"As the road approached the crest of the hill I stood up in the saddle and pounded the pedals, trying to find the energy to propel me to the top. Sweat was pouring off me and I emptied the last of my water-bottle over my head." - No I'm not a professional cyclist, or in training to be one. This is what I do on my holidays.

Laos was our destination and my spirits soared as its landscape loomed into view all rugged and mountainous in the hazy sunshine. Being born on an island it seems strange to view one nation while riding a bicycle in another, but as the road disappeared at the top of the hill we saw the expanse of the Maekhong River and the land beyond. The mountains that lay ahead filled me with two quite contrasting emotions - excitement for the adventure ahead - and the dread of having to cycle up and down those blasted hills.

Laos is a sparsely populated country, the size of England yet with only 4 million citizens and is landlocked in the heart of South East Asia. It formed part of French Indochina before becoming a communist republic in 1975, when the king was banished to a cave in the mountainous north and the country entered a period of isolation and re-education. Looking for a novel way to visit a country that had only recently woken from a socialist slumber and started admitting foreign tourists, I decided a mountain bike tour would be the ideal way to get a ground eye view.

After a little investigation I found I was a very small minority. Laos is a little known destination for mainstream UK tourists. It had fewer than 100,000 foreign visitors (if you don't count Thais and Vietnamese) in 1998, of which mere 8,902 were from Britain (compared to 482,000 Brits going to Thailand). Trying to find an operator to take me there was difficult. I was told by one large bike tour operator that had previously sold

tours to Laos that "it was just too difficult a destination to book". Not because the product was poor, or the local operators inefficient, but "because the UK market simply did not know where Laos was". Laos, it seems, is overlooked in favour of its high profile neighbours Thailand and Vietnam, two very popular destinations.

More by luck than design I was eventually put in contact with a group of friends of friends of friends who had booked a private tour with a small independent operator, specialising in bike tours of Thailand and Laos. I was told to pack plenty of padded shorts, bring my bike and a sense of humour and I was in.

Our journey started and ended in Thailand, which was appropriate, as culturally the two countries are very similar. The languages are mutually intelligible and both the Lao and Thai peoples are descended from the same migratory groups that were gradually forced out of China thousands of years ago, eventually settling in the river valleys and plains of modern day Thailand and Laos. Even though Laos is still a one party communist state, it is gradually opening itself to western consumerism, including tourism. Although Vietnam and Russia have had a greater leverage on Laos politically, Thai television beams a much more popular influence across the political divide.

We picked up our visas in Bangkok before flying up to the Northern Thai province of Chiang Rai, which would act as our springboard into Laos. Chiang Rai is enjoying a tourist boom and we saw plenty of foreign faces at the night market and hotel. While we were out riding however, we saw very few. We were heading for the hills on what was billed as "a warm up ride to test you and your bikes". All the members of our group were competent cyclists and most had been on bike tours before, but none of us got out on our bikes quite as much as we would have liked. In other words, we spent a hard day cycling up and down hills under a scorching sun that left a few of us wondering whether we would even make it out of Thailand.

Our route took us from Chiang Rai east across the notorious Golden Triangle to the border town of Chiang Khong and then to Huay Xai in Laos. We followed interesting dirt trails and minor roads and our guides led us up to some hill-tribe villages. The most memorable being an Akha village at the top of an impossible hill where we sipped Coca-Cola with the head man while his children rode our bikes up and down the village and old women with mouths devoid of teeth attempted to sell us silver of dubious quality. There was a support truck always close at hand, laden with fresh fruit and iced water, ready to sweep up weary riders, so we were free to enjoy the countryside from the comfort of our bikes.

Once in Laos, we lost Pan our local Thai guide and support truck driver for obvious bureaucratic reasons. Fortunately our western tour leader was coming with us and he had arranged a Lao guide who would make sure we had a vehicle of some description with us at all times.

Crossing the border was much easier than I had imagined. I was almost disappointed when we weren't, at least temporarily, imprisoned by suspicious soldiers, or held up by deceitful officials waiting to extort baksheesh in return for allowing us to import our bicycles. Instead we crossed the huge expanse of the Maekhong River to be greeted with nothing but a resounding silence. We were, however, well aware that we were being watched. It's something you have to get used to in Laos, you are always being watched. Not in the sinister way one may expect to be observed by a totalitarian state. But in that wide-eyed amazed manner reserved for very strange events. - Hardly surprising really when you think that we were six cumbersome, and very foreign looking people with Hi-Tec mountain bikes that bore closer resemblance to formula 1 racing cars than the local two wheelers.

As we crossed the river we could have been passing through a time warp. Gone were the flashy pick up trucks and pop music of brash and modern Thailand, in Laos the taxis are called Jumbos but have little to do with elephants. In fact they are more akin to an oxcart, one that has seen the oxen replaced by the front half of a veteran 125cc Yamaha motorcycle. We changed our money at the Bokeo Bank where 20PST got a large brick of Kip (at the time of writing 1PST = 70,000 Lao Kip) and by the time the fifth member of the group had cashed in their purple note we had broken the bank. Ever resourceful the immigration officer dashed off somewhere and came back with a plastic bag full of notes that he cheerfully exchanged for our hard currency, instantly making us all millionaires- and himself a few bob on the side one suspects.

We quickly stashed our huge wads of cash away from prying eyes, but we need not have worried as people watched passively as we unloaded bikes and bags from our long tail boat. Earlier on the Thai side I had seen a group of tourists coming the other way surrounded by a locals competing for their business, but here they quietly kept their distance until our Laotian guide found us with a reassuring "Sabai-dee" (Lao for greetings.). Huay Xai is a small town on the Maekhong, where very little happens except between mid-April and May when the Pla Buak, or giant Maekhong catfish are caught. These huge fish are netted, (whilst making their journey upstream to China where they eventually spawn) and rushed to Bangkok restaurants to be eaten. From Huay Xai we took a boat downstream, unsuccessfully scouring the river for giant fish, to Pakbeng from where we set out on a ride across the country that was once known as "Lan Xang" the land of a million elephants.

We headed straight up route 2, a rough road that had been built by the Chinese some about 20 years ago. Since then it had fallen into a state far worse than disrepair and became our adversary for two full days, as we struggled from pothole to pothole. Although the riding was tough by all our standards, we were equally unanimous in our appreciation of the setting for our exertions. We rode through picture postcard villages that could have passed as backdrops from the set of the film "Never Ending Story." The countryside was green and lush, full of tropical trees and cascading bamboo. The comforting sounds of the Beng River and colourful songbirds helped muffle our grunts and the mountains were ever present. They provided an inconstant backdrop to focus on, sometimes rolling and forested and at other times dramatic with towering limestone cliffs jutting into the skyline.

Yet for all the natural beauty of this part of Laos its most striking feature is the exuberance of its people. As we rode through village after village we were greeted like conquering heroes. If you happened to be the last one through the entire population would have been warned by those ahead and would line the street like spectators on the Tour de France, waving and cheering as you passed. "Sabai-dee, Sabai-dee" or sometimes "Falang, Falang" (foreigner). When we stopped to rest or take water - we had been told to try and consume twelve litres a day - an inquisitive crowd would form at a polite distance, watching us with bemused fascination. Fortunately our leader spoke Lao and we were able to swap simple stories. I was able to find out that most of the pretty young girls carrying infants, were in fact the mothers and not the elder sisters as I had assumed. That most villages had one or two rice crops a year and the rest of the time they sold vegetables by the side of the road. That nearly everyone from fifteen years old and upwards was married and that children went to school every day after they had collected water from the nearby river. Information was shared equitably and a collective murmur of incredulity went around one village when I admitted that I was 32-years-old and still single. These people had had almost no contact with foreigners, we saw a few pick up trucks laden with determined backpackers forging a path to China, Vietnam or wherever else they could discover before the package tours arrived. But travelling by bike through the heart of rural Laos gave us a chance to interact directly with a most beautiful and peaceful part of the world. The genuine warmth and interest shown by the local people was truly touching and the innocent glee of the children and their vociferous welcomes led us to dub our trip "the Sabai-dee Tour".

The heat was the most difficult factor, especially for the first few days. Temperatures in March can reach 36 Celsius and I'm told it is even hotter in April. Although we were told it could get quite cool in December and January it seemed hard to imagine. We cycled almost 600 kilometres and although it got easier as the trip went on it was nearly always too hot. Cycling as a group was easy. We all found our own pace and with the truck stopping for refreshments every 10 kilometres we could choose whether to stop and chat or keep going. In fact I found cycling alone for long periods strangely therapeutic.

In the brochure it said "facilities in Laos can be basic but this is small price to pay for a glimpse of South East Asia in its purest form" - and it was spot on both counts. Facilities were sometimes (but not always) basic. One evening we stood round the village well pouring cold water over each other, which is probably not an every day event for a money broker, a banker, a restaurateur, a finance director and a computer engineer, but they all seemed to be loving it. However in Luang Prabang and Vientiane we were promised the modern comforts of air-conditioning and minibars and they were duly appreciated.

Each day we cycled for between five and eight hours, stopping at Hmong, Mien, Kamu and Htin villages, learning about the secret war waged by the CIA and Air America- more bombs were dropped on Laos than Vietnam during the Indochina Wars, making it the most bombed country in history. We had two cylce-free days, which were spent on boats, chugging down stream through the steaming jungle, bringing visions of "Apocalypse Now" to mind. Most evenings we drank one or two beers before collapsing into bed, although one night we were invited to a wedding, where we danced the "ram wong", and sampled some of the moonshine whiskey. Finally, exhausted, we made it to old royal capital of Luang Prabang and some rest.

Legend has it that in the shadow of Phu Si Mountain, at the confluence of the Khong and Khan Rivers, two sorcerers conjured up a "flaming city". They named the surrounding lands Lan Xang and called fifteen Naga serpents to gush from the river and create a palace for a future king. Since then Luang Prabang has had a long and interesting history enough of which is still in evidence for UNESCO to declare it a world heritage site. But you had better be quick as one of Asia's best kept secrets is getting out, a beautifully preserved mix of Bhuddist temples and French colonial architecture, pleasantly faded, giving it a warm, lived in feeling. In fact everyone seems to wander around town with a contented smile, and I kept catching myself nodding away happily to complete strangers.

We had two nights, barely long enough for us to scratch the surface, but we were on a cycling trip after all, so we were bundled onto a plane to Vientiane before we really had time to soak it all in.

Vientiane is really a country town masquerading as a capital city, but to six weary cyclists used to the rural pleasures of the mountains it was a daunting prospect. However we quickly learnt how to safely navigate the traffic and It was a fitting finale when we cycled into Vientiane and saw the Arch de Triumph (yes they built one in Vientiane as well as in Paris) signaling the end of the ride. Although we had left our adoring fans up in the mountains we all understood that we had achieved something very special.

For more stories on Laos, Thailand, Cambodia or Burma
contact hamishk@loxinfo.co.th