Or, for that matter, the absolute, unalloyed luxury of starting every single day with a complete free rein.

Where shall we go today? What shall we do? What shall we see?

All, as it happens, for less than the rent or mortgage on a one-bedroom London flat.

I was self-employed, single and working from home when Z was born. On a Sunday. By Tuesday, I was back at the laptop, newborn at boob, hitting a deadline I’d hoped to get out of the way before he arrived.

Now, I’m aware that working from home is many mothers’ dream. But, like self-employment, it tends to spill. You cannot leave your work at the office, because your office is your home. When jobs for different clients collide, you work all the hours god sends, and then some.

Preparing for a holiday was a frantic scramble: endless late nights at the laptop, followed by a last-minute squash of possessions into backpack (usually sitting on it, by the end), check of passports, cards and tickets. Enough, in fact, to make you need a holiday in itself…

So… here we are. Our year out to travel the world has extended to a multi-year trip. My assumption that we would return to the London grind has been replaced with a desire for a 300-euro a month rental somewhere the boy can become bilingual in Spanish and I can work much, much less.

And what have we done with today’s time?

Well, we caught the night train from Hanoi to Lao Cai, a highland town spitting distance from the Chinese border, and picked up a bus to Sapa.

It’s a slightly surreal place, Sapa. Tiny Hmong women in dark leggings and endless scarves and minuscule Wen Xai ladies in scarlet turbans wander amid French colonial buildings, fantasy Pyreneean mansions appear amid dramatic contours clad in oriental pines, while water buffalos laze on the endless rice terraces.

We had coffee.

Breakfasted. Bought a penknife, with a compass. Chatted to a Vietnamese family at our guesthouse and two Hmong ladies in town.

And then we went for a walk, in the blissful, cloudy cool, four miles or so, to Cat Cat village down the valley, below the cloudy hills.

We looked at the wonderful landscape, the maize, young rice and paddy terraces, and the bamboo irrigation system. Played pooh sticks in an irrigation channel. Z built an archipelago out of mud, tried to catch a butterfly, and picked me a bunch of wildflowers.

And, yes, as they say on the postcards, we are having a lovely time. Thanks to Josie at Sleep is for the Weak for the writing prompt, time.

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The elegant Nikolai, who owns the Snake House restaurant, the Airport disco and an exquisite and extremely expensive island, is responsible for the snake thing.

Cambodia is home to ten of the world’s most dangerous snakes, disconcerting information given the medical care is some of the worst in the world north of the Sahara.

Tourists die quite frequently, having gone out to the jungle in flip-flops and shorts, sans guide, disregarding four decades worth of unexploded ordnance and aforementioned wildlife to take a little walk on the wild side.

Because if the guesthouse plays Bob Marley, what could possibly go wrong?

Nikolai, apparently, is the only man in the entire country who has a clue what to do when pit vipers/king cobras/krait take askance to one’s presence. Handy if you’re in Sihanoukville. Less so elsewhere.

One recommendation is to pour boiling water on the bite. In theory this coagulates the venom and slows its progress through the system.

Then pray, I guess.

A trained vet, Nikolai arrived from Moscow with a vision. A restaurant full of snakes.

It would be fair to say his taste in decor tends to the Bond villain. Snake House has snakes living in the table-tops, a chained crocodile lolling amid exotic palms, and colonial bamboo furnishings under a hessian roof.

Will go like the clappers once off the chain

Eating Cambodian mushrooms pickled Russian style while vipers and cobras dart and squirm in one’s peripheral vision is definitely an experience.

Yet Snake House has grown beyond commerce, beyond passion and into a brilliant obsession.

What was once a single, relatively restrained line of scary creatures behind glass on astroturf is now a maze of ferns and cages, giving onto a frankly baronial moat populated by a small army of crocodiles, cages full of tropical birds, fish, sea turtles, terrapins . . .

Perhaps most surreal of all are the cute little bunny rabbits shaded by banana plants. Petting zoo in the making? Or dinner for the crocs? Time will tell, I guess.

Nikolai’s primary vehicle is an Aston Martin with a skeleton riding shotgun. He also, word has it, owns a Porsche, an original MacLaren, and a few other nippy little runabouts. (The Hummers belong to his managers.)

Finding that local roads rather removed not only the point but also the suspension from his fleet, Nikolai prevailed on the powers that be, AKA the Cambodian People’s Party, to open the disused airfield so he and his friends can race his vehicles.

Z appreciates the man's decorative genius.

Complete with someone’s great-grandmother to pick every single stray leaf off the lovingly landscaped beach with a rake.

Only in Cambodia? Possibly.

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