As I came off the stunning East-West highway, having munched through Tom-boy Nor's mangoes, grinned like a Cheshire Cat at the simple fun to be had on the mountain roads and stopped by a bunch of Malaysian bikers on some very expensive machinery made by Ducati (they just wanted a chat), I descended into Kota Bahru where my instruction from Tom-boy Nor was to head for a school building and phone a guy called Chik Gu Mat who will come to find me.   Apparently his house is so remote it doesn’t have any phone signal (again) and the tracks don’t exist on Google maps or any Sat-nav mapping!  Sounds interesting …
Riding a big Adventure bike around Malaysia you get used to people randomly waving at you, talking to you and trying to help you by suggesting places to stay, eat, visit, photograph and so on.  It’s usually other bikers but that’s by no means a rule.  Route, time and distance questions, random advice and selfie requests can emanate from a wide variety of sources; truck drivers to kids on scooters to petrol pump attendants.  I pulled up to a stop light in a one-horse town devoid of merit or interest and a young guy in a car next to me in the queue for the lights became wildly excited.  Not hugely unusual but he was overdoing it a bit and gesticulating at his phone a lot.  I assumed he wanted a selfie so I suggested he just took a photo from where he was sitting.  “No, no Mr, I have you photo here” was the answer.  I probably looked a bit quizzical but I just put it down to his pigeon Minglish losing something in translation and assumed he wanted me to stop for a photo somewhere.  I duly followed him into a layby and the guy jumped out and ran over to show me a photo of me, taken by Tom-boy Nor two days and 600km ago.  It seems that I’m going viral around Malaysia and ‘Roop-spotting’ has become a national Facebook pastime, it’s like a nationwide game of Where’s Wally!
… Anyway, I digress, so I descended into Kota Bahru, looking for a school building landmark to stop and phone Chik Gu Mat when another random guy starts gesticulating at me from the other side of the road; another Roop-spotting perhaps?  The scooter rider ignores the traffic signals, races the wrong way across the carriageway and beckons me to follow him.  On enquiring as to why and what purpose it turns out this guy is the guy I’m looking for; Chik Gu Mat who has been scooting around for the last hour looking for me!  Amazing.  Chik Gu Mat escorts me to his parents’ house where another open-house buffet feast for Hari Raya is in full swing.  I am thoroughly fed, watered, maternally pampered, selfie-ed, family portrait-ed and quizzically interrogated about my crazy trip.  Malaysian hospitality continues all afternoon and evening with Chik Gu Mat and his wife who take me home and feed me some more, just in case I haven’t been stuffed enough at lunchtime.  The next morning, after much breakfasting, thanking and some more selfie-ing I head south to Singapore to visit my friend Sam, her boyfriend Paul and their new 5-month old baby Indie.  My main concern is the stories I’ve heard and web pages I’ve read about the nightmare of getting a foreign registered bike into Singapore.  Apparently it’s like trying to thread a needle wearing boxing gloves.
In terms of distance, the longest day for me in the last seven months was getting from Kota Bahru on the north east coast of Malaysia to Sentosa Island on the southern tip of Singapore.  Even the most direct route is over 700km and of course I rarely take the most direct route; that’s boring, you miss all the interesting bits.  So 770km (that’s nearly 500 miles) after leaving Chik Gu Mat’s family hospitality I arrived at the causeway border between southern Malaysia and northern Singapore.  The ride down had been mostly uneventful but thoroughly enjoyable; speeding effortlessly down almost empty coast roads with the South China Sea on my left and endless palm, coconut and rubber plantations on my right, blue sky above and perfect tarmac below, I am back in biking bliss.  It’s why I’m here, doing this trip my way on my bike.  It makes me smile even though 770km takes its toll on your bum cheeks!
The Woodlands causeway between Malaysia and Singapore is by far the busiest overland border crossing I’ve experienced in the last 40,000km.  Several thousand people cross by car and motorbike every day, commuting from the cheap accommodation in Malaysia to the higher wages in Singapore.  So the border crossing is very efficient, you don’t even need to get off the bike, you just pull up at a counter, a bit like the toll booths at the Dartford crossing and hand over your passport.  According to the online forums and travel advice you need a whole bunch of special documents from Singapore transport and insurance offices to get a foreign registered vehicle across the causeway; you have to leave your vehicle in Malaysia, get a bus across the causeway, spend hours (or days) traipsing around offices in Singapore getting permits.  Hmmm, I don't have the time or patience for that so I think I'll just chance my arm, turn up at the border, hope they don’t look too carefully at the number plate and see what happens … Keep the immigration officer talking about Brexit (probably the only good thing to come out of that idiotic vote is its usefulness as a diversion conversation).  Acting like I do this every day and it’s a typical formality and within minutes ... bingo, I’m riding my big British registered bike down the perfectly manicured boulevards of Singapore.  This was always my end goal, my final destination, to ride to the bottom of Asia.  It’s 35,000km from Mumbai if you take my scenic route, and a million miles from the Indian assault on the senses which I met 7 months ago.  I allow myself a bit of American-style fist-pumping celebration as I waft along past pristine floral displays (other countries would call them kerbs or ditches, but not here – they’re too immaculate).  I know other bikers have ridden for longer and further, but not many have ridden off the side of a mountain, or got stranded in a monsoon at the top of a mountain, or flipped their bike down a remote Indian road, rode across rivers, dropped it in rivers, smashed the front wheel a thousand clicks from anywhere, glued their screen mounts half a dozen times and found that the most useful tool to carry is indeed a Jeremy Clarkson hammer!
It turns out that whilst I can get the bike into Singapore, I’m not allowed to go onto Sam’s rather exclusive mariner island called Sentosa at the very south tip of Singapore.  I’m escorted off by an effusively polite policeman and have to leave the bike in a shopping centre multi-story and take a cab over to Sam’s idyllic little bit of flashy hedonism.  They live on a luxury boat, permanently moored in a private mariner with the usual accoutrements of pools, bars, coffee shops and BBQs.  This really is a million miles from where I’ve been since starting my tour of Asia in the sweating stink of Mumbai.  The world is a diverse place.  I’m more than happy to spend the next three days drinking Macchiatos and Margaritas, wandering around air conditioned shopping malls, lazing in the pool, cycling round the harbour and playing with 5-month old Indie – now there’s something I didn’t think I’d be saying … playing with a baby, that’s really not very “Rupert”, things have definitely changed since I left Surrey!

During my previous visit to Malaysia in 2012 I experienced the remarkable hospitable culture of Malaysian people.  I have vivid memories of turning up in Johor Bahru four years ago, across the causeway from Singapore, on the hunt for a motorbike to rent or buy to go on a quick cruise around Malaysia and Thailand.  Despite some Googling before my arrival I didn’t actually know how or where to get hold of a big bore bike so I wondered up to the gaggle of taxi drivers who were hanging out in a café next to the bus station and asked for some advice … “anyone know where I can get hold of a big motorbike for the next 3 weeks?”  The horde of old geezers who, as is the case with taxi drivers the world over, collectively knew something about everything, discussed the problem like a swarm of bees debate a new queen and decided to put me in touch with a guy who just happened to be happy to lend me his prized possession; a Suzuki GSXR 1000cc sports bike – a serious piece of kit for burning up the pristine Malaysian tarmac.  My only caveat was that Achun (owner of the GSXR) insisted that I should meet up with his biking club buddies and go up to the Terengganu bike festival on the north east coast of Malaysia, near the Thai border.  I was more than happy with the suggestion, especially when I became a guest of honour at the weekend meet of over a thousand bikers including not one, but two royal Sultans who had all converged on Terengganu.  These guys took me in, showed me round, hosted me, fed me, planned routes for me, and set up people to meet me I every town as I continued my little tour of Malaysia.  Their touching, delightful hospitality and friendly helpfulness was one of the major factors in wanting to end my current trip in Malaysia, hopefully meeting up with some of the wonderful people who I met here four years ago.
Malaysian hospitality is still alive and well.  Before crossing the border from Thailand to Malaysia I sent a text to Nor, a photojournalist who I met in Terengganu back in 2012, asking if she was around to meet for a coffee when I crossed the border.  It didn’t surprise me at all that she went a step or two better than a coffee.  Nor is just a little bit crazy, slightly bossy, loves organising people and events and is constantly making some sort of arrangement, plan, scam, or insider-only deal.  She is a million miles from the Western perception of a middle-aged Islamic lady; take that perception and cast it far from your mind, then imagine a small, bubbly, denim-clad Tom-boy with a bandana and a Kawasaki and you’re getting a bit closer to reality. There is seemingly no limit to the strings she can pull and the contacts she knows to get something sorted in them Malaysian world of bikes.  So Tom-boy Nor arranged for me to stay with a Malaysian friend called Joe and his young family in southern Thailand the night before crossing the border.  Joe, along with his wife and young daughter took me out sight-seeing to see the Mangrove swamps on the Satun coast, took me out for dinner, and put me up for the night, and drove me down to the border to make sure I didn’t need an interpreter to get through Thai customs / immigration, and all for free, just the moral Islamic duty to look after travellers.  When we arrived at the border we realised that the vehicle insurance and tax permits required for entry to Malaysia were only available on the Thai side of the border, and I’d run my Thai cash down to next to nothing, I only had US$ and GB£, and frustratingly there were no exchange kiosks at this border crossing (weird or what?).  So I was just about to get back on the bike and ride the 30km back to the nearest Thai town to find an ATM when Tom-boy Nor’s next helpful step arrived.  To ensure me smooth passage through the border she had not only organised Joe to be there on the Thai side, she’d lined up four Malaysian KTM riders to come up and meet me from their side.  Bear in mind these guys had never met me and could barely pronounce my name when they were lending me the necessary cash to get the permits and insurance documents to get into Malaysia.  Now I know I could have dealt with this on my own, it would have meant an annoying ride back to find a Thai ATM (who doesn’t put a currency exchange kiosk at a border crossing?) and I could have found the correct offices to obtain the correct documents eventually, but having both a Malaysian welcoming committee and a Thai send-off party to deal with the inevitable border problems was heaven-sent, well, actually sent by Tom-boy Nor, but the effect is the same!
On entering Malaysia the welcoming committee escorted me down to Jitra, the first major town inside the border where Tom-boy Nor was waiting, bursting to announce that she had sorted out a tour of the KTM factory assembly plant for us, starting right now … come on boys, let’s go!  Sure enough there’s a big industrial assembly plant outside Jitra which builds KTMs from the component parts sent over from Austria.  We were shown all the way through the process including the production line where a brand new bike can be assembled in about an hour, then tested on a rolling road.  What a remarkable process.  Malaysia has punitive import taxes on foreign vehicles, so to get around this KTM have set up an assembly plant in Malaysia, using a Malaysian labour force and therefore are able to say that the bike is produced locally and so avoid the outrageous import tax.  Imagine in the UK being charged a huge extra tax on anything that wasn’t physically made in Britain … Oh, hang on, the Brexiteers have just voted for that sort of ludicrous nonsense!  Anyway, the VIP guided tour of the KTM assembly plant ended with being given a test ride on the new 1290cc KTM Duke street bike which hasn’t even been released on sale anywhere in the world yet.  I could get used to VIP treatment.
Tom-boy Nor set up a homestay to house me for the next two nights in a traditional Malaysian farmhouse in the countryside, complete with a talking / laughing Miner bird, a 4m long python who swallows a whole chicken about once a month and a ludicrously loud cockerel who announced dawn at, well, dawn, and then continues to remind you every minute or so for the next few hours.  So annoying!  The lazy lifestyle in the teak stilt huts probably hasn’t changed in a century or two, and doesn’t look likely to change any time soon, there’s no mobile or internet signal out there, no air con, and other than a couple of carved wooden benches everyone sits on the floor or lazes in a hammock.  The family here seem content to operate life quite slowly and are happy to take in a few waifs and strays as they turn up.  Chut, a young German guy in his early 20’s arrived 3 months ago and liked it so decided to stay (for free), and currently has no major plans on moving on.  I’m not sure I could abandon my life and travel plans for so long, but then when you’re 22 you’ve got perceivably more time to vegetate and contemplate the meaning of life from a creaking teak Malaysian farm hut.  Nor’s plan for the next couple of days was to enjoy the open house feasts of the Hari Raya festival.  Hari Raya marks the end of the Ramadan month of fasting (no food during daylight hours) and Hari Raya marks the beginning of the new Islamic year.  People open up their houses for huge buffet feasts and invite anyone and everyone to attend.  The weather put a slight dampener on this as the Monsoon season decided it hadn’t quite washed through yet and we were treated to a few hours of spectacular electrical storms and flood-inducing rainfall, but it didn't dampen the mood of the families who Tom-boy Nor took me to visit, all happy to invite us into their home and feed us any amount of delightful spicy beef, chicken, lamb, veg and sweet sticky rice.  If I'm not careful I'm going to put all the weight back on that I've lost in the last seven months.
After Jitra my next port of call is Kota Bharu on the North East coast.  It’s about 350km of some of the best biking roads in the world, using the East-West Highway to cross the Belum Rainforest with spectacular views across mountains dripping with dense foliage.  It’s another few hours of pure motorbike nirvana, although my choice of soundtrack is little more chilled to match the fresh mountain air and the sweet mangoes which Nor picked from her garden for me this morning to ensure I didn’t go hungry on the way.  Blue skies, wispy mists, fresh breeze, green rainforests, perfect roads and freshly picked mangoes; life doesn’t get much better than this, I decide that Chut should definitely get out of his teak stilt hideaway and go and see the world by bike.

​Otres beach near Sihanoukville, on the southern coast of Cambodia is pretty close to an idyllic desert island resort – bamboo beach huts, quirky beach bars, white sand, sun and so on, but for the closest thing I’ve seen to the location and vibe of the film The Beach, you can’t get much better than Koh Ta Kiev.  It’s a mostly uninhabited island where there are a couple of hippy communes running beach bars with accommodation huts although there’s no electricity or running water and the cost of a drink is twice that on the mainland, but then you’re paying for the location.  The place is staffed by people who are mostly more interested in cannabis than customer service, but hey, what do you expect to find on a desert island?  It’s either going to be hippies listening to Bob Marley or the latest James Bond villain!  Possibly the most frustrating part of the excursion was being on a long tail boat with a few other tourists (no that’s not the annoying bit), we stopped to do some snorkelling and line fishing over the side of the boat.  Everyone else managed to catch a fish except me, my fish were far too clever and managed to eat the bait off my hook without getting hooked … very frustrating, but I consoled myself with the fact that I’m not depleting the local fish stocks unnecessarily!  Back on the mainland I met up with Critical Dave again who is mooching around Cambodia trying to work out how to get into Vietnam without an entry permit for his bike.  Dave had hooked up with two more motorbike overlanders; Norm and Maggie with Northern Irish accents but living in Hertfordshire!  Well, I say they’re living in Hertfordshire but they’ve been on the road for ages with no immediate plans to return and they’re still heading away from the UK.  I’m quite jealous, travelling together as a couple on two bikes gives you more impetus to just keep going and see where you get to.  Maybe, one day …
My front tyre is serious cause for concern now, it’s got almost no sign that there was ever any tread on it, and it’s starting to wear down the main body of the tyre, not long ‘til the steel belt starts showing, it’s a good thing I’m less than 700km from Bangkok, it’s a bad thing that the KTM service centre doesn’t have my tyre size in stock, and probably another three weeks until they get one.  With stress level rising again I ask them about other tyre dealers in the city.  There must be someone who’s got a 90/90-21 tyre, surely?  I could hug the helpful service manager at the KTM service centre in Bangkok, he sensed my stress and phoned round all the tyre dealers in Bangkok until he found a great little shop called ShowPow who had a whole selection from full-on knobbly off-roaders to street tyres.  I remind myself of the advice I gave a bunch of young KTM riders who I bumped into six months ago in the hills of Tamil Nadu in India … “always make sure you’ve got decent tyres; they’re the only thing holding you to the road”.  Time to adhere to my own advice and get some fresh rubber to keep me shiny side up.  You cannot imagine the feeling of relief when you take a totally shot tyre off and put a nice new grippy hoop on your front wheel.  The bike instantly felt more confident and better balanced, the handlebars stopped wobbling in corners and I no longer felt that I was going to slide into the ditch if I took a bend with a puddle.
The further through Thailand I travel the more secure I feel.  The stress of tyre failure has gone, as has the stress of bad / non-existent roads or flooded roads or roads without bridges or petrol stations or meeting death-wishing truck drivers.  After Bangkok I took a recommendation from Kasia to go to the Khao Sok national park on the way South through Thailand.  Great recommendation; riding up to the Khao Sok national park with lush green vegetation and near-perfect road surfaces is like being back in Western Europe, whether the UK are part of it or not.  Don’t get me started on that ridiculous debate, I’ll be here for hours!  In Khao Sok I left the bike at a friendly guesthouse and booked an overnight stay on a floating bungalow on the Cheow Lan lake.  The Cheow Lan lake is a manmade dammed reservoir stretching 165 square kilometres through the national park, filled with amazingly warm but ridiculously deep fresh water.  It looks for all the world like a Scottish loch, especially on the day I arrived which had black storm clouds brewing overhead, but Scottish lochs tend to be quite cold, whilst this lake is at bathwater temperature, even during the sudden Monsoon storm where the rain was so hard and heavy it bounced off the surface of the lake.  Over dinner on the floating restaurant, just down the gangplank from my floating bungalow I am struck by the irony that my crazy home nation has just voted to remove itself from Europe whilst I sit here with a selection of Dutch, German, French, Spanish and Belgian travellers whose only common Lingua Franca is English, and who all think that the British have gone mad.  I’m inclined to agree, I like being part of this little European community on a lake in Thailand.
Three hours south of Khao Sok the famous part of the Thai Southern peninsular starts; Phuket, Krabi, Phi Phi Islands and the like.  It really feels like I’m on holiday now, my only stress is figuring out how to book the bike on an air-freight out of Kuala Lumpur and whether I can get it in and out of Singapore in a few weeks’ time.  Whilst in Krabi I take another fantastic recommendation from Kasia, who’s stuck back in London, that is to do a SCUBA diving course.  The first and only time I’ve been diving in the past was not a good experience, I ran out of air in the Irish sea and was not fully briefed on the procedure!  So with some trepidation I signed up to do the Open Water PADI course having spent not an inconsiderable amount of time researching a decent dive school in Krabi.  The Kon-Tiki dive school, run by some British and Swedish guys is, thankfully, a super-professional, super-helpful and totally confidence-inspiring outfit.  All my previously found fears and misconceptions have been alleviated and I am now a fully-fledged convert to deep sea diving, and a certified Open Water Diver; how cool!  And how come I always manage to pick some of the most expensive and inaccessible of pursuits … skiing, diving, motorbike travelling … crazy fool!  Over the last couple of days I’ve seen the underwater world for real: Blue Sea Star and Crown of Thorns Starfish; Black Diamema Sea Urchins; various Sea Cucumbers; a Peacock Mantis Shrimp (which has the fastest, most powerful claw punch in the world), schools of Damsel fish and Yellowback Fusiliers; some Bannerfish; Trumpetfish; Tigertail Seahorses and an aggressively territorial little Tomato Clownfish!
Now I’m sitting in another idyllic beachside hostel bar looking at the Andaman sea on the island of Ko Lanta off the West coast of Thailand, it being low season I have the bar and most of the beach to myself and I’ve just met a crazy Thai guy who is supposed to be running this bar but has nothing to do due to the lack of tourists so he’s offered to take me on a guided bike tour of the island tomorrow.  He’s got an off-road scramble bike so this is going to be interesting … looks like I’m going to get at least one more crazy adventure on the bike before heading to the relative civilisation of Malaysia.

If I can’t stop waxing lyrical about the roads and scenery in Vietnam it’s because they just continue to be stunning, as long as you’ve got rolling hills, winding roads and dense forests to enjoy.  But all good things come to an end, and the hills finally gave way to flat plains, the desolate winding roads gave way to busy arterial routes and the woodland gave way to a thicket of industry.  We were approaching Saigon.  Eight hours to do 300km is a pretty crap average speed, you don’t mind it if it’s because of tight mountain roads and stunning views but if it’s just being stuck in jammed traffic of trucks and buses things quickly lose their charm.  The outskirts of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City to use its new name) are super-busy, industrialised and wet, at least they were the day that OCD and I rode in, we were treated to a full-on Monsoon storm which flooded the roads in minutes and soaked me to the core.  Even the waterproofs can’t keep that amount of rain out so just smile and bare it as your front wheel creates a bow wave in the foot-deep flood water which has covered the entire road as far as the eye can see – hope there’s no pot holes ‘cos we can’t see any road surface anymore and crash-landing into a big hole doesn’t appeal right now; it’s dark and teeming with big rain. The rivulets running down my back, arms and legs are being collected by my boots which are turning into water butts!
Central Saigon turns out to be a whole different experience from the outskirts.  The centre is crazy fun bustling life, mostly living on mopeds.  You’ve never seen so many scooters and small bikes, converted and customised to fit any job.  The transportation vehicle of choice here isn’t the transit van – that’s boring, in Vietnam you can get anything onto a bike if you try hard enough:  attach a huge wheelie bin to the back - it’s a dump truck; or strap a dozen fire extinguishers to it – it’s a fire engine; fit a family of five on it – it’s a people carrier; pull a wheel barrow backwards behind it – it’s an articulated cement mixer; strap anything to the back from bedding piled 2 metres high to a wide-screen TV to a 6 foot tall mirror.  There’s no limit to the ingenuity of what you can do with a 100cc bike, I even saw a woman in a hospital gown on the back of one with a third passenger behind holding an I.V. drip in the air for her!  And nothing stops for the rain, just put your plastic cape on and keep riding.  There’s a lot to do and see in Saigon, I love sitting outside a coffee shop just watching the street life, walking through the tiny streets to China town and getting soaked again in another Monsoon shower, going up to the Heli-bar on the 52nd floor of the Bitexco Tower and paying three times over the odds for a coffee, although the view is worth it at dusk.  There’s also a fascinating (if harrowing) war remnants museum which gives a very Vietnamese view on how French colonised them before WW2 and the more recent American attempts to burn them, poison them, shoot them and bomb them back to the stone age.  The tour of the Viet Cong’s tunnels at Cu Chi gives a bit of an insight into the Vietnamese resolve to repel their invaders.  The tunnels spread for hundreds of km from Saigon to the Cambodian border and even the bits that us tourists are allowed to crawl down give you claustrophobic nightmares without having fighter-bombers, Napalm, Dioxin (one of the most toxic substances on Earth), tanks and GIs with M-16s trying to kill you.  The craziest feature of the Cu Chi tunnels tour is the opportunity to fire live ammunition with an AK47 or an M-16.  The cost is astronomical, but there were plenty of Chinese tourists with Mastercards who gave me an interesting aural backdrop to being down the Viet Cong tunnels with the sound of machine guns a couple of hundred metres away.  Holy shit machine guns are loud!
A couple of hours after crawling through the Viet Cong’s tiny tunnels to the tune of an AK47 on rapid fire I met up with OCD Lawrence and Fix-it Brett at the Vietnam – Cambodia border for what would be the last time.  There was a definite sense of an end of a big chapter in all of our travels today.  I first met Brett in a traffic jam on an Indian expressway somewhere South of Pune on Christmas Eve 2015.  On and off for the last six months we’ve done bits of India, Burma, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam together; the roads, the mayhem, the breakdowns and the bush-mechanic fixes.  I have a vivid memory my first encounter with Lawrence, in a bad burger bar in Bangalore where he took a dislike to their BBQ sauce.  Since then we have shared a wide variety of culinary disasters, some unusual sleeping arrangements, some mountains to race up and crash down, and music and philosophy by moonlight – very romantic!  About half of my time on the road since December has been spent with one or the other of these guys and I’m going to miss them, but my agenda is now a bit different from theirs and I’m twisting the grip round to the quick setting to get myself across Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia in the coming month.  They’re going to do it in a more leisurely fashion and I have a feeling OCD is heading back to Northern Thailand to play with fire with a Thai girl who’s already got 2 kids!  It felt a bit strange to pull away from our last lunch stop together, leaving them with a fag and a cloud of dust, but now I’m back to where I started, and what I had always envisaged which is making decisions on the fly based on how I feel, what I see, what I’ve read and how hungry I am.  So as I leave our lunch stop in another forgettable dusty border town I feel intrepid again; I can see blue sky and an open road and I’ve read that the South coast of Cambodia is stunning so I set course for Sihanoukville with a stomach full of noodle soup.  Initially everything is perfect; decent roads, not much traffic, wide rolling plains, blue sky with cotton-wool clouds - it's heaven again, but that can all change quite quickly.
Seven hours later I finally arrive feeling hungry, tired, damp and a little bit irritable on account of events over which none of us have any control.  The only way to get to the South coast is to loop around the bottom of Phnom Penh, which I happened to hit at rush hour, just as the afternoon Monsoon was kicking in.  So I got stuck in the muddiest, floodiest, busiest, slowest rush hour I’ve ever seen (and I’ve commuted into central London for several years).  The Monsoon turned the roads back into flood plains.  The brown mud water obliterated the tarmac, it was impossible to tell where the potholes, kerb stones, dead dogs and tree stumps were, and there are a lot of those on the way in and out of Phnom Penh so several million people were making slow progress across the city by sense of smell, and everything smelt wet and mouldy.  Phnom Penh’s outskirts were a pretty horrific ride, I expected to be able to speed up a bit having got out of suburbia but no, the industries which litter the roads south of the city seem to be sweat-factories where thousand upon thousand of Cambodian women work.  And at 6pm they all come swarming out of the factories to get herded into the back of cargo trucks to take them home – wherever that may be, I daren’t even guess, but looking at the way they’re crammed into trucks I can’t imagine it’s all that salubrious!  And there doesn’t appear to be any men working in these factories, at least, none who have to catch the slum-trucks home.  I wonder what they’re making in all these factories … Premiership football shirts or plastic toys or permanent markers?  No idea, but the air around these factories smells of chemicals and plastic.  Two hundred km away is a different world, on the idyllic white sand of Otres beach near Sihanoukville there are no polluting industries or sweat-shop workers, there’s a chilled out assortment of wooden beach bars playing Reggae, there are bamboo huts with ineffective air-con, and an authentic Italian Pizza restaurant and I’m just in time for last orders.  I try not to think about the factories and their labour force, it’s a very different way of life.

Back home in Britain it's EU referendum day ... there's an interesting life choice for us.

The roads and scenery of the North Vietnam mountains are some of the best ever, anywhere, so the decision to ride around the mountains up near the China border was one of the best decisions ever made by anyone with a motorbike although the protracted discussion about how and where took far too long.  I’ll spare the details of how three overland bikers with three big overland bikes can argue quite so much about how, when and where to go and just focus on the good bit … the mountains.  They’re stunning!  Not far out of Hanoi, riding North towards the border with China we take the Ma Pi Leng pass which routes across the highest, most northern roads in Vietnam.  The scudding clouds cast dappled shadows across the vast slopes and valleys which are covered in a rich green carpet of dense tropical forest.  Through this idyllic landscape, which looks like the Pandora backdrop from Avatar, the road carves a narrow path, but here the huge expanses of greenery are guarded not by strange blue aliens but by roaming cows, water buffalo, goats and chickens.  Cut into the hillsides are terraces of rice fields and orchard, often on crazy-steep slopes.  Some are still full of water which reflects the blue sky, and some are teeming with impossibly bright green shoots of new rice plants.  I struggle to make much headway initially, stopping every couple of corners with another breath-taking vista to photograph.  I have some ridiculous thoughts about how I wish you could photograph the smell and feel of it.  It’s so fresh, vibrant and yet placid, and being up in the mountains the air temperature has freshened from the stuffy humidity of Hanoi and the East coast.  Lawrence and I ride as far North as you can get before bumping into China to find the final Vietnamese lookout tower, perched on the top of a high mound, watching for marauding Chinese invaders.  There’s a lot of national pride up here, the Vietnamese flag is everywhere, but the locals are super-friendly and always just a little bit too interested in the bikes, we engage in various means of stopping the over-inquisitive locals from trying to jump on.  There is occasional evidence of the Vietnam / American war up here; we found a hidden cave with a huge protective stone wall hiding the entrance from the B-52 bombers.  Looking at this huge scary landscape it’s little wonder that the Americans were never going to succeed, the mountains are too vast, the forests too dense.  And the views just go on, and on, and on.  We took a loop of over 1000km through the hill stations of Cao Bang, Ha Giang and Sa Pa, often feeling that the road had been built purely for our benefit, and maybe the occasional local on a small scooter transporting live chickens.  But this was just the start of how good Vietnam is to ride around.
After the Northern loop OCD and I headed south, in the general direction of Saigon (still well over 2000km away) and picked up the Western Ho Chi Minh Road which runs north-south down the backbone of Vietnam, twisting over the mountainous ridge which separates Vietnam and Laos.  There are now essentially two roads which run down the central mountains of Vietnam; the Eastern Ho Chi Minh Road and the Western Ho Chi Minh Road, the latter being a little more twisty and remote on account of being higher in the hills and further from the major towns.  Fifty years ago these roads were tiny trails along which the North Vietnamese communists were moving weapons from Hanoi to Saigon to fight a guerrilla war against the Americans.  The Americans decided that the best way to stop this was to carpet bomb the route, but there wasn’t just one route, the mountains along western Vietnam are full of tiny tracks and trails, hidden by impenetrable forests.  The routes became known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail and, despite being “bombed back to the stone age” (quote the head of the US Airforce) with Napalm carpet bombing, the trails were so small, complex and difficult to find that the Americans failed to ever shut down the supply train, but they indiscriminately burned hundreds of km of forests and thousands of people with Napalm gel in the process (Napalm, invented in Harvard, is a flammable gel that sticks to your skin and burns at about 1000°C).  Today, there’s no visible trace of the Napalm attacks and the tiny trails that were the Viet Cong’s Ho Chi Minh Trail are now perfect ribbons of smooth tarmac twisting their way through the forests like a never ending race-track.  Back then it would have been a muddy rutted path and taken weeks to negotiate whilst dodging B-52 bombers, for us, we opened up the big bikes and raced around the tight turns dodging chickens and scooters, managing to rack up over 400km in a day - that's a long way on knotted mountain passes.  The last time I really opened up the bike in the twisty stuff was back in Tamil Nadu, five months and 20,000km ago.  It’s been too long since I had some proper, endorphin-making fun with the bike and it was fantastic.  I love Vietnam’s mountain roads; endless fast sweeping bends and tight hair-pins, in seven hours the only time I went in a straight line was on a section of an old US army run-way which looked like a drag-race strip; it’s proper motorbike Nirvana and for me has completely justified the ridiculous expense and stress of bringing my big KTM all the way over here.  Riding anything less I would be disappointed, but today I know why I’m doing this crazy journey on this huge bike, it’s cos it’s fun!  The downside of riding so far and so hard is that my front tyre has worn out and is beginning to look like a racing slick.  That’s all good when it’s dry and the road is good, but it’s a bit of a nightmare when it rains so I urgently need to get some fresh rubber on the front, and the problem with that is that you can’t get my type of big touring bike in Vietnam, so you can’t get my type of big touring tyre here either.  So it looks like I’ll have to nurse it back to Bangkok (that’s about 1500km yet) to go to the KTM dealer, again!
Dalat is a tourist-mecca hill resort about 300km north of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City).  We were recommended the detour to Dalat by a quartet of crazy Irish guys we met in a tiny rural town in the middle of nowhere on the Western Ho Chi Minh road.  They’re on a long university holiday from Dublin having bought four half-dead scooters in Saigon from a cowboy bike dealer who has sold them a load of scrap metal masquerading as bikes.  They’re trying to get to Hanoi but they break down several times a day, they can’t make it up steep hills and they’ve never ridden any kind of motorbike before now!  In fact, three of them don’t even possess any kind of an Irish driving licence, let alone in International Driving Permit so they’ve already been fined by the Vietnamese police.  But they’re having fun, they don’t possess a map, any protective clothing or the slightest bit of mechanical knowledge and they’re riding four rust-buckets across Vietnam – brilliant!  As I lean the bike into the twists and turns of the mountain road to Dalat I can’t imagine how the Irish quartet made it up here on broken scooters, my mind tries to visualise what this looks like from above; what the American bombers would have seen from a B-52 in 1970 and now what this spectacular road to Dalat looks like from the air.  I imagine seeing a looping braid of black ribbon draped haphazardly across a green baize of hills and forests with tropical mist rolling up the valleys.  Dalat is a welcome break from the basic existence of rural Vietnam.  Outside the tourist resorts, rural Vietnam is quite utilitarian; the cafes and eateries (I can’t call them restaurants, they’re too basic) serve a fairly meagre set of variations on a basic theme.  There’s chewy beef, chewy chicken, pork fat, rice and noodles, and you can have it boiled or fried, and you can sit on the most uncomfortable plastic chairs which, having been bought from a Kindergarten school supply catalogue, are only 30cm off the ground.  Your food will arrive in stages, the noodles first, 5 minutes later the fried chewy beef, 5 minutes after that the cold chewy chicken, then finally, once you’ve laboured through the previous offerings the plain rice arrives with a smile.  You sit on your tiny chair, with your knees around your ears trying to pick food up with chop sticks from the tiny table at shin-height debating whether it would be more comfortable to just sit on the floor with the insects and discarded beer cans.  I’m being a little harsh but it’s really not much of an exaggeration, so to have a choice restaurants in Dalat, some serving sushi, steak and wine with cushioned seating was grounds for celebration.
On the way across the Vietnamese hills Lawrence and I have had some great existential conversations over dinner on our Kindergarten furniture; discussing what makes people tick, and why we are engaged in such a crazy venture as overland motorbike travel.  The conclusions are long and varied but all have a psychological leaning.  And we start to discuss the concept of going back to the reality of home. This is a something which I am increasingly looking forward to; I’ve been on the road for 6 months and travelled over 30,000km so far and now, for the first time I feel like I’m starting to head home.  I think it’s because Vietnam is the furthest East I’m going to get in Asia and I’m now heading back towards the relatively westernised worlds of Thailand and Malaysia with their more accommodating infrastructures.  We talk at length about our fears for being back home and needing to re-engage with the world of work, houses, jobs, and all that goes with it.  I don’t expect any sympathy from those who are still doing all that and have been for all the time I’ve been away, but from a personal perspective it’s already looming as a bit of a shock to the system.  I’m trying to keep it in perspective and not let it concern me too much at this stage.   I’ve still got 6 weeks until I’m planning on flying the bike back to London so I don’t want to start over-thinking things now, I’ll ruin the experience of the final few weeks in Asia. 

In order to get a foreign registered vehicle into Vietnam you need a special temporary import licence, which can only be obtained in Hanoi and is only printed in Vietnamese so when we reach the Nam Phao international border crossing high in the Laotian mountains in the rain I am eternally grateful that we decided to pay a fairly large amount of money to a Vietnamese agent to arrange all the paperwork in advance and meet us at the border to talk to the customs officials on our behalf.  The process still took a couple of hours to get us across the border but it soon became clear that without the agent’s help we would never have got the bikes into Vietnam.  Heading down through the dense green forested mountains to the hot sweating plains which used to be the DMZ when the American army were messing around here I try to establish how this country operates.  You can tell a lot about a country from the way they drive, their road systems, signs (or lack of), and what’s on the roads (cows and buffalo or BMWs).  Vietnam is a bit confusing, it’s got all of them (more buffalo than BMW though), and a distinct lack of adherence to the supposed rules of the road … overtake on which side? On the left, of course … no, not that left, the other left, the one on the right, well either side really, or straight down the middle … but what if you want to turn left?  Just indicate left and pull over to the right, or don’t indicate, or indicate right, then swerve violently across the road.  Or indicate left whilst driving straight on, whichever.  Haphazard is the best way of explaining the way it works, it’s not as crazy as India but it’s definitely different, and quite a lot of fun.
For specious reasons I’m deliberately being very English, no Robin Williams film quotes yet, I find myself wanting to avoid an international faux-pas involving being confused for an American in a country which went to war with America for several years.  This concern is completely misplaced, the Vietnamese seem very happy to embrace all things Western, including a bit of American culture.  They even refer to Ho Chi Minh City as Saigon and there is CNN news playing on the TV in a hotel lobby, so it’s OK, the local North Vietnamese villagers are not going to take up arms against us in case we’re American sympathisers!  I’m exaggerating of course but it’s amazing what a few erroneous comments from people who don’t actually know much can do to create mistaken preconceptions.  The local people are not at all shy, they’re inquisitive and funny.  Where people in Laos were a bit reticent and kept their distance from odd-looking men wearing strange protective plastic clothing, riding unfathomably large loud bikes, the Vietnamese don’t wait for an invitation, they look with their fingers.  We are prodded and squeezed to test the protective elbow and shoulder pads, we are quizzed about our lineage and the bikes are thoroughly inspected by every passing man, woman and child.  They test the accelerator twist grip, the brake levers, the suspension travel, the firmness of the tyres and the clickiness of the switches.  They try to climb on to test the comparative height of the bike next to their scooter whilst (un)helpfully adding new waypoints to the Sat-nav!  Every stop for food, drink and petrol turns into another game of trying to stop people from knocking the bike over without coming across as too grumpy or unkind.  It’s fun to engage with local people again, we haven’t attracted this much attention since India, but it does mean that stopping for a quiet break becomes a logistical nightmare.  At a rare service station on the highway between Sa Pa and Hanoi Lawrence and I had to tag team between eating beef-noodle soup in the crazy-busy cafe and fending off the unwanted attention from the bus-loads of locals who were trying to climb on our bikes with no concept of the outcome if they knock over a 300kg KTM!
First stop on the whistle-stop tour of North Vietnam is Cat Ba Island in Ha Long bay.  We’re forced to stay an extra night in Ha Long town because the ferry timetable I found online was wrong and we missed the last boat to Cat Ba an hour ago.  I’m slightly annoyed that we just nailed 300km at quite a considerable speed to try to make the final phantom ferry of the day but I’m slowly learning to keep my frustrations in check having been on the road at the mercy of the rules of “sod” for nearly 6 months.  Staying in the main town is no bad thing; it’s a busy fishing port, tourist centre and full of interesting eateries.  Cat Ba Island is one of about 2000 limestone islands which are dotted across Ha Long Bay.  Some of them are tiny little islets and others have got whole towns perched on them.  The vast majority are uninhabited (by humans) but covered in thick rain-forest type jungle.  Apparently the islands were created by a family of Vietnamese dragons who were protecting the bay from Chinese invaders.  The dragons dropped jade stones into the bay which grew into islands which created an impenetrable wall of defences, and you can see why this would work so well as the ferry has to weave between the rocks for an hour to get across the bay.  Within minutes of leaving the ferry terminal you can’t see the mainland anymore, just a vast array of limestone rocks and islands growing out of the green water of the South China Sea.  The bay is huge, several hundred km across and is a photographer's paradise.  There's something about water that makes everything look good.  The next day we take tourist boat trip around the bay, stopping to go snorkelling, kayaking and rock climbing around the islands.  It’s been ages since I last engaged in such an unabashed tourist activity and it’s great.  I’m touring Asia so why not be a tourist?  And it’s the only way to see the stunning rock formations, coves, caves and colours of Ha Long Bay, unless you copy the Top Gear team’s idea from a few years ago when they came to Ha Long Bay and converted their bikes into a motorised pedalos … erm … no!
Food in Vietnam can be a hit and miss affair, you’re never quite sure what you’re going to get, sometimes it’s hard to tell if it’s a restaurant at all.  Some restaurants have no prices (be wary, be very wary), some have no menu at all and only serve one thing (that can work, as long as you don’t mind what you get).  And some have their menu swimming around in tanks and nets and you just point at what you want to eat, hoping that they kill and cook it first!  So in true, old-school-teacher ranking, here’s what we’ve come across from good to bad, to inedible.
The fish and seafood eateries in Ha Long Bay are brilliant, especially the ones that are actually floating out on the water because they keep their food fresh by letting it swim around in the bay in its natural habitat.  OK they’re kept in big nets and wooden tanks submerged in the sea to make it easier to catch what you want, but this has to be the freshest fish restaurant I’ve ever known.  The huge meaty local fish (no idea what type it was) was plucked straight out of the sea, bashed over the head with a plank of wood and grilled in garlic, ginger and lemon for less than the price of a few frozen fish fingers.  Finding food on the road can be a bit tricky, you pull into a small town hoping to find somewhere which serves lunch so ride slowly scanning for anywhere that looks like it’s got chairs, tables and people.  Lawrence and I found just such an establishment at about 2pm full of locals who were busy drinking beer and munching on some shared table snacks.  Food is a communal activity here, they just put a bowl of stuff on the table and you all share, great, let’s have some of that then (without the beer).  What arrived was bar snacks - Vietnamese style:  a plate of raw minced pork with chopped onions, some large leaves which were straight off the tree outside and some chilli sauce.  You just get a small ball of raw pork, wrap it in a tree leaf, dip it in the chilli sauce and there’s your lunch!  It wasn’t inedible and it didn’t cause food-poisoning but it was a long way from a pleasant, tasty culinary experience.  In another town we found absolutely nowhere that serves food, although they do like to drink so there was a lot of dodgy bars serving cheap beer and raw pork.  The only option was an American Diner themed ice cream parlour run by some teenagers who gave us some tasteless frozen pizza – not what I had in mind for an authentic travelling experience.  But it beat the inedible offerings from a place which appeared to be busy and therefore well thought-off by the locals.  Typical of Vietnam local restaurants it was essentially a metal-framed shed with some plastic furniture which is always too small and flimsy to be in any way comfortable, but then that’s our problem for being tall heavy Westerners, the locals seem to fit on the primary school sized stools with ease!  There was a large poster on the wall with a lot of options for food, all in Vietnamese, all with no prices.  We’ve learnt some basic words and they spoke a little bit of English so we agreed to have some noodles, chicken, and fresh vegetables.  What we got didn’t break any trade description contract other than it was totally inedible.  I have never known a chicken be so tough and chewy.  This one had clearly had a hard life as a pack-horse before it became our lunch; no flavour, no taste, no meat, just gristle and bone and old skin.  The green spinach-type leaves were cold and tasteless and the noodles were freeze-dried.  And then the final insult was that we never checked the cost, so after giving up on trying to eat it we were stung nearly as much as the stunning fresh fish on a floating raft in Ha Long for a pile of gristle in a sweaty shed on a plastic chair in a one-horse town after the horse has died and his role has been taken on by a chicken who then died and became our lunch.  OK, rant over, the good here is very good, and the bad is very bad, but then that’s the same anywhere, and that’s why I never go to KFC!

In the last post about Phnom Penh and the Pol Pot regime I actually got out of chronology so I’m going to back track a bit.  It’s been a bit of a strange couple of weeks.  In no small way that could be attributed to the flying visit back to the London for 5 days, more on that anon.
After my birthday shenanigans in Siem Reap with the brilliantly hedonistic Essex Helen, Philippa & Joe, and of course Critical Dave, we took in some culture in the form of the Phare Circus.  This remarkable organisation was set up by nine children and an art teacher when they returned home from a refugee camp following the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime.  It helps to give young people from the streets, orphanages and struggling families an opportunity to learn, express and recover through the arts by teaching music, art, theatre, acrobatic and circus skills, not dissimilar from the style of Cirque du Soleil.  The show we saw, devised and choreographed by the founding teacher and performed by students, was an autobiographical account of her life from the Khmer Rouge murdering her family in front of her through to present day, told in mimed physical theatre, acrobatics, live art and live music.  It was inspiring, tragic, tearful, terrifying, hilarious and astonishingly impressive all in one 90-minute show, Cambodia has such a rich cultural vein to tap into, it’s inspiring to see students and teachers engaging in the arts in such a vivid and expert manner.
I left Critical Dave shacked up with his latest skirt in Siem Reap and took the scenic route with the intention of reaching Phnom Penh via the coast – not that Phnom Penh is anywhere near the coast but I’ve got a few days to kill before I need to be in Phnom Penh for a Skype interview so some mountain scenery and a bit of coastline is called for, it’s so hot inland on the plains I decided a bit of altitude and some coastal breeze might take the temperature down.  I headed South to find the trails leading over the Cardamom mountains which run up over 1000m so the air should be cooler up there.  The Sat-nav was reluctant to let me route over the mountains to get to the South coast, it kept trying to take me on the long, hot, straight main roads so I set a waypoint at the top of the mountain and forced us onto the little roads.  These little roads which wind their way up through the remote villages and forests of the Cardamom mountains are not really roads. Well, they are marked on maps, on Google and on my Sat-nav but they do bring up the semantic argument as to what a road represents.  I’d suggest these should be called dirt tracks, and these dirt tracks run for over 200km through the mountains.  Sounds fun, looks great, spirit of adventure, let’s go!  As with all dirt tracks they’re a bit rutted and pot-holed with some loose dust, dirt and gravel to skid on, but Cambodia has been in the hot dry season for the last couple of months so the tracks are hard-packed and baked dry, the only issue is the deep red bull-dust which is super-slippery.  (That’s deep holes of dust, not deep red in colour, it’s more of a terracotta).  So it has been the hot dry season for months, but now it’s not, it’s the beginning of the wet season.  Over 80km into the dust trails the clouds arrived, closely followed by the rain, big heavy globules of soaking rain.  My speed slowed from steady progress to a careful crawl, as the deep dry dust turned into thick slime.  The type of mud that manages to stick to everything whilst being as unpredictable as riding on ice.  The front wheel squirmed and slid through the ruts, the back wheel clogged with mud and spun up giving no traction.  The average speed is now less than 15km an hour, it’s 1pm, I’m almost half way into the mountains so there’s no point turning round, but at this speed I’m unlikely to get to civilisation before it gets dark, and there’s no sign of the rain stopping. 
By mid-afternoon the situation had become critical.  The quality of the dirt track had reduced to rivers of mud, the mountain had become steeper meaning treacherous inclines and descents, the rain had got heavier, I was soaked, cold and becoming exhausted and then at about 3pm the nightmare started.  The mud was so thick I lost control of the front wheel, at less than walking pace I skidded sideways, lost balance and dropped the bike.  Soaking wet, covered in mud and somewhat distressed there was no way I could to pick up my fully luggage-laden bike and in the rain I had very little inclination to start taking the luggage off to make it easier to lift.  I’m in the middle of nowhere, halfway up a Cambodian mountain, I haven’t seen any signs of life for the last 10km and it’s going to get dark in a couple of hours.  Two minutes later a couple of saviours arrived on a scooter.  They were having the same problems, they had no traction, no grip and no steering but their saving grace is their little scooter weighs less than 100kg – less than a third of the weight of my stupidly over-sized beast.  The two boys must have been late teens, not wearing any shoes, just shorts and a tee-shirt and skidding around on a tiny scooter which they could pick up with ease.  I envy them as I stand there, bedraggled, with soaking wet heavy clothes and protective gear and my bike lying on its side in the mud.  They helped me get the bike back on its wheels and we mimed to each other that we’re all going in that direction so we set off further into the mountains.  Three more times in the next hour my bike landed on its side in the mud and the boys helped me pick it up.  Their scooter had no rear tyre traction so we created a system: we push their scooter up the steep hills then climb back down for my bike, they walk either side of it keeping it upright whilst I try to keep it moving without skidding.  It took us another hour to reach their village which consisted of no more than half a dozen wooden shacks.  The track had improved a bit and the rain was easing off and they mimed that the road onwards was more flat and should be OK.  I ventured on alone, conscious that it’s going to get dark soon.  By 5pm the rain came in again as I rode into a tiny village still over 60km from a tarmac road, I’ll never make it off the mountain before nightfall, it’s time to hope for some help.  I pulled up outside a farmer’s wooden hut and prayed to the Gods of humanity that they’d take pity on me.  People are amazing.  This village has no electricity supply and no running water, it’s subsistence living in the truest sense.  But this small Cambodian farming family ushered me into their hut, found a plastic sheet to cover my bike, hung up my soaking gear under cover and started making dinner.  There was no common language so we communicate through mime and copying.  Their wooden house consists of a single storey, single room hut on stilts to keep it dry.  The dogs and chickens and a pig live under the house.  The toilet is over there in the woods, pick a tree.  There is no furniture, everything happens on the raised floorboards in the single room.  I am ushered to sit and dinner arrives from blacken pots on the open fire in the corner; plain rice and boiled pigs innards.  I’ve had pig intestine before as a dare in a restaurant in Soho but that at least had a strong black bean sauce, this is literally just the gristly chewy insides of a pig boiled in water and put in a bowl in the middle of the floor.  I can’t not eat it, and anyway I’m quite hungry, it’s a good job I’ve got an open mind and high tolerance to unusual food!  After dinner and a glass of some revolting tasting homebrewed liquor they clear the room and get beds out.  Beds means a rolled up bamboo mat and a blanket.  They have a spare and we all settle down on the hard wooden floor with the rain beating down on the rusting corrugated roof.  Total darkness descends by 6:30pm, an hour later most of them are asleep, this way of life is a bit of a culture shock, even after being on the road since the West coast of India.
Cardamom Mountain village life revolves around daylight so it starts early, they’re up at 5am.  I spend the morning trying to be inconspicuous whilst observing their way of life as the sun comes up, the sky turns blue and the stress of yesterday dries up.  Not for the first time I find myself spreading my belongings around the ground to dry, propping my boots and helmet at the right angle to catch the heat of the morning sun.  The friendly family make me instant coffee (they seem to treat Nescafe with some bizarre reverence) and I leave at about 10am with much thanking, bowing, smiling and waving to head down the mountain and back to a more normal way of life.  Even in the couple of hours of morning sunlight the rivers of mud have turned back into hard-packed dirt tracks which are no longer treacherous slimy death-traps for my huge bike and I begin to enjoy the scenery again.  Stress returns in the form of a lack of petrol stations on this mountain but I’m carrying a 3 litre spare tank which I’m so glad of, without it I’d have run dry 30km short of the tarmac, towns, phone signal and petrol pumps which we take for granted most of the time, even in Cambodia.  That afternoon as I lie in a hammock outside a stunningly idyllic wooden guest house looking out over the Gulf of Thailand sea, with a beer, an internet connection and an air conditioned room I have some existential thoughts about different lifestyles and cultures.  I’m not sure I could cope with such a remote lifestyle as where I stumbled upon last night, there’s something missing from their world which I couldn’t live without for long, mainly in the form of a lack of a piano!
Talking of music, when I get to Phnom Penh I’ve got set up a Skype meeting with the recruitment company who are hiring the new Director of Music for the BRIT School.  I’ll keep this bit short.  The Skype interview went very well, despite the culture shock of not thinking about music education for several months I fell back into the thought process with ease.  They said I was exactly the sort of person that the BRIT School were looking for so I belted the bike 700km over to Bangkok, jumped on a flight to Heathrow, went through a ludicrous two-day interview process in London which felt somewhat false only to be told that the position has been given to the internal candidate.  It was so nice to be back in the UK for a few days though and briefly catch up with family and a few friends, so I’ll suck up the extortionate cost of return flights and not hold it against the BRIT School, shit happens, although it’s the first time I’ve ever not got a job; up until now I’ve always nailed every job interview with a job offer.  Oh well, that track record had to come to an end at some point.  So now I’m back in the back end of beyond in central Laos having belted the bike another 800km across Thailand to meet up with Fix-it Brett and OCD Lawrence as we head for the border to Vietnam tomorrow.  I feel a Robin Williams quote coming on soon …

Cambodia has a shocking recent history; one of the most harrowing stories of the breakdown of humanity anywhere in the world.  Apologies for all those well-read people who already know this but I didn’t realise the extent of the problem.  Other than a few notable exceptions such as Princess Diana supporting the landmine removal programme, it has not been widely publicised, so for my benefit here’s my very short synopsis.  In 1975 a dictator called Saloth Sar, who became known as Pol Pot, took power by force as head of the Khmer Rouge, a communist movement idolising extremist Maoist politics, (everyone who’s read Animal Farm knows that communism only works on paper, not in reality).  The Khmer Rouge espoused a whole load of rubbish about being a party for the Kampuchean people; Khmer, Kampuchea and Cambodia all being interchangeable words for indigenous Cambodians and Khmer Rouge just means the communist “Red” Cambodians.  Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge were only in full control of the country until 1979 when the Vietnamese army, supporting a Cambodian rebel alliance, started to overthrow the despot leaders, although that war rumbled on until the mid ‘90s.  In the four years that Pol Pot was in power his regime killed 25% of the Cambodian population (nearly 2 million people) and broke down the civilisation by displacing all the people living in urban areas to labour camps in the countryside, and separating all the families, and forcing people to work for nothing but meagre rations of rice.  Bizarrely the UN continued to recognise Pol Pot as the official leader of Cambodia, apparently no-one in the world noticed that he was engaged in genocide against his population, except Vietnam – who were given UN sanctions as penalty for invading the Khmer Rouge!  Pol Pot set up detention centres such as S21 in Phnom Penh where so-called spies, dissidents and objectors were tortured in the most brutal and unbelievable manner.  S21 used to be a high school, Pol Pot kept the buildings and the guy in charge who was known as Duch.  Duch stopped teaching Maths and started torturing and signing death warrants for anything up to 20,000 people.  This included the British and New Zealanders who were sailing a yacht around the world when they got captured by the Khmer Rouge.  Their ludicrous confessions about being CIA spies, all carefully typed up by the S21 interrogators, show the extent to which the Khmer Rouge were completely mad and deluded.  The New Zealander called Kerry Hamill somehow managed to maintain a sense of humour in his confessions despite being tortured by whipping, electric shock, drowning, starving and many more indescribable inhuman behaviours – you’ll have to go to the S21 Genocide Museum to see the full extent of what Duch devised for extracting the “truth”. 
Kerry Hamill’s “true” confession is brilliant.  He confesses to being a CIA spy who was trained by such luminaries as Ray Davies (lead singer of The Kinks), Colonel Sanders (bespectacled old American with a bow-tie who set up KFC), and Professor Pepper (probably a reference to the Beatles album).  He says he was taught communication skills by a Mrs S. Tarr (his mother’s name was Esther) and psychological training by a Major Ruse (meaning a con, of course).  To have the presence of mind to make all that up whilst being tortured is hard to comprehend.  No wonder his brother broke down in tears when he explained the genius of the confessional rubbish to Duch during the trial in 2012.  Duch started off as a Maths teacher, then became the man who tortured and killed people for a living, then was discovered in 1999 hiding in a Christian Aid centre in the Cambodian jungle.  He got his sentence increased to life after he had the nerve to appeal that the original sentence of 19 years was too harsh!  If you see the Killing Fields museum a few km South of Phnom Penh where Duch sent them to executed after extracting his confessions you’ll know why he deserves to never see the light of day again.  At the Choeung Ek Killing Fields they have found over 8000 skulls but believe there are several thousand more still in the ground.  5000 skulls are displayed in the glass walled Stupa in the middle of the Killing Fields site.  Bullets were too expensive so people were clubbed to death, or had their throat cut then pushed into the mass grave to bleed to death and covered in DDT to speed up the decomposition.  Pol Pot believed that “To kill a weed you have to remove it, roots and all”, which means that the entire family of every traitor has to be killed because it is “better to kill an innocent by mistake than spare an enemy by mistake”, so he killed everyone.  To kill children and babies (so that they can’t take revenge) the executioners picked them up by the feet and smashed their head against a tree then threw them into the pit.  We know this because they found thousands of fragments of bone and hair and flesh ingrained in the bark of a big tree next to a mass grave.  Pol Pot died naturally in 1998 before he could be brought to trial.
​
If you want to read Kerry Hamill’s S21 confession go to
http://www.eccc.gov.kh/sites/default/files/documents/courtdoc/00090609-00090621.pdf

​After a day listening to the audio guides at S21 and Choeung Ek which included some eye witness accounts of terror, and seeing the way a high school building was converted into a torture factory, the cells where people were chained up which used to be classrooms, the gallows from which they were strung up which used to be a school exercise beam, the paintings from survivors which depict the suffering, and the photographs which the Khmer Rouge took of all their detainees (despotic genocidal maniacs always keep immaculate records – the Nazis were the same), I’m a bit lost for words.

Heading South towards the end of April and the inexorable date which marks another year older for me, I split from OCD and Fix-it after the hottest, sweatiest day yet.  So hot that the sun melted the super-strong glue which, for the last 4 months, has held my miniature video camera to the side of my helmet.  As we roll into Sukhothai, the ancient capital of Northern Thailand which has some quite impressive looking buildings and relics, it hit 45°C in the shade.  Strangely we weren’t in the mood to go sight-seeing around the ancient Thai Kingdom’s palaces and pagodas, wherever we stop has to involve air-con and they’ve yet to install AC in the 12th Century ruins – odd that!  We follow a sign for an air-conditioned Thai restaurant and guest house but found the place deserted.  Not for the first time we seem to be in the opening sequence from 28 Days Later where the whole of London was deserted.  Apparently they shot that sequence at about 5am on a Sunday morning, this is the middle of the day and there’s nobody here, but all the buildings are open and there’s a car parked outside.  Weird.  We let ourselves into the restaurant, find the air-con controller and the fridge so for now we’re happy.  I find a random dude snoozing in a hammock slung outside an outbuilding who makes a phone call and soon the pretty receptionist / cook / manager returns from the market and suddenly OCD wants to play scrabble again!  Fix-it and OCD are just killing time before heading into Laos, but I’ve already done Laos, and got a broken bike for the trouble so I’m going to chance my arm with Cambodia, then meet up with the boys later in May to try to get into Vietnam, so after lunch I head South and Brett tries to head North and OCD falls asleep in the pretty girl’s restaurant (so much for scrabble, Lawrence!) 
En-route to the Cambodian border I stopped in Lopburi to find a KTM dealer who might be able to sell me a new battery and to visit the monkey’s temple.  To paraphrase the Lonely Planet, the residents of Lopburi are fighting a losing battle with the millions of monkeys who live in and around the central temples and squares and are threatening to overrun the city.  I can testify to this, I stopped for less than ten minutes to walk up to the temple and photograph the monkeys, I was less than 100m from the bike, but the minute my back was turned a monkey found the water bottle attached to the side of the bike, stole it, undid the top and necked it.  I turned round to see him sitting smugly next to my bike looking like he owned it with my water in his hand.  I’m amazed he didn’t nick the key and ride off!
The Cambodian border crossing made the customs experience in India appear to be even more ridiculous, if that’s at all possible.  Getting the bike in and out of India using the international Carnet de Passage document was a long harrowing experience; getting the bike into Cambodia using the same Carnet system was a painless 15 minutes in an air-conditioned office with a very nice customs officer and a $35 fee for my visa.  I like this country already, the people are happy and helpful and smiling, but it’s still too hot, wearing heavy black protective bike gear seems ridiculous in this weather but I’ve seen the results of hitting the tarmac without it so I’ll put up with sweating and drinking a few litres a day.  Next stop, Siem Reap where Critical Dave happens to have holed up for a week or two while his Dad’s visiting S E Asia.  Siem Reap is a bit of a magnet for tourists, what with the Angkor Wat where they filmed Tomb Raider; but it’s worth it.  The Angkor Wat temple complex is stunning, it’s the largest religious monument in the world.  Built in the 12th Century, originally to worship Vishnu the Hindu God it was converted to Buddhism a couple of hundred years later so there are strange deformations to the carvings as they removed certain Hindu features to make it more Buddhist.  You can see why Hollywood came here; the whole place looks like an Indiana Jones film set, but it’s a real.  The ancient crumbling stone temples with huge faces carved into the rocks set in the middle of a lush green forest with trees finding root around the buildings are more like the result of a crazy dream of a lost kingdom rather than a reality, but then that sort of sums up Cambodia, it’s a bit of a hidden gem and quite unexpected.  The walk around Angkor Wat inspired some more of those “how did we all get here” type existential thoughts.  The idea that the ancient Kampuchean societies were able to build such remarkable edifices is an existential feat of human creation.  And what has become of all this human endeavour?  Where and how has society developed?  How does modern society meet the challenge of Angkor Wat at Siem Reap, or the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, or the Golden Temple in Varanasi?   It builds temples to the new social Spirit; it puts the Angkor What? on Pub Street in central Siem Reap.  The town centre has a party vibe but it’s not too overrun with commercialism; the bars, markets and restaurants manage to keep a bit of an authentic feel.  So it looks like the Tomb Raider town is going to be the venue for my discovering the meaning of life, which, as anyone who’s read Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy knows, is 42.  My meaning-of-life day started well, exploring the ancient Khmer architecture of Angkor Wat, climbing up ludicrously steep stone steps to discover what the Hindus and Buddhists were on about to build such huge monuments to bow before, and it ended … well … it ended at the Angkor What? club on Pub Street (yes, it’s actually called that) with my head bowing after being buried in several beers and buckets of Mojito.  And how did I manage to get myself from cultured exploration to inebriated insobriety?  Easy, I met some English people, and one of them is from Essex!
My meaning-of-life-day involved bumping into three fantastic people in the slightly inappropriately named Luxury Concept Hostel in Siem Reap (it wasn’t that luxurious but it’s amazing what a name will do).  As I was chilling in the insipidly air-conditioned room, debating with myself what to do with my significant evening, in walked Joe, Philippa and Helen.  Philippa and Helen are touring S E Asia, and Joe (their mutual long standing college mate and Philippa’s recent bf) has flown out to join them in Cambodia; and so it started.  Now there’s four of us out on the piss on pub street.  We meet a guy who’d just bought barbequed spider and scorpion from a street vendor which seemed like a good place to start the silliness, we help him over his fears and bbq spider’s legs taste remarkably … err … normal, as if that’s ever an adjective you’d associate with eating spider.  I didn’t try the main body, its huge abdomen looked too abnormal!  All along pub street there are mobile hand-carts adorned with bling lights and PA systems selling cocktails by the bucket so the party just evolves in the street as people mooch between the cocktail vendors trying to secure the best deal.  I have no memory of how many buckets of Mojito, Whiskey Sour and Margarita we got through.  I have photos of Canadian, German, Dutch, French, Swiss and Spanish guys celebrating my meaning of life as Essex Helen orchestrates Tequila shots and more buckets and insists that I really need to down half a pint of Mojito in the time it takes half of pub street to sing that silly birthday song to me!  Critical Dave finds us having managed to find a pretty Cambodian associate earlier in the day and we adjourn to the Angkor What? club which turns out to be disappointingly try-hard and empty, and sports an over-aggressive bouncer who tries to wrestle the beer out of my hand as we move across the road to Temple Bar (can you spot the theme in the bar names here).  Somehow Critical and I manage to lose another few hours in various bars, sink some more beer and attract the attention of a Cambodian lady boy who follows me around like a lost dog.  There’s really no point in following me at this point I have lost track of where home is, so I’m eternally grateful to Critical for delivering me back to my room just after 4am having established that the meaning of life is definitely not to be found with a lady boy in the dark alleys of Siem Reap.  The next day involved a lot of sleeping and regretting that last beer or two, but definitely no regrets over spending my birthday being very silly with Critical Dave, Joe, Philippa and Helen who ensured a totally unforgettable and unexpected night out.

​The second leg of my trucking tour back to Chiang Mai was organised by the amazing Lawrence & Brett through the incomparable, always smiling Nu.  Nu is the owner of the Plearn hostel and general lovely person, we guess she’s in her late 20s.  She’s running a busy hostel with her family and friends and seemingly working all day, every day whilst knowing how to organise pretty much anything from jungle treks to emergency motorbike rescues; nothing it too much trouble or bother.  So Smiling Nu managed to negotiate a pickup truck to come and find me at the Thai border, load up my broken bike and all my gear (although, again, without bringing a ramp made things interesting), and drive me another 650km back to Chiang Mai.  In a pickup truck that’s about 10 hours, and it cost me half the cost of the Laos leg of the journey, but there seems to be something about these drivers that make them want to arrive at stupid o’clock in the morning.  The Thai pickup truck was supposed to meet me some time mid-morning, but he rolled up just after 2pm which meant arriving in Chiang Mai at 12:30am the following morning!  Knowing the sleepy nature of the Plearn hostel I was a bit worried about how we were going to lift the bike off the back of the truck (without a ramp), but I should learn to trust the good nature of people:  Plearn’s residents had clearly been prepped for my arrival and most of them were waiting up to A) – see the state of the sautéed and lightly baked Rupert who has been stuck in smelly trucks and sweaty border crossings for the last 3 days, and B) – lift my bike off the back of the truck without even worrying about the lack of ramp, as overseen by the man who can literally think a solution around any problem; that’ll be Aussie Brett (I feel a new moniker coming on).  The least I could do as recompense for all this assistance is supply a crate of beer to Plearn’s communal fridge.
Getting back to Plearn felt like a homecoming; such a friendly, welcoming environment.  The next day, after the ubiquitous Plearn breakfast of scrambled eggs on toast, Brett and I set about taking the various bits off the bike to look for clues as to what had caused its demise.  Brett has a remarkable, innate understanding of how things go together and come apart, so before I’ve even found the relevant page in the pdf workshop manual about removing the fuel pump and filters, Brett’s got them out, off and dismantled on the worktop!  I’m sceptical that it’s just the fuel filters that are causing the engine to not fire but they do look black and filthy, and I did drop the bike in a river, and Brett has far more diagnostic knowledge than I do about fuel pumps, injectors, filters and all that.  Smiling Nu makes some more phone calls, this time to a bike dealer in Bangkok and organises replacement parts to be sent up to Plearn.  All good, if Brett is right, we’ll be up and running again in a couple of days.  Except everybody forgot about Songkran.  For those not au fait with Thai customs and traditions, Songkran is Thai New Year, otherwise known as the biggest water fight in the world.  The whole of Thailand goes out and buys super-soakers and engages in a three-day-long water fight!  During this time everything shuts down, for at least a week, so my spare parts are languishing somewhere in a delivery sorting office in Bangkok while the whole country goes nuts throwing water at everyone else.  So there’s nothing for it, if I can’t fix the bike I may as well get a big water-gun!  Armed with the most ostentatious super-soakers we could find Brett, OCD and I spent 6 hilarious hours getting repeatedly drenched at the Roo Bar on Loi Kroy Road, along with hundreds of other tourists and locals.  We ambushed taxis, pitched battles against trucks loaded with barrels of ice, hurled buckets and terrorised cyclists, and may have partaken in a beer or two.  One full day of crazy water fights was enough for us but the Thais are hard core, they continued to have street parades and processions while everyone throws water from every house, hose-pipe, bar and shop-front for three days non-stop.  You couldn’t walk to the end of the street without getting drenched!
Smiling Nu reckons it’ll be at least another 5 days before the post network is up and running again so I’ve got time to kill in Chiang Mai.  OCD and Brett decide to get out of town for a couple of days (can’t blame them, they’ve been there since before I went to Laos), so they took a three-day ride around the Mae Hong Son loop.  A stunning stretch of tarmac up in the hills which runs over 600km with something ridiculous like 1,864 corners – like anyone is going to drive round and count them all!  Left to my own devices in Chiang Mai for a few days with no bike I engaged in some “normal” tourist / traveller activities:  I took a ride out to a canyon with a few nice Brits, most of them on gap-year trips, to jump 15m off a large rock into a lake; I took a Thai massage course which lasted all afternoon as we had to practice the various techniques on the other people on the course, I got quite familiar with Jose from Brazil and Daniella from Chile as we were instructed how to rub, poke, prod, bend and flex each other; and I took a 4-hour Thai cooking course where I met some lovely people and made some amazing authentic Thai curries, and spring rolls and noodles etc…  It’s amazing the people you meet in the strangest places, so on this cooking course in the old town in Chiang Mai I met a couple of Californian med students who were just about to graduate and start doctoring.  (Have you ever noticed how American travellers and tourists never say that they’re just American, we should already know that, they always tell you what state or town they’re from, as if we’re all supposed to know the geography of the US!  So on this cooking course Lilly and Allison are from San Fran, and Kelly and Kaysha are from Idaho, wherever that is!)  Anyway, Lilly and Allison, being medics are part of that ever-diminishing demographic of educated, erudite Americans! (Adopt heavy West Coast accent please … I’m like sorry, but like, ya know, I’m like only kiddin’!).  Sorry, digressing again.  The afternoon and evening passed quickly through a bit of beer and a lot of politics, education, music and culture, and much amusement and bemusement at the Republican presidential nominations.  It turns out that Lilly and Allison are singing medics so we make a plan to find a music bar and take over!  The North Gate Jazz Café in Chiang Mai is a great venue, super-busy every night with live bands playing everything from Salsa and Santana to Swing, but it’s too busy to hijack the stage.  The guitarist runs another bar on the other side of town and tomorrow night is acoustic night so we’re invited to come and play.
Tomorrow turns into a long day, my spare bike bits finally arrive from Bangkok so Brett and I set about trying to get things sorted.  Six hours later after Smiling Nu has driven me around Chiang Mai on her scooter looking for jump leads and jubilee clips we arrive at a final list of ailments on the bike.  To keep it brief, the river dunking almost certainly got water in the fuel which blocked the already overloaded filters which meant the fuel pump wasn’t pushing enough pressure through the injectors which meant there was nothing to burn in the cylinders, meanwhile the battery, which has been flipped, crashed, dropped in water and spent too long cranking the engine without getting any charge in it, had lost power, so even when we’d put the fuel system back together the bike wouldn’t start because the lack of battery charge and constant cranking without firing had put the ECU in immobiliser mode.  The bike’s computer decided that it no longer liked the magnetically coded ignition key so the bike immobilised itself, so much for bloody modern technology!  With jump leads we took power from Smiling Nu’s car, used the spare key which has a different magnetic coding and the bike spluttered into life, after many hours of stress and the occasional expletive.  Now I would have given up and paid a fortune to take it down to the only KTM centre we know of in Bangkok hours ago, but bush-mechanic Fix-it Brett wouldn’t give up on it and finally breathed life back into my big lump of metal.
To celebrate Fix-it’s triumph with the KTM (subtle reference to the fact that maybe I should have bought a Triumph after all?) we met Lilly, Allison, and Theo in the Roadhouse Bar.  Theo is another one of those “it’s a small world” situations.  She lives just round the corner from my house in Enfield, North London – small world!  The Roadhouse is running its usual acoustic live music night but probably wasn’t expecting us to supply most of the music for the night.  I was helped by some beer, a decent ear, some distant memories of chords and keys, and Lilly and Allison, who sang their way through Eva Cassidy, Carol King, The Beatles, Billie Holliday, Aretha Franklin and the like.  My brain hasn’t worked so hard in months trying to guestimate the piano parts, although OCD even recorded some of it and it doesn't sound too shabby so maybe the adage is true - piano practice is over-rated!  The long day turned into a long night, after a fun night singing and playing the Roadhouse, Fix-it Brett and I put the world to rights; discussing life, the universe and everything until about 4am.  The only trouble is, is that we lubricated the conversation with another beer or two and have no recollection of the conclusions, other than a fixed bike and an impromptu gig with some delightful randomly met new friends makes for a pretty successful day, who needs normal life?!