So I'm having dinner while watching an aweful vampire movie here in Vang Viene, Laos, when after about 30 minutes I realize that, written behind the TV at the restaurant are the words "Happy Ben Johnson Restaurant." Why call it that? Then I see the word "Happy" written just under the TV itself, and then again on the wall to my right. This prompted me to finally look around the place I had been eating my casual dinner at for the past half hour and find the walls absolutley COVERED with spray paint pictures of giant mushrooms, framed in the words "Happy" and "Fun." In giant letters, on the wall lining most of the tables of the restaurant, the words "Try our Delicious SPECIAL Mushroom shake" were staring down at me. Then I look down to see I had been eating the mushroom pizza. After a closer look at the menu, I found I was lucky to order just the "Mushroom pizza" and not the "SPECIAL mushroom pizza," which was twice as expensive. Laos, of all places. At least now I know where to go for New Year's. Happy 31st from here.

Oh yeah, and I finally figured out how to enable anonymous comments. go nuts.

Round one of pictures has been sent out. If you didn't get it, email me and I'll send it to you by Gmail. I'm in Luang Prabang, Laos, about two days along the Mekong river east of the northern tip of Thailand. Really beautiful, and even cheaper than Thailand. Out here I'm a millionaire with $100,but best of all the biggest denomination of currency is equal to about 2 bucks, so I have this humongous roll of money in my pocket right now, and it takes a stack of cash every time I want to buy anything. Kickass.

For about $350US, I can blow up a buffalo with an RPG-7. A full, real life buffalo. I got the offer last night and I've been thinking about it way too much. Just imagine the look on his eye just as he sees a screaming rocket coming towards him. Then imagine the brains, guts and glory spewed across the field. Jesus. I think the only thing holding me back is that if I miss, I still pay the $350. The money's for the rocket round, nobody gives a fuck about the buffalo.

So that's why I decided to leave thailand. It's too much here. The devil can sit right next to you and you can take him by the hand and show him something new. Anyway, I need a break. I've been in Chiang Mai long enough to start running into people I know everywhere. It's no longer anonymous. I can't even talk to a girl anymore without getting the evil eye from some girl I used to know or her nosy friend. I've had enough, at least for now. If I don't leave now, it won't be long before I end up covered in buffalo guts.

So we're heading up to the northern tip of Thailand, then taking the two day boat down the Mekong river into Laos. For the next few weeks I'll be following the river down through Cambodia, through dirt and shit and disease and poverty and beautiful, untouched landscapes. Hopefully that'll get my head on straight and get me the hell out of Gammorrah before I end up with a hole in my pocket and possibly somewhere else. I just learned yesterday that the room I've been staying in for the past week was the scene of the brutal murder of a 24 year old western girl about two years ago. In my bed.

So I get two more nights of trouble before I head out. I've been looking long and hard for a Santa Suit but, for some reason, they're a bit hard to find out here. In the spirit of Santarchy, I had found friends who would do a Rude Santa pub crawl with me but alas, drunk santas without suits are just drunks. So it shall be.

A Burmese guy I met last night turned me on to this story of a Nepalese boy who's been meditating under a tree for 7 months without food or water, and plans to continue for another 6 years, as Buddha did, until he achieves enlightenment. This time, however, reporters will be watching. It's exciting, if not absolutely terrifiying, if the world will get its Buddha incarnate at this particular point in history.

Melssa's right, I might as well drop my pants now and go find a ladyboy bar to get reamed up the ass by a girl named "Long." I am getting old. My last few nights in Pai, I started seeing this girl who wouldn't tell me her age ever since I told her I was 23, insisting that she's 23 since I'm 23. She's old enough to be that smart, anyway, which places her at around 32. She does a really good job looking young and punky with the center-lip ring and the sexy hippie fashion that can only come from an interior designer, but she comes from the part of England that makes her accent identical to the uber-feminist ultra-posh artist chick from Big Lebowsky. Above all, the way she rolls a joint shows at least a decade of practice. Needless to say, I can't get away from these older women. Maybe that's why I like this 21 year old Laotian bar owner I met here last week, who has in the past two days won my heart over by being too hammered to stand up straight (and still somehow manage to drive her scooter home).

Anyway, the visa run took an unexpected 4 hours each way of driving max speed (80-100km/hr) and since I couldn't manage to wake up before noon, I ended up driving the whole way back in the dark. Go figure it was up in the mountains, so even though it doesn't compare to what the New York nights are like now, I had to wear a full ski mask, helmet, sweater, jacket, boots, and hold on to the bike as tight as possible to keep from freezing to death. The best thing that happened to me was being stopped for drugs at a police checkpoint (I guess I did look pretty sketchy), and I they let me warm up by their fire for a few minutes before going onward. Anyway, now I have a cold. But I have a month long visa!

I got to see Myanmar for about 20 minutes, too. I rushed as fast as I could to get to the border before it closed. As it happens, I made the 4 and a half hour trip to make it to the Thailand exit gate at 4:58 on the day my visa expired. But then, in order to get a new visa, I had to officially enter Myanmar, which was 100 feet away. Somehow, for some reason, Myanmar exists on a time zone that is 30 minutes behind Thailand. So it was 4:28 in Myanmar. That gave me a half hour to get the stamp, walk around the product of a brutal totalitarian regime for 20 minutes, and get back before 5:00. Anyway, Myanmar sucks. It's kinda like the border in South Tahoe between Nevada and California, taken down about 20 notches. On one side you had large urban developments and on the other you had, basically, an Arab market. Cheap, cheap, cheap stuff and people who are desperately desperate enough to lower the price from that if you walk away. Anyway, fun stuff.

Big lebowsky girl just came by. Off to party,

There was some point about an hour or two after we got back when the three of us, sitting around a bottle of whiskey commemorating a successful trip, all looked at each other and realized how rediculously lucky we were to have come back in one piece. I don't know why it felt so safe to be on the road like that, but in retrospect we were riding like madmen on cycles that slipped and skidded every time we had to stop, without helmets, without gloves, without insurance. Whew.

I guess the reality of our recklessness really sunk in when we saw our friend who had been taking life very easily since his accident on the second day of the trip. We found him living in a bungalow 8 km from town with a bandage wrapped around his shaved head like a turban. Before the accident, he was a ready-to-go party hearty Sir Fucksalot whose goal was to fulfill some bet he made to sleep with 100 women during his 7 months. But instead of spending the next week using his scars and badass haircut to his sexual advantage, he locked himself up in his bungalow for the next 5 days to meditate. By the time we saw him, he had a new glare behind his eyes that shone through the layers of sweat and shit that come from a week of not washing your head. He had a new lease on life, and was making the best of it. Strikingly different than the rest of ours' intention to live hard and fast.

Anyway I'm back in Chiang Mai cause I need to make a "Visa Run." Thailand offers a free 30-day tourist visa, so anybody who wants to stay in the country longer than that has to leave every 30 days and re-enter. There are busses that take you from here directly to the Myanmar border just to get the passport stamped and then turn back. From Pai it takes about 7 hours each way. From Chiang Mai I think I can do it in 3, so I rented another motorbike and am going to spend the day on the road tomorrow. This time with a helmet, on the highway, going slow. I've had enough of physical danger for one week.

I must have spent close to a week in Pai, the lost hippie getaway of the world. It's just one of those places to end up if you have nothing to do for a long time and don't intend on learning anything about the local culture. In any case, it's one hell of a party. Still, it was really nice to find a group of people who wanted to take a motorcycle trip around the province. Their plan was written on a table napkin by some thai who sorta knew something about something in the area, but basically we all left our backpacks and sent off for ten days around the country with nothing but a small bag and a napkin map. I guess I expected a slow cruise, since we had these crappy bikes and no helmet or sunglasses to block the swarms of mosquitoes that come out at sunset. Instead, we pushed these bikes as fast as they could make it, pushing 100km/hr on the straightaways. For most of the trip, the road was steep and rediculously curvy, enough to end up in first gear just to make it to the top of the hills. At night this turned into one hell of a deathtrap, since much of the road had been washed out in the recent floods. The whole helmet thing became frightfully apparent when one of our group (the fastest) took a turn right in front of me at night and didn't see the signs (written in Thai anyway) that said the lane ends immediately after the turn. I saw him fall, then made a full skid to stop myself in the gravel, barely not falling over. I parked the bike and ran over to find him lying face down in a huge cloud of dust, unconscious. In a few more seconds, he began to cough and answer to his name. A few minutes later, a truck stopped for us and took him to the hospital where they gave him 5 stiches in the back of his head. By the way, two hours of good, sterile medical attention out here cost him $15US including 12 more daily visits to have his wounds cleaned. Needless to say, he had to head back. Three of us left. So we slowed down a bit, enjoyed the scenery, and made it the rest of 600 Km around and to Chiang Mai safely. Two nights ago we stay in this tiny town in Bumblefuck nowhere and try to find the party. For some reason, there's one bar with anybody in it in this whole town of 1000 or so people. Of course, it's a ladyboy karaoke bar. Why not? We walk in and everybody is so crazed to see three foreigners that I felt like a big juicy steak in front of hungry lions. The lions, of course, were singing awful thai songs. Awefully. It took two songs before they hand me the mic and make me sing some god aweful song I've never heard before by a group called Westlife. I sung at the top of my lungs in the butt-rock drunk karaoke tone I know from home, but it was enough to get surrounded by ladyboys. At one point I go take a piss and one follows me into the bathroom, mid stream, and closes the door behind me.
"Five minute"
"no"
"Two minute"
"Get out of the way"
"Just give me two minute"
I had to physically push her out of the way to get to the door. She was, by the way, a full foot taller than me. I guess I missed my chance to get my asshole tickled, but I almost got her to strip in the bar in front of everybody to prove she had a ManGina. That would have been worth the effort.

Now we get the weekend back in Chiang Mai, in essence, to get laid by legitimate chicks. So last night we went back to Bubbles 'till 2 and Spicy 'till 6, the two bars that exist for the sole purpose of providing a breeding ground between Western guys and Thai girls. The girl I met this time happened to actually be a winner, not just a pretty face for sale. I didn't expect much, since she was wearing next to nothing (fashionably) and dancing like a spring break girl gone wild. But at 21, she owns and runs her own bar in the center of town and speaks perfect english. I guess what won me over was when she refused to let me buy her a second drink. I hope I can play this one without her getting too attached, but it's real nice to have someone to see in Chiang Mai since I'll probably be coming back here a lot. Then again, one of the guys I'm travelling with has been getting a daily phone call from his girl in Chiang Mai, complaining about why he's not back to see her yet. I don't mind learning my lesson the hard way.

Oh yeah, so I go take a piss at this Spicy place. I barely have time to unzip when I feel a cold towel around my neck. After the ladyboy incident, this is a nice subtle touch. I guess it's OK. Then I feel hands massaging my back. Pretty nice massage, actually. I keep peeing. Then, two hands around my neck and before I know it, the entire top half of my spine cracks. Then the other way. Fucking chiropracters in the pissers out here. I finish, zip up, and stick around for another few minutes to get three guys grabbing my arms, ears, and back to do the quick and dirty upper body massage. I give them 50 cents and walk out feeling more refreshed and alive than I've ever come out of a bathroom before. Fantastic.

One more night in Chiang Mai before I have to return the bike to Pai. Then I head to the islands in the south for the new year's and "new" moon party. NYE should be huge, I think 100k people descend on Ko Pangan for the weekend. I guess life could be more difficult.