Luang Prabang

On a comfortable double bed sleeper bus straight to Luang Prabang, Laos' second city with 20 odd thousand people, and we arrived with the Slovaks at a night market full of farang. White people everywhere! Too much white people, we agreed, diving for bottles of the cheap and tasty national treasure BeerLao, some fruit shakes, baguettes, and pork chop and chicken bbq. We ate almost no meat in China because of their stingy portions. A chicken noodle soup would get you a quarter of a boiled chicken neck in plenty of noodles and soup. We made up for lost time, and spent 4 days in the lively city and took a cooking course.

The cooking course taught us a lot. We learnt, walking around the meat market that ''more flies, more flavour''. Meat and veg bought off of the floor costs less than if bought off of a table. Fermented fish sauce is made by putting fish bits in water in the sun and waiting a year (in this case, flies mean bad fish sauce). Rat stew tastes much worse than locusts. Sticky rice is made by soaking the rice in water overnight, and rice wine (lao lao - 50%proof but who's counting?) is made by boiling this leftover water for 8-10 days. We learnt about what to do with some herbs and spices I've not seen before and wouldn't want to see again, and because sticky rice makes you sleepy, "no sticky rice, no lao people''.

There was no blow torching dogs in this market, and we moved on to the outdoor kitchen where we made 5 or 6 dishes, the best being not chicken stuffed with lemongrass, but chicken and herbs stuffed in lemongrass.