To say that I woke up refreshed would be an understatement. I woke up as the earthly avatar of Contentedness and Well-Being. Rather than a hangover from a night of smoking and drinking on a swaying boat, I felt more refreshed and invigorated than I had in a long time. Maybe Southeast Asia turns all that booze and THC into vitamins, or maybe I was feeling the effects of Eating A Goddamn Snake Heart. Regardless, I felt great, with just a touch of existential hopelessness, because oh yeah I watched The Deer Hunter right before going to bed.
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| And the view waking up wasn't too bad neither. |
One of our last sights on the tour is The Kissing Rocks, which, let me describe them for you, look a bit like two rocks kissing. As we came near they kissed:
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| Like so. |
And then parted.
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| Like so. Oh, and there's a story about how this is supposed to be sad, if you want to feel bad about rocks. |
Our last sightseeing over, the hosts of the cruise finally let us have our breakfast. But first: cooking class!
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| Work for your food! Di di mao! DI DI MAO! |
Guess what a bunch of tired white people on a tour don't want to do before they eat? Learn how to roll the spring rolls they've been waiting to eat. I wish I could've been cool like the German non-couple who abstained, but I wasn't. I rolled a bunch of damn spring rolls while the snake energy coursing through my blood hissed and left me in disgust.
After eating breakfast, including the spring rolls we had collectively made (and for which I was complimented on my rolling skills by the tour guide, natch), our ship made for the mainland. While waiting for the docking boat, an ambiguously gendered child of an Australian family wandered over to where I was drinking beer and playing my Nintendo DS. S/he had never played Mario before, and was able to quickly and soundly defeat my theory that Anyone Can Play Mario Immediately After Picking It Up.
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| "Who is the turtle?" "He's evil, he stole the princess, and HOW DO YOU NOT KNOW THIS?!" |
After about five minutes and a frustrated exclamation of "I HATE the mushrooms!", the boy/girl gave up on Mario forever. Sad news, but dry your tears Shigeru Miyamoto, at least the kid seems to have found a strong anti-drug stance.
From the dock our group is taken by van back to our individual lodgings. There's a conversation between some Aussies saying they came north to Asia for the heat, and an American man blown away by this revelation ("That's amazing! We go SOUTH to get warmer!"). Shut up, you're judging him too. Back at our hostel, we ask the front desk where's a good place to get pho. After a week in Vietnam, somehow I'd still only had it the one time. The restaurant Highway 61 is recommended to us, so we grab a cab and hightail our starving asses over there, and learn that pho is not actually on their menu.
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| So, instead we buy a bunch of son tinh liqueurs. Same same? |
Rather than pho, the menu is filled with an assortment of unusual items that at first I assumed to be targeted towards tourists, but a lot of them didn't even seem to be Vietnamese in origin. Like, say, ostrich steak.
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| Not a bad steak, really. |
And barbecued frog legs.
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| Legitimately delicious. |
We did buy a local dish though: a healthy serving of fried locusts.
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| If you say you like these you're lying (but that's okay because I did too so I would look cool) |
They were a little like popcorn, if popcorn had way, way more legs and tasted like dead bugs. Sarah didn't want us to be "those people" though (the kind of people who order the wacky foreign dish only to not eat it and forever brand themselves in the eyes of the restaurant staff as White Tourist Devils), so rather than leave a shamefully unfinished plate of perfectly good locusts on our table, she wrapped up the remainder (re: 75%) in a paper napkin and stealthily threw the greasy bundle in an alley after we exited. Offending the waiter and instigating a race war: Averted. Image of a giant, bipedal locust standing on the side of the road and shedding a single tear: Terrifying.
After dinner we headed over to the Thang Long Water Puppet Theatre for their Water Puppet Show.
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| All three words of the title are startlingly accurate. |
The theater was surprisingly packed, even though there are several performances throughout the day, and even the show is...kind of boring. The show being in a combination of Vietnamese and song didn't make things easy to follow, but I do remember a bald man with a gigantic head:
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| In the upper right, with the gigantic head. |
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| And in puppet form. Horrible, smiling puppet form. |
And then at one point some of the puppets were on fire, but the thrill of danger was dashed on account of the whole show being in water.
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| Whomp. |
After a long night of cultural appreciation and annoying fellow theater-goers when cracking smuggled beers, we spent our last night in Hanoi and left in the early, early morning for Laos. At the airport I'm stopped because of a bottle of sunscreen in my carry-on that's over the liquid limit, so I tell them "It's only half-full." Somehow, that works, which I'll be honest, I've never seen before. But then, the security lady did have eyes that could see my body and face and skin. At this point, sunscreen was pretty much my spirit animal.
From the Vientiane airport we book a bus to Vang Vieng, where we'll be staying the next few days. We wait for a bit at a nearby cafe for our ride, while I eat flan and notice that my debit card isn't working.
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| Also the cat at my feet had huge tits. I'm painting a portrait, guys. |
I had enough money for the next few days, but it was still a concern. But, there was nothing I could do at the moment, so I got on the bus and hoped the ATMs in Vang Vieng might work instead.
The ride takes about 4 hours, which was sufficiently uncomfortable and tiring enough that once arriving in town we rented a room at the first inn we came to. At eight dollars a night, not too shabby. Granted, the room did have a giant, dimly-lit stone bathroom with paint peeling everywhere, so it looked like our room was adjacent to the set of a Saw movie, but hey. Eight dollars. I take a nap, and get ready to go out.
Vang Vieng is famous for its river, which is lined with water-side bars and perfect for tubing, but it was far too late in the evening by now to check it out. Now, everyone was wandering around the banana pancake stalls and Friends bars, another credit to Vang Vieng's fame. Friends bars are restaurant/bars where you can lie down on pillows and watch old reruns on Friends. Why Friends? Because there's nothing more comforting to an overprivileged white tourist high out of his mind than an old episode of Friends. Why is he high out of his mind? Because most of the places here also serve drugs, that's why.
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| My opium-den fingernails were ready. |
Some travelers will warn that, despite the prevalence of weed and what have you, rolling papers are exceedingly rare. I'm here to tell you this just isn't true. We saw them at a number of convenience stores, and even being sold at the front counter of our hotel (the same one that put a sign in our room warning not to smoke narcotics). We wandered through the main strip for an hour or so, and I took note that Family Guy and Two and a Half Men had done a good job of supplanting Friends on many of the TVs. If you want to know what it felt like to be the world's most pointless social archaeologist, it was making me hungry. So we stopped in a restaurant.
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| Not the typical tablecloth for a hive of scum and villainy. |
Sarah and I are each given a menu, but Sarah's turns out to have a little something extra inside it.
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| HELLO! |
Fighting the urge to just order "one of everything", I get a pizza and a "strong happy shake".
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| Strong=Tastes like sipping on a bag of lawnmower clippings |
The pizza was a disappointment, but that shake...I went comatose. For the rest of the night, everything looked a little like this:
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| ...Phoebe? Is that you? |
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