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Bangkok, mid to late June 2000. We\'ve been in Bangkok for about thirty hours now; it\'s hot, really hot--leaving the air con exit terminal of BKK international was like entering a vacuum and I almost lost my balance when I hit the wall of wet heat. You can buy fried scorpions and cockroaches from street vendors outside of bars at two AM; you can, it appears, buy anything or anyone outside of bars at two AM. The Thais drive on the British side of the road-- I had no idea that this was the case and had an odd moment at the airport. I tried to enter on the wrong side of the taxi and thought, when confronted with a steering mechanism, that I was in the early stages of dementia, sleep deprivation. Despite the fried scorpions, the easy access to anything, and the obviously transvestite prostitutes outside our hotel, this appears to be a smooth place, a fast developing city full of Mercedes\' and BMWs, marble facaded high-rises, skyway rail systems, and legions of workers. We\'ll probably be here for about five days while we make arrangements (visa and air tickets) to get to Hanoi. I\'m finding it pretty easy to keep to my budget of $35/day while still enjoying hair raising taxi rides, some sight-seeing, a few beers, and three daily restaurant meals. The food really couldn\'t be better. We stayed at the White Lodge for the first two nights but then moved to reside a block off of Khao San Road, which Leonardo Dicaprio in, The Beach, dramatically designates as, " The Gateway to South East Asia." The film was terrible, but the quote is correct. This is where everyone from everywhere comes to start his or her stay or trip or exile in Indochina. Our flights were longer than expected--we were awake for twenty six hours, and then found that we couldn\'t sleep, that we could only sit on our hotel terrace, drink Singha beer, watch geckos and smoke cigarettes. I\'m still shaking off the lag and I\'m not looking very forward to getting back into a jet to get to Hanoi, but that\'s life. Hanoi, late June 2000. I Think it\'s a Monday and we\'re leaving Hanoi in about nine hours. We\'ll be taking a sixteen hour train to Hue, which is about at the midway point of the country. This is authentic Asia. Hanoi has remained exotic and kept us entertained for five days now, and it has made Bangkok look like Europe. People had cars there and were used to seeing Westerners. Here, the motorbike to car ratio is about 400/1. Add in a few hundred thousand bicycles, cylos, and a complete and hilarious disregard for traffic protocol and safety and you have Hanoi, a perfect eastern chaos. We\'ve made the rounds: had a picture beside a statue of Lenin, taken photos of butchered dog, seen a few accidents, been on some mad cylco rides and made a two day treck to the Gulf of Tonkin-Halong Bay, where we dived off of a ferry into seventy five degree open-ocean water. In general, I\'ve found it much more comfortable here than in Bangkok. There was a visible sex-tourist presence in Bangkok-a perversion of some sort in nearly every restaurant we ate in, and the Thais would regularly address Thuy in Thai. So we, more particularly I, felt self conscious about our public image. Ironically, in Vietnam, no one addresses Thuy in Vietnamese; the nose ring, tattoo, and western clothes, and perhaps the silver rings we picked up on Khao San road, preclude any perception that Thuy is Vietnamese. We\'ve met a lot of other travelers, had some broken English conversations with cylco drivers at midnight after a few beers and generally had a great time, but I\'m ready to go-it\'s loud and very dangerous because of the traffic situation. I keep trying to get a photo that captures the image of one thousand motorbikes crossing an intersection at thirty miles an hour from all directions, all with horns blaring, while an eighty year old lady, bamboo stick over her shoulder, and baskets of scary food balanced from each end casually crosses diagonally. Hopefully at least one of my photos really conveys the madness. Unfortunately, I\'ve got a sluggish camera; it has about a four second epoch between the moment I press the button and the moment the shutter decides to move. I\'ll figure its timing out eventually-probably when I\'m back in the states. Anyhow, I\'m off to run last-minute errands before leaving urban Vietnam for the countryside. We\'ve seen two motorcycle accidents and counting. Hoi An, early to mid July 2000. Here\'s a list of things I have recently done that you probably haven\'t - Given impromptu English lessons to waiters and beach vendors. Surfed and caught three fairly nice waves at China Beach (water coming in at about 70-75 degrees) Raced down crazy Vietnamese highway 1 between soviet busses, ancient pedestrians, water buffalo, and other motor-bikes on a 110 CC motorcycle with sexy wife on back. (Think moped on steroids-though since their exhaust systems are far from intact, we were able to get them up to 98 kilometers an hour). Vomited explosively in the bathroom at the Pho Hoi 2 hotel. Had a Hugo Boss suit custom tailored in cashmere for $35. Although, strangely, I can\'t find the Hugo Boss label. Woke up abruptly from sleep reinforced by 20 mg. of Valium on a ancient sleeper car a few hundred kilometers above the DMZ at circa 2AM because Thuy was screaming about the, "hands of a man with very long fingernails" that had forced their way into her window at an unknown night stop. Saw a ten foot shark strapped to the back of a motorcycle just after having surfed at China Beach where small children trying to sell me trinkets had sworn no sharks were in residence one kid actually responded with the word, "sharks" when I told her I was from California. Saw our third motorbike accident. Saw some ducks in a river who were referred to as "sexy" by Mike the Australian. I\'m leaving on the night bus for Nha trang in two hours. Saigon, late July 2000. It\'s monsoon season and Saigon is wet. There\'s a lot of water here. This country has a thousand and one rivers and nearly a thousand miles of sea coast; yet despite the heavy downpour here in Saigon, it\'s still eighty degrees so no one seems to pay much attention to the rain. We\'ve been here in Ho Chi Minh City for about five days now and are leaving tomorrow morning for Phnom Pen, Cambodia. Saigon is a much bigger, much flashier, and much more developed city than I had expected. Hanoi, the second largest city, is a thousand years behind Saigon, which of course makes sense in the overall scheme of things; still it was a surprise to see the modern high-rises, neon billboards, and the presence of cars, (a rarity in this country) some German, on the roads. Saigon is not at all unlike Bangkok. We have had some fun meetings with Thuy\'s relatives and an especially touching one with Thuy\'s mother\'s best friend with whom contact had been lost. Thuy has managed to reestablish this contact. The long lost friend was, at times, in tears. Thuy\'s mom had been about eighteen when they fled, and hadn\'t had time to say farewell to friends. I can\'t go too much into detail, beyond the tears, on these meetings since I still can\'t speak word one of Vietnamese. Tonight, Thuy will visit another faction
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