GuerillaZ

Welcome to readers from the US Virgin Islands, Trinidad & Tobago, Oman and the Philippines With Vanessa Mae hitting the pistes in Sochi I felt it time to review my time in Thailand Thailand distinguishes itself by having avoided colonisation by any country while all around the French and the British took over Burma, Vietnam, India, Laos and Vietnam and even China for a while. Phuket In Phuket one got the sense of a set-up designed for intense levels of hedonism. Bars, joints busting with Thai flesh. You can find the same kind thing in Ayia Napa, Sihanoukville, Rhodes or Ibiza with less flesh on offer. In the rainy season the resort turns into a dripping wet ghost town, one where I got infected with jungle foot-rot. Within two days one foot, continually soaked in the copious rains, had cracked open at the heel so that I could look into it. Like looking into a fissure in rock. If you like tea with your travel visit GuerillaZ&#

Vat Sokpaluang If you Read The  Dragon Apparent  by Norman Lewis it becomes clear it, or at least a great deal clearer, that Laos is an incredibly interesting place that does not present itself to you in the same assertive way as its neighbors.  I found Vientiane quite the opposite to the offhand description of Vientiane in Paul Theroux's The Great Railway Bazaar. I spent close to a month in Laos. I stayed in Vientiane for all of that time.   It was 95 degrees every day except one.  When you arrive in Vientiane it quickly becomes clear that it is all about the lives and customs of its people. Perhaps it occurs to the traveller that they might become an amateur of pagoda architecture as it did me but I gave that up very quickly.  According to Lewis, the accumulation of wealth which is not to be used for definite, approved purposes, causes a man to lose prestige among his neighbours, just as in the West, the process is reversed. T