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,