The Mekong Delta is a water world of dizzying, dazzling, 'spit-in-your-eye' greens, long-stemmed vivid fuschia water lilies, and purple water hyacinth. It's a world of boats, floating houses, markets and fish farms. A world where rivers, canals and streams outnumber the patches of land. It's a world where everything bobs gently up and down, and sways slowly. A world of plenty. The people of the Delta produce one of the most bountiful rice harvests on earth and the range of fruit, coconut and sugar cane available is staggering. The area is rural, but intensely populated - hectic, but also charmingly chilled. This was the Mekong as we'd never seen it before. The wooden houses of Laos and Cambodia gave way to corrugated iron - leaning tipsily over littered waterways, little homes practically stood on each other's ... read more

In Vietnam the mighty Mekong finally reaches the sea. In a final fling before losing it's identity forever the river splits into two main branches. The Hau Giang (Lower River or the Bassac River) which flows via Chau Doc, Long Xuyen and Can Tho to the sea; and the Tien Giang which splits into several branches at Vinh Long and empties into the sea at five points. Each of these channels splits into countless smaller rivers, waterways, and canals to make up the waterworld of the Mekong Delta - one of the largest river deltas in the world. The Vietnamese call the river the Song Cuu Long (River of Nine Dragons). We took our time to explore the 'rice bowl' of Vietnam and ended our journey at Ba Dong beach - the nearest we could get ... read more

Located on the banks of the mighty Mekong, Phomn Penh is fast paced, modern, charming. Motorbikes whizz through the streets without a thought for pedestrians, street vendors push hand carts and glass-walled boxes stuffed with fruit, snails, bugs and beetles and large four-wheel-drive vehicles over-ride all, blasting on the horn and storming ahead. The cyclos - a Phnom Penh institution since it's introduction in 1936 - do not seem to belong to this frantic, frenetic world; and indeed this iconic form of transport is under threat; numbers have dwindled from 9,000 in 1999 to around 1,300 on the streets of the city today. Our cyclo driver tilted the bucket seat forwards and, climbing up onto the high bicycle saddle, pushed me out into the on-coming bedlam. We skirted traffic, and keeping up a steady rhythm, slow ... read more

Cambodia's two dominant geographical features are the Mekong River and the vast lake, Tonle Sap - the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia and an incredible natural phenomenon. At Phnom Penh the Mekong splits into three channels: Tonle Sap River which connects with Tonle Sap Lake; the Upper River (called the Mekong or in Vietnamese, Tien Giang) and the Lower River (Tonle Bassac, or Hau Giang in Vietnamese). The rich sediment deposited during the Mekong's annual wet-season flooding has made central Cambodia incredibly fertile. This low lying plain is where the vast majority of Cambodians live, fishing and farming with the rhythms of the monsoon. From mid May to early October (the wet season)the level of the Mekong rises rapidly, backing up Tonle Sap river, causing it to flow into the Tonle Sap Lake. During this ... read more

The United States was never officially at war with Laos. Yet between 1964 and 1973 the USA dropped two million tons of bombs on this beautiful, largely rural country. Around 30% of these bombs failed to detonate leaving Laos liberally littered with unexploded ordinance (UXO). Imagine: You wake in the morning, and rubbing sleep from your eyes, you stumble to make your morning cuppa. Except in Laos there is no running water and no electric kettle; you heat water on a wood fire, squatting on your haunches, literally watching the pot boil, smoke and steam wafting over your face. On the 10th of May last year, Ms. Thang was doing just this, as she must have done for the greater part of her thirty-eight years. Except Ms. Thang had no way of knowing there was a ... read more