare these days: hand over your photo, passport, forms and money, plonk yourself down on your bags and get your books out, and when a pile of mixed-up passports are shoved back through a separate window, rush over before someone else with the same nationality as you nicks your little maroon identity. Then you just walk out the station into town, like any other city railway station.

Hah, yeah, right.

No, there was once a railway in Laos, a short section of tracks down in the south used by the French to transport lumber between two rivers, but other than that defunct stretch, these three-and-a-half kilometres from Thailand constitute the only railway in Laos and they're still getting the hang of it. Thanaleng sits in the middle of an expanse of carpark, upon which three minivan taxis await the morning influx of passengers. It took 45 minutes and 400 baht to reach the central market.

From there, there being no more railway to carry us onwards, we boarded a plane for Luang Prabang. Same as my last trip, this was a small turbo-prop plane, and we were barely up in the air before we were descending again.

Fairyland And Its Inhabitants

Early on Sunday morning I packed my bags and left Rivertime for the airport. On the 40-minute drive, Joy told me of his great happiness at entering the army in two months' time. So very different to South Korea where most men would do anything to get out of serving... With Lunar New Year and Valentine's Day falling on the same weekend this year, the streets were awash with red - lanterns for the new year, teddies and roses for the lovers, everything sold together from tiny stalls on the roadside. There was one particularly blessed woman somewhere in Vientiane, whose boyfriend sat in a tuk-tuk in front of our car, red and white balloons billowing out the back and completely obscuring the door. Even the dress code matched the event, with a red t-shirt or dress atop every scooter. I was rather glad to leave the American-style commercialism behind at the airport gates!

I quickly cleared check-in and went through to the waiting lounge, a grid of hard plastic chairs looking out to the runway where a plane was waiting. Not, surely, my plane, for I was flying the national airline on their busiest route, and this was a teensy tiny propellor plane.



With a lovely flower on its tail, yes, but still teensy, nonetheless. I sat and waited, but no other flights were announced and no other plane showed up, and the pilots walked through, pushing the unlocked doors open to the tarmac, and then a sweet lady in her silk uniform told us we could now board. So we all did, walking across the tarmac to get to the 5-step ladder. Which of course I have done before at other small airports. I have, however, never had to duck to get in through an aeroplane door... My window seat was right in the middle, right under the wing, and next to the wheels.


I started to understand why other travellers were wary of flying Lao Airlines, but in the end it was a perfectly pleasant, very short flight over valleys and mountains and bright red dirt roads. As we descended into Luang Prabang, the Mekong stretched and yawned beneath us, curling around the little town, gold temples reflecting the morning sunlight into my eyes. Luang Prabang used to be a distant colonial outpost for French officials who, for one reason or another, never wanted to go home again. In my 40-minute flight I leapt over a month's travelling. It used to take longer to get from Bangkok to Luang Prabang than to go from Bangkok to France by ship! Perhaps as a result of this unimaginable distance, the officials who settled here eventually turned it into a beautiful village in the French style, with shuttered two-storey cottages lining a narrow street, and a boulevard running above the Mekong with space for a cafe table or two.


The town mostly fills the peninsular space between the Mekong and the Nam Khan, a river that joins the Mekong here. On the 15-minute tuk-tuk ride to my hostel, I started to see the chaotic Asian traffic I missed in the Vientiane countryside. There are scooters and tuk-tuks everywhere, although it's still far from the stereotypical Vietnamese streetscene. I was barely at the hostel long enough to dump my bag on my bed, and then I was off to the main street, Th Sisavangvong, named after the king at the time of independence from France. Lovely.

Of course, it has the usual ebullience of Asia, but the allure of the town is in the bougainvillea creeping over the carved wooden balconies, and the open-fronted cafes. Asia shows her motherhood in the street food sellers - I buy a coconut dumpling straight away from a man who says he has 7 children to feed, although at least in the drawing on his cart they all have very smiley faces - the friendliness of the people - the dumpling seller chats to me for 5 minutes then makes me another one because he sees the sticky smile on my face, then tries to refuse to let me pay my 10p - the brightly coloured tuk-tuks everywhere - often with movie scenes painted on the sides.

Of course, because this is the 21st century, all the houses and cottages are now massage spas and restaurants, tour agencies and money changers. This is a town where people feel comfortable leaning over from their table to contribute to your private conversation, as if because we're all tourists we're the same, and should help each other out with tips and warning tales. Every Lao person is seemingly in the tourist industry, from men guiding the tours, to women giving foot massages and selling silks, to the children selling trinkets when they're not at school. At least the kids do go to school - when I tried to fob off one persistent ten-year-old with "maybe tomorrow", she retorted "Tomorrow school, every child learning learning. You buy now."

I did "buy now" in the end...

I retreated to my room for a late afternoon siesta but I'm back at 5:30 for the night market, a sea of silk and silver that shuts down Th Sisavangvong.

I eat street food, which in this fairytale land means a vegetarian baguette and a fruit smoothie, and wander about talking to sellers and deciding what I would buy if I were a millionaire. I pass the boat pier where a rotund man sporting an improbably moustache suggests I might like to take a boat to the other side of the river, "with your boyfriend" he says. I tell him I have no boyfriend. He and a nearby tuk-tuk driver laugh and shake their heads at the shame of being an elderly spinster. "That pity," the boatman says, "but don't worry, for today, I can be boyfriend." I laugh with the two of them, politely decline, and move on.

On Monday I walked down to the Mekong, still bleary-eyed with sleep, which was interrupted repeatedly by the person in the dorm above mine shifting position in his (I presume) sleep. Not a well-soundproofed room - but then, it is almost eighty years old. I've booked a space on a boat down the river so I patiently wait on the benches at the ticket office (a glorified shed under some lovely old trees on the riverbank) until my ticket number is called.


I scramble down the steep steps and wobble my way onto a boat, where before the five other passengers can say hello, I nearly knock myself out on a low beam, adding a bump on the head to an infected scrape on a toe on my list of Laotian injuries. Not as impressive as the Balinese list yet, but it's early days... The boat is a traditional long boat. Low and narrow, both ends sit out of the water. It's steered from the front, though the engine sits towards the back, in front of a living space. Only six passengers are accommodated on each boat; the rest of the area is taken up by the family whose home this is. I could see that being awkward, but I'd luckily been assigned a lovely young couple, the wife nursing a cheerful baby boy, and it felt less like an intrusion than a homestay.

At the other end of the two-hour journey were the Pak Ou caves: the lower one, Tham Ting, a gaping black cavity in the limestone cliff, reached by crude, whitewashed steps.


Our boat driver moored at the far end of a line of boats; we climbed over three other boats to reach a wide bamboo raft which acts as jetty and leads to the foot of the steps where a $2 entrance fee must be paid.

The cave had religious significance for the people living in the valley long before the Lao arrived here from China. The religion changed, the significance remained, and then Buddhism arrived. Inside, the cave rises from the mouth, creating a kind of amphitheatre in which we the visitors become the actors on a stage. The audience, silent, but each with their own unique expression, is thousands upon thousands of Buddha statues. They sit and watch, some in the meditation pose, or Calling for Rain. Some with their hands extended, open-palmed, exhorting listeners to Stop Arguing, a rare pose for a Buddha. A few lack heads or arms or bodies: these have been brought here and left, as if it were a Buddha graveyard for unwanted icons. Many, though, were crafted by royal sculptors for kings.

They sit on rocks and in cracks right up to the ceiling of the cave, gold, bronze, wooden and painted.



I venture up a path on the side of the mountain to the second, higher cave. All the way up there are ragged children who wave tiny, meticulously made bamboo cages. Inside tiny songbirds flutter their wings, waiting for Buddhists to buy them for a dollar and release them, thereby purchasing extra credit in the ladder of good karma. I wonder if you wouldn't gain just as much karma by not buying them, thereby discouraging their capture in the first place. I am taking a photo of the view over the river when a boy thrusts a cage at me and cries "photo!" So I take one, and show it to him. He smiles, but then babbles in Lao and another child translates: "He say, you take photo, you pay him. Only one dollar. You pay." Whoever told me Lao weren't as mercenary as their Asian neighbours had their tongue firmly in their cheek.

On the return journey, our boat pauses at Ban Xang Hai, a village famous for its lao-lao - rice whisky. We get off the boat onto a jetty, 500m of death-defying rickety bamboo poles crossing the exposed Mekong mud. In the village we're invited to try the lao-lao, which tastes like wine laced with vodka, and watch it being fermented, which is very exciting. Like watching grass grow. The pots remind me of the clay containers used for fermenting kimchi in Korea.

The boat trip itself is perhaps the most interesting aspect of an interesting day. There are fishermen in bamboo hats casting fine nets from their low boats, and women cultivating lettuce and cucumbers on the banks. Now and then a village passes into view, connected to the shore by ladders or sometimes mud steps, the grass-roofed huts poking out of thick vegetation.

During the Vietnam War, the US waged a "secret war" in Laos, training Hmong fighters for illegal skirmishes along the Vietnamese border. When the Vietnamese started importing arms along a trail that led through north-eastern Laos (the Ho Chi Minh Trail of legend), America carpet bombed the "neutral" country, increasing support locally for the communists, both Lao and Vietnamese. With the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I can't help feeling the Americans will never learn their lesson. Floating peacefully down the river I watch the thick forest lining the banks and imagine how terrifying it must have been to have had to travel in the 1970s - with the CIA, the Viet Minh and the local communist army, the Pathet Lao all operating in the area, I can't imagine feeling less safe.

That afternoon I spent wandering the peninsula and drinking thick Lao coffee at street stalls. In amongst the hundreds of tourists, ordinary Lao went about their business unobtrusively. I started to see beyond the play put on for tourists. Though I've generally found the people here to be far less friendly and open than down near Vientiane (too much contact with pushy Westerners perhaps?), once I start sitting and smiling at people, I can see their hospitality and willingness to talk resurface.

Everywhere I look, the saffron and yellow robes and shaved heads of the monks brighten the day. They wander the streets, their faded golden bags slung over their shoulders, talking to each other and buying fruit. The novices are as young as 7 or 8, taken to the temples by parents desperate to ensure them education and a daily meal (just one though - the monks eat only at lunchtime, I'm told). Sometimes a truck or tuk-tuk passes, filled to the brim with the orange robes.

The joy of a river

Lunar New Year, and Korea is shutting down. So once again, I'm climbing on a plane and going to have a look at someplace new! Hooray!

From Korea to Vientiane is just 7 hours on a plane. Unfortunately, the Laotian capital isn't on a major route from Seoul, so after a frantic drive to the airport after work on Wednesday and a flight to Bangkok, I get to, once again, spend a night on the obliging Starbucks couch. I have a ten-hour layover and it's bringing back memories of the long night on the way to Bali last year...

Sadly they're building a new shop right next to Starbucks, presumably to avoid inconveniencing day travellers, and I can't block out the screeches and whines of their tools. So after a gruelling night spent moving from chair to chair, trying to find a quiet and comfy place to sleep and eventually giving up, I made it to morning and to my 11:45 flight to Vientiane. It took just over an hour, flying north into the peninsular hinterland, over miles and miles of rice paddies and the odd hill. Coming in to land, it was only at the very last minute that the ground beneath us turned from field to concrete runway. Through tedious customs and visa formalities, a driver waited for me in the heat; he had very little English, so, with a minimum of words, he hustled me into his battered Peugeot and set off through the city streets. The buildings lining the wide avenues reminded me of Madagascar: with faded French colonial pretensions, the shabby beauty of the verandah-lined stilted houses appealed to me straight away.

It wasn't until we reached the outskirts, though, that I realised I was going to fall madly and irrevocably in love with this country. We turned onto a dirt road and drove through tiny villages centred around shops operating from wooden shacks. The houses, set on large plots of land, were all built on stilts, and in the spaces beneath, whole families were gathered, eating lunch, or chatting, or simply sharing a smoke. Goats meandered along the edge of the road, paying no heed to the drivers, who were, if we're honest, simply meandering themselves. Some were meandering so successfully they'd come to a complete stop on the road and were now engaged in talking to stall owners, maybe buying a baguette or two for lunch. It was great. I couldn't have come further from the grey high-rises and farm-quilted valleys of South Korea. And we were only a short drive outside the capital city!

My lodge was on the banks of a river, the Nam Ngum, just a collection of rough huts with verandahs and an outhouse or two.



Steps led down the steep bank right to the water's edge, where, having now run out of land, the owners built a restaurant on the water. The deck enclosed a section of the fast-moving river as a makeshift pool.




Tables and chairs were scattered over several moored rafts under thatch, and at the far end, when I arrived, the kitchen was filled with chattering Lao, all of whom stop at the sight of me and come over with warm smiles to wish me welcome to their country. I settled on the edge of the restaurant, my legs dangling in the cool water, a book in one hand, in the other a bottle of Beer Lao, the best lager I've ever tasted. Can life actually get any better than this? The next few days will tell...

Across the river, a village lies, carved out of the forest. A ferry carries people and scooters back and forth, but I make my way there on a section of the restaurant, which detaches to become a thatched raft.



We land next to some women washing clothes in the river and Joy, my guide, leads me up the steep bank to the village. (Joy is a nickname; it means 'skinny' and he lives up to it.) Although Hmong people are increasingly coming down from their traditional mountainous homes to live and work alongside lowland tribes, this village is entirely Lao. The Lao are strictly Buddhist and a bright gold and green temple occupies prime position. Joy takes me inside. He is Hmong so his knowledge is limited, but the images on the wall bear close resemblance to the ones I saw in India, if a little more graphic; one shows a man, surrounded by a feasting family, his guts graphically spilling from his belly.

We walk to the village school, where around 50 children are taught by a single teacher. When we arrive, a pack of kids waves at me from the verandah, but then the teacher walks up and they all disappear back inside to learn about mountains and valleys (Joy translates for me).



I discover that the students are divided into classes, the teacher moving from room to room, handing out work to be done in her absence.



I don't want to interrupt, so I quietly look in through the windows; the children seem fascinated by me though and so I move on for the teacher's sake.

The afternoon, hot and sticky, begs to be observed from the cool vantage point of a tube on the pool, and I find myself very obliging in this respect.

The next day I ventured to the restaurant next door where I bought a Fanta and sat down under a thatch roof at the top of the riverbank, above pumpkin patches and tomato stakes - an organic vegetable garden which has to be abandoned once a year when the river swells, but which otherwise feeds the restaurant, the attached families, and my lodge.

It wasn't quiet. Mohawked boys drank Beer Lao and laughed in the larger hut next to mine, and Thai pop blared from the loudspeakers. The ferry roared its way across the river beneath. But it was calming in its cheerful simplicity. Families of chickens stalked grubs in the overgrown garden. Whenever I glanced up from my book, my eye was invariably caught by one of the legions of butterflies - sometimes a tiny yellow buttercup butterfly, someimtes a giant blue-black Birdwing, 15cm across its span. A silken cream butterfly, its wingtips brushed with orange paint, veered by to inspect my Fanta but went off in search of more natural sugar. And just down the bank, an abandoned hut, marigolds testing its boundaries, played sunny host to an almost chameleon-like lizard, its skin glowing bright red in the noon light, fading to a muddy green at the tip of its tail. He watched me with as much interest as I showed him, turning his head to stare into the camera lens.

I was talking about India a few days ago with some colleagues going there, and found it strange that my enduring memories are of the myriad cafes Sara and I sat in, not talking, often, but simply writing, reading, watching people. It seems that often the best impressions I get from a place are from doing absolutely nothing! Score!

Sometimes in Bali I got frustrated with the thought that everything was just for show, that the only industry was the tourist one, that even the most genuine-looking restaurant was too pricy for locals. It's different here. When lunchtime comes along, the huts fill up with Lao, chattering, bantering with the owners and eating the same food as I've just ordered.

Like I said earlier. Love at first sight.