What lies in store for our tweedy heroes? Tune in next time.

We've bought food and woolly garments, and we've arranged for a motorbike. This morning we embark on a seven-day journey through northwest Yunnan, near the Tibetan border. Be sure, we will live to post on this blog again.

Into China

We woke up in Vang Vieng at 6 a.m., ready to return to Ventiane for our Chinese visas (in processing) and head north. Such optimism, such chipper, knowing so little about the interminable journey that would end in first delirium, then panic, and finally vomiting.

It was five hours to Ventiane, where we found a bus leaving in one hour for Udom Xay, a northern city that was close enough to the Chinese border. That was to be a thirty-hour bus ride through the Lao mountains, often on unpaved roads, during which time was measured by the pendulous motion of the bus and the corresponding swishing between our ears. Straight ahead, all we ever saw was either dark forest or the land's martyrous plunge. The road itself dodged to the right, left, or backward as soon as it escaped our headlights.

In Udom Xay, a bus was leaving in thirty minutes for Mueng Laa, the first major city in China. The ride was ten hours. At the border, Chinese officials pored over our passports, plucking at the binding and peeling back the paper. We finally arrived in Mueng Laa and checked into a hotel for 40 yuan (~$5 U.S.). That was all we had, though, so we set off to find an ATM, dipping and swaying as we walked. After checking a dozen banks that wouldn't take our cards or our Lao kip, we found a woman who spoke a little English. She told us that there was only one place nearby that would take foreign cards, and she wrote the name down for us.

The first person we showed the characters to pointed us back in the direction of the bus station. We walked past it and asked another Chinaman for confirmation, and he pointed us back in the direction we'd come. We bounced back and forth this way, making shorter and shorter runs, for a half hour until we asked someone in the center of our pattern, the bus station. She pointed to the schedule on the wall.

So Mueng Laa was the problem, there were no foreigner ATMs there. We had to go to Jinghong, five hours away, and the tickets were 33 yuan each. We got our money back from the hotel and begged pitifully with the bus ticket people. A stranger finally came to our rescue with 10 yuan, one minute before the last bus to Jinghong was leaving. We made it on board, and once there we discussed the other options we'd had, all of which could have become very real if we were short one benefactor. First, we could try to hitchhike with people we couldn't speak with. If that didn't work, we could sell Mike's watch and my mobile phone. Still no, then we would have torn our clothes, left our shoes, and posed as beggars. As a last resort, we could have sold our exotic milky bodies to Chinese businessmen.

Milking our ignorance

Needless to say, Mike puked in his sleep that night.* So as not to anger the hotel matron, whom we had already had a charades argument with, he stuffed the sheets away in the corner of the room. We kept the "do not disturb" light on so no one would find them until we left.

A few days later, we came back from a day trip, and the girls in the lobby were giggling at us, speaking Chinese and tugging on their shirts. Ah yes, they must have found the drying apparatus. We had washed our clothes in the tub and strung them up in zigzags throughout the room. We found our clothes dried and folded on Mike's bed. What's the point of a "do not disturb" light anyway? we wondered. Just then two hotel girls, who didn't speak a word of English, knocked on the door.

They came in waving some sort of a fee chart that was all in Chinese, jabbering unintelligibly. I covered my mouth and then my ears to express my confusion. They shook the paper, on which one set of characters was underlined, more emphatically. I tried to join in the argument.

"You and your friend are both really pretty," I said, jabbing an angry finger at them.

Mike kept telling them he didn't understand, for some reason using the Thai phrase. One of them rubbed the bedsheet and then pointed to the number 70 on the paper. I thought I'd figured it out. I pantomimed vomiting and pointed to the bedsheet. They threw their hands up and nodded with relief.

"You keep quiet," Mike said to me, "and don't try to show them that you understand. I'll take care of pretending I don't know what's going on."

He tried to tell them we had paid for the room already, four nights, they should check the books. I wondered why he was trying to fake this particular manner of confusion, when there were worlds of insults and anecdotes that would have had the same non-effect. The girls stomped their feet and yelled harder.

"Why don't we just make out and forget about all this?" I bellowed at them.

Eventually they left, but they came back with reinforcements. We ended up giving them some money, but we had exhausted them into accepting a third of their asking price.

These people had treated us coldly for the past few days, and we felt like we had finally won them over. This is because arguing is a traditional Chinese pastime. When judging the length of a taxi ride in Jinghong, you have to account for the driver stopping to have several arguments along the way.

Travel brochure

Jinghong is the capital city of Xishuangbanna, the southernmost district of Yunnan province. To quote from our district map: "Virgin forest, rubber forest, fruit forest, banana forest, tea mountains, and etc, form the pictures of green sea, and it seems that the green wave will just come into your heart. There are many pretty Dai girls who have slender figures and beautiful hair."

Jinghong itself is an illuminated city. Everywhere are varicolored lights pulsing, gliding, fading to black and then awakening with a start. Azure-lit ferns and purple-gilded roofs. Worst is the Supercenter Skycity Shopping Vortex, madness of spins and counterspins, flashing spacegate, towering logos, like a hundred prostitutes pulling back garments to incite your consumer's member.

Zoom out now, quickly, and see the outlines of wooden huts and shivering rice fields at the edge of the radiance. Further still and see Jinghong as a pulsar in vast black space.

City of lawless children

Here in Jinghong, babies live the lives of thrill-seeking libertines. Dangling from the arms of their pliant parents, they defecate on the sidewalk at whatever spot pleases them. We've seen them release their spoor from the edge of a high balcony, the torn bottoms of their little pants flapping in the wind. Outside the mini-mall, they gather around a wading pool full of fake dinosaurs and real fish, jabbing their nets in the water and shouting curses. They fill their buckets with fish and stegosaurs, then dump the helpless creatures onto the sidewalk. At the river's edge, they climb into giant plastic spheres and are tossed into the water, whence they tumble about the ball drooling in their abandon.

As far as older children, ages four to six, we often see them in the alleys, setting fires to cook found turtles, or chasing each other with BB guns. Today we watched a toddler pursue a chicken while flailing a cable whip. Another boy was standing in the middle of traffic (often going both ways in one lane) and playing with his yo-yo.

And the din I hear from my fourth-floor window, that says something. From the blurred rabble that rises up from the streets and markets -- think amusement park, or Colosseum, maybe both -- one sort of sound escapes intact, and it's the ringing voice of a Chinese child, demanding, singing, or laughing like a pirate.

One hundred cups of tea in three days

We were out walking in Jinghong when diarrhea struck Mike like a mud torpedo. He hurried toward home, and I spent the rest of the day in a Western-style cafe with books I could read. I returned to the hotel to find that Mike had made friends with a man named Shuo San, an artist, writer, singer, and former policeman who belonged to the Akha minority. This province, Yunnan, has supposedly been difficult to govern throught China's history because of not only its rugged terrain but its disparate ethnic groups, including Shuo San's. He was the first person we met in China who spoke English well, and though I enjoy shouting "Poop!" at the supermarket, it was a relief to speak with him.

Mike told Shuo San that he comes from North Carolina, but this was received blankly. He saw that Shuo San's cigarettes were "Virginia-style" and told him that he was born in Virginia. Shuo San's face lit up, and he sang "Take Me Home, Country Roads," from beginning to end.

We hung out for the next few days, and always sidling in and out of the picture was Shuo San's driver, a big Mongolian who was quiet and removed until things needed to get done. He would decide on the restaurant, inspect the kitchen, and order all the food, but he never paid. Shuo San evaded most questions about him, including those about his other job. On the third day, Shuo San had no car because his driver had to pick up an imperiled friend in Burma (currently a serious danger zone). The driver laughed heartily, drank heavily, and seemed to do whatever he wanted to. When we went out to eat the other night, he wanted to hear a basketball report, so he pulled the car up to the edge of the dining room and blasted the stereo with the doors open. No one dared say anything.

While his driver was in Burma, we rode a bus with Shuo San to his brother's village and tea factory. We walked on trails among the tea fields and the high stepped terraces. As we walked, Shuo San plucked a leaf from a branch and blew into it, making it sing a high and hopeless song. He pulled another leaf and gave it to Mike as a cure for his chronic and powerful diarrhea. Then he showed us how to drink nectar from a banana flower. We ate several other fruits and leaves from the trail before we arrived at his brother's restaurant.

The decor was polished, but all made of wooden poles, and Mike noted that it would make for a top-notch theme restaurant in America. The food was diverse and satisfying. Fried fish from the mountain stream, rice pudding-soup, some kind of non-peanuts that made peanuts taste like sand, and lots more. The elder member of the family was smoking tobacco from a bamboo bong the size of a chimney. Mike tried it, but his narrow Western face was too small to form a seal. As usual, the women served us and cleaned up. They were friends, but food-servers are otherwise addressed coarsely in southeast Asia (Girl! Where is my food?). At this outing and elsewhere with Shuo San, we were constantly moving from one place to another to drink tea.

*Mike did end up thoroughly sick, with a fever and sudden explosions from both ends. At our stopover in Ventiane two days before onset, our friend had Chid shaken Mike's hand and creased his brow: "Michael, you are very ill. You are too hot."

Mike recovered quickly, but recalling Chid's perceptive touch gave us pause.

Jinghong China photos

We found these children cooking their pet turtle in a fire they built on the street.

Hei Piao, Shuo San's older brother, a retired Akha village teacher. Shuo San cannot utter his name in his presence.


Chinese people smoke tobacco out of huge bamboo bongs.

Justin tastes a spider.

Having tea right at the farm where it was grown.

Shuo San poses in front of the mural he painted at his family's tea farm and factory.

Cards, blocks, dominoes - people are intensely involved in street games at all hours of the workday.

Steps leading up to a furniture store.

Some Lao homes seen on our way to China. These are a bit more upscale than the average.

Note: Check the top of the previous photo post for new pictures of bridge crossing and Lao landscape.

Happy Thanksgiving

Just a quick note before our next post: Our blog is censored in China! It looks like we can create a post, but we cannot view the page. More on the communist experience later.

Edit: I would also like to direct you to the comments on "Last days in northeast Thailand," where Tong, Som-o, and Aim left us a message. This shit is real, folks!

Young entrepeneurs in a communist nation

We were sitting under a parasol on the bank of the Mekong, sipping cold drinks and reading books. It was low tide, and a wide strip of mud split the river in two. This sector of Ventiane, Laos's capital city, was dominated by lounging Europeans and their exceedingly pleasant Lao service people.

I noticed walking our way a family of two women and two children. The first woman carried a baby in a sling, and the second child, a little girl, tottered along without any pants on. They were all barefoot, and they walked in a sort of daze. I nodded to Mike that these must be villagers come into town to gather supplies. Then I yawned like a lion. They walked past a Lao family and the second woman, beautiful if filthy, approached our table. She started doing something like praying, moving one prayer hand up and down her body, then back and forth. She obviously wanted money. We gave her 3,000 kip, about 30 cents American but a pocketful for her. It wasn't the first time, but I feel like any such encounter is really just a rare and unseemly revelation of the western presence here in Laos.

Someone from a food stand chased the women away so they wouldn't disturb any more of the foreign customers. I watched my empty glass; the flies were hurrying to absorb the bits of smoothie that i'd ignored in my voraciousness. Then I hated myself for that analogy. Curiosity, then pity, condescending by accident, then hating ourselves for it, then protesting is it our fault anyway. That was our psychology when it came to these things.

And then afterward I sat there writing about it in the breeze while someone did my laundry, putting a pen to my teeth, all ponderously, because I don't actually have to work. There's no escaping the guilt. Or there is, you can ignore it, but I mean there's no thinking it through.

History lesson

It was several days since we arrived in Ventiane, and we were beginning to feel like those Europeans who sat outside our guesthouse all day smoking cigarettes, unaware of how long they'd been there or what their plans ever were if they'd had any. We arrived from Nong Khai via the Thai-Lao friendship bridge across the Mekong River, and we found a higher concentration of travelers and expats than we had anywhere else so far. Restaurants included Swedish Bakery and Pizzeria, Nazim's Indian Dining, Kitchen Tokyo, and other international varieties. The city itself was partly French in design since Laos used to be a French colony. There were French architecture, sandwiches, and cafes -- we stayed on Rue Francois Ngin.

Laos has always been a slow, rural region as far as I know, but for the last few hundred years it has been pummeled by countries from all over the world. Its history is really worth reading about on Wikipedia or something. It includes the Secret War, conducted by the U.S. military in the 1970s, in which the U.S. was not constricted by Geneva conventions. Laos is supposedly the most bombed country, ever. Now the country is communist, and some say that for the last thirty years it has been trying to build a nation for really the first time.

We visited the National Museum in Ventiane, where the photo displays included captions like, "Example of the grueling labor that Lao people were forced to undertake under French imperialist rule" and "A U.S. imperialist smiles over the bodies of Lao villagers." The modern-day portion of the museum seems meant to show that Laos has the basic infrastructure of a real country. There are photos of the women's club, a doctor's office, mining operations. Beneath a picture of a mentally handicapped girl singing karaoke, the caption reads, "Disabled children are well take care of." A case on the floor holds over-the-counter drugs and a basic prosthetic foot. The foot didn't belong to anyone important, it was just there to show that Lao health care can indeed provide prosthetic feet.

Go shopping lady

At our guesthouse in Ventiane, I befriended the guy who worked at the desk. His name was Chid, which means "forethought." He was 26, wore trendy clothes, and spoke softly. I told him that before I came to Asia, I knew nothing about the U.S. Army's "Secret War" in Laos. He was surprised about this, and also that most Americans didn't know about our support for the French war there. I did explain to him, though, what a protest was, and that protests were part of the reason the Indochina War ended when it did.

Going bowling was our only definite plan for Ventiane. Later that week, we invited Chid to join us for a few games, which also meant that he gave us a ride to the bowling alley, showed us where it was, and told us how to pay. The bowling alley was located inside a vast athletic/shopping complex. Lanes were modeled after the rugged terrain of northern Laos, and the balls were shaped like coconut shells. Chid's friend Nit (small), an expert bowler, scored a 111 in his best game.

After bowling, we told Chid that the night was up to him.

"I think maybe we go small shop," he said, "drink small beer, go shopping lady."

"Go shopping lady?" Mike said.

"Yes, for a long time I don't do this."

"Okay, but I don't want to go away in the night. Don't want to pay for lady," he said.

"No, don't have to pay. Don't have to go away. Can sit with us. Maybe you can kiss."

"Pay for drinks only?"

"Yes, pay drinks."

"Okay, same America," Mike said.

"Yes, same. I think maybe we find some lady fourteen, sixteen years."

"I don't know, maybe sixteen okay."

"Okay, sixteen okay."

We arrived at small shop, a cozy wooden two-story restaurant near central Ventiane. Upstairs, we ordered our drinks and food, and Nit invited four of the waitresses to partake with us since we were the only customers.

The one they seated next to me was by far the best-looking. I forget her name, but lets call her Ting, which means "girl who would be so much more aloof in America." She had a beauty mark just above her tender jawline and just below the corner of her full and mocking mouth. From there her cheekbone rose softly to her eye, forming the squint in her sly, squinting smile. None of the girls spoke English, and Thai wasn't working very well with them though the language is similar to Lao. Ting and I exchanged some basics --hometowns, etc.-- but communication was pretty garbled. Sometimes we laughed together, but it was probably at different things. After a couple of beers I assumed a position of chin in palm, eyes studying Ting.

We drank Lao style, which means that we each had a glass of beer and a few more were passed around to be drunk in turn. Laos can drink much more than Thais.

"Jissting," Chid said to me solemnly, "I not happy same this for long time. Not drink beer have funny time like this."

"That's because you had that girlfriend for a year."

"Yes. Not fuck-boom for one year already."

Chid's girlfriend never had sex with him. This is part of a weird dichotomy we've noticed so far in Southeast Asia, which should become obvious in this blog post.

Chid was fine waiting for marriage, he loved her very much, but he had reason to think she didn't like him. So he told her parents he was breaking up with her and then he took a hike, without a word to the girl. I told him that in America things are much different; there must be a great war for independence. At this he nodded.

Meanwhile on Mike's side of the table, he was joined by a girl who said she was 16 but looked about 13. [CENSORED] His face looked like a Basset hound's.

"Seriously," he said, "every time I set my drink down, somebody fills it with beer when I'm not looking." (See last entry's "Notes on Disco.")

The girl beside him was named Nawy, which means "little." She looked like she might cry.

"What's wrong with her?" I asked Chid.

"I tell her 'fuck-boom,'" he said.

Mike wasn't interested in Nawy, who would only laugh at him anyway. Eventually Chid got her to sit next to him, but she squirmed at his advances.

"Jissting," he said, apparently deep in forethought, "this one I don't think she like me. I only take girl who like me. When we go back and I pay, then maybe I can see if she really love me. In the middle of the sex, I can see if she love me, maybe. If it's good, I pay up to her. If it's not good, I pay up to me."

"That's a good plan," I said, or something. I turned to Ting and tried to talk to her again. "Do you like any American songs?" I asked in Thai. Lazily she unfurled her confusion.

"Seriously," said Mike, his face now dangling over his plate, "who just refilled my beer?"

"Jissting, what you think about?" Chid said. "You will take her home with you?"

"Gee, I don't know," I said. " She's real pretty, but I mean she's a big girl, she'll do what she wants."

I should insert here that I've in the past been unbelievably oblivious to something in a social setting. Soon, Mike shuffled back to the guesthouse so he wouldn't have to drink any more. I hung back because it was only ten-thirty.

"I think this one, she will go home with me," said Chid, who was now sitting with a slightly fatter girl who looked about 17, taken from Nit's side of the table. "Tonight I very happy."

It came time for everyone to get up, and Ting started talking with Chid in Lao. Chid's girl stood up smiling with her hands clasped at her waist, sort of murmuring to herself.

"Jissting," Chid said, "you don't take?"

"What do you mean?"

He and Ting spoke again. "How much you pay for her?"

"What?" I looked back at the girl. "That's what she's saying to you right now? I just thought..."

He nodded. They talked some more.

"Okay. You want only short time or all night?"

"No, it's, I mean [pleh--fleh--prostitute? Me no know? So pretty. T-shirt, no high heels. But then quiet. I see.]." I approached him. "Look," I said, "I don't do that, don't pay. Besides, I only have 30,000 kip ($3 U.S.) left after dinner." I looked back at her -- "She shouldn't be--" and almost said something that dumb.

"Okay," Chid said, and spoke with her again. "She say $25 American. Thirty thousand kip is --"

"No I know. Twenty-five dollars is a very fair price. It's such a fair price. Just will you tell her that I think she's a very sweet and pretty girl but I don't pay, and if I did I don't have the money anyway."

He spoke to her, and on hearing it, she looked disgusted at having wasted so much time. I approached her to say something, and she recoiled.

The next morning I talked to Chid, whom I found sleeping in the lobby of the guesthouse. Apparently he paid the girl $10.

"Boom boom," he said, "but not good."

"Why?"

"Her not good. Just sleep."

"So, pay up to you?"

"Pay up to me."

Massage brutality

On our second day in Ventiane, we got massages at a place called Holiday Massage, where in the ad photo all the massage girls wore Santa hats. We ordered a "traditional Lao massage," not knowing at all what that would entail.

Mine was going fine until the girl started jabbing her finger at my butthole. She would do it at various stages of the massage, giggling merrily. Mike told his girl that he had a bruised tailbone, so please be careful, and she started pounding on it with her fists. She told him she thought he was a homosexual and that he had the HIV virus. I saw her spank him when she thought he was sleeping.

Meanwhile, mine had cooled down with the anal business, and everything was going well, then she put a gob of menthaledum in my eye. I was half-weeping. That was it, I returned the favor. Without depth perception, I think I poked her pretty hard. I spent the rest of the hour in contrition: I'm so sorry. Do you want to take a break? Here, hit me in the face. She would pretend to cry, then burst out laughing when I tried to comfort her. Mike's massage girl had put menthaledum in his eye as well, and he bodyslammed her for it, but he couldn't bring himself to put the gunk in her eye.

After our time was up, we went downstairs and they served us tea. I'm enough of a sucker that I still tipped her for the massage.

There was a chihuaua playing by the receptionist's desk. "He look like you," Mike's massage girl said to me.

"Goodbye," we said, and walked back out into the street to begin our evening, bleary-eyed and sore.

One country's poverty, another continent's playground

I was writing the previous section on the bus ride from Ventiane to Vang Vieng, and I had to stop several times because it was making me sick. The mountain roads that took us there were just one switchback after another, so the back of the bus behaved like the tip of a puppy's tail.

Vang Vieng is essentially a few dozen bars, guesthousese, and massage shops, huddled together in the flats among jagged terrain. Thus the sky is rimmed with mountains, strange mountains that seem to have been hacked out in spasms by a lovesick god, he shutting his eyes and swinging his hammer-axe downward, diagonally, and sideways, then in and out of the formed shapes, long after he should have stopped. The result is a monster of a landform, a hundred hills in all, with steps and buttes and peaks jutting out at all angles.

The town itself is full of mostly Europeans and Australians taking advantage of the ready supply of drugs. Here in the middle of nowhere, they lie in little comfort pads at an outdoor restaurant and watch Friends on a single TV, each of them as high as the nearest mountain. Shrewd Laos take them on long "treks," where they can alternately tube under waterfalls and peer academically at village poverty. Oh yeah and there's this tubing thing we went on where you go to a bunch of Bob Marley bars and jump off high swings.

Many restaurants and bars in Vang Vieng have a special section of the menu labeled "Happy and Fun for you." At Smile Bar we ordered a couple of mushroom shakes which, upon consumption, were pretty obviously just weed shakes.

We played a few games of bocci ball--big there--then we swam out into the river to lay down on a shoal of stones in the middle of the water. Mike lit a joint and we sat there quietly for about twenty minutes, watching the swift motion of the water between our spot and the shadowy riverbank. That and the huts on the town side, the infinitely shrinking river ahead, the hushed cool shade behind us, the wet smooth stones, the sun glare in the clear sky, the swift water, the grass between stones. It was all perfect and everyone's heart was full blah blah blah.

We crossed the rest of the way and started to investigate the trails on the other side of the river. They turned out to be cow trails, but we found an area I really liked. We came to a circular clearing where the low western trees let in a great gout of late light. An aperture in those trees showed two overlapping mountains, near and towering. Best was over to the right on the northern side, two rows of arching bamboo stalks, a tunnel leading away into dark. I wanted that tunnel, and I knew I would go in later, but I preferred to stand a moment on the threshold, in the light, where I could see how dark it was.

We dove back into the turquoise river and let it pull us downstream to where a bridge crossed. There we swam cross-stream to the bridge's out-of-town end. Mike went back for his camera, and I went into the cowtrails, which were really much too overgrown. Fifteen minutes later I emerged, dirty, bloody, half-naked and stoned, into the company of a young German couple who had just crossed the bridge. I was first drawn to a stream, home to many small creatures. I cupped my hands in the water and lifted some of them out. "There's so many tadpoles," I called to the Germans. "Ah, yes," one said. There really were a lot, some with little legs growing already. Isn't it strange how tadpoles are one of the very first things you learn about in school?

Gone fishin'

We rented a motorbike from our guesthouse and headed north, Mike sitting behind me and swigging from a large bottle of Beerlao, the official brew of the People's Republic. We were a couple of kilometers outside Vang Vieng when we pulled onto a sandy turnoff to investigate.

Recall this classic film scene: Our heroes are fleeing their enemy when they come to a long, swaying rope bridge with broken and missing planks. They attempt it only because they have to; it's a choice between certain doom and likely doom.

When we got off our bikes at this turnoff, we came across this very bridge. Now, I've done some exaggerating on this blog, but believe me when I say that this bridge was fucked. It was skinnier than you might be picturing it -- the width of four bamboo poles -- and more irregular. The ropes were instead metal wires, and the planks were old, old strips of bamboo laid vertically across very scant lateral boards. It must have been a long-defunct bridge, or some kind of joke bridge. It lay high in the air, across a river and its rocky banks. Why we tried to cross it I don't know.

As per usual, Mike sent me on ahead of him. The beginning was the worst.

"In the movies, it always breaks," I said to Mike as I started going. "Every single time."

Except that in the movies, they're able to swing on the broken bridge, eventually to safety. Here, the bridge was longer than the fall, so when it broke we were rock food.

"There's no way I'm doing this. Why am I doing this?" I said.

Mike watched curiously. Squatting, I held the cables and tried to shuffle lightly along the flimsy shards of bamboo. I pushed down on the cables to take some weight off my feet. "Why do I let you talk me into these things?" I said to no one in particular.

Mike started when I was about a third of the way across. Presently, we turned around to see a small crowd of Lao villagers perched at the start of the bridge, laughing at us.

"This is no working bridge," I said to Mike. "It's out of order or something. They're watching to see us fall."

One of them waved his hand and shouted the words for "go on." So they weren't gawking. This was their morning commute!

On wobbling legs, I at last reached the savior tree at the end of the bridge. Then, behind me, I heard a terrible crunch. Mike had put his foot through some bamboo planks. Shaking, he lifted himself back up with the cables and hobbled on.

On the other side, we found a single-file line of children carrying diving masks and some sort of spears -- bayonetted toy rifles, they looked like. We followed them through a maze of trails in the rice fields to another bank of the river. There they would dive underwater near the shore and occasionally come up with small fish stuck to their spears. These they put in baskets. Then they made a fire, singing and shouting, and cooked their fish.

Having finished our requisite ogling of the villagers, we collected our badges and rode on down the road.

We got about forty kilometers out of town before we turned around. In the remote villages, people who saw us stopped what they were doing and stared. Children would all shout "Sabai dee!" their greeting, with big smiles. Between villages we would stop on the shoulder and stare in turn at their mountains, admiring the serpentine way the road descended away from us until we could see it was the crux of a pattern that was too big to view when we were among it -- a deeply-layered "V" of gnarly slopes, paling and paling as the layers receded.

The landscape really was something to behold, and I could fill the whole Internet writing about it if I could describe it, so I'll turn it over to Mike with the photographs.

Vientiane and Vang Vien Laos: photos

The scenery during our Vang Vien motorbike outing.

The bridge.

These kids showed us how they dive and catch fish with spears.

A young monk rides his bike through Vang Vien.

Relaxing by the river at Vang Vien.

Sunset over the Mekong as seen from Vientiane.

Getting the dough ready for our banana roti.

Lao police.

The morning market, Vientiane.

Last days in northeast Thailand

Nam Nao National Park is set in mountainous jungle, about two hours south of Chiang Khan. After arriving, we hiked about five kilometers up the mountain and set up camp in a cluster of bamboo. We slung our hammocks across the stalks and tied a tarp up overhead.

Whenever the wind blew, the bamboo would creak high overhead. Thick stalks rubbed against each other, and the sounds ran up and down the whole register. As we hiked over elephant dung on the trail, it sounded like the animal's trumpet. At night in our hammocks, it sounded like a stalking tiger. Later still, the cold had kept us from sleeping, and we heard in the creaking the jingle of an ice cream truck.

We stayed up late that night contemplating a tiger attack. We knew that tigers lived in that jungle, and they were no rarer than the elephants, whose tracks and droppings gave shape to the hiking trail. The fire would die out while we slept, and we would be unconscious prey hanging from a tree, wrapped up like burritos.

"If a tiger killed me tonight, I wouldn't be that upset about it," I said. "It would be a return to the natural order of things."

"You wouldn't think that way while a tiger was eating you," Mike said.

"Yeah but, when you're in a situation like that you don't really have the capacity to suffer. Your body just goes into panic mode."

"I don't think so. Not while he's eating you and you're still alive."

"He wouldn't. They go right for the neck and it's over in a few seconds."

"No way, I've definitely seen that shit on the Discovery Channel where a tiger takes down a gazelle while it's obviously still alive, and the tiger is eating its intestines for thirty minutes."

Not thinking to question that they'd occupy half of an entire program with this scene, I believed him.

"Okay," I said, "but he's not likely to attack humans anyway. We're probably too difficult of prey."

"We'd be so easy."

"I guess so."

"Haven't there been a lot of mountain lion attacks in America recently?"

"I don't know."

"I know that in California, mountain lions have been attacking a lot of people. They interviewed this guy whose face was chewed off by a mountain lion."

"His face was chewed off?"

"Yeah."

"Okay but don't you have any concept of not talking about this stuff when we're trying to go to sleep?"

"No, because then when it happens, I can say that everything happened just the way I said it would. I'll be like, yeah it's so weird, we were just talking about this exact thing happening just like this."

"Who are you going to say that to?"

"The media."

"Okay," I said, rephrasing, "how are you going to say it?"

"Well the tiger's not going to eat both of us."

"So you're just going to run away?"

"Well, yeah," said Mike, who was wrapped up in a sheet with his hands in his sleeves, "by the time I got out of this hammock you'd already be dead."

"If the tiger attacked you, I'd pull one of these sticks out of the coals and burn its eyes or something."

"Yeah, I mean that guy who got higs face eaten off said that when he was being attacked, this woman hit the tiger on the head with a stick a few times and it ran away."

"Really?"

"Yeah, but his face was still eaten off. I mean he definitely looked like Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky."

We went on to talk about the most distressing aspects, if there were any, of our dying that night. Then we curled up in our hammocks and tried to sleep. Soon after that, space-time forked, and in one direction a tiger visited our camp and ate my face off. Mike hit it on the head with a stick a few times, so it ate his intestines for thirty minutes while he was still alive. I told the newspapers that Mike had been sort of wrong about what was going to happen.

In the other reality, we lived through the night, if you can call this living. Okay,whether we live or not I do not know, but we maintain the ability to blog.

That morning we descended to the visitor's center with the intention of setting up camp off one of the other trails. You were supposed to stay at this cheesy campground next to the visitor's center, but we'd noticed that none of the rules were really enforced.

As soon as we emerged from the jungle we were accosted, as we so often are, by a group of drunk Thais. Airport workers they were, accompanied by their one-armed attorney. They asked us to eat chicken guts with them and drink some of their morning whiskey. They informed us that we must not camp off the trails because it is very dangerous. There are tigers, they said, and elephants. Worse still was the double king cobra, as wide as your thigh and as tall as a tree, which eats tigers and elephants both.

This warning was repeated to us at the visitor's center. The tiger possibility did it for me. For Mike, it was the snake. We stayed on the campground that night. We call this setup "ice cream camping" because there was ice cream for sale a hundred paces away from our campsite. I guess that when your home bathroom consists of a hole and a bucket, you don't have a great urge to rough it when you go to the woods.

Though we were lower in altitude, it was still very cold at night. November is the coldest month at Nam Nao, and it often reaches zero degrees Celsius. That night I put on every pair of clothing I had, including four pairs of boxer briefs, the discomfort of which didn't set in until later.

We managed to sleep, but it was strange. If sleeping is like plum pudding, with dreams scattered throughout the thick custard, then sleeping out in the cold is just plums. Oblivion can't survive in the low temperatures, so what you have is just closing your eyes and entering a dream, then later being roused by a dream gunshot or something.

Thai fever: The mystery of the Thai lady

We hitchhiked from Nam Nao to Khon Kaen, which has the largest university in northeast Thailand. We met in a bookstore a couple of university students , Som-O (superhot) and Tong (superfruity), whose names mean "pomelo" and "correct."

The next day we visited them at their campus, where the male and female dormitories are set behind high walls, and conjugal visits are forbidden. I asked Tong about this, and he said that Thai students do not have sex until they are married.

Tong, Som-O, and many lady friends took us out to the temple, parks, and markets around Khon Kaen's big lake. We rode a song-tiaew from place to place. The girls were still wearing their school uniforms -- black heels, black skirts, and flimsy white button-downs that only come in XXS because there's no use stocking any other size here. Besides the dark hair and apricot skin, each was striking in her own unique way, Beauty in her seven different aspects, and all of them apparently virginal. But to them, we were the objects of desire. Yes, these girls got a special thrill from big noses and long lanky bodies. If you were into this sort of thing, you might think that such a scenario only takes place while you're sleeping, and your mind culls together various elements of desire for a meeting that waking life would never allow. Except in my dreams, the molecule is never stable, and soon the bus would roll over and dump us into the oceans of Saturn, or the bus driver, a barbarian, would put all the girls in his sack and run through me with a broadsword.

But here, in real life, and now preserved among the Internet's innumerable crystals, we hung out for three days. For two nights we went to Rad Pop Society, where the bouncers searched and ID'ed all the Thais but let waved us in with a smile. On the third night, we all climbed into a box and sang our hearts out to a television. With Asian karaoke, it's easier to cut loose because the crowd comprises only the friends you rented the room with.

By the last day, Aim, who usually spoke to Mike through a third party even though she had a basic use of English, told him in the same fashion that he needed to learn Thai so he could meet her mother. We remain baffled by this. Mike and Aim didn't hold hands, let alone kiss. Though the girls go clubbing all the time, they did not "dance close," and Mike was Aim's first in this regard. Som-O, my date, seemed slightly more experienced, but that seemed to us like the difference between sixth grade and seventh. The girls were terribly shy, contributing only scant phrases to a conversation, but now and then one of them would drop a line like, "Sweet dreams...I will dream about you." The dating scene in Thailand seemed to consist of traditional Asian prudence with a veneer of imported sexy romance.

That's not to say that we didn't have an awesome time with Aim and Som-O. They were both extremely sweet and highly attractive, and unlike other Thai girls we've come across they were wholly sincere in their motives.

As for our sociological research, we concede that our sample group so far is absurdly small, but we also had some consultation.

In a drunken and clandestine interview, Tong told that to kiss a boy was right up there with "to go away...with a man...in the night." Good Thai girls did not do it until some sort of serious ritualized moment, and sex was held off until marriage. We gave Tong's perspective creedence because here was a guy who groped us to no end and who grabbed every male buttock that passed him at the disco. He would not kiss one of these guys, though, no way.

He went on to tell us that all Thais have always been pious in romance, and that going away in the night was brought over from Europe. Harder to believe. Were ping-pong shows brought over from Europe, too?

A few notes on Thai disco, as experienced at Loei's Disco Robot and Khon Kaen's Rad Pop Society

• There is no dance floor. Everyone waits until midnight and then just stands up from their chairs to dance.
• Music alternates between a DJ and a live house band, which plays the same songs every night. Most of the house band songs were in Thai, but sounded a lot like music from either Fall Out Boy or Reel Big Fish. The one English song they played was "She Has a Girlfriend Now" by Reel Big Fish.
• Rather than buy beer or mixed drinks, most people buy a bottle of liquor and share it at the table. It is the girls' responsibility to keep everyone's drink brimming at all times.
• Thais cannot drink. They made us seem like alcoholic sailors. To illustrate: With one regular-sized bottle of whiskey, the bar staff brings out ten bottles of soda water.
• I've taken to closing myself in the toilet stall when I have to pee. If you go at the urinal, someone will spot you as the farang in the bathroom and give you a massage while you urinate. That's great, except when you turn around the guy will ask for 5 to 20 baht.

Thai words of the day

Fry the bridge -- This is supposedly a translation of a Thai idiom, and it's colloquially spoken in English. It means that someone is trying to snare you by flirting, but we have no idea how this meaning is derived. Obviously there is no way to fry a bridge.

Kuai -- Weiner. Women are not allowed to say this. We asked if there was a female counterpart, but either no one would speak it or the word doesn't exist.

Mai bau -- Fuck you.

Your bow has rice -- You have accidentally put your elbow in rice that was on the table, and now rice is stuck to your elbow.

Last days in the northeast: photos

Cross-dressers in a traditional Chinese style parade in Nong Khai.

A parade in Nong Khai. We awoke to fireworks and loud music right outside our guesthouse.

Tour boats on the Mekong river.

Light and colors inside a Khon Kaen temple.

Thais put the Playboy logo on everything.

A statue of an important monk at the temple in Khon Kaen

Lights outside a hotel.

Our campsite in Nam Nao national park.

Along the Mekong River

Disregarded ruins

We headed east of town on the motorbike, toward the far hills showing under cover of blue clouds. Eventually we came across an alluring mountain with one balded stone face, and we turned off the highway. On the farm roads, wet from yesterday's rain, we skidded and stopped and skidded again. A sign -- the only one in English -- pointed to "Big Cave." We looked up at the mountain and saw a jagged mouth in the rock, clamoring for dinner. At this point we were deep in the papaya fields, getting wary looks from farmers. We dodged the gravel showers poured by a group of road workers and rode on toward the cave.

We were pretty certain we were lost when we came upon what might be the entrance to big cave. It was obviously a long-defunct attraction of some sort. A sign, which meant much more now than it had originally, read "We apogize for pore conditions of our facitily." Another read "Toarch FOrent." There was a monk living in a sort of tree fort at the base of ruined stairs. We climbed these until we came to a small, pitch-black cave entrance. There we found what centuries ago might have been a torch, and we brought it back to the monk for a guesstures-and-broken-Thai routine. He gave us a candle and a box of wet matches. "Antalai," he said. (See last entry's words.) He pantomimed a slow ascent and quick descent of the mountain.

"Con tok, mai?" I asked ("People fall?)

"Haha, yes," he sad.

Back at the cave entrance, we got our candle lit and went inside, holding the flame to the ground so we could see that at least. A short climb up and then something caught our candlelight. It was a golden Buddha, smiling in the dark. We did some motions that we'd seen others do before a Buddha. Deeper still, and we emerged through a hole in the roof.

The going from here on was a steep climb up slabs of rock, all wet with rain that started while we were underground. I put the candle in my teeth and we started to climb, though our shoes were coated with slick mud. The candle wick was being rained on. Like so much of my life, it was cautionary tale in the making.

"Proceed carefully," I said to Mike. "If we fuck up, they'll say it was our own fault."

We came to a ledge, and on the ledge was a bamboo cot. Maybe the monks came here to fast, we figured. There was an opening in the rock wall, roughly dog-sized, shrouded in spiderwebs. "Next we have to go through there," I joked.

We continued on a sort of trail until it was blocked by boulders. There was no getting around them. Below us, a thorny drop. We returned to the mini-cave, and I went in alone in case Mike needed to call for help. I moved in hunch, mindful of the squeaks, the scurrying, and the bigger noises as well. I came to an open chamber and tried to get my bearings. My eyes had adjusted, but the faces of the cave changed in time with the active flame.

I waved the candle along the wall. Here and there were drawings -- one of a walking monk -- and Thai lettering. I feared calling to Mike because the sound waves might cause a collapse. I went back to retrieve him. Using his camera flash and the LCD display, we could map out our surroundings. Thus we stepped up to a platform at the back of the chamber. Bats flew through Mike's hair. The photos showed another passage after a rocky fall. But there was no exit in sight, and our candle was getting stubby. After a short debate, we decided we would go no further. We got out of there and tumbled back down to the base, having seriously abused the protection of some deity.

A streetbike called Metallica

We proceeded on the motorbike alongside the Mekong River, which was milky brown and feathered by the breeze. The Metallica sticker at our prow broke the wind. Our bike had originated at ban Pee-Noi, the home of a matronly English teacher with a shock of white hair over her dark face. We'd spent the previous day with Pee-Noi, her niece, and an English teacher friend. They were entertaining a class of students, and we toured the city with them so they could hear the tones of native speakers. Pee-Noi has fed us at least five meals and lent us her Internet connection and motorbike. Our guesthouse hostess was hospitable in kind.

Chiang Khan, the town we're in now, has been a comfortable cushion to collapse into and soon to rise up from. It's quiet and idyllic, not much happens here. The town sits on the bank of the Mekong, and across the river, right outside the window of our $6 room, are the mountains of Laos.

We headed farther east after Phu Quai Ngun, the mountain that guarded Big Cave. We took side roads into small villages that we explored in low gear. Open doors or absent doors exposed living rooms to the street, and we could see people laying in hammocks, picking their toes and watching a royal parade or something on TV. Villagers sprawled on steps and ledges, swatting flies, or not swatting them. Or they dragged their gnarly bare feet along the road to some awful job in food service. Boiling fish heads on the roadside or whatever. I wanted to scream at them: "Don't you people have any ambition?!"

One thing we noticed was the prevalence of Coca-Cola marketing in these villages. On a chicken-wire food cart, or tacked to a leaning wall, there would be a bright Coca-Cola poster featuring a thirsty babe. Who was making this happen? How? I made a mental note that when my Thai improves to interview capability, I should write an article about this.

A couple of times we found what seemed to be a meeting of lively people, some kind of party to lift them from the stupor. Was this the first village bar we'd seen? We tried to join, but they shooed us away, telling us either by morbid gestures or with the English word "death" that this was in fact a funeral.

Anything is food

At the market that evening we met an Isan family and were invited over for dinner. Isan Thais hail from the northeast, and they're regarded sort of like countryfolk. Their culture is closely related to Laotian culture.

This Isan family lived off a dark road in Chiang Khan proper. We sat on the floor in the living room, and the first thing they did was tie these white strings around our wrists for good luck. Each elder family member tied two -- there were I think eight in all. They were chanting at us, patting and stroking our arms. They put some flowers in our hands, then later moved them to our pockets. We understood very little of what was said. I just sort of went limp in a general sense, gazing at the tube coming out of grandfather's shorts, until it was over. Later we learned that each string is for a beneficient spirit who normally comes and goes but whom the string is meant to contain.

The dinnertime. The first dish they showed us was striking because it was not inert like most food. Little shrimp jumped all over the bowl. I was nervous because I had never killed anything with my teeth before. Nothing macroscopic.

The rest of the food was interesting, but nothing I could fill up on. Frogs, bugs, etc. I sought refuge in a bowl of chicken soup, but that turned out to be chicken feet. Though I tried everything, try was all I did. The food was quite good, don't get me wrong, I just wasn't ready to eat a whole lot of it.

In transit

Today we left Chiang Khan on a song thiaew, headed for Nam Nao (Cold Water) National Park. The truck broke down halfway there, and we had to change over. I should mention here that any time we've ridden anything anywhere, it's broken down. Bus, train, song thiaew, they all give up halfway through. On the way out of Pitsanulok, the bus broke down, and every passenger piled into the back of a pickup truck. I don't know where the truck came from. We noticed at this point that when you don't have an itinerary, and you don't value one destination over another, there's no such thing as being held up. Riding on the back of the truck, speeding through seams in the mountains under a blaze of stars, was just a destination that happened to be moving, which anyway it wasn't really moving any more than it was sitting still while the earth whirled beneath, bringing with it a rush of chill mountain air.

Thai words of the day

cahn moi -- pubic hair

tam yai -- big cave

men-men -- smelly

ai -- brother

sehhhhp sehp -- delicious (Isan)

Along the Mekong: Photos

The cave walls were marked with ancient script. We burnt the end of a stick and added: "USA J & M 2007."

Foreground: Our bike, Metallica. Background: Big Cave Mountain.

Implements around the temple grounds.


The eye of a dragon, seen on a temple wall in Chiang Khan.

Rice farmers, shot from the back of the motorbike.

Chicken organs for sale at Chiang Khan market. Yum.

Pig faces for sale. We tried to imagine two people sitting down to eat, a pig face staring at each of them. It seems strange.

Watching, we figured out this was street chess. The players slam their pieces down with each move.

This guy sold a variety of tasty drinks, including iced coffee, iced tea, iced green and iced red.