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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Britons! Take a bow...

We have been in Japan for almost a month now. The food is no longer an adventure into the unknown, we can speak a few words of the lingo, we can even navigate our way through the spaghetti-soup map of Tokyo’s metro system.

But there is one thing that I still haven’t got used to: bowing.

It didn’t take long to make this serendipitous discovery. In Japan, they do it everywhere: in shops; in the street; on public transport, people get on down and bow.

Sometimes you feel as if you’re in a Monty Python sketch. Enter a shop, a hotel or a restaurant and you risk being attacked by profuse bowing that’ll leave you blushing and bewildered. Have I inadvertently been mistaken for a Knight of the Realm? Has Queen Victoria suddenly popped up behind me?

Japan must be a chiropractor’s dream, for bowing is the norm and indeed it forms an essential feature of one's social interaction people with others, be it friends, colleagues or complete strangers.

Children are taught at home how to show respect and bow, job seekers are shown the exact angle their bow should take, and workers are expected to bow as part of their daily work

In the land of the ‘salaryman’ white-collar worker, bowing helps show respect to colleagues and acknowledges the rigid hierarchy which structures the company.

Like many other aspects of Japanese society there are strong norms that define how one behaves towards friends and colleagues and different degrees of bowing to follow according to one’s place in this hierarchy.

The more important the person, the deeper the bow, and more outwardly fawning you must be. A kind of replacement for the days of the shogun when one prostrated oneself before the ruler.

Hence you witness a frenetic outbreak of bowing amongst work colleagues, at train stations and other public places, when they go their separate ways at the end of the working day.

In the company of those higher up the work hierarchy poor salaryman doesn’t dare turn his back and show disrespect to his seniors, rather he must shuffle backwards, through the crowds, bowing and scraping as he goes.

This isn’t just restricted to salaryman. It is rife across all workplaces. I have seen train drivers bowing away, performing a strict ritual before changing shifts.

Bowing is not restricted to the workplace but is commonplace throughout peoples social lives as well. You often seen friends leaving each other at the end of the night with a bow, as we might a hug or a handshake.

I’ve even seen two friends bowing to each other after a baseball game, on one the station platform, the other inside the train.

Surely all this back-bothering can’t be good for the old lumbago.

As a gaijin you don’t escape this curious social proceedure. Every time I enter a shop or ask a stranger for directions I get a bow. And actually purchasing something can spark a frenzy of spine-stretching, accompanied by an effusive flurry of thank yous and please come agains.

In a hundred yen shop in Nara today the young cashier bowed so deeply and so vigorously to me I was worried he’d knock himself out on the counter.

My surreal encounters with this odd social ritual haven't been limited to shops either. I've been bowed at by ticket inspectors on the train (one of them even doffing his cap as well), by the little lightsabre men who control the traffic at roadworks, by post office clerks and waitresses, theatre ushers and even a policeman.

Blimey, a policeman! Imagine such a thing in Blighty - that would knock the stuffing out of even the most hardened criminal.

Shortly after arriving and getting my first bow, I began to learn to steel myself before attempting to speak to a local, suppressing the urge to giggle and returning them the level of respect they accorded me.

After a week, the bowing, like so many of the other bizarre things I have encountered in Japan started to become normal, then even tiresome.

By the third week I had started to find this excessive politeness unnerving. When even hotel cleaners bowed to me (surely it should have been the other way round, considering they were about to muck out my stables) I felt uncomfortable, as if I was some colonialist oppressor, baying at my coolies for shaking my sedan chair.

But perhaps all this bowing has a purpose other than acting as some quaint, albeit rather odd, courtly hangover from days long gone.

Maybe bowing plays a key role in helping to maintain social harmony in what is a densely populated nation, the well-ordered and disciplined society we witnessed where good, upstanding citizens abide the law and respect each other.

In this way it could even make a vital contribution to Japan’s economic prowess, instilling in its citizens the values of good, honest hard work, self-discipline and respect for authority.

Without wishing to go all Daily Mail how has Japan held on to many social values which Britain appears to have lost? Perhaps bowing is their secret.

So why not give it a go back home? After all, ASBOs have failed, and if we can try them we can try anything.

Of course, any politician would be laughed out the House if they tried to introduce this. No, this has to be more organic, to come from the people themselves. This demands popular action!

So go on, give it a go. Next time you’re at work, down the pub or at the football, face your boss, your friend or your colleague, bend down and give them a good 90 degrees. Trust me; it'll catch on in no time...
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Into the rising sun

Japan, BONG (picture of strapping bare-chested chap striking a large gong).

We have culture shock. Two days sailing in a rusty tub over the Sea of Japan and we could be on another planet.

And this after all our fine words about how travelling slowly would cleverly allow us to bypass the sense of bewilderment brought on by sudden exposure to a new and very different place. You know, approaching a place slowly, witnessing the gradual changes as one travels through as one country or region gives way to another.

Sure, we experienced it in this manner all the way up to and into Russia. But not this time.

Rather, as we stepped onto the deck of the MV Rus and caught our first glimpse of the modest port of Fushiki we realised we had moored up in a place very different from that we had left.

The hot, humid air hit us in the face, torrential rain lashed down on the well-kept dockside. The streets were small, dark and empty except for the odd tiny van scuttling past.


And up above us, fluttering in the breeze, the flag of the rising sun, framed by a backdrop of blue, misty peaks.

Stepping off the boat, the people were immediately different. Gone is the pale and lardy Russian look; the 80-a-day, beer-swilling hubby and dyed-haired, micro-skirted wife. This skinny little Englishman is a giant in this land, squeezing my 10 ½s between train seats, cramming my enormous pack onto the luggage racks as immaculate businessmen and well-behaved school kids duck out the way.

And the service is different. In Vladivostok we spent a bewildering few hours trawling through customs and immigration, sucked into a scrum of liquored Russian tourists before being finally spewed out on the darkended dockside, apparently left to pick the guess the right ship to embark on.

A far cry from the hyper-efficient, ultra-polite world of Japanese officialdom we now find ourselves in, all laptops and bows. Blimey, even the newsreader on the television bows!

Perhaps this will be the only time we experience this culture shock, Japan is after all renowned as a rather insular and culturally isolated nation, happy to be adrift off the coast of Asia and its more boisterous neighbours.

Or perhaps we should steel ourselves for this every time we take a long boat trip, after all America should prove somewhat different from Hong Kong.



Either way, this is culture shock of a highly serendipitous nature. Lara couldn’t stop beeming, “at last - a civilised country!” Her Finnish genes were firing away and she danced for joy: goodbye Russia, hello nice neat, clean Japan.


But despite all these pleasant surprises I got the feeling that it wasn’t all going to be plain sailing. Lurking beneath the surface of this rigidly ordered and law-abiding society lies a complex web of manners and etiquette, a whole new protocol we have to fathom and follow.


Add to this of course a notoriously difficult language, particularly in its written form, which makes cyrillic seem a breeze.


As the monsoonal rains lashed across the harbous and we headed out into the streets we scanned the roadsigns for our next mode of transport.

The squiggles and squirls seemed all robots and rabbits to us. Anyone know the kanji for train station?
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