Pedalled out to see a few caves around Tham Phu Kham today, in incredible heat. There are limestone towers all the way out there, mostly covered in jungle (imagine the Dolomites covered in green snow). The first cave featured a huge cavern just inside the rock, with some good formations and an inevitable bronze reclining Buddha. Impressive bright green moss was growing on the stalactites that stood in a blazing ray of direct sunlight coming through a high entrance. Nevertheless, it deepened my conviction that if you've seen one cave you've seen them all, especially if that cave is Carlsbad Cavern, New Mexico.

I'm using the Lonely Planet guide in Laos, and the Rough Guide in Thailand. One thing you notice is that the LP guide is desperate to have an opinion, and often makes sweeping generalisations and judgemental statements that turn out to be wrong. One example is that all the restaurants in Vang Vieng have the same menu which has been photocopied from an original, and just the header changed. However, I've never seen the same menu twice and there are two fantastic Indian restaurants (read wooden shacks that do good food) that have menus similar to their English counterparts but the food is incredibly good and costs next to nothing. Plus, among the generic fare offered by the mainstream eateries (which are legion) there are bakeries with fresh baguettes, pain au chocolate, and addictive banana yoghurt shakes. Another is that the town has lost its soul due to the influx of travellers, but the truth is that we stay in a southern suburb on Highway 13 that caters only for itinerants, while the local businesses, market, wats and pulse of the town remain untouched 2km up the road. The Rough Guide is cautious in its proclamations, and benefits by comparison.

One of the Indian restaurants' menus mis-spells the word gravy so it becomes an useful adjective, viz: 'comes in a spicy gravey sauce'.

You can get the BBC World News on the TV in my room, but the rest of the available fare comprises endless sport and Thai soaps. Therefore, have been reading. Hence the reappearance of that long-absent straightjacket of verbal discipline, the two-line review...

Empire of the Sun by JG Ballard ****
As to war as Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is to Ireland, this is really a novel about recollections of growing up; in this case the backdrop is Shanghai during the Japanese invasion of WWII. Our hero Jim is increasingly subsumed and feralised by his survival instincts following separation from his parents - instincts that sustain him through years of internment in a brutal Japanese prison camp where people either looked out for themselves or died.

The Farenheight 9/11 Reader by Michael Moore ****
Lest we forget, the American administration let dozens of Osama bin Laden's rich, Saudi relatives fly out of the USA in the first few days after 9/11 when all other flights in the country were grounded, rather than detaining them for questioning like they would in any routine case and as they did with dozens of Arabs who had no connection with the bin Ladens. Lest we also forget, George W Bush lied to Congress about WMDs, has friends making huge amounts of money from the war, and was filmed teaching primary school kids to read a book about goats for a whole seven minutes after an aide came into the classroom and told him that the north tower of the World Trade Centre had been hit, looking like a complete moron - if you haven't seen the film, this bit is essential viewing that wasn't screened by the puppet American TV news channels despite being widely available on the Internet. This is a third sentence, but hey, this book has the whole screenplay of the documentary film, and it's assembled with the passion of true art.