The church was almost full. From my pew near the back, between two bulky headdresses, I could see a young Chinese woman with a pudding basin haircut and an open hymn book, standing on the stage. Beneath their various ornaments, the headdresses were simple cloth caps dyed blue-black with indigo, but fully embellished they must have weighed a couple of kilograms. Hemispheres of beaten silver, called chukhaw, were sewn onto the front and sides. Silver-plated trapezoids the size of cigar boxes had been attached to the backs, with lengths of coloured beads, dyed horse hair and feathered tassels hanging from them, amongst coins. Sitting behind the ladies wearing the headdresses, I could read King Edward Emperor, still visible on the silver. The monarch’s face was worn down and the coins were thin and dainty: rupees spent in Burma or India during the British Raj.

The woman at the front of the church greeted us in Chinese, “Dàjiā hǎo!” and I wondered whether the ladies in headdresses understood this phrase by now. They were Akha, one of the ethnic minorities that Thailand calls “hill tribes”, as was three quarters of the congregation. The other quarter was Chinese – except for two curiosities: Iain and I, trying hopelessly to blend in

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In 1950, the Kuomintang’s 93rd Division fought its way out of China into Burma’s Shan State. The Chinese Civil War was already over: a year earlier, two million refugees had followed Chiang Kaishek to Taiwan. Mao’s Red Army was celebrating its victory, but the 93rd Division refused to surrender. It survived for twelve years in the jungles of the Shan State, in constant conflict with the Burmese Army. When China entered the Korean War, the 93rd Division was armed by the CIA and on seven occasions, between 1950 and 1953, it tried – and failed – to retake the Chinese province of Yunnan.

In 1961, the by now Forgotten Army was granted asylum in Thailand, on a hilltop in the Golden Triangle called Mae Salong. It had still not surrendered. To fund its military operations, the Forgotten Army grew poppies and turned Mae Salong into Southeast Asia’s largest heroin refinery. It was co-opted by Thailand to fight a Chinese-backed communist incursion and it was not until 1982 that the soldiers of the Forgotten Army put down their guns, after more than 40 years of war. For their service to Thailand, they were granted Thai citizenship. Zhan Dening was among them. We met him sitting outside his family home when we visited the hilltop town, which is now called Santikhiri, “The Hill of Peace,” and asked him to tell us his story

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At the foot of Lasagongma Mountain, 5224 metres above sea level, the Mekong takes its first icy breaths. Under Tibet’s cobalt skies, it tumbles toward flatter earth, into tropical Southeast Asia, where it meets the ocean at Vietnam. It’s a journey of 4,350 kilometres through six countries, making the Mekong the world’s tenth longest river. It is Laos’ Mae Nam Khong, or Mother of Rivers. The title mother is bestowed on great rivers by both Thai and Lao people; perhaps unsurprisingly, the Khong in Mae Nam Khong is derived from the Sanskrit Ganga of Grandmother Ganges herself.

The Mekong gives shape to Laos’ western border with Thailand, and divides it from Burma just north of the Golden Triangle, where opium and arms trading have been replaced by casinos and Chinese cargo. The river is Laos’ pulse and lifeblood. It is its backbone too, a line of defence that has helped the landlocked nation survive. I am sailing along the northern arc of the border between Thailand and Laos, following the Mekong from Chiang Kong back to my temporary home in Luang Prabang, and Iain. It is a two day passage on a Luang Say cruise, with days spent on the water and a night at a lodge halfway, in Pakbeng. Watching the scenery go by, taking photos – and a few notes – are all I plan to do.

Thailand is on the river’s right bank, where a shrine gleams gold behind leaves of dull jade. Steps lead up to it, skirted by a banister sculpted into a writhing naga. The mythical serpent is a guardian of treasure, often associated with water. Thai flags flutter between the King’s flag of yellow silk. Across the river – in Laos – three women are bathing on the shore, wrapped in sarongs, beside a royal blue long-tail boat. Today’s laundry – trousers, sinhs, Hello Kitty sheets – blows in the breeze on the river bank. Further up the river other Lao people fish and unload sacks from wooden boats, dragging them onto pebbly shores

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In his novel Travels with My Aunt, Graham Greene tells the story of a bookmaker who has spent his entire working life at a racetrack, watching horses run endlessly along a circuit, like hamsters spinning a wheel. When he retires, the bookie plans to travel perpetually, by train and boat. He believes constant movement will slow time down, stretching out the last part of his life.

When he leaves England, the bookie is a wealthy man. He boards the Orient Express in Paris, but at Venice he has a debilitating stroke. Stuck, he strikes on a workable alternative: the bookie asks the novel’s Aunt to find him a house with 365 rooms, which will allow him to sleep somewhere new every night. The Aunt scours Italy, but can only track down a crumbling mansion with 52 rooms, including bathrooms. The bookie buys it and every week he carefully packs his suitcase and embarks for the room next door. Near the end of the 51^st week, he has a single bathroom left, where a comfortable armchair will substitute for a bed, but a day before his final move the bookie has another stroke and is confined to bed.

Doctors instruct him to stay there, where he can expect to live for another few years. The bookie ignores their advice. Left unsupervised, he packs and drags himself along the floor to the bathroom, where the Aunt finds him dying at the door. “It felt like a lifetime,” are his last words.

Greene’s story is interesting apropos of nothing, but for the past few days Claire and I have been repeating the bookie’s experiment. We’re in Bangkok, staying in an area loosely called Khao San. It is the hub of Southeast Asia’s Banana Pancake Trail, with as much English and Japanese on its signboards as Thai. Khao San is “a new sort of place,” writes Susan Orleans, “not really Thai anymore, barely Asian, overwhelmingly young, palpably transient, and anchored in the world by the Internet, where there is no actual time and no actual location.”

People appear on Khao San just long enough to disappear. It is, to quote the Khao San Road Business Association’s motto, “Gateway to Southeast Asia,” provided that you are travelling on the cheap and have a backpack fused to your shoulders. From here you can embark on Welcome Travel’s escorted tour of Chiang Mai, which guarantees contact with four different hill tribes, or the Cheap and Smile Tour to Koh Samui, or a minibus trip to Phuket or Penang or Kota Baharu, or an overland journey by open-bed pickup truck to Phnom Penh or Saigon, or a trip via some rough conveyance to India or Indonesia or Nepal or Tibet or Myanmar or anywhere you can think of—or couldn’t think of, probably, until you saw it named on a travel-agency kiosk on Khao San Road and decided that was the place you needed to see. Everything you need to stay afloat for months of travelling—tickets, visas, laundry, guidebooks, American movies, Internet access, phone service, luggage storage—is available on Khao San Road.

My father and stepmother were in Bangkok with us, for a few nights. We stayed together at the New Siam Riverside, on the Chao Phraya. It is a new, three star hotel with a small swimming pool, flat screens in every room, malfunctioning WiFi and buffet breakfasts where guests can pile up reconstituted bacon but no cheese. Our room, which faced the street instead of the river, cost 1,600 Thai baht per night – roughly $50. When my father left, we moved just across the road to a sister hotel called New Siam II. It has a smaller pool, which is in the shade of the hotel building for most of the day. Breakfast is à la carte, beers are cheap and the TVs are badly tuned boxes. That room, at 790 baht a night, cost half as much as New Siam Riverside, just across the road, run by the same company. Two nights later, we moved next door, to Peachy Guesthouse, which has the marked neglect, tropical decay and shrill signs – No shoes! No prostitutes! No noise! – of a Khao San original.

In 1982, Bangkok celebrated its bicentennial, which coincided with the auspicious Buddhist year of 2525. To draw in tourists, the city filled its calendar with processions and festivals, centred on the Royal Palace just south of Khao San. It worked: Bangkok was overrun with farang, and people who couldn’t find accommodation talked the residents of the neighbourhood into renting out their spare rooms. Peachy’s name marks it as a part of the Khao San old guard: other, equally ramshackle guest houses in the neighbourhood have names like Rainbow, Sweety, Live Good and Merry. Peachy takes up the whole of a three storey building. The wooden floors creak, eliciting loud shushes from long term guests. Its courtyard is shaded by trees bent over like battered drunks, where the Moonshine Bar sells Thai rotgut. The rooms are bigger that any of New Siam’s and have scarified couches and desks, but no TVs. They cost 230 baht a night with air-conditioning and 400 baht with an en suite bathroom.

Travelling between these three neighbours – New Siam Riverside, New Siam II and Peachy – was like travelling back in time, through the progressive ambitions of Khao San’s landowners. It has also drawn out our time in Bangkok, giving it three distinct seasons: sundowners beside the river; disjointed days spent hunting down WiFi, strong coffee and the will to work; late nights under a towelling blanket, with music from the Moonshine Bar seeping through Peachy’s walls.

We couldn’t bring ourselves to go straight to Peachy when my father left. New Siam II had most of its more luxurious sister’s comforts and was a useful halfway house, but once we had checked out and moved next door, it was hard to imagine why we had prevaricated. What had justified the price of our other two rooms? Most obviously, it didn’t seem like other people had slept in New Siam’s spotless hotels, with their towels carefully folded to resemble flowers or Southeast Asian animals, whereas Peachy wore its past guests like a badge of honour. Were we paying for the comforting lie that the room was ours alone? How much more fun – how much more like travel – to have a guest book in every room, so that you would know Reinhard from Germany had spent a night in your room alone before you arrived, or that Abass and Nsedu from Nigeria had shared this room with you, separated only by time, on their way to “anywhere you can think of – or couldn’t think of, probably, until you saw it named on a travel-agency kiosk on Khao San Road.”

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Nong Khai is a place most people pass through briskly, on their way from Thailand into Laos. It is  modestly-sized, but the town’s infrastructure makes clear the difference between Thailand and its neighbour, just across the Mekong. The roads are clean and well laid out. When Claire and I cycled out of town, through nearby villages, there were well-stocked shops, public phones and power lines, which are all rare in rural Laos. Nong Khai also has expatriates. Some of them are teachers or small business owners, others are pensioners, but the majority are dishevelled men of a certain age, who spend their days in bars beside the Mekong, drinking and whoring. Border runs to Laos are easy, I suppose.

Nong Khai is a town without pretences, with one exception: the Salakaewkoo Sculpture Park, a garden filled with cement colossi on its outskirts, made at the inspiration of a single man. Claire and I spent most of our time in Nong Khai at Mut Mee Gueshouse, writing in its garden. We were doing work for a Hong Kong magazine, but found time for a few stories of our own. We did not find time for the tale of the sculpture park. I’ve borrowed it instead, from the owner of Mut Mee,  Julian Wright.

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There is a singing, smiling Tibetan in the documentary about our lives in Shanghai. Her name is Lamu and she works at Mokkos, the Japanese bar that Claire and I made our local after chancing on it down a quiet lane. Lamu sings when customers pick up the instruments scattered through the bar – the bongo drums, guitars and clickers, along with the single-stringed ektara from Nepal. She doesn’t need the accompaniment: her voice is strikingly powerful and drowns out everything, even the drums.

Smiling, singing Tibetans are a mainstay of Chinese propaganda. They appeared in ads for the 2010 Shanghai World Expo while we were there, twirling in traditional costume with the Expo’s mascot Haibo. It is how China chooses to portray most of its ethnic minorities: childlike, simple and happy with Communist Party rule.

The documentary was funded by the China Intercontinental Communications Centre – a government organ – and I can only imagine how happy we made officials by inserting their favourite prop into the story of our time in Shanghai. We also took the film crew – flown in from South Africa, working for a television station called eTV – to a longtang scheduled for demolition. It appears in the documentary without context. I am shown talking to and taking photographs of an old woman who had lived in the collection of homes and lanes that made up the longtang her whole life. She was, she said, happy to go. Her home had no plumbing and she saw no reason to stay so close to the city centre, without having to work. There was nuance in the longtang – progress paired with loss – but forced demolitions are a thorny subject in China and had no place in documentary intended to project its soft power, without nuance. It was propaganda and we, to some extent, were its puppets, but we didn’t mind very much. In fact, we felt lucky: whatever the final result, the documentary was an opportunity for us to reflect on our time in Shanghai, just before we left

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Kham pointed across the river, at a peak like a rotten canine in the purple distance, with its tip hidden by a monsoon shroud. “That’s where we’re going,” he said, and led us down to dragon boats idling on the Nam Khan, waiting to take us from one riverbank to the other, into terrain that was emphatically blank on a Google map, but only fifteen kilometres east of Luang Prabang.

We were on a tour – a two day “fair trek” organised by a company called Tiger Trail. Kham was guiding Claire and I along with three women from Normandy to a village in the shadow of Houy Fai Peak, where we would sleep; in the morning, we would make our way back along a different trail. It was seven hours up and five hours down in muggy heat, through the sorts of rural areas where three quarters of Laos’ population live. Tiger Trail promised “authentic interactions with Khmu and Hmong villagers,” which rung like clumsy copy for a human zoo, but Laos is not a country of cities, towns and tubing: the majority of its people live in hard-to-reach villages, inaccessible without a guide or careful preparation, and Claire and I had succumbed to the choreography of a tour.

The river was full. Trees with fat, naked roots squeezed its banks, playing a game of chicken with the ochre current. The French explorer Henri Mouhot called the Nam Khan “a beautiful stream, which leads to some Laotian and savage villages bearing the name of Fie.” It was these “savages, with habitations…in the thickest parts of the forests, where they only can find a path,” that we were going to see, and when we arrived on the opposite bank, and started on our way, it was clear that we could have neither found nor followed the path ourselves

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When he at last succumbed to malarial fever, Henri Mouhot was just ten kilometres from Luang Prabang. He had tramped his way across mainland Southeast Asia for three years, between 1858 and 1861, living for months in the Cambodian jungle, amongst “the savage Stiens”, where tigers were such a constant menace that he slept with a loaded gun. He had visited the ruins at Angkor, which were being torn apart and swallowed in places by a resurgent jungle; locals told him the temples were built by gods or giants and Mouhot, with no knowledge of India, could not offer a more plausible explanation. When he penetrated the hardwood forests of Laos on the back of an elephant, he was the first white man in 25 years to enter the kingdom – or what was left of it after Thailand and Vietnam had casually picked Laos apart – and it was only at the very end that his health gave out. Around him, people regularly suffered from “the pestilential miasmata”, but he had a regimen – “abstinence, all but total, from wine and spirits, and drinking only tea, never cold water” – that he credited for his sustained good health.

Mouhot died on October 29, 1861, beside the Nam Khan River. He was 35. His servant Phrai sent Mouhot’s journals – “scribbled generally by the light of a torch, and on my knees at the foot of a tree, amidst interruptions of all sorts, of which the mosquitoes are not the least annoying” – to the French ambassador in Siam. Three years later they were published in two volumes, both of which are now in the public domain. In the preface, Mouhot’s brother thanks Phrai, who accompanied the explorer everywhere. “Phrai is delighted to attend me, and to run about the woods all day,” Mouhot wrote, soon after the two men met, “and I am not less pleased with our bargain, for his knowledge of the country, his activity, his intelligence, and attachment to me, are invaluable.” The bond between the two was so strong, by the end, that Mouhot worried Phrai might die for him, but he still referred to his servants as “boys” and wherever he went, Mouhot looked at Southeast Asia with a European’s jaundiced eye.

While Mouhot was in Cambodia in 1859, his countrymen were planting France’s tricolore in Saigon. By 1893, the French conquest of Indochina was complete; Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos had been incorporated into a French protectorate, and gunboat diplomacy had left Thailand with a territory reduced at every side. Mouhot was posthumously accused of being at the vanguard of European imperialism, but in spite of his stage-whispered assessments of Bangkok’s fortifications, he was mostly an old-fashioned naturalist, more interested in skinning monkeys and digging up worms than military conquest, and his colonial views were an inescapable – if inexcusable – product of his time. He collected and carefully packed specimens of plants and animals across the region, and classified hundreds of species for science. His journals are scattered with observations of geology, meteorology and anthropology, with a breadth of scientific knowledge that modern travel writers can only admire.

Mouhot was an old-fashioned Christian too, constantly worrying about Southeast Asia’s heathen soul. Religion gave him a network; it was also a bulwark against loneliness, because he stayed with missionaries everywhere except for Laos. They introduced him to government officials and tribal chiefs, who provided Mouhot with the oxen, ponies and elephants he needed to haul his baggage. “Their life,” he wrote of Southeast Asia’s missionaries, “is one of the hardest and most painful, and requires self-sacrifice more than any other. Exposed to the influence of pernicious climates, badly lodged, badly fed, far from their families and from their country, often ill and dying without help — such is the lot of these men.�

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Luang Prabang is a riddle that photographs can solve. It is a town popular with tourists and a World Heritage site, but it rarely feels overrun. It is like a sprawling resort in places, with a commerce given over to foreign comforts, but it is not a colony on the Banana Pancake Trail. Instead, Luang Prabang is tranquil. The Mekong and its bubbling tributary, the Nam Khan, wrap around the historic district and meet at its eastern tip, punctuating time with the river sounds of Southeast Asia – with the hum of motorboats and squeals of swimming children, with the plop of hand nets and sploosh of oars. Bamboo groves and palm trees arch over its riverbanks, and the jungle has not yet been banished by urban sprawl; it covers the town protectively, and looking down from the limestone hills that surround the town, nothing but the golden tips of Buddhist stupas remain visible above the green fecundity of trees.

Luang Prabang is a riddle because it has no single wonder to leave you awestruck, but the town pries its way into your imagination all the same. It has the elegant temples of Southeast Asia, with roofs tiered like loose skin on the arch of a dragon’s back, but in and of themselves, its temples are not especially remarkable. It has novice monks moving between the duties of a carefully structured day, in ochre and saffron robes set off by the browns of teak, brick and rust, but monks are a part of life across the region. Its architecture is a blend of indigenous and French styles, with elements borrowed from Laos’ neighbours, but its mixture of timber and brick, shuttered windows and ornamental eaves can be found throughout old Indochina. Its animals are remarkable, especially its dogs; they are left to take themselves on walks, but stay friendly, greedily chasing after a stroke. There are cats too, with broken tails, and chickens clucking and pecking in vegetable patches on the river banks. Luang Prabang is not wholly urban, nor is it rural: it is a town of distinct parts and mingled pasts that has held onto its soul, and with photographs you can frame the elements of its heritage individually and start to unravel the riddle

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Claire and I went to Vang Vieng to laze in a grove of Edenic green. It was a picture-perfect fantasy, conjured up by a postcard in Vientiane labelled Blue Lagoon, but we were curious too. Vang Vieng was where drug-addled backpackers bobbed downriver in tyre tubes, and its ugly reality did not come as a surprise when we arrived, or even a disappointment. The town pandered to the depths of hedonism, and its signboards promising cold beer, blaring hip hop and reruns of Family Guy and Friends were like a parody of Western culture, as if the joke was on us. It was laughable and dispiriting by turns, but on the day we rode out to find landlocked Laos’ Blue Lagoon, pedalling mountain bikes over a bamboo toll bridge and along a dusty track, into farmland, we found a reason to return to Vang Vieng.

Rain started pouring down in heavy, languid drops. The track became slippery, forcing us to pedal quickly through deep puddles, spraying mud. It covered us up to our necks in a layer of brown, like the buffaloes around us, wallowing idly in the paddy fields. There were signposts at intervals, pointing to caves with Buddha idols in their depths and a variety of Blue Lagoons; if we hadn’t stopped to play with a litter of puppies, we might have paid 20,000 kip for access to the wrong pool of water.

The puppies’ owner was a Thai man with a small homestead set beside the road, kilometres from the closest settlement. He said he had been a jungle monk at home, but now he was married to a Lao woman, and he meditated with her every evening, in their home of crooked logs without electric light. The couple had chickens and a garden planted with vegetables, basil, lemongrass, bananas and pineapples; the only food they bought was rice. They had placed three tables in the garden and optimistically opened a restaurant, where Claire and I promised to eat on our way back. We did, and the slices of pineapple served with our fried rice were sweet and soft, without a trace of stringy fibre. The Thai man warned us to ignore the signs to other pools, and pointed us in the direction of the postcard’s Blue Lagoon; it was about five kilometres away, he said, past a village and over two more bridges, where we saw children cavorting naked in the clear river water, and wondered why we were cycling further, our arms aching from the dirt road’s constant bumps

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