Laos part 2 - you've only got one pop song...

Oh God, I'm sat in an internet cafe again. What am I doing here? I might as well give you another update eh!

Me and Sonia have now moved on to Vang Vieng in central Laos, a nice little city next to a river with lots of beautiful craggy mountains nearby. It is a popular centre for trekking, cave-exploring and watersports (teehee). The watersports attract lots of barechested western jock types who drive up and down hollering like chimps on adrenaline. Watersports always bring out this side in people I suspect. Other than that life is very good. I myself will be going to caves and trying some watersports tomorrow. I will keep you updated on my progress!

I've been to Luang Prabang and Phonsovanh so far in Laos. Luang Prabang is a beautiful place. It's Laos' second city but has yet to develop any of the characteristics of a city; for now it is just a small unspoilt town that sits on the meeting-place of two rivers.

With no skyscrapers or modern buildings, and with its quiet streets and Parisian lamp-posts, it is strangely evocative of a small town in pre-war France. But then Laos was a former French colony - the British weren't the only ones who liked nicking other people's countries and changing all their shit around! There are hundreds of beautiful, glittering Buddhist temples spread throughout Luang Prabang, populated with flocks of orange-robed monks. After a day spent temple-spotting in the old town I have now definitely seen enough temples to last me a lifetime!

Late on Monday afternoon (17th March) our slow boat chugged up the river to the town, completing its mammoth journey down the Mekong. We gratefully disembarked, free to explore the town as dusk fell. Like many of the places in Thailand and Laos I've been, a small, cheap and friendly guest house just happened to be waiting in a backstreet for us to chance upon it.

The friendly old lady greeted us with 'sabadee!' (Lao for 'alright me ducks!') and once a price was agreed, she showed us to our room. That night I changed approximately 50 pounds of my Thai money into the local currency and was presented with 870,000 Lao Kip - a humungous wad of money literally an inch thick! I was rich!

The guest house, we later discovered, is built right next door to some sort of all-night open-air karaoke bar, where pissed Lao people go and sing Thai pop songs rather badly all the way into the wee small hours. But on the plus side, guests are welcome to free tea, coffee and bananas round the clock, so I was quickly placated! Oh and they have a big wall collage of former guests' pictures, from which one of my utterly minging passport photos is now gurning out at the world for all posterity. I cannot be held accountable for any loss of business or unforseen mental problems which will ensue from the airing of that rather unappetising photo.

Thai music and TV is everywhere in Laos. In some ways Laos is like a smaller sibling of Thailand, and the Thai culture pours into the void which westernisation is creating in Lao society. The two countries have different languages, and completely separate alphabets, yet there are many cultural similarities.

Even in the quiet backwaters, nearly every village has a house with a huge Jodrell Bank-size satellite dish bracketted to its roof to pick up all the Thai channels. Having seen Thai TV I'd rather face a life with no technology at all!

Thai pop music is kind of strange too. They ape western musical styles but they only seem to have grasped one basic tune. It crops up all the time on the radio in countless different songs - the chords run in a dirge-like circle of C minor-B flat-A flat-B flat, or something like that. And they've taken to one particular musical style with a relish - the all-out, balls-to-the-wall 1980s power ballad!

Our first two nights in Luang Prabang were marked with calm weather and unexpected monsoon-like downpours of rain. We did a few trips out to surrounding villages and beauty spots as is the usual way. First we rode on a boat to the cavernous Pak Ou caves, which nestle inside a big cliff on the Mekong. The caves contain a massive shrine and countless sacred Buddha figurines - small gold statues which visitors must not touch.

Then we visited a village where locals produce Lao whisky and rice wine for tourists, in rustic-looking metal vats. The white rice wine is excellent stuff - alongside the excellent lager Beer Lao, Laos has a lot to shout about alcohol-wise!

Finally we went swimming at the stunning Kouang Si waterfalls, discovering the Lonely Planet brigade from the river boat had all come to visit too! Eeh, it's like taking your holidays at Blackpool. I was affecting a haughty air of anti-western snobbery by this point.

On Friday (21st March) it was time to pack up and move on. We booked tickets at a travel agency and endured an eight-hour bus ride to Phonsovanh. That was tough going. Phonsovanh is a small town a couple of hundred kilometres from Luang Prabang through very mountainous terrain.

At many points on the journey the elderly bus was slowed to a crawl by the uncompromising gradients of the road's endless twists and turns. The views of the wooded valleys and plains, however, were spectacular. Our sanity was further tested by the endless replays of Thailand's one ubiquitous pop tune blaring from the driver's radio at full blast! I turned my music player up on full, stuck my headphones in, lay back and thought of England.

Phonsovanh was bombed to oblivion during the Vietnam war. Quick history lesson - America bombed Laos because they were on the commies' side, and refused to see that communism is dirty and nasty and wrong. Bad Laos! Dirty Laos! In your bed! And they didn't do it by half measures, dropping two million tons of explosives on the country in ten years; more than was used on both Germany and Japan in the second world war.

The town now been entirely rebuilt from scratch, featuring street after street of entirely new buildings. But bomb craters and unexploded bombs still litter the countryside. The debris of war lies everywhere, and much of it has been ingeniously recycled by opportunistic scrap-hunters. Rusted old bomb casings are used as fencing, house foundations and water carriers, and many of the guest houses have some sort of arrangement of old bombs and metal helmets outside to try and catch the tourists' eyes.

We came to visit one of the other 'must sees' in Laos, the Plain of Jars. This is an area of about 15 square kilometres of countryside, near Phonsovanh, containing thousands of giant prehistoric stone jars. No-one really knows when they came from, or why they were put there by the ancient civilisation of the time - are they funeral urns? Food storage? Was it... aliens?

The area was also the centre of intense fighting during the war and is still littered with UXOs (unexploded bombs) dropped by US planes in the late 60s. As much as 30% of the bombs dropped over Laos never detonated, and still lie in wait somewhere. (I have many more bomb facts and figures I intend to save for small talk at future dinner parties!)

So I spent the day yesterday wandering round various picturesque hillsides, littered with giant stone jars and ancient mossy bomb craters. In some places the earth is still churned up from those terrible events many years ago; and always the bomb craters are perfectly round and spherical in depth.

Also we went to see a cave where the Lao people once sheltered from the incessant American bombing raids, a rusting Soviet tank in a nearby village that had been cannibalised for scrap, and an imposing war memorial for Lao & Vietnamese soldiers up on a hillside. Am I a communist now? Not sure. But I certainly take the Vietnam war a lot more seriously now I've seen its implications in people's lives forty years on.

Finally we visited the local office of MAG, a Manchester-based charity who organise the clearing of explosives from Lao villages. There was a hugely interesting exhibition there explaining how many Lao villagers are very poor as they cannot farm on their bomb-infested land. Due to intense poverty they are forced into the incredibly dangerous route of digging up the bombs, attempting to diffuse them, then selling them on as scrap metal. The unused explosives also have monetary value. In an absolute sense the people are attempting to live off the land any way they can; accidents and deaths are commonplace.

What I can't believe is how forgiving the Lao people are - they love all foreigners! They're even friendlier than the people of Thailand. I was expecting the older generation to harbour grudges against Hawaiian shirt-wearing Americans at least. Most of the people don't seem to care, and every credit to them. They only want to rebuild the country and move on.