After five days in Luang Prabang I think I've done just about everything there is to do here. Actually, that is a complete lie. I haven't done anything here. I was too cheap to pay the 20,000 kip (not even $3) to see the main palace, or Wat Xieng Thong, the main temple of the city, or the wat at the top of the hill that overlooks the town, called Wat Phou Si (pronounced "What p**** . There is also a p**** hotel and at least one p**** restaurant. Heh heh.). To be ...

Long distance buses in Laos don't offer much in the way of decent food. The bus stations offer the same fare of boiled eggs on skewers and fried chickens which the masked sellers, always women, hold up on sticks and wave in the dusty air, trying to attract the attention of the seated passengers through the bus windows. The chicken looks tempting until you realise just how much diesel exhaust fumes and red dust grit must add to the flavour. If it's not that it's s...

After Don Det it was Champasak, the ancient outpost of one of Indochina's many long-extinct civilisations, the Khmer, and the seat of the pre-Khmer Chenla before them. It was a relief to find that the majority of the country's inhabitants aren't twenty-something white backpackers after all. Champasak is lowland Laos life at its best, and a little off the beaten track, being fortunately skipped by most travellers in their rush to get to the north of the country....

Laos, at least the southern half, feels remarkably similar to outback Australia. Very flat, very hot, very dry. I feel I have to keep reminding myself where I am. I'm sure if you came here in monsoon season, though, it'd be a very different story. And of course, some things are still the same. The pot-holed roads, the dust, the dykes and dried-out paddies, the 50cc motorcycles. Laos has a reputation for being chilled out. "Forgotten" is another word often bandied...

I was limping along riverside in Phnom Penh the other day, Christmas Day, having spent the morning sponging off the seeping plasma from the wounds on my knee, hands, and elbows from a motorbike crash in Saigon just a few nights before, and this guy who looked Cambodian sitting at a bar with some other travellers called out at me, said to me, "Hey, man, what happened to your leg?", to which I answered, "Huh?" or "What?" (I can't remember which one, but really, the...