Someone told me Burma is where they grow the rice, Cambodia is where they eat it and Laos is where they listen to the rice grow. It’s a very peaceful Buddhist country with a very quiet capital, Vientiane. I was luck enough to go to Laos with both my good friend James and my wife later.

When I went the first time with James there was no Internet, no ATMs etc. We actually ended paying $500 to make a phone call to my Dad in order to get $1000 so we could get out of the country. When he wired the money through AMEX, we were literally the first tourists in the country to retrieve money that way. The person at the bank opened a massive ledger book that was completely empty and proceeded to enter our names as the first ones in the book.