Aux and Lissa's Epic Cycle Journey

luang prabang, still...

well the waterfight went well. i wandered down the main street for an hour or so drinking some sweet beerlao while lissa beacme irate having lost what she was writing for the journal in a computer crash or something, prolly something water related. it has a funny way of adversely affecting electronic equipment. so i stumbled across a lao family eating a massive lunch on their step just back from the street while they listened to these hardout looking lao kids playing rock music that sounded like a really bad asian imitation of wheezer, the best music ive heard in about a month though. so i bought a beer off the family and they offered me a seat and all this food. i discovered my new favourite dish, fried mekong seaweed, which is an algae that grows on the riverbed and is scraped off, dried and pressed into sheets not unlike the stuff they have around sushi, i think its kelp maybe. anyway, drank with them for a while and had the worst conversations ever, noone being able to hear anyone else over the band and the madness going on all around on the street, and me not speaking their language. i tried speaking some french to them but gave up, and left to join in on the fight. it was the second day of conflict and my cheap chinese gun packed it in pretty early on, thankfully lissa had had enough so she gave me her weapon. a cool irish guy who we met on the boat fed me mekong whiskey (which is not whiskey but some kind of cheap whiskeyrum combination) and things started getting blurry. his girlfriend gave me her gun and i jumped in the back of trucks full of lao guys covered in black oil facepaint that looked like some kind of lynchmob out for blood and cruised the streets for a while causing trouble. when i started to feel ill we left on our bikes to ride the short distance back to our hostel and i managed to prang it into the hillside. no damage to the beast but i have a few scrapes in uncomfortable places.


after a day of recovery and several changes of hostel due to the ridiculous price of accommodation over the lao new year we were about ready to leave, so we arose bright and early this morning, loaded up and headed towards  Vientiane. the capital of this most awesome country. our plan is to ride there over the next week or so, having given up on our vietnam visa situation. so, we got about 30 km down this road that was becoming increasingly narrower, climbed about 10km of pretty snarly hill and came to a stop at a gate across the road and a shitload of tourists. not such a bad thing cause we were kinda hanging out for someone who spoke english to tell us where the fuck we were. so turns out we took a wrong turn way back in town, oh well, we parked the bikes and hiked up to a cool waterfall that all the tourists (who didnt know where they were any more than we did, i guess you can afford to be ignorant when someone else is driving you somewhere) were coming to see. after swimming around for a while we hit the road again, mostly downhill this time, and are now back in sweet prabang.


so changed the plan for the trip again, instead of going straight to naam across laos, we are riding down the full length of laos (the first stretch of which is a hotbed of bandit and guerrilla activity, with warnings to look out for terrorists of all things. ill keep my ears open for american accents) into cambodia, around that for a month then finally up naam from the south.i hate communist countries almost as much as i hate the thai inefficency and ineptitude of their government  agencies (the TAT fucked up our visa) . laos isnt really communist, i dont think, so they can be immune to my hatred for now. vietnam visas have an entry and exit date. you have to be at the border on or after the entry date, and you have to leave on or before the exit date. i blame the russians.

one of the cool things about luang prabang is the periodic power cuts at night. it seems to happen every night around 9, so i should prolly wind up this rant real soon, and all the cafes and restaurants bring out their candles, giving the town even more of a french look. very cool. we were in the only cd store when they first went off, i guess the people here are honest or that place would be out of business by now. we also found a damn good curryhouse with an awesome range of veg curries (the meat here is not prepared well, and i think they use every piece of the animal) for about $2. i want to move to this town.

anyway time to leave, will try not to get attacked on the 'notorious' highway 13 and not to get blowed up by old american weopanry, difficult at times, and will update this schmozzel again when we get to a place with electricity. yaaaaar.
over and under.
Aux.