I've successfully checked off the last on my shopping list, now I'm just having fun. The diving course was a whole lot of fun, but since it sounds like everybody an their mother has done the same thing, I won't bore you with brutal details of the pretty things I saw since half of you already saw the same thing. I did get to swim with a school of Barracudas, that was pretty neat...

Anyway, yesterday I came further down the Gulf of Thailand to Ko Pangan, the island that is best known for its Full Moon Party, where way too many people crowd along one beach to drink and fuck to some of the worst Techno in the world. My friend Mark met me off the pier, one of the Dutch guys who had acompannied me on my 10-day motorcycle trip about 2 months ago. My last chore, by the way, was to retrieve $75 I lent him when we parted. Check. I took his advice and rented a "real" motorbike, which is basically the same 125cc bike I had earlier, except this time with an actual clutch and dirtbike tires. At first I thought it was just for fun, but then I followed him on the 20 minute ride to the bungalow he had reserved for me.

The roads here are fucked. Fucked. I mean, the best case scenario is a 2-lane pothole road with washed out dirt patches interspersed. The northern Thai roads look like 280 by comparison. I live about 15km away from the parties, and the last 2km is not just dirt road, but washed out dirt road with rivlets and gaping holes,rocks, and mud patches scattered about. This virtually guarantees that I'll be staying up every night past sunrise, since it's way too hazardous to try traversing as drink as I will be during the night. About half of the people out here have some sort of Thailand Tatoo, or at least recent bandage, so it's no longer a question of IF I fall down as WHEN, and how bad. This way I won't be surprised when I do, just pissed off the morning after. None of the injuries out here are serious, since they all happen on a rediculous dirt road that anybody with half a brain would recognize is a tactical impossibility of crossing going any faster than 5mph, so whatever scrape I have will be on ankle, shin, knee, elbow, or (worst comes to worst) forehead since I'll only be going fast enough to make a nice mark. Place your bets, guys.


I missed the Full Moon party, so instead I made sure to get here just in time for the BlackMoon party, a much smaller event on a smaller beach which goes from 10 last night to 10 tonight. Right now (10:30AM) I'm having breakfast in the 2-hour break while the party switches beaches to keep going for another 12 hours.

The party wasn't that big, but of all things it looked exactly like one of the 2:00 or 10:00 clubs at Burning Man, except transported to a beach in Thailand and the people weren't dressed nearly as cool. The party went on long into the sunlit hours of sleep deprivation like in the desert (this time the Red Bull had real speed in it, making it easier), but my Burning Man conditioning made me feel anxious to move on to the party next door as soon as I got bored, and I was a bit dissappointed to realize there was no other party next door. I guess it was cool, but I've been spoiled by going to the Best Party in the World for the past 5 years, and it's really unfair that I have to frame this place by those memories. At least, for the first time since I left San Francisco, most of the people here last night have either heard of or have been to Black Rock City themselves.

Anyway, my coffee is finisihed and I have another 12 hours of party to go. Last night I took the advice of my friend and went to sleep at 8 to wake up at 3, in time to get to the party by 4 and have enough sleep to keep going all day. So we'll see, maybe I haven't given this the chance it diserves. Time to shake my head out of this daze, pack up and head out. Fuck, it's a hard life out here.

So that was that for Vietnam. To be honest, I'm kinda glad to be rid of the place even though it was really tempting to stay while I was there. I guess getting attached anywhere would do that to you.

I've come to about the halfway point of my trip (it's been since November 16!), and about a week ago I decided to get the hell out of Southeast Asia. I think I've just about had enough, and it's time to swich gears before India. But before switching gears, I have to put in the clutch and take some time to readjust. And, since I'm new at riding stickshifts, I'm gonna ride with my foot on the clutch for as long as I can. Two weeks, actually.

Basically, I've accumulated a laundry list of things to do before I leave this part of the continent. It's kinda like an international scavenger list, and so far has been making traveling a lot more interesting. For one, I left my iPod with this girl I was sharing a room with (no, not "sharing a room with") in Dalat, just before staying on the Vietnamese farm. Then she hurried up the coast of Vietnam while I was passing out fliers in Nha Trang. I managed to take the (fucking) 36 hour bus ride (!) straight to Hanoi before she left the country and take my iPOD with her, so after almost a month I'm now reunited with my one true companion out here, Mac.

So I flew back to Bangkok after relearning the hard way that I'll always be late for any flight anywhere in the world (I came to the airport 40 minutes before the flight, where they threatened to not let me on and then let me on but then realized I had to talk to the immmigration police for 20 minutes because I was late on my Visa and then checked my bags for me while I was talking to the police so I had a few minutes to spare before they closed the plane doors. I think they let me through security with my swiss army knife just to get rid of me). I digress. In Bangkok I had to pick up a Packsafe from a hostel (this chickenwire that wraps around my backpack) that I left with my friend in Pai 2.5 months ago. I also had to fix my digital camera, which is now broken in 2 different ways (the LCD's broken and I've got sand in the zoom lens mechanism), and it took visiting two Cannon Service Centers before someone could tell me it would cost $150 but might be free if the warranty covers it and I ship it home to the States. I'm shipping it home just in case and waiting to buy a cheap knockoff digicam in India, which kinda pisses me off since now I'm in some of the most beautiful scenery I'll ever see and I don't have my camera. Hooray for being "in the moment."

Now I'm on Ko PADI (formerly Ko Tao before all these dive operators moved in), taking the 4-day Open Water Scuba certification lesson 'cause this is where I've been told is the best (and cheapest) place to take it. One more thing to check off my list. After this I head to Ko Pangan where I can check off two more things on my list, go to the "New Moon Party" (which is supposed to be cooler and smaller than the massive Full Moon party) and, more importantly, meet this guy who owes me $75 that I lent him around the same time I lost my packsafe.

Basically I'm doing my housekeeping before setting out again. I'll head to Bangkok, buy new clothes and supplies, and take the next flight to Calcutta... provided I don't get stuck anywhere in paradise. For some reason I'd much rather prefer standing on a train packed chest to elbow to face to knee to back with sweaty Indians in the boiling heat for 10 hours across the most polluted parts of the world. I'm trying to figure out why as well.

A Phuong to call my own:


Phuong with "almost"



This post won't make any sense unless you read the last half of the previous post, but in any case I went out for dinner with "almost but not quite" girl, thinking I would take the moral highground and tell her off in favor of Phuong. Then, of course, I got drunk and for some reason invited her out to the same late night club Phuong was going, mostly out of some perverse desire to allow myself that whim selection at the end of the night that is difficult to explain to anybody not male. As predicted, the results were disasterous.

At first, the two got along drunkenly as old friends would, jumping over each other and allowing me to take this unflattering but improbable photograph of the two together. Then I decided to make that fatal mistake, the one that every playboy has warned me against and has never failed to ruin a good situation: I told each of them the truth about each other. I really don't know what came over me, maybe it was that they were getting along so well I figured they knew, or maybe it was that each of them was looking at me like I was theirs tonight and I wanted to illicit a little competition. Actually it was probably that them sitting on each other like that made me reach for that one-in-a-million cocky meneuver of trying for both, but in any case they ceased to be friends at that point.

Both were really drunk at this point at least, and Phuong confided in me that if I wanted to leave with the other girl it would be OK, so long as I never gave her my heart. That would be have been great aside from that the other girl had already run away crying. I mean LOUDLY crying and collapsing into the arms of some random stranger, the kind that made the whole club know what kind of asshole I was (and it was conveniently timed to coincide with the end of the music and the "go-away" call). When I saw this, however, I remembered she had pulled the exact same meneuver that night on the beach when I refused to hang on her arm the whole night. That night I chased her out on the beach to consoler her and ended up making out further down the beach. When she did this again at the club, I lost all sympathy for her and told her, and Phuong, they were both drunk and I was going home alone.

This girl could barely walk, so I called a cab for the two of us thinking it would be the only decent thing for me to drive her home, but she would only give the driver directions to my hotel. I looked at her waving her drunk ass head in circles and told her, again, that I didn't want her in my room and asked her for directions to her place, to which she responded by vomiting graciously all over the floor of the cab. For some reason I expected the mythical torrent of Arabic curses and plagues to pummel down on us within seconds of the purge, but instead the driver simply smiled at me and increased the fare. Anyway, as if the puke didn't make me happy to not take her home, I looked outside the window to see Phuong driving drunkenly on her motorbike directly in front of us, preparing the lobby of my hotel for the cockblock.

She still refused to give me her address, so I drove her back to the club, kicked her out of the cab, and walked home with her running away crying behind me. Only this time her cries only made me angrier knowing they were only for show and there were no tears anyway. I walked back pissed off at everybody and Phuong kept calling me saying she couldn't stand to see me go home with someone else. Walking home alone at 3AM also made me a prime target to the swarms of motorcycle drivers and ladyboys offering sex and "may i steal your wallet," and after living here for a month it took 'till this mood before I realized that if I look them square in the eye and bark loudly at them to "FUCK OFF" then they leave me alone. If I don't, I have to pretend to not hear them for a good two minutes until they get the picture. My friend lost $20 this way because two ladyboys got off their motorbikes and reached into our pockets while telling us they wanted to fuck us. I got the idea when mine accidentally tugged outwards on my cellphone, but my by the time I told my friend he had lost his money. "FUCK OFF" is far more effective than "no thanks." I digress. Telling everybody to FUCK OFF actually put me back in a good mood and I forgot about being angry at the crying girl long enough to realize this was no place to leave her by herself. I ran back to find her sitting on the curb still crying. I felt really aweful for a moment, then I looked more closely to see she was just passed in crying position and had no tears or even red eyes when she woke up. I called over one of the motorcycle taxis I hadn't told to fuck off yet, gave him money to take her home, and walked home with a clear conscience where Phuong was waiting patiently. She called me today apologizing for whatever she did and told me she doesn't remember a thing, which means she probably thinks everything's her fault. Lucky me.

I've said this before and I still don't believe myself, but I've had enough of getting entrenched in local situations. Phuong has been calling and sending text messages saying how much she appreciated our time together and wants to see me again. At least she confessed that she absolutely hated my guts when we first met and it wasn't until the night on ecstasy that she started thinking I wasn't such a bad guy. In any case, Buffalo Springfield was right, Vietnam is a quagmire. So I just took a 36-hour bus out of there to Hanoi and I'm flying back to Bangkok in another 48. Time to move on.

The party I was promoting sounded like it would turn out to be one of those spectacular full moon raves rivaling Ko Pangan, but by the time it had started, I was pretty happy not to have invested anything in it personally. After a full week of handing out flyers, putting up posters, and trying valiantly to sell the $25 tickets, we went to the beach ourselves and waited patiently for the latecomers to arrive. Of the 500 people I had expected to come, we ended up hoping for 200 and only sold about 70 tickets in advance. Waiting on the beach for these latecomers to arrive felt much like watching the election results. Long after you know the trend had been set, there's always the possibility in the back of your mind for a landslide at the end of the evening. At the end of it all, even some of the people who bought tickets didn't show up.

By the time the sun set, it became clear that the only thing left to do was make the best out of a bad situation and party our brains out. I went back to town with two other Americans who had been roped into promoting the party, with two mission objectives: get some more people to come and, more importantly, buy drugs. We came back with 7 pills of surprisingly potent (and extremely overpriced) ecstasy to find everybody at the party either trashed or sleeping. In other words, it was clear who was up for the all night party, which made it a lot easier to get things going. The DJ was trashed, he didn't have a mixer, and everything was running off the Windows Media Player of an old sandy PC. In his drunken (and partially defeated) state, he had set the playlist to "dance music" and passed out, leaving people trying to nod their heads the rotten House music that had been corrosively eating away at the hard drive. I wasted no time running up to the "DJ booth" and finding any old funky dance music I can find and ran back to the dance floor to help wrangle up anybody who was on the verge of dancing.

Lucky for me, one of the people still awake was this girl I had vaguely gotten to know that morning. She's pretty, vietnamese, and surprisingly cool but our conversation only went so far as me asking, somewhat sarcastically but mostly just-in-case-ly, "do you want to be my girlfriend now?" and her matching my tone and saying "yeah, ok." Then I left for town and didn't come back until she was drunk. I took the whole thing with a grain of salt, but as I ran back to the dance floor that night, she came out of the dark and virtually tackled me to the ground. She was, to no small effect, drunk. For me, the drugs were just starting to take hold and I was in no mood to defer my carnal instincts. After about half an hour of stumbling around with momentary bursts of uncensored PDAs, I took her for a walk along the beach. Now, one of the shortcomings of this party was that they had security guards set at either end of the "party area," of the beach, which only gave about a half kilometer of party space. Lucky for us, the security guard had temporarily abandoned his post, leaving us to our own demise by allowing a quick run to the other end of the beach.

10 minutes later, I was in the middle of what I absentmindedly thought would be the absolute perfect situation. The full moon was out, it was a beautiful night, I was lying down making out on a desolate beach with this gorgeous local in the middle of some foreign country, on a really strong pill of ecstasy, she was all for it, I had brought my condoms. It had all the ingredients to a perfect night... aside from that one fatal shortcoming that I had always thought were only rumors. I took her pants off, followed suit, got ready, and...wait...FUCK! I thought whiskeydick was bad, it didn't come close to the adverse effects of ecstasy on one's reproductive "enthusiasm." She was disappointed, I was trying my best, but to be honest it might have been worse had things worked. About one minute after we got to this point, THREE security guards were virtually on top of us shining flashlights down at my bare ass and shouting something in Vietnamese that I could only pretend to not understand. Neither of us saw them coming, but I was impressed how casually she stood up (naked from the waist down) and put her pants on calmly as if nothing happened. We zipped up and walked back, and I guess she realized she was a bit drunker than she thought. My drugs were just getting going, and she was on the verge of passing out. I tried keeping her awake but in the end I walked her to her friend's tent and she went to sleep.

I was happy to learn that, out of the 50 or so dissapointed partygoers that night, 8 of us were up to make it to the sunrise. So we kept the music playing, took the rest of our drugs, and started with the spliffs. I still had a little bit of the my pill left, and at the plea of my vietnamese coworker I gave it to one of his friends, this flyer girl who works at the bar I had been DJing for the past few days. As far as I could tell, her name was "Fu," or at least that's what she was responding to. Before I knew it, she was rolling hard and was in no mood to deal with my coworker who kept trying to get her into his tent. I, on the other hand, had completely given up on sex that night and the two of us ended up sitting in front of the speaker staring at the moon and talking about Vietnamese folklore. Until that point, I hardly knew her other than as that punky tomboy girl with the baseball cap and permanent chin bandaid who kept hitting me over the back of the head with her pack of flyers. Actually, I had basically given up on her and regarded her just as a fun person to hand out flyers with, but by the time sunrise came I had started to really dig her. Once it got light out, she grabbed a spraycan and painted a startlingly accurate charicature of me on the dancefloor, then asked how to spell my name (the closest she had come was ENDU). I showed her and then asked how to spell her name, partly so I wouldn't feel embarassed anymore in case I had her name wrong. My heart skipped a beat when I saw what she was writing. The first PH was almost obvious, but she kept writing letters out until they spelled "P-H-U-O-N-G." Anybody familiar with the half of Matt's blog (upsidegone.blogspot.com) that talks about his Phuong would understand why I had the distinct urge to give up chasing her right then. In fact, for the rest of the morning, I did. Once I knew her full name and the precident behind it, I realized everything she had been leading me up to had the seal of running me around in circles until my head spun around in a false love and ended up writing half of MY blog about her. So the next night when we went out for drinks, I put all my effort in an all-or-nothing play for her and, fortunately or unfortunately, we've been steadily seeing each other ever since.

I've basically made a home for myself here, which is making me want to leave. I have an awesome girlfriend, I have a job if I want it, and people want me to stay. This American who had been working with me to promote this party just signed a 6-month contract with a club out here to promote/spin fire and if I didn't have other things to do out here, I can easily imagine doing the same. Westerners who know how to party and know what other Westerners want in a party are a highly valued commodity here, and these people can really use the help. They recognize it, and I've been really impressed with how heavily my advice has been taken. The beach party was a disaster, but they want me to at least be here next month to help fix what went wrong and, somehow, I feel if I have the control they might give me and the money they're willing to spend, we can turn it into a BurningMan-style full moon party-all-night, good music, cheap drinks, drugs available real party. But, as I said at the beginning, I was really happy this time to have nothing personally invested in this disaster. I think it's best if I keep it that way and, in any case, it's not worth sacrificing India. So I'm trying to uproot as fast as possible so I don't, as they say, gather any moss.

But, then again, I just got a phone call from Impotence girl asking me to meet her for dinner. Much as I like the girl I'm with, there's some part of my manhood at stake now. It's not even about the sex anymore, just the pride. But alas, morality might win out on pride tonight. If not morality, nackerdness. Let me just say anyway that it's been a month with virtually no feminine contact and here I am, back in the game and feeling fantastic. Rock on.

I got a whole lot of catching up to do, so sorry for the length of this post. For those of you who only have the time to read this first paragraph before your boss looks over your shoulder, it starts with being adopted into a Vietnamese catholic village community and ends with me finding work as a promoter for the http://www.vietnamwildbeachparty.com. That's the gist, you can stop reading now. Oh yeah, and if you're inclined to find out for yourself, you can now call me by pushing 001 84 905957437 into your phone.

As for the juicy part, I think it might be easier and more interesting if I give up trying to merge the past week spent in the village into a cohesive prose and just list random things as they pop into my head. I'll warn you now, if you're not into cultural exchanges, this first part might be a bit boring but I promise it gets interesting towards the end.

The tour guide I was with (about my age, real nice guy, spoke fluent english) invited me to spend Tet (Chinese new year) with his family in the 'burbs. He also happened to need another driver to take his spare motorbike out there, so it worked out easy. Anyway, we drive 50km out to the middle of nowhere just northwest of Dalat (if you feel like looking it up) to the Thanh Bihn village, where I took part in a very awkward family reunion between the tour guide (Hinh) and his folks. Luckily, there had been another American (from LA) that had been staying in with the family for the past two weeks already (but I think he was the first guest ever), which made living there a bit easier. Apparently, the entire country goes home for a week or two in celebration of Tet, and for most of them this is the only time they ever see their family. As you can imagine, the families here are ENORMOUS. There were two huge dinner tables full of people, and some more eating on the floor during the high point. And that's just for relatives once removed.

The town is 100% Catholic. This has far reaching implications with everything they do, act, or feel. Basically, and completely unexpectedly, the place looked overwhelmingly like the deep south, except that everybody was so goddamn happy all the time. That was probably the wierdest thing about the place, actually, even though I spoke absolutely no vietnamese at first, everybody would communicate in smiles and laughter. Not like the polite smiles we have in the states, I mean like genuine smiles that come out of being extremely happy all the time. These kids particularly, they sleep with all their siblings, sometimes as many as 5 per bed, spend every waking moment running around and playing with each other, and don't ever get a wink of discipline from their parents (to the point where I'd get woken up every morning at sunrise to the 7-year old running around the house singing the worst vietnamese music at the top of his lungs). Many times the houses have plenty of extra room for more beds, but they just see no reason to sleep alone. It's the kind of happy that was really, really nice at first but after about 5 days started to get under my skin. Once I figured out that they weren't just pretending for the guests, it almost started to bother me that families back home were never so together. These people were poor by international standards (they grow their own food, plus coffee for some income), but the family acted as a single unit, as if each member was just an extension of the whole. I mean they were really, really happy together in a way I'd never imagined possible.

There's also a lot of physical contact between men, and absolutely no contact between men and women, which took a little getting used to. Absolutely no sex before marriage, and never any kissing in public afterwards. Basically, it's a country of 5th graders.

Oh, I went to Mass at sunrise on the first day of the new year and no, I didn't take communion. Kinda wierd, really, some guy came up to the altar and started singing into a microphone as if the psalms were some kind of Buddhist chant, then everybody sung along. Women and men, by the way, were separated on opposite halves of the pews.

I got to see a pig die, and made me consider becoming vegitarian if it weren't for the fact that they then could feed the whole family for the next three days with it. The first day, actually, they made this really delicious jello stuff out of the fresh blood. Goes really well with lime.

I saw my first cockfight, too. They really beat the shit out of each other before one walks away, for almost half an hour. At one point Hihn's brother had to pick them up to move them back into the middle of the fight space and got blood all over his hands. I didn't even think that this was exactly the spot in the world where bird flu happens until he starting scubbing his hands with grapefruit and lemon to disinfect afterwards.

Oh, it turns out that the first visitors into your house after Tet determine the luck for the rest of the year. And somehow we were considered extremely lucky. I think the criteria was foreigners with big smiles are lucky, but in any case we got whored out to 6 or 8 houses on the first morning of Tet, after waking up an hour before sunrise to attend mass. At each house we drank buckets of green tea in front of an identical smiling shy girl who, translated through Hinh or his brother, wanted to marry one of us. For this one girl, who was really cute actually but also 16, the third sentence was "Do you want I be your girlfriend?" after using the previous two to establish that I didn't already have a wife or girlfriend myself. Good for her, the next sentence invited us to coffee with her friend, who wanted to marry the other American. It would be great to come here without any morals one day...

Anyway, we parted on a long and drunken night full of sad and really touching speeches (loosely translated), and before I left they offered me the new name Tran Thanh Anh, which kinda has a ring to it. I had adopted the name Anh, after realizing that nobody could pronounce my full name, and in Vietnamese culture they put the first name last. All the kids were really sad to see Uncle Anh leave, and the entire family from the bottom up gave me a whole hearted open invitation to come back for Tet (and/or the marriages of anyone in the family) anytime I could make it.

Hinh and his brother Quinn drove us back to Dalat, and just before arriving there Hinh stopped and asked if it would be OK if they drive us all the way to Nha Trang (7 hours away). Quinn, being a country boy, had never seen the ocean, and they both felt it was too soon to part. So I changed my plans from kitesurfing in MuiNe to getting drunk with Hinh, Quinn, and Tyler (the other American) in Nha Trang. We left late, so it took two days of motorbiking through absolutley gorgeous scenery to get there, something which Hinh as a tour guide usually charges $40 per day to do.

We got there yesterday morning, and after two full hours of hearing the Yelps and Yahoos of a Vietnamese countryboy playing in Ocean waves for the first time, we started drinking. I don't think I've ever been quite this drunk before on this trip, but it was nice to know that my "guides" were far worse off. After splitting a liter of rice whiskey on the beach, the conversation inevitably drifted over to sex which, we soon realized, was a very mum subject in the fully Catholic village of Thanh Binh. So Tyler and I proceeded to give a full female anatomy lecture, using sand diagrams to compare techniques, enough to get both of them riled up for a complete night. After another round of Long Island Ice Teas, we were ready to say "yes" for the first time to the motorbikes passing by offering to take us to brothels. We went to this one that looked exactly like a massage parlor, except there was no question about the motives of the employees or the clientelle. An hour, by the way, costs about $6. The brothers tried and tried to persuade us to come with them, since they felt bad doing it on their own, and we must have spent close to half an hour outside the place trying to communicate our intentions. It was probably the best reason I've ever had to pay for sex, but whenever I looked into the mechanical setup of the place, it was such a turnoff that even in my drunken state I had no desire to get led into one of those mangy rooms. For the price, though, we couldn't help but treating them to one hour each of fantastic City-Girl sex and running away to find the local nightclub. When we saw them again at the hotel, they didn't give us any details but both were so rediculously exhausted that it must have been something good.

We woke up a few hours later (7AM) to wish them goodbye and good luck for the long trip home, then after a few hours sleep Tyler and I got some afternoon breakfast to try to remember what the hell had happened to us the night before. It must have been something good, because after sitting down for about 30 minutes, some guy I vaguely recognized as the promoter for the bar we got our long island ice teas came up and asked if I wanted to work with him. Maybe it was the wierd hair (which has since become blondish pink), or the loud happy drunken state I was in, or the awesome bright blue T-shirt I was wearing that said "I EAT YOUR SKIN" in bright red that is so much more disrepectful because I bought it in Cambodia, but in any case he thought I'd make a good sell for this massive full moon beach rave next weekend.

So I followed him to talk to his "boss," who was this young (mid-late 20's) Vietnamese business-looking guy with a Moto Black Razr cellphone and a black silk shirt that made him look like some agent of the local mob. Both of them, by the way, speak this hilarious Australian-Vietnamese accent. Anyway, he explained how absolutely awesome this party was and how much money they're putting into it, then blitzed me with all sorts of freebies and incentives to make sure I didn't run away. They'll basically pay for all my transportation expenses, some drinks, and (nice) hotels for as long as I want to work for them. He showed me around town and pointed out the various bars and travel agencies that he "owned," then bragged about how he knows everybody everywhere, can get free drinks at all these bars, and before I left I got the distinct impression that this is just the kid of some rediculously rich family who wants to make his starting capital into an entertainment empire. Anyway, the way I see it, I've just been flung from the deep South to the New York VIP crowd.

Whether it turns out for the best or not, I'm in Hoi An at the moment getting ready to start talking to everybody I can find about this party, and when I get back to Nha Trang they'll need me to tend bar and keep doing the same thing. Except this time I'm getting paid to drink and party. I guess I'll have more to say about this in a few days once I figure out if the whole thing's a huge scam or not, but this morning arrived at the "free" hotel I was supposed to stay at in Hoi An and the receptionist gave me a brief scare when he told me the "arrangements" my "boss" had told me about didn't exist and tried to charge me $20 per night for the room. With a quick phone call to "the boss," everything was cleared up and I was escorted across the marble floor, past the massive swimming pool, through the Hyatt archetecture, to the room. Nice.