Postcard from Laos

I'm writing this on the deck of a hut on the banks of a small river in Laos. Truth to tell, I don't know exactly where I am, but tomorrow morning I paddle a traditional dugout along 7.5kms of river under a mountain.



I don't like caves, but I signed up for the whole event and I'll do it all too. Meantime, my journey, while only four days in from the time I arrived in Bangkok, has been fascinating.

The Land Rover G4 Challenge has certainly already taken me, as an observing journalist, to places I never expected to see.

For the past two days, for instance, I've been driving through the rain forests of Laos, on tracks which are actually the 'roads' between villages which don't look like they've changed much in centuries.



Sure, they do have electricity, most of them, even the odd and very incongrous satellite dish but the houses are rickety efforts, many on stilts because they keep the wildlife and such in the open spaces underneath.



And it seems to me that almost every home here is a small trader's establishment, because so many seem to have small stalls which sell small selections of goods. Most of them, though, have the staples of Coke, Fanta, and other cold drinks.

The Lao people are shy, smiling and welcoming. The villages seem to have scores of children, all of whom wave to us as we travel through. If we stop, they continue to smile, but you know that you're on their space, and you want to respect that.

I don't want to dwell too much at the moment on the truly subsistence level of the local economies, but they do depend a lot on the chickens, pigs and goats which run around.

In this area too there are lots of paddy fields, which were dry yesterday and this morning but with this afternoon's rains were already getting filling into pools of water, ready to sprout into rice plants.

There's so much hitting at the moment, and I'm suffering from too much information overload to get a proper picture across. But this is a snapshop ... and besides, it has started raining again, and I have to run.

Brian Byrne.