Ants, farming and village life...

I was feeling all chocked up when I was leaving Lao but it was probably time I ventured into Thailand for some proper TLC. My body has been ravaged by bed bug bites, a spider bite, an ear infection and a bad knee. That’s from a couple of months of going all out on the trekking, home stays, the lot. Over the last couple of weeks I braved the sweltering heat and travelled through the Mekong Delta to cross the border from Vietnam to Cambodia. I’ll never forget the looks on our faces as my Swedish buddy and I waited at the border helplessly staring at each other as sweat poured out from every possible part of our bodies. Anyway, I only had a week in Cambodia, so I hit the Angkor Temples and it lived up to all of my expectations as the most stunning site in SE Asia. The jungle ravaged temple ruins from the Khmer empire have a seductive air of mystery and despite the heat; it was well worth the cycle to the temples every day (or maybe get a tuk-tuk if you're not tight like me). One mini boo boo though, cycling really quickly to catch the sunrise is probably a photo no-no because I arrived there 40 minutes later again drenched head to toe in sweat. So after a week, I was kind of relieved to be heading north into Northern Lao so that I wouldn’t drown in my own sweat.

Lao was not on my original itinerary but after so many recommendations from fellow travellers, I needed to pay it a visit. They were all right; Lao is jaw-droppingly beautiful. Its landscape of mountains and hills are covered in every shade of green imaginable, a natural beauty that could rival Nepal (my favourite so far for natural scenery). Now Lao does not have a train system so you can't just hop onto a sleeper bus or train and expect to get anywhere quickly or on time, you'll be spending days travelling. The drivers here don't seem to be in too much of a hurry or in desperate need for business. So Echo (my friend) and I mastered the art of persuasion by either scrambling around for other travellers to fill up the bus/boat or hopelessly trying to charm the pants off of the driver and convince him that earning something for the day is way better then chilling with your buddies. Bartering’s a whole new ball game here too, you've only got one chance to offer your desired price and if you went too low, that’s it, you've blown it and your paying for the full asking price or more.

Once we managed to make it up to Northern Lao (despite the boat breaking down and not having enough travellers at one point), Echo and I thought we would trek and ‘couch surf’ at the nearby villages back down. What an eye opener. Village life really is a close knit community and there are generally about 170 people living in the bamboo huts. When we arrived, we quickly realised that we couldn’t have met a friendlier bunch of people. The inquisitive women circled around us and asked us to wait for their husbands to come back from farming. We used our best sign language to ask for food and shelter and before we knew it, the women were preparing a slap up meal of fresh chicken (they didn’t have deer that day as they hadn’t caught a deer) and some other new taste sensations - frogs, ants, ant eggs (I only knew I had been eating a plateful of ants when I shone my torch on it and had to hide my look of 'horror' from the chef).

The next day, we joined them farming in the hills and it is this scene that will stay with me forever. The hill where they were harvesting the rice was spectacular, I could just about make it up the hill so was dragged up it by one of the women. We spent two hours farming and then had to call it a day to finish our trek. As amazing as it was, I'll certainly be thinking twice about farming for 2 hours before a long trek; we were well and truly messed up afterwards. Now once again, this experience has opened up my mind a little bit more and I'll probably be thinking twice when I complain about having a bad day at the office.