English for monks

Wonderous Laos, with its effortless mix of Lao and French gracefulness, its jungles and bendy roads. A few days is way too short to fully appreciate all this, and we're already trying to work out how soon we can come back again.

On Saturday we caught a bus from Jinghong to Mengla with a bus driver who used his horn as a kind of force-field - as long as he was tooting it, there was no way anything could go wrong, and overtaking around blind corners or over blind crests was therefore perfectly safe. As it turned out, he was right.

From Mengla, where the square was full of people doing Tai Chi early the next morning, we took a bus to the Chinese border. The Chinese border guards practised their english on us, then cheerily waved us goodbye. We took a taxi to the Lao border where the visa guy had a long conversation with us about his sister who lives in Sydney, then put stamps in our passports and waved us on our way. We ate 'pho', Lao noodle soup for early lunch and changed our Yuan for Kip then hung around in the breezy bus shelter and listened to the cicadas singing in the heat. Even waiting in a busstop in a desolate construction site in the jungle made us want to stay forever.

We made it all the way to Udomxai, as we'd hoped. The last time we were here, we camped in the nearby jungle, staying in the town no more than 20 minutes. This time we were pleasently surprised to find the town was quite charming - we visited the local wat and watched the sun set from the hill.

The next day, to Luang Prabang, World Heritage town and star of many recent Sunday travel supplements. It has filled up with stylish hotels and cafes since our last visit, and the river side is bursting with places to buy a papaya shake, but it is still beautiful, and so relaxing. And papaya shakes are a treat.

Unlike last time, we could actually see the nearby mountains. Later in the season there is too much smoke.

And for the privilage of hanging around one of the 53 wats in town, a monk got chatting to us and asked us to help out that evening with his english class. So there we were, standing at the front of a class full of novices dressed in orange robes, reading out lists of nouns and hearing them repeated back in Australian accents.

On the bus again, and the further south we went, the less old jungle we saw, and the more regrowth. This clearing, we gather, is where the smoke comes from. This driver was careful to avoid chickens, pigs and people, but seemed less concerned about massive buses and trucks. He seemed to be having some kind of race as he tested his machine to the limits - bearings crunching as he threw it into the bends. Stopping only to buy some motion sickness bags for his passengers, and ironically, for lunch, he got us to Vientiane in record time, even beating the 'VIP' airconditioned buses which were supposed to be faster.

And now, kicking and screaming, it is time to leave.