Luang Prabang

The easiest places to write about are the ones you hate. There's nothing like having an axe to grind to get the literary juices gushing; you drink a few beers, plug the brain into the keyboard and let the vitriol pour forth. Spellchecker does the rest.

When I like a place I hesitate. It takes time to let my thoughts crystallize; even the most heartfelt praise needs empirical evidence to prop it up. It's not enough to say I love you, I need to tell you why.

Waiting for the thoughts and words to shuffle into some kind of order, you risk losing them. With Luang Prabang, the superlatives began suggesting themselves long before I even crosssed the Mekong to Huoy Xia. In my dreams I saw the reflection of a glorious city shimmering on the surface of a dull brown river, but instead it crept up on me, as dreams often do. Modest, subtle and unannounced.

Luang Prabang, Luang Prabang. Let me rummage in this old bag here and see if I can't find some words to describe you.

I love the smell of your twilight fires, and the sound of their crackling. I love peering through your fence as orange robed monks warm their hands by your glow. Across your tree lined streets, I love the sound of clashing metal, as the energetic voices of invisible tuk-tuk drivers play boules upon your hallowed ground.

I love your wooden houses. I love the stains that streak down your walls. I love the children that play in your streets, that stand naked in your doorways and laugh as you walk past. I love your smiles, transcending the moments through which you shine. That make a mockery of poverty, race, creed and culture. Smiles that turn your heart inside out and show the deepest warmth of your soul right where I can see you.

Luang Prabang, you are a beautiful woman who grows more beautiful with age. You don't fight time, but embrace and dance with him instead. As the years slip from you, the wrinkles augment your beauty; heightening your grandeur, not diminishing it. You are timeless, graceful, unforgettable, and I hope with all my heart you don't change before I return.

Village People

An added advantage of my chosen mode of river transport is that we get to stop at a few villages along the way and gawp at the locals. There are some truly awful village experiences in Thailand, only slightly less distasteful than Victorian freakshows, but thankfully these aren't too bad.

The kids of Houy Palam have the day off school, and are scattered about the village hanging out or helping their mums pound rice. They don't mind you taking their photograph, so long as you leave a few quid in a box to help them build a new school, which seems like a fair exchange. The town is pretty well isolated here, they rear buffalo and cows, grow rice, and there are dogs, chickens and pigs scattered around the place, most of whom will end up being eaten.

Childhoods are truncated in Houy Palam, since they began reproducing as soon as they can. Attempts to educate them in contraceptive techniques have met with limited success - showing people how to put a condom on a banana doesn't quite register, and nine months later it turns out that a fully sheathed piece of fruit next to the nuptial bed doesn't actually preclude you from making babies.

A picture like this can seem a little odd to our prying western eyes. But who are we to contradict nature, who creates us and adorns us with the powers of procreation whenever she sees fit? Kids grow up differently here - it's impossible to gauge their ages, and you only have to look at their faces to see they are far older and worldly wise than a cursory glance would suggest.

Western childhoods have been practically abandoned to the modern world anyway; at least here they get to enjoy a pure, free pre-adolescence before assuming their natural roles. As we prepare to leave, most of the boys have headed down to the river. Naked or at best scantily clad, they laugh, shout, jump and play with wanton joy and abandon, completely uncorrupted by the trappings of modern youth and, for the moment at least, blissfully happy.

Downstream in Kohk Ek there's a different feel. They're selling stuff, for starters, and we are accosted by silk bearing women as soon as we step off the boat. It feels less welcoming here, and I'm not comfortable getting the camera out. Maybe they call it progress.

Wandering between the stilted houses, the children are conspicuous by their absence. Are they toiling in the fields, we wonder? But no; at the far end of the village is a school, and 150 kids are in their little classrooms, studying Laotian, English and History. There's not a sound from any of them, and their only signs of inattentiveness come when they peek through the slats in the walls to gawp back at us the way we've been gawping at them.

My only regret? That I didn't leave every last cent in that box back in Houy Palam.

Apocalypse Then

The Mekong River, the aorta of Indochina, meanders through the Laotian jungle like a long brown snake.

It takes two days by boat from Huoy Xai to Luang Prabang. You can go by speedboat in seven hours, but this is only really a viable option if you regard your life and luggage as frivolous luxuries worth squandering for the sake of a few hours and some rigorous spine compression. The only remaining question is whether to take the public slowboat, with its wooden benches and couple of hundred Thais and Laotians drinking, gambling and squabbling over the solitary lavatory, or a private one, bedecked with old bus seats, picnic chairs and a table for lunching and playing leisurely games of backgammon as the lush green scenery rolls effortlessly by. The drinking and gambling might entertain me for an hour or so, but two days? Relative comfort triumphs in a swift, bloodless tussle.

I imagined the Slow Boat's slowness would make the greatest impression upon me, but it was quickly usurped by the extraordinarily sense of complete remoteness. The great river runs through barbaric wilderness, tamed in just a few choice spots by a cluster of houses where hill tribes meet the water, and with it the fragments of civilisation that traverse its length. We stop at a couple of them (next post) and spend the night in Pak Beng, a halfway house of a place if ever there were one.

All that time on the boat affords you plenty of opportunities to reflect. And despite my best efforts, though probably understandably, I can't stop thinking about Apocalypse Now. Of the prospect of being subjected to a brutal attack by stick firing tribesmen or the face of a dead black guy being silently consumed by the murky water. But moreover, by the notion that I am actually playing out that drama in reverse. Not for me an irresistible journey into the magnetic Darkness of the soul, rather the slow but steady draw of a revelatory gravity, and a gradual stumbling from darkness into Light.

Moon River

"The best Mexican food this side of the border" read the sign. Which would be fine, except they're talking about the border between Thailand and Laos, otherwise known as the Mekong River. I resist the temptation, and spend my last night in Thailand eating barbecue with the Chiang Khong locals instead.

Natural borders make so much more sense than man made ones. Rivers, mountains, seas; these are the things that should divide people, not lines drawn on maps by distant men. Slumped in my hammock looking out across the river to Houy Xia and listening to the faint music drifting across the river, I wondered how different it could really be.

An understandable duality shrouds you when you stand on the brink of something. A border or cusp, real or figurative; leaving one thing behind, entering another. Reflection, anticipation. It might actually be the greatest thing about travelling, moving from one place to another, body and mind constantly charged and energised by these changes. And not just travelling but life, too, come to think of it.

As I mused over these things, an apparition began to materialise above the opposite bank of the river. A warm yellow glow climbed reticently from behind the landscape, winched into the sky by an invisible hand. It took me so long to realise that it was the moon, as I sat transfixed by it, that by the time I reached for the camera, it had risen quite quickly and the sun's distant glare was shimmering off its dimpled skin, suffusing the dark night.

Chiang Rai

I don't have an awful lot to say about Chiang Rai. The Lonely Planet says it is "more liveable than visitable" which seems to be a polite way of telling you not to go there.

I went anyway, mainly because it was in my way, and also because it is the best place to go trekking from. But the Lonely Planet's advice is evident, because there seem to be a lot of white guys living here. They could be attracted by the clock tower, resplendent in its coat of shiny gilt, surely the most tasteless roundabout in the world, and peculiarly reminiscent of Del Boy's mum's ostentatious grave in Only Fools and Horses when they inadvertently daubed it in luminous paint.

Or maybe they're here for the dubious bars, fronted by nubile Thai girls of questionable age, frequented by fat balding Brits of questionable morals. Last night I sat in a restaurant and listened to an effeminate Northerner arguing with the owner in English before ordering Spaghetti Bolognese with Garlic Bread. Then another ugly fat bloke the wrong side of fifty waddled in to eat chicken and chips in silence, before slinking off to no doubt exercise his economic superiority over the local population.

I like Thailand. I like its people, its countryside. But I despise its moral ambiguity, and moreover, I despise my compatriots, and everyone else, who flaunt their relative wealth to extend their pitiful sexual dominion over those people weaker and poorer than themselves.

I have to leave before I drink myself into a Travis Bickle style stupor, stuff snooker balls in my socks and go marauding around the streets in the dead of night looking for Gary Glitter, or anyone else who happens to bear him anything approximating a passing resemblance, and beat them to within a few inches of their miserable, sordid little lives.

Welcome to the Jungle

I'm a bit of a pussy when it comes down to it. I like to be comfortable. I don't like strange creatures nibbling away at me; mosquitoes, snakes, beetles, hirsute caterpillars. So when I woke up yesterday morning, I was really thinking about ducking out of my two day jungle trek and hanging out in Chiang Rai instead. Thankfully, something deeper than all that won the day.

After an hour or so in a boat up the Mae Kok river, twenty minutes on the back of an elephant and a couple of hours of uphill struggle through Thai jungle, myself and Woot, my guide, finally arrived at Akha village, saturated with sweat, exhausted and smelling like Robin Hood's armpits. Just another ten minute walk (in our flip flops) and we were showering underneath a mercifully cold waterfall and I was trying to remember when I last felt this happy.

Akha Hill Village

I helped Woot and Apha, our guide for the next day, cook dinner, and in true hilltribe style, we cracked open a few beers. When the sun had shrunk from the valley, Woot asked if I wanted to walk back to the waterfall. He wouldn't go because, he said, Thai people believe in ghosts. I told him I wouldn't go because I was afraid of the living things out there, not the dead ones. As if to prove my point, a massive beetle landed between us, scaring the crap out of me. They obviously thought this was hilarious, picking it up and throwing it at one another whilst relishing my discomfort. We turned in for the night when the excitement was over, at a saintly 8pm, and fell asleep listening to the gentle sounds of the jungle, woken only by an owl perched on the roof of our hut, hooting knowingly.

When I was a lot younger and fractionally more stupid than I am now, I would often watch the sun coming up. It's not a habit I carried with me into my thirties but this morning, urged on by a crowing cockerel, I clambered out from under the mosquito net and strolled into the village in my underpants to watch day emerge from night.

A few hours later, replenished by my twelve hours kip and four slices of toast thickly spread with crunchy Sun Pat, we're off again, back in yesterdays crusty clothes, a new "That's not a knife" knife swinging from my hip and just the jungle ahead of us. We walk, talk a little, every now and then, and sweat. Along the way we harvest lemongrass, banana leaves, shoots and tea. In a small clearing we begin on the bamboo. We make fishing rods, cups, chopsticks, plates and cooking tubes. "Jungle is like 7 Eleven", says Woot.

We stop for lunch, and try to fish but apparently another tribe upstream are using nets, so we're having pork. It's the only thing we've not picked up along the way, though in theory we could have raided a neighbouring village for a pig or two. Apha cooks lunch on the fire while I stroll around unhelpfully looking for things to do with my knife.

Bear Grylls? Taught him everything he knows

Apha and Woot

After lunch we head our separate ways; Apha back to the village, Woot and I to the Hot Springs where he left the car, twelve kilometres away. It's a long old walk, through rice fields, tea plantations, but we get there in the end. By the time I'm back in Chiang Rai, aching all over, with a fascinating array of new insect bites despite the 33% deet, I feel somehow different. I always look to explain things through comparison with others; best this, best that. Finest whatever since whenever. It's all bollocks.

Experiences like this neither need to be, nor prosper from being, measured against others. Rather they are the things that make you realise you are alive, that the world you live in is inherently wonderful, and that each genuinely new experience, regardless of its nature, is irrefutably greater than the last.

Chiang Mai

You gain a unique perspective of a city from among the rooftops. Not by looking down at it, but by listening. It's a distillation; all the other senses stripped away, leaving just the sounds. Sat up on the terrace here in Chiang Mai, all I can hear is the irregular but persistent phut-phut of the tuk-tuks, and the city sounds like a waiting room full of infants when the whooping cough's in town.

Chiang Mai may well be the biggest city in Northern Thailand, but it never quite feels like it. The old town centre is as near to a perfect square as town planners get, marked out by an ancient wall and moat. Within it are all the usual South East Asian charms; quirky little alleyways, food carts, holes in the road, stray dogs, low hanging electricity cables, massage parlours, 7 Elevens, McDonalds, Starbucks and colourful tuk-tuk drivers canvassing your fare. And temples, of varying condition and grandeur.

Atop a nearby hill, the temple daddy, Wat Suthep, keeps watch over the city. They like their gold in Thailand, sometimes a little too much, but this place just about pulls it off. That's partly due to the setting; a crisp view of Chiang Mai below, and raw natural beauty all around. Only the high pitch of the crickets, sounding like a million kettles all boiling at once, upsets the harmony.

I was fully prepared to fall in love with Chiang Mai. It's not Southern Thailand, with its marauding backpackers, stunning beaches, mushroom shaped Bond islands and sex-pats. It's the North. It is different. Rugged, genuine, honest. And maybe it is, but it doesn't quite manage to charm me, and I can't help feeling a little disappointed

An hour either side of five, the city chugs to a standstill, and the fumes from a few thousand tuk-tuks stifle the air. The markets sell almost exclusively tat, and manage to string the same four stalls out over what seems like a few square miles (why do people have a foot dragging, deathly slow market walk?). There are some good eateries, and the bars don't feel quite as sordid as I'd feared, but just a couple of days here is enough for me, and it's definitely time to leave the tuk-tuks in my dust.