Apologies for the tardiness of this latest installment: we have spent the last two weeks travelling with two veteran overlanders - who drove from Wiltshire across the Sahara to the Congo in the 1960s - and we've been hard pushed to keep up with the pace! Finally we have found a few free hours and find ourselves in Siem Reap, by the Angkor Wat temples in Cambodia. Since last we spoke, Georgia and I continued on through Laos, back through Central and Southern Vietnam, up the Mekong Delta, stopped off for a few days in the island of Phu Quoc then continued up the river to Phnom Penh in Cambodia and, finally, caught a bus up to Siem Reap. Phew. We will deal with much of this in our next article, coming up in a few days. For now, we should pick up where we left off: in northern Laos.

The Mekong river was present from the start, its muddy banks and silt laden water gliding around the North and East of the World Heritage City of Louang Prabang. This is a most beautiful city, as ancient red roofed temples share the skyline with immaculately preserved French colonial buildings. Food too reaches its peak here, with riverside restaurants serving a variety of spicy curries and tomyum soups, fresh fish and the ubiquitous sticky rice, rolled into balls with your fingers and then dipped in any sauce available.

After a few days' indulgence, we forced ourselves out of the town on a three day trek, which started with a 50 Kilometre cycle ride, along dusty tracks and through remote villages, over hills so steep that one of us had to enlist some local help to push to the top! We spent the night in a small riverside village, far removed from the splendour of Louang Prabang.

The next day we went further still, hiking up the highest nearby peak, until we reached a Hmong tribe village. Still exhausted by our walk, it was striking to realise that the path upon which we travelled was their only route to the outside world, their only means of transporting supplies, including it would seem, enormous bags of World Vision sponsored rice. Despite this, according to both our guide and our own eyes, the members of the village lived on a low subsistence level - nearly everyone there lacks "enough" to eat. They live in a communal way, sharing what meagre resources they have in a hierarchical system: the chief receives the greatest share, followed by the village elders, then the rest of the village in priority of importance.

They have small amounts of livestock - pot-bellied pigs, chickens and a few turkeys - and a bit of arable land, but the rest of their food comes from foraging and hunting in the surrounding jungle. Alongside hunting dogs, they also have the unusual sight of "hunting cocks". This flatters the cockerels somewhat - they're really just glorified bait: they are tied to a high branch of a tree in the middle of the jungle at night, while the hunter beds down in the undergrowth. Then, as dawn breaks, his morning call attracts all of the wild chickens and cockerels, making them easy pickings for the hunter.

We were lucky enough to meet the chief after we arrived, his two gold teeth gleaming in the mid-afternoon sun. The teeth are a symbol of his status, which also affords him multiple wives (apparently up to five, all sharing a - presumably large - bed), two in the chief's case. Soon our feeling of uncomfortability, intruding on these people's lives to do little more than gawp, was further increased. Behind us a rifle of gunshots was fired: the village was mourning the death of a 10 year old boy, who had died three days earlier from a simple throat infection - we were miles from the nearest hospital and there was little medical support in the area. We were given the opportunity to see the body, which remains unburied for a period of up to ten days. We were relieved to find out that we could decline without causing offence.

To put the health care problems into further perspective, our wonderful guide was a fully trained nurse. He left nursing just a few years after qualifying, as a nurse's salary of 15 US Dollars per month is the same as the amount he can earn guiding small groups like us for three days.

There are still allegations of repression of the Hmong by the Laos government. During the Vietnam War - or the 'American War', as it known here - the Hmong played a major part in the South Vietnamese/American campaign. The South and East of Laos were occupied by the North Vietnamese and the puppet communist faction, the Pathet Lao. Occupying this area allowed the North Vietnamese to bypass the de-militarised zone (DMZ) across the centre of Vietnam, transporting troops, arms, trucks and supplies along the 'Ho Chi Minh Trail', through Laos and Cambodia into Southern Vietnam. Despite this occupation, Laos remained officially neutral, meaning that the Americans could not, in full view of the UN, bomb and break up this supply chain.

Instead the US surreptitiously recruited and trained 30,000 Laos troops, the majority of whom were Hmong people - with a traditional antipathy towards autocratic regimes and who had already suffered atrocities committed by the Pathet Lao - to undermine the North Vietnamese campaign in the so-called 'Secret War'. The activities ranged from guerilla warfare on parts of the trail, to open battles aided by the Royal Laos Airforce (until the Pathet Lao gained control of the whole country) and a small number of American planes.

As Laos tumbled into civil war, there were three major factions: the monarchists, the democrats and the communists, each side led - in name at least - by a Prince. The 'Red Prince' Souphanouvong led the Pathet Lao, having studied in Paris alongside Ho Chi Minh (Pol Pot also studied in Paris before leading his Maoist regime in Cambodia - how strange and de-civilising the influence of Parisien institutions has been in South East Asia).

After the Pathet Lao take-over, very few resistance fighters managed to escape the country. Those who did became refugees, predominantly in either Thailand or America. Those who did not were victims of large scale retribution, which allegedly continues to this day (the last reported case was January this year). The Pathet Lao have changed their name to Lao People's Revolutionay Party, the single party of Laotian power, and are slowly attempting to liberalise the country and the economy (like China, economy first), but this legacy remains. However, the only repression we witnessed was that of neglect.

Past the eastern fringe of the village lies the local primary school, shared between the children of this village and the next, another minority group called the Khmu. The Hmong are originally from Southern China and were slowly pushed into the hills of Northern Laos and Vietnam by the expanding Han majority. As the Hmong moved south, the Khmu - the autochthonous inhabitants of Laos, displaced by a northwards Thai migration - moved north. They met in the middle, up in the hills. They speak their own languages, Khmu part of the Mon-Khmer language family, Hmong the indigenous language of Southern China. They don't learn Lao until they go to school, which must make communication between the two sets of children difficult for the first few years at least. The school itself was a two roomed building, with a large dusty playground in front. At break time, as we went past, Georgia noticed how similar it was to the primary schools she has taught at in the UK: groups of boys playing football, girls skipping.

The next day, unfortunately we had to make our way back to Louang Prabang, this time down the river, on kayaks. A month after the rainy season had finished, the river was calm with only a few tiny rapids to punctuate the time. Small as they may have been, they were still too much for us, the white water knocking our inexperienced selves off our shared kayak twice! Eventually, happy and wet, we arrived back in the town, stopping at a roadside stall with our guide, serving barbecued goat (including some unusual and tasty black pudding with sorrel) and endless quantities of lao-lao - a lethal, homemade spirit made from fermented sticky rice.

The next evening we boarded our 'VIP' bus to Hue, in central Vietnam. VIP is something of a misnomer - it was actually a cargo bus, having removed half of the seats to make for a bigger storage area. Up to the border, before the bus was fully laden, it gave it the atmosphere of a seedy bar, with everyone sitting on mats on the floor, drinking cans of beer, smoking cigarettes and, with no toilet stops for the first few hours, using open windows as urinals. This had a particularly nasty end when one of the driving team (of five) forgot to check if the next window along was still open.

Just before the border, the bus was filled with 250 cases of red bull and two large fridges - a more palatable cargo than the leaking fish sauce and sacks of onions that accompanied us on our way into Laos. After a tortuous and reckless 14 hour drive through Vietnam, where the Highway code has been replaced by the enthusiastic use of the horn, we arrived in Hue. As one driver gleefully told us, "In some countries you drive on the left side of the road, in some countries you drive on the right. In Vietnam, you drive on both!".