The Highs and lows of Asia with a baby!

South East Asia
Well we started with a great week in Laos, visiting our close friends, seeing some of their work, and having a great time catching up. Laos is just beautiful, the people are friendly and we just love the food and weather.

At the same time it's really hard seeing a country in such need. They spend only US$1 per child per year on primary education, have appalling road safety records (it's quite scary driving there!) and we visited the only hospital in a major town and you'd be ashamed to let a farm animal go in there.

Laos is the most bombed country in the world - as Vietnam war pilots were instructed to dump their munitions as they left Vietnam, although they were not at war with Laos. It has also been sprayed with billions of gallons of pesticides so the Americans could route out the Khmer who were alleged to have sided with the Vietnamese. Unfortunately this means that there are huge numbers of still births and birth defects today and people (mostly children) frequently lose limbs as they come across unexploded munitions. 6 tonnes of bombs were dropped on Laos for every one of the 6million inhabitants (36 million tonnes !).

We'd like to come and help here, but can't find the right openings. But, who knows what Sri Lanka will lead on to?

Sorry for the despondent bit, now here's the fun side:

Jason, Olly and I (no girls allowed) went off road dirt biking, - excellent fun, especially watching Olly (who has never ridden a motor bike before) twang into trees, disappear into ditches and generally try to avoid sticking to the track! He warned us he is known in mountain biking circles as "tree hugger". O.k. . . . . I have to confess I had a couple of spectacular encounters with a bog and some challenging low branches. . .


Photo 1: bikes


We also managed to get a good mountain bike trip in - crossing the river with our bikes in canoes was fun - even though we called this part of the trip work!














Photo 2: Dodgy scaffolding Photo 3: All of us

More photos on the right hand side of this blog.

Sorry this is a lot longer than we'd like to make each blog page, but a lot has happened in a short time!