January 2007
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A year ago, my old travelling companion Alan Guignon emailed me (as he is wont to do) an itinerary for an escorted tour (yes, an escorted tour) that included a week floating down the Mekong River in the comfort of a newly built boat – it was leaving from an unknown port in China meandering through the jigsaw of countries around the Golden Triangle and down through no-man’s-land to Luang Prabang in Laos.
How good could that be?
And if that wasn’t enough, the tour was starting in the land of Shangri-La up near Tibet and driving down to the World Heritage protected town of Lijiang in the south western Yunnan province of China. To cap it all off, it was finishing up in Angkor Wat in Cambodia.
“I’m sold!”
Over coffee the next morning, I shared my enthusiasm with my old travelling companions the Turners
and no sooner had I arrived back home than the phone rang and Pam was asking would I mind if she and Ken came too. I’d better get back to my old cabin-mate Alan Guignon on the Gold Coast (we met on an airline familiarisation trip to Germany forty years ago this year!) and move this thing forward.
One year on, and having returned home safely avoiding warring Burmese drug lords along the Mekong, I invite you to share some of our experiences. You can scroll through text which I try to illuminate with some of the pictures from my little Kodak digital. The type-face is big to make it easier to read in PDF format and there are many pictures. So, it may appear to be long at first glance. The other version is ‘text only’ that can be easily printed out and read at your convenience.
I’m separating it into four books – Shangri-La, The Mekong, Luang Prabang and Siem Reap.