This was letter-for-letter posted in our guesthouse in Huay Xai, Laos.

Guest House Rules

We have the guest house rules. That's a good thing for the guest who stays in guest house. below 5 points:

1. Please keep a quiet when other people sleeping.
2. Don't bring the weapons and illegal materials.
3. Don't bring the service girls for sex.
4. Please deposit the worth goods with the guest house owner. Don't put it in if the guest doesn't do it. when if's lost we're not responsible for it.
5. Please give black the key when check out.

We use the guest house rules, it's the best neat so we hope the guest clearly and do it.

Last night was spent on an overnight bus. We were in a swank A/C soft sleeper which was a small room with 2 bunkbeds. We both lucked out with a bottum bunk, although Maeve's bunk was underneath a very large Spanish man. The A/C was freezing. Like put-on-a-winter-hat and start shivering cold.

We arrived this morning in Sapa. It is a beautiful mountain town. We were attacked when we got off the van from the train station by women wanting us to look at their guesthouses (oh, the rainy season). The first room we looked at was $6. It has a balconey (although you have to turn to the side to see the mountains), a tv (you can rent a DVD player and movies!) and a BATHTUB!!! Like a gorgeous, deep bathtub. It has a gas heater. While having an afternoon bath I read on the side of the gas heater: "Don't install inside bathroom. Install in a well-ventilated area. If you smell gas...". So I spent the bath "smelling for gas". When I started to fall asleep in the tub, I made sure to get out since I might have been passing out from a gas-leak and not from the effects of the over-night train!

We met a wickid American girl who we are going on an overnight trek tomorrow with.

I'm sitting next to Maeve in an Internet place. We're internetting while waiting for an overnight train to Sapa. We are totally unable to send a group email to everyone on Maeve's contact list (ironically to tell them that Maeve has moved to gmail) without clicking on each of the 78 contacts individually. So gmail kind of sucks, eh?

It's day 3 of our package Halong Bay trip. It actually was quite fantastic with a good group of people (only 5 couples). The first day and night were spent on a beautiful boat. Yesterday we arrived on Cat Ba Island. Maeve and I are staying for an extra day and are going to head back to Hanoi tomorrow.

Last night a bunch of us from the trip went to the disco in town. There were about 15 Viet. guys who all looked 15 years old and one girl. The music was dance music from 1994 (eg. Short Dick Man and I Like to Move It). I don't know if it ever picked up or not. We left after about an hour.

Before we left Hanoi I did the *FUNNEST* thing ever. I went to a tailor and had clothes made. All the travellors to Vietnam do this in Hoi Ann but I'm not going to make it to the South. It was like $20 for a pair of pants (supposedly Hoi Ann is only half that price). I'm having a pair of red linen pants made, two pairs of silkier pants, one linen shirt, one black silk shirt and one purple silk shirt made. The whole experience was fab. You try on the clothes, choose a fabric and colour, get measured and pay with c.c. It seems like if would be more cost effective for people (...Matt) to fly to Vietnam and have a wardrobe made for them. If the linen pants work out I'll also get them in white.

The guest house that we're staying at now if family owned. The girl who is close to our age probably spent her whole life with english speaking guests. Her english is perfect, only it's an off-putting hodge podge of accents, none of which are Vietnamese. She says her Rs like an American but everything else like a posh Brit.

Also, in the land of no Trademarks, if one place (guesthouse, travel agency) appears in the Lonely Planet then 3 others will change their name and proudly tell people that they are featured in the LP. This was also the case at the guesthouse we ended up staying at last night. The guy showed me the book highlighted with the name but not for too long. We've passed some legit places that have huge signs saying "The REAL so and so.".

And you can buy knock-off books for really cheap. And knock-off Lonely Planets. We bought the Vietnam one.

Here is the scam:

You get in the taxi at the airport and tell the driver where you are going. The driver gets a call on his cell phone and tells the caller the name of the hotel (which is likely one of a handful that appear in The Lonely Planet). When you arrive a man approaches the vehicle from the hotel and tells you that they are all full but they have a second hotel that is 500 metres away and is not full. Remember that you are coming from the airport, it is dark out, the street that you are driving through is thronged with people, and you're tired of travelling. So you go to the other guesthouse.

Alright, so Maeve and I were SCAMMED!! We only really realized a couple of hours after we checked into the CRAP second guesthouse. When we pulled up to the first guest house I checked that it was the right place. Although we never got out of the taxi it looked like the lobby was empty and the guy we were talking to was in fact from the guesthouse. I was just told that part of the scam is that they change the sign at this guesthouse to be wherever you are going.

So it would seem that Vietnam is kicking our ass (also, my Swiss Army Knife that I've had for 7 years fell out of my bag) but today has been much better (which isn't hard) and this seems like the most interesting, craziest city I've ever been.

It's really off-putting to have people lie to your face. The only other time I can recall this happening (that I know of) is in Bangkok when a tuk-tuk driver told us that the temple beside us (which we weren't even aware of) was closed. I think that scam works because you are so distraught that you say, yes tuk-tuk man, won't you please take me somewhere else. A guy today approached me in front of an ATM and told me that it might not be working and he'd check it for me. **Only someone was using it at the time**.

I just booked a flight from Bangkok -> Tokyo -> Detroit -> London ON on October 6.

We're in Vang Vieng which is some kind of bizarro travellor mecca. Maeve and I headed north (v. close to China) to Luang Nam Tha where there is supposed to be some great trekking. It was very nice but it is the rainy season so 1) the weather was pretty crap and 2) there were no other travellors and the treks are supposed to have a minimum of 4 people. We did go on a day hike through rice paddies and jungle. There was a really freaky (although I was more freaked out by the leaches sucking Maeve's blood) time when our guide **almost stepped on a poisenous snake in his flip flops**. Stay away from those green snakes with red tails!!

We've been talking with a lot of really diverse travellors. Some people are so crappy and some people are really wickid. Up North we met a couple people who were ending their months long China trips and they had interesting stories. An Australian couple got me really excited about the -stans in Central Asia.

We've had hours and hours on the buses. On the night bus up north a tire blew at 4:30am. This was after people started puking and sympathy puking. And at every muddy patch (this is the rainy season) a guy would get out with a flashlight and direct the bus through the shallowest path. I spent all of today on the bus afraid of landslides. I tried to plan what I would do if a landslide happened. There is evidence of them everywhere.

Last night D and T and I went for a second dinner because the first one sucked. We went to this cheap, mediocre vegetarian buffet place in the market. We started drinking BeerLao then Dean asked the 10 year old who was running the show if they had any LaoLao. LaoLao is a moonshine-style-whiskey. The kid said that they didn't have any. Then she came back and communicated something like "one thousand two hundred" "five thousand" while Dean put up fingers. After this sketchy communication she left with an empty pepsi bottle and returned with it filled with a clear liquid.

We did some shots of it. It tasted like rubbing alchohol and tasted like "burning of the throat". After 2 shots I refused to drink more. We left the market with the remains of the whiskey in a plastic bag tied with an elastic.

Today I haven't seen Tamara. Maybe she's hungover. The rest of us and a Cdn girl from Edmonton went to a waterfall and swam until it started to rain.

We finally made it to Laos (we're in Luang Prabang). It was a long journey which started with an extra day in Chiang Rai while we waited for D and T (Dean and Tamara) to catch up. Then the next day we made it into Laos but we were an hour late for the slow boat of the day. In retrospect we should have spent the night on the Thailand side of the border but what can you do. Then the slow boat. It was 2 days with a bunch of westerners on a big wooden boat that went slowly down the Mekong. Everyone awkwardly tried to play cards in the aisles. But now we know a ton of people who are here in town. And we still love D and T.

Laos is different. Last night Maeve and I were drinking Beerlao (v. v. good) and chatting with this guy who had been on the boat. Maeve mentioned the lack of ATMs in the country and he was like, "yeah, I haven't seen any yet". He had no idea that there was no international banking in this whole country. We downplayed our shock and changed the subject. I guess it's people like that who get malaria. We laughed really hard when he left. Hysterical.

Our budget is 260000 kip a day (for the 2 of us). We have these huge wads of cash. Deflation is a bitch.

We are on our way to a temple on a hill but it started to sprinkle so we popped in here. Modesty in dress is important here. I don't really know how important or what Laos people think of foreigners. But there are all of these western girls who walk around wearing short shorts and small tank tops and it seems like they don't realize that it's likely really offensive to the local people here. Laos women do seem "less shy" than Thai women ("shy" is how a Thai person would explain a Thai woman's modesty). They seem to be louder and to actually drink alchohol. It's illegal in Laos for a foreigner to have any kind of sex with a Laos person. And there is a government law that foreigners must be in their guesthouses by midnight.

Today is the last day in Thailand. We're still here waiting for Tamara and Dean to arrive. Tomorrow Laos. Hopefully.

Yesterday we were in a coffee shop and there was a knock-off copy of the Laos LP. I asked if the girl working there would trade it for some books I had on me and she laughed because the book was a friend of hers. But she would lend it to me. So we walked out of the shop with the book. We just returned it (you have to watch your karma when travelling).

Also, there was a headline in the paper yesterday: Singapore tells magazine not to be so gay.

I'm sitting here in Chiang Rai trying to upload all of Maeve's and my pictures to ImageStation. I wanted us to do it here because we're going to Laos (remember that it's pronounced without the 's') tomorrow or the next day where things are all-around sketchier and it would suck to lose all the pics.

Other sketchy things about Laos - there are no international banking facilities. So we're taking out wads of baht here (planning on an upper bound of 20 days in Laos before hitting an ATM in Vietnam) which we'll exchange for kip. Travel within Laos also seems "epic". Thailand is really developed. There are also 7-11s and Boots pharmacies. Before heading into the sketchiness I've got to get some more sunscreen. There is also a store with a lot of Adidas and Nike in it. I'm considering getting a new pair of runners. The ones I have now are rotting and falling apart. We're doing more trekking and I'm afraid that during the next trek they might actually FALL APART. That would be bad.

Maeve and I made friends! We got an email from our friends saying that they want to travel with us in Laos with us. So if they can haul ass to here then we'll wait until Saturday to go. Otherwise tomorrow is the day. Our friends, Dean (from Victoria) and Tamara (from California) have been teaching in Seoul. They're also about the first people we've met from N. America.

Since I've been travelling I've been reading A LOT. Like too much. So a couple of weeks ago for every novel that I buy I also buy a book from the "classics" section. For a while these books would just make me feel guilty as I would choose reading chick-brit-lit instead. I've read The Great Gatsby and Through the Looking Glass so far. I think I might get Anna Karenina. I tried to read it once in the past and couldn't do it so maybe now's the time. I've just discovered how enjoyable John Irving books are. They are not only good books, but they are long, they're in all the second-hand bookstores, and they are pulp novel size. All v. good for travelling.

We spent the last couple of days in Pai. It was a beautiful town that was really relaxed and we met great people. No complaints except for the packs of dogs that roamed the city. There were these packs of big, well-fed dogs that would attack each other and bark and fight. All day and all night. It was horrible.

They didn't seem to attack people like the pack of little dogs that lived on the corner beside me in Ban Bung. Everytime I would walk home I would try to walk in the middle of the road so the pack of tiny dogs that protected the corner store wouldn't surround me and bark. They always would. And they would try to nip at me. They were vicious little things. I eventually started swinging my bag at them.

The sound of dogs barking has started making me really anxious. Maeve pointed out a statue of a (scary lifesize) dog at our guesthouse and I almost screamed. I think I'm developing a phobia.