A Long Email After a Tough Loss.

This is a bit of a marathon. Hanoi was the last place in Vietnam that we hit and it was pretty good. Not really that much to do in Hanoi but shop and buy a ticket to Halong Bay. Halong Bay is really, really nice. I've never really seen anything like it. But enough of that. So the four of us (we managed to ditch the girls) have started to play Hearts for the food or beer tab whenever we go out. The loser (first to 100) has to pay. It makes for
some very loud and angry dinners pretty much every time we eat and I'm quite sure we have offended many other tourists with our cursing, screaming, banging the table, and occasional outbreaks of violence. I am actually sulking right now after a bad loss. It's very addictive though and we are actually eating more often and becoming more and more anti-social because of this game. The cool thing is whenever we play out in public, groups of locals swarm around us and watch. In Hanoi we were sitting on the sidewalk drinking 10-cent beers (Think about that. For the cost of a Seabus ticket, you could get hammered. A return ticket would kill you. And they were still better than Canadian) playing Hearts for the $2 tab when like 8 old Nammy guys surrounded us. They kept laughing and shouting whenever we put cards down and giving us pointers in Vietnamese although I'm fairly sure they didn't know any of the rules. It’s happened other times in Laos as well.
After Hanoi we got on a 21-hour bus trip to Laos, probably one of the worst 21 hours I have ever had. Every country in SE Asia, including the loser countries like Laos and Cambodia, have recognized that people have legs and some room should be put aside in vehicles for such legs. Except for Vietnam. They refuse to believe that legs exist. I was sitting in the back of the bus with my knees near my ears and about 30 packages of gifts and stuff falling on my head while some Laos guy (we tried to call them Laosers but it's not working out) kept falling asleep on my shoulder for 21 hours. I changed from politely tapping this guy on the shoulder to throwing whatever oddly shaped gift that had just fell on my head at him at about the 4-hour mark. The Laos border was kind of funny though and it is a definite indication of how relaxed Laos is compared to the rest of SE Asia. The guy at the customs desk was wearing an adidas jacket and sitting next to a bonfire he had started in his office.
Vientiane was fairly boring as cities go but also refreshing. There was little traffic, no motorbikes, and no one really hassled you for anything. Laos people are pretty sleepy and lazy. Shopkeepers in other countries usually scream at you from the moment they see you until the moment you've pushed some elderly German woman in their face. In Laos, they are sleeping in their stall and seem annoyed that you've woken them up if you want
anything. We also met this guy Bob from Cameroon in Vientiane. Now Bob was the first guy from Cameroon I have ever met and also the first black guy named Bob I have ever met. We learned at dinner that Bob was recently in a Chinese prison and used to have a grand time back in Cameroon with his buddies hijacking cars and robbing rich people's houses at gunpoint. Once he realized that we were not laughing as hard as he was at his exploits, he assured us that usually only the guard was killed in the adventure and that
they didn't shoot white people, which is nice. Needless to say, the rest of our time in Vientiane was Bobless.
After Vientiane, we headed up to Vien Viang, which is pretty much a town that revolves around tubing. You go down this river in a tube and there are bars every 100 metres down the river that pull you in and sell you cheap beer and let you use their rope swings, zip lines, and volleyball courts. This is how we spent 4 days. There is this one rope swing bar that is the biggest and most popular and where most people spend the majority of their day. Its like 30 feet in the air and pretty scary. Most people doing the swing are pretty lame so our attempts at "grabs" and back flips were fairly big spectacles. And so forth. I actually went too far and almost completed the second flip, landing square on my back. Just a great four days of drinking and jumping off rope swings. We also did a whitewater rafting trip after which was pretty cool. Just when I thought I had trouble understanding the locals, this deaf, German couple shows up on this trip. They were completely deaf and knew about as much English as the guides, which wasn't a lot. I don't think they appreciated how I was standing right next to them with a stupid grin on my face, watching the charades they and the guides had to perform for every communication, and nodding along in encouragement. But they were amazing,
they figured out every little thing the guides were saying. I didn't even know half of the time. By the end of it, I learned a little sign language so if anyone needs to tell a deaf person any of the first 16 letters of the alphabet, I'm your man. Except for K.
Now we are in Luang Prabang, which is a really nice town. We walked around
yesterday and were invited to drink with some local students who had just finished exams. As usual the first question they asked was "Do you have a girlfriend?" followed by the less subtle "Do you like Laos girls?", "Do you like that girl?", "She likes you you know", and "You should learn Laos from her". We walked with their group of like 20 back into town and all of a sudden one girl kept smiling at me and laughing. Then her friend tried to push me into her. Then some guy told me I should go talk to her. I was wondering if I had mistakenly hit on her in Laos custom by walking too close to her or making eye contact (which by the way, is considered a valid contract to buy something in Cambodia) with her. So I walked faster and slower, looking at everything but her, including the guy behind me, until I was satisfied that if I hadn't shown enough lack of interest in her, I might have made enough eye contact with the guy behind me to dissuade her. I later found out that the whole thing started when Brett had told this girl's friend that I liked her and all of my evasive action was useless.
Anyways, we're going on a trek tomorrow and then Northern Laos, Northern
Thailand, and Bangkok and some other stuff. I hear the election is very soon and I'm not going to get preachy about how you should vote, but if you vote for the conservatives, you are probably a child molester. There, I said it.

Bouche

P.S. The age-old mystery of who wins in a fight between a preying mantis and a chicken was revealed to us while walking today. It's the chicken, and its not even close.