On this day of food we said farewell to a comfortable guesthouse in Kampot with one last Western breakfast, stopped for a snack just before 12pm which made do for lunch, cycled almost 150km when we’d intended to do 100km and ate dinner in near darkness. As you do.

The below documents what two hungry cyclists ate in one day in Cambodia.

Breakfast

Two banana pancakes each (sold at a bargain US$1.75) and we figured that we also needed the omelette and potatoes (Justin) and peanut butter and toast (Emma).

Drinks

Sugar cane juice in crushed ice, and iced coffees – typical of our on the road fuelling in Cambodia’s heat.

Lunch

Fried rice with pork and vegetables with both brown and chilli sauce.

Snack

Sour mango and plain muffins (pictured half devoured).

Dinner

Sour fish soup (tastes better than it looks), chilli and fish sauce dipping sauce and steamed rice plus remaining muffin and packet of wafers. Dessert consisted of shaved ice, condensed milk and random jelly stuff not pictured as it melted too quickly!

At 5:30am we’re at the Angkor Wat Archaeological Park ticket office, blurry-eyed as we’re directed where to stand to get our obligatory mug shot snapped by the incredibly bright-eyed early morning staff. We opt for a three day ticket which we can use over a seven day period. Its still pitch black as we take the left fork towards Angkor Wat. The traffic has picked up with motorcycle drawn tuk-tuks and buses heading the same direction as us while a steady street of Cambodian commuters pedal bicycles in the opposite direction. Most tourists are racing towards Angkor Wat for sunrise but we pass without even a glimpse of its famous silhouette as it is still shroud in darkness.

We’re on a mission to climb the only hill in the area for what promises to be a quieter sunrise over ancient Khmer architecture. Two kilometres later we arrive at the gates to Angkor Thom meaning we missed our temple. Another cyclist. from Spain, hails us in the dark and joins our Indiana Jones-inspired temple hunting. We return the way we’d arrived and peer into the dark forest on the side of the road, wishing for such tourist amenities as information boards.

Spying a promising dark shape in the distance we lock up bicycles and follow a forest trail, climbing up a short steep stairs to the top with only head torches to light our way. Swarmed immediately by mosquitoes, we look out from our precarious view point as the sky slowly lightens. A canopy of trees towers us on all sides and we’re clearly not on a hill. Its becoming very apparent that we’re in the wrong place.

Back on the road we cut our losses and enjoy watching colour enter the sky at the gates to Angkor Thom, one of the most impressive cities of the ancient world. Dawn is still breaking as we pass through the middle of Angkor Thom, leaving our Spanish companion to explore the central ruins of the city while we continue in the still absurdly early morning to the city’s Northern gate.

Our first temple stop is Preah Khan, where we resist the enticements from a row of breakfast vendors in order to make the most of the early morning cool. A few minutes walk across a moat and into the temple complex we’re the only visitors in a maze of corridors seemingly made for shorter people than us. I try to imagine Kings of diminutive stature striding through the rooms, wearing down the uneven slabs of stone beneath our feet. We’re absorbed by small details in carvings still visible on walls, stains of colour growing on rock faces and a state of disrepair which makes me think of a giant’s Lego set. Its only as we’re leaving that other tourists begin to arrive.

We continue clockwise around what is known as Angkor Wat’s “big circuit”, stopping in front of each temple to read up on what’s in front of us and invariably deciding that each is worth a visit. The huge towers of the Eastern Mebon, a Hindu temple made of red bricks with elephant statues at each corner is an unexpected highlight.

At the top of Eastern Mebon we peer into the dim of each tower. At one, a guardian catches us unaware and beckons us into one adorned with a Buddhist shrine. He shows us the echo that sounds if you thump your heart and directs Justin to take a photo of the sky through the hole in the ceiling. We’re offered incense sticks, which we place into a pit of ash and told this is for luck in Cambodia. He indicates where we should make a donation for this service and, charmed by his sales technique, I pull a few small notes out of my wallet.

Its great having the bikes out with us, as the temple grounds are well shaded for cycling and traffic is fairly slow moving. It only gets busy as we turn back towards the centre to visit a well-known temple called Ta Prohm which the jungle had once almost completely reclaimed. Just before lunch it appears we’ve timed our visit with the tour buses, coming across a car park swarming with traffic and wily restaurant owners making us promise to visit them at their numbered cafes.

We do our best to give Ta Prohm a chance to woo us but our eyes are a little glazed over as we sit in the shade to eat peanuts halfway through our visit. Its not long before the hordes of visitors disappear to their waiting transport and we tackle the slightly quieter main buildings with just a few independent travellers. We have managed to wander around six temples in just as many hours so it is clearly time for lunch ourselves. Two hours and one monkey watching episode later we head out of the temple complex having visited at total of 8 temples in 10 hours.

Unfortunately we head back into the park that evening somewhat sooner than planned, as I’d lost my ticket on the way out. We retrace our steps until Justin spots it along the side of the road. I suspect that finding the ticket was the extent of our good fortune purchased from the temple guardian. We wisely take the next day off.

We planned to see best bits last, visiting Angkor Thom and the surrounding buildings on one day and and the main attraction, Angkor Wat, on another. Our Ankgor Thom morning doesn’t start so early, but visitors are still light on the ground as we climb up into the many-faced temple of Bayon. On the lower levels bas-relief fatigue quickly sets in, but while I could kill for a coffee, I struggle around the entire 1.2km of carvings looking for oddities such as men juggling monkeys and picking nits out of each other’s hair.

Justin climbs the steep steps to a library room while I quickly get bored of the low levels and climb to the top of the central temple, losing him for half an hour in the process. Reunited we find a place to sit and contemplate the oddity of carving the same giant face 214 times in one building. Continuing our tour of the ancient city, we avoid the tour group crowds by following well-trodden forest paths between less popular sites, including Baphoun and Phimeanakas temples.

After coffee, exploring the well-named Terrace of the Leper King and Terrace of Elephants doesn’t take long as we had already seen them from the road. We pick up our bicycles to head East. After an unplanned detour to the little used East gate (which featured in the movie Tomb Raider) we rejoin the main road for a few final sites. Most of these we find underwhelming and over-run by trinket sellers. The last temple, Ta Keo, is impressive solely because of how high you can scramble up without any real protection and how high you suddenly feel when you’re about to climb down.

The next day we’re eating a late lunch in a cafe in Siem Reap township when a Dutch cyclist starts chatting to us. As we wrap up and pay we apologise for excusing ourselves rapidly. We’re on our way to Angkor Wat. He gives us a second look as we wave goodbye, clearly thinking that we’re mad to enter the park with just three hours until closing.

After two full days of temple gazing, a time limit at the top attraction is just right for us. Its predictably crowded with tour groups and photographers almost everywhere, but we sneak in a little education listening to English-speaking guides before we take a close up parade around the inner courtyard.  We muster enough excitement to pull ourselves up one last staircase to the mother of all towers and look at those incredibly carved turrets from all angles. We old temple-hands can’t help but think that the view is a little lessoned by the scaffolding covering some of the front and the size of the main building is hard to grasp, but regardless it is a beautiful piece of history.

Having read that when Angkor Wat was ‘discovered’ in the 1860s there was a working monastery inside, we’re not surprised when we turn a corner to find a young monk silhouetted against a doorway opening to a steep outdoor staircase. We join him to catch the breeze which has cooled the afternoon significantly and chat idly for a few minutes about our respective journeys. Its here I kind of get the point of building a temple on such a huge scale, as even with the huge volume of visitors, there is still room for quiet contemplation.

Here are some facts and figures from our time cycle touring in Laos:

• 1992 km cycled (longest day 125km, several short 8km days on Don Det)
• 48 nights in hotel beds, 5 nights in a apartment, 1 night free-camping
• 30 “rest days” from 54 total days in Laos (that’s a lot of resting!)
• 27 international cycle tourists met (four of them cycled with)
• 10 words of Laos learnt
• 10 Western style meals enjoyed among many days of sticky rice
• 8 domestic elephants spotted and 1 ridden
• 5 caves explored (including a 7km boat ride through Kong Lor cave)
• 4 waterfalls visited
• 4 cups of single estate espresso drunk during our Paksong coffee tour
• 3 vomiting instances (Emma’s last night in Laos wasn’t so fun)
• 2 days wearing socks and sandals (to prevent sunburn, not as fashion)
• 1 cheap Chinese tablet computer purchased (then 3 days to get it working)
• 1 troop of monkeys spotted by Justin
• 1 motorbike ridden (by Justin with no previous experience)
• 1 communal breakfast shared with a rice farmer and friends
• 1 punctured inner tube (a failed patch in Emma’s £4 Chinese tyre)

Justin’s most exciting cave: The 7km boat ride in the pitch black through Kong Lor cave rates as one of the most exciting experiences of my trip. Exiting the cave on the far side to find a German tourist playing a set of Scottish bagpipes to the bemusement of the Laos villagers made it extra memorable.

Emma’s best ice coffee: On a warm day heading south from Xeno I followed the local trend of getting my drink to go, carefully carrying a carrier bag of ice, condensed milk and coffee on my handlebars until the ice had diluted the super sweet concoction. Possibly the best cyclist fuel I’ve come across.

At the bottom of Laos, the wide arm of the Mekong  becomes many fingers sifting through clumps of earth, aptly named Si Phan Don (or 4000 islands). Many of these islands are barely big enough to support a single tree and disappear completely in the wet season. The close proximity of land and water supports a healthy ecosystem, with frogs and lizards making regular appearances around our bungalow, more birds than we’ve seen in the rest of Laos in the trees and the biggest population of bugs we’ve encountered since Mongolia. Watching the world go by is easier when it literally floats past.

Don Det is the most touristic of three populated islands in the Si Phan Don archipelago. After a long haul down from Xi Pian National Park, we transported ourselves and bikes by boat to the main village of Ban Hua Det and started down ‘Sunset Boulevard’ (really little more than a dirt track) looking for a bungalow we could call our own. Passing rickety shacks crowded along the waterfront, with grim-looking shared toilet blocks and not much in terms of shade, we stubbornly cycled on until we reached the much less developed southern tip of the island. There a hand-painted sign pointed along a wooden bridge to Cindy’s Guesthouse. The place had been open for less than a month, was cheap, down a dirt path far from the road, and with only four separate bungalows in a vast paddock, as far from the madding crowds as we could want to be.

Most days we only moved from our base for meals, with lots of cheap eats available within walking distance. Some mornings we cycled the 8km loop of dirt roads to the main village where proper English breakfast staples were available and other days we picked up vegetables to cook on our private deck. Some of the best Laos food we’ve tasted was at Mekong Dream, a restaurant even more memorable because of the warm welcome from the proprietors who are fond of topping up guests glasses and sitting down for a chat.

It was at Mekong Dream that we learnt about an upcoming boat race between neighbouring Don Det and Don Khon islands. The race seemed to be an excuse for two days of partying and our host, Mr Home had clearly been at the pre-race party for most of the day. That night live music floated across the water and we regretted that we were too tired to cross the nearby bridge to investigate.

We went to watch the boat race, amazed about the transformation of a small dusty strip of restaurants into something close to a festival site complete with huge sound system. Typical of other small town events we have attended, not much happened for a long while. When the race was finally underway, the boats disappeared from our start point view in minutes and we were left with no idea which team won.

That same day we caught a glimpse of the endangered Irrawaddy dolphins from the southern tip of Don Khon. At 7am we’re clearly the boat company’s first customers of the day and once a boatman was roused for us we had the privilege of being the only people out on the water. We spent an hour watching these shy animals as they peeked out of the water to breathe.

The New Year creeps up on us, and could have snuck by unannounced if we weren’t determined to see it in appropriately. Gathering two sets of couples from bungalows next to ours, we headed to the bright lights of Ban Hua Det where a strip of pubs would surely be throbbing with NYE mayhem. Errr… or not. Arriving at 11pm we came across almost empty streets and sparsely populated bars. Whatever mayhem once earned Don Det its reputation as a Vang Vieng-style party place had clearly long drifted off. We backtracked rapidly to the one place we’d heard good music emitting from and joined the small throng in time to count down to 2012.

It was refreshing to talk with our German neighbours Victor and Sabrina who are two months through a six month backpacking trip, and had dedicated two weeks of that time to island life. Sabrina offers just one complaint – her feet get sandy. She says its necessary to complain about this because when you are somewhere like Don Det there really is little else to complain about.

Wishing everyone a happy holiday period whether that’s relaxing on a warm New Zealand day, tucked up inside a warm British house or where ever else in the world you happen to be.

After another amazing year of travel, we wanted to post a big thank you to everyone who has helped us out, read the blog and cheered us on. Reality returns in mid-February upon our return to New Zealand.

The wind started on our second day heading south from Vientiane, seeming to hit us head on no matter which direction we cycled. We wish we had a thermometer as we couldn’t tell if was really cold, or just relatively cold compared to the mid-30s days we’d become accustomed too. Having just witnessed a bunch of local fishermen (and woman) load up a boat and disappear into the river, it doesn’t take me long to reconsider. I’m seriously doubting that this blustery day will be a good day to travel upstream by tiny outboard motor.

We had started south on Route 13, the highway which links Vientiane to Pakse and the Cambodian border to the south, but at Vieng Kham planned to veer off to the east to pick up ‘The Loop’, an off-the-beaten path track popular with travellers on rented motorcycles. This would take us past several tourist-friendly caves, to the edges of four national parks and within spitting distance of Vietnam, before turning back West to rejoin the main road at Thakhek.

With the waterfall still not located after our detour to the ferry departure point, and another unsuccessful attempt following a dirt road that led into the same national park (stuck this time with fully loaded touring bikes on a yet to be completed road hewn out of raw rock bed) we ended up at the crossroad settlement of Vieng Kham at 3pm, both with sunburnt feet and fed up with the wind.

That afternoon our goals were at odds, as were our moods. While Justin wanted to push through the dark to make it to the next big town (which he thought was between 20 and 30km away) I refused to agree to cycle in the dark, but also didn’t fancy sticking around in another dusty crossroads for the night. I refuelled with a bowl of noodles, bought a couple of handfuls of sticky rice and some flossed meat as emergency dinner supplies and agreed to cycle on. We left town with barely two hours of daylight remaining, but still carrying our tent we knew we would find somewhere to sleep.

As the light dropped, so did the wind, and in the early evening we were blessed with a cool stillness. We pedalled with greater urgency towards Nahin, hoping to come across a friendly temple complex or a welcoming village where we could find somewhere to pitch the tent. As dusk started to fall around us we were still winding up and down jungle-clad hills, lit magically by the evening sky. Night in Laos falls like the flick of a light switch. Just as it was getting properly dark, we found a track leading off the side of the road with a sandy area just big enough for our needs. With practiced familiarity we pitched our trusty tent as the already risen full moon shone down on us.

The Nahin tourism office was funded by the French as thanks for the locals who helped find some lost French citizens. I’d recommend a stop inside to anyone passing for the comedy value of your exchange with the young girl manning it. We were enticed in by a sign pointing to the front door of the simple building, claiming this was the way to the waterfall, but offering no obvious trails into the jungle beyond. Turns out the sign just points to the tourism office and the waterfall path is further down the road.

After being shown an A2 full colour picture of the waterfall and a map in Lao script which she told us didn’t have any relevance to the waterfall, we eventually paid a dubious national park fee, got vague directions, and headed off on our speculative adventure. This was despite warnings from the tourist office that a guide would be advisable and suspicions that this is where the French adventurers may have gotten lost. We found it an enchanting walk, with only us and a few hunters out on the trails, badly signed and maintained paths that do indeed peter out into nothing, and a final scramble up steep boulders for a view of the waterfall, spectacular at over 100m high, even in the dry season.

The next morning I found myself on the back of a motorcycle, having delegated learning to ride to Justin. Fifty pancake flat kilometres away, our destination was Kong Lor, a 7km long cave, which visitors can take a boat ride through. Its well worth visiting, but not one we fancied cycling 100km to see.

Justin was offered a crash course in motorcycle handling by the lady running our guesthouse. She was still in her pyjama’s and with feet clad only in socks as she jumped on the rental to show us how to ride with the confidence of someone who has been riding motorbikes since their pre-teens. Her instruction seemed to consist of continual stream of “1…. 2….. 3…. 4….” as she shifted through the gears, then she nervously handled over the controls and watched Justin take a test ride. She warned us to drive slowly through villages and ‘look, look’ so as not to hit chickens or children, then waved us off with a very worried sounding ‘good luck’.

We arrived at Kong Lor cave with hair swept back, ‘Born to be Wild’ still looping through our heads and jumped onto a boat manned by two young men, which would take us through the cave system. Our own headlights dimmed quickly, and we were glad that our guides were better prepared, as our boat weaved in and out of tunnels for a nearly hour long ride to an opening on the other side of the mountain.

Riding through the pitch black with occasional glimpses of boats headed in the other direction reminded me of the underworlds pictured in Lord of the Rings, with a little bit of the adrenalin of the Willy Wonka pitch black boat ride thrown in.

On the return journey, our guides seemed to race a little faster, and before we knew it we’d emerged back into bright sunshine. We spent an hour or so with our feet dangling in a clear natural lagoon near the entrance, marvelling at how many people are moved through the system, but how alone you feel in the middle of the cave complex.

Despite a fair number of tourists travelling on the same roads as us, some of the villages we passed through over the next few days seemed poorer than any we had seen so far in Lao. It took us most of a day to traverse a 70km stretch of dirt road, where we passed a dozen tourists on motorcycles all headed the opposite direction.

Many local people had been relocated from the Nam Theun 2 dam site which dominated stretches of the road with its vast expanses of waterlogged tree stumps. While still friendly as ever, their kids were a little less well dressed than those we’d seen further north and there was very little available in roadside stalls. We wondered how the dam had affected the wildlife, noting that even when cycling the jungle corridor between two national parks, we saw and heard very few birds, though Justin briefly saw a troupe of monkeys swinging away from roadside trees.

Subsisting mostly on rice, whether sticky with sausage meat, fried with egg and vegetables or in the form of noodles, we had what was possibly our worst few days of food in Laos. With mysterious meats and unidentified dumpling-type things making their way into my noodles in Lak Sao, I tried not to recall the stench of the dog trucks we’d seen passing us on their way to dinner tables and restaurants of Vietnam.

Something in our diet made us both feel pretty bad, and for the first time in our trip I longed for a kitchen where rice wouldn’t be the only thing on the menu. Forgoing more cave exploration we raced the last few kilometres to Thakhek where our decision to stay at Thakhek Travel Lodge was solely based on the extensive repertoire of the kitchen staff.

Vientiane is possibly the most laidback capital city in the world, or at least in the small part of the world that we’ve traversed since leaving London. Everything moves in slow motion, from the traffic, to the promenading monks who wander out to the Mekong on dusk. We’re charmed by wide tree-lined streets, brightly coloured wats and an extensive fresh produce market which sells every edible plant and critter imaginable. Our first burgers since Istanbul are devoured with gusto and we start an extensive survey of smoothies (winning flavours being coffee and coconut shakes tied with lemon, mint and pineapple).

Not long after we’d announced our safe arrival via Twitter, Remo (last seen in Kunming, China) sends us an email saying he is also in town. We arrange to meet for dinner the following evening. Before long we bump into Martin and Catarina (two Swiss we’d met on the way into town) again, plus a Dutch cyclist we’d briefly spotted on the road and three Korean cyclists who are staying at the same hotel as us. We spend a few social evenings with the Swiss bunch and secretly wonder if Vientiane has some sort of powerful magnet attracting long distance steel framed bicycles from miles around.

A late drink with Eeva, a friend of a friend from Finland who is working for the EU, fixes our ,plans for the next week. She needs a cat-sitter for a few days and we decide we quite like the idea of a real house to stay in. She leaves us with a set of keys, instructions to feed ‘The Annoying Cat’ whenever she turns up and a heavily annotated map showing her favourite places in town. Our Eeva-inspired eating highlights include mango pancakes at a tiny eatery around the corner from her house, and a night at a Pakistani restaurant where the gregarious owner films our reaction to dinner and posts the results on his Facebook page. He was evidently delighted with this new marketing tool.

Aside from a few bakeries and high class restaurants, there’s little left of Vientiane’s French colonial days, with only a few of the old French buildings left standing under the bulldozer of modernisation. We left the expensive baguettes alone, but tried lunch at a guidebook recommended restaurant one day, finding the whole white linen tablecloths and fast fluent French surrounding us incredibly surreal.

Our one important task in town is to extend our Laos visas. The process goes smoothly enough until the officials notice that I don’t have a Laos entry stamp. I quietly curse the bumbling border guards at the Sop Hun border who seemed more interested in collecting dubious fees rather than inking papers. The man-in-charge disappears into a backroom with my passport and Justin and I spend an impatient 15 minutes waiting for the verdict.

Back behind his desk, he beckons me over saying with a small smile -  “Okay, you can stay.” Unfortunately it takes us two more visits to the office to get the correct extension stamp. Perhaps the attitudes can sometimes be a little too relaxed here.

Five days of living in a real house goes far too fast. Despite the best intentions to be productive, most of our time is spent trying to root a cheap tablet we buy at the Laos markets so it will run on the Android operating system rather than the fake-Android it comes with. Aside from this time-sucking task, we buy a few days worth of vegetables at the fresh produce markets and cook as often as we can, plus take bike rides along the waterfront and out to Pha That Luang, the temple which features on the national seal. On one of our last evenings we finally catch a sunset on the banks of the Mekong with cold beers in hand.

There’s a little darkness in Laos’ blue sky days, as witnessed during our visit to the COPE centre. COPE provides prosthetics and mobility devices in Laos, a service all the more critical because of Laos’ dubious title of the ‘most heavily bombed country in the world’. Despite ongoing bomb disposal efforts there are still 300 casualties a year caused by detonation of UXOs which were dumped on the country during the Vietnam war. After wandering around the exhibition we sit in the attached movie theatre to watch Bomb Harvest, a documentary about bomb removal squad training. We vow to watch our step as we cycle south.

Here are a few snapshots of the city and surrounds during our break.

Monks and morning markets

Early morning rising was a satisfying ritual in Luang Prabang, as before 8am the morning markets were busy with all manner of exotic beast, the best bread seller still had loaves left and snacks were just being pulled out of woks of hot oil. The bounty we brought back to our hotel room included just ripe papayas, deep fried sweet potato and rice pancakes like those we’d sampled first in Vietnam.

Also rising early were Luang Prabang’s monks who walked a circuit of the town as part of the daily dawn alms-giving ceremony. One morning we woke extra early so we witness this act of devotion as quietly and respectfully as we could (hence no photos) and found ourselves a quiet corner of the town’s main drag, across the road from a handful of devout Buddhists waiting for strings of bright orange clad monks to pass. I couldn’t help but wonder at the devotion required to eat rice pressed into balls by hundreds of different hands.

Walks, wats and waterfalls

Still adjusting to the South Asian heat we imposed strict rules on our excursions, trying to walk through the city as it cooled in the late afternoon. One day we lazily strolled to the top of the hill dominating the centre of the touristic peninsula, another we found ourselves on the Mekong at sunset. We spent another afternoon admiring the mosaic work on the temples at Xieng Thong, one of the cities most impressive wats.

With the call of “tuk tuk…. waterfall?” following us around the centre most days, we couldn’t resist exploring Kuang Si, one of the nearby waterfalls ourselves. A short 30k ride without luggage rewarded us with a whole day of exploring through a gorgeous park, where we got to wade through deep pools at the very top of the falls, and swim at the very bottom.

Routes, rest and other riders

We had quickly settled into holiday mode at Somgith guesthouse with Philipp and Valeska, who cycled from the Vietnam border with us. With fresh bread a short walk away in the markets and an endless supply of hot water outside our room, it was all too easy to let mornings slip away with idle chat. We also convinced two British cyclists, Sam and Francesca, to stick around for another day, despite the fact they were about to depart when we invited them to join us for lunch. Oops.

Route planning for our final few months began in earnest after the Austrians said their goodbyes and we ran out of other things to distract us. After drawing some big lines on bikeroutetoaster we realised that we had a lot of time to do just a smidgen more cycling in order to catch a flight in mid-Feb back to New Zealand. While we could push ourselves and fly from Singapore instead, we’ve decided that an enforced slowdown will be much more enjoyable than a speedy trip south.

With less than 2000km between us and our end goal of Bangkok, it was an easy decision to stay in Luang Prabang for one more night. Lucky too, as on our final rest day we realised the minor road we had planned to take south of Phonsavan might not actually exist and had to come up with a few alternative plans.

When we finally roused ourselves out of rest and back onto the bicycles it was for another early start. The effort in leaving before dawn was made up for by watching the city begin to wake up. We cycled past large groups of monks preparing for their morning alms-collection under yellow street lights. What surprised us was they were all chanting and as we cycled away their voices trailed off behind us into the fog.

We cross into the country with Mirko, an Italian cyclist who is also headed up to Vietnam’s premier hill top town. He (perhaps wisely) opts for the bus, leaving us to conquer the 28km climb alone. Pedalling away from the river, the border town of Lao Cai passes by in a blur of motorcycles and baguette stalls before the climbing really begins about 5km in. We’re soon in thick jungle interspersed with roadside shacks selling beer and food, following a road which heads relentlessly up. The heat is a new challenge and almost instantly the sweat factor is so high that the water is rolling off my cheeks. Three hours later, just as our legs are threatening to turn to jelly, we hit the outskirts of Sa Pa and our incredibly disproportionate reward of a five day break.

A tranquil hill-top village with stunning views of rice terraces and Vietnam’s highest peak, Fansipan, Sa Pa’s stretch of swank hotels and 5-star dining options is about as far from Vietnam-proper as Invercargill is from London. We’re lucky to find a cheap room with a view over the valley at Green Valley Hotel, about 500m past the end of the main thoroughfare, but our overriding impression is that the place is a little expensive for our budget.

A mist hangs over the valley for much of the week, only occasionally clearing to reveal the rice terraces below. A constant throng of woman from local villages cluster together in small groups along the main street. In a swirl of brightly embroidered garments, they’re in town to sell local handicrafts, but we suspect the bigger business is taking visitors on tours to the villages. Hundreds of camera-toting tourists follow a parade of brightly clad villagers past our hotel pied-piper style every morning, leaving us envisaging their village destination as a vast factory of souvenir manufacturing.

We’re up early one morning to take advantage of an “all you can eat” breakfast buffet in town, and burn off the calories by hiking past Cat Cat village, which lies at the other end of Sa Pa. We’re quickly away from the well-maintained paths lined with souvenir stalls and find ourselves on a path which eventually leads to Fansipan peak. Taking a steep off-piste ‘short-cut’ back to the main path, I get a little too close to nature, resulting in three impressive leech bites, though we never saw the little blighters.

We’ve decided to head straight for the northern Laos border at Dien Bien Phu, following a four day route through Vietnam’s high country. We follow a line of peaks which seem to fold into the distance in identical lines, passing small villages where the woman remind me of peacocks, all beautifully dressed up with elaborate hairpieces, often carrying work tools or baskets. In bigger towns the houses are dominated by brightly painted concrete colonial structures but as we start following rivers, the villages are made up of simple stilt houses.

At close quarters our days are dominated by cuteness. Baby animals dominate the road with piglets, chicks and puppies weaving on and off the road. Children shout ‘bye bye’ to us as we cycle past and giggle uncontrollably as we reply. Its incredibly infectious and we laugh with them.

Rural Vietnam is awake early and when we leave hotels at dawn the streets are already alive with motorcycles. At dusk things shut down quickly and we’re amazed at the contrast. After dinner one night I walk looking for a late night snack and see a whole crowd of children sitting in an open living room watching television together. As I walk by the programme finishes and they all disperse into the pitch black night.

Arriving in Dien Bien Phu after a few days where our diet has been dominated by rice based products, we enjoy its slightly bigger town feel, staying for a couple of nights and stocking up on Vietnamese coffee.

Justin is cleaning bicycles in the courtyard when a couple of Austrian cycle tourists check in. Philipp and Valeska are also heading home after a long period away and we had a lot to talk about in our last evening in Vietnam. With a big climb ahead of us to the border it made sense to team up to cross into Laos.

The below documents what two hungry cyclists ate in one day in Vietnam.

Breakfast

Sticky rice with ‘flossed’ meat on top (could be chicken, could be pork) served at a roadside stall outside our hotel. Followed by banh cuon (rolled rice pancakes) accompanied by meat rissoles in fish sauce.

Snack

After 18 months of cycle touring we’re still eating Snickers bars (considering an appeal for sponsorship!)

Lunch

Pho bo (noodle soup with beef) and a plate of scrambled eggs.

Dinner

Stir-fried beef and greens, cabbage, sliced cucumber ( with cabbage soup and bowl of rice not pictured). All other tables at our restaurant served pretty much the same meal.

Dessert

Nine bananas and the rest of a packet of ‘Good Choice’ biscuits. Hunger abated.