Vientiane

Laos is very very quiet and a bit bumbly after Thailand. There are only 5m people here in a country the size of GB. Vientiane is tiny! Stayed in grande luxe in a crumbling colonial villa with a wonderful garden (although I did wish they would pick up the empty beer cans).

Laos seems to attract some interesting people. Met a 70 year-old nurse from New York who has spent the last eight months working for Medecins sans Frontieres in Cambodia with HIV patients. She leaves her husband at home and goes volunteering abroad to remote places.

Everyone very keen to practise their English. Got talking to some monks at one of the Wats and ended up giving an impromptu English lesson. We were invited into their room where they had set up a classroom - complete with whiteboard - where they practise English conversation among themselves. Becoming a monk is one way for boys to receive an education. They explained that while they had been monks for four years, they did not expect to be monks forever, and English was necessary to get a good job. Being inside the temple was a bit like being in a boys boarding school. They had boxes of little cellophane wrapped snacks under their beds to keep them going between their one meal a day. So on the whiteboard went: 'Guests eat snacks' - except of course we only ate one tiny packet of Chinese crackers to be polite, as they had so little.