Here’s a quick one for lovers of pho. The Vietnamese dish is also a staple in Laos.

My favourite, however, is khao piek sen, a chewier noodle tossed in a tapioca flour which makes the soup a little more glutinous too. With the cool weather we’ve been having lately, it’s the perfect breakfast dish.

I had a wander around Bangkok’s Chinatown yesterday and captured this familiar street scene.

I was up with the sparrow’s fart on Saturday and took a three hour wander around Bangkok backstreets, eventually finding myself in deepest Chinatown. It’s always a good place to go poking around dimly lit alleys looking for scenes from daily life. I had a nice chat with this lovely lass as she boiled and bagged up rice noodles in her atmospheric kitchen.

More from my wanderings later in the week.

Laos marches, albeit at a sedate pace, on noodle soup. Pho, which was brought to the country by the Vietnamese, and khao biak sen, a more starchy noodle soup dish (and my favourite), are eaten enthusiastically for breakfast, lunch or dinner.

In any given town there are numerous pho shops and you would therefore think it an easy task to find an excellent bowl of noodles but  this is not the case. In recent years Knorr stock powder has been aggressively marketed in the country and very few shops still make their own stock from bones. Additional MSG is added to the stockpot in large quantities and even offered as a condiment on the table. So, alas, finding a good bowl of what is a staple dish has become a challenge. These days your order can be anything from excellent to truly ghastly but most of the time it is mediocre at best.Who would have thought it would become so difficult to find a satisfying bowl of noodles in Laos?

However, I might add that the ones pictured here (pho , top, khao biak sen the other two shots) were pretty damn good.

Whenever I am travelling in Laos, or any country in Asia for that matter, my morning ritual is a leisurely stroll around a fresh market chatting to the ladies selling produce, grazing on a couple of local snacks, and taking pictures.

Up north, markets are particularly colourful due to the presence of many different ethnic groups such as the Tai Dam lady above.

Sellers have a particular way of arranging their produce in small sized heaps or freshly cooked food in portion sized  bowls, ready to tip into a bag when you make a purchase.

 The ladies  take great care with their beautiful displays, bunching salad vegetables together and threading them on strips of bamboo, and arranging small river fish nicely. It’s a visual feast.

Next on my morning itinerary is a warming bowl of fur, a hearty noodle soup and the staple dish of Laos. Most markets have an area with several fur stalls, each beautifully laid out with baskets of fresh herbs and condiments to enliven your soup. The stock is cooked on a charcoal brazier and ladled over a handful of noodles and your choice of meat. 

The most common in Laos in beef or buffalo but pork and chicken are also available. Tear in a handful of mint, basil, pea shoots, a squeeze of lime and a dollop of roasted chilli paste and there’s no better start to the day. Add a Lao coffee with sweet condensed milk and kanom jap gluay, a Chinese style doughnut to dip in it and you have the breakfast of champions.

More pictures can be seen in the Laos gallery.

Walk down any street in Phnom Penh and the chances are it won’t be long before you stumble across a shop, stall or mobile vendor selling noodles.

The mainstay of the Khmer diet, noodles provide a quick, nutritious and cheap meal, breakfast, lunch and dinner. Made from wheat or rice flour, they are blanched, fried and fermented to create an overwhelming choice of noodle dishes.

The origin of the humble noodle is of course Chinese, not Khmer, arriving in the country at the beginning of the last century with a wave of immigrants. Many of the noodle shops are still run by descendents of the original Chinese who settled there.

A sizeable Vietnamese population in Cambodia also serves up pho – pronounced fur – their own particular type of beef noodle soup.