I've been reading the NY Times online in the mornings and I also take a peek at Le Monde, just for kicks. Today there was a page one article about a world opinion poll concerning President Bush and the United States. I didn't see any mention of it this week in the Times. Instead I found this article today stating that the polls in the US were tied. Apparently the world poll was conceived by the Canadians and conducted by a bunch of newspapers around the globe, all using the same exact questions. The translation of the Le Monde page is a bit sketchy, but I found another reference from the Google news site.

A search on the NY Times finally revealed this article which states:

Support for President Bush was strongest in Israel and Russia, according to the polling in those countries, with 50 percent of Israelis favoring Mr. Bush's re-election and 24 percent favoring Mr. Kerry. In Russia, Mr. Bush was a 52-48 favorite.

But elsewhere, Mr. Kerry was a strong favorite, leading in percentage terms among Britons by 50-22, Mexicans by 55-20, Japanese by 51-30, South Koreans by 68-18 and among the French by 72-16.

How is it that the rest of the world has such a definite opinion on this election while we ourselves are struggling with it. Perhaps we should do as I suggested long ago and let Mexico annex us. Think about how great that would be. Flights to Cancún would be domestic. Our president would be a Fox. All these silly debates about making English our "official" language would go away. And we'd be neighbored by cool new countries like Belize and Guatemala.

Looks like I filed my absentee voter request too late so I'm not going to be able to vote this election. Guess it doesn't matter too much since California is a winner-take-all electoral state and we tend to vote Democratic Party. Besides, after seeing this, I think I'd vote Bush anyway. If that sort of thing works, why do we even have debates? We should just have made for TV movies for each candidate, or center E.R. episodes around their campaign platforms. Every election year we should just add each candidate as a regular character on Days of Our Lives and then on November 2nd, we'll vote for our favorite one online.

Blech, I need to go spit this bitter taste out of my mouth.

After Marie left, I cleaned it up, as much as I could, filled the tubes with a moderate amount of air, and removed the reflectors - I mean - those are just plain gratuitous. Unfortunately, the rain kept me from riding it for almost a week. Then, a few days ago, a ray of sunlight shot through my bedroom window and spurred me into action. I grabbed my small backpack, rolled up my pant leg and shot off towards Bussy-le-Grand. Well, okay, I didn't "shoot" necessarily, it was more of a wobble at first, and then I guess you could call it a coast, since I was starting at the top of a hill. But it felt like a shot, like a reckless bolt of lightening, fleeing the constraints of the stone farmhouse and striking into the heart of France. Armed with an ATM CheckCard and a fingertip grasp of the French language, I sped straight to Les Laumes to resupply my bare kitchen cabinets.

Les Laumes, or more properly Venarey-les-Laumes (because a town without at least two dashes in its name ain't shit in France), is about ten kilometers away. The main road leading to it is two lanes without a shoulder. The width of a lane in France is officially determined by measuring the width of a 1981 Fiat Le Car. That makes it about three-quarters the width of a Jeep Cherokee. So in effect, two lane roads are really just one lane roads with a white stripe painted down the middle. I suppose they use the stripe in combination with the skid-marks to determine fault in an accident.

The road passes through a couple of small towns before Les Laumes, and in between there are farming lands and grazing pastures. The hills surrounding the valley are each capped with a large copse of motley trees and shrubbery. The air was crisp and my breath trailed behind me as I pedaled with a contented grin up the hills and through the dales. Motorists were very accommodating. I noted two types (if you don't count tractors, whose sheer practicality clearly disqualifies them from the motorist class): Young people and old people. Young people watch rally racing on France5 and then emulate the driving style of people with names like Frederico Vitessolini. Old people seem to be too short to fully engage the gas pedal. So some tiny little Fiat starts to gently overtake me, and then a brand new Peugeot 307 zooms past all of us, lights flashing while the crooked-capped operator takes a last draw from his cigarette and finally flings it out the window.

Finally in town, I went first to the Super U (pronounced seupair-ew), bought vegetables and ingredients for crépes, then to the bank for some cash, then the boulangerie for some baguettes and then the local bookshop for a map. A French supermarket appears to be exactly the same as an American one, and if you just walk through without buying anything, it pretty much is. Problems arise when you need to purchase something. For example: peanut butter. They don't have it. Flour - they got it in spades. Actually they have so many different kinds of flour that I almost gave up on the crépes idea. Finally I saw a package that had a picture of crepes on the cover so I bought that one. It was marked FLUIDE. Whatever that means. Wine would be tough if you could make a mistake. The wine here is all French (surprise!) and they have a preponderance of local wines, like Irancey, one of my favorites. They're all similar to Beaujolais or Pinot Noir. Five euros buys you a very nice bottle of wine. Actually the white wines are really quite surprising. I'm far from being a wine connoisseur, but I've drunk my share of wine (weddings, art openings, last thirty minutes of a party - you know the good stuff), and I'd say the red wine here is good, but nothing to fawn over. The white wine however is damn good. So good in fact, that I'm writing home about it.

The baker lady was nice to me. I do a lot of stumbling in French. A lot of backpedaling. I probably sound like a caveman to the locals with my 22 word vocabulary. It's just enough to get in trouble. If all I knew were hello, goodbye and thank you - and that was enough to get by in Asia for months - then I'd probably be okay. But I gotta be clever and try to slip in words that I don't actually know exist. One of my French books claims, rather suspiciously I think, that thirty percent of all English words are derived from French. So I figure if I take an English word and add a French ending I've got a thirty percent chance of conveying meaning. That's pretty darn good if you think about it. There must be an error in my calculations however, because empirically, my results are more like 5 or 10 percent. Which ain't bad.

So I stuff the baguettes into my backpack - and now I'm feeling very franch with such accessorization. Rain begins to come down lightly, but it's nice - sort of misty and morning-like. Then I feel the thumpity-thump of a flat. My rear tire has disintegrated. It's just flopping around inside the fender like one of those gratuitous casualty shots from Saving Private Ryan. Oh mon dieu! Now it's ten kilometers of pushing a bike. That's not the end of the world. So I start pushing, checking out the countryside in slow motion detail. Then, as if out of a movie, a thunderclap erupts and moments later it begins to rain wholeheartedly. I put a grocery bag over my baguettes and settled in to a squishy march back to Bussy.

Oh, and everyone should fly Virgin Airlines. The flight attendants have cute accents, you can watch new release movies on demand, and the toothpaste is super-minty.

So far my French has been holding up, but barely. People are pretty friendly around here, and several times, like when standing in line at the grocer, someone has decided to share a joke or make a mischievous comment. I chuckle politely and wrinkle my eyes and that seems to satisfy them. Inside, however, my mind is racing through all the combinations and perturbations of my known French vocabulary trying to decipher some meaning from their garbled jargon. In Paris, on the way to Gare de Lyon, one of the many train stations in the city, I asked a meandering local for directions. Being near the station, I tried to say "ou est la gare," but it came out as "ou est la guerre," which means where is the war. The poor lady's eyes shifted back and forth as if she was trying to decide if she could outrun me in a worse case scenario. "La guerre?" she asked. "Oui" I replied, confident and wide-eyed with expectation. After an uncomfortable moment she spied my bags and then smiled, "aaah, la GAH! Pas de GAIRE." I nodded bashfully and then she gave me detailed directions which bounced off my forehead and fell into a lovely sewer drain on Rue Diderot.

Marie Gorsline, the woman whose house I'm sitting (photo above), met me at the Montbard train station. I took the TGV, which is to normal trains what ice-skating is to rollerskating. We went to lunch at a local restaurant and had a five course meal. Damn lady - nice intro! I spent the next four days dividing my time between learning her idiosyncrasies and learning her history. She was a self-trained art curator, self-trained psychoanalyst, self-trained chef, novelist, publicist, and general provocateur. It's obvious she was a fox back in the day, and even now at 76 or so, her poise is elegant and she dresses quite fashionably. Just before she left she disappeared into her room, went through her wardrobe, and tried on all her clothes to see which ones she had "outgrown". At some point she walked out in a kickass black a-line overcoat, with a tall stand-up collar, and a high narrow waistline. "Do you think this is too formal to walk about in?" she asked. Slightly taken aback, I said, "I think you can pull it off" whereupon she whipped around with a smirk of agreement and strode back into her room. Style, man.

She's also a nervous wreck who was driving me insane with her numerous neuroses by the time she left.

The house is an old (as in hundreds of years old) farm house that has been slightly modernized. Apparently some of the cribs out here have yet to be upgraded with indoor plumbing. The entire structure, minus the roof is stone. Rough hewn lumber with hand carved wooden pins fastening the joints rather than nails, hold up the clay roof. Windows are deeply set into 2-foot thick walls. Inside, the house isn't so much decorated as it is adorned. Mostly with the detritus of fifty years of an artistic marriage. Books, mixed with papers - bills, notes, accounting slips, drawings and postcards line every surface. The kitchen walls are a collage of misshapen pans and obscure utensils, hanging from screws and nails sunk amateurishly into the cracks between the massive stones. Atop the kitchen counter is a thick cutting board like those you see at tacquerias - blackened and concave from the constant beating of cleavers. Every door is unique, some painted green, some red, others raw - and each with a different number of windows.

Attached to the house are three separate but connected barns. Ghosts inhabit these gaping, musty caverns, caught in a photo finish state of mid-collapse. Underneath are a series of arched-roof caves or cellars. There are two directly below the house. One is where water from a natural spring seeps up and is captured in a pool, then released through a wall to the outside. The other is stocked with wine. That's how they do it here.

Across the narrow road, looking out across a fertile valley, is the museum. It was a small barn that has been nicely converted into a two story art gallery by the labor of local craftsmen. It's a good indicator of how idyllic one of these houses could be if fixed up properly. I met one of Marie's friends, a Dutchman named Laurens who recently bought a house in the nearby town of Alise-Sainte-Reine (if you don't have at least two dashes in your town's name you ain't legit). He paid seventy thousand euros but feels slightly ripped off because his garden is too small and he doesn't have a terrace like his neighbor. I visited his crib today. It needs some work, but damn, it's beautiful. Everything around here is so damn charming.

Take Bussy for example. Bussy is a collection of five small towns. Small means populations below 200. One could easily walk to all five towns in a day. Apparently, long ago, the local duke, who was outcast from Paris for writing a scintillating novel with the King as the too thinly veiled antagonist, built a grand chateau on the Rabutin river. Immediately taxes skyrocketed and a group of peasants decided to break away and form their own independent community. So they moved one hill over from Bussy-le-Rabutin, to Bussy-le-Grand, nearer the protection of the local church. Each household took on the responsibility of a profession from the previous town. The farmer who built Marie's house became the baker and so there is a large iron oven built into an addition on the east side of the house. Each of the big houses in Bussy-le-Grand has a special additional structure dedicated to something like butchering or candle-making or beekeeping. Quaint, no?

It turns out that the house pretty much takes care of itself and my sole purpose here is to satisfy the whims of three cats. Camille and Hibou are the indoor cats that get to come in and out as they please (with my assistance as the doorman) and eat whatever and whenever they please. And these cats are French. I've learned that in the morning, they will not eat fish-based cat food with their milk. It must be lamb, paté or get this - terrine cat food. The rule for feeding the cats is that whenever they want to eat, I should feed them. Camille like's his food on the table. Hibou likes his on the ground. There is another cat, an unofficial cat, dubbed Emil, who takes whatever he gets, but like the others gets to eat whenever he wants. So he scratches the door and I obediently bring a plate of terrine and then he hisses at me till I leave. How'd I get to be the kitty bitch?

But things aren't so bad.

Let's start with lunch. Today it was local goat cheese, some cured sausage, a bit of bread that I got from the boulangerie in Montbard, a sliced up pear from the neighbor's farm, and a glass of Cote d'Or Bourgogne. It's like that around here. I bought some eggs, cheese and fresh herbs at the local farmers market, so I'll probably make a nice omelette in the morning.

There's also an operable bike and a selection of non-operable bikes. I'm still looking around for one of those cool old black-framed single speeds that you see in old French movies (ask Stephen Jaycox for a screen capture) but there doesn't seem to be a bicycle shop in the vicinity. I'll be turning in my rental car - a cool little Peugeot diesel - on Friday. From then on I'll have to pedal to the market. It's about 10km each way. Just entertaining the idea (which doesn't seem too far fetched to me) has earned Laurens' respect - and he's Dutch. He doesn't think I'll last, which of course makes the whole thing that much more appealing. I'm dumb that way.

Copacabana, resting casually at the edge of Lake Titicaca, is a tourist destination for Bolivianos. Paddle boats line the shore and a daily circus of makeshift restaurants specializing in Titicacan gold, trout, open along a 100 meter stretch of what could only generously be called a beach. Apparently trout or trucha, in Spanish, is a big draw for the touristos, so every restaurant has a big sign out front that excitedly declares it on the menu. Trucha a la plancha! Trucha con limon! Trucha frita! We ate our fill of trucha. Mucha trucha. Our trucha immersion soon turned the rather cute moniker into a four letter word.

We stayed at a funky hotel with styrofoam statues coated in cement lining the balconies. The owner, Manuel, eagerly sold us a room and then began getting shifty on the prices. Everything is so cheap here we just didn't care, and his craftiness only made us laugh. The streets of the city are lined with Alpaca hats, gloves, panchitos, placemats and pretty much anything else you can think of that can be woven, knit, embroidered or otherwise sewn together. Does anybody want a cute hand knit beanie that says ALPACA along the edge?

The market in Copacabana is about 5 blocks long, filling the narrow alley and bustling with trade. Everything from meat to coca leaves to OMO laundry soap is on sale. We cruised it. A woman was selling ice cream. She had two buckets, one filled with ice water, and inside that, another filled with cream. She used a spoon to spin the inside bucket, forcing the cream against the edge and freezing it. A minute of deft spinning makes for a couple of scoops, which she scrapes off using her same spoon. Two buckets, ice and a spoon. She's the ice cream lady.

Isla del Sol, a two hour boat ride from Copacabana, is a strange little piece of history. Settled by the Incas and currently occupied by their descendents, the Aymara, its 4000 meter altitude and amazing panoramic Andean views figuratively and literally took our breath away. The entire island is terraced for crops, but hardly any of it is farmed any more. Llamas, sheep and pigs roam freely in and out of their adobe enclosures and herds of animals are constantly on the move to and from various grazing areas on both sides of the island. Ancient villages with tiny, ancient paths winding in and around melting adobe abodes, are paved with volcanic rock worn smooth from hundreds of years of trodding. There are no cars on the island and if there were they would need to be fairly sturdy off roaders, because there aren't any roads wide enough to support a vehicle.

At night, the island is pitch black and an utterly stupefying display of astronomical glory paints the sky. The milky way appears as a bright white cloudy stripe from horizon to horizon. Standing at the top of Yumani village, looking up, I felt like an astronaut, floating amongst a sea of stars. There is a legend that the stars are simply pin pricks in the roof of the sky which the light of the gods shines through. It's an explanation that seems hard to deny on Isla del Sol.

We sleep under four Alpaca blankets with our hats on and our hands tucked warmly between our legs. As soon as the sun descends below the mountains, the temperature drops ten degrees celsius. Along with a lack of oxygen, cold is a way of life here. Everyone wears the Alpaca gear we saw for sale in Copacabana. The women, especially the older ones, wear ten layers of clothes - petticoats, leg warmers over socks, sweaters upon sweaters and gloves upon gloves. And they top it off with a proper British bowler, still conforming to a decree by the Spanish colonial goveners issued over a hundred years ago.

The pace of the island was such a nice departure from the hustle of the cities we had been visiting that we found it hard to depart. But our friend and porter, Seberino, arranged a ride in a local boat for us and we and forty Islans crammed on board to make the sunny trip back to Copacabana. At the harbor we collided with another boat, and the whistling exchange between the captains didn't seem to indicate any fault or ill feeling concerning the incident. Just another ordinary mid-lake collision, some whistling, and Suzy's fingernails buried in my thigh.

We arrived at the stadium at the end of a kilometer long line. After pondering whether we should find the tail or search for a shorter line, we approached a police officer and asked for advice. One problem with my Spanish skills is that I understand just enough to believe that I understand everything. So after listening to the cop I ´understood´ that the line was the line and that we were to join it. Fortunately we found this answer unacceptable and decided to walk through a gate which had no line. And to our surprise the man at the gate waved us through. I have no idea what that long line was, but those people in it probably didn´t enter the arena for hours.

The stadium was filled with groups of color-matched fans according to country. The Brazillians wore green and gold, but it seems as though every other latin country´s colors are some combination of white, red and sometimes blue. That makes it hard to tell the Peruvians from the Chileans from the Columbians. And that´s why they chant. Chants are often followed by counter chants, usually less positive in their hopes. A chant might be something like, ohhh ohhh eeyyy eeyyy, goooo, Chile. Then a counter chant would be something like, everyone from Chile is a bastard son of a whore (except it rhymes in Spanish). One kid, no more than twelve years old had a particular knack for the obscenely turned phrase. He would respond to any peep from the Chilean block with a ´quiece maricones!´ (shut up, whores) which inevitably drew smiles from the Peruvians of all ages sitting around us.

A couple noteworthy things happened at the game. First, the half time show. That´s a story in itself, but a quick summary would describe the unpracticed, uncoordinated dance of: many carnival style clowns, a gold robot resembling C3P0, but with the proportions of Captain Caveman, people in cowboy outfits, and a bunch of women dressed up like cheerleaders but with no skills. They began to make their way around the stadium´s running track (just inside of the moat), when they were blocked by ten or so riot police. The crowd started to get mad, but the face off between the underfed C3P0 and the ridiculously overclad SWAT captain was too funny to sustain the crowd´s ire.

The wave was in full force at this event. The wave would encircle the field several times before finally petering out in the expensive seats. During one rotation, a boy selling bags of popcorn saw his cargo upended by the enthusiastic wavers in the first row. A shallow box full of plastic wrapped popcorn was pushed into the air, over the retaining gate, and into the moat. I couldn´t tell from where I was, but I´m sure the boy was crying. One of the riot police thoughtfully directed a ball-retriever (the dudes that fetch the ball when the players kick it out of bounds) to fetch the popcorn. They have a special device that resembles a pool cleaning net to fish soccer balls out of the moat. I assume the moat is some sort of riot control device. So the retriever starts scooping popcorn bags out of the moat and dropping them back over the fence to a small crowd of excited children. Now the question must be asked... did the joy of many make more than amends for the sadness of one?

Suzy and Anne have adopted the custom of a daily crush. Usually it´s a local, like the one for the hunky, curly-locked, blue-rim-spectacled futbol fan sitting next to us, but sometimes it´s a foreign traveller like the German Ethan Hawke at the table next to us at lunch today. I´m going to start encouraging them to photograph these unwary game in order to build a ´los capitans log´ to harken back to.

The bus from Arequipa to Puno was stocked with omens. First there was the question as to where the bathroom was. Then there were the indigineous people on board. One look at them and we all got nervous. They were wearing layers upon layers of alpaca product and then covered in blankets. How cold was this ride going to be? We knew we were climbing and we knew that we were to arrive in Puno at 4am, but surely there was a heater on the bus and a warm place to kick it in waiting for our next bus.

At some point, mid-journey, I woke up and Suzy and Anne pointed out the ice which had formed on the INSIDE of the bus windows. Suzy described the front windshield as a piece of smashed glass. While Suze and Anne battled insomnia, I snuggled up to a large, warm, and only slightly stinky indigenous woman who had a losing percentage of teeth but made up for it in a smile that could melt rainbows.

Lima was fantastic. We got a lot of reports that it was a shithole and that we should spend as little time as possible there. Dang, I couldn´t disagree more. We arrived in foggy, San Francisco style weather and felt immediately comfortable. A winding late night drive from the airport doubled as a tour of the eerie, empty streets. The architecture is a mix of colonial style Spanish flats, and sixties modern. Not combined, but next to each other in some cases. It feels like a middle aged man who used to be swingin but recently inherited his grandmother´s decorative plate collection. The modern stuff is all worn down and vaguely Planet of the Apes, while the old stuff seems well taken care of. The center of the city is alive with well dressed business people and various hawkers of tourist devices. We bought candy from an old lady and walked away confused as to whether she was telling us to watch out for bandits or describing the inticracies of the local banking system. Either way she was friendly and our little marshmallow-carmal-pecan treats were yummy.

We ate a dinner time snack at a local second-floor restaurant. We ordered simple things from the menu, but felt a bit thick after subsequent customers received their delicious smelling green soups and piled up meat things. We vowed that in the future we would not be dumb. I´m positive we´ll meet this goal.

Speaking of goals... We took a bus to Araquipa (13 hours on the timetable, 16 hours in reality - not bad I think). Too bad the ride was in the middle of the night. In the morning I caught glimpses of some amazing adobe villages that were literally melting. There were also some very large sand dunes and about two hours of stunning views of what appeared to be the surface of Mars.

For us, Araquipa is just a cute town on the way to another cute town. Then we chose a taxi driver (or did he choose us) who informed us that a Copa Americas match was happening today in this very town. Brazil vs Chile would be playing in the evening while the afternoon offered Costa Rica vs Paraguay. After seeing some viligant Chilean flag waving in the plaza, we decided to buy tickets. Manuel, our super-friendly (as in: very friendly, not Hall-of-Justice-y) took us to the end of a line that wrapped around the ticket office. He told us to chill for a momento, and came back with an old woman and a cute little girl who apparently had been waiting in line since 4am and were now prepared to scalp. Which they did, to three very happy touristos.

If the occasionally heard chants and groups of similarly-clad fans marching through the plaza are any indication, we are in for a wild four hours of drinking and cheering. Hopefully Anne, Suzy and I can find matching jerseys and some non-toxic face paint in time. Tienes el painto del futbol non-toxico?

All of the chairs began sliding in unison from side to side like backup dancers in a Janet Jackson video. It was impossible to sit, so me and salty man stood, bracing ourselves against the rickety canopy frame. I couldn't help feeling like Marky Mark in Perfect Storm. Actually, I usually feel like Marky Mark anyway, but this was specifically a Perfect Storm moment versus an Italian Job moment or something like that. As the boat rolled, I found definite pleasure in looking towards the rear of the boat (stern?) and watching the horizon tilt to an unnaturally acute angle. Then the boat would right itself and tilt in the other direction and the chairs would slide the other way. It was pretty freaky. Water was spilling into the lower deck, pre-salting the rice. You know what salty man was doing? Smoking a cigarette. Considering the horizontal rain and gale winds he must've lit the thing with voodoo magic or a handy acetylene torch hidden in his trousers.

The rain stopped by the time we got to shore. I asked the guys huddling around my bike if they thought it would rain again. Definitely yes, they all concurred. Well they must be mistaken I thought and I mounted and rode off. Actully, after being dormant for so long I think I flooded the motor and it wouldn't start, so they gave me an unheroic push start. Oh and I forgot my shoes on the island. They were nasty little buggers and I'm glad I left them behind, but I really wanted to document them before I tossed em. Later I bought some 15 dollar shoes in Bangkok - size Large. These shoes are so cheap they don't even make them in real sizes. But they fit great. Turns out my feet are exactly Large.

A few drops hit my helmet and I figured that it was just some residue dripping from the trees. They were big old drops too, landing with a heavy thunk instead of a light pop. Within ten minutes I was soaked through. How did my butt get wet when it was glued to my seat the whole time? Thai roads are really good, but sometimes they get overwhelmed by the weather. On a few low spots, the road would get flooded. This is a multi-lane freeway. So I'd be going 90 or 100km/hr and suddenly I'd be swimming through a huge puddle. The bike didn't seem to mind and at first it was kinda neat to get the big splash. Then I got passed by a bus which almost drowned me in it's puddle wash.

I was driving through thunderstorms. It rained, with differing intensity, for three hundred kilometers. I had long ago given up on rain gear. It doesn't really help and it keeps you from drying up when the sun comes out. But a body just can't stay that wet and cold for such a long period. My big problem is that I get really heavy shivers and my fingers go numb. The numb thing isn't too bad, but the shivering sucks because it's hard to control the bike when I've got these little convulsions pulsing through me. But why stop? There's something cool about being completely soaked through and driving as fast as you can down the freeway. People in their cozy little VIP buses look out with their reading lamp lit faces and throw looks, macho pickup drivers (and it seems everyone who has a pickup in Thailand must prove that their pickup is faster than your motorcycle if just for a kilometer or two) splash, and visibility is poor, but dammit, it's fun!

The Atlanta hotel was booked so I stayed down the road at the Raja to avoid having to make a left onto Sukhumwit road. The Raja, a delapidated hotel which was once lustrous is now just a flophouse for johns and their nightly Nana street girlfriends. Everytime I go to Bangkok I get closer to the redlight district. Next time I'll probably end up crashing at one of the strip clubs in the sex mall. Maybe I'll come home with a girl whose name I can't pronounce but has more experience in bed than me and all my exs and all their exs put together. Every bar and restaurant in the Nana area also doubles as a prostitution clearing house. So if you go to eat a slice of pizza and drink a beer you will inevitably end up chatting with a girl who's trying to pick you up. One girl I talked to works seven days a week and has two kids. Apparently the long work week is standard. And the kids? She estimated about fifty-fifty. Pretty weird, huh? Anyway talking to the prostitutes is way funner than tallking to the guys that are there to pick up on the prostitutes. Creeps.

Over at Rajah's (my tailor, not my hotel), I got fitted for the rest of my suits. They are always super crowded and they give you Heinekens and peanuts while you wait. I met a DEA agent, a couple of black dudes working in computer manufacturing in China, a marine colonel helicopter pilot, and half of the Bangkok expat community. Bobby Rajah, the younger half of the father-son team, showed me the blueprints for his new crip. It's a seven story apartment building on the very happening Soi 20 on Sukhumwit. Bobby and family will be occupying the 6th and 7th floor and the pool laden roof deck. His plans include skylights bigger than my room in San Francisco. Right then I realized that I should have bargained a little harder for my suits. What's the overhead on a 200 dollar suit when the boss is building a million dollar property Donald Trump would undersign?

Weather forced me to stay an extra day, so I headed down to Siam Center for some shopping. At this point, at the end of my trip, I'm just blowing cash like mad. I bought a couple of hats, some button down shirts, some t-shirts, some shoes, some totally useless stuff from a weird Japanese store that sold everything from beer cozys to children's underwear, and I went to the movies. Shrek 2.

Siam Center is big. Probably about the size of the financial district in San Francisco. Part of it is two huge, multistory malls. One is upscale and one is downscale. One has Gucci and one has an entire floor of cell phone shops. The latter is the Asian way. All of these shops sell almost exactly the same thing. And there are hundreds of these tiny shops on one floor of this uber mall. I actually gave up at this place. I made it up three of the seven floors and finally just took an elevator down. The two malls are surrounded by hundreds of tiny shops in various smaller mall-like configurations. These are mostly run by independent designers and mom & pop shopkeepers selling original designs or complete ripoffs. I bought an Alphanumeric hat and a Bathing Ape t-shirt. It would be so great to have a place like this in the city. Hip, young people paying cheap rent and selling their stuff for relatively cheap prices. I guess the labor is so cheap out here that anybody can be a designer and then hand off their drawings to some lady holed away in the ghetto sewing unicorns on spaghetti strapped camisoles all day.

When the sun came out I left Bangkok and headed for the border. Totally uneventful trip. The roads are just so damn good out there. Poipet reminded me that I was in Cambodia again. I navigated three scams before leaving the border area. Immigration guards wanted me to pay a dollar to get my bike across a tollgate. I had my paperwork and I knew this was bullshit, but I paid because arguing with these dudes is not worth a dollar of my time. Then some random dudes wanted me to pay them to get my visa. This was right in front of the visa service booth. So thinking that the official visa booth was closed I went with them. Then they saw that my passport was full and wanted to charge me ten bucks to get the police chief to OK putting the visa on a non-standard visa page. Apparently the last few pages of US passports don't say "PUT VISA HERE" and so the Cambodians found a way to make ten bucks off this little detail. I refused to pay and knocked on the tinted glass of the visa service booth. A sleepy immigration officer slid the window open and made a hook with his finger, motioning for my passport. I handed it over and without removing his head from his hand, resting on his elbow, he said no and waved me away, closing the glass. I knocked again and he opened up, showed me the last page and said "passport no good," dropped the document and closed the window. AAARRGGHH! So it turns out you have to ask the scam guys to ask the window clerk's boss to sign off on your no-room passport. They pay him because it's illegal for immigration officers to take bribes from travelers. Or something like that. I got the overall price knocked down five bucks by putting up a stink. Lastly, at the immigration entrance to Cambodia they wanted five bucks for overtime approval of my motorbike. This time I just refused and lied that I came through the border three times a year and never paid any fee like that. Good lie. They let me through.

One more little reminder that I wasn't in Thailand anymore was that roads sucked! As soon as you leave the casino infested pavement of the border the road turns to shit. Literally, cow shit, dog shit, goat shit, all blotted over the rocky, broken down dirt and remnant asphault of National Road 6. This is the only thoroghfare from Thailand to Angkor Wat, Cambodia's national treasure and main tourist attraction. Then it started to rain. I made it about 60km across a hectic muddy pot holed road and finally gave up in Sisophan. Not because I was tired or defeated, but because it was pitch dark. Actually, after the boring flat and smooth roads of the last couple weeks it was fun to stand up in the saddle, get dirty and scramble.

The next day, to Siem Reap was even funner. The bridges are higher than the road, making little ramps so you can sort of jump them. Oh man, the kids are so stoked on that. I approach the bridge, stand up to see if any traffic is coming and then gun it, giving a little extra gas at the end for that extra kick. The bike is airborne for a second (nothing like that crazy shit you see on ESPN4), then land squarely in the middle of the little bridge, then gun it again to get air over the descending ramp. And the kids standing around the bridge go ape shit and throw thumbs up and yell, wanting another go.

Siem Reap is a cool little town with a bit of that lawless Cambodian vibe. The expat bars are filled with expats and the road rules follow the law of the jungle as they should. I met Paul at Hidden Cambodia Adventure Tours. He couldn't afford to buy my bike but said that his friend at Earthwalkers (or some hippy name like that) had a hotel and she might want to buy it. Paul gave me a bunch of advice about selling the bike in Phnom Penh (basically, lie) and shared some lychee and watermelon with me. I checked in to Earthmothers (or whatever) and met the two hot Swedish chicks that own the place. I'm not making this up. But they didn't want to buy the bike either, so they sent me to Angkor What?, the main expat bar in town. It was easy to find the place because there were five Honda enduros parked out front. I played some pool and drank a beer and even smoked a cigarette but nobody wanted to buy my bike.

Everyone needs to start sending good vibes so I can sell this bike. This is like the bat signal in reverse. Batman (me) needs good vibes, Gotham!

On the advice of The Atlanta's front desk man, I took an alternate route to the end of Sukhumwit the street and the begining of Sukhumwit the motorway, also known as Highway 3. In fifteen minutes, and much in line with my style, I was thoroughly lost. Police officers and friendly pedestrians upon hearing of my destination didn't even attempt to give me detailed directions - they just pointed in the general direction. And that pretty much worked. After thirty minutes I found my way back to Sukhumwit the street and decided not to take any more chances with fancy shortcuts. Sukhumwit the street sits below the elevated tollway and for most of the morning and afternoon supports gridlocked traffic in both directions. This day was no exception. Bangkok's motorcyclists are not ones to sit idly. While buses, taxis, vans and fancy foreign cars sit with bored diligence, the motorbikes dexterously snake through the interstitial narrow gaps and alleys. Following a long train of delivery boys, students and motorbike taxis gave me an exciting tour of the gutters, potholes and sidewalks of Sukhumwit. I learned from my impromptu driving instructors that barreling down a crowded sidewalk is cool as long as you keep one finger on the horn the whole time. Also if a lane is free, it should be taken, even if it is on the side of oncoming traffic. An hour driving like this gave me an elevated risk of lung cancer and several ideas for new reality tv shows.

One problem with Thailand is that I'm no longer the fastest vehicle on the road. That honor goes to whomever has the most expensive German sedan. Truckers are also quite quick, and nearly blind. The trucks here have mirror-tinted glass all around, so when they almost run you off the road you can't even give them a satisfying sneer. In Thailand, I'm one of the slowest vehicles on the road, which is both annoying and slightly dangerous.

You can tell how corrupt a country is by the number and sorts of cars that have government license plates. In Cambodia, almost every fancy car has government plates. But a fancy car in Cambodia is a Hyundai Sonata. In Thailand I am repeatedly passed by convoys of large, long, matching black Mercedes moving at about 250km/hr. They flash their lights and will drive within inches of you if you don't get out of their way in time. Either I'm crossing paths with the president of Thailand very frequently, or the average assistant minister of forestry here makes $2M a year including kickbacks.

I had some money problems in Bangkok and ended up leaving town with a full tank of gas and only 40baht in my pocket. That's about two bucks. My ATM daily limit was maxed and I wouldn't be able to pull out cash till the next night. Somewhere along the line I was going to need to get gas and to do that I was going to need to get cash. My only hope was a cash advance from my Visa card. Just as I was pondering where the best town to find a foreigner friendly bank would be I ran out of gas. I had left my reserve switch on and thus had drained my tank completely without any warning. Drifting from 120 to 0 along the side of the road, some death metal playing on the iPod, I sat atop my bike for a minute and cursed myself.

Across the road was a little brick house. I froggered across the highway and sheepishly knocked on the door. An old man with an impressive collection of silver teeth packed into his generous smile answered the door. I did some international signing explaining my situation. Apparently he had not received his latest issue of International Handsign Monthly. He smiled anyway and invited me in, the pungent scent of Thai whiskey trailing behind him. Eventually I made my predicament clear to him and he shuffled into his car port and returned with two clear bottles filled with red liquid of different tints. Gasoline? Nod. Gasoline? Nod. Okay. Okay.

I poured the two litres of gas into my tank, hoping to God that I was actually putting gasoline in my bike versus deisel or lamp oil. The man followed me over and watched with a big satisfied grin as I started up the bike. I handed him the empty bottles which he promptly threw into the jungle next to the road. He wouldn't accept any money at first, but after I insisted he took my forty baht and gave me a handful of boiled peanuts in change.

The next town had a bank and that was another, more boring fiasco, which resulted in me not being able to get a cash advance from either bank in town. Eventually, somehow, from the deepest crevice of my brain, next to the part that controls my breathing and generally keeps me from peeing my pants, I found the PIN number to my Visa card and used it to get cash from an ATM.

I was late to Laem Ngop and in fifteen minutes found a secure place for my bike, found the appropriate ferry to Ko Kham, ate lunch and chatted up some German chicks.

Ko Kham is a tiny island off of the small island of Ko Mak which is off of the large island of Ko Chang. Kham has a beach which is nothing more than a brilliant white sand bar, extending 20 meters at high tide and 40 meters at low tide. The sand slopes rapidly down into tropically warm water which for a hundred meters gets no more than chest deep. The effect, with the palm trees and the little thatch bungalows, is like the cover of Conde Nast Traveller with a headline shouting, The 14 Best Island Getaways You've Never Heard Of. And apparently nobody heard of Ko Kham, because I was the only tourist on the island.

On my second day there, the local militia caught what looked to be a small crocodile, about one meter long. They cut its throat, bled it, charred it, skinned it and cooked it up over an open fire. Then they chopped it up, bones and all, and stir fried it with ginger and garlic. The consistency was a cross between squid and chicken and it tasted a lot like ginger and garlic. Apparently this was a small specimen and they were happy to exterminate it as it would only return later to eat some chickens like its momma did earlier that month.

Ko Kham was luxurious as long as I was on the beach. My bungalow however had a mosquito net that looked like something Cher would wear to the Grammys - sparkly, red and full of holes. Between the mosquitos and the sand flys I probably donated a liter of blood to the local fauna. Does that put me at the top or the bottom of the food chain?

Next was Ko Mak. Also empty, I found a bungalow on the edge of a small mangrove copse facing the channel between the two islands. I leave the double doors and large windows open at night and am rewarded by cool ocean breezes at night and a sunrise alarm clock every morning. A hammock on my little deck offers the perfect spot to read a bit while the sun comes up and the resort awakens.

A couple of nights ago I went to a party on the the other side of the island, invited by Noi, the manager at my resort. The night started quietly enough and ended with a mix of Thais and tourists dancing arm in arm and singing along to local pop tunes. One guy was wearing these super cool wraparound goggles with a straw tucked in the band mimicking a Britney-style microphone. He played a large water bottle bongo and drank straight from the Thai whiskey bottle. That's like drinking straight from the Liquid Drain-O bottle.

Everyone made friends and I was offered a job for next high season as a bartender at my resort.

Most have my time is spent laying in the sun reading or floating in the sea watching the clouds go by. It's a high pressure affair, but I feel that by doing my small part, I'm making the world a better place.

I've got another story about my short shorts swimming trunks, but I'm still a little to embarrassed to tell that one. Give it time.

Well, my masseur gingerly kicked the shit out of me. It was a cross between untelevised southern-style no holds barred wrastlin' and one of those dreams where you wake up spasmotically, pulling a string of drool off your pillow as you jerk to a sitting position. My one hour massage lasted a bit over fifteen minutes, and luckily so because I don't think my body could've recovered easily from much more punishment. Dude had me face down with his feet in my armpits and was squeezing my ankles together with his hands while he wound my hips skyward. Joints were popping like Michael Jackson in the Billie Jean video. I walked out of the massage "room" with my knuckles dragging, caveman style and got pushed into the sauna. The temperature knob is a burning log that sits underneath a small wooden shack that is the sauna. It was great. Super hot and herbal somehow. I guess the herbs were boiling in the water that was generating the steam. I spent five minutes in, two minutes out, for about thirty minutes. Next to the sauna was a large stone cistern filled with water. Next to that was a rice field full of hunched over women planting seedlings. So I'd pop out of the sauna, pores pouring sweat, sarong clinging, walk over to the cistern, wave at the stitched-browed farmer ladies and pour a few buckets of the chilly water over my mildly shocked but appreciative skin. Total cost? Two bucks.

Up and out of Adima early the next day, I planned for a quick stop at the market and a topping off of the gasoline. The market took a while because I couldn't resist a morning bowl of mystery meat noodles. Then I had to buy some of that delicious water buffalo jerky. Then the lightly sweet deep-fried rice balls called out to me - twice! Petrol turned out to be an elusive quarry. If I was driving a tractor, or more likely a half-tractor, these weird one-eyed, two wheeled pulling machines, then I wouldn't have had a problem - deisel was in long supply. But the only petrol station in town was 3km east off of the main road. And nobody seemed to know where it was. I was getting that twighlight zone grade paranoia when I accidentally drove past the two barrel supplier and his mom. The quality of the fuel was questionable, coming from a barrel that looked older than the elderly station mistress, but in the end, one tankful got me to the border.

The road to Luang Nam Tha was the same route I arrived on. I passed a couple of tourist buses, smugly offering a no-look thumbs up as I drew even around a blind curve. Super macho and stupid. Why do those two always cling together? The scenery was the same old jaw-dropping beautiful stuff that I'd been seeing for hundreds of kilometers throughout Laos.

A few kilometers past Luang Nam Tha the road changed from asphalt to dirt. It forked at one point offering up two equally shitty, craggy roads. I took the more east looking road, by this point relying unblinkingly on my honed sense of dead-reckoned direction. Besides, I had been wrong so many times in a row that statistically an incorrect choice was nearly impossible.

The scenery was lovely - emerald green, stepped rice fields sitting afoot a narrow jungled gorge and fed by a small snaking river. Thatched villages on stilts poked out atop small natural rises, decorating the geography like moss on a tree trunk. There wasn't much time to admire the surroundings however, as the road was a disaster. I was certain that I had become lost. My map had a little orange line representing the road I was supposed to be on, but the one beneath me warranted maybe a light-gray, dashed hairline at best.

I maneuvered carefully, avoiding large rocks and deep puddles when possible and slowing down to first gear at the gravel filled hairpin turns at every corner. I ventured that if I was on the wrong road, then eventually I would run into the road I was supposed to be on. Some concentrated sky watching in an attempt to determine my compass direction proved fruitless. Duh. Perhaps the fact that the road was so damn fun to drive delayed any drastic decision making on my part. Two hours into my trip the first sign of hope passed before my eyes - it was a bus. Older than me by far and full beyond capacity, it met me where I least expected it - at a water crossing. We stood mano a mano at either side in true spaghetti-western style, wincing and daring the other to make the first move. Finally I gunned it, spitting gravel behind me and dropping knee deep into the muddy stream. I didn't falter. Keeping the accelerator twisted, my head down and my eyes closed, sheer momentum and Honda bitchin-ness carried me through. I stopped next to the bus to catch my breath and bowed to a round of happy thumbs up from the bus riders. The bus then grumbled forward, carefully not taking the path I chose.

Water crossings. Basically small rivers or streams that happen to go across the road. Roads with water crossings aren't important enough to justify the building of bridges. They always sneak up on me. Bouncing downhill on loose dirt, my fingers and toes delicately working the brakes, my shoulders hunched and strained from taking the slack where my shocks give up, the water crossing appears as a sort of oasis. I used to imagine them as punishment, but once I learned how to forge them my opinion flipped. With enough speed and a dedicated grip on the handlebars, the water crossing becomes a post-dirt wrangling climax, akin to the final drop at Splash Mountain. The mud is cleaned off my brakes and engine and my shoes, clean mountain water cools my sunburned ankles and refreshingly soaks my pants. But more than anything else, it's just fun as heck. Scrambling through the dirt, straining and jostling and jolting, and then SPLASH - baptism - rebirth. Ready for another stretch of dirt.

That road went on and on and on. Then I got to the quarry. Way out in the middle of nowhere was a huge quarry, complete with a big manmade lake of unnaturally blue water. Running to and from the facility were huge Chinese-made dump trucks - scaring the holy shit out of me when I encountered them at horribly frequent intervals. This road was barely traversible by me on my motorbike. Imagine a row of ten-ton dump trucks convoying it. Naturally I was forced to the edge of the road and usually stopped entirely when they appeared. The good thing was that their wheels made two solid tracks where the gravel had been compressed and a narrow but easily negotiable path was formed.

Almost had to stay a night in Huay Xai, the border town just across the river from Thailand, but a nice old boat driver offered to give me and my bike a ride for a bit over ten bucks. I accepted and did not fret when I saw the size of his boat. If he says my bike will fit, then it will fit. Four men hoisted it aboard with a bit of elbow grease and some non-directed yelling. A round of Beer Lao and a pack of Chinese cigarettes sufficed for a tip. We sipped and they smoked and then we crossed the river.

Customs and immigration in Thailand was a breeze. Dude told me that Chiang Rai was only 100km away so I filled my tank and sped off. After two hours of bumpy riding my ass no longer has feeling. After four hours I forget I ever had an ass (and that ain't no small feat). So at that point I was good for 300km. The roads in Thailand are first-world quality - best I've been on so far. Thailand in general is so much more developed than anything I'd seen in months that it was a bit shocking. But it was a nice clean line too. Crossing the river, entering Thailand, I was reminded of how special Laos is. After several weeks I had become accustomed to an overflowing cup of natural beauty. My mission in Thailand was the beach, and with my hand squeezing the gas, I stared straight ahead and firmly resloved to get there as quickly as possible.

Then I got sick in Chaing Rai and had to hole up for an extra day. Shoot! Got half-way through War and Peace and hung out with Mr Sam who makes killer grilled cheese sandwiches in a very Alice from The Brady Bunch way.

Chaing Rai to Sukkothai. Looked at some unspectacular ruins. Gotta say though - they got the Buddha image dialed. Standing Buddha. Reclining Buddha. Walking Buddha. Meditating Buddha. Smiling Buddha. Non-smiling Buddha. And then, en masse Buddha. These particular ruins were a Buddha blowout and each and every image was enchanting.

Sukkothai to Bangkok. That makes 1000km in two days.

And Bangkok? The sign said BANGKOK 50km. That's right about when I hit Bangkok. The city is huge. And the highway system is crazy. And the drivers! Like when you hit city limit, a little indicator bulb in your car lights up notifying you to turn on your loco. Taxi drivers wedge between lanes to create a third where there is only two. This is in bumper to bumper gridlock. Oh, and they drive on the left in Thailand, like in England. That kind of throws a pipe wrench in the gearbox. Seeing the option for the elevated toll-road I took it. Merging into the separated far-left lane, fully commited to the toll-road on ramp, I noticed a parenthetic reminder in 6pt type at the bottom of the sign - FOUR-WHEELED VEHICLES ONLY. But of course my Asia training told me that rules were meant to be broken. Besides, it was too late to turn around. At the toll booth the money taker was clearly unhappy with my turn of events. She motioned for me to turn around. Imagine busting a U from the middle lane of the Bay Bridge and driving, against traffic and across several lanes for 500 meters. That's what I did. I had to stop at the end of that little trip and take some time to let my hands stop trembling. Then I went two kilometers further and fucking did it again. Of course this time it was no big deal - this time I hugged the shoulder on my feeble David vs. the Expressway victory lap.

Signage is pretty good. My problem is that I didn't know where I was going. So naturally, and with an undeniable precident, I got lost. I started going in circles on the highway. You know The Maze in Oakland, just before reaching the toll gates at the Bay Bridge? It's like that, times, well, infinity. Finally I saw a sign for Asok. I knew that was near where I was going and figured I could ask for directions wherever I landed. Which I did. The first guy scoffed at me. He repeated my request to an older woman staring straight ahead and sitting across from him on a bus bench. She removed the cigarette from her lips, exhaled, opened her eyes, leisurely looked my way and sized me up. Then she returned to her original fixed gaze and almost imperceptibly shook her head, clearly conveying a sarcastic "good luck, farang."

An hour later I found my hotel. It was about 5 blocks from where I exited the highway. Heh. Sometime during my little jaunt, they changed the lanes around. At certain times they change which lanes can go in which directions. It's clearly indicated in Thai on the roads themselves and there are also some very handy cryptic lights which flash red and green. Very helpful. So I spent some time driving in the wrong lanes and ignoring whistling white-gloved traffic cops who, annoyingly, were trying to pull me over. Like I don't have enough problems.

First things first. Went to JAL (like it was that easy) and secured a reservation home. I'll be in Oakland around 3pm on June 1st. Can't wait!

Made a reservation on Ko Mak (because I'm the mack) for a week on the idle beaches of the best island in Thailand you've never heard of. Oh but the rainy season just started. Dude at the resort says it rains for either two days a week or two hours a day every day. Depends on your luck and your personal relationship with Jesus. Guess we'll find out how tight we are in a week.

Went to Rajah's to buy some suits. It was recommended on Lonely Planet's message board. I made a deal with myself that I would get a good suit for 250 bucks. Now, it's possible to buy a suit here for 50 bucks, but apparently those are polyester and when you go for your fitting they slip a mickey in your tea and steal your kidney while you're out.

Rajah's was a busy but low pressure affair. Mr Rajah himself, a Sikh, patiently helped me pick a material and a style. His son works by his side and a portrait of his father patiently oversees all. He offered me a 'package.' Three suits and six custom shirts and several ties for so much money. I said that I only needed one suit. Maybe two. Then I looked at the fabrics. Oh, there were so many nice fabrics. And how can you just have one suit? And then don't you want one fun suit and one serious suit? But what about a light colored suit? And a black suit of course - you need that. And then there was the young Spanish guy who was getting his final fitting and looking really good in his suit (not in a gay way, but probably in a gay way too) which happened to be in the same fabric that I had picked out. And then there was the guy moving to Moscow who got a little teary eyed because he was leaving Mr. Rajah. So I talked myself into four suits. What the fuck am I going to do with four suits? I know what you're thinking - he's gonna come back looking like an NBA point guard on Letterman. No. I'm getting four totally killer, custom-made, fancy-silk lined, nicely pinstriped, perfect suits. Well I know what I'll do with one of them - after throwing away all of my belongings, before boarding my plane home, I will don one of my Tiffany-blue-lined suits, put on shmoozy face, and cross my fingers in hope of an upgrade.

So a long day of riding usually requires a day of rest. Adima was perfect for this sort of thing. I let the last remaining bungalow at the exorbitant price of six dollars per night. It came with a bathroom and a well proportioned rear deck overlooking a small rice field. Rice season is over, so the field was usually occupied by water buffalo attended by a local hill tribe villager. I met this woman briefly upon first arriving. I was standing on the deck surveying and eating some small plums I had picked up along the way. She motioned that I should share my plums and so I threw one down to where she was standing, about ten feet below and twenty feet away. She made no attempt to catch the small fruit, and instead let it fall with a splash into a puddle near her. She submerged her arm to the elbow into the puddle and after a moment happily extracted the plum. Without missing a beat she popped the whole thing into her mouth and with some difficulty, smiled. I later found out that this woman was mentally disabled as are a higher than suspected number of these villagers.

The sky was becoming overcast, so I left my deck, book in hand, for the resort's small restaurant. The chef's singular ability to ruin even the simplest of dishes did not fail to astound me during my whole visit. Sticky rice was the lone dish that was prepared nicely and constituted the bulk of my orders there. The first guests I encountered were a young French woman named Benedicte and a couple of outspoken Americans who wasted no time in breaking down the local prostitution scene after Benedicte's departure. Turns out these two were just visiting for lunch. I wiped my brow in relief.

As the sun's light quietly retreated and dusk came into its own, the local fauna appeared. Insects of such density and boldness began to swarm. Not swarm really, but rise up. The buzzing of numerous flying things ranging from near invisible to halloween-sized mixed with the buzz saw announcements of amorous circadas and the violin concertos of millions of crickets. Frogs and toads began to rip and trumpet and lizards clicked, cooed and geck-ko'd. Out of the corner of my eye I saw what I thought at first were small village fires, seen from quite a distance. But when I turned I realized that this place was infested with fireflies. Hundreds of them would swarm around the trees, their red taillights en masse offering early christmas decorations. Several of these nocturnal fliers would sneak into my room each night and after the generator was turned off and the lights extinguished would perform a lullaby dance for me, switching their lights on and off to an accompanying march to which I was deaf.

On my second day I chatted with Benedicte (call me Bene - rhymes with penne), and learned that she has been traveling in six month stints for the last five years. Everybody out here is like that. One year abroad is more the norm than the exception. One guy was bicycling for three months across Laos. Props, homeboy. Through the course of conversing with Bene about nearby activities I suggested that we ride to the town of Muang Sing and get a massage and a sauna. She agreed and mentioned that she had some business to attend to up the road at the nearby Akha village. As it turns out, Bene was here for the second time because she liked the relaxing atmosphere and the plentiful, accessible and inexpensive supply of opium available at the nearby tribal villages. She invited me to join her, and having nothing else to look forward to before six besides biting off some Tolstoy, I accepted.

Now, tourists are not supposed to be jotting about buying drugs from the local farmers. It encourages drug addiction and makes an unfavorable impression on the village youth. It's also illegal and capitally punishable. But like Tom Cruise said in that touchstone example of culturally important film, Risky Business, sometimes you just have to say, what the fuck.

We walked up the small washed out dirt trail into the village. This village, like many of its kind, is a small ramshackle affair. The huts are built on platforms and are constructed of thatched roof and bamboo timber. The walls are made from a woven bamboo lattice. The floors, like everything besides the roofs, are water, wind and sight permeable. Bene led us to a larger hut near the center of the village where two amiable men greeted us warmly. Inside was dark, with closed windows and no lamps. Three young children sat inside and several others came and went to check out the foreigners and be impressed by our lust for drug.

Bene went first. She layed down on a grass mat, facing one of the men, who lay in a mirrored position about an arms length away. Between their faces were an assortment of jars and metal implements and a small oil burning lamp. Here's how it goes:

The opium pipe is a half-inch diameter bamboo tube with a hard, black chamber affixed to its end. It closely resembles a primitive turkey baster. The chamber has a two millimeter hole at it's top. The man, our dealer and executor, pulled the chamber from the tube and scraped out a hard, black, gunk from its interior. He emptied this into a pestle and then ground it into a fine powder, pouring the result into a sawed off Chinese anchovy can. He then adds to the can what appears to be Chinese aspirin powder from a packet resembling a KFC hand-i-wipe. Next he unfolds a tiny piece of paper to reveal a bit of pure opium. With a short and thin metal awl he scrapes a tiny portion of the light brown stuff, just enough to cover the instrument's tip. Over the lamp's flame he heats the opium and then dips the awl into the aspirin/resin powder, rolling it around for even coverage. He heats and repeats until he has formed a large pea-sized ball.

Immediately, he stuffs the warmed, malleable ball into the hole of the pipe, forming a little volcano and clearing a hole with the tip of the awl. Finally the pipe is ready and he turns it round to face the smoker. I watched Bene and our man repeat this for several pipes. She rolled over, very content looking towards the other man who had prepared another pipe and I took her place.

Lying on my side, my eyes even with the lamp, the man turned a prepared pipe to me. I held my end lightly and began a long fifteen or twenty second draw. The hole is small and closes up regularly as the opium burns. The man must constantly poke and reshape the mound to keep the air passage open and the burning constant. In this hut, the only sound is that of the flickering flame and the slight hissing of the evaporating opium. The smell is subtle, but the taste is an extremely pleasant sweetness that fills the mouth from the tip of the tounge to the front of the throat. It is a sensation between taste and smell and it is by far the most enjoyable aspect of the smoking experience, which is, perhaps by design, quiet and non-taxing overall. After two or three long draws the pipe is finished.

After five or so pipes of the recycled stuff, I tried a pipe of pure opium. The pure stuff comes straight from the paper packet, burns faster and sweeter and is much more effective as a drug.

An half hour of smoking left me feeling light headed, clear minded, and with a subtle but secure sense of well being. This wellness was deep, concerning not just myself, but the world in general. Everything in the world was okay, exactly as it was. Kofi Annan would not aid his career by adopting an opium addiction. The feeling lasted for the rest of the day and was longer lasting but much less intense than the high of a cigarette.

There you have it. I'm a dope fiend. If anyone wants me to stuff ten keys of the stuff in my underwear to foster or feed their addiction, just email me.

Confident of continued sunny weather, but not one to take chances (heh), I wrapped my bag in a waterproof tarp and stopped by the market on the way out of town for a plastic poncho. That was the best 15,000 kip I ever spent. An hour later I felt the first drops of what would end up being a very thorough soaking. Two hours later I was convulsively shivering, wet through, and barely able to maintain control of the bike. A small village market offered the only hope for relief. I pulled in and immediately bought a pair of white gloves. They were loose-knit cotton jobbies, but they were better than nothing. Next I wandered over to the food area where a pot was set to boil over the single source of fire in the market. Hunched over next to the soup, I feebly wrapped my hands around the stone hearth. The proprietess gave me the same look you'd give a wet cat or perhaps a retarded child who has become lost.

Minutes later feeling returned to my fingers and I was off. The rain was so dense that I had no problem seeing with my visor down. It was as if I was driving through an aquarium - there were no raindrops, only solid sheets of water. I stopped again at a small down located in the crotch of a highway junction. Yearning for a nice bowl of hot soup and hoping for some place with a roaring open fire, I eventually settled for the former. This place, without any sign, was occupied with several men in matching shirts and sunglasses, a woman who could not be bothered, a young girl doing her homework, and a young boy, apparently suffering from Down's Syndrome. David Lynch was in the air. The men divided their attention, in unison, between me and the Thai soap opera playing on the television behind me. The boy repeatedly shouted at me in a punctuated way that closely resembled a bark from a large dog. The woman brought out my soup, duck, right away, then returned to her chaise lounge. I asked her for chili sauce. Her head rolled in my direction and she blinked, slowly and dramatically, then returned to the soap opera, ignoring me henceforth in full. Halfway through my delicious soup, I looked up. The men, in sunglasses, were staring at me, the television was blaring and the boy was barking, siezing up a bit with each effort.

The rain continued, letting up on occasion, until Udom Xai. There, at the market, I bought a long sleeved football (soccer) jersey. This jocko gear is perfect for motorbike riding. It's totally synthetic so it dries quickly and it allows air to flow through. When the fabric becomes wet it still manages to stay warm. The only problem is that I have one jersey that says SIEMENS and one jersey that says FLY EMIRATES. This means very little to you and me, but to the British and select Europeans, these shirts constitute territorial markers which could fertilize or defoliate a potentially budding friendship. Eventually I will own up to the fact that I don't even know which teams I'm wearing (I keep forgetting) and my new friend (or enemy) curses my American-ness.

These roads in northern Laos are just too beautiful to describe, so eventually I'll post pictures to give you a taste of the glory. They are either mountain passes or riverside squiggles. Either way they are surrounded by towering, jungled peaks and dotted with tiny, straw and bamboo villages. The higher I climbed, the more elaborate the costumes of the old village women became. Many of the homes were built on stilts and under the raised floor I could see women operating looms. They weave textiles similar to those of Latin America. Then they embroider the woven pieces, sewing them together in unusual patters to make their clothes. They have silver-scaled headdresses, baby slings, skirts, vests, jackets and everything is held in place through a seemingly complicated array of belts and knotted string. The old women chew something red, maybe tobacco, which stains their teeth as if they've just finished the biggest cherry gobstopper known to man.

Some sixty kilometers before Luang Nam Tha, the sun began to peek through the clouds. After riding for four hours through a monsoon downpour, the sun is like the warmest, most delicious, fresh from the oven, sugar cookie. It tickles and caresses. It chases moisture from waterlogged clothing. It was so good I made up several songs about it.

Maybe I haven't mentioned my song making. Driving for hours on end can get tedious. Sure, there is the beautiful scenery, and sometimes the roads are so bad that I have no extra attention to spare on idle pursuits, but generally my mind is left to wander. And it very often wanders to the set of Star Search. There, I am competing in the combined solo male vocalist/songwriter category. I usually start with some song that I know most of the chorus to. This day, I remember, Ike and Tina's Proud Mary was in my head. I'll sing the chorus and then start making up the rest, inspired by the most trivial events of my trip. Potholes are a frequent subject of my songs. And bus drivers. Slippery roads are popular too. The songs get ridiculous very quickly and I'm inevitably caught singing aloud to myself by some confused village kid, tracking me around a slow corner.

Adima resort, and resort is a oft-abused term in Laos, sits 6km outside of Muang Sing, 3km from the China border. It is surrounded by rice fields and beyond by Yao and Akha hill tribes. I stayed for three days. One day was spent reading. The next was spent reading, with a short trip to a nearby village to smoke opium, followed by a jaunt to town for an herbal sauna. The last day involved a walk to several nearby villages. More on all this later.

Jeez, sorry for the long-winded entry. I guess I just could've said: It rained.

Eldon and I ran into each other the next morning for a breakfast of noodles at the market. He had tried to catch sunrise at the plain of jars but got hopelessly lost in the intracate network of local roads surrounding the place. My gear was packed and I left right after eating my noodles (and also after taking an experimental foray into a florescent green rice-jelly-fish-egg-looking dish). We bade each other bon voyage and I was soon on the road. About 45 minutes later, Eldon passed me going about 100km/hr. He was in a hurry to make Nong Khiaw before sunset. I caught up with him at Muang Kham, a little town on the junction of national roads 6 and 7. We turned left, onto road 6 and into some of the most beautiful scenery I've seen yet. This road is newly paved and snakes up and around several mountains. It's not much more than a thousand U-turns connected randomly at their ends. Eldon and I passed each other several times on this road, when one of us would stop to take a break or a photo. The road was narrow and it hugged the mountainside, forever climbing. To the left was a heavily jungled mountain and to the right was a deep, lush valley. Dotting the road every ten or twenty kilometers were tiny villages - no more than fifteen huts each, tempting the precipice with a bold, bamboo-legged balancing act.

It was tempting for me to use the entire road as I drove. On the 95 kilometer stretch of this road, only four or five cars passed in the opposite direction. The only problem is that if a car happened to be on the same left turn as me, and I was hugging the corner, my living license would surely have been prematurely revoked. So I took it relatively slow. Descending the pass, I came upon a left turn that sharpened as it turned. I approached it too fast and began to brake midway through the corner. At the apex of the turn was some loose gravel and a big rock, the size of a large grapefruit. I was too committed to the turn to avoid the rock and the gravel and I hit it squarely with my front tire. The bike skipped as the front end bounced off the pavement. I straightened up, going about 50km/hr to avoid sliding out. Now, making the turn would be impossible. I gently applied the brakes, but could not keep myself on the road. Luckily there was a big, soft drainage ditch running the seam between the mountain and the road. The bike dropped into the grassy, rocky ditch and I felt a sense of relief, thinking that I would be able to ride it out. The ditch acted like a slot car track, forcing my wheels to align to its path. I had probably slowed to 30km/hr at this point (we're talking about a few seconds worth of time in total), when before me appeared a small boulder, about the size of my front tire. I slammed on the brakes, but without much consequence. The bike hit the rock squarely and I was thrown over the handlebars and into the ditch, about ten feet ahead of my bike.

After several stunned seconds in the grass of trying to recalibrate my senses and letting the adrenaline drip out of my lobes, I stood up and assessed the scene. One shoe had gone missing, apparently having eloped with my sunglasses. My bag had come completely off the bike and some of my accessories were strewn about. I cringed at the thought of what damage my bike might have been dealt. It lay on it's side, wheel against the boulder. Front tire was not popped. Nothing appeared to be leaking. I stood it up, got it in neutral and started it up. Vroom. No problem. The front rim looked true and besides a few cosmetic scratches on the plastic front fender, which had completely buckled into itself, the bike was fine. A broken bike at this point of my trip, at this particular location, would have been a very bad thing.

My body was still trembling as I searched the ditch for my shoe. I found it near the road, wedged into a small cluster of adolescent bamboo trees. My elbow, ankle, neck, knees, back and foot were throbbing. Each, in the split second of my tumble, had managed to aquire some small injury. It must have been quite the gymnastic dismount. Everything still moved - and so I declared a small victory over ill-fatedness and began reassembling my possessions. The sunglasses were gone and I was still too shaken up to conduct a thorough search. Without much grace I exited the ditch and began driving towards Thenchong, the next reasonably sized village on the road. I stopped there for water to cleanse my various nicks, cuts and gouges. A woman there was unsatisfied with my triage and called for her husband, dressed all in black, who casually sauntered out to eye the fuss. My elbow was deeply cut and stuffed with dirt. I couldn't stop the bleeding once I had picked and washed the debris out - chalk up one more use for a mechanical pencil. As I elevated and compressed, the man walked off and returned with some freshly picked herbs. He made motions to apply them to the cuts. At first I thought, oh no, no witch doctoring for me. But then I thought of my dad. He would not only happily stuff any random herb into his wounds, he would ask for seconds and probably a branch from the original plant to take home with him. Then he would spend the rest of his days mixing the fruit of that plant into his aloe vera smoothies, gulping each down with a satisfied lip-smack. So I allowed the man to doctor me. He squeezed some juice from the grassy plant into the cut, still bleeding profusely, then stuffed a few leaves directly in. Mmm, that smarted a bit. But a minute later the bleeding stopped. Very many thanks were offered to the medicine man and his twenty-odd crew of teenage and younger interns, and I sped off to the next town of Nam Neun.

There I found Eldon, who had run low on fuel. While I was licking my wounds, he was coasting down the mountain in an attempt to conserve gas. His first aid kit was handy so I antisepted a few of my joints and drank a nice warm Pepsi. We sped off to Phou Lao, a few kilometers down the road to junction onto national road 1. Besides the primary name, this road does not have much to offer those seeking road-like conditions. National road 1 more closely resembles a creek bottom than a driving surface. It took two and a half bumpy, slippery hours to travel the sixty kilometers to Vieng Thong. Here again I met Eldon and we shared a plate of sticky rice and some unidentified meat (water buffalo I suspect). The Lao have many more choices of meat that westerners. In the markets I've seen bats, rats, squirrels and other rodents, different sorts of deer, birds of the endangered variety, water buffalo, and dogs. I think that no matter how thinly covered in meat, any animal is a potential game prize. I'm sure the scenery on road 1 was lovely, but all of my concentration was keenly spent keeping my vehicle upright. I also had the chicken problem. There's something unusual about Lao chickens. Most animals on the road are fairly predictable - upon hearing or seeing the motorbike, they will either run in the direction they are pointed or they will run away from the bike. Chickens are totally unpredictable. From the edge of the road, they will spin round and run directly under your tire. Almost as if they know that their lives are doomed, considering suicide the only proactive choice they can make to outwit their Kentucky-fried fate. Proudly I have yet to kill a chicken (or a piglet - also a bit of an erratic road crosser) mostly because I couldn't bear facing the double row of farm kids that would invariably witness the gruesome execution.

National road 1 turned into a real road after Vieng Thong. I missed my left turn, about 100km later and realized it about 50km after that. Road signs? Heh, no. So I ended up in Nong Khiaw at the sunset guesthouse. This was a recommendation of Susan Garrett a very nice woman whom I met via the internet. She had done a long solo journey throughout Laos and Thailand last year and had emailed me tons of advice about where to stay and which roads were good, etc. She's a popular woman. I've dropped her name on several occasions and was warmly received afterwards. Nong Khiaw is the kind of place that people plan to stay at for a couple days and stay for a couple of weeks. Mr Church, at the Sunset, hooked us up with simple rooms, yummy pancakes, and even had a very nice buddhist good-luck ceremony on our last night there. The group I became temporarily friends with included a Frenchwoman, a Swede, a Dane, an Irishman, an Argentinian, two Kiwis, and a partridge in a pear tree. We ate Lao style with his family and did some chanting and lit some candles. It doesn't really work in translation, but the vibe was good and the old folks were really cute in that good-natured grandparently way.

Nong Khiaw is on a river that feeds into the Mekong. You can walk on foot paths which trace the river to small, isolated, sandy beaches and take swims in relatively clean sections of the river, unpolluted by proximity to town. Rivers, though... they're gross. I'm an ocean person. I don't like the feeling of my feet squishing down into a slimy, muddy river bottom. And rivers are basically nature's sewers. Every waste-related, runned off thing ends up in a river. I'll put just about any food-thing into my mouth, but I draw the line at river water. Most of the guest houses in Laos pump the shower water from the river. Stoked.

Today I woke up early and back tracked to my turn-off. I've got my Lao phrase book so I've been making more of an effort to learn a bit of the language. Stuff like, "this beer is very expensive" and other catalysts of cultural exchange. I managed to handle all of my direction-asking in Lao, with some success. People just dig it when you speak their language, even if you don't make any sense at all. The road from Sam Soun (a tiny hamlet that was my turnoff point) and Pak Xeng follows a mountain ridge. The views would be spectacular if not for the clear cutting of the forest on both sides. Thousands of acres are being burnt to make room for farming. I couldn't help but wonder what crops could be planted and harvested on sixty-degree slopes. This fire road, and the villages along it are about as remote as it gets in Laos. At least 150km of tough road from the nearest thing you'd call a town. The road, generally in good condition, tends to fall apart on its steepest aproaches. This makes for some challenging riding and some rewarding pit stops.

Pak Xeng had a gas station. Oh have I described a gas station yet? It's two fifty gallon barrels. One is diesel and one is petrol. Each is topped with a graduated glass cylinder which holds five litres. Below the cylinder is a hand crank which draws fuel from the barrel into the cylinder. A plastic tube below the crank delivers the fuel to your tank with the opening of a hand operated valve at the top. By opening and closing the valve at the right time, fuel can accurately be dispensed in quarter-litre increments. The barrels are usually housed in a wooden shack, next to the owner's home, usually on one end of the village. Small villages do not have gas stations. Large villages will sometimes have two. The competition there must be intense. One man had very neatly branded his station with red, yellow and white paint as a Shell outlet. He did a good job too. All hand painted, with the Shell trademark and logotype in Helvetica and everything. I gave him a double thumbs up as I rode by. Pak Xeng also had a restaurant. Fancy! I stopped and ordered the only dish on the menu - pork pho. Not just any old piece of pork though - only the choicest bits - intestine, heart and liver. As I ate I could hear the source material oinking and rooting around in the river runoff behind me. That's called keeping it real.

Now I'm in Luang Prabang, a lovely old city in the heart of Laos. A couple days of recuperation here should settle my motoring debts and prepare me for the trip upto the Chinese border. I have vague directions to a small guesthouse just outside a small town, just outside a small city in the northeastern corner of Laos. That will be my last stop in this awestrikingly beautiful country.

At every guesthouse I've stayed at thusfar, Mary Jane is a permanent resident. It's really no way to travel. Don't get me wrong, if I was twenty I would be doing exactly as they - no doubt in my mind. But now, to me, it's a bit depressing. Yesterday in Vang Vieng (the self-proclaimed chill-out capital of Laos - and trust me, that's saying something because it's nearly impossible to not to chill out in this country) I arrived and walked out to the river. There they have a bunch of platforms and wooden beach chairs set out on the river bank. There are also floating platforms and innertubes connected to trees allowing you to float in place. Traditionally, people rent an innertube and get dropped off three kilometers upstream, then they float leisurely for several hours back into town. Along the way, children swim up to the floaters and sell them beer and hash and opium and whatever else these gap-year kids demand.

Well, apparently a group of people on the bank had made the trip, but after being retrieved from the river couldn't quite motivate themselves to get past the bank. I walked by and they narrowed their eyes at me and said, "hey" in the most energy efficient way possible. I felt like an apparition as seen by a group of paraplegics. I'm sure later they conferred with each other to confirm that I was indeed not a figment of their imaginations. Those kids looked like Trainspotting extras. I looked around. Everyone on the riverbank was either staring very deeply into space or trying in vain to make their lighter work. "Dude, let me see it." "Dude, it's just... the fire won't come out the end." "Whoa." "Yeah." I hope they're taking photos, because they sure as hell won't remember Laos first-hand.

I've had a fire under my ass since the Cambodian border, and thanks to the pristine state of the national roads here have been averaging 95km/hr across the country. Most of the south was very similar to Cambodia, thus delivering an unwanted familiarity that kept me from lingering. The north however is a different story. Vientiane is a nice city on the Mekong. The riverfront is crowded with pizza joints and expat bars, but around the market there are some really superb ghettos. The market itself is quite good too, bringing back fond memories of Vietnam. Unlike Cambodia, Laos has it's shit together.

A man named Goop at a motorcycle shop recommended to me an alternative route out of Vientiane. Although paved, the road lacked signage, and I quickly became lost. Being lost in Laos is a pleasure. It's so pastoral and lush. People are friendly and although nobody seems to speak English, they are pretty good about doing the sign language thing. I've had a couple funny incidents when asking for directions when my interogatee just didn't want to deal with me and just nodded yes to whatever I asked. "Ban Ka, that way," pointing. Yes. "Or THAT way," pointing in the opposite direction. Yes. "Ban Ka?" Yes. Okay. Next innocent villager please!

I don't think I ever found the right road, but I did manage to find the national highway again. Because the roads are so twisty my motorbike is the fastest vehicle on the road. I can tell you that this is a very good thing. The last thing I want is some big bus clammoring to pass me around a blind corner. Traffic is relatively light and the farther out I get the fewer vehicles I see.

After Vientiane I stopped for a night in the chill out town of Vang Vieng. They had a nice market with lots of weird stuff for sale. Gophers and live bats and stuff. They also had a decent bookstore. I bought War and Peace. I'm kind of on this Russian novelists theme. War and Peace is a burly book - it's got more chapters than the Jehova's Witnesses. It's a pretty good read though - sort of in the style of the modern night-time television drama series.

The road out of Veng Vieng is spectacular. It snakes between huge mountains and emerald rivers. It climbs, reaching up to tiny villages whose thatch huts are perched on the road, above striking drop-offs, like birds on a wire. It's rare for foreigners to make this trip on a motorbike so the villagers are usually pleasantly surprised to see me. The mountains and the ravines are a bit like the most extreme parts of Yosemete. Then add these villages. Every 10km or so they appear, each one like an oasis, seemingly so remote, but really just a short hop along a long chain of neighboring hamlets. The men seem fairly well armed. I hope this is a holdover from the bygone days of banditry, but I doubt someone would shoulder the extra burden of a rifle if they didn't feel they needed to. Shit, maybe they were the bandits.

The memory card on my camera is full. I snapped so many photos on the way. Every photo felt like the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. Then I turn a bend and find myself stunned at another show of natural beauty. These are the sorts of photos that really suck too. Like, you had to be there - it was majestic!

Today, I'm in a town called Phonsavan. It's claim to fame is a mysterious archeological find called Plain of Jars. I don't know why they call it that - it's just a group of empty fields with twenty or thirty huge stone jars tossed about. They don't know how the ancient people got the jars from the quarry where they were built to the fields and they don't know what the jars were for. Since my track record with local guides is dismal I opted to guide myself. The jars are located on three separate sites, but I heard that the most remote one was also the most interesting. I had a small map, an inset of a larger map really, and I had a desire, and so I was off.

Let me say something about maps. What is left out of a map is just as important as what is put in. For example, let's say that this road to the jars had about a million small, unmarked roads branching off of it in both directions. If the map only shows the road that goes to the jars, then I have no idea which of the stealth roads is mine. And what if there is a huge lake. If it's not on the map, then either - it's just not on the map, or I've gone so far that I'm past the boundary of my map. There were literally a twenty turns needed to make it to the Plain of Jars. Two of them had signs. My powers of dead reckoning and a homing-pigeon-like sense of direction brought me to my destination with very little pain. I had heard that the jars were a bit of a let down, but I thought they were quite nice. To reach them one must walk about a kilometer through a beautifully intracate set of stepped rice fields and grazing land. A very rickety bridge made entirely of bamboo and baling wire aids the approach. Finally, the jars are very understated. They are big and quiet. Some people speculate that they were burial vessels, and based on their solemn demeaner and their location overlooking a wide bountiful valley I would concur.

On the map, the road was a loop. By continuing in the same direction I would soon reach the paved road into town. Apparently I forgot to activate my powers of navigation. One wrong turn and ten minutes later I was on a bumpy cattle track getting lanced by razor like brush growing slowly into a canopy above me. Every hundred meters or so I would come upon another road. Then I would make a decision. Does this new road seem bigger or smaller. All I needed to do was find continually bigger roads until I was on a paved highway. The problem is that roads start big and end up small. Some roads get so small they disappear entirely. Some roads look like roads but are actually driveways. Some roads are not roads at all - they are drainage paths or animal tracks. It was 2pm and I figured that the worst thing that could happen was that I'd get really far from where I wanted to be, but I knew I would eventually get out. So I just kept going. Through rice fields. Through a little pine forest. Through mud. Deep mud - that sucked. I talked to an ox driver for a while. I talked to what I assumed was some sort of Laotian girlscout. When I was in the mud I talked to Jesus and asked him to deliver me unto solid land (which unto me he did). Finally, climbing a very steep mountain (this can't be right) I stopped and asked a stooped old man which way to town. He pointed one way. Then he thought a moment and pointed the other way. I thought maybe he was senile, but in fact what he was saying was that it didn't matter. I was so far off that any direction would get me closer. Kop jai lai lai! Thank you very much. The old timer grinned, obviously proud of his last remaining black tooth.

Tomorrow I'm heading out of the guidebook. Should be fun. I've been waking up at 5:30am lately, getting on the road by 7am with quick stop at the market for some morning noodles. By 2pm I'm road weary. Tomorrow, around noon, I'll start looking for a guest house in the small villages I pass through. It should take two days on the unpaved mountain roads running near the China border to get back to Luang Prabang. I'm hoping Vieng Thong has a place for me. If not then maybe Hong, or Homthong or even Thenchong. Can't some hong give a brother a crib?