Last week of holidays.

In a place called 4000 islands. Electricity is here only 4 hours a day. Everyday is mid 30s so it gets real hot and sweaty. Brent stole my deodorant and threw it away into a river. Reading Jurassic Park right now. Really looking forward to alot of things next week upon returning.

LAOS.

In the backpacker mecca that is Vang Vieng. Everyone all over southeast asia talks about coming here and going tubing. We did it the last two days and it was real wild and real fun. Got some good videos of us doing stunts on the various river activities...maybe sometime Ill put them up if I am ambitious. Coming home soon...no extended tickets.

Le Concorde on the Nam Ou.

We met two dudes from France about 10 days ago while crossing the border from Vietnam to Laos. Nice guys. We then met them again in the town of Nong Khaiw in Northern Laos a week later. They told us they had bought a boat and wanted to paddle down the Nam Ou river from Nong Khaiw to Luang Prabang. They asked Brent and I to join and we could not turn down the offer. It was supposed to be about a 5 day journey so we got and the necessities - a machete, a tarp, some rice and 8 packs of oreos. We named the boat 'Le Concorde.'

The first day was calm and we slept in a village where all the locals stared at us and we were a major sight. The second day we went through some big rapids, grazed a few rocks, but made it a long distance through the beautiful mountain scenary. That night we slept under a full moon on a beach. We woke up to see two boats full of children just staring at us. We set out for the third day and went through some huge rapids that were way out of our league, but some how navigated them missing rocks by a foot or two with water splashing into the boat and filling it about 5 inches deep. Late in the day we came to the biggest set of rapids yet and had to make a sharp turn right before them...it didn't turn out well. We lost control and smashed into a rock sideways at fullspeed. One guy flew out of the boat, a huge hole opened in the bottom, we spun around backwards and went through another set of rapids while the boat was filling up quickly with water. We all jumped out and swam it to some rocks in the middle of the river. Nobody was hurt. We were all pretty shocked, but Brent and I could not stop laughing. Its definitely one of the most exciting thing to ever happen to me. Right up there with birth and highschool graduation. A lao man rescued us from the island and we caught a ride in a truck box the rest of the way to Luang Prabang. Crazy crazy memorable day.

Northern Laos has been alot of fun other then just crashing boats. Beatiful landscape and super relaxed people. The bus rides are pretty asian though as they are extremely packed on extremely bad roads with extremely loud Lao music.