The Dos and Don'ts of South East Asia

Sun, sweat and scooters; trains, temples and tours; bananas, buses and lager. The tourist infrastructure in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Laos turns travelling into a wonderful holiday. However, alongside the tourist trade come touts and tricksters to be wary of. So to supplement your Lonely Planet/Rough Guide (delete as appropriate) here are World in Slow Motion's top tips for S.E. Asia:

Do:
- Take a sheet sleeping bag. There is a curious lack of bedding in these parts.
- Carry plenty of U.S. dollars cash. They are a useful back-up and the currency of choice in Cambodia.
- Drink bia hoi on plastic chairs in the street in Vietnam. 20p for a glass of draught lager.
- Drink fruity drink and coconuts with a straw. You can spot a fruity drink stall by the glasses of chopped fruit to which condensed milk, coconut milk and balls of sticky rice are added and served with crushed ice.
- Eat amok. This creamy Cambodian curry is the among the best food in SE Asia.
- Take the sleeper bus. A bus with beds is a sight to behold and an experience not to be missed, but don't expect to have a good kip.
- Have a massage at Seeing Hands in Siem Reap or Phnom Penh. These blind masseurs know what to do.
- Help out at Big Brother Mouse. Either chat with the children in English or buy one of their books to help promote literacy in Laos.
- Get up early to see monks collect alms at sunrise, a special sight in Luang Prabang, Laos.
- Go to the flag lowering ceremony in Hanoi, Vietnam. A triumphal affair every night at 9pm at the Ho Chi Minh memorial.
- Learn to say "no thank you" in the local language to keep the hawkers and touts at bay.
- Stay at Golden Temple Villa in Siem Reap. Excellent value and unlimited free bananas make it a winner.
- Stay at Hong Thien Hotel II, 46 Chi Van An Street, in Hue, Vietnam. Tien at reception is very helpful, but don't book a Halong Bay tour through them (see below).

Don't:
- Stay at Greenfields in Hoi An, Vietnam. Poor value and dreadful service.
- Rely on your guidebook for accommodation and eating recommendations. Use the Web, get tips from others and explore by yourself to find some real gems.
- Go on a Halong Bay, Vietnam, tour with Tuan Linh travel agency. These tours are sold through Kim Adventures and various hostels in Hanoi. The boat is broken and the guides lousy. If your boat is called the Duy Tan Junk 02, don't get on it. Electricity is intermittent and the motor may give out.
- Use the travel services at Victory Queen Hotel (formerly Old Darling Hotel), Hanoi, Vietnam. They take a whopping commission without telling you.
- Buy shoes at Cham H'Mong, 495 C'ua Dai Street, Hoi An, Vietnam. They fall apart within hours. - Buy your Cambodian visa at the 'Cambodian Consulate' in Aranya Prathet, Cambodia, it's a scam. Buy it at the desk once you'e through Thai immigration.
- Take any price as given - accommodation, food, things - all are up for negotiation. Pay what you think is fair.
- Sleep at the back of a sleeper bus. The bounce prevents sleep.
- Lose your temper with a local. If you cause someone to lose their temper they will lose face and make your life very uncomfortable as they try to regain it.
- Expect a peaceful sunrise at Angkor Wat, Siem Reap. You will be joined by hundreds of tourists all jostling for the same perfect sun-rises-over-ancient-temple photo.
- Wear shorts and sandals in Khao Yai National Park, Thailand. The leeches will eat you for breakfast.

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Laos - Thailand

Crossing from Laos into Thailand, on the ‘friendship bridge’ spanning the Mekong River is a relatively simple affair.

Indeed, if it wasn’t for the painfully slow queue at immigration, standing in line in the baking heat for some dead-eyed, moustachioed chap to staple yet another piece of paper into your passport it’d feel more like a little jolly across the Severn Bridge rather than crossing an international border.

But low-key as it is, the differences between these two countries start to become apparent the moment you reach the other side.

Goodbye sleepy little Laos, hello thrusting ‘tiger economy’ of Thailand.

Within minutes the tiny, winding bumpy roads of Laos became a fading memory, as we sped along a smooth, fast dual carriageway, heading south for the second city of Nakhon Ratchasima. We travel a good inch across my battered map of the world in a few hours - something that would have taken a several days north of the border.

The scenery has changed as well. Gone are the wild mountains of the north, smothered in dense jungle, the jagged limestone peaks peaking through low cloud and teak forests teaming with wildlife.

Instead we speed through the pancake-flat plains of north east Thailand, a land of coconut trees and paddy fields where water buffalo submerge themselves in an effort to escape the searing heat.

And gone are the villages of little rattan, thatched huts, perched precariously on their stilts. Now we pass shopping complexes, car showrooms and steakhouses.

It seems south of the Mekong they have plumped for one form of imperialism for another: forsaking old Europe for the New World; French for American; colonialism for cultural and economic imperialism.

In the land of the Thais Uncle Sam has found himself some followers as the economy as expanded. Thais drive their pick-ups to the parking lot, they shop at the mart, they go downtown at the convenience store.

But the US isn’t the only country to get a piece of the action. Even dozy old Britain is represented, albeit by Tesco superstores (sweetly branded ‘Tesco Lotus’ in order to give it a nice, suitably exotic-sounding appearance) and the overpaid primadonna footballers from the Premier League, gurning across many TV screens and newspaper back pages.

Still the Thais are not ready to disown their own identity just yet. Indeed in this land you need only look at the nearest fencepost to be reminded of where you are, for the national bunting is permanently on display. The Thai flag festoons every frontage, usually accompanied by the yellow Buddhist flag.

This practice in itself would seem odd if it weren’t overshadowed - often literally - by the enormous portraits of the reigning monarch and his family, given pride of (public) place on every road, in every street.

They gaze down serenely upon you from every available space: on roundabouts and above pavements; along central reservations and across bridges, on calendars hanging in shops and outside municipal offices.

I’ve even seen soldiers sporting the kind of plastic wristbands worn in the West to pledge allegiance to a particular cause, yet their ones proclaim ‘Long live the King’.

As the longest reigning Thai monarch ever (60 years and counting), and indeed the longest-reigning current monarch in the world (he even puts our Brenda into the shade) His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej (Rama IX)’s is particularly popular.

Blinging up his his bespeculed, rather straight-laced appearance as elaborately as possible has ascended to almost an art form, albeit one that is perhaps more in keeping with Posh ‘n’ Becks rather than a refined royal.

Entering this country from Laos, where the monarchy was overthrown by the Communists and the Hammer and Sickle still flies from government buildings, it feels rather surreal - like travelling through a Tintin comic set in some obscure East European country where all the names contains lots of z‘s.

Unlike Laos, where tourism has only recently taken off, Thailand is now well-established as a firm favourite for Western tourists. The Thais have got it sussed: they dazzle you with their smile, enchant you with their accessible exoticism and leave you happy to be relieved of your Baht.

They have had time to develop this winning formula, benefiting from their climate, cultural and natural attractions and the kind of fully-developed infrastructure needed to draw overseas visitors.

The Lao have all but the latter: it’ll be interesting to see whether they will be as successful as their southern neighbours.

All this is immaterial however, compared with the surely the most reliable indicator of a nation’s greatness - its food. Thailand is rightly famed the world over for its fantastic fare and, despite all the differences we had noticed since crossing the Mekong, it wasn’t until we had tasted a Thai Green Curry that we could be sure we were in a different country.

Now all they need to do is take a lesson from their northern neighbours on how to brew a good beer to accompany it.

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Laos. Enchante.

We have crossed the border from China, south into Laos. En route we passed through some of the wildest, most remote terrain I have ever encountered.

It was also some of the most beautiful.

Our road wound along river valleys, their thick, muddy waters chocked with debris from the recently-passed moonsons. We skirted steep mountain sides and passed through tiny villages, with small thatched huts sat on stilts, children, chickens and little pigs scattering in our path.

And all along the thick, green jungle shadowed us, lining the route and stretching out across the hills as far as the eye could see.

The road was long, the journey arduous and slow. Our tiny little road bumped up and down, veered left and right and never ever seem to run straight for more than a few metres. No wonder Laos wasn’t accessible by road until about ten years ago.

Finally, after nine hours of bumping up and down we arrived at our Eldorado: Luang Prabang.

An ancient imperial capital of this wondrous country…an enchanting town of golden temples and the exotic mysteries of the east…an outpost of mankind standing at the confluence of the Mekong and the Nam Khan rivers...and all a bit….French.

Upon arrival I was amazed , and rather charmed, to be addressed in French by the elderly Madame of our guesthouse. Enchante.

It didn’t stop there. The town is chokker with battered old French-style buildings, crumbling colonial houses with long thin shutters, rickety balconies, and outside walls whitewashed against the tropical sun.

On the main street, Sisavangvong Road, all kinds of treats await the homeless Parisian, from baguettes and quiche lorraine to tarte aux pommes and milles feuilles. And of course the excellent, thirst-quenching Beer Lao - a French lager if ever there were one.

I half expected Arthur Bostrom’s hapless gendarme/British agent character from ‘Allo ‘Allo to saunter by, waving his nightstick and greeting us, ‘good moaning’.

Across the road from our guesthouse we can hear young children learning French at the French language school; around the corner we had a nice chat with a friendly chap from Clermont-Ferrand who runs one of the town’s numerous bookshops.

My Francophile father would love it, though it did leave me wondering quite why the French went to the trouble of colonising a place which, despite it’s numerous charms, is rather inhospitable.

There must have been good reason to do so, after all the French were only one country in a long line of others to which the Lao people found themselves rather reluctant hosts. The Burmese, the Thais, the Chinese, the Vietnamese, even the Americans have also left their mark on this little nation.

Add into the mix a whole host of different ethnic groups, stir in the rise and fall of an imperial family and add a good measure of communism and Laos comes out with a rather interesting and unique flavour.

The people have certainly changed from those amongst whom we walked yesterday, on the other side of the Chinese border. Not only do they look decidedly different but their character is a refreshing change to the ebullient, noisy Chinese.

Quiet and shy, Lao people seem reticent to accost the numerous wealthy foreigners strolling about their town.

No shopkeepers hassle you here, rather you have to hassle them, waking them from their slumbers as they doze in the afternoon heat.

No rickshaw drivers harangue you mercilessly, instead they crouch in the shadows, perhaps offering a rather halfhearted sales pitch: ‘cheap cheap’.

No crowds, no pushing, no shoving, no spitting.

You can put your elbows away when you leave China and enter Laos, for it’s suddenly very well mannered once more. Smiles, apologies, bowing. Is it all going Japanese again?

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How to…travel from China to Laos overland

Mohan is the only border crossing from China to Laos. There are a number of ways to get there and once you do the procedure is simple as long as you have dollars and long arms.

We took the 15 hour night bus from Dali to Jinghong [180 yuan]. Buses also depart for Jinghong from Lijiang and Kunming. From Jinghong it is an easy three hour bus journey to Mengla [35 yuan] where we had to spend the night to take the morning bus to Luang Prabang, Laos. There is one bus daily that leaves at 7.50am and takes a good 12 hours including immigration and customs time [98 yuan]. It is a sleeper bus so has beds for lounging, not seats; rather a luxurious way to travel when you don’t need to sleep. Buses also depart from Kunming to Luang Prabang and Vientiane.

The bus stops at Mohan, the last town in China before Laos, where everyone disembarks and you walk 100 metres down the road to the immigration queue. Hand is your China departure card and get an exit stamp. You then have to wait to get back on the bus while Chinese customs search under the beds, open people’s boxes and shake coconuts. Then you drive on to Laos.
Three minutes later you get off at Boten, the first town in Laos after China. You can buy your Laos visa upon arrival. Go to the window with the blue sign reading ‘Visa arrival unit’ to fill in a form, and hand over a passport photo, your passport and $35 dollars. You are then given your Laos visa (30 days for Brits).

Next you need to get your arrival stamp. Go to the next window on the left and fill in an arrival form. Take it to the window with the red ’Check in’ sign and join the scrum. Most people going into Laos are Chinese so the Chinese queuing system applies. Sharpen your elbows and wade in. Thrust your passport and form through the window and keep pushing until an official takes it and stamps it. Then you can get back on the bus. For another ten minutes.

Laotian customs follow and depending on what your fellow passengers are carrying this can take some time, an hour or more. Our coach contained boxes of chillies, bags of rice and flour and a sack of cabbages. Why would you take rice and cabbages to Laos?

Finally on the road for the nine hour bus potholing experience and the scenery starts to change. It gets warmer, there are more banana plants and concrete box buildings are replaced by thatch huts on stilts. It starts to feel very tropical and remote. There are noticeably more children in Laos than China and an abundance of potbellied pigs that decrease in number as you head south. Women wear sarongs, not trousers and there is a lot more mud and dust. It is the most extraordinary way to enter a country and was quite a surprise when we terminated in the French style backpacker oasis of Luang Prabang during their Ork Phansa and Lai Hena Fai (end of Buddhist lent and end of rains) Festival. Talk about arriving with a bang!

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Turning to the bottle?

“We should get some plastic bottles to wee into”.

It wasn’t a typical suggestion from Lara. But then, we weren't in a typical situation.

We found ourselves crammed in with 30 other Chinese people on a sleeper bus down to the south of Yunnan province.

Catching the bus at Dali, we found the bus almost full. The choice of beds was thus limited…to the very beds any traveller wishes to avoid on China rudimentary rural roads - those right at the back.

Squeezed into our five-foot berths, clutching our bags tightly to our persons, we weren’t exactly eagerly anticipating this journey. 15 hours, through the night, on a bus reeking of BO and full of scary-looking types. Oh and with no toilet on board.

We had been warned about these buses: ripe for thieves; poor safety records; drivers popping funny-looking pills to keep themselves awake.

Perhaps we should have headed back to Kunming rather than attempt this shortcut, skirting along the edge of the Burmese border all the way down to Xishuangbanna in the tropical south of Yunnan.

A tubby chap in front of us didn’t seem to share our concerns. He yawned, scratched his crotch and smoothed his whispy moustache, a soup-strainer teasing the corners of his mouth.

Tubby wore the usual attire of polyester jogging bottoms, a worn-out t-shirt and pungent nylon socks. No wonder the bus stank.

After an hour and a half on the road, the driver turned off and steered his vehicle into a dusty yard. On opposite sides dirty fuel tankers were lined up. A couple of mangy dogs drifted about in front of them, sniffing each others’ behinds.

At one end I could make out what looked like a public lavatory, at the other a chap in a old cream suit and spotty tie implored this new batch of potential customers to savour the delights of his dingy restaurant.

I plumped for the WC. I soon wished I hadn’t. A stygian nightmare of a place.

Stepping inside I was almost overpowered by the reek of a thousand digested stir fries.

Beneath bare bulbs a line of grunting men squatted, their behinds clearly visible to all for each ‘cubicle’ consisted of a low wall, minus door. Above an overspilling trench, which had clearly long since had a good flush through, they crouched, shouting to their mates and even smoking cigarettes.

I desperately searched for a free, and perhaps slightly sanitary spot and made my leave as soon as possible. Back on earth’s surface I staggered out into the yard, gulping in air like an asphyxiated asthmatic.

Walking over into the half-light of the restaurant entrance, I came across Tubby and his wife. He stood proud, his legs far apart and hands on his hips, making half-hearted stretches and fully-committed guttural sounds.

Tubby’s copious burps rattled the windows, his hocking-up rocked the ground. The earth nicely coated in his spittle he raised his t-shirt and patted his rotund midriff contentedly.

At last, when he had run out of cigarettes our driver reappeared and squeezed into his seat behind the wheel. We were back on the road.

Many passengers chose to eschew the charms of Jackie Chan on the temperamental on-board televisions and got down to the serious business of sleeping. We did similar. Or tried to. A good night’s kip on this night bus soon proved to be rather elusive.

The road conditions were atrocious, with more bumps than flat. And our driver seemed to have a taste for offroading. Indeed, speeding through the mountains, I wonder whether our bus touched asphalt at all during that long, long night.

Lying in my prime anti-gravitational positions at the back of the bus I seemed to spend more of the time in mid-air than on my bunk.

Whilst Lara had wisely found a belt of some sort with which she managed to strap herself firmly to her berth I contented myself with shooting up into the air at every bump. Crashing back down onto my bunk I winced with the impact

Sleep, or at least more than the odd doze, was impossible. Instead, in between the snatched periods of semi-conciousness, I grasped the handrails and admired the landscape, bathed in the light of the full moon.

The road intermittently followed the course of the Lancang River, destined to become the mighty Mekong at the Laotian border.

Having already come across this river, on the fringes of the Tibetan plateau, this river will soon become an old acquaintance, as we follow it, on and off in the next few weeks, through Laos, along the border with Thailand, across Cambodia and down into Vietnam, where it finally empties into the sea, chanelled through the Mekong Delta.

Leaving the river behind for now, through my sleep-deprived haze I watched the mountains of the north gave way to smooth green hills, decked with rice terraces and rubber plantations, interspersed by banana plantations and the odd remote village.

We had crossed the tropic of Cancer.

By first light the scenery was decidedly tropical and I was decidedly disoriented as we pulled into our destination, Jinhong, a staging post for our journey down into Laos.

Still, mustn't complain: at least I didn't need to turn to the bottle.

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