One of the things that travelling teaches you is that your expectations mean nothing, and so it was with the south of Thailand, where my notions of what it would be like turned out to be 10 years out of date. My mental image of beaches full of hale and hearty travellers all sharing tales of travels around the globe proved to be well misfounded. Thailand, even the supposedly 'backpacker' areas, is packed full of people from northern Europe on 2 week holidays. Not that there's anything wrong with that of course, except that they all seem a bit zombified (yes, I do remember what effect cold and work has on you) and not particularly interested in meeting and talking about adventures with other travellers. In other words, it was all a bit undynamic and, dare ... read more

I travelled to Saigon (also known as Ho Chi Minh City) from Pnom Penh to meet up with Kiran who had come all the way from sunny Glasgow to join me on my travels for a couple of weeks. As he only had a bit less than two weeks to travel from Saigon to Hanoi, we were on a schedule (something I'm not used to anymore!) So day 1 was spent exploring Saigon, where we went to the market and the War Remnants museum, which displays some very disturbing evidence of the war with America. The next day we went on a tour to the Cu Chi tunnels, an amazing network of underground tunnels which thousands of people lived in during the war. In the evening, we go the bus to Dalat in the central highlands, ... read more

I spent a month in Laos in total, and it still wasn't enough to take everything in. After doing the trek mentioned in the previous blog, I headed for an even smaller town, Muang Sing, which was according to Lonely Planet, the eco trekking centre of Laos and one of the highlights of South East Asia. They must have been having an off day, there was absolutely nothing to do and no one knew of anything to do, apart from going to look at the Chinese border 10km away. The 2 hour journey up through the hills was spectacular, although I was a bit distracted by the old woman sitting across from me leaning out the back of the sangthew (an open sided minubus / van thing) to be sick at regular intervals. As my legs ... read more

I spent a couple of days trekking in northern Laos from Luang Nam Tha to a hill tribe village, Ban Nam Lai, where we spent the night. There were no roads at all to the village, so not even a motorbike there, and other than the odd Man Utd item, life there seemed to our European eyes to be unchanged from what it must have been like hundreds of years ago (although the villagers may well feel differently). The hill tribe was Akha, and fortunately for us we arrived on night 1 of a 3 day wedding celebration, which we were invited to. This involved us, out of politeness, having to down shots of lao-lao, the rice whiskey here, which the groom then rewarded with a handful of sweeties and a fag. First time I've experienced ... read more

Hve only been in Thailand a few days now - spent 4 days in Bangkok, saw a few of the main sights, the Grand Palace and Reclining Buddha are amazing. I'm now in Chiang Mai in the north of Thailand after an overnight train journey (a proper sleeper service where someone comes round and makes your bed up for you, it was brilliant, after a year of many overnight journeys, I've not been able to lie out before!) The big dilemma now is whether to go on a three day trek or stay in Chiang Mai in the hope that someone will be showing the Scotland game, which will be on here at 2 in the morning. It seems as if none of the Asian networks show the European qualifiers, so will maybe go on the ... read more