It’s serene, like - 11 November 2007 - Vang Vieng, Laos

Nihao and sabaidee.

[Check that out. I actually now have a "hello" linguistic reportaire reaching into the dozens, well at least 5. Sure to be useful in the years to come.]

Well, since the last trainspotter-esque note I'm off the tracks - these train puns are really going to be missed I bet - although there are some train stories still relating to the Chinese rail authorities' inability to book a connecting train anywhere.... and the past month could probably be better described as the "If it looks good, and isn't walking away from you PARTICULARLY quickly, eat it" phase of this trip. I've been chomping down on many new and unusual things (and please limit the jokes back on that comment :)

But back to where we left off....

Reached the end of the Trans-Mongolian on arrival in Beijing. Ensconsed ourselves at this palatial diplomatic pad that my friends John and Tara were occupying, and proceeded to make an enormous mess, unpacked our packs for the first time in, well, a while. After not too much of this, John and Tara announced they were taking the kids and going to Yunnan for a while (like, the period we had invited ourselves for, strange coincidence n'est pas), and could we feed the fish.

So we had a week to adjust to life with one and a half billion Chinese (who obviously don't all live in Beijing, but I think they all have relatives there and appeared to be visiting during our stay).

We walked Tiananmen Square and saw our first Olympics countdown board. Went to the Forbidden City and saw the first of what we came to recognise as a national phenomonon - the Chinese tour group kitted out in matching caps/bags/waistcoats. Explored the Temple of Mental Agility but frankly came away just as un-agile as I arrived. Headed out to the Great Wall and traversed the segment between Jinshaling and Simatai. Nearly died coming back into Beijing as the two lane road was being used as a four lane road by four equally large and stubborn trucks all heading directly for our (much tinier) taxi with our driver angrily waving his cigarette with one hand and beeping the horn with the orther, which seemed to leave no additional hands for driving..... Had a conversation with myself about not ever sitting in the front passenger seat of a Chinese taxi again.

And oh, god, the food. Oooooooh. And oooaaawwhhh again. We found the local street food vendors and had our lunch plus beer (all of which comes in the eminently sensible longneck size) for a dollar each. Visited the western supermarket as if it was a sight in its own right, going up and down the aisles squeaking excitedly at things like parmesan cheese and chocolate biscuits, and spending fifty dollars on ingredients to make pizza and caramel slice. Ate ourselves into the well-recognised asian culinary state of Food Coma with the first Peking Duck lunch. Used this to our advantage when my friend and international cat-napper Matt invited us out for Peking Duck dinner. [You just need to make sure there are some vegetables on the table.] Developed our restaurant ordering technique of "point and shoot" where we would hopefully pick out a few things from the menu and pray for a minimum of omlette-and-tomato and dishes dominated by wood-ear mushrooms.

But eventually we had to leave. Most of the fish at John and Tara's had survived our care but the day we cleaned the tanks had been kind of stressful. We got our train tickets to Xian, having worked out Tibet should come OFF the itinerary as it had temperature lows of minus 8. And headed off into the night.

When we got to Xian is was very early morning, but as the day wore on, one thing in particular became apparent. We had been pretty impressed by the lack of smog in Beijing. Well, the Chinese make have worked out how to reduce the pollution in the capital for those pesky Olympics officials, but they obviously have no such imperative for other places in the country. The smog in Xian meant you couldn't see to the end of the street and all the photos look like it's sunset. And as we travelled down through the country, east and then south for Hunan and Guanxi, there was no let up. Some places were unbearable (read: Zhangzhou, where your eyes burned and throat hurt just from the air) and some were simply bad, but there was not a single break in the smog until, a few weeks later, we crossed through into Laos.

Having adjusted somewhat to life in a life-threatening environment, we hit the Terracotta Warriors in Xian and eavsedropped on a tourgroup fraying at the seams on day 1 of their tour, due mainly, it seemed, to a deranged Hispanic gentleman who kept accusing people of hitting him on purpose (he obviously hadn't done the maths on how many people you jostle with for photo positions at the Chinese sites).

And we discovered much to our delight that the Big Goose Pagoda in Xian was THE site where the monk Tripitaka deposited the scrolls he brought back from India. Now this was a find. For those of you who didn't grow up with Monkey Magic, it may not sem exciting, but for those of you who did, we have pictures doing that whistling thing with our fingers he did to call his pink cloud-transport. And I have a little set of four terracotta figures (Tripitake, Monkey, Pigsie and Sandy) that stand in a bowl of water and then pee in unison. Best kitsch so far.

[And for the Xian food blue ribon winner.... tiny little apples the size of cherries, on a stick and then covered in clear toffee. Oh so good.]

But after Beijing and Xian we thought we would try out some of the smaller villages and see a bit of minority life. We had visions of burbling streams, little rickety house on stilts, people weaving blue cloth and carrying children in baskets. What we didn't factor in was the Chinese population (yes, yes, it's enormous, yes, yes) who when they travel, tend to travel domestically. So there's a LOT of them at any given place.

Dehang, not so long ago a little Miao village at the base of soaring limestone karsts, now has bus service that runs 3 times an hour to and from Jishou, concrete guest houses, and a tour system where groups are led around by a guide with a megaphone (soooo relaxing). And Fenguang, our next "small charming village" stop, has become so popular that all of the riverside buildings, bridges and pagodas, have been outlined in Christmas lights, in a kind of Walt Disney effect. The two days that we stayed (which were wonderful once we just embraced the insanity of it all) saw us become tourist sights in our own right, with the Chinese tourists taking pictures of us, often resulting in them taking photos of us taking photos of them....

[Fenghuang food bonanza - each evening the road off the bridge became pedestrianised as the street become one enormous food stall/grill strip. Whole fish, kebabs, vegetables. Beautiful. And there was some food "confrontation" - at the back entrances of the restaurants, the produce is waiting - alive - for someone's dinner. Chickens, some concerned looking ducks, a very nervous hedgehog, and disks and disks of honeycombs containing hundreds of little larvae-looking things. Fish and eels and catfish splashing about in, and sometimes escaping from, big buckets all over the shop.]

Anyway, by now we could barely see for the pollution and so with a final stop off at the Dragon's Backbone Rice Terraces (covered in smog, oddly), we decided to make a mercy dash for Laos and, we hoped, some clear sky and air.

Bus to Guilin. Overnight train to Kunming. Overnight bus to Mohan (the bus had lines and lines of bunkbeds running down each side and the middle - you just got in, and lay down for the whole trip). And a tuk tuk from Boten at the Laos border into town at Luang Nam Tha.

Sun.

Blue sky.

And the most enormous amount of people for a guesthouse well out of town in what was a pretty small town. But the Chinese sidewalk conversation I'd had with the guesthouse guy on the phone all of a sudden made a bit more sense - "..... is possible ..... festival ..... have some noisy happening ....grrrshshs, crackle crackle."

So the boat festival was in town and we were staying at the boat landing itself. And the team they sponsored had won the races. We got swept up for a night out at the local makeshift "disco" and had to escape under cover of darkness.

Things did quieten down after that and we happily breathed in the air, went kayaking, had a cycle, ate the local food, quality tested the BeerLao (they are very very proud of their local beer here), and readjusted to the change of pace. The last couple of days up north we decided to trek. The national forest is part of a restricted ecotourism project, to try and limit the impact on the local villages and ecosystem (which would stand a far greater danger from the cataclysmic Chinese environmental disaster just over the mountains I would have thought , but then I am now somewhat scarred by that whole pollution thing....). So we fronted up with our guides and fellow trekkers, and headed off.

After a couple of hours, we crossed a wooden fence. "Now no more tigers" our guide happily announced. Escaping a marauding tiger wasn't exactly on the introductory talk and in any case that flimsy little gate didn't look like it would hold back a turkey with a half-decent sense of direction. We were somewhat preoccupied in any event with de-leeching ourselves. The leeches proved determined and the battle was on.

The following day our guides cooked lunch from the forest. Rattan (yes, not just for chairs!), banana flowers, bamboo, spice wood, forest rice, and banana leaf bowls to eat from. We saw wild galangal and tried cardamon fruit. Kept the French boys moving with constant ingestions of lao lao rice whiskey. Started winning the battle with the leeches.

After a session with the betadine (for the bites where the leeches won), and some more local food and a further quality control on the BeerLao, we headed down to Luang Prabang, the home of 34 wats and the largest concentration of novice monks in Laos. Many of the boys here enter a monestary for a time when they are young - often it is the only way they can recieve an education, and offers an alternative to a very young marriage (and in Luang Prabang at least, pleanty of opportunity to try and have conversations with Western girls "Hello! Where you from! How you like Laos!"). So it was entirely standard to see seas of the saffron coloured robes (normally topped off with complementary umbrellas to keep off the sun) drifting around the streets, zooming along on tuk-tuks, hanging out in the local internet cafe, or sneaking over the road for a couple of cigarettes.

We climbed Mount Phousi to see the sunset, checked out the silk, did some shopping. And had a late lunch at Tamarind, for the "Adventerous" Tasting Plate, which was in fact 4 plates, complete with pickled raw pork (tasty, our chef told us it was "good with beer"), deep fried buffalo skin (hair still on, "this is how the Laos prefer it"), steamed bee larvae ("tastes like chicken"), fried centipedes (when we asked if this also tastes like chicken, he looked at us like we were total idiots and said "no. tastes like centipede"), a small bird complete with head and feet, and all in all resulted in us entering into our first Laos Food Coma.

But it was great and the next day we went off for a cooking course with the chef. Amongst the dishes we were doing was a Laos salad, and he wanted to know if we would have it with buffalo, or ant eggs. The Laos are cheeky buggers a lot of the time and we were happy to see how this was going to turn out. Ant eggs. And so it was that Joy was scrambling up a tree, knocking down an ant nest, and dousing the lot in water ("This send them to sleep"). Ants and eggs went into the salad and it was put on the table with a warning "You eat now, is better. Maybe 5 minutes, the ants wake up". Sure.

Well, served us right, our salad did indeed wake up and tried to extricate itself from a very tasty chilli, banana flower and lime dressing and march off the plate. I spent most of lunch trying to subdue it.

We accidently fell headlong into a bottle of lao lao with Joy and his friend, and woke up the next day feeling somewhat the worse for wear. But we we had hit our stride with this learning caper and went off for a day of silk dying and weaving. The weavers semed to spend most of their time alternating between laughing hysterically at us and trying to be encouraging, but we were most chuffed with our little pieces and just ignored the slightly more spectacular hangings they were churning out.

So now we are in Vang Vieng, where life seems to have slowed down even more (some time soon it may have to slide to a halt altogether, the people here are VERY relaxed). Yesterday we floated down the Nam Song on big tractor inner tubes and stopped off at the island bars for some scary swinging out over the river. The day before Cecilia and I managed a cycle as for as the blue lagoon cave and had a paddle with some triffid-esque fishies.

It is warm and sunny, the food tries to escape, the coffee is OK, the drinks are cold and the air is still clear ;)

As Dave from Shrewsbury explained to me the other day, "it's serene, like".

Love to all. It's nearly Christmas and nearly time for Melbourne.

xxc
____________________________________

"For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move." Robert Louis Stevenson