Mike Smith (Illustrator)

Forgive me for putting in a quick shout for a new weekly comic that’s coming in January: The Phoenix. Well, Issue 1 swoops in on January 7th but there’s a free special taster Issue Zero right now, via a promotional code to be found in Waitrose Weekend magazine.

Marvellous reasons to get the comic:

• It’s British
• It’s quality
• It doesn’t have plastic landfill stuck to the front
• It’s original, ie. not a vehicle for some horrendous mega-corporate tat-selling enterprise
• Kids will love it

Let’s start a British children’s comics renaissance right now!

Subscribe here

From 28th October to 5th November we crossed from Vietnam to Thailand via Laos, by bus. Places we stopped at: Buddhist monk-populated Savannakhet, and Pakse, from where we took a boat to a tiny village called Champasak on the Mekong river. This was a lovely place (probably my favourite of the whole trip) which was just a cycle ride away from Wat Pho — a less grand but very beautiful version of Cambodia’s Angkor Wat.

We also went kayaking, but the less said about that the better.

This is a bit of a naff picture of the Mekong, but it’s the only one I had.

We spent a few days in Hanoi in the north. The original plan was to travel to Ho Chi Minh City in the south — it being the furthest point by rail that we could reach from London — but we realised we would then run out of time to get to Singapore. So we decided to go half way down the country to Dong Ha, where we stopped for a day to visit the amazing Vinh Moc tunnels, then cut across to Laos.

Looking back at my little journal, I thought it was hilarious that I wrote this when we arrived in Hanoi:

Then just three days later, this:

Here are some pictures from our trip through China, from 14th-24th October. We stopped at Beijing, Yangshuo and Nanning. I’d learned some Mandarin from CDs before we came, which meant that on the Chinese trains, instead of being completely misunderstood, I could be a comedy feature and be completely misunderstood.

Special memories: seeing someone flying a kite in Beijing with such a long line that you couldn’t see the kite; hiring bikes in Yangshuo then getting stuck on the wrong side of a river and getting rafted across by a bunch of old ladies; the train trip where we sat at the back in the special gobbing/smoking compartment.