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Travelling around northern Laos on the ‘vomit bus’
When I was dithering about whether or not I should travel to Pai, a small hippyish town in northern Thailand favoured by Western backpackers, one of the marks in the ‘no’ column was the fact that the bus ride there was pretty hairy. So much so that there are plentiful reports of hapless tourists becoming extremely sick during the journey, thanks to being crammed into a minibus that’s speeding around multiple hairpin bends. When I did eventually make the journey to Pai, I was amused to see sick bags tied to the back of each seat of the bus. Fortunately, no-one needed to make use of them. However, the same…
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Teaching English in Laos with Big Brother Mouse
Before I went travelling, if I had to think of a really random situation to find myself in, teaching English in Laos would be a strong contender. I didn’t know much about Laos and I had absolutely no desire to teach anything to anyone ever. Yet travel changes you and I arrived in the UNESCO-listed town of Luang Prabang, in northern Laos, a different person to the one who left London several months earlier. I immediately fell in love with Luang Prabang and its sleepy old town, sandwiched between the Mekong and Nam Khan rivers. I spent days wandering through streets lined with palm trees, past Buddhist temples and…
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Hiking, beer and chicken feet in Luang Namtha
“We should all sing something! Let’s take turns to sing our favourite song”. These are words that usually strike fear into me but this time I thought it was a GREAT idea. Why? Because I was rolling, roaring drunk. Somehow, hiking through the villages around Luang Namtha in northern Laos had turned into a lost afternoon drinking beer. It reminded me of being at university – you know, where you plan to spend the day in the library but you end up in the pub instead? The difference here was the my drinking buddies weren’t an assortment of skiving students or even my fellow backpackers. They were a family from…
