Living like the Monks

After the intensity of Vietnam and Cambodia, I was more than ready to lighten the mood of my trip - and luckily Laos turned out to be just the place for a bit of fun and relaxation. Starting off in Vientiane, I was soon won over by the slow pace of life there; it is very small for a capital city and as in the rest of Laos, there is little traffic to disturb the peace. But despite its serenity there was plenty to occupy visitors, including a Buddha Park full of bizarre statues, an unexpectedly endearing "cultural show" performed in what appeared to be a school assembly hall, and an imposing monument in the style of the Arc-de-Triomphe, which was described in an official notice nailed to the wall as a "monster of concrete".

After Vientiane, I took the bus three hours north to Vang Vieng, which is apparently famous among backpackers and turned out to be a very odd place. Set in stunning surroundings with tropical vegetation, a tranquil river and misty layers of forest-covered mountains, Vang Vieng itself is somewhat incongruous. The town is dominated by a handful of streets packed with guesthouses, TV bars playing continuous episodes of Friends, restaurants selling western food and even a McDonalds of dubious authenticity. Due, I think, to the multitude of opportunities for adventure sports - rafting, kayaking, rock climbing, caving and the backpackers'-favourite tubing (floating down the river on a tyre, often while drunk and/or stoned) - tourists started flocking to this little town, and the town responded by turning itself into a miniature version of Khao San Road. Luckily, it was entirely possible to avoid all of the above by walking just a little way out of town, across a temporary bamboo bridge and on to the tiny Don Khang island. There you could stroll by the river or relax in a hammock, and every evening after dark the local bars organised a bonfire - the perfect place to while away the evening chatting to other visitors over a bottle or two of the ubiquitous Beerlao.

My favourite destination in Laos however, turned out to be Luang Prabang, which combined the calm of Vientiane with Vang Vieng's picturesque mountain setting and close proximity to waterfalls and caves. When I arrived at my guesthouse, they told me about the sunrise procession of hundreds of monks, who pass by every morning at 6am. As they make their way to the temples, the monks collect alms of sticky rice from locals, and bananas sold by street-vendors to bleary-eyed tourists woken by the drums. There are a lot of monks in Luang Prabang, many of them children, and they could be spotted all over town in their orange robes - sightseeing in the museum, doing the gardening outside their Wat, climbing trees, smoking, sending text messages, checking their email and playing computer games in the internet cafes... even the monks have fun in Laos it seems, and (as Barry Norman would say) why not.

Regardless of History

The journey from the Mekong river to Phomn Penh in Cambodia was predictably entertaining - everything I'd heard about the roads turned out to be true. For about an hour, our minibus bumped along in a cloud of dust, the vehicle shaking as though it could collapse clown-style at any moment, with twenty of us crammed into the sixteen seats and our luggage jumping all over the place. Luckily everyone retained their sense of humour and we arrived at our guesthouse with the minibus, our luggage and ourselves all intact.

When I ventured into the centre of Phnom Penh the following morning, I found it surprisingly quiet for a capital city. At first I thought it was just calm in comparison with the Vietnamese cities, but I later discovered (when talking to a Cambodian student who had been studying English and had then swapped to the more lucrative Computer Science) that I had arrived during a three-day public holiday to mark the king's birthday. My time in Phnom Penh also apparently coincided with the visit of the North Korean Prime Minister Kim Yong Il, but I had no idea about that until I saw all the flag-waving on the BBC World News that night.

Apart from an occasional pile of dead rats obstructing the pavement, Phnom Penh was an easy city for me to navigate, compass in hand. The guesthouses offered cheap whirlwind tours of the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda, Russian Market, National Museum, Toul Sleng genocide museum and Killing Fields of Choeng Ek all in one day, but I decided to take things a bit more slowly and visit all of the above independently. On my second day in the city I went to the Killing Fields in the morning and the Toul Sleng museum in the afternoon. I thought I was prepared for what I'd see there, but I can't describe the feeling of walking across the site of a genocide, where the clothes of victims are still visible through the earth from unexhumed mass graves. You pay US$2 to visit Choeng Ek; according to the guidebooks the government privatised it a couple of years ago, despite outrage from the victims' families, and it is now managed by a Japanese company.

I also heard that the Angkor temples are privately owned, by the owner of a luxury hotel in nearby Siem Reap, but I don't think this is true. However, the hotel resorts certainly epitomise the extremes of rich and poor in Cambodia. These resorts and the nearby French colonial areas have the look and feel of continental European boulevards, while just a couple of streets away are neighbourhoods that are clearly those of a developing country. Even my guesthouse, located in quite a tourist-orientated part of town, was set back from an unpaved track where the pavement was an obstacle course of rubble.

I spent a day exploring the temples, beginning with the obligatory 5.30am sunrise at Angkor Wat. But although Angkor Wat is the most famous, the most striking (to me, at least) was Ta Prohm, a 12th century Buddhist temple which - unlike most of the others - has not been restored or preserved in recent times. As a result, the jungle has taken over and giant tree roots have gradually grown over the walls (as in the photo above) or worked their way in between the stones to push the buildings apart. When I saw Ta Prohm, it reminded me of the Bill Woodrow sculpture "Regardless of History" which was displayed in Trafalgar Square a few years ago. The sculpture made quite an impression on me at the time, and I was excited to finally see in real life an example of the phenomenon that perhaps helped to inspire it.