Mud

The worst thing about cycle touring is that there's so much that can go wrong.  When backpacking or bushwalking the worst that can happen is you miss your bus, or your legs get tired or you contract syphilis.  When cycle touring you've got to watch out for your tires being pumped, the gears to be aligned, the drive chain not worn, the seat position to be correct, your brakes to stop you (but not all the time), your knees to work properly, your physical condition to be not exhausted, your spokes tuned, your bike not to be on fire and for you to be heading in the right direction.  And you have to be aware of all of these all of the time. 

That's what the first few days of my time in Ha Noi was all about. I got my pannier rack welded back together, gave my drive train a general service and allowed my left knee some rest before the next stage of the ride.  But before I could head off I had to wait for my Chinese visa to be granted and my spare brake pads to arrive from Australia.

Some of this time was spent in the hill town of Sapa.  I took the long and scenic day train and mini bus to arrive at a viewtastic hotel room.  Walking around town the next day I encountered an official demanding to see a ticket.  "What for?" I asked.  "Tourist Mountain" was the response.  'Tourist Mountain'.  Who goes to a place with a name like that?

I was tempted to climb Mount Fansipan - a REAL mountain, and the highest in Vietnam - but my twin excuses of a sore knee and terrible visibility forced me to wuss out.  Plus my friend Tom has climbed it so I knew it couldn't be much of a challenge.  Instead I went on a two day guided trek along a rice-paddied valley.  Nice as it was, my group soon discovered that our tour guide was actually rushing through interesting river beds, rice paddies and local villages in order to get to our home-stay so she could watch a Korean soap opera on TV.

Despite this annoyance I had an excellent time.  My small trekking group met up with a bunch of other groups and proceeded to ensconce ourselves in a Big Night involving copious beerings and the ever popular game of 'I Never' which quickly got out of hand, as it's supposed to.  One other advantage of the trek was being given a first-class sleeper train ticket back to Ha Noi by a generous American who had decided to go to Laos instead.  It was luxury.  I felt so American.

Back in Ha Noi I discovered that the backackers' I was staying at had morphed into a construction site while I was away and the constant drone of jackhammers chipped away at my sanity.  Still waiting for my Chinese visa and spare brake pads I occupied my time by searching for the internet cafe where I'd left my camera, agonising over whether or not it was worth getting up early to see the embalmed body of Ho Chi Minh and trying desperately to get to what eventually turned out to be the world's worst river-front.

On the plus side, being surrounded by tourists I honed my new-found skill of being able to pick from their accents which V-Line district Australian tourists grew up in (it's safe to assume that any Australian tourist here is Victorian).  Oh, and also showing off my Vietnamese language skills: if you bargain with a local by hurling out numbers the tourists around you think you're speaking fluently.

I also bumped into my old friend Mel from Laos.  The last I'd heard of her she'd got some sort of flesh wound on her leg and a local witch-doctor had treated her by blowing dust on the affected area, the healing of which she had boasted about endlessly.  The post script of this story turned out to be that her leg got infected and she had to see a real doctor.

Finally, after several days of being told it would be ready tomorrow, my Chinese visa arrived.  I decided to abandon my spare brake pads and beer magazine being sent to me by my old housemate Tim.  This would not end well.  A brief stop off at the post office to send the bulk of my luggage on to Hong Kong and my hotel key back to Sapa (whoops!), and I was away.  Following the coast towards China.

The first day of the ride was like most first days cycle touring: pretty uninteresting.  I very gradually extracted myself from the extenuated suburbs of Ha Noi and clung desperately to the feebly offered hand of the wilderness - a hand that would later grab me and refuse to let go.  An eerie sight presented itself in this awkward interface: a modern township that had been completely abandoned with the roads ripped up and given to pastures.  Couldn't get my head around it.  Ironically, I saw there was a storm coming and so found a hotel early in the afternoon to avoid it.  This storm was to last for the rest of my trip.

The next morning saw me riding off into the maelstrom towards Halong Bay, which started as gentle rain and soon became a torrential downpour.  It was lucky that the hotel staff at my last stop had generously built a mudguard for my bike (they're like that, the Vietnamese) or I would've had to ride the whole way with my eyes shut.

Halong, the town at Halong Bay, was a pretty dead town - in both senses of the term.  Half-constructed dripping skyscrapers and empty streets soaked with rain.  My hotel was quite nice, with a viewy balcony, but it suffered from having a terrible mouse problem: after a few half-sleeping hours of battling it over control of my left-over food it eventually took the offensive and attacked my hair (presumed to be the enemy's high command).  When I tried to complain about this to the young receptionist in the morning she thought I wanted to exchange email addresses ('a mouse', 'emails' - same same).  I eventually gave up and went along with it to prevent embarrassment.  Bad move.

Halong Bay was amazing.  Very rainy and foggy, but very awesome.  It was like global warming had flooded Pandora (yes, this country reminds me of Avatar a lot).  Thousands and thousands of densely vegetated karsts jutting vertically from the ocean.  Initially I was annoyed that I could only get a four hour boat tour, but it soon became apparent that a pair of rich Koreans had bribed the tour operator to give us all eight hours.  To keep my schedule I ended up having to ride to the next town into the night to the point where finding a hotel became a desperation.  I eventually found one in the guise of a decaying block of Soviet-style flats.

The next few days got worse and worse.  I initially rode 20 kms along an island that, contrary to my map, turned out not to be connected to the mainland at both ends, forcing a long and dispiriting backtrack.  To make matters worse, the mainland road I had to take, the highway, became mud within a few kilometres.  Although there's humour in every situation.  Every now and then a crazy dog would rush out onto the road and bark at me.  It got so muddy here that one dog couldn't stop itself and slid straight into my rear spokes, nearly toppling my whole bike.  I laughed for kilometers.

After cycling consistently for a few weeks you tend to extend your nervous system beyond your biological body and into the machine you rely on for transport (nerds: yes, just like in Neon Genesis Evangelion - but without having to fight alien monsters).  Every clicking sound, grinding feel, oily smell, loose sight and greasy... taste... is part of your sense of self and problems with these are equivalent to pain.  Getting off this beautiful and well-roaded island I suddenly sensed what I'd been dreading: the metallic scraping sound of naked disc brake.  My rear brake had worn through and I'd have to remove it.

Still, I had my front brake - two is just for redundancy right?  Well, riding along this muddy, rocky, wet, winding, undulating highway I needed all the braking power I could get my hands on.  Typical of Vietnamese road-building, they first tear up the old road, then wait five years for the paperwork to come through, then slowly start work on the new road.  And the traffic!  Huge Chinese freight trucks passing back and forth, sometimes getting bogged in the up to 300mm deep mud ruts and occasionally backing up for hundreds of metres at a bottleneck.  If I could stay on the road when they went past they would spray a thick waterfall of mud at me.  Although I knew it was futile I would still have my bike cleaned in every town, just to give my gritty chain a few metres' rest.  I was a mess.  But in the midst of all this, one Chinese truck driver gave me an enthusiastic thumbs up, as if to say "Hey - that's cool!" - it was a welcome revelation that however bad things got here, nothing could detract from that.

However, the next day really sunk the boot it.  My front brake wore through.  This was the one that had had plenty of wear left in Ha Noi - the abrasive mud scourers all.  I was forced to hobble the next 80 kilometres with no braking ability whatsoever, suffering the shame of walking my bike down the hills (for those not used to dealing with hydraulic disc brakes - the pads are practically unique).  My aim:  Mon Cai on the Chinese border - the only real population centre for the 200 kilometres of this jungle-encroached 'road'. 

Thankfully, the knowledge that there was no way I could continue riding to Hong Kong released me from all my worries about my bike, the constant driving rain and the road conditions: I became happier than I'd been in days and was suddenly able to enjoy my surroundings - and they were amazing!  I eventually rolled into Mon Cai to the tuneful screeching of my front brakes (they seem to clamp shut when worn through) where I found a hotel that allowed me to take my bike onto the balcony.  I cleaned and repaired it one day and posted it the next.  The destination: Nepal.  The only place I knew I would be in the next few months.  The postage cost $370.

On the other hand, I was now a backpacker again and welcome to rejoin polite society.  Although, as I walked across the border into China, I realised that I was more accurately a 'pannier-er', and those things are pretty damn hard to carry around.

Oh yes, and those spare brake pads?  They'd arrived in Ha Noi two days after I'd left.

The Solo Tour

I spread out the tear over my cheek so it would dry faster.  I'd just seen the backs of my four cycling comrades anonymising amongst the railway crowds.  From now on, I was alone.
 
Getting back to my hotel the first thing I did was consume an evening meal consisting entirely of a can of stout, a litre of milk and a kilo of chocolate ice-cream while I watched a chick-flick marathon on HBO (that's the sort of stuff I wouldn't be getting away with in a pack of guys... well maybe the stout).
 
There was one thing keeping me in Hue: my camera.  I think now is as good a time as any to indulge myself in the tale of my camera's quest to stay alive.  For the first month of its existence in my possession the memory card refused to fully recognise its union with the hardware until I gave up and bought a new card.  Clearly in retribution for all this stuffing up I began to treat it badly.  Firstly, I crashed my bike with it on the road to Dam Rong, filling it with dirt and breaking the battery cover.  Then in Da Nang I dropped it onto concrete, bending the extended zoom to comically resemble the leaning tower of Pisa.
 
As it happens, my camera was still not quite destroyed: it could be rebuilt - we had the technology.  I Found a guy near the station to repair it and he finally showed me the result after two days, several attempts and $15 (the distended but still operating camera channeled Robocop 2) during which time I had been cycling around to the sights of Hue (the best way to see a city is to get lost and then try to get home again).  When I finally got it back I was too nervous to use it for a few days - and sure enough, the auto-focus cog had disengaged.  Magically, it clawed back to life after a bit of tinkering and so far continues in that state.  As an addendum, in Ha Noi a couple of weeks later I left it at an internet cafe for two days.  After searching for hours for the establishment's location I discovered they'd kept it for me all that time.  The battered camera limps on to this day.
 
The first couple of days of my solo tour have been blanked out of my memory - the most fascinating thing about them was that they were so boring, riding along the shoulder of Highway One for hundreds of kilometres with nothing much to look at.  But when you're riding solo you do get into an interesting state of mind - you lose yourself in your thoughts, and your emotions are free to spin off unchecked by people or activities.  Alone with the Universe.  And 90 million Vietnamese.
 
On the ride I started to categorise the Vietnamese responses to my presence, it being so much more overt than when riding in a group.  There's the stunned staring; the polite "Hello?"s (you have to reply in exactly the same tone or they won't understand you); the uncontrolled laughter - probably by people who think Westerners only come in packs of tourist bus; the stop-what-you're-doing-and-look-confused look (a personal favourite); school boys clapping each others' backs and laughing haughtily when they get a response, coupled with school girls collapsing in embarrassed giggles; the dreaded "Hey!" which strongly resembles the 'Hey' as in "Hey!  You're pannier's fallen off!/You're bike's snapped in half!/You're heading towards a tsunami!" but instead intended to mean "Hey!  You're white!"; and finally, the worst of all (other than not getting a response in the game 'Hey Cow'), the delayed 'Hello' - you can see it on their faces: they're stunned for a minute, then they chase after you shouting... but you're too far ahead to respond easily and have to choose between being rude and straining your neck.  Always the former.  They had their chance.
 
As the days went on I got so into the rhythm of cycling I lost interest in stopping during the day, pretty much at all.  When I was with the others we'd find any excuse to rest for an hour, drink coffees and talk crap.  But on my own there's only the prospect of language wrestling with curious onlookers, asking the same questions they always do, to entice me to put on the brakes.
 
Also, the true extent of my stinginess came out, not in money, but in conservation of momentum: with heavy panniers it takes some time slowly accelerating up to full speed and I didn't want to waste that.  I'd ride for up to 70 kilometres in three hours or so without even slowing down.  Combine this with 6am starts and you go a long way, on many days up to 150 kilometres.
 
Finally, I reached the seaside resort of Dong Hoi and parked myself in a hotel with a balcony overlooking the beach.  It being a hot day I went for a swim, losing my one good (Caucasian-skin-coloured and hence sand-coloured) knee brace in the process.  This would have later consequences.  Afterwards I went for a meal, that, like most meals cycle touring, didn't quite satisfy, so I went elsewhere for another.
 
Do you ever get that fear in restaurants that don't have prices on their menus that when the waiter produces the bill it's for 3 trillion dollars?  "But that's more than Brazil's GDP!" You protest.  "I'm sorry sir," he replies, "But we are an exclusive restaurant, I do hope you enjoyed your meal.  We have a no refund through regurgitation policy of course, but most customers prefer to pay it off as a loan."  So there you are having to quickly build a drug and arms empire from the ground up to raise the $7 billion a month interest repayments until you get enough capital to finance the extrusion of a space elevator and mine the asteroids (actually that sounds kind of fun).
 
Well that's (sort of) similar to what happened at this place.  The first restaurant charged 15,000 dong (reasonable), the second 180,000 (unreasonable) with barely anything to distinguish them and served on plastic chairs outside a garage on the street.  It was like paying $200 for a pub parma.  It's the only time I've considered doing a runner, but my bike was in the guy's garage (conveniently).  This put me in a bad mood for most of the next day.
 
This mood was finally broken when I intruded inland and almost instantly found myself surrounded by the most epic karst mountains I've ever seen - here I stopped every two minutes to photograph them (see them on Flickr!).  They emerged majestically from a sea of mist, like when you watch Avatar standing on your head.  Tragically, most were in the process of being dismantled for their limestone, so I'd check them out before they're all leveled (challenge: can humanity flatten the earth faster than it's uplifted?).
 
A few days of clemently overcast weather allowed me to cover even greater distances by removing the need to seek shade during the heat of the day.  I still had to have lunch though, and one thing about lunch in central Vietnam is that it invariably involves a lot of rice-wine.  For nearly a week I had shots forcefully offered to me by groups of drunk men, while their women-folk looked on shaking their heads in shame.  Does the male half of Vietnam contribute anything to its economy?  And rice-wine is such an inefficient drink - you get drunk without the pleasure of drinking.
 
When the weather cleared for a day I made an error of judgement.  The previous night I'd been up at all hours finishing off Jane Austen's 'Emma' (which I think is the best Austen novel, and I've read most of them now - it really gets the reader into Emma's head), and so the next morning I foolishly drank a Thai Red Bull to compensate (far more potent than the western rip-off).  This had the effect of making me deliriously happy, like most energy drinks, and I spent the day listening to Fat Boy Slim on my ipod as I rode through iron-age villages and around buffalo-ploughed rice paddies - safely, the only other traffic on the road was other cyclists.
 
When school finished at lunchtime (the rotters), all the kids were out on their bikes and, as usual, wanted to race me up the hills.  This time, high on Red Bull and House Music, I took up the challenge and left them and their un-panniered bikes in the dust... but wrecked my newly unbraced left knee in the process, forcing me to hobble up to Ha Noi very carefully for the next three days and ruining my dreams of cycling to the hill town of Sapa.  It is STILL recovering.
 
At last I reached Ha Noi and was congratulated by the Australian owners of my backpackers with a free beer.  I'd ridden 1,980 kilometres in 28 days.  Suddenly I was thrust back into touristland, meeting an Australian buddy I met in Laos, and Kye and Emma from the Mekong Delta Tour.  Waiting around for my knee to repair, for my spare brake pads to arrive from Australia and for the Chinese bureaucracy to grant me a visa, I began to realise that I have an inner need for progress, and without the tangible experience of knocking off kilometres on a map I feel like I'm wasting my life.  I had to get back on my bike...

Bikes in 'Nam

Ah Vietnam. The longest, spindliest country of all (after a few more earthquakes in Chile that is). It looks like an interplanetary spacecraft, divided into two halves and spun on a linking thread to provide artificial gravity. Alternatively, it resembles someone spooning Laos and Cambodia, which also conveniently resembles its cultural relationship with those two countries.

After finding my Melbournian buddies Dave, Nathan and Morley coming from the Ho Chi Minh City Airport with their bags and bikes we heading off on a Mekong Delta tour to Can Tho. Here we learned that the three letter acronym of our tour company which I forgot a moment before I heard it is supposedly easy to remember and that the reason Vietnamese families are so large is because couples struggle to invent activities under the mosquito net whose outcomes don't involve the manufacture of more Vietnamese.

Here we met a charming Australian couple named Kye and Emma who were to reapperate to me later on like cockroaches swatted with an inadequately wordy paperback novel, as do so many of my other traveling acquaintances (hi guys!).

It was in Can Tho that I finally lost my beloved sun hat to the pleading whimpers of a small drunken mob. But that was not to deter me from enjoying the lengthy explanations of which construction companies had been responsible for the numerous cable-stayed bridges of the region and how whilst coconut sweets are "Very good for ladies", banana wine (read: undrinkable rice-wine with a slight banana taste) is very good for men. That took some experimentation but proved false.

Once we were safely back in Ho Chi Minh City we were met by Phil, fresh from his move from Saigon to Singapore, who was keen to introduce us to the cultural wonders of southern Vietnam, such as his former workmates, wild nights on the town, supposedly non-dodgy massage parlours and the delights of eating turtle.

Once these important cultural introductions had taken place it was time to get into the serious business of acquiring and reconstructing our various bikes from airport luggage, a Saigon bike hire business and cold storage respectively. Possibly unwisely, Phil and I had decided to head to Phil's friend's house which had been harbouring my precious mode of transport (after Phil had graciously taken my bike to Vietnam from Australia months ago in preparation for this ride) having consumed several beers over our long reptilian lunch. The first result was a sever cross-threading of the crank where one of the pedals was attached, and the second was my pedal actually falling off into busy highway traffic on our ride back into town, forcing me to use my remaining usable cleat with abandon to one-leggedly power my bike home.

After a brief flurry of excitement in which Dave and I went to the post office to post our unnecessary luggage for our respective year-long trips to our future-selves in Hanoi (it's quite hard to translate that concept into Vietnamese), we were off to the only serious bike shop in Vietnam to collect Dave's bike and fix mine - as it turned out the proprietor was a practicing Melbournian construction engineer looking for recruits. But the next day we were on our way.

The first stage of our epic cycle sojourn across Vietnam involved the necessary four hours of faffing around revisiting the post-office and having an emergency bike shop stop but...

...Suddenly the five of us found ourselves hurtling irrevocably north towards the ambitious (too ambitious as it turned out) destination of Hanoi. The first few days went fairly well with no major incidents so I'll skip through them quickly: the first day was mainly about traffic getting out of Ho Chi Minh City; the second day was a lot nicer - following the shoulder of Highway One to the coastal town of Phan Thiet where we were embroiled in the trip's only real argument (concerning wake-up times - the party representing the least flexible sleeping schedule inevitably prevailed over that of the most); the third day was much more scenic with views of giant wind-turbines, rice paddies and coastal mountain ranges; and on the fourth day we rested.

The most exciting activity of that day, which chiefly involved sleeping, eating, train spotting and mucking around in the ocean behind our faded 60's beach motel, was spectating for a giant crab which had escaped from a restaurant and was making a desperate bid for freedom by crossing the highway to the sea: we were all half hoping it would make it and half excited by the prospects of it getting squished by a truck. It got squished.

The next day we pelted along the scenic coastal road to Phan Rhang, where we immediately set to work faffing it up to 90's classic tunes from the west, which the Vietnamese seem to always play whenever we turn up somewhere, and surfing the web for a few hours. We then headed inland for the beginning of our epic ride up to Da Lat, which was tempered only by us being rejected by the town right at the bottom of the climb, forcing us to backtrack 10 kms to a town with a guest house.

The 1500m climb up to the French-Alps inspired Da Lat was grueling but satisfying, apart from the 30 kms of dusty road works Phil reckons has been on the go for over three years. The town itself was very picturesque, but we spent most of the rest day sleeping off the ride up, visiting the market for snacks and, in my case, enduring the irritation of Phil's new discovery that my Vietnamese after two weeks in the country is of a slightly lower standard than his after two years (grr...).

However, the next day is when the real action began. It began with me throwing up in the basin after a combination of ill-timed malaria tablet consumption and a beery previous night. This was to be a foretaste of the future.

The ride down from Da Lat was a beautifully scenic sojourn around dams and through pine forests on a quiet newly sealed five star highway. This was to end abruptly at the bottom of the climb to 1812m where it became a rocky unsealed dirt track, during which the only surcease to our struggle was a spot of tea with the park rangers (all their other activities seemed to involve large amounts of whiskey). We celebrated our success at the maximum elevation with 'Rum on the Hill', but no cannon-fire.

The ride down though. That was something. We all hurtled along the dusty, rocky and occasionally muddy track towards our destination: a town aptly named Dam Rong. The views were spectacular: we were mostly riding through thick tropical rain-forest often broken by views of the surrounding mountains and mountain villages. Here I made a foolish mistake: I was using my camera to video the others on their descent by riding one-handed and overtaking them. After the easy success of the first video I upped the ante with a faster one. This inevitably led to me skidding into a turn and seriously grazing my elbow, snapping a tube on my pannier rack and breaking open my camera filling it with dirt.

Luckily Nathan did such a good job of patching me up that my wounds didn't get infected, and I managed to turn my camera on and off enough times that it started working again.

The rest of the day just got wilder. After clearly missing the 'correct' road we found ourselves being directed down a steep single-track (often meeting the criteria for a creek) through the forest that had us all silently contemplating a scenario of spending an untented night in the bush.

After many hours we suddenly found ourselves on a sealed road at Dam Rong, just as the sun set. Little realising that our troubles were only just beginning.

After three hours of hot discussion between our guest house and the police, which in Vietnam must okay all requests for anyone to sleep anywhere at all, we were politely informed that not only were we not welcome in the town, but we had to leave the entire ward those cops patrolled. Immediately. No reason was given (although they might as well have just said 'Communism').

This proved to be a difficult directive to follow because the only road out of town was blocked by a river crossing for which the ferry does not run during the night. Luckily my clearly visible Christian piety must have shone through like a beacon to the assembled masses who'd come to gawk at the white guys vs cops battle of wills as we were offered clandestine lodging at the local church. This turned out to be a real coup with the place being extremely comfortable and the priests all too generous.

Thinking that my troubles were over I and the others continued on our way the next day, but I was getting a head-ache (initially thought to be due to my massive stack) that got worse all day, and the sun was unrelenting throughout the undulating 70 km journey. When we got to a hotel in Lien Son I'd attained a new height of weakness and soon began throwing up. I'm going to skip the detail of how I vomited in the basin, which, like all Vietnamese plumbing, feeds directly onto the floor, causing my spew to clog the drain unnoticed while I had a shower - flooding the entire hotel room with spew water. That would sicken my gentle readers.

After a terrible fitful night sleep during which I continued to instantly regurgitate every mil of water or gram of food I took it became apparent that I'd be on the bus the next day. Thinking it was all over in the regional capital of Buon Ma Thuot I found that I still could not keep liquids (or solids) down and so the only recourse was to visit the local hospital. Here a lack of English skills was no impediment to getting on a saline drip for a few hours (extreme thanks going to Phil for his bedside patience and, *cough*, Vietnamese skills during this time) which seemed to completely cure me (not bad for $10!). This leads me to believe that I was suffering from dehydration.

The following day we kept the ride up, ending at a hostel watching 'Fool's Gold' on HBO with the rest of the rum. But the day after that we came to the conclusion that (partly due to my hospital day) we were one day behind schedule and needed to take the bus a few ks north to Kon Tum (but I'll gloss over that part in the hope no-one was paying attention). This riverside town proved a hit with the beering-it-up part of our brains, although the movie 'Marley and Me' was complete flop with the movie-appreciation part of our brains.

The next few days got steadily more scenic as we rode along ridge-lines, flood plains and river valleys on the Laos side of Vietnam. This culminated in the awesomest terrain ever during the day Phil retired to Danang to have a 'pussy infection', *snigger*, the size of a golf ball doctored up, clearly resulting from some impious remark to the Gods he must have made (or maybe they're just mean).

This day involved three climbs, each more awesome than the last, poking us well up into the clouds to soak in the rain we'd been missing for the last two weeks. Waterfalls, jungle, slippery roads - we had it all. We were so pumped from the ride - pretty much 10% grade all day - that at lunch, where we'd planned to spend the night, we made a go for the next town 50 kms down the road: a tangle of dam building construction activity and tiny village streets, crossing major rivers and negotiating small farms. Universally acclaimed as the best day of the trip (Phil abstaining).

After that it was an easy matter of spending the next two days hitting the tourist town of Hoi An where Phil rejoined us, destroying my camera at Da Nang whilst trying to photograph a ship beached along an uncanny Beaconsfield Parade imitation and negotiating tunnel tollers for safe passage for our bicycles before arriving at our updated destination of Hue. We'd cycled 1100 kms as a group in 18 days.

A morning of cyclo-sight-seeing presaged our somber separation, where my fellow cyclists took the train to Hanoi. From there Nathan and Morley headed home (they avoided the Tulla's outrageous airport shuttle fare by, brilliantly, riding their bikes), Phil flew back to Singapore to start his new life there and Dave, well, the last I've heard of him he'd crossed the border into China by the thinnest of visa margins (and has been popping on and off Google Chat's online list since then).

As for myself, I was to continue in my epic quest to get to Hanoi by one of the slowest methods possible (barring lip-crawling). But that's another story...

Templetastic!

Here I am, sicker than I've been for years, trying to ride my hired bicycle home from an epic day of temple-finding on my last joule of energy before the sun sets on the Cambodian jungle. But I'm getting ahead of myself - I'm still on the bus.

Skipping the crap, I'd taken this bus all the way from the jetty across from Don Det Island in Laos all the way down through Cambodia and back up to Siem Reap for those temples people seem to keep talking about and setting movies in.

This place, Ankor Wat, seemed to be the culmination of a gradual trend in architecture I'd noticed since the Kerinci Valley in Sumatra. Not knowing anything about South East Asian architecture I can be free to unleash my observations unfettered by expected trends... and to be unashamedly wrong.

In central Sumatra there is a particular, and super-awesome, style of vertically tapered building that as you head north gets flatter and blunter. In Malaysia they become thatched and exclusive to museums, and in Thailand they become temples and lose the taper altogether for a stick-on bit at the ends (also, they paint them yellow, like everything else) but retain their roof-layering. Around Chiang Mai this style develops a tall tumour-like growth that juts straight out of the roof, and through Laos this starts to dominate the whole structure, just like Ankor Wat. What am I talking about? Well I know of two major (Buddhist) empires in South East Asia - one with its capital in central Sumatra and the other at Ankor Wat. Looking at the temples at Ankor Wat it seems to me that the builders of the whole region got all their ideas from just these two places and today they all merge together. The only thing now is to check out Wikipedia to see if it all matches up.

Finally getting off the bus late at night in Siem Reap we found ourselves dumped inside a locked holding pen for half an hour while about a dozen tuk-tuk drivers, who had clearly paid to be there, hunted us down for our US dollars like fish in a barrel. The bus group was soon divided into those who liked paying $5 to travel 2 kms into town and the cool backpackers who held their ground at $2 and were willing to walk (although it turned out that tuk-tuks on the street outside were only $1). This group consisted of my Canadian buddies Matt and Troy, two female Canadians they'd met on the bus: Sherry and Christine, a Swiss mate of mine from the old boat trip called Sam and a new Dutch guy called Michael. We were to stay as a group for most of our time in Siem Reap.

A celebratory night of beering it up on saved tuk-tuk dough led to everyone else snoozing it for the next day. Not me though - I got up (sort of) early to hire a bike and buy a three day pass to the temple complex and proceeded to get my money's worth. Ankor Wat itself was the main temple to see, and it was pretty huge I guess, but it seemed basically the same as the millions of temples I'd already crawled through in southern India, including the familiar smell of bat turds. The best temple of the day was that famed temple being torn apart by tree roots. I reserved the 'Grand Circuit' for the next day.

Unfortunately, I woke up feeling completely shithouse. And it turned out I wasn't the only one: four out of our expanded group of nine had contracted similar symptoms over night. Now, I'd already bought a three day pass so I was damned if I wasn't going to use it, despite needing a toilet every hour and a half and feeling like my energy levels had jumped a trillion years into the future and had degraded into background radiation. The fact that I'd left all the tall temples for today certainly did not help, particularly when there'd be a sudden need for an emergency evacuation at the top, if you know what I mean.

In the morning I sporadically bumped into the others from my group, seeing the temples for their first and only day mostly also on bicycle, but the afternoon took me dozens of kilometres off to obscure ones, often swamped by vegetation, occasionally tempting me to ride right through the jungle for elusive shortcuts (these did not end well). By the end of the day I felt so dead I was willing to pay some annoying local kid to dig me a grave, but I knew he'd whack on an extra charge to fill it in again (the bastards know you can't do it yourself). At this stage I basically had to halt fingernail growth to maintain enough power for essential body functions and I was still over thirty kilometres from home.

During an evening in which I fluctuated violently from states of extreme cold to extreme fever, Sherry gave me a pill she could only describe as 'Indian medicine' (ultimately her native land). The next morning not only was I completely recovered, but I seemed to have been paid back all my lost energy from the previous day with interest (at loan-shark rates). So I used my final day's pass and rode way out east for a really early batch of temples which turned out to be some of the best yet (although I spent about three hours searching for about a dozen unmaintained temples only one of which I found - not even the locals know about them).

That night, to celebrate my triumphant return to full health... and Chinese New Year... I hit the town in one of my biggest nights yet. My Siem Reap group had all gone down to the beach by now, but who should I run into but my old Irish pals Morgan and Shane, both keen to repay me all the drinks I'd bought them when they were saving their dollars for Cambodian border bribes. Together with an English pair we drank and danced the night away to timeless classics such as the Black Eyed Peas' 'I've Gotta Feeling' and The Killers' 'Brightside'. I had just enough time to run home and stuff my possessions in my pack before hitting my 6 a.m. deadline to catch the boat to Phnom Penn.

I'd got this boat ticket, at eight times the cost of the equivalent bus ride, to compensate for my failure to float down the Mekong after Luang Prabang, but it ended up being not entirely worth it - not because the floating villages weren't surreal and incredible, nor because the vast lake connecting Siem Reap and the capital Phnom Penn wasn't a spectacular mockery of the ocean, but because I was so fatigued from the previous night that I could feel my brain consuming itself so as to allow my body to be fixed permanently to the boat's hull like a sea squirt preparing for its adult phase.

But Phnom Penn was an eye-opener. The first thing I did in my dazed state after alighting from the boat was to walk straight into a brothel named 'Candy' and ask for a room. I realised with a start where I was half-way through this request, but it was already too late to back out. The ground level of this establishment was some kind of 'swinger's bar' and everything a den of sin should be: dark and dingy, lewed posters, seedy music, scantily-clad dames of the night wrapping themselves around anything a penis might be attached to and, as always, a loud pair of Americans telling each other how they're not violent people but they keep finding people they've just beaten up.

I was taken to see the room at the top floor and I was amazed at how awesome it was. Extremely clean, well-designed and built, balcony with a view - I had to have it. And before you ask, it did take a fair effort to convince the hotel girl that I wanted the room without a happy ending, but I succeeded.

It being still quite early in the afternoon, and having regained some of my energies, and most importantly of all it being Valentine's Day, I decided to jump on the back of a motorbike and see Pol Pot's Killing Fields. Now, at least one person has suggested I use this blog to try to encapsure the exact horror and disgust I felt at being at the scene of thousands of indiscriminately murdered Cambodians. But this is a feeling I get when I think about this period of the country's history - actually being there didn't really enhance it for me, except as an anatomy lesson from the skulls. The simulated wolf-cries loud-speakered over the bones didn't help with the sombrerity either. I went back and watched 'Bee Movie' on HBO for Valentine's Day night.

In the morning I took another boat to Chau Doc in Vietnam, which I enjoyed a lot more than the previous day's. This one had contained an awesome bunch of backpackers like a mini version of the boat in Laos and we traveled the narrow waterways of the Mekong Delta across the border, drank a few beers and listened to one backpacker describe his adventures both traveling on a makeshift bamboo train in Cambodia and horse-touring in Mongolia while another one played Spanish classical guitar. What a trip.

As for my contribution, I've noticed something happen to me over the months when I talk about Australia, and in particular Victoria, to my fellow-travelers: I've become tediously patriotic.

"Have I mentioned that in VICTORIA there are beaches that are so remote you can walk along them for days without seeing ANYONE ELSE? Or that in VICTORIA we have a place called the Kiewa Valley that has the BEST MILK EVER MADE? Or that there's a band from MELBOURNE called Architecture in Helsinki that is Bruce Willis' THIRD FAVOURITE BAND IN THE WORLD?!!"

"Yes Felix. You've told all of us all of those things already many times." It must be part of some sort of creeping homesickness lurking back there.

After hitting the meagre night scene of Chau Doc and then cramming into a single hotel room to save money we all went our separate ways the next morning. Three of us took the bus to Ho Chi Min City which ended up taking all day and introduced me for the first time to drinking coffee. It must be the way the Vietnamese make it because I'm hooked. It only took 26 years (although I'm still yet to try it without ice).

In Ho Chi Minh City we quickly found the local backpacker area and settled into a hotel above a silk shop. Within minutes I'd managed to spot from a restaurant balcony my four Canadian friends from Cambodia and Laos, all now traveling together and up for a big night. I was up for one too, because tomorrow my old pals from home were about to join me for an epic three week cycle tour through southern Vietnam.

Two Trips To Cambodia

Before coming to South East Asia everyone I talked to would tell me that above all else I absolutely had to go tubing at Vang Vieng. It was for this reason that I was dreading the end of the bus ride to get there. It's not really my kind of thing but but I felt a sort of duty to at least be able to say I'd done it. I was imagining it would be full of hundreds of western bogans spending the day fluctuating between two high levels of inebriation. I was right. But I soon realised that that was okay because I was one of them.

For those yet to experience the psycho-weirdness of tubing at Vang Vieng, the idea is to float down the town's river in an inner-tube stopping at various crazy riverside bars full of pumping music, rhythmically-challenged dancing, free-flowing alcohol and people throwing themselves at the mercy of Laos' nascent medical system by 'zip-lining' into supposedly deep pools in the otherwise shallow river, all set amongst beautiful but barely noticed karst mountains. There are also landmines.

Turning up alone I soon ran into a couple of Irish buddies from the boat trip and suddenly I was in the mood to party. Skolling a few half-litre cans of BeerLao plus some free shots to bring us up to at least the lower quartile of inebriation we quickly got into the swing of things by joining a game of mixed mud volleyball. Surprisingly, we all decided to play the game seriously and my team ended up not only winning decisively but also avoiding serious injury resulting from the many sharp shards of glass nestled in the more viscous levels of the mud. By the time it was all over it was almost dark and the further three kilometres of rapids still to be negotiated by our inner tubes forced us to discuss the very real possibility of hypothermia.

Not to be deterred, later that night we ordered a large $1 bottle of whiskey over dinner that turned out to be only 20% non-alcohol and let the night of parties, dancing and buckets (the fluid goes out of them, not into them) fade into amnesia. I woke up suddenly at 8 a.m. and knew that I had to leave that place. Immediately.

The bus ride to the Lao capital of Vientiane was eventful only in that I managed not to throw up. Now when I hear that Vientiane is like something out of a Graham Greene novel I know it's not a joke. It's a bit like that previously mentioned sci-fi genre with the suspiciously quiet daytime and excitingly lethal night - but with the night instead also being suspiciously quiet. I sat on the Mekong's riverfront for a few hours trying to understand some inexplicable construction activity and consumed the occasional baguette (Oh ho ho! Baguette!). I soon made up my mind to move on.

And what a move! The eleven hour bus trip was one of the best yet: I realised here that I have the stomach to read on buses after all and was entertained by the enthusiasm of Richard Dawkins to the ambiance of an epic Mekong thunderstorm. I paused for a night in Savannakhet where I discovered the joys of being evil as I wielded an electric tennis racket in my hotel room and committed a mosquito holocaust that must never be forgotten.

A far less satisfying bus ride to Pakse introduced me through shared misery to another cool English couple and two Canadian blokes called Matt and Troy (who would definitely hit back if referred to as a couple) with whom I searched for a hostel and had some riverside beverages. The next day I hired a motorbike and rode 170 kilometres to explore the Bolaven Plateau.

This was the first time I'd ever (legally) ridden or driven on the right side of the road and it did take some getting used to. I kept thinking, "Hey, this feels kind of natural. Maybe that sinister Napoleon was right to have invented dexterous driving after all" and then realising that I was actually back on the left with a truck bearing down on me.

But the destination made it all worth-while. At Tadlo I was given directions to three spectacular waterfalls by an American backpacker named Amber which involved a lot of rock scrambling to get to an extremely tall fall, and information on how to avoid the annoying pleas for money from the local village children for two huge wide falls.

Another failed attempt to travel down the Mekong by boat rather than bus brought me to Don Det, one of the famed Four Thousand Islands. This island is an amazing gravity well of cool (and may I say extremely handsome) young backpackers such as myself. Here I rediscovered, bit by bit, my old friends Teresa the German beautician I'd met in Pai, Matt, Troy and the English couple from the Pakse bus and Morgan and Shane, my Irish buddies from Vang Vieng and the boat trip. We instantly became a cohesive group and a large subsection chartered a boat for the next day.

This trip was a spectacular tour of many of the eponymous four thousand islands such as beach islands, water buffalo islands and an over-excited school children island. This was all capped off by the usual Felix-generated beach bonfire (the best kind) on Don Det in which the utilisation of bamboo as fuel ensured an explosive experience. However, my satisfaction of these evenings was somewhat tempered by late-night calls for my Australian de-vermination skills (I knew that show 'Crocodile Hunter' was a bad idea). I was even contracted out to deal with a scorpion found in the bed of some French backpackers.

One of the many things I'm seeking on this epic trip of mine is a certain level of craziness. For things to go a bit out of hand. A pub night becomes a beach party becomes a tribal jungle festival and all of a sudden I'm leading a small colonising expedition to a long period comet (that's why '2001: A Space Odyssey' is so awesome - it starts off like a normal movie with apes and stuff and then goes psycho towards the end). The final day of Don Det was nothing like that, but it reminded me of it.

I and the group that had congealed around me (yes, I have that effect on people) all hired bikes to ride around the serenely rural Don Det and neighbouring Don Kong (Connected by an old rail bridge) to see a waterfall and have a swim in the Mekong. Afterwards we visited a hot-sand beach that required a zen-like trance to avoid feet burns by using levitation and decided to charter another small boat to see the endangered Mekong dolphins on the Cambodian border.

Having consumed a few bevos on the journey we stopped right on the aquatic border and spotted the snub noses of a fair few fresh water dolphins as they flaunted international boundaries. Miraculously, half an hour of broken Lao coaxing and eventually beer bribes convinced our pilot to land the three of us in my boat on the Cambodian shore. Here we watched the sun set over the Cambodian hills from a Cambodian beach shack drinking Cambodian beer and learning our first Cambodian words from the Cambodian family living there. The daring boat ride back up through the rapids (the somewhat tipsy pilot was showing off) only enhanced our excitement at having committed our first illegal crossing. Luckily, on the pitch-black bicycle ride home over dodgy dirt paddy tracks we weirdly bumped into Amber from Tadlo who escorted us home with her presciently acquired bike light.

The next day I went to Cambodia the proper way.

Crazy Laos

Pai for breakfast. It's a small backpacker village in the highlands of Thailand, north of Chiang Mai. The drive up was pretty spectacular with a lot of the mountainous terrain covered in jungle, despite there not being any national parks around - non-use of land is something I have trouble comprehending. It was here that I finished listening to all the songs on my four gigabyte iPod in alphabetical order. I started on the buses in Malaysia - the buses in Indonesia are too interesting for one to be incommunicado.

My first activity in this town was discovering an amazing and cheap bungalow right on the river. And then one of those great things happened that all backpackers secretly yearn for: I randomly bumped into my old friends Tom and Lisa with whom I'd shared many lazy days watching movies months ago in the Cameron Highlands, Malaysia. And this English couple is a great one to bump into twice so we instantly hit Pai's bar scene (a scene barred from a mere individual like me due to awkwardness, as in my Surabaya experience).

As a couple, Tom and Lisa tell me they find it hard to meet people while traveling as everyone around them doesn't want to impose on their symbiotic mind-meld of true coupledom (like pan-dimensional beings of pure energy). I tell them it's just as hard as an individual but I guess everyone just needs to be more socially engaging.

The rest of my time in Pai was spent drinking beer on the river watching the fire lanterns rise to their altitudes of equilibrium, riding a mountain bike to a waterfall and then on into the hills - waaay too far, as a thunderstorm caught me on the way back, and celebrating Australia Day with the only other Australian in town. I woke up covered in Australian flag stickers.

The next day was a work of timing genius. I got to the bus station at a random time in the morning, just making it for the trip back to Chiang Mai, where I walked straight into the dentist's for my second appointment without putting down my pack, then driven by the plush Dentistmobile back to the Chiang Mai bus terminal in time for the last bus to Chiang Rai. The Dentistmobile was so classy they needed two dental workers in the car - one to drive and one to open the door for me at my destination.

Now, my timing hasn't always been the best in Thailand - I arrived days after the full moon - the only one for about 280 years with a decade turnover in it - and left days before the next one, nicely bypassing the notorious Full Moon Parties. But there is one department in which my timing has been impeccable: milk. The very month in which I was inhabiting Thailand was the very month in which 830ml milk bottles were on special at 7/11 and I can tell you I spent a fair whack of my budget on them.

As an asside, I've learnt that tolerance to lactose is one of the most recent evolutionary changes in humans, or at least those with an ancestry of pastoralism. but there is an even more recent change: colour vision. After the dinosaurs died out our newly diurnal ancestors regained colour vision by making use of a parasitic strand of DNA that accidentally duplicated the code for our eyes' cone cells. But in the last few thousand years, due to the lack of selection pressure in the wild, colour blindness is increasing dramatically as this parasite is being removed. The upshot of all of which is this: as a colour-blind milk lover, I am the pinacle of human evolution.

I'll just wait for all the biologists to stop throwing up at this appalling evolutionary logic.

Okay. Chiang Rai is similar to Chiang Mai in name only. The town itself seems devoid of life in the metaphorical sense but is surrounded by beautiful hilly country all the way up into Burma. I didn't get that far but was close after having hired a motorbike to see waterfalls, hilly villages, lots of cool snakes, hot springs, tea plantations and French tourists on 4WD tours.

Now I had this big plan of getting to the border town of Chiang Kong and settling in for the night at an internet cafe to video in to the awesome party at my old share house, but I got swept along with this general movement to cross the Mekong into Laos, then onto a two day slow boat to Luang Prabang.

This boat ride was so incredible its ramifications have lasted several weeks into the future (as in 'right now' in Felix time). Almost everyone I met here I've come across again and again everywhere else I go. Laos is one of those long skinny countries taht funnels the backpackers into one main route. I quickly formed a group and we sat on the back of the boat drinking beer and playing guitar (not me, I've lost that ability) and admiring the river villages of the Mekong. When we stopped for the night in a small town it took a while to come to terms with the fact that it had no internet and I would miss my party at home. Unfortunately, I shared a room with an American guy and spent the next week running into him and forgetting to pay him my half of the room cost. For a while after that everyone I met I ask to look out for him.

Laos is a funny ol' place. For one thing they drive on the wrong side of the road, and I was disappointed I didn't get to see the crazy loop-over interchange they'd have to implement in order to link up with us lefties (I made the crossing by boat you see). The border also marked the moment I left the Free World for the last time until... do you count Nepal? On the plus side, it's my first fully landlocked nation I've ever visited (most have actually been sea-locked) - and my last until... Nepal? Hmmm. Cutely, the Lao people don't seem to be aware of their relationship with the sea, as they refer to their borders as 'coasts' and talk about going 'overseas' when they take the bus to Hanoi.

I've always thought of Laos as the bits that all the other South East Asian countries left over after they'd had their pick. It doesn't have any coasts, no famous mountain ranges, nor major rivers (whoops! The Mekong). But there really is something about Laos that's incredible. The place is stunningly beautiful, the people are all awesome and, most importantly of all, it's a massive backpacker hub.

I arrived in Luang Prabang after another day floating down the Mekong hanging out with world backpackers (sinisterly for me, we call ourselves 'Boat People') and instantly found myself in a situation of having to maintain my integration with too many social groups, all of which seemed to have crystallised from the super-saturated solution of the Boat People (I like to think I was the nucleation but I tend to think things like that).

During the day we achieved little - we went to an amazingly beautiful emerald-coloured waterfall, saw a temple and... er... yeah. This took three days. Weirdly, at the waterfall I again randomly bumped into Tom and Lisa for the third time and nation. But the nights out was what it was really about. On one night we found ourselves at a Lao club where even old women danced with leather-clad youngsters to the music of Britney Spears. That night later ascended into immaculately choreographed line dancing in which we ineptly took part.

Other nights focused on the age-old problem of beating the 11pm nation-wide curfew, usually by finding out-of-town clubs and er... bowling alleys?... that must have had Laos People's Party links. On one of these nights I spent over an hour stumbling randomly home lost in the darkness, and others managed to have even more extreme Odysseys that stretched credulity.

Now I don't usually like to whinge into my blog (whinging to fellow-travelers at least alows them to fight back), but I'll make an exception for one annoyance: banks. Every time I get money out I'm charged by [leading Australian bank] to the tune of $5. Then they charge me another few dollars because I'm doing it overseas. Then another 2% or so for an intercurrency conversion, and then, if I've survived all that, a $5 monthly fee. All so I can have to privalege of lending them money. But the worst part is that a lost of the ATMs over here also have a fee of about $5 to take money out, to a maximum of... $80. This means I pay about $15 to use an ATM, or up to %20 of my total expenditure. There must be another way! I mention this here because in Laos I accidentally typed 4 digits of kip instead of 5 and got socked with a double charge that took the fun out of the whole day.

Viang Vienne was next after fleeing Luang Prabang's banking nightmare on an impressive karsty bus ride. The town itself is beautifully set on a river amongst towering mountains, but it's really now only famous for one thing: tubing. I was actually dreading having to float down the 3km river on an inner tube stopping at all the crazy drunken bars on the water all alone, but like most places I've been I met some people I knew from the slow boat: Morgan and Shane from Ireland.

After jumping off the bus, hiring a tube and being dropped off up-river I experienced one of the most outragious and almost grotesque phenomona on the backpacker circuit... but that's anather story.

Bangkok Nights

It's a lot harder to get off a moving bus than it looks - the main thing you've got to remember is that even though you jump out of the bus backwards the ground is still trying to push you over from the bottom at the speed the bus is traveling. Even at 15 kms per hour this is quite a push and I'd be lying if I told you I'd remained upright.

Arriving back at Patong Beach I was invited by my English buddies Paul and Karl to cram into their small but luxurious hotel room whose remaining floor space was almost entirely inhabited by their giant friend Will - but we made it work. All that remained was to hit the town with the reckless abandon only Phuket can elicit.

Now, when I progressed through the ascending stages of technological advancement of Indonesia, Malaysia and then Singapore I was half expecting to be transported next to a brightly-lit techno-utopia with skytubes and floating screens. Similarly, after emerging from Sumatra, my brain prepared me for an encounter with a post apocalyptic zombie wasteland. Patong night-life is a hybrid of both of those visions. It was a scene of pumping music, huge distracting LCD screens, arrogantly drunk white tourists lumbering through the streets (not us of course) and cheeky prostitute girls (or at least very good imitations of girls) whose recognition of our personal space eviscerated the crotch area.

After a few buckets - a litre mix of whiskey, coke and Thai red bull - and drinking games with some Australians who had congealed from the crowd, we rediscovered the ancient art of buying cheap beer from 7/11 and storing it in our stomachs for slow release during dry bar visits. My last memories of the night involved us sitting on the beach helping some Thai prostitutes improve their (already excellent) English skills - although I'm fairly sure now they were actually after some help with their student fees.

The next day the three of us took the bus to Khura Buri for our subsequent boat trip to Surin Island. This little town was at the time hosting what they called the 'Watermelon Festival', which was really just a huge food-fest (but with no watermelons).

Speaking of food, I've noticed that it's changed significantly since Indonesia, in gradations small enough not to notice at the time. In Java I basically just alternated between Mie Goreng and Nasi Goreng (which were delicious), supplementing my protein diet by grazing on nuts during the day. In Malaysia the cuisine is either Chinese or Indian, depending on which part of each city you're in. In Thailand things are more complicated (I'll refrain from mentioning that I think Thai food in Melbourne is better than in Thailand itself) and I've found it harder to avoid meat. I've always been a bit suspicious about a food that when not cooked in exactly the right way will turn around and kill you. Also, I swear that I expend more energy extricating bone shards from my tongue than I get from the nutritional value of the meat. But at this festival I found the perfect alternative: fried insects. They contain no bones except a crunchy exoskeleton and I've certainly never heard of anyone dropping dead from a salmonella-infected locust. We were all insectivours not too long ago, maybe we were onto something.

The speed boat ride to Surin Island was a nasty affair. We'd actually bought a slow ferry ticket to save money but it turns out there is no slow ferry - the proprietors just like to divide up the market for greater passenger numbers, almost like the manufacture of hard disc drives. This trip taught me that anti-nausea pills warning of drowsiness are actually sleeping pills with an anti-nausea side effect: those of us who had taken the complimentary pills all managed to fall asleep sitting up and flailing around. This knowledge would later come in handy.

Surin Island is a remote and spectacularly beautiful tropical island national park. Paul, Karl and I rented a tent right on the high tide line of the beach and spent three amazingly relaxing days luxuriating by the water. Here my activities included reading a Thomas Hardy novel, lying aimlessly in a hammock all afternoon and making some serious head-way in ameliorating my fifteen year long disappointment at having been born into an age lacking cities floating in the gas giants and space elevators flinging passengers between the inner planets. This is, after all, the age of beaches. Soon to end.

Another day-consumer was snorkeling. I have never seen so much amazing stuff under water: endless intricate coral structures, vast schools of large blue fish unconcerned by a human joining their number, a probable mating-ritual between two tropically coloured flat fish swimming around each other in impossibly tight circles and a vertiginous abyss whose depths could be fathomed by sight into receding blackness. I spent a lot of my time perfecting a technique in which depths of about ten metres can be reached: find a spot at the right depth, breathe out all the air in your lungs and stay as still as you can - you drop like a stone to the bottom and you don't need as much oxygen while you're not trying to fight against buoyancy (just remember to leave enough energy to kick your way back up again). Unfortunately, this caused extreme pain in my sinus glands from the pressure (I should have been breathing out all the way down) which can probably be blamed for my sudden development of a cold. I find it ironic that in this region of fearsome tropical diseases I contract the common cold (self-diagnosed) - the only other illness I've so far experienced is one severe hangover (two if you count the one I brought from Melbourne).

Returning to the mainland we all took the night bus to Bangkok - twelve hours away. I ended up being so concerned about missing out on the scenery that I got off at a town called Chumpon, walked most of the very long distance to the train station and slept the night there through the most unpleasant stage of my cold, attacked by a constant swarm of mosquitoes and woken up every hour an a half from trains turning up. This is where my new sleeping pill discovery came into its own.

But the train ride was worth it all - local of course (it took a lot of effort to convince the ticket office that I actually wanted to go slowly), sharing the seats with the real denizens of Thailand, watching the beaches and karsts fly by along the narrow spindly bit of the isthmus and, importantly, reading through a few more grams of the column of books I've now accumulated (I feel like a caryatid). Before Thailand I was reading at an average rate of three millimetres per day but here it's slowed to just over one millimeter per day - a mere seven times faster than India is crunching into China and only twice as fast as the top land-speed record for a continent - so I have a lot of catching up to do.

At last, Bangkok. A new world. Or at least lots of different worlds squished in together and forced to get along. I spent most of the diminishing daylight hours (I've traveled north a fair way now) navigating the Chao Phraya River by local ferry and visiting various wats (Buddhist temples) around the city. I also made an excursion to pick up several more kilos of books kindly donated to me by my Auntie Su through Poste Restante. From here I also undertook a grueling cross-city expedition to replace my purple-smearing camera, which I luckily retained for sentimental reasons as my new one turned out to be just as buggy in its own special way. The next day I managed to get myself all over Bangkok using almost every mode of public transport available: ferry, bus, subway and skytrain. One interesting encounter was a whole linear community built over a functioning railway line, using small rail carts as goods transport but having to disperse several times a day.

The evenings were a different matter. The biggest night involved my old re-acquaintances Paul and Karl and some of their new co-travelers in a Khao-San Road bucket-filled booze-up. I ended up mysteriously possessing a couple of buckets the next day but we put them to good use. Earlier on in the evening we witnessed a white guy being brutally beaten up and even repeatedly tasered by a bunch of bulky Thais in a popular restaurant, which was pretty distressing. I'm sure it was drugs related.

On my last night I met up with a mixed group of local Thais and Queenslanders I'd met on the bus and we went to a great club with a live band playing a jazz/traditional Thai fusion. I'd arranged to meet up with a young co-worker from the Westgate Project here but I must have missed him by mere minutes or metres.

Chiang Mai was next after a long but (sorry 'and') terrific train journey. After an epic quest finding somewhere to stay I wound up at a huge and central wood paneled hostel with bay windows overlooking the city. After a quick and, importantly, successful geohash (Thailand's first) I got down to the serious business of dental tourism. Here I got a few cheap and professional fillings and decided to one day have a wisdom tooth out. It's quite sad to abandon a seemingly permanent part of one's own body, particularly as a result of one's own negligence. I'll run it into the ground first.

The next day I visited some of the thousands of wats around the city. Fading tiles on crumbling stupas next to sparkling new gold-clad Buddhas. A sentence without a verb. Pretentious really.

I leave you on a sad note. Within the grounds of one Buddhist monastery - yes, inside a monastery - I left my hired single-speed bike unlocked outside a temple while I had a peak inside. Of course, returning after a few minutes I found it gone. Gone in that typical way a bike is nicked (I'm used to it now) where you're left wondering if you ever even had a bike in the first place. Now I know you're all going to say "Well you should have locked up your bike then, hmm?". But I actually remember thinking as I mulled over the decision to get the lock out, "I know the situations in which bikes are nicked. This isn't one of them. I'm an expert". Hubris I guess.

I quickly alerted the monks and they took me to room full of giant-screen audiovisual equipment to search the security cameras. I found the yellow-robed techno-monks (they were also the security staff) so incongruous I took a photo of them telling me they'd run out of free disc space just before the theft (see it on facebook!)

Well I could have easily left Chiang Mai, which I was doing in a few hours, without alerting the totally disorganised hirers but instead I handed over 3000 Baht for the bike. Although this is only about $100, to put it in perspective I could have stayed at my hostel for three weeks with that.

I was so depressed the other guests at the hostel took me out to the weekend night market and shouted me a few beers. I'm still getting over it.