(Editor’s Note: This is part of a series of travel correspondence from Dan as he travels around southeast Asia. Click the “continued” link to read the full message.)

July 20, 2005

Greetings from Ninh Binh!

I’m fine. I’m not hurt. It’s only a scar. Turns out I was a bit mistaken about Vientiane being boring. After signing off last time, I went to the local Hash House Harriers hash. If you don’t know what this is, google Hash House Harriers. Their tagline is “A drinking club with a running problem,” which we adopted for the Grizzlies: “a drinking team with an ice hockey problem.” To be honest, I didn’t know how much running to expect, but I assumed that I could bow out if (when) I ran out of gas.

Most of you have heard my Urban Challenge stories…limping up hills, sprinting through traffic, celebrating with gusto. The Vientiane Hash House Harriers put those experiences to shame! First I had to find them. They placed an ad in the local English language paper, pointing to a bakery where they post their starting point weekly. I found the bakery still hungover, haggling with songthaew drivers (songthaews are taxis made from open-bed pickup trucks) for a ride, and finally walking over new blacktop that glistened in the heat, unable to dry. That pointed me to a bar near where I started. Time to walk.
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(Editor’s Note: This is part of a series of travel correspondence from Dan as he travels around southeast Asia. Click the “continued” link to read the full message.)

July 16, 2005

Greetings from Luang Prabang!

I apologize in advance for the awful use of local currency in this email, but you can all do the math. $1 = 40 Baht = 10,000 Kip. Also, this keyboard is terrible, but what do you expect for internet at 100 Kip per minute?

We left Chiang Khong by slow boat, and spent two days on the Mekong river. Smells are the dominant sense. The river is full of silt, and runs brown. The fragrance is a quarter of the smell of a farm. Rich earth, animals, waste. The hills loom high around us, and the mountains beyond that. Everything is lush and green. Square patches of slash-and-burn farm abound, each with its own farmhouse, and square patches of scrub brush show where farmers were years ago.

For our one night stop, we landed at Pak Beng. Here, I realized that we are in sync with some travelers we met in Chiang Khong. Marcus (23, UK, normal, remember?) and I were having dinner and drinks at a restaurant run by a Finnish man and a Thai woman in Chiang Khong when we met David, Eva, and Simone. David is Swiss, and the two girls are Austrian. Hell of a lot of fun. Chiang Khong works on an interesting system: slowness. People order dinner for a particular time, then return to eat. They had ordered dinner for 9 pm, so they went back, and we got a bunch of our friends from our guesthouse, wandering the streets with an open beer in my hand. Chiang Khong has no closing time. The Finn served us until we were falling over. At 3 am we staggered back (no beers in hand) and settled down for our 7 am wakeup call.
(Click here to read the rest of this post)

(Editor’s Note: This is part of a series of travel correspondence from Dan as he travels around southeast Asia. Click the “continued” link to read the full message.)

July 12, 2005

Hello from Chiang Khong, home of the 650 pound catfish!

After a few drinks, I wander into an internet cafe. Nature calls, and I ask for the bathroom. In the back is the owner’s home. Pictures of family, a couch, a teakwood carved dog. And his own bathroom. Amazing. I’ve never seen hospitality like this. It was also my first full encounter with a country-style toilet, if you know what I mean.

(You don’t? A country-style, or squat, toilet is a toilet bowl embedded in the ground, with no seat, but some porcelain footrests on each side. You drop your pants and - hope that you don’t dip the pants in the toilet - pray that your cheapo sandals have enough grip to keep you from slipping and landing in the bowl - wish that your knees had a few less miles on them

To a man, pissing in a hole is quite natural. My full experience tonight was much more difficult. Conversely, my female tour guide remarked that she prefers squatting over a country-style toilet to squatting over a Western toilet.)

Today was a transit day, where I slept in a van while we drove across some remarkable terrain. Northern Thailand has many of these abrupt hills, rocketing up from the valley floors, and covered in jungle scrub. The hills and mountains are amazing.
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