Rain rain rain. Vietnam is meterologically mysterious. All the books say that when you pass through the strip of mountains just north of Dangang, the weather changes, and becomes pretty awful. I couldn’t quite believe them. Yesterday morning I was in tropical winter, beautiful, hot dry climate, giving you the feeling of no care in the world. Today I toured the ancient city of Hue in the rain. This is the same latitude as Yangon (Rangoon, in Myanmar), which instead is hot and tropical. So from now on it’s cold and wet, a good job spring is coming on, although there isn’t really such a thing as spring until a lot further north.

This morning I had an amusing introduction to the Vietnamese gay scene. There’s a fantastic imperial palace in the middle of Hue, built in the 19th century by the Nguyen dynasty. It’s a huge set of nested fortresses very much Chinese in style. Absolutely daunting that such things are built, how much power can accumulate. While walking round I imagined it being active, which it was until 1945. There are other places in the world which are living now, and perhaps in a shorter time than we think will be tromped through by tourists – perhaps the Vatican, the Whitehouse.

Anyway, it was raining, so I was hanging out to dry in one of the buildings for a while. A man minding a shop starts talking to me, and asks the usual introductory questions. “Where are you from?” “Are you married?” “Do you have a girlfriend?” This is quite clever, as everyone asks me if I’m married, it just seems to be the culturally accepted question to ask a man unaccompanied by a wife.

When I say no, he suddenly says “I have a boyfriend, in Germany”. I assume that he doesn’t quite understand that “boyfriend” isn’t just a friend who happens to be male, but as he tells me more it dawns that he really does mean boyfriend. This German is coming to visit in the summer for a month, and they are going to tour Vietnam together; by this point I’m pretty sure they won’t just hold hands.

So I ask him how they met. Here, in the picture shop! The German came with another male friend, and at first our Vietnamese shopkeeper thought that they were partners. Somehow it became clear that this wasn’t the case, and the German asked him if he likes boys. Then one led to two, and afterwards they swapped email addresses, so this year they can have another rendezvous.

By this point I was curious to learn more about the local gay scene, so I ask him if he has boyfriends here. No no! Not at all, he only has foreign boyfriends, as they are easier to keep secret. There was evidently some stigma with being openly gay, although he said that some people were nevertheless. No, instead, he says, he has Vietnamese girlfriends!

It was quite clear that there was an offer to me going on, so I made it explicitly clear that I prefered girls. He went so far as to say (in hushed tones, going quiet as another two tourists passed by), that some people who haven’t had boys before like to try it out anyway, even if they’re not sure. And, he said, that if it didn’t work, or they didn’t like it, that would be no problem.

At this point I decided to make what he perceived as a hasty exit – “You can just stay and talk if you like, I’m not forcing anything on you!” – not because I felt at all uncomfortable about the situation, but to quickly run a hundred yards and burst into laughter.

So if you’re in Hue, and gay, I can tell you the place to go!

The last few days I’ve been travelling up the coast of Vietnam by railway. It’s good to have a change from buses, boats and pick-up trucks. I haven’t been on a train since an early, and somewhat bad, experience in Myanmar. It’s 1726km along the iron road from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, the whole journey taking 30 to 40 hours depending on how express the trains you get are.

For me the best thing is that it avoids the backpacker’s cafe tourist-bus trail; a depressing situation where you buy a cheap ticket the whole length of the country with stop-offs where you want. You end up herded from over-touristed area to over-touristed area, on buses shared entirely with other tourists. For all the Vietnamese that you see you mayn’t as well be in Vietnam. As I found in the Mekong Delta, the tourist infrastructure here is often too good.

There are three different classes of seating, and two different classes of sleeper. I’m deliberately travelling by day, and so far have tried the “soft seat” and the “soft sea air conditioned” classes. Because of this, I have been accompanied by reasonably wealthy Vietnamese. The people on the trains, and in Vietnam in general, are very friendly and kind to me. I’d heard bad reports before I got here that the Vietnamese were distant, cold, or even nasty, but I find it hard to see where that idea comes from. Perhaps I’m smiling at them too much ;)

Yesterday I stopped off in Qui Nhon, bypassing the famous beaches of Nha Trang partly because I don’t like beaches, and partly to speed things up so I can get to Hanoi by 18th February. Mainly I chose Qui Nhon so I could visit somewhere by the sea that hasn’t yet been quite so infected with tourism. The mountains, the sea, the bay are beautiful there. It was lovely to see the sea, which I haven’t seen for months. I cycled round the harbour, watching huge tree trunks been unloaded from boats, and ice been crushed and chuted into fishing boats.

It was interesting to observe the tourist infrastructure being built. I stayed at a six month new guesthouse designed for backpackers, which is only just mentioned in my brand new edition of Lonely Planet (a bookseller in Ho Chi Minh City spent some time trying to buy the book off me, so she could copy it and be first with the new edition – she wasn’t prepared to pay more than the cover price though, so evidently wasn’t that desperate.). It was very quiet, the only other guests I saw were a Singaporese civil engineer who was managing the building of a beach resort just along the coast, and his architect. Nevertheless the New Zealand proprietor is expecting such a rush, presumably now she is in The Book, that she’s already building a second hotel “Barbara’s on the Beach”.

So, we tourists all rush to the latest place, incited by Lonely Planet to avoid the crowds. It’s all authentic, local, interesting, cultural, if tough because the moto drivers don’t know where your hotel is, and some of the restauranteurs (shock!) don’t speak English. Of course eventually there are too many of us to want to go there any more, so we head off to remoter places like Cambodia or Laos. “Luckily” there is always somewhere new regenerated to be fresh and raw by civil war, or emerging from the isolation of a totalitarian dictatorship. So we can look forward in about seventeen years time to cultural tours of Iraq, or perhaps bathing on the beaches of Somalia.

After enjoying Qui Nhon, I made my way today to Hoi An. It’s a beautiful town, with surviving, practical, wooden colonial architecture, a rarity in much bombed Vietnam. I just ate the most delicious meal ever, at a place called Cafe des Amis. He cooks different meals as he likes each day, giving you only one choice as to whether you prefer seafood or vegetarian. This was the best demonstration yet of my nascent rule of thumb – the fewer items on the menu, the less choice you have, the better the food!

Time to talk about shopping. The nice thing about shopping is that it is easy for a tourist to make some kind of judgement about it. Shops are designed to be open, visitable, and for you to be able to find out about them. Also, coming from the consumerist culture that I do, even a bad shopper like me is very well trained. This makes it much easier than trying to analyse, say, the system of government.

The shops are just starting to open with avengeance after the Chinese New Year festival. Yesterday I went into the Diamond Department Store. This is part of a 13 story sky scraper, much of which is offices. The offices are all for international companies, the sign in the lobby telling you which floor to go to is written entirely in English. Although, apparently lots of Koreans work in the building – these companies are Asian as well as Western.

The shops were opulant, more like a posh department store on Oxford Street (London) than John Lewis (a cheaper, commoner UK department store). Prices seemed quite reasonable but only when compared to prices in the UK. A designer t-shirt for seven dollars is good value, but not if you only earn one dollar a day. The quality was very good, I was impressed by the clothes fashion – I think perhaps it was from the US, and the colours are brighter than in the UK.

As I walked round, the place felt wrong. It wasn’t Vietnamese, it felt plonked here to satisfy the market of people working in the offices above it. Who were the people shopping there? How did they earn so so much more than most of the people in the country? People in Ho Chi Minh City on average (HCMC) earn four times as much as the rest of the country, but even that wouldn’t be enough. The Diamond Department Store felt like an invasion, not part of a process of improvement.

In contrast, today I went to Ben Thanh market, just reopened after Tet. This is in the centre of HCMC, and it is the best market I’ve seen in SE Asia, and I’ve seen a few. By best what I really mean is cleanest. The place had a red tiled floor, rather than earth or concrete. The noodle soup stalls were fantastic, made with white tiles, and they felt safe. The whole place must be thoroughly scrubbed every day – as are all the roads and markets I’ve seen in Vietnam. In Vinh Long in the Mekong Delta I watched a market from my hotel room. It was messy, dirty, covered with rubbish by the evening when I went to sleep. In the morning, I awoke to a clean empty street. Similarly in HCMC, somebody comes along at night and clears up the streets. Better than parts of London!

The thing about Ben Thanh market is that it felt like a natural improvement of SE Asian markets. It still sold all local and fresh foods, and a whole range of clothing, both local cloth and cheap international clothes by Nike or Ralph Lauren. You could still find fresh living fish, but admittedly meat still wasn’t refrigerated despite the heat. There was real proper free market competition, between lots of shops owned by different people, selling similar products so you can compare and negotiate prices. Yet it had been improved, to be more organised, and cleaner, and could be improved more. On the bad side, the service is partly only so good because of the working hours market people put in, they are in their shops for 12 hours a day, and 7 days a week.

Before I fall into the soup of my own rhetoric, I’ll give a different example of the point I’m trying to make. Just opposite the market there is a fast food noodle soup place called Pho 2000. Bill Clinton stopped there for a bowl when he visited Vietnam as president in 2000. It’s basically an improved, easier version of your normal noodle soup stall. It’s inside a building for one, with decent, clean chairs and tables, waiter service, and a fixed menu in English as well as Vietnamese. I could easily see them franchising it, and opening up shops all over the country. What I really want them to do is move into Europe, compete with and cause the shutting down of half the Burger Kings, so we have a good cheap Asian choice of fast food.

Anyone think they can do it? What, you mean you couldn’t compete with McDonalds’ marketing? Or perhaps you believe that the Burger and Fry is fundamenally superior to Noodle Soup, so it would never catch on? Noodle soup certainly seems popular enough here, and these human beings don’t seem that radically different. No, the hard bit is cultural, how would you promote such a thing, and get it to reach a tipping point where it becomes as popular as an American burger chain?

I’ve been here for five and a half days now, and see no sign of leaving yet. I’m staying in a really good guesthouse, a bit away from the main backpacker area, and friendly and hospitable.

My long visit is partly because you have to chill out during the Tet festival. That’s the Lunar New Year, which is the same as the Chinese New Year. For three days people go back to visit their family, so the city is relatively deserted, as recent migration patterns mean that more people in the city have families in the country than vice versa.

There seem to be endless things to do here. Lots of interesting modern history stuff, such as meseums to do with the Vietnam war, and day trips to visit the tunnels that the Viet Cong hid in. And then loads of interesting pagodas, from the strange religions that the Vietnamese have, mixtures of Mahayana Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Animism and Ancestor Worship. In the Mekong river delta people regularly seem to start new religions, which often have had their own private army at periods over the last century.

And that’s without all the stuff that’s closed for Tet! Like shopping centres, some of the museums, and the french patesseries.

The city is seem seemingly infinite. There’s a central bit where most stuff is, and you can soon get to know it. But if you leave from there, it goes on forever. Endless long wide streets with tall trees, and infinite infinite local shops, selling who knows what, as they’re all closed for Tet. I climbed a curious pagoda today that had 7 or 8 levels, with a different statue on each one. From the top the city stretched to the horizon, with no real break or distinguishing feature.

This morning I accidentally ended up at a theme park crossed with a garden centre and water park on the outskirts of town. It was next to a pagoda that I was trying to visit. Hoardes of holiday happy Vietnamese, going on rides, having picnics. In Europe at such places, we might have tropical plant greenhouses, so of course here there was an air-conditioned glass building, full of exotic temperate climate plants.

I’m leaving Cambodia, catching the boat tomorrow afternoon to Chau Doc in Vietnam. Internet access probably won’t be as easy and cheap in the Mekong Delta (it’s only half a dollar an hour here, cheapest so far in SE Asia!), and I’d like to be away from computers to take things in, so I’ll probably disappear for a bit. Some final thoughts on Cambodia.

Since Battambang, I’ve only been in Siem Reap and Phnom Penh. They’re both highly touristy, so I feel more hassled by people rather than befriended. In Battambang, I’d managed to learn the Khmer numbers, and was starting to learn phrases like “How much is it?” and “Where is the toilet?”. Khmer is much easier for me than Thai and Burmese, as it isn’t tonal at all. Since then it’s been much harder to get support with Khmer, so I gave up. In Siem Reap people would laugh at me if I even said “Thank you!” in Khmer – I guess the thousands of tourists jetting in to see Angkor Wat don’t bother to learn it.

Lots of the moto drivers have second (third!) sources of income touting dubious businesses. More obviously these are cannabis (“I have high quality weed, very high quality!”) and prostitution (“You want lady?”). It’s also the only way to find the place where you can try out machine guns and grenades just outside Phnom Penh, as the guide books don’t mention it. Today a moto driver was so determined to sell follow on business to me, that after he’d checked I’d already been to the killing fields out of town, and that I didn’t want to go to the mountain pagoda, or to illegally try out guns (“English people like shooting!”, I turned out to be more French or German in this regard), that I’m somewhat unjustly sure he’d have offered to take me to Svay Pak if the brothels hadn’t finally been shut down by the government the night before I arrived.

Two highlights of Cambodia for me that are somewhat macabre – really lowlights, there to learn and understand what happened so recently, maybe to be better informed to stop it happening again: (Part of me says that this is still voyeuristic, which it is, but it is also learning about the truth)

• Talking to an exhibition currator in Battambang about his personal experiences slave labouring as a child on the rice fields for the Khmer Rouge, and later as a refugee trapped between many armies and landmines on the Thai border. I am so lucky for my childhood… What should I do to make sure more people have happy childhoods?
• Toul Sleng Genocide Museum, especially the photos of the people there. They looked so real, they are so real, it made it real. And some of the paperwork administering the prison, telling the soldiers to keep their uniforms properly on, that made it more real also.

And some positive things. I loved Lokesvara’s faces on the Bayon at Angkor. I enjoyed people being welcoming and friendly in Battambang. The rice porridge Bor Bor is fantastic for breakfast, if you can work out how to pronounce that O. Perhaps one day if in the right mood, I’ll come back here, and do the other route diagonally across the country – from Thailand, go round the coast to Sihanoukville, then up across through Phnom Penh and to the NE and Rattanakiri, then on to Laos.

Now, Vietnam.

(Argument still goes on at Conrad’s blog – thanks to everyone who’s given me a bit of support. I’ve learnt quite a bit. It’s always good to understand other peoples opnions better, especially those which are quite different from yours (or appear to be quite different)…)

Gosh, this blog has been flamed in another blog. (Translation out of Internet jargon: Somebody else on the internet has read part of this online journal, and written a bilious reply on their journal). Head on over and join in the fun. I’ve posted a reply (defense!) at the bottom of their blog.

English really is a global second language. At least, in SE Asia, in every country it is the lingua franca. It’s assumed that if you’re a tourist, actually if you’re white, then you’ll speak English. And fluently. If you’re a French or a German independent traveller then you really have no choice; learning even basic English is such good value that you’d be foolish not to.

In Cambodia, the local people are desperate to learn the language. This wasn’t as obvious in Myanmar, but it was still the case. In Thailand the whole process is formalised as in France, so you don’t know that people are learning English, they’re kind of shy about it. It’s only that all people working in the tourist industry speak it which reveals the truth. In Cambodia on every street corner, on the steps of every ancient temple, in monastries, at the tables of exhibitions… Everywhere, people are lurking to practice their English on you. “Where do you come from?” “How old are you?” “Are you married?” It’s their ticket to wealth, to knowledge.

I feel like a strange, itinerant English teacher, wondering aimlessly round Cambodia talking to anyone who’ll listen. An intelligent monk asked me back later in the day to give a lesson to his English class. A tuk-tuk (motorbike powered trishaw thing) driver on a street corner engaged me in conversation, and asked complex details about vocabulary. What is the difference between “fit” and “enough”, they are the same word in Khmer? (It takes a while – think about it – to realise what a similar meaning they have, that they could be one word). When is it a “hill” and when a “mountain”? (Tricky, as the abrupt lumps of earth sticking out of the Cambodian plains aren’t tall enough to be mountains or anonymous enough to be hills) By going round casually teaching people English, am I just expanding the American empire?

Part of me had hoped to need to speak a bit of French when in Cambodia, as it was a French colony – make me feel less guilty for not knowing foreign languages. But only a lucky few here speak French, the old people who were taught it at school. Once there were many, but as they were also the intelligentsia, the Khmer Rouge murdered them. The new young educated all learn English.

Two final pieces of evidence clinched it for English being a global language. ASEAN, the SE Asian equivalent of the EU, speaks English as its working language. Thinking about it this makes sense, how else could Burmese, Thai, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Indonesian and Malaysian people talk to each other? Secondly, an independent tourist who has just been in China told me the other day that even there everyone is learning English. I had thought Chinese stood up alone, but it appears not. They even have a national TV quiz show to find the best speaking English student in the country – that you’d like to see!

I’m not ashamed any more that I don’t speak a second language fluently. What would be the point? It’s easy if your native language is anything other than English, you learn English. If I’d known that at every tourist place in the world I could talk in French then I’d have been motivated to take evening classes, and the yearly practice on holiday would have at least kept me in reasonably good shape. Instead of guilt, I have a more hostile feeling. My native tongue, my ethnic language, is stolen away from me. English is no longer mine. I have no language, my first language is a second language. The only recourse to rescue would be by using lots of those infuriating English phrasal verbs which contain a preposition – “to put up with”, “to crack down on”, or perhaps lapse into cockney rhyming slang or a Scottish accent.

Even that isn’t safe. My moto driver the other day was a hoot, as he showed off American, Australian, and even Cockney imitations and phrases that I couldn’t understand…

I arrived here in Cambodia on Tuesday, travelling overland from Thailand. Within eight hours of crossing the border, eight people or groups of people had made warm and friendly contact with me. This left me deeply moved, and in love with Cambodia. Completely different from Thailand where, as in Europe, everyone is too rich, too congested with people, and ignores you.

1. A hassling, fluent English, border truck tout. OK, not the best start and not the most friendly of people, as he hassled and lied about having a pick-up to Battambang. However, he was friendly, and helped me across the border. When I then refused his father’s pick-up, which had no other passengers yet, he was helpful and found me another one. And he taught me the essential first two phrases of Khmer, “Hello!” and “Thank you!”.
2. People on the back of the first pickup truck. The most fun and cheapest, and if you don’t book the only, way to get from the Thai border town of Poipet to Battambang is on the back a pickup truck. They fill the thing to bursting, you never quite believe what small space, and precariously balanced cargo another will sit on. An old man sitting next to me held my knee in the kindest, warmest, most unconscious way possible, as he couldn’t reach part of the truck to hold onto. A very young boy fell asleep with his head on my lap. Innocent, friendly, spirited togetherness.
3. People on the back of the second pickup truck (had to change truck at Sisophon). Three friendly smiley young women, an older guy with two children and two dogs, who tried chatting with me in English.
4. Sombat (aka Bat) at the transport stop in Battambang. Fed up after the tout at the border, I was first of all rude to him, but he turned out to be a great moto driver and guide who took me out to surrounding sites for the next two days.
5. NGO man in restaurant. He was sitting at the next table to me, working for an educational charity in the villages, and just started talking to me. He was Christian, and told me a bit about their work.
6. Group of friends at the dessert stall. Cambodia has great fun night markets where you can buy food after 4pm, including Khmer dessert stalls. Sickly concoctions, of jelly or rice sweets with condensed milk, ice, or a strange almost potato-like fruit. More fun to eat than delicious. I sat a dark and candle lit stall. The young people who ran it and their friends, were chatty, jokey, and warm.
7. Hotel staff playing cards outside. They invited me to join as I went in to go to bed, although I declined.
8. Receptionist. Amusingly, after giving me my key, he then changed the television channels to show me which one was the (best?) local porn channel. This is some kind of level of service that I’m not used to!

Since then I’ve been giving English lessons to Buddhist monks, having teenagers teach me to count, and being offered to join a group of people at the next table in a restaurant (Cambodian saying: “The more people at a meal, the tastier it is!”). On the country roads all the children wave to foreigners.

So why are they so friendly, as they were in Burma? The cynical side of me says that people who are poor, people who have lived disconnected to the world, or at war, are happier and more excited to see “farang”. Foreign visitors are both a sign of stability, and a source of local wealth. My moto driver said that the children and visitors are so friendly to me because most white people in the area work for NGOs. The villagers believe the NGOs have done actual valuable work in mine clearance, education and healthcare. This is great to hear, and very sweet, but not really a privileged welcome that a tourist is deserving off.

The other side of the coin to this cold explanation is simply that the people are warm and friendly. They live more in communities, and haven’t had their soul sucked away by television, and by more wealth than they know how to organise as a society in a sensible way. All the travellers seem to like the countries which aren’t developed more than those that are, because of this warmth and friendliness. What are we developing?

I’m now in Siem Reap, jumping off point to visit the temples of Angkor, one of the wonders of the world. So, it’s overflowing with tourists, many of whom fly here and don’t see anything more of Cambodia. Not that I’m much better, rushing on next week to Vietnam.

Bangkok has some excellent public transport, at least great fun if you’re a tourist. There are several canals with super-fast water buses on them, you quickly leap on, pay them 5 baht (about 7 pence) and they zoom much faster than the jammed traffic. There are canvas shields which raise and lower along the side to reduce splashing, although you still get a bit wet with all the wakes it causes. Under some bridges they have to lower the entire roof, and the young lads clinging to the outside who collect your fare duck down.

More hightech, like something from a manga movie are the sky trains. Vastly healthier than an underground would be, if a bit pricey compared to water and land buses (more like 30 baht a trip). The picture is of the start of one of the sky rails, they zoom along several stories in the air usually in the middle of a dual carriageway. They work exactly like the underground, you buy a ticket which gets used in an automatic barrier, and there are similar maps. You just go up an escalator before getting on rather than down, and it’s sunny and light on the station platform. Very clean and well managed, I wasn’t allowed to take an ice cream in, had to finish it first. Between stations you get beautiful views of the city, and feel like you are flying.

Despite already having this system straight from a futuristic Japanese city, for some reason a Bangkok underground is being built as well. There are only two sky train lines, and they don’t cover the city comprehensively, but nor will the initial underground. I’d much rather they built sky trains everywhere.

The picture? Oh yes, I found a shop which converted my digital camera pictures into a CD, which I can now use in internet cafes, and post back to the UK for backup. I’m not sure if the picture will work if you’re reading this by email subscription, you might have to go to the web site to see it.

More technical details for those who are interested: I found an internet cafe with Windows XP, so that I can easily look at the jpegs using the built in slideshow, and resize them with the built in Paint. I upload the pictures using Blogger Pro (the version of blogger which you pay for) – it gives a browser interface for file uploads to your blog.

Before I forget them, I’m going to post some general impressions of Myanmar/Burma, since I spent the last month there. I spent most of the time being a proper tourist, so I don’t have any real insights into the political situation that you can’t get elsewhere. However, I did talk to an interesting Wa monk (from Shan “state”) in a monastry in Mandalay – I’ll post up some of the stuff he said another day.

It’s hard for me to think about Burma without making comparisons, to either Ghana or Cuba, being the most similar places that I’ve been to. Relatively speaking, Burma felt quite prosperous. The people had a lot of dignity, a real strength and depth behind them as a people, that they will succeed and maintain who they are. They also had reasonable resources, lots of standard consumer products either manufactured locally, or imported from China, and there wasn’t much overt poverty. However, I suspect the worst poverty in the country is in more remote and rural, or even war-torn, areas, exactly where the government doesn’t let tourists go.

Saying that, the country has low quality facilities by Western standards – the roads are atrocious, and you can’t buy many European/US products, particularly outside Yangon. This has a very good side to it. People still wear their traditional clothing, and I was soon used to seeing men in longys (a sort of skirt, a sewn up sarong – they nearly all wore them), and everyone in nice bright coloured shirts. People still eat traditional food, cooked by the road side, produce bought from markets. Here in Thailand people do that too, and the best and cheapest food seems to come like that, but there are also pointlessly expensive restaurants and fast food chains. In the UK you can’t buy cheap traditional food many places, and our food culture has vanished such that you probably wouldn’t want to.

You’ll notice that I’m saying Burma again, when before I was so picky about saying Myanmar. This is an interesting one. Really, to my mind, Burma is a subpart of the Union of Myanmar. It’s forms the bulk of it, and consists of the people who are ethnically Burmese. Now, before hand I thought that saying Myanmar was a bit like saying the United Kingdom – Myanmar includes the other parts such as Shan state, as well as Burma, just as the United Kingdom includes Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland as well as England. I think this is how the Myanmar government sees things. However, it isn’t how people in Shan state see things. They refer to the Burmese areas as Myanmar, and their own areas as if another country (albeit not internationally or UN recognised) – almost deliberately subverting the word Myanmar, so it can’t be used for the political inclusiveness the government is trying to achieve.

The Burmese smile all the time. A cynical part of me says this is the laughing smile in the face of adversity. However, I think it is genuinely that they care. They aren’t worn down by tourists (like people here in Bangkok, where the land has considerably fewer than a thousand smiles), and they are calm, compassionate, friendly and warm to each other as well. I miss being able to smile at anyone and get a smile back.

Religion – it was lovely to travel in a Buddhist country for a change. There are stupas and wats everywhere, as much as there are churches in Europe. I had lots of lovely experiences in the early evening visiting a stupa, and watching the generic pious paying their respects to a Buddha. If you are Christian and have never been to a Buddhist country, come and try it out. The two are similar in lots of ways:

Both spread from one man having a new, positive, ethical way of looking at the world. Both Jesus and Buddha lived a similar amount of time ago, and both the religions have spread a long way (one mainly West from the Middle East, one mainly East from India). Both have diversified into sects with different doctrines. Both created and still create incredible religious buildings, amazing texts and statues. Seeing these similarities makes it even harder for me to believe that strong Christianity could be “right”. Not that I’m about to become Buddhist either, it is often to me cosmologically suspect, and also I think some of the people do worship Buddha as a God, rather than celebrate his achievements as a person. Both religions have spot on ethical messages.

Phil (who I was travelling with in Burma) is addicted to Buddha images, so we went to see lots of them, and look at how they vary. I can imagine a mirror world where a Japanese tourists gets obsessed with images of Jesus being crucified, and tours the cathedrals and museums of Europe hunting out obscure ones. If you look at a Buddha sculpture hard, kneel down and stare into his eyes, it is easy to get entranced by the enigmatic smile, or the strong face, and wonder what character he had to have to achieve whatever state of mind he achieved.

On a lighter note, Asian toilets are fantastic. There are lots of combinations, and I’m not too fond of squatting – most guesthouse toilets were sit-down though. However, the trigger hoses which you use to spray and clean yourself instead of toilet paper are fantastic. Bidets, eat your heart out.

Yangon (Rangoon). It’s a very green city, from the plane even in the dark all the lights twinkled, and it took me a few seconds to work out that the effect could only be caused by trees. I kept thinking I was in a Tintin novel there, I think because of the type of green jeep that was often in the streets, and also because it still had the feel of colonial times before cultural imperialism of Coca-Cola, Shell and McDonalds – a real foreign city.

A thought on being annoyed by people overly-persistently trying to sell you tourist tat (not too bad a problem in Burma – I’ve heard stories elsewhere of people being followed by a hawker for an hour): That people are annoyingly persistent in trying to sell you stuff is a symmetrical consequence of you (the tourist) being able to visit the place so casually and easily.