At first I noticed it and passed it by, drawn to the noise and colour around me. Yet I kept coming back to it, looking for the image that may be there…

“Sightseeing is one of the more doubtful aspects of travel … It has all the boredom and ritual of a pilgrimage and none of the spiritual benefits.” Paul Theroux

To spend eight hours perched on various wooden long tail boats, interjected by a spell of cycling across an island, for a chance (with no guarantee) to see the critically endangered Irrawaddy dolphins is madness. A masochistic madness borne of a life-long fascination with cetaceans … and as Riff Raff so eloquently sang: “madness takes its toll”.

The Mekong river, having traversed the length of Laos on its journey from Tibet to the South China Sea, takes a breath at Si Phan Don before crashing down a series of waterfalls and entering Cambodia.

Lacking Cambodia’s ruins and tumultuous history, Thailand’s culture and regional power and Vietnam’s long history and story of conflict, Laos seems like the ignored quiet child in the back row of the classroom by comparison.

The late afternoon sunshine bathes the fifty-four gothic towers of the Bayon temple in a gentle warm light. The sun’s slow progressive setting casts deep shadows on the two hundred and sixteen large faces of Avalokitesharva, ” the Lord who looks down”, carved on each of the four facets of every tower.

Faced with the prospect of enduring a five to seven hour ferry ride from Battambang to Siem Reap, squashed into a plastic chair big enough for an infant and squeezed between forty nine other tourists or perched in a lotus position on the ferry rooftop, I chose the latter.

The sun, a great big red ball, clawed its way through the haze and early morning mist painting the sky a pastel shade of orange, and visually bringing warmth to the chilly early morning city of Battambang.

Battambang, or Bah dembong, is the capital of Battambang province and is tucked away in the north west corner of Cambodia. It is, according to the guidebooks, well known as the leading rice-producing region of Cambodia.

An early morning start is always a lottery; sometimes the effort is repaid with a spectacular sunrise and sometimes not

After the fall of Saigon in 1975, the unified Vietnam became a communist country. Recently it moved away from a strictly communist ideal. And it’s this juxtaposition of communism and capitalism that interests and intrigues me traveling around Vietnam.

What’s to be said about Ho Chi Minh City that’s not been said before? Described in romantic sentences filled with superlatives in any guide book you care to look at, the city is everything that’s said about it, and more.