The transit part of RT 2010 started on a beautiful Tuesday autumn afternoon out by the seaside village of Dalarö south-east of Stockholm in Sweden...
	...and went via a local bus, commuter train and another bus to Arlanda airport and from there to Frankfurt, and onwards with Lufthansa LH 782 to Bangkok...
	...and continued with Thai Airways TG 574 to Vientiane, the capital of Laos...
	...where two guys from the car rental company waited with a name sign in the arrival hall, exactly as agreed by email beforehand. It was now Wednesday night local time, and the the journey from Dalarö to the hotel in Vientiane took 26 hours and 12 minutes. It's always a big plus when the logistics work as planned, although I am not particularly fond of air travel and airports.
	Thursday morning, and finally on the road, heading north on road 13 through the outskirts and peripheral villages north of Vientiane toward the steep blue-green Indochina mountains.
	In Laos the monsoon season was just coming to an end, and the vegetation was lush and intensely green, similar to impressions from Africa during RT 2005.
	The road fork by the town Phu Khoun, where 13 splits into road 7 eastbound, was lined with locals selling fruit, vegetables, nuts and grains, grilled meat, water and beverages to travelers.
	Further east along route 7 the landscape became more mountainous, with the top speed limited to just 30-40 kph, due to the meandering and narrow sharp ascents. Around every few corners was another small mountain village with animals roaming free - cows, chickens, ducks, turkeys, dogs, pigs and a lot more running around or just lying in the middle of the way. The chickens were especially unpredictable, deciding to suddenly cross the street at the most random and unnecessary moment, resulting in an abrupt halt of my Ford, stepping on the brake. I never figured out why the hell those chickens really had to cross the street in front of me, always.
	Aside from carefully and respectfully observing real poverty from my car window, from farmers to schoolchildren whose material possessions amounted to almost nothing, the structural design techniques and building materials of the natives' homes also caught my interest. Built to withstand monsoons and torrents and minor landslides, the stilt foundation and all the rest filled a purpose. The greatest threat to these houses would probably be if the Chinese would be allowed into these areas with heavy logging machinery, cleaning the hillsides from vegetation. Or something like that.
	Many of the most remote and poor locales are however connected with the outside world via satellite television, which seemed to be a common priority in almost every village.
	The long and winding road 6 toward Sam Neua. Turn left, turn right, turn left, turn right, turn left... Continuously and incessantly while climbing up the snaking paths higher, then the same thing down toward the valley on the other side, then up again… This was a quite new driving experience, and required complete attention...
	...because even though the panorama was breathtaking...
	...one slip behind the wheel could have meant plunging straight down over the cliff edge into the deep jungle.
	Finally, Sam Neua, tucked away under the clouds in the northeast of Laos.
	Closer toward the Vietnam border, the scenery included many vertical limestone formation like this one. For a sense of proportion, notice the little huts in the bottom right part of the picture.
	Lao roadside kiosk, not far from Vietnam.
	On the other side of the border, the driving became a mess due to a complete lack of correlation between my map (which was almost useless), the travel advice of one of the border officers, road signs and names, and reality. Everything became a guessing game, which resulted in a few wrong turns. Welcome to roadtripping in the developing world, where sometimes, well, there are no roads.
	This mud track became even worse, and any other car than a 4x4 would have been stuck down the line.
	Having reached the Vietnam coastline and joined the mayhem on "highway" AH1 - the crowded, crazy, violent, noisy, no-rules, mixed-quality transportation link between Hanoi in the north to Saigon in the south. Only 1,291 kilometers left to Ho Chi Minh City...
	In Laos the monsoon season was coming to an end, but in Vietnam the driving rain was exceeding anything I had seen till that point. On the day when passing Hue, that town received 619 millimeters of rain within 24 hours. The windshield wipers were set on maximum speed and were throwing water left and right, but the visibility ahead was sometimes limited to just a few meters. The picture left is from a drenched rice field near Dong Hoi north of the former DMZ.
	As a result of relentless and extremely intense American bombing, like a monsoon downpour of steel and explosives, villagers of Vinh Moc began digging tunnels by hand or with simple tools in the red-clay earth. More than 90 families, around 400 people, lived underground for several years. The Vinh Moc tunnels are still kept as they were by the end of the war, and the nearby museum shows pictures and items from tunnel life. In the foreground left is also a Soviet-sponsored anti-aircraft gun, used by the Vietnamese resistance.
	From Henry Kissinger with love. Empty US bomb shells on display. (Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, the greatest irony in history, which quashes all other attempts by anyone in the world to ever be ironic again.)
	Inside the tunnel system, 23 meters below the surface. It's amazing that the entire underground structure - including very small private family sleeping chambers, small gathering rooms and even a maternity ward! - was created in relatively short time. This photo was taken with a flash (otherwise it was pretty dark down there) and shows the redness of the clay.
	Near one of the Vinh Moc tunnel exists...
	...where a path under the thick green foliage...
	...leads to the South China Sea, where the US war ships lay waiting.
	On the ground above the tunnel system the bomb craters are still very apparent, 40 years later.
	Vietnam's coastline is 3,444 kilometers long (excluding islands) and has always been lined with fishing villages. Many of these fishing villages still remain, but some have suddenly started to grow too fast or mutated into something else due to industrialization or an inflow of new people and tourists. This picture is from the bay by Quy Nhon...
	...where old methods of catching fish still survive next to long sand beaches where modern tourist hotels are beginning to pop up.
	Typical blue-red fishing boats in a cove a bit further south down the coast.
	Poor in monetary terms but rich in color and tradition.
	Next night stop for RT 2010 was Mui Ne. This little place was actually also a local fishing village, but has now in a short time period morphed into a tourist ghetto. Europeans including wealthy Russians flock to Mui Ne for an authentic Vietnam experience, not least when it comes to the wonderful local Asian cuisine.
	Trinkets on sale along the entire main street through Mui Ne...
	...and of course a string of massage and spa establishments...
	...and alternative "massage" quarters as well. Everything is for sale in Vietnam...
	...while the kind taxi driver is waiting outside in the dark for the customer inside, with the lights switched off. How discreet.
	The Mui Ne beach is nowadays lined with mostly upmarket resorts...
	...where old fishermen or family members (sons, daughters) of previous fishermen now work as luxury hotel garderners, bartenders, cleaners, waiters or restaurant cooks.
	I tend to be among the first ones out on a beach in the morning, anywhere, since sleeping away half the day indoors in an air-conditioned dim hotel room is a waste of time when being out on a roadtrip.
	Bring on the westerners! But it's also quite discouraging to see yet another tranquil self-sufficient Asian seaside village turned into a silly and loud theme park for conformist pale tourists from far away.
	New town. Just a snapshot of a developing world telephone solution. If anything breaks, for example if lightning stikes this pole, do they need to rebuild all this mess from scratch again?
	Modern Vietnam is said to have been officially founded on 2 September 1945, when Ho Chi Minh, founder of the communist party and leader of the liberation movement, proclaimed Vietnamese independence from France. When celebrating its 65th birthday in 2010, the country's largest city Saigon was full of large wall posters paying homage to the greatness of communism and the superior standard of living it brings for everyone. Hooray for communism. See how happy everyone is in the drawings?
	But Saigon is actually officially known as Ho Chi Minh City, at least within Vietnam or at least among government bureaucrats, after the country's eternal father figure Ho Chi Minh. The man himself is portrayed here on a street poster at Le Loi (the chic hotel and shopping avenue in downtown Saigon) on red background, with the hammer and sickle in yellow in the corner. However, this nostalgic government propaganda and the communist ideology it represents is in stark contrast to the glass windows selling Rolex and Louis Vitton and other Western bling along this very street, the Ferraris and Mercedeses and BMWs cruising by, and the Caravelle hotel in the background, one of the most famous luxury hotels in the Far East. Poster nonsense galore. The real Saigon is nothing but untamed capitalism on steroids. Pretty much like most coastal cities in China, I would suspect.
	The Notre Dame cathedral in central Saigon, built between 1877 and 1883, is one of many striking pieces of evidence of historic French rule.
	The War Remnants Museum in Saigon was one of the emotionally strongest experiences of this roadtrip. Even though it is said to give a fairly one-sided picture of the Vietnam war (1955-1975), the weapons and photos and other objects on display and the stories behind would leave no human being untouched.
	On the grounds outside the museum building are US armored vehicles, fighter planes, artillery pieces and other left-behind metal on display.
	But the most powerful and thought-provoking items at the museum are the many photographs on the walls inside, and the stories behind the people and their respective fate. One section deals with the American's use of the so-called "agent orange", an extremely toxic herbicide and defoliant that was manufactured for the US government by mainly Monsanto Corporation and Dow Chemical. This chemical substance, a US weapon of mass destruction indeed with the sole aim to exterminate (forests, lakes, rivers, crop fields, animals, humans), has also left scars for generations. The Vietnamese woman left was born with serious defects and facial deformations, that can be attributed to contact with agent orange. The decade-long exercise 1962-1971 during which American planes systematically sprayed an estimated 20 million US gallons (80 million liters) of toxic chemicals over Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia was called "Operation Ranch Hand". Cute name. This picture to the left, and the following nine images, are photos of photos from the museum.
	Vietnamese child born without limbs, due to agent orange.
	Deformed young Vietnamese man, another victim of agent orange.
	One of the most famous images of the Vietnam War, that contributed to turning around the opinion and tacit support for this miserable war venture both in the US and the rest of the world, is the photo of a young Vietnamese girl running naked on a country road away from the burning village Trang Bang on 8 June 1972. The girl in the picture, Phan Thị Kim Phúc, who survived serious burns after 14 months in hospital, was at the time of RT 2010 (October 2010) 47 years old with two children of her own, and was named a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador in 1997. The honorable US president Richard Nixon questioned the authenticity of the photograph when it appeared in newspapers on 12 June 1972, suggesting it had been "fixed". Well, perhaps the whole war was just an illusion; maybe the Vietnam war never actually happened?
	An American war hero resting on the ground in a foreign land, Vietnam, with the scull of a local Vietnamese man or woman as a trophy on top of his tent pole.
	Beheaded Vietnamese men dragged around in a rope after a US tank. What would the nation's great leader Nixon and his foreign secretary Kissinger, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, say? Who were the "winners" in this war at this stage?
	An American war hero holding remains of a Vietnamese man in his hand. One can discern the head, a hand and what probably is part of an arm and a shoulder, kept together in a messy piece of skin and dripping flesh. The rest of the cadaver lies on the ground.
	WAR!
	What is it good for?
	Absolutely nothing.
	The War Remnants Museum in Saigon was the strongest such experience since the Genocide Museum in Kigali in Rwanda during RT 2005. In both Vietnam and Rwanda, as in pretty much every war, it was the innocent civilians that suffered the most. After a couple of hours in a museum like this the sorrow and sadness become rather heavy, it possesses your mind and your thoughts. However, stepping outside in the sun again, I saw these young Vietnamese schoolchildren also visiting the place, who were taking pictures of each other with their new digital cameras in front of old US tanks and helicopters. These kids were probably born in the 1990s. A new generation, a new beginning, a new future. New hope in a new post-war Vietnam.
	New hotels and high-rise buildings housing financial firms are springing up in the Dong Khoi area in central Saigon by the Saigon river. The skyscraper in the middle has a helicopter pad on the side.
	Scene from Ben Thanh Market, the kind of busy bazaar that can be useful for a casual midday meal or for picking up anything needed for the onward journey. But beyond that, I stay clear of tourist magnets like these with their tiresome endless propositioning and haggling.
	Ben Thanh's narrow indoor passageways have dozens and dozens and dozens of little booths like this one, selling different types of clothes, belts, watches, wallets and miscellaneous other accessories.
	Peasant woman from the country in a traditional conical hat on an old-fashioned bicycle on her way at an intersection in central Saigon to sell whatever she has in her side bags; fruits, vegetables, rice or grains perhaps. Behind the woman the traffic lights have just released hundreds of light motorcycles driven by mainly younger people, who are about to catch up and overtake. There are 3 million light motorcycles in Saigon, and the new generation is giving the city tons of energy 24 hours a day. This picture is pretty symbolic of what is going on.
	Another crowded, buzzling street.
	Roadtripping in the jungle, sort of.
	Time for a dose of local culture - Vietnamese water puppetry - at the Golden Dragon Water Puppet Theatre.
	The stage consists of a square tank of waist-deep water. The puppeteers are working behind the front curtain. The band members on the sides (three on each) enhance the performance with music (wooden flutes, gongs, drums, bamboo xylophones, and the single-stringed zither) and some kind of verbal commentary. Of course most guidebooks praise this kind of "genuine Vietnamese culture" as an "unmissable" part of a Vietnam visit. Personally, all I know is that I won't be in a hurry to see this stuff again.
	Café Terrace at Night. Perhaps Van Gogh had Saigon in mind (when he painted his masterpiece in 1888), perhaps Saigon has Van Gogh in mind. Or perhaps just the roadtrip guy had Van Gogh in mind when taking this picture.
	Celebrating communism by night with the People's Committee Building in the background.
	A block away, celebrating tourist dollars and international business travelers to Saigon with the Caravelle and Sheraton hotels in the background. Fellow travelers told me there was a photo ban at the top floor bars of these hotels, for whatever arbitrary reason but probably one involving the popular word "security". Nonsense, of course. The real reason is that random visitor photography would intimidate and scare away (international) businessmen and (foreign) politicians and others who might be caught on camera in happy company with some of the many prostitutes colonizing these places for ample, willing and lucrative opportunities.
	On the road across the southeastern Cambodian green plains.
	Waiting for the car ferry by Neak Luong, where vendors were selling bottled water and food including grilled chicken and fried shrimps.
	Little boy quenching his thirst, riding across the Mekong river...
	...to the other side.
	Staying at a gem of a small boutique hotel in Phnom Penh, designed and managed by a couple of French guys. The evening was spent in the hotel bar chatting away with people from Australia, the Philippines and Europe, finishing off with a swim around two o'clock in the morning.
	New day, new discoveries. Only a short drive away from the hotel lies the Tuol Sleng prison, also known as "S21", which was the most notorious and feared interrogation and torture center run by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime. The prison has been converted into a genocide museum.
	Tuol Sleng used to be a high school...
	...and almost everything has been left as it was found when the unbelievably cruel activities ceased. In classrooms intellectuals and other suspects were tortured in all ways imaginable...
	...such as electrocuting "different thinkers" and "disloyals" while they were shackled naked to metal beds, after having had fingers or toes cut off. There were still pictures on the walls as haunting echoes from those days.
	The S21 experience was very strong emotionally. It makes one question if man is at all good in the first place, or what it is that makes man evil. The truth about how people treat each other will always come out, sooner or later. The particular case of the Cambodian government torture chambers in the 1970s is neither the first nor the last in history. Power corrupts, power intoxicates, power deludes. Too much power numbs the holder's judgement and erases his ability to feel sympathy and empathy over time. Mostly the effects and consequences are slight yet definite, sometimes they are disastrous.
	In another section of the former school, many classrooms had been divided up into tiny cells by walls made of sturdy planks or bricks and mortar. In some places passageways between classrooms with small cells had been created by simply just knocking a hole in the wall.
	View from the inside. None of the many innocent men or women who were kept here in this cell, one after another, is alive any more. Today sun rays find their way into these previously dark rooms in dark times, shining on the empty rusty shackles on the floor.
	Having left Phnom Penh with a heavy heart - without even having toured the districts of the city where real poverty and child prostitution today are rampant - cruising northwest along highway 6. This country road itself across Cambodia wasn't particularly busy and not as anarchistic as Vietnam's main vehicle artery, but in some villages along the way plenty of water buffalos viewed the passers-by with amusing calm and indifference.
	Angkor Wat, the world' largest religious building. Angkor was, in its prime days 800-1000 years ago, the political, religious and social center of Cambodia's ancient Khmer empire. Over one million people lived in Angkor at the time when London had 50,000 inhabitants. The three temple towers of Angkor Wat, pictured left, are today a national symbol of Cambodia on for example government documents and banknotes.
	Like with most other famous historic sites around the world, a combination of escalating commercialization and competition for tourists by the loads, and destructive air pollution, are taking their toll on the structural foundation of these invaluable pieces of inheritance from mankind's past. Temporary fixes (such as reinforcing surfaces with iron and another layer of modern concrete) are also soon falling apart.
	Scaffolding forever.
	But let's shift the focus back to the past. What the people of Angkor created is simply stunning, both in terms of quantity and vastness, synchronicity and detail. The meticulous stone inscriptions describe battles and key events in the locals' history across centuries, as well as stories about gods, and illustrations of heaven and hell (or rather, the punishments and rewards of the 32 hells and the 37 heavens).
	The gallery carvings are exact down to fractions of a millimeter...
	...and the artwork itself is indeed amazing by any standards. The wheel pictured in a close-up shot is just a few centimeters in diameter. And these bas-reliefs stretch across a series of stone walls that are 800 meters long combined.
	The exterior of the towers and gates in the Angkor Wat complex are also elaborately decorated. However, while some analysts and scientists just see the very apparent war stories in all these carvings and sculptures...
	...I believe there is much more beneath the surface, between the lines, behind the obvious. I believe these temples contain thousands of hidden messages. Are all creatures on this flank looking in the same direction, or is one looking another way - and where is he looking? Why? Do all have two arms and hands, legs and feet - why or why not? Are all the numbers involved while creating this jumbled collection of figures random? Do different towers, different gates, different stones, different details at Angkor look unique at different times of the day, sunrise and sunset - and what does that symbolize? And going back to the wheel above - is a wheel always just a cart wheel, or can it be something more? The sun, the moon, a symbol for harmony, or the circle of life? I believe many thinkers and architects of some of the greatest pieces of heritage on this planet - be it the pyramids in Egypt or Mexico or Peru, the temples of Esfahan in Iran, or for example Angkor in Cambodia - left us with layers upon layers of code, for us to decipher thousands of years later. What does it all contain? The secret to the meaning of life?
	Taking the rental car on the prepared narrow paths through the jungle to another part of the Angkor complex.
	Another spectacular temple of Angkor is Ta Prohm, where only part of the jungle has been cut back again (following the archeological rediscovery of the Angkor complex).
	At the Ta Prohm temple, roots of huge banyan and kapok trees still cover the buildings and walls.
	Tomb Raider was partly filmed at Ta Prohm in 2000. However at this RT 2010 stop I unfortunately didn't run across Angelina Jolie.
	Nor did I see Indiana Jones around.
	In the late afternoon the temples and pathways between them were emptying out pretty quickly. Shortly before sunset it was only me still around, and this little guy up on a shelf. For a moment while observing each other, I wondered where it all went wrong for us. Man builds, and man destroys. Civilizations rise and fall, and are eventually forgotten. Empires rise and fall. Following the sights and experiences on this RT 2010 from the Vietnam war and the Khmer Rouge crimes against humanity, both happening just very recently in a historical context, perhaps this monkey is rather superior to all of us in terms of evolution, after all.
	Good night, Angkor and Cambodia. Thanks for an amazing show.
	Fast forward 24 hours and into Thailand the following day. Red lights. Flying through Bangkok on a Saturday night in the back of a tuk-tuk. It seems like every tuk-tuk driver in Bangkok is working extra as a pimp, insisting everywhere upon bringing male Western tourists straight to miscellaneous establishments with girls. Sometimes vacant tuk-tuk drivers waiting for customers at any random street corner discreetly pull out a color brochure from their pocket in a flash second, presenting a whole menu of sweets and options. I thanked them for their very kind hospitality but of course declined - but there is no doubt whatsoever that the shady market in Bangkok for this sort of stuff must be absolutely enormous.
	At the rooftop bar of State Tower on Silom Road in the Bang Rak business district of Bangkok. State Tower has 68 floors and is 247 meters tall, and is probably most famous for its outdoor and indoor bars and restaurants on the 63rd floor and above.
	Just like at the luxury hotels in Saigon, there is a photo ban in the proximity of the main restaurant in the illuminated dome and the surrounding patio - "for security reasons" is the bullshit line delivered to innocent tourists like me of course, while everyone knows it is to protect the marriages of the male customers there, who are not dining alone. The inset (below right) is from the outdoor bar, where photography is allowed but prices are inflated by any standards.
	"Oh daah-ling! Isn't expat life just… divine! Oh I just love the Far East, everything is so nice in Asia, don't you think honey? Wait till I tell my girlfriends back home about these steps, it's just like walking down on heaven, don't you think?" Sure. Congratulations, expats.
	Bangkok was at this time by far the most developed and modern city on my RT 2010 journey, but Saigon is catching up fast. In my opinion Saigon is just beating thunderously with energy 24 hours of the day and is alive and booming and ever-changing, while Bangkok on the contrary is quite mind-numbing. New tall buildings, new shopping malls, various types of massage parlors, hundreds of temples, elevated motorways, traffic jams, restaurants, hotels and backpacker hostels... Yawn.
	After the military coup in 2006, when president Thaksin Shinawatra was ousted, security in Thailand's bigger cities has been tightened, especially in Bangkok. Policemen and smaller brigades can be seen here and there on the streets, and those who pay attention will discover that Bangkok is completely littered with surveillance cameras everywhere, almost like London.
	Millions of European tourists to Thailand will probably jolt when I say this, since many don't know better, but I actually think Bangkok is an incredibly boring city. After a couple of days in this hole, with its predictable street life and predictable and abundant tourist clientele and its incredibly predictable and very busy shopping centers, I was more than fed up. Time to get out and get away, time to get home. I will not be in a hurry to revisit Bangkok yet again as a multi-day tourist. I checked out from the hotel and drove the Ford Everest north through Thailand, briefly stopping in a few places along the way but keeping in mind that this was the final stretch of RT 2010.
	Through steep and narrow mountain roads, through landslides and thoroughfare mud baths, through insane and lawless Vietnamese "highway" traffic, through monsoons and through scorching heat. And finally back in Vientiane, Laos, having parked for the last time outside the car rental company without the slightest scratch to the car. RT 2010 will go down as the most demanding roadtrip up to that time in terms of the actual driving, narrowly beating Siberia (RT 2007).