Laos

Any country in which it is economically rational to staff a toll booth and separate check point to collect a $0.30 fee from visitors on entry must have some severe financial problems. I paid my 30cents, exchanged $100 thereby becoming a millionaire and jumped back on the bus holding my now bulging wallet tightly (2 girls had had their wallets emptied on the overnight bus trip) wondering how much worse the Laos poverty would be than what i saw in Bangkok ... call me culturally blinkered, but all i knew about Laos was that it is the most bombed country per capita on earth (CIA ... who would have thought!), is a renowned opium den and that foreigners reputedly get fined $500 if caught sleeping with a local girl (Anna was Laotian - that's why she was in Bangkok).

The last two facts were confirmed as soon as I jumped off the bus into Vientiane (the capital) - for the first time in a while I was not offered to be taken to a ping pong show or massage parlour ... rather, I was immediately offered opium. Vientiane was unremarkable for such a remarkable country - perhaps redeemed only by the fact that it had a shooting club where for a couple of bucks I could try my favourite pistol so I tried my hand and headed to Vang Vieng.

I had began to love Laos by the time I got to Vang Vieng, I kept my face pressed to the window in order to take in the beautiful scenery and thatched villages lining the road offering glimpses of the Laos way of life - slow and relaxed ... I am not sure if it is not just the difference between rural and urban poverty, however, the Laotian lifestyle seemed enviable (at least from the bus).

Vang Vieng is a visually stunning place where the thing to do is to grab a tube and float down the river stopping off every couple of hundred meters at one of the many riverside bars offering blaring music, 10m high swings or flying foxes into the river, free Lao Lao (local whiskey) and cheap drinks/marijuana/mushrooms ... by the bottom of the river everyone is loaded and well acquainted and, if lucky, no one has drowned (unwisely I took the Kayaking option - that, although advertised, did not include the tubing). There are a stack of bars offering Friends or Simpsons reruns and "Happy" pizza's/shakes in which to recover from tubing ... the whole place is somehow not quite as offensive as it sounds ... this and Daphna, an Israeli girl I met on the river, made for a pleasant couple of days.