laos, or the democratic people’s republic of laos as it is officially known, is a landlocked, communist country in southeast asia. to the north is china, south is cambodia, west is thailand, and it’s eastern border with vietnam is still covered in unexploded ordinance dropped by the US in what is known as the ‘american war’.
made a finger puppet with a french mustache to amuse myself. every time i grab my beer a little part of him dies. brilliant.
update: woke up to find the finger puppet dead, he was on my left hand…
it is nice here, people are genuinely friendly, they don’t try and sell you something every time you walk by, and the beer tastes awesome. no really, my main reason for coming here was because i had heard you can rent an inner tube and float down a river where there are bars conveniently located along the entire length. yes, my entire reason for coming here was to float on a river and drink beer. little did i know that there was also gigantic monkey death swings!
well that was all just loads of fun and all until the next day when i woke up with a fever, headache, body aches, and a bit of gi trouble(eww). so i was stuck in bed for 2 days but now i think i am ok and shouldn’t die of malaria or anything. sweet.
PEOPLE!! please refridgerate your mayonaisse. freak me out.
ok ok, back to the swing, after i felt a little better i headed right back to the river because i had to get some more swing action. these things are just amazing, the platform itself is probably 40 feet above the water and the swing is connected to this brilliant piece of laos engineering(a bunch of wood haphazardly nailed together) about 60 feet up! what a thrill! it is like being a kid again when you first went on the ‘big swings’. of course half the fun of anything is the possibility of death or permanent damage and this is no exception, there were quite a few belly and back flops from those who were too drunk or uncoordinated to put their feet into the water first, and i didn’t have to ask the girl i saw this morning why she had gauze taped to her ear, ouch. the guys who work at the bars are even crazier, and if it didn’t take me an hour to upload one video i would post some crazy laos acrobatic shots, i will when i get back to thailand, promise!
the river wraps itself around a small rise forming an island, on this island sit a number of cheap all night bars, the kids are bathed in a neon glow of some drunk’s vision of apocalypse now. i’ve distanced myself from the mayhem, enjoying my bia lao in a hammock, watching the madness unfold with some easy listening in the background. i don’t have to drink much to imagine the random banter of the bar scene i am watching silenced by a well-placed grenade.
that’s about it. like i said, the most perfectly boring place in the world. life happens, slowly, cows walk down the street, and the locals have wedding parties on the airstrip behind my guesthouse, the most physically demanding thing you can do is swim from one bar to another. i want to take so many pictures but most of them come out bad, they burn trash so the sky is always a kinda funky haze. apparently it is a lot prettier during the monsoon later in the year, much greener and clearer. i was going to go further into the country, check out some smaller villages and temples, but after losing two days to the hanta butt virus i think i could stand staying here for a few more days, doing absolutely nothing.
a major theme of my conversation with alex today was money, specifically, what do you do with more money when life can be enjoyed with relatively nothing. it has occured to me that all paths eventually lead to NZ, what i mean by that is eventually the dream becomes more monotonous than the grind. i was doing what i had always wanted to do, hiking in one of the most beautiful places in the world. there was nobody to answer to, no schedule, just me and my backpack. but after five months, it became boring, now it could be that i just got tired of seeing the same scenery or maybe even that wasn’t what i really wanted to do, but i don’t think so. for some reason a lot of us just need to work, it isn’t for the money specifically, most have the money to enjoy themselves and they don’t need any more, but without work, how can you enjoy your time off?
like most big cities i was quickly overwhelmed with the madness and decided to get out, i picked the closest beach and here i am, hua hin. home of the king and tourist destination for a billion thais, swiss, and of course, 
so other than sitting on the beach all day long for the past five days i have been making a strong effort to go out and meet people, the longest conversation i have had was about 5 minutes with some german girls who graciously put sunblock on my back(one of the perils of traveling alone is a burnt back). but every bar i can find(and i have been looking for 5 nights) consists of about 20 call girls asking me if i want a massage, and like 5 dirty old men. i do not know where everyone is hiding, but i am getting a little tired of it. so the next stop, is somewhere quiet where i can have an interesting conversation with a normal person, drink my 
