(all pictures to come--these computers and this program prove to be too unreliable a combination)

Luang Prabang, the four thousand islands in the Mekong near the Laos Cambodian Border, and now Siem Reap.

Luang Prabang was cool; a relaxed town we toured with an Irish guy who was a little off his bicycle. He hadn't talked to many people, traveling as overland as possible through the middle east to Asia over the past 8 months, and exploded seemingly, as we drank beer in a little noodle joint just outside the old town. He had a shaved head and an 18 inch braided beard that kids in Nepal chased him yelling out the name of some goats hair for. He was a gregarious guy and got drunk on one beer more than we drank: we're sitting there drinking big beers but only two and he drinks one quicker and manages to get down three and he's singing Kevin Barry, though he hates the revolutionary songs he says. The town has many monks, many monks and goes to bed early, nothing really being open past 10 or 11. We find the Hive, a bar that pleased neither Traci nor I, because it's the only thing open. It's full of western white people and pumping music that is just short of obnoxious. Everyone's drunk and the overheard conversation is discouraging deep to the soul, but we buy expensive--relatively speaking--beer decide to leave afterwards. This dude, Alex, is drinking Smirnoff straight from the bottle--to which he periodically adds 7up--and plain jaded looking. I try to make the inane small talk--do my part to participate in the soul-discouraging conversation--and yeah it's small. Then, I forget the lead up, he yells at Traci, saying she came there to see all the foreign people, that's she full of shit when she says otherwise.

We don't take this well. We argue and make fun of the guy--he was there before us and had obviously been there awhile--and have a good time at it. He asks me about eating and I tell him his best bet is street meat. Immediately he's trying to get me to go with him, standing up and falling over chairs and tables. He no longer trusts me to help him up and stumbles off to some group that cheered his fall. Traci and I leave.

We ride bikes around the city, it's quite nice. Relaxing and provincial, tons of monks in bright robes everywhere you turn. I went to a waterfall without Traci--she wasn't feeling well--and did a twisting sloppy flip off this 5m waterfall.




It was nice that I didn't hurt myself.

Bus ride to Vientiane--long windy vertiginous roads made this 10 hours of hell for some. The little monk boy was nodding his head to the music at the beginning, but was soon hunched over, his father's hand on his back, vomitting and remained so until he got off.


Vientiane to Pakse--not seemingly as long despite the assseats at the back of the bus we shared with these rich dudes fighting over a blanket or laughing at the Mac laptop one of them brought. They fed us. Then stopped the bus and threw the trash out the side door.

We took another bus to Si Phan Don, one that stopped to wait an hour for to fat backpackers who wouldn't pay the 50 cents or a buck for the few mile tuk tuk ride to the main road. Dudes didn't give nor receive any smiles.

But we're smiling anyway, as soon as we reached Don Det. 3$ a night accomodations, 2$ meals 1$ beers etc. We crisscrossed the two islands Don Det and Don Khone on bikes under a burning sun, sweaty hot and happy. Drinking beers where we wanted watching the Mekong thunder over rapids or shelter water buffalo from the myriads of bugs plagueing them.

The not so smiley was the funeral. The day we got there we were walking to rent a bike and saw this truck being offloaded onto the island. Imagine Huck Finn with a Korean-make truck on his raft pulling into some hillbilly river town and you got the scene. It was a spectacle. Everybody watching and engrossed. We returned our bikes and found a congregation by the loading area (I can't call a slope of dirt a dock) a woman wailing, and men sitting around a fire. We passed again and no wailing but we saw the little girl on a platform by the fire. We thought this was maybe some elaborate ritual to break a fever. She didn't seem dead. We found out later that the two year old girl fell in the river and was lost for 30 minutes or so. They tried to revive her; westerners tried CPR but the family refused. She'd been under too long. So the family was drinking and trying to carry on like normal. We learned the severity of the situation over drinks at the Monkey Bar, which earns it's moniker from the chained up monkey out back that towards the end of the night tormented us by bouncing around, jangling it's short chain. It was almost closing time--the time when the generators on the island stop running and everything goes black, sort of like a horror movie except with more Australians than monsters--and this guy Floyd had a bottle of Lao Lao to drink. Lao Lao, for the uninitiated, is vile shit. Traci and I were anything but initiates. We thought we were tough with the soju, but were proved terribly terribly wrong. The stuff is brewed at home nad comes 50 cents for a 10 ounce (sprite) bottle. Floyd wanted to play quarters and after Traci was suckered in by a crunk Australian named Abbey, I wasn't far behind. I did well, until Abbey started cursing my name and telling her boyfriend that he was going to have to hold her hair and I held up took pity and lost my groove. Then Traci started sinking them, inadvertantly, we were a team, and it was nasty. Finally, lights went out, things got weird and we had to go. We had to walk straight through the funeral, which we now knew was a funeral, and things got a little weirder. Traci asked what we could do. Guy-named-Andy said sit down and drink. And so we did, the group of Laos, one of whom spoke English, Andy and us. They fed us more of that vile nasty petulant liquid. We learned the details, sad and sat awhile trying to carry on with the folks. When the father left we did. It was only too soon . We'd each smoked two cigarettes, and we don't smoke.

Vang Vieng

We stayed in a nice bungalow overlooking the river and the jagged limestone mountains to the west of us. We argued a little over the price--8 dollars or 80,000 kip. The bus dropped us off at the place after circulating a color flyer on the way up, rather than at the airstrip just to the east of town as normal buses do. The coersion turned me off, but we were just outside of town; the place was quiet and the view was more coersive than the connected bus drivers had been.

Into town looking for something to eat, waiting for Christa to show up. We eat at this organic farms cafe that seemed to have a pretentious hippie feel lurking in the shadows, but days later I'm mulling over a fantasy of working there for a week or two in exchange for room and board.

Vang Vieng is a tourist town. There is no way around that. It's anything but 'offthebeatentrack' and by the end of our soujourn there I was convinced it was the land form of a cruise--Royal SE Asia. People arrive there in droves and the one local that I was able to hold a conversation with told me the only traditional Lao food you could find in town was on the street. The restauarants all catering to western tastes. In the bars along the main street, TVs play constantly, most with a DVD of Friends reruns on repeat. One showed the Simpsons, one showed Family Guy.

Possibly the most enjoyable part of Vang Vieng was tubing down the river that runs alongside of town. 4$ gets you a tube and a ride 3 km up the river. You put in and in less than 100m there is a guy with a long stick beckoning you to come and enjoy a Beer Lao and his zipline built out from a tree with bamboo, running into the water. How could you resist that. Nevermind the fact that it's 11am, it's hot! A short while later, perhaps another 100 200m and another guy has a rope swing and a long bamboo stick with which he brings in his catch. This continues down to the town with some smaller some larger makeshift bars and ropeswings, places to jump out of and shacks to get food at. A few of the ropeswings are rather large, one of them Traci biffed off of (video coming shortly) and some are so hopelessly small in comparison that I feel bad for the solitary guy sitting on his dock shouting at the disinterested passersby. By the end Christa, Traci and I were a mess, as was everyone else on the river, but decided to stop off at the bar on the way home, aptly named the Happy Cafe. It was such a merry place that the owner even named his daughter, 4 months old, Happy.

Vang Vieng wasn't all bloating and floating. One day I rented a bike and toured some of the local caves on the opposite side of the river. The lamps given to me by the guides and other locals sitting in the bushes trying to make a buck were dodgey at best. One I had to twist two wires together to get it to turn on. That was a cave I didn't go very deeply into. The next cave, however, I realized my guide periodically pulled out a lighter to melt some of the inuslation off his wires so he could twist them together. We were already quite some way in, light being a faint glow behind us. This cave was large, with slippery ledges abutting gaping chasms. I ended up jumping out of a tree with a Lao boy and swimming in the lagoon with a slightly pompous rich Israeli. Good times.

I also went climbing, coincidentally behind the bar on the river that did me in two days prior. I was the only one with the guide, but wish I could have had a little more time to rest in between climbs. I kept falling off the last route at a difficult part because of hand failure.

Then we left, went to Luang Prabang for a few days of walking around the small city.

It's a chopper baby

We took one of those forms of tourist-cattle transport from Koh Tao to Bangkok. We bought the ticket on a whim from the place we had our laundry done and later got reprimanded by the dive shop we'd been using. They sell the same tickets. She didn't hold it against us though and arranged for a taxi to bring us into town to catch the boat. It was about 24 hours of ferry and bus travel with an ear infection and a hangover (we met this Irish couple who introduced us to the bucket--A pint of Thai whisky a drop of coke and a a red bull--and a laid back bar on the beach--before we got to the little hickish town of kantharalak. We met Les, a man who'd gone to High School with my mother and has lived here for 13 years or so. He picked us up at 8 am and we spent the next two days with his family, Ya, Benz, Jackie and Tony.

As luck had it, Les owned two Honda choppers, and trusted my professed riding ability. Ya dropped the kids off at her mother's and we took a trip into town. Got some drops for my ear and that progressively felt better over the next few days. We rode around on some other business and finally decided to ride south to a curious national park that likes to charge foreigners inflated admissions prices at each new bend or rise or sight. It was flat and straight and devoid of the potholes that littered the road from Les's farm into town, so we got going. A stupid idea since the helmets we were wearing were unreliable at best and the paper thin clothing and sandals provided little other protection. But the speedo was broken, so each time I had to hold onto the helmet because we were going too fast, I looked down and saw that we were only in fact going 0 km/h. It reassured me.

The way people drive in this part of Thailand--right near the Cambodian, Laos, Thai border--is casual. If you want to pass someone, do it and don't worry about. The other cars and bikes and tractors and motorcyles and scooters and carts and trucks and buses will move towards the shoulder or slow down or some safe combination of both. Otherwise they will sound their horn and let you know they don't intend to do any such thing. The bike had some get-up to it, so I was able to negotiate this sort of situation and keep up with Les, who was givin her ahead of me.

We got the discount, two foreigners, one resident alien and a Thai citizen for the price of three Thais and one foreign child. Somewhere up the way we had to pay another 20 - 50 baht, this one confused me, before being stopped just short of the Cambodian border where Cambodian's wanted another 200 baht each to continue up to the ruin. Les was appalled by the racist principle behind it and I bought a pair of sunglasses so rocks would stop hitting me in the eyes on the way home. We settled for an overlook into the three countries where Les and Ya spoke to some Cambodians about dead bodies below the cliff we were standing on and Traci and I tried to follow and stared out over the vista.

Les's kids were great, if a little high-maintenance. A little standoffish at first, they lost all inhibitions when I started throwing them around. First with flips and then around in circles. I swung them in between my legs and around in poor dance moves. We played my favorite game of all, wheel-of-children, where they lie down and I spin them until their pupils become the size of soup bowls. They loved this game even more than I did.

The two girls are good dancers. They get it from their mother, who is great dancer, natural rhythm. Ya wanted to go dancing the last night we were there so we went down town and for a little while were the only people at a bar with a band playing maudlin rock anthems. At set break Ya got them to dance music and soon we were all dancing and drinking bad 'blended imported spirit' that was called whisky on the menu. At the end of the night, there was a fight, over jealousy between boyfriend and girlfriend. She hit him with a chair, he hit her. They went outside. By this time we were dancing on the stage, the whisky all gone. Transvestites were getting their groove on in these banistered platforms. Outside the man and woman are still fighting, then he hits her, grabs her face and throws her to the ground, kicks her. Now it's getting uncomfortable, the scene inside is not jibing with that outside. Nobody is doing anything. Our jaws dropped and getting down off the stage and going outside and Ya waving it off, then talking to the girl and soon everbody is outside, the party is over, the fight is over. The guy who was sitting on his scooter looking tough with his side crowded around him while his girlfriend yelled from the stairs amidst a different crowd was gone. Attention shifted to us. The lead singer called me handsome, I said he was too. One girl was calling us lovely, Traci a super star. The Transvestites were talking to us introducing themselves. The lead singer made sure to point out the obvious, to which one replied "noboby know, nobody know!" We droved back out the potholed road to the farm ending the strange night.

I loved staying with Les and his family. It was a welcome break from the backpacker trail where it seems we will spend most of our time. 6 weeks may sound like a long time here, but we feel rushed. a month for each country is a more adequate time. As it is, we're having to stick to few places, easy places due to long travel times between.

And now here we are in Vang Vieng Laos. More on that later, hopefull with pictures. No time left today.

Ko Tao

On Ko Tao down in the south of Thailand. We travelled overnight by bus and boat to get here and it was worth it, though the weather sorta sucks. It was bright for half a day, then the rain came and hasn't really let up. Before that we managed to ride a little scooter, a piece of crap, like the dirtbike it wasn't. Still didn't make it to the remote beaches I wanted so we settled for a swim on the largest and most accesible beach. There are bigger bikes and now I know where to get them.

Today we dived. Rain didn't matter so much underwater. The first dive wasn't the greatest due to a massive current and an anxious girlfriend, but the second was great. Nice and comfortable. I goaded an aneneme fish into attacking me. Got guts for a 2 inch fish.

Bangkok

We made it, as you may have heard from Traci. After a leisurely drive to the airport with Nicole down the east side of the Olympic penninsula, we had long but reasonable flight to Incheon, ROK. Months ago, when booking our ticket back we requested special meals thinking they would be special. Not so. We looked with envy as the other passengers were served chicken and beef dishes that looked only moderately bland while she got some eggplant sandwich and I a dish of rice with flecks of mushrooms on top. Now know not to say that we are devout muslims.

We stayed with Will at our future home, drank lots of Korean beer, the sweet nectar we dearly missed during our sojourn in the states. We received our expensive but already paid for last shot of Japanese encephalitis immunity. Nothing really was open do to it being Chuseok, the Korean Thanksgiving, but we managed to wrangle up a dinner of chicken galbi. Just before I called a friend's number hoping to get him to come along. Someone picked up and I said "I heard you been talking about my mom" in a somewhat threatening voice. He laughed a little uncomfortably and asked who it was. I said my name and he asked me how Busan was. This was my first clue that I did not know to whom I was speaking. It turned out to be Colin, one of the new Prime teachers who just got here. He was confused, but agreed that it was a good way to make each other's acqaintances.

We packed and left on the first bus of the day, at 230a. Still the highways had the most cars I've ever seen on a Korean highway. Half of Seoul was going home after the holiday in the country. The rest area was so packed that the lanes normally meant for driving were filled with parked vehicles. The exit ramp also looked like a parking lot. It took my special knowledge to realize the truth.

We discovered Thai airways to have the best service of any airlne we've been on. They forced beer down our throats for four hours before noon, a trick helped along by the fact we were passing receding time zones. They even tried to foist cognac on us before we politely put a stop to the madness. The bus ride from the airport to teh Khao San road to almost as long as the flight did. It was hot and sticky and endless. But here we are in the major tourist distract of Bangkok, "the decompression chamber" for tourists coming to or from Thailand according to a recent movie and book by Alex Garland. We didn't want to stay here long, nor did we want any hassle trying to figure anything out after so much travel and madness. It's what it is. We have food, a bed and a cold shower before our bus leaves for Ko Tao tonight at 8p.

Today we did the Tuk Tuk thing--getting ferried around to some of the major tourist sites as well as some of the major tourist shops selling jewelry and tailored clothing. Apparently the drivers have some great deal, because after going through three such shops and smiling a lot and politely saying we don't wear suits or jewelry, the guy dropped us off and wouldn't take our money. He'd originally asked only 10 baht, a little more than a quarter, but he took us to several other non-retail places and drove us around for nearly two hours.

Flowers in Buddhas hand



Look I can drive a Tuk Tuk


Here is our driver and Traci:


Meal at a street stall, notice the legs and shell still on the shrimp. The woman who cooked it had something large and hairy on her arm. Traci couldn't stop staring at it. It looked like a two and a half inch long hairy beetle was burrowed into her wrist, waiting to make it's next move whatever that is.

Port Angeles before our flight

Last night we saw Derrick
and ate some fried pickles. Yum!
Night before our flight. We're in Port Angeles visiting Paullete and Dave, Traci's aunt and uncle.

We spent our last day running errands, some of which didn't need to be run. We waited at the department of licensing for too long to find out that we got fifteen dollar copies of what we already had and didn't need. We got out of town later than we planned and missed our ferry. But Traci and Nicole found time to defend America's borders.

Bellingham

After a week in the FL heat we're now in WA. WE had a lazy day sandwiched by nights that defined the phrase rok n roll.

A bunch of people came over







We partied and barbequed.






Then did high kicks in the kitchen. Mikkel practices.




Zooey is still around, despite attempts to cook her.


Dave realized the madness early.


and Hardcore was consumed by it






It was rok bliss