Luang Prabang to Pak Beng to Huay Xai to Chiang Khong to Chiang Mai

I think last time (if you managed to read to the end of my overly long post), we left off with me seeing in the early hours of the morning on a bench in Luang Prabang awaiting sunrise and the opening of cafes/guesthouses.

After this, I spent a few days just wandering Luang Prabang, visiting the odd Buddhist temple (of which there are many to choose from) and watching monks doing surprising things (e.g. smoking a cigarette, surfing the internet) and less surprising things (being dressed entirely in orange including orange umbrellas as sunshades, chanting, generally looking mystic and calm about life).

The "city" is really a tiny place. It wouldn't qualify as a town in England, just a large village. This is unsurprising as there are apparently only about 6 and a half million people in all of Laos. The centre of the town has quite a few tourists and tourist-orientated things, but not in an offensive in-your-face way like in the south of Thailand. In Luang Prabang, you can walk down the main streets surrounded by white faces, and then easily slip into a side street or lane and see nothing but local inhabitants or no one at all apart from the many wild dogs and cats that laze in the sun all day.

There you can see the positive impact of the money brought in by tourism, in the shiny paved roads, and booming businesses, but also the stark contrast between the sanitised front painted on for tourists, and the crumbling interior of the country behind this facade. Walk just behind the French colonial shopfronts and crowded in the back are bamboo shacks where many of the Laos people themselves live, with the charcoal burners they use for cooking cooling by the door.

Despite the obvious poverty and hardship that most people in Laos clearly face - especially compared with their more economically advanced neighbours in Thailand - it was also wonderful to see a country where tradition and culture was so important and alive. Although, having said this, Laos hasn't been a country for very long. In fact the French artificially created it when they colonised the area, and perhaps local "culture" seems so important here as a reaction against negative outside influence - first the French, and then the Americans who bombed Laos to oblivion during the Vietnam War. Also, there is a communist government in Laos, and although you'd hardly know this as a foreigner, except for the 11.30 curfew, I imagine the controlling influence of political power is more strongly felt by locals.

A lot of the women in Laos where tradition sarongs (long, beautifully patterned skirts) and as I mentioned, much of the home-cooking is still done on clay charcoal-burners. I learned something of Laos tradition when I enrolled for a day on a Laos cooking class. This was not so much about cooking as it was about Laos itself, since their culture seems to be firmly based around food, and much of the food is firmly based around sticky rice.

Laos people use this to eat with - rolling it into balls and scooping up curries etc. - and the leftovers are used for everything: rice noodles; rice paper for spring rolls; dried rice cakes eaten with a tamarind jam; mysterious rice powder used in cooking; laolao (rice whisky) and rice wine. Frankly I wouldn't have been surprised if our teacher had turned round and told us her clothes were made of sticky rice. As she kept reminding us "If not sticky rice, then not Laos people". This I suppose is hardly surprising in a country where they grow over 30 types of sticky rice in a whole rainbow of colours.

Much of Laos cuisine will be difficult to reproduce at home however, since about half the ingredients are sourced from the jungle and have no English equivalent, including a piece of tree called "chilli wood" which if you chew it (why anyone would do this to find out, I don't really know) tastes zingy and hot.

On my last day in Luang Prabang, I took a minibus to Kuangsi waterfall which is just stunning - a proper huge waterfall, with water crashing down a rocky cliff, and below a series of turquoise rock pools and smaller waterfalls in between them. Some of these were "Swimming pools" and others were "Don't swimming pools". I had a dip in a swimming pool, it was icy cold but lovely. Also it was home to the biggest pondskaters I've ever seen in my life, which were interesting water-borne companions. Oh and by the way, my camera survived the day intact. I managed to resist the urge to fling it into the water.

After Luang Prabang I took a 2 day boat trip along the Mekong to Huay Xai, with an overnight stopover at Pak Beng. I'm really glad I did this (despite the fact that it wasn't so fun with food poisoning), because it was a way to observe a little of Laos rural life without being intrusive. There are lots of treks organised from Luang Prabang and also from Chiang Mai here in Thailand, that purport to take you to visit hill tribes and observe their way of life. In fact you're hard pressed to find a tour that doesn't include this kind of anthropological tourism. This (along with the food poisoning) entirely put me off the idea of joining a trek. As someone I was talking to pointed out, it seems to make local people into animals in a zoo, with westerners wandering past and saying "ooh isn't it ethnic". I'm sure some of these tour companies do organize sensitive tours that are of benefit to both tourists and local hill tribes, but having no way of telling which ones, I decided to give the whole scene a miss.

So, it was really nice to see Laos people along the Mekong and how important this waterway clearly is to their lives. In the whole two-day boat trip we didn't pass under one bridge, and roads only connect with the river at Luang Prabang, Pak Beng and Huay Xai, nowhere in between, meaning many people are half a day or more by boat from the nearest towns. But despite this there are lots of tiny villages of bamboo/tin/wood houses, many on stilts, nestled in the steep hills that rise up alongside the river, and the people from these villages were using the river for all sorts of purposes aside from the obvious one of transport.

Lots of small children swam and frolicked in the water, and women bathed more demurely with their sarongs pulled around them, or washed clothes. I even spotted 2 teenage girls shaving their legs and applying face cream. There were also lots of people shaking shallow bowls in the water, who I can only assume were panning for gold. Away from the villages, boatmen set up bamboo poles and floats made out of plastic bottles (debris from passing boats like ours) indicating fishing nets. Several times I also saw racks of waterweed drying. They press this into flat sheets with tomatoes and spices, and then deep fry them for 1-2 seconds before loading them with freshly cut lemon grass and peanuts. We were given some to try on the cooking course. It was quite a tasty snack.

I also saw some wildlife - lots of Buffalo, goats, birds, abundant insects - and the view as a whole was just jaw-achingly beautiful all the way. The river itself shining and rippling, with craggy rocks and boulders jutting through it; strata of rock and sand and mud at the banks leading up to tree covered hills and misty, sloping mountains in the background. I've never journeyed through anywhere so consistently beautiful and remote in a long time so I'm very glad I made the trip this way instead of taking another bumpy (but considerably quicker) nightbus.

From Huay Xai, I crossed over the Mekong to Chiang Khong in Thailand on the other side and bought a ticket on a bus to Chiang Mai. Just as I was buying my ticket, the driver ran outside to the bus, so thinking it was time to leave I followed him. He then moved the bus forwards and after that there was a huge fuss with lots of Thai people milling around and a couple of policeman turning up on motorbikes and whisking the driver away. It turned out that the bus driver had backed up slightly before pulling forward and in his haste had driven his exhaust pipe right through the bumper of the car behind which had in turn been pushed into the car behind that. Still, all the people from the boat were on the bus, so I had familiar people to talk to while we waited for the woman in the ticket office to go and bail out the driver so we could get moving. And yes, I do mean she had to pay a fee so that he was able to leave the police station. This whole business didn't give me much faith in the driver's abilities, and my lack of faith was confirmed when he appeared to be in entirely the wrong gear as we were going up a not-all-that steep hill. The bus started juddering backwards and then he managed to brake and claw us forwards up the hill, the smell of burning clutch following us all the way. So all-in-all the seven hour journey was not much fun, especially since the bus appeared to have no suspension at all, meaning that my hair was full of static from my head bouncing against the back of the seat so much. Oh and I was given a seat right at the back with the toilets behind one ear and the noisy air-conditioning unit behind the other. Do I sound bitter at all? If I do it's only because I seem to have had such awful luck with public transport here, and after 2 days of feeling ill, sitting on a boat doing nothing, another day of feeling ill sitting on a bus doing nothing was not my idea of a good time.

But still, I made it to Chiang Mai in one piece and went with a couple of Australians to a groovy guesthouse one of them had stayed in before. This has a beautiful garden with hanging vines and flowers everywhere, and is populated by ageing hippies. If you ignored the smell emanating from the toilets it would be wonderful. Since I couldn't ignore this, I've now moved to a soulless block with better facilities. That night we went to this reggae roof-top bar and watched the rain fall down on the Sunday market below. This was populated by the same clientelle as our guesthouse.

The next day (yesterday) I did a Thai cooking course (yes I do love food) and that was just wonderful. We went to a local market which, unlike many markets I've seen, was very clean with lots of inviting produce, and then were driven out to the small farm where the cooking school takes place (the company is called the Thai Farm cooking school). Here we were given a tour of the garden where they grow everything we cook. This was so tranquil I could have stayed there all day, done no cooking and still have been happy. Then we went to the kitchen where all of us had our own little workstations with hob, chopping board, knives, ingredients etc. I made 5 different dishes and they all looked reasonably like the picture and tasted very nice, so I was pretty proud with the result.

Today I've been far less adventurous as I've been struck down with a horrid cold, so I just stayed in my soulless room watching crap and slightly fuzzy television. Tomorrow, I intend to see a bit more of Chiang Mai itself, and check out the night bazaar (a market spread out over several blocks) which is supposed to be fun. Then the next day I'll be off to Sukothai, before joining Mum and Lucy in Bangkok on Saturday.