From Phnom Penh, I followed the course of the Mekong river north, and the scenery became more beautiful the farther I went. My first stop was Kratie, where I hired a boat to take me out into the middle of the river to see the famous freshwater Irrawaddy dolphins, which live in the waters around Kampi, a few kilometres outside town, and in very few other places in the world. I was only expecting to see a few of them, if I was lucky, but when the boat driver turned off the engine and let the boat drift with the current, they were easy to spot. Sometimes just one or two, sometimes pods of five or six all surfacing together. The number of dolphins has dropped in recent years, but the efforts of an Australian conservation group, and the fact that the dolphins are a tourist attraction, might just be enough to protect them. The next day I sat on the roof of a large, crowded boat for the trip upriver to Stung Treng, and for the final stretch to the Lao border, I squeezed myself into a tiny speedboat, with only four or five other tourists. We bounced along the water at what seemed like an enormous speed, as the driver dodged around rocks and floating branches. Along the river bank, and on sandbars in the middle of the river, the trees that are partly submerged during the wet season stood high and dry - their roots and branches bent and trailed away in the direction of the current, as if they were frozen in time during a violent storm. After about an hour we reached the immigration post, and crossed over into Laos.

Just north of the border, the river widens, and flows around many small islands. Some are submerged during the wet season, while others remain all year round. The area is called Si Phan Don, or Four Thousand Islands, and a couple of the larger islands have become favourite backpacker hangouts. I spent a few days unwinding on Don Det, where there is not that much to do except lie in a hammock or float down the river in an inflatable inner-tube. The night-life is limited to a few restaurants and one of those generic Rasta Bars that seem to spring up wherever you get a high concentration of independent travellers. Just like most of the other versions I'd seen around Asia, this place had Bob Marley on the sound system, pictures of Bob Marley on the walls, books about Bob Marley on the bookshelf etc. But they also had lao-lao (rice whiskey) served warm with honey and lemon, which was excellent - even if it did taste a bit like something that was designed to cure your blocked sinuses.

North to Pakse, where I had arranged to meet my old friend from England, Rob Evans. After travelling around Asia in opposite directions for months, Rob and I had finally arranged to be in the same place at the same time. Over a few beer Lao we exchanged news and travel tips; he told me about his nightmare bus rides in the north, I warned him about the pain of a lao-lao hangover. We talked about our plans for when we returned home, about the contrast between our old working lives and our new, if temporary, travelling lives; and both agreed that after getting back to England our work/life balance needed to be shifted a little bit more in favour of life.

On a Monday morning, while most of our former work colleagues in England were settling into yet another week at the office, Rob and I were trekking across the Bolaven Plateau to the top of a spectacular waterfall. From close up, the stream that drops over Tat Fan falls does not seem to carry much water - but when you walk to the other side of the volcanic crater down into which the water cascades, it looks like a raging torrent. After lunch at the top of another set of falls - a favourite picnic spot for Lao day-trippers - our guide took us to some of the coffee plantations that support many of the villages on the plateau. The climate here is ideal for growing coffee, and although the market price has dropped this year, most of the villages are still able to make a good living. Everywhere there were mats covered with freshly harvested coffee beans, laid out to dry in the sun, sometimes raked into patterns like gravel so that they resembled miniature Zen gardens. The children of the villages all help in the harvesting and drying of the beans, and they were always excited to see us. We stopped at a house in one village, where the children played around us while we sampled some cups of coffee made from newly dried and roasted beans from this year's harvest. So much better than Starbucks.

Rob continued south towards Cambodia, but before he left he gave me his spare set of earplugs to replace the ones I'd lost in Vietnam. I was soon to be eternally grateful for this gift. The bus that took me from Pakse to Vientiane was equipped with the latest video-CD sound system, and "The Video Karaoke Collection Volume 43" was playing all through the 12-hour trip, at volume levels approaching those of a Motorhead concert. Although it's called Karaoke, no-one actually sings along when they're on the bus - they save that for when they're drunk in one of the many karaoke bars in town. The songs are all incredibly depressing. In a typical video, a boy/girl sits alone on a rock staring out to sea, remembering (in flashback) the times he/she was frollicking through the paddyfields with the girl/boy of his/her dreams. The video usually ends before the boy/girl chucks themselves off the rock and into the sea, but still, the effect is not exactly uplifting. The songs all seem to be in minor keys (even those rare songs where the boy and girl end up together), and the music consists of a high, nasal, meandering vocal line over the sort of backing track you get by pressing "autoplay" on a 1980's Casiotone keyboard. The earplugs couldn't block it out entirely of course - they just took the edge off things, like a local anaesthetic during root canal surgery.

Two days in Vientiane, then a bus to Vang Vieng. As if the winding roads didn't make me nervous enough, the guy sitting in front of me rested his rifle against the window at such an angle that it pointed directly at my head. I prayed that the road wouldn't be too bumpy. Apparently, most of the armed men on these buses are government soldiers, since there have been attacks by Hmong rebels in the past. At least there was no karaoke this time. Vang Vieng had some picturesque views to the limestone karst formations by the river, and a couple of interesting caves, but the town itself was full of pizza restaurants, 'shroom shakes and all-you-can-drink specials. Khao San Road, Lao style.

Back on the bus the next day to Luang Phabang, where I hit burn-out. I'd been told that this would happen, and most of the travellers who'd warned me about it said that they experienced it around three or four months into a trip. So it was right on schedule. The problem was not that I was fed up of travelling - I was still excited about the rest of the trip - but that I was just fatigued with moving on all the time, with never spending more than a few days in the same place. Motion sickness.

The usual cure for burn-out is just to stop moving, and it turned out that Luang Phabang was the perfect town to spend a few days doing very little. It's a beautiful place - lots of tourists of course, but it never feels overrun. The town is a World Heritage site, and so there are strict controls on how much development can take place in the historic quarter. Many old wooden houses remain on the narrow streets leading down to the river, which feel like quiet village lanes. Coconut palms line the roads. The green hills across the Mekong river are veiled in a bluish haze, the smoke from slash-and-burn farming, as villagers set fire to fields in preparation for the wet season. The pace of life is slow, either laid-back or lobotomised, depending on your point of view. There seems to be a wat around every corner, and I liked to sit in the temple grounds in the evenings, and listen to the monks chanting. My mind felt as fuzzy and indeterminate as the views over the river, and I felt like I could dissolve into the place. But the atmosphere (or maybe the lao-lao) must have had a restorative effect, and after a week I was feeling refreshed and ready to be on the road again.