My bag was safe and sound back at the guest house and in celebration, Motta and I decided to take a quick nap. Scott, bless his soul, was still under the weather, and still in the deterioration phase, which we were crossing our fingers would soon transition to the upswing. So for the time being it was once again Mr. Motta and I who heaved out on the Speed TRs. We ordered a couple of fancy banana coffee drinks at a nearby cafe, still in celebration mode, and, fueled by those, we wheeled over to a pharmacy and picked up some electrolytic salts for our dear Mr Norton.

Pi Mai Lao was in full swing by the time we hit the streets, and were it not for the plastic bags that mercifully protected our cell phones, our robots would have been completely destroyed during the first few minutes of the wheel.

As we wheeled north in search of sandwiches, we were repeatedly soaked to the bone. In fact the entire street on which our guesthouse was built, which ran along the water, had descended into an anarchy of water warfare. Everywhere, music was playing, people were screaming, and water and powder were flying. Crowds of young people in black-face rode around in the backs of pickup trucks, jumping up and down until the trucks bounced on their springs like careening jack-in-the-boxes.

It was all we could do to keep our sandwiches dry as we scarfed down lunch at a street stall. Great parades of people were marching through the streets with hand-painted paper banners, displaying the creatures and gods that represent the new year. The winners of last night’s beauty contest were riding on great floats through the streets, still looking gorgeous, though in my estimate overly painted and uncomfortable. Children roamed the streets with water guns, and it seemed like every hose in the city was running. We were soaked and re-soaked and powdered with tapioca. Each subsequent drying left my shirt starchier and starchier, slowly turning it into a kind of crusted armor, which repelled water for a moment before giving up and capitulating to new levels of water-logging.

Foreigners were participating too. Many of the visitors had brought their children, who seemed to be thoroughly enjoying the huge water fight. Older, twenty-something foreigners were also participating, many of whom had bought giant $10 or $15 squirt guns. I found their propensity for spraying a bloke in the eyes to be a little much.

We stopped once more for another cup of coffee from Stew’s favorite coffee fellow in Luang Prabang. For a little less than a dollar, that man will whip up a large paper cup filled with a mean blended coffee drink, made from ice, startlingly strong Lao coffee, and sweetened condensed milk. Quite tasty and invigorating.

As we wheeled on, we started to notice that the streets were emptying of merry makers. This meant that everyone was headed to this large sandy island in the middle of the Mekong for the sand stupa (a structure that houses Buddhist relics) and the Bosi ceremony, the traditional Lao ceremony of well wishing. The island was a new addition to the Luang Prabang landscape. With this 50-year drought, the river had fallen so low as to create a new land mass. The people of Luang Prabang had decided to take advantage of this during the festival. The Vietnamese president was even flying in for the occasion. The people were gathering to continue the party, build sand stupas, and complete the Bosi ceremony, at the end of which white cotton threads are bound around the wrists of the participants.

We piled onto a longboat along with a whole bunch of locals and putted across the Mekong.

On the sand island, we found ourselves once again immersed in a giant crowd, while some water was still being thrown (for instance, I found it impossible to buy a bottle of water and drink more than a third of it before a beautiful woman would come up to me and dump my bottle over my head or down my back). But the weapon of choice here was the white tapioca powder and the black-face. They were selling bags of the white powder everywhere, and I was soon covered with it.

We ran into Stewart’s interns on the island. They had bought some powder and were completely covered in a starchy encrustation. Now in a larger group, we began to roam the island, taking in the many stupas being constructed on the shore, and craning our necks to see into the Bosi ceremony. It seemed the ceremony was closed to the public. Inside, we could barely see a decidedly stuffy procession taking place, while well dressed dignitaries looked on or dozed, decidedly not covered in white powder.

Meanwhile, outside that strange vortex, the party raged on. They were firing homemade rockets into the air, smearing each other with black make-up, and jumping into the Mekong to cool off. We did all of the above, save the rockets.

There were also many traditional music groups marching around the island playing Lao music. Along with these, there was usually a fellow wandering through the surrounding crowd with a gourd filled with some kind of homemade firewater, doling out drams by pouring them into a little length of horn, out of which passers-by could drink.

Having thoroughly enjoyed the sand stupa party, we headed back to the other side of the river on another longboat.

Back on the other side, the madness was in full swing again, with giant speakers pumping deafening music into the streets, a savage upping of the water fight, and even impromptu stripping poles erected in the streets.

The extremes of experience, to be sure.

Pi Mai Lao – the Lao New Year. It’s the Lao interpretation of the New Year on the same calendar used in Thailand. The Lao, usually a quiet, modest, and polite people, take this opportunity to descend into madness and debauchery, soaking each other relentlessly with water, powdering all in sight with tapioca, and smearing black gunk over their faces and those of passers-by.

The idea of watering came from the legend of King Kabinlaphom, whose seven daughters kept his severed head in a cave. The daughters would visit their father’s head every year and perform a wetting ritual to bring happiness and good weather. About the white powder and black-face, I am still searching for the cultural significance, so if any of you readers know, by all means please share.

My Pi Mai Lao experience started bright and early, when spurred by some inner failsafe, I shot out of bed, thinking in a frothing panic “Where is my backpack?!!” I ravaged through the room, turning on the light and waking Stewart and Scott. “Oh no, oh no…” I paced the room. “How could I be such an idiot?”

Stewart propped himself up to 30 degrees from horizontal and addressed me through the phlegmy veils of slumber. “Relax. I know this is hard to believe, but this is Lao. I think we can get your bag back.”

“You think we can get it back?!”

“Yeah, we lost a bag full of money once on a Dragon’s trip here, hundreds of dollars, left it at a street vendor, and they hung onto it for weeks and returned it untouched.” I was still skeptical and panicking. Motta continued calmly, as though speaking in a trance, “What time is it?”

“5:00 am,” I was cold sweating.

“Wake me up at 6:30, and we’ll try to find your bag.”

I tried, but sleeping was out of the question, so I took a long shower and paced and waited for 6:30 to roll around. Eventually it did, and I shook Mr. Motta to life. We grabbed the Speed TRs from where we had folded and stashed them under a staircase the night before, and headed out into the city.

It was the first day of Pi Mai Lao, and preparations were well underway. To get to the location of the night market, we needed to go through a giant morning market where everything from caged birds to giant catfish and beetles were for sale. The place was packed. Lao is definitely an early morning society, and today was no exception. Everyone in Luang Prabang seemed to be out and about. Despite the propellant of clenching fear and volatile hope that churned in my stomach, we had to dismount and walk the bikes through the thick crowd.

When we finally got to the street market, we found it a ghost town. Only one woman was there serving food, maybe four stalls down and across the walkway from our stall of the night before. She was serving up the Lao interpretation of Khao Soi. In the north of Thailand, it is a coconut curry soup, creamy and thick. In Lao it is a tomato and ground meat soup, with a semi-translucent reddish broth.

Stew began explaining to the woman, in Lao, what had happened to my bag. She smiled and expressed her regrets, and we were about to move on when she had a thought. She called to Stew, and we turned around. She started asking follow-up questions: Was it a young girl or an old man? Was she selling drinks or meats? Finally, she seemed to have narrowed it down, and looking satisfied, she called to her two daughters, who had been helping her wash vegetables, and told us to follow them.

We followed them, walking the bikes behind the two tiny Lao women, as they picked their way onto a side street holding hands. The two of them walked slowly, and were so dainty and frail as to seem weightless. In the strange gray morning light, filtered through the smoke all around us, I felt as though I were in a dream. We walked the Speed TRs behind them along the uneven pavement, and I felt separated from reality, afraid to hope, but not yet willing to despair.

We turned another couple of streets and found our way to a small concrete building, where some people were sleeping on the linoleum floor. One of them got up, an old man, while his younger wife (or daughter?) pulled out two chairs for us. Mr. Motta and I removed our shoes and entered the home.

The old man slowly climbed up a creaking ladder made of large bamboo poles toward the attic of the building. He then reappeared with… my backpack! I was so excited I nearly bit my tongue in half. I thanked him as much as I could in Lao and English, and after a brief counsel with Stewart decided to give him about $5.50 as an appropriate thank you. The man smiled and bowed to me with hands pressed together; I awkwardly returned the gesture.

As we walked away, with the bag on my back, I felt as though I had been given an undeserving gift by the gods of wheeling. All morning my mind had been playing over the ramifications of my lost passport. We would have needed to spend another week at least in Lao, getting a new one, and then we would have needed to re-populate it with visas… it would have been a huge investment of time, effort, and capital… but no need for that now. I had my bag, here it was.

We stopped back at the Khao Soi place for a celebratory bowl of noodles.

I opened by bag and rifled through it. Everything appeared to still be there. As I put my bag down on the seat next to me, Stewart commented… “I think I know that bag from somewhere….”

“Well,” I replied “Martin, my step brother, used it throughout most of highschool.”

“No… I think it was mine at some point.” This was not at all out of the question. We were both from the same small town of Grinnell, Iowa, where most things have a way of circulating.

“Well, now it’s coming AsiaWheeling.”

“Cool. Cool,” Motta replied.

Cool. Cool. Indeed.

The next morning the three of us, Mr. Motta, Mr. Norton, and myself, awoke in our room at the View Khem Khong. The evening before, in an effort to make the two-person room more egalitarian for three people, we had overturned the  beds and spread the mattresses on the floor, allowing us to sleep three abreast, each man with his torso on one mattress and his legs on the other. This was marginally successful, but I dare say all three of us were quite glad to be awake and out of that strange arrangement. A better solution would need to be found for the next night

We made our way across the street from the View Khem Khong to have a seat on the banks of the Mekong. We shared some sandwiches and some very strong dark black coffee. So strong was the coffee, in fact, that it seemed completely impervious to milk. It was the kind that we run into from time to time on AsiaWheeling, which is brewed in a sock, this one for quite some time. A healthy shlop of full cream milk had essentially no effect on the color of the brew. But while the color stayed the same, the flavor was perhaps slightly softened, which was important, for while the strength was high, the quality was not.

Motta left us to attend to his affairs with the Dragon’s interns, and Scott and I climbed back on the cycles. The festival was still a few days off, but squadrons of Luang Prabang natives and even some foreigners were already convening on the street corners with buckets and the ladles one uses to wash one’s self in this part of the world, ready to soak any and all passers by. We pulled over and acquired some plastic bags with which to protect the contents of our pockets and pedaled into the fray.

It was quite intense. We were dripping wet by the time we made it into the central market. In addition to the stationary teams with large buckets and dippers, there were rogue squads of little boys and girls with Chinese-made super-soaker style squirt guns. Luckily it was boiling hot outside, so getting wet felt just fine. We also seemed to dry off in a matter of minutes. It was boiling hot and pretty dry. The sunlight was bright but comfortably diffuse, thanks to the thick shroud of smoke hanging over the region.

First things first. We needed to find a place to repair Scott’s wheel. At Stewart’s suggestion, we headed to the “Lao” part of town (the not touristy part of town) where we found a little shop that sported a welded metal shape that looked like it could be used to aid one in truing a wheel. A grinning old Lao man appeared from down the street  and greeted us. “Sabaidee.”

The Lao have a delightful habit of greeting one another when they meet. And they take such pleasure in it, elongating the word and stretching it out into a long honeyed syllable. “Saabaaaideee.” I took great pleasure in greeting people in Lao, for they lit up with such glee at the greeting and returned it so lusciously, nuanced with the understated song of Lao’s tonal language. Even a very small child would almost invariably return your greeting. Ah, Lao, really a gem.

Sure enough, the man was more than happy to help us with the wheel. While he went to town on the rim, Scott and I produced a canister of paint thinner we had purchased earlier, along with a couple of toothbrushes, and went to work on our derailleurs, cleaning large clods of the red dust of Tamil Nadu, whetted with Indian typewriter oil, from the inner workings of the machine.

About the time that we had gotten the derailleurs back to ship-shape, our fellow had finished with the wheel. He asked only about a dollar for the work, and we were thrilled to get back on the road.

Back in the old-city, the water fighting in the streets had taken on a new fierce intensity. It seemed it was time to arm ourselves. We wheeled back to the vicinity of our wheel truing shop, and haggled our way into three Chinese-made super-soaker style water guns.

With one of them strapped to the back of the cycle, and the other two loaded and in hand, Scott and I headed back into the fray.

Now we were able to participate in the action. Soon the game became spotting those people who were about to soak you, and stopping them in their tracks with a well aimed drive-by. Often though, I was still caught unaware, and was forced to whip around and fire a stream of retribution as we pedaled on, dripping wet. The traffic was very light and quite slow, which was great because wheeling and water gunning (I’m talking to you kids) is not advisable in any kind of technical wheeling situation.

Growing peckish, we ventured into an alleyway off the touristy main street to sample some spring rolls.

To finish off the snack, we enjoyed one of the famed Franco-Lao baguette sandwiches, with ham.

We met Mr. Motta at an Internet cafe that evening.

We had been soaked and dried over 100 times, and I felt as though my clothes had been laundered on my body. Stewart appeared with his interns, the three of them were a little wet around the edges as well, having arrived by longboat from across the river, and shortly thereafter been ambushed by a few water gangs of their own.

“It’s wild out there,” we agreed.

That evening, Scott began feeling under the weather, likely with the same virus that had laid me up during our eleventh hour bicycle repairs in Bangkok, so Stewart and I let him retire early, and went out night-wheeling together.

We called a dinner waypoint at a vast night street food market, where we ordered some fantastically delicious Mekong fish. The fish was gutted and its stomach filled with lemongrass. It was then sandwiched between two slivers of bamboo, which were secured tightly around the fish using bits of wire. The fish was then slow roasted over a charcoal fire. Paired with Lao eggplant mush, which one could dip bits of Mekong seaweed sheet into, the meal was to die for. Two frosty bottles of the local BeerLao, an incredibly tasty golden lager they produce in this magical country, completed the meal.

Since we had been working in an Internet cafe earlier, I had been carrying my backpack with me. Inside the backpack was my computer, my passport, a bunch of cash in about 20 different currencies, my Maui Jim sunglasses, my camera, a bottle of Michael’s Paraherbs and about everything else of value I’ve brought on this odyssey. When I got up to leave the wooden table where we had been eating fish I left my bag behind, leaning against a greasy stone wall in one of the largest and most crowded night markets in Lao. And I didn’t even notice.

After that little occurrence, we made our way to a night carnival being thrown in honor of the impending New Year. It was giant and sprawling, next to where we had purchased the Chinese battery charger the previous day. It was jam packed with Lao people, and on the center stage, a beauty contest was taking place to determine the most beautiful maid in all of Luang Prabang Province. The women on stage were quite beautiful, but covered in makeup. They also seemed uncomfortably packed and cinched into their costumes. A couple of giant spotlights, operated by two fellows hovering overhead chain smoking cigarettes in the basket of a cherry picker, played over the women. I felt very aware of the differences between Lao and Western concepts of beauty as we walked through the crowd. Many of the women  walking by in tee-shirts and jeans appeared to me much more beautiful than what was happening on stage. But, I guess, there’s no accounting for taste….

We wiled away the rest of the evening playing five- and ten-cent carnival games, such as throwing darts at huge banks of balloons. We also tried our hand raging around in groaning and twisted bumper cars while thundering Thai techno-dance music played in the background. The bumper car rink was incredible, festooned with many flashing lights, and pulsing neon shapes. The rink reeked of ozone. The carts had no throttle and no seat belts; they were just always going, powered buy a giant sparking snarl of wire that extended to the electrified ceiling above us.  To reverse, one simply turned the wheel far enough to begin thrusting backward.  Depending on which part of the ceiling you were touching and collecting power from, the bumper car would vary in speed from very slow to downright breakneck. A giant painted sign proudly exclaimed “TUBULAR” in English characters above the rink.

All at the carnival appeared to be in stupendously high spirits, screaming and laughing and generally letting loose in preparation for the impending New Year. We wheeled home feeling like kings and generally enamored with Lao. Meanwhile, my poor yellow bag languished in the ether, lost and forgotten.

We arrived in Luang Prabang just as the sun was rising.

The many delays on our bus ride had unexpectedly worked in our favor, delaying the journey long enough to put us in right at sunrise, rather than at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. Once again, we were the last off the bus, taking a bit of time to rustle ourselves. By this point, the cycles and our bags were laying on the dusty earth, under the careful guard of the driver, who was chain-smoking cigarettes nearby.

We collected our things and retired to a small cafe about 20 meters away, across the gravel floor of the bus station. We sent Stew a text message. I knew that the fellow was not much for sleeping, but at 6:00 am,  everyone deserves the common courtesy of SMS. In the meantime, we procured a couple cups of Lao-style coffees and a baguette sandwich, filled with omelet.

Thanking the French again for their delightful cultural additions to Lao, we scarfed these down and climbed on the cycles.

Stewart, we knew, had a hotel in mind. He had a fair amount of Guanxi with a local place by the name of View Khem Khong, so rather than check in at a guest house, we decided to nest for a bit in an Internet cafe and wait for him to get back to us. We reached one just as they were finishing breakfast and starting up the computers. No sooner had we sent word to our loved ones that arrival in Lao had been successful, than Stew called my Lao number.

He was awake and, it seems, even on a cycle already. We paid for our Internet and headed off to rendezvous. It was not long before I saw Stew’s telltale shoulder-length hair blowing in the wind.

He was wearing a Lao style hat that could easily have been confused for a Rastafarian cap, and wore a beard. He rode a rental bicycle, with a large basket on the front, huge somewhat mangled fenders, and an intermittent squeaking problem.

Once warm regards had been exchanged, we made our way to the View Khem Khong. The owner was a roly-poly woman, just gushing with friendly smiles and eagerness to make our stay more comfortable. With the Lao New Year, what they call “Pi Mai Lao” impending, the prices for rooms were on a schedule to sky rocket in this city. Thanks to Stewart’s good relationships, we managed to lock in a relatively low price for the next few days. With our things safely stashed in the room, we retired to the restaurant across the street from the View Khem Khong.

The restaurant was perched on a kind of balcony deck looking out over the Mekong river. Even with this 50-year record drought, the river was still quite impressive, and if only the billowing smoke that filled the air would clear, we could have seen majestic jungled hills and a village across the water. Here, as they had been in the north of Thailand, the farmers were burning their fields in preparation for the next planting. However, in Luang Prabong, I believe the smoke was even thicker, because just over the hills that we could periodically make out through the smoke across the river, they were also burning the jungle to create new farmland.

We were finishing coffee with Stew when he informed us that his professional obligations were about to kick in, and he would need to leave us. You see, dear reader, Stewart was not in Luang Prabang strictly on AsiaWheeling business, he was also helping to conduct an internship program for his other current employer, Where There be Dragons, or as he refers to it, “Dragons.”

So with Motta gone on other business, it was time to explore the general region in the best way we know: wheeling.

First we took a general look at the center of Luang Prabang. There appeared to be plenty of tourists here, and with the number of hotels and restaurants that could support themselves, it was likely a year-round state of affairs. Even with preparations for the New Year celebration underway, the city felt sleepy and quiet.

And it only got sleepier and quieter as we wheeled out of town and into the countryside.

Soon all dissolved into agricultural fields and swaths of jungle. We could just barely make out through the dense smoke that we were riding amidst a great many steep hills.

The landscape continued to awe us, offering incredible biodiversity interspersed with agricultural land.  In the lower right-hand corner of the image below, you can see two water buffalo in the river.

From time to time as we rode, children would run up to us from a farmhouse and splash us with water, or a farm woman would spray us with a hose.

The New Year was still some days off, but people were already getting into the spirit, and two silly looking foreigners on strange bicycles were the perfect excuse to kick things off a little early. We attempted to follow signs to a waterfall, but when the road became very poor, we began to tire of being rattled. Although the Speed TRs appeared to be loving it, we were fearing a bit for their ceaseless vibration as well.

Back in town, we stopped at a collection of shops overlooking a giant goods market and what looked like a country fair below.

We ordered two iced coffees, which were made in the same way we had seen in Thailand with espresso as the base and plenty of sweetened condensed milk. We sipped them while we surveyed the various goods for sale.

Not long ago, Scott had lost his cell phone charger… perhaps in the cozy confines of Steve’s room (may that man’s beard grow ever longer). So when we found a group of Chinese merchants selling the same kind of universal battery chargers we had seen during our wheel across the Chao Phraya, we decided to enter into negotiations.

After purchasing the charger, it was time to make friends. Once Scott disclosed to these men that he spoke Chinese and presented them with AsiaWheeling business cards, we became quite popular with most of the Chinese goods sellers in the market. We even allowed one of the more senior fellows to take the Speed TR out for a spin.

He got off the cycle and pointed at the rear derailleur, explaining that this was the secret to the bicycle, the reason why it goes so fast. The other fellows in the group sagely nodded. With that done, it seemed it was time to get back on the cycles, and so we did, bidding our new Chinese friends goodbye and heading back into town.

That evening Motta took us to a rather fancy Lao restaurant, owned by a French Canadian woman. The restaurant was across a river from our guest house – not the Mekong, but a smaller tributary. Each year the locals build a bamboo bridge across the river, and each year during the rainy season the bridge is destroyed by the rushing water.

We were to wheel to the bridge and lock our bikes there. Night was falling, and we were quite hungry. We met up with Stew, and climbed on our cycles. Not long into the ride, while I was riding anti-bishop, a small Lao boy appeared out of nowhere and dumped a bucket of water onto Motta and Scott. This caused a mild loss of control that ended up intertwining their two handlebars. Helplessly tangled, the two knights fell, bikes clattering and bodies rolling into the street.

There was no traffic and so no real danger of them being hit by cars. Both rose to their feet again. Scott was essentially unharmed; Motta bore a few scratches on his arms. Scott’s bike, on the other hand, appeared to have suffered a minor misalignment of the front wheel. No problem here, though;  truing a wheel should not be a huge issue in this part of the world, so we planned to do it tomorrow. In the meantime, we disengaged Scott’s front wheel giving the rim room to wobble without slowing us down, and headed to dinner.

We woke up quite relaxed, mostly due to the last vestiges of the anti-anxiety medication we had taken the night before, and mostly no worse for the wear. The bus ride to Nong Khai had taken quite a bit longer than expected. The traffic leaving Bangkok was an immense snarl. I remember waking up a number of times on the bus to find us simply stewing in an endless stagnating river of bumper-to-bumper traffic.

The bus had no bathroom and stopped infrequently, so I had deliberately dehydrated myself. Not surprisingly, my first thoughts off the bus were of water. My next was of time. The sun seemed quite high, so I looked down at my watch. Our bus should have arrived a little before 8:00nam, but it turns out we had not rolled into Nong Khai until nearly noon. Our chances of getting to Luang Prabang in the north of Laos that evening were growing ever slimmer.

We unfolded the speed TRs and slung on our packs. My knees were a little creaky, and my feet a little sore from sleeping for so long in the upright position, crammed like sardines against the bulkhead, but we were more or less well rested and excited to be AsiaWheeling again. Onward to a new country again, at last!

Once we got clear of the bus terminal, we wheeled for a while in the wrong direction, mostly due to some sour advice given to us by a fellow driving a large pickup truck full of watermelons. Eventually, a family running a small roadside repair and noodle shop explained to us that a simple uber-rausch would have us back on track.

Now headed in the right direction, we laid into the speed TRs double time, just letting them eat road. And soon we were at the border. This border is called the Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge. We exited Thailand with no trouble whatsoever, and commenced wheeling across the bridge. The guards at the entrance to the bridge seemed uninterested in soliciting a toll from us, instead greeting us with huge smiles and flagging us on.

As we rode on across toward Laos, our way was adorned with Lao and Thai flags. We looked down to our left, where some kind of strange emergent beach party was coming to life on the banks of the Mekong.

The Mekong was, and still is, at its lowest point in the last 50 years, but even during this current terrible drought, it is a mighty river to behold. And the extent to which the bridge overshot the shore on either side spoke to how much larger the thing could be during a heavy rainy season.

Near the midpoint of the bridge was a place where both of the side walkways abruptly ended in giant warning signs, and we were forced to portage the cycles down onto the main road.

This was somewhat harrowing since there was no shoulder and little room for the giant goods and construction trucks to avoid us. Luckily traffic was pretty light, and from there we rode into Laos, which we quickly learned is locally written “Lao.” The French added the “s” to the end in order to be French, but the Lao have since dispensed with it, as will we.

There is an interesting moment once you cross off the bridge and onto Lao ground. In Lao, they maintain the French style of driving on the right side of the road. Until this point, AsiaWheeling had been traveling exclusively in left-side driving countries. The bridge itself was a lefty as well. But upon arrival on Lao soil, the road criss-crosses itself, much like a figure eight slot car track, and we started driving on the right.

It was strange to drive once again on the side I grew up with, like trying on an old pair of tennis shoes that has long languished in a closet at your father’s house.

We wheeled up to the Lao visa upon entry counter and had very little trouble acquiring the required documentation. In fact, our passports came back to us not only with a gleaming new visa, but with an entry stamp to boot, allowing us to shortcut the arrivals line and wheel directly into Lao.

On the other side, we met a French fellow named Olivier, who was also headed into the Lao capital city of Vientiane. The three of us haggled a decent fair for a van ride into the city, though our driver was successful in extracting another $3.00 above the quoted rate from Scott and I when we asked to be dropped off at the bus station rather than Olivier’s hotel. Fair enough. Once at the station, we unloaded our belongings and began to survey the area.

The Vientiane bus station is a none too glamorous place. It is small and jam-packed with old Korean buses. Likely due to the impending New Years celebration in Luang Prabang, it was also reasonably crowded, with people looking to head out of the city for the holiday.

All the scheduled VIP buses had been booked long ago, so we were left with the option of waiting here in Vientiane for a bus tomorrow, or getting on one of the many “people’s buses,” which ran on no schedule, and simply left as soon as all the tickets were purchased. With so many people in the station, these were leaving at the alarming rate of two or three an hour. That said, they were also quite the crap shoot in terms of quality. Some of them looked passably nice: aging Korean double deckers advertising interior bathrooms. Others were more like crumpled jalopies held together mostly by paint and rust.

It was then that we realized we were starving. The decision of what to do next would warrant a full stomach we decided, and thus proceeded to a restaurant in the vicinity of the bus station, where we were able to procure two giant steaming bowls of the Lao interpretation of Pho, my favorite Vietnamese soup variant. Each steaming bowl of noodles was accompanied by a large plastic basket of freshly washed greens (basil, mint, lettuce, and dandelion) which could be torn apart and added to the soup, along with fresh cloves of garlic and hot peppers. We doped ours heavily with a variety of fish, and spicy and savory sauces before tearing apart and adding plenty of greens. It was glorious.

With sanity, logic, and lucidity rising as they tend to along with blood sugar, we decided that we needed to get to Luang Prabang, and that the people’s bus would do just fine. And with that, Scott purchased tickets. We rounded the corner to check out the bus on which we had just snagged a spot, and breathed a sigh of relief. It was one of the nicer ones and even seemed to sport a bathroom. Feeling quite jolly about the whole thing, we began to fold up the cycles and load them unto the underbelly of the large double-decker.

Just as we were trying to do this, a man came up to us and indicated that we stop, and step back with our luggage. Though he was not in uniform, few of the officials in this station were, so we followed his orders. He then proceeded to conduct a team of men who loaded the entire remainder of the underbelly of our bus with large multicolored tarpaulin bags. When this deed was done, the un-uniformed official came over to us and apologized, explaining that he did not know we had so much luggage, and we would need to catch the next bus.

We protested a fair bit, but when it came down to it, he held the cards. So Scott was ushered into the back door of the ticket office, where he exchanged the tickets for ones on the next bus. Along with the exchange came a hefty refund as well. It seems the next bus would be a little more down to earth. It was certainly no double-decker, and had no bathroom, but the seats reclined and there was room for our luggage, so AsiaWheeling climbed aboard in the highest of spirits.

So high were our spirits, in fact, that it seemed nothing could bring them down. Not when the bus broke down the first time, and the driver and his helper got out to top up the power steering fluid, bleeding the hydraulics in a thick stream out into the road.

Or the second time it broke down and the driver and his helper got out a Persian looking rug that they laid down beneath the bus to make working underneath it more comfortable.

One of the breakdowns occurred near a giant street of baguette vendors.

Lao was after all a French colony at one time, which we discovered has its perks. In fact, for the rest of our time in Lao, we would never be too far from a pretty decent crusty bread.

The bus also stopped at an interesting night market in the middle of nowhere, which sported a great many vendors selling all manner of dried river fish.

We rode on munching bread, wishing we had bought some fish, but with spirits ever rising, not damped even when the driver stopped again and again to do strange things like wandering over to closed convenience stores and peering in the windows (looking for more steering fluid?), or walking around the bus, or hammering on the latches of the luggage bins with mallets for a while waking everyone up.

All we cared about was that this bus was headed to Luang Prabong and so were we.

Tokyo Envy

Flying into Bangkok from Sri Lanka, we alighted from the plane and promptly began searching for food in the airport. The most obvious choice  seemed to be a ramen restaurant, which appeared fast, easy, and relative to airport food, reasonably priced.

Odd, I thought, sitting down, that our first meal in Thailand wasn’t the world famous Tom Yum Khaa or Green Curry we had been dreaming of. Watching people pass in the airport as I dined on these noodles, it seemed there was more of Japan in Thailand than just the food.  Clothing worn by the glitzy airport patrons brought me back to my time in Tokyo. The emphasis on and intensity of cosmetics on the light faces of women passing by matched Japanese standards of beauty and public presence.  All around the airport, customs officials and idle waitresses read Manga translated from the Japanese. Throughout Thailand we found that 7-11 (owned by Japanese Seven & I Holdings) does a brisk business, with over 5000 locations in the country, despite pricing goods at a premium over family-owned bodegas.

The aesthetic experience of Japan has permeated Thailand and become a point of desire held by a large class of consumers. Food packages, media design, retail experiences, and public transportation feature Japanese-style iconography.

These designs are characterized by simple geometric shapes to communicate meaning (such as flavor, function, or usage directions), anime-style illustrations, cartoon characters, and often Japanese writing, as if to suggest their progenitors or intended export destination. Japan, as a tourist destination, commands much attention among the Thai. Bangkok itself even has a surprisingly high number of Japanese expatriates, complete with associated neighborhoods of book shops, restaurant-filled streets, and cafes.

Korean cultural artifacts also have been in high demand among Thai consumers. While not as present in packaging and products, the K-Wave has swept across Thailand in the form of pop music, film, and fashion that has made Korea the new “cool” for Thailand. This wave of Korean and Japanese influence is especially interesting, as it can be considered to be unseating the U.S. and Europe as the cultural producers whose styles and products are interpreted and consumed in developing Asia. As Thailand looks to Japan and Korea as  trading partners, tourist destinations, and marks of high quality products, what are the implications for the future?

Overseas Chinese Entrepreneurship

Bangkok’s business community seemed to be the most pronounced example of a phenomenon we experienced in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore: Overseas Chinese entrepreneurship. In Thailand it came as a surprise to discover Chinese heritage, as the vast majority of overseas Chinese business families in Bangkok had migrated long enough ago to adopt Thai surnames. The name Bangkok itself was given by Chinese traders who populated it as a port city before it became the nation’s capital. Vast numbers of Hakka, Fujian, Chaozhou, and Cantonese people settled in the metropolis to found manufacturing companies and create a financial infrastructure to support them. These Chinese now represent an engine of growth in the Thai economy, both producing manufactured goods that make up the bulk of Thailand’s exports, as well as driving growth in Bangkok’s upmarket institutions that firmly place it in the category of “world class city” as it would like to be defined. How far do these Chinese bonds go? Will they facilitate trade and partnership in the new wave of Chinese foreign investment in infrastructure and industry that has occurred over the last three years?  The sheer quantity of Thai-Chinese business families will no doubt make it a space to watch.

People’s Hero

AsiaWheeling visited Bangkok at a time of political upheaval, experiencing street demonstrations and all night speeches projected onto giant screens near a democracy monument. Hundreds of thousands of farmers and fishermen from rural areas came to rally, spill their blood, erect bamboo barriers, and demand elections be held. On the surface, this movement for democracy, against corruption, and against urban favoritism is one of altruism, making it easily encouraged by outsiders’ encouragement. The individual nearly deified on these red shirts is Thaksin Shinawatra, the former Thai Prime Minister who held office from 2001 to 2006. While the protesters demand new elections for a number of candidates, the understanding is that this will allow Thaksin to be re-elected.

Why should the Red Shirts favor Thaksin, other than the fact that he may be monetarily compensating both the leaders of the movement and the commoners for participating in the rallies? He’s a billionaire businessman and Thai Chinese (see above) who represents the elite old guard, who, one would assume, is out of touch with the needs of plebeians. However, during his time at the helm, Thaksin discovered the key to growing his popularity in terms of sheer number of supporters was to satisfy the rural poor. To achieve mass appeal, he instituted the “30 Baht per visit” healthcare policy, allowing Thai nationals to pay only 30 Baht ($0.90) per clinical visit and receive medical treatment at no additional cost. Additionally, he instated rural credit expansion programs, allowing individuals to borrow against their future incomes at very low interest rates, essentially nationalizing the payday loan industry.  Thaksin  legislated direct injections of cash into village development funds, and instated the “One Tambon One Product” stimulus program that  identifies superior goods in each sub-district and formally provides these products with marketing exposure on the national level.

However, something about Thaksin’s behavior doesn’t align with the Red Shirts’ cries to end government corruption. He has been accused of selling strategically valuable national assets to foreign governments, as well as for exhibiting illegal and nepotistic sales of Bangkok real estate to his family members. Now jet-setting around the world, Thaksin operates the Red Shirt puppet show in Bangkok from stopovers in Dubai, Moscow, Brunei, and London.

Before he was a politician, Thaksin was simultaneously a police officer and businessman who experimented with a number of failed ventures including a silk shop, a movie theater, an apartment building, public bus radio services, and security systems, which left him over 50 million baht in debt. Finally, with the help of his police connections, he founded Advanced Information Services (AIS), nominally a computer rental business, but one that went on to capitalize on mobile phone growth in Thailand just as the sector was beginning. Started in 1990, the firm gained a 20-year monopoly concession on 900-MHz GSM mobile service from the Telephone Organization of Thailand, growing rapidly and getting listed on the Thai Stock Exchange. One year later, it became the largest mobile phone operator in Thailand.

Thaksin would later grow his holding company, Shin corporation, into an entity that held large stakes in:

• AIS – The aforementioned mobile phone operator carrying the majority of Thailand’s wireless voice data.
• Shin Satellite – The first Thai company permitted by the Ministry of Transportation to launch satellites
• ITV – A major Thai television station acquired from the King’s Crown Property Bureau, with a 30-year concession to operate UHF frequency broadcasts
• Other portfolio investments include additional media, telecomunication, and information technology firms, as well as Thai Air Asia, the local branch of the low cost carrier.

In 2006 Thaksin and his family then sold their 49.6% stake in Shin Corporation for US$1.88 billion to Temasek Holdings, the sovereign wealth fund of Singapore. He has received considerable judgment for this sale, both because of the national information infrastructure assets that are now owned in large part by a foreign nation, as well because many of Shin Corporation’s business lines benefited favorably from legislation that was put in place when he was at the helm of government.  The fact that this sale was free of any capital gains taxation, based on Thai securities and investment law, further angered many.

In 2008, Thaksin was found guilty by Thailand’s Supreme Court of arranging the sale of plots of land at government auction for a discounted price, violating the National Counter Corruption Act, which prohibits officials and their spouses from entering into contracts with state agencies for such purchases. Sentenced to two years imprisonment, Thaksin continued on his self-imposed exile abroad, requesting political asylum in Britain stating that the case against him was politically motivated. Repeatedly, Thaksin has ignored the arrest warrants and bail terms and failed to appear in Thai court. Since then, he has lived as an elite global fugitive, spending the bulk of his time in Dubai, Manila, the UK,  and Germany, and obtaining status as a diplomat of Nicaragua.

As of the time of this writing, the Red Shirts are still demonstrating on the streets of Bangkok, sporting Thaksin’s image on coffee mugs and tee-shirts, under banners proclaiming “Truth Today” and “End Corruption.” How are the beliefs of the Red Shirts and the actions of Thaksin reconciled? Could it be  possible that, in the eyes of the Red Shirts, Thaksin’s siphoned cash and refusals to face justice are inconsequential in relation to the vast improvement in their quality of living? Or is it that the current government is, in fact, worse, exhibiting both corruption and ignorance of the farmers’ plights?

One thing is for certain.  If Thaksin is indeed seeking revenge on Thailand’s current government, he’s doing an incredible job of unleashing fury on Prime Minister Abhisit’s regime.

It was 10:00 am, and in a rare role reversal, Woody remained in bed as I paced on Steve’s balcony.  With phone in one hand, and MacBook Pro balanced on the air conditioning unit, I sipped on an open WiFi network while avoiding condensation drips raining from above.  That morning the dear parts from SpeedMatrix and My Bike Shop in Singapore had left Thai customs and headed toward Bangkok proper.

Logistically, the parts had to be delivered by Axial Express Courier’s Bangkok counterpart, received at ProBike, fitted to the Speed TR, tested, and packed up ready to go by 7:00 pm for the bus to the Lao border.  I was now at step one of this process.  Where were the parts now?  With the help of Google voice, I dialed Axial Express and chatted with the office manager-cum-client service agent, who provided the phone number of their Bangkok representative.

After a series of negotiations with multiple parties, ProBike would accept delivery of the package and front the money for the customs charges on the goods if I agreed to pay it.  The package was now scheduled to arrive at 2:00 pm, giving us a tight window for repairs.

With Woody still in the throes of a virus, we made our way to November, a nearby cafe that had been amenable to the construction of AsiaWheeling mobile offices.

When the time rolled around, I hopped in a taxi and headed for ProBike.

Wan, my contact at ProBike, was sitting at a desk behind the cashier, and stood up to greet me.  I began thanking her and commending ProBike for all their help.   She cut me off.

“First, bad news,”  she said.

I gulped.  “Show me.”

She held up a threaded bolt that joined the handlebar post to the fork.  Placing it in the fork, it was clearly too small.  Can we bend back the original fork?  Can we coat the bolt in metal? Rubber? Saran wrap?  Caulk?  None of these seemed ideal to either of us.

I sent Woody an SMS and he promptly replied with ideas for a stopgap solution, which it seemed we must implement.  We had spent too long in Bangkok and were beginning to go stir crazy.  A small piece of threaded metal wouldn’t get in our way.

“Can you check the warehouse for a larger part?” I asked Wan, and she agreed, making her way to the door as I poked around the shop floor looking for various metals and polymers to provide a sleeve for the bolt.

Magically, Wan arrived back smiling with a larger piece in hand.  She screwed it in, and voila, the parts joined perfectly.  Now we could get cracking on putting Humpty Dumpty back together.  The bike mechanic who had straightened Woody’s primary ring was assigned to this project, and he worked like the dickens.

I began filing a thin copper washer to widen its gauge as he began slicing the fork with a metal saw.  Measure twice, cut once, I thought. The adage, which my father had taught me in our backyard years ago, crept into my mind.  Next, I was swapping out the inner tubes and tire on the new hub and rim.  Finally, we were moving.

It was now approaching 5:00 pm and the final adjustments were being made to the Speed TR as we fastened the handle bars to the post and took her for a spin.  It was good as new, with a cobalt blue fork to remind me of the rebuilding.  With a few quick calculations, I paid Wan and thanked her and her team, and exited to return to Steve’s room (may his beard grow ever longer and his mind stay ever blissful) to report the success.

Starving, I went on a quick wheel through the back alleys of Lumpini, and grabbed a few baht worth of grilled meats and sticky rice, which I fastened to the bike’s handlebars.  It was 17:10, and we were set to leave at 18:00.  I raced back home.

Woody seemed on the mend, though his appitite had not yet returned, and we did a final scan of Steve’s room and laid a bar of Meiji chocolate on his pillow for good measure.  Strapping down and making the decision to hail a cab, we headed downstairs.

The first couple of cab drivers refused to battle the rush hour traffic for such a long ride, and we settled on one fellow with no meter but a will to negotiate pricing.  Forty five minutes of medium speed through Bangkok on elevated freeways proved stimulating enough, and we were dumped in front of the Mo Chit bus station.  It was packed.  It was Friday before the Thai New Year, Sangkran, and everyone was heading home to see grandma.

We promptly found our bus port by catching the eye of an attendant for Thai Ticket Major, the broker through which we had purchased the tickets, and were ushered to the platform.  Some real characters and some real chaos, but Woody and I both thought to ourselves: things would be ten times more hectic in India.  Thailand had become AsiaWheeling Lite, and we were excited to head north to Laos, land of secret wars, old growth rainforest, and packed-earth roads.

As Woody stood guard, I ventured to the restroom and to acquire something to quench my thirst.  No one, however, was selling our beloved Leo Beer.  No beer, it seemed, was being sold at all at the train station, because of the New Year holiday.  Smart for crowd control, I thought, but surely there must be loose data points to be exploited.  Slipping into a small bodega inside the station, I asked nicely and was granted a can of beer on the condition that I would hide it in my shirt during the sales process.   Giddy, I slipped back to the bus port, and tagged Woody for the bathroom.

After Woody returned and the bus arrived, we loaded our gear on and found ourselves in the two front seats of the bus.  Our knees were cramped, but that detail wouldn’t be enough to dampen our spirits as we slipped in ear plugs, tilted down our Panama hats, and settled into slumber.

Scott and I had just finished a bowl of that fantastic northern Thailand curried noodle dish, Khao Soi, at our favorite joint just a few blocks down from our place at Chez Steve (may his beard grow ever longer, and chest ever hairier), when we decided to lay into the task of getting to Laos.

A woman who had been sitting near us eating a little Khao Soi of her own had overheard our struggles and decided to step in. Soon the three of us were deep in the world of Thai bus service websites, and making calls. The train was certainly sold out by now, since we were looking to leave the Friday before the beginning of the week and a half holiday.

We needed to get a bus, and those were filling up fast as well, she assured us. Finally we were able to find a bus line and a number to call, and with the help of the fine stranger, we were able to secure the last two seats on a third-class bus headed for the border town of Nong Khai. It was too late to pay over the phone, or via the usual method, which is to go to 7-11 and wire funds through the cashier. In order to pay for the ticket, we would need to go to a giant central mall and find a movie theater on the top floor, which would have our tickets waiting. Fair enough.

The parts for Scott’s bike had still not arrived from Singapore, but this was our last chance to get into Laos in time for the New Year, so we had to take the chance. We told our new friend to go ahead and initiate the sale.

We offered to buy her a little green tea ice cream as thanks.

While the three of us enjoyed the celebratory treat, I could not help but think what would happen if the parts did not come tomorrow? Or what if they came, but there was not enough time to perform all the repairs to Scott’s bike in time to catch our 8:30 pm overnight bus? Would we ever escape Bangkok?

Stay tuned dear reader, stay tuned.

Meanwhile in Bangkok, while Scott and I had been stuffing ourselves at the many expensive aristocratic eating houses of that fine city, the people of Thailand had poured onto the streets in one great prolonged protest. They called themselves the Red Shirts, I believe in no small part due to communist tendencies within their political doctrine, but more primarily because they all wear red shirts.

It is technically illegal for a foreigner to engage in Thai political activism when in Thailand, and though (as you may already have gathered, dear reader) Scott and I have not brought any shirts of red color wheeling with us, we did know some foreigners who had made the mistake of wearing one during a protest. The protest had been going on for weeks now, with red-shirted people pouring through the streets, jumping around in the back of pickup trucks, wearing cowboy hats, playing patriotic music, and generally causing a ruckus.

It is my understanding that the primary goal of the Red Shirts is to create enough havoc in the city to convince the government to invoke a rule within the constitution that calls for new elections, should a significant number of people request them. Most of them wish to do this at least in part to give an ousted Thai leader by the name of Thaksin Shinawatra another chance at re-election. Taksin had been ousted by a group of people, many of whom were wealthy Bangkok elites backing a group of military leaders to take over and re-organize the government. These fellows wore yellow shirts, and were, at least at the time of this writing, more notoriously violent than their red shirted equivalents, having done such things as shutting down the Bangkok airport for a few days, and deeply eroding many foreigners’ faith in Thailand as a safe place to travel. Well, looks like the Red Shirts are moving in that direction as well.

In addition to that, there is discontent in Thailand because of the great disparity in wealth and development between Bangkok and the surrounding countryside. Most of the Red Shirts are country folk who have come into the city to make their voices heard. Many of them are also being paid a decent wage to do so by Thaksin and his organizations.

I’m not sure what it’s like to be in Bangkok these days, but while AsiaWheeling was there, it was not scary at all. The Red Shirts were so friendly to us, and appeared to be simply holding a large party in the streets, plastering Bangkok with many signs preaching their non-violent approach. As of late the threat of violence has been increasing. We can’t pretend to even begin to understand the complicated snarl that is Thai politics, so let it be said that the simple wish of this publication is for the peaceful operation of democracy in Thailand.

SIM City 2000 rang out bright and early not for the first time in Steve’s room. It was not really that early by most standards, but during our time in Bangkok we had become so shifted from the normal solar-based schedule that it might as well have been ringing at 3.00 am. We groggily extracted ourselves, grabbed our passports and computer bags and made our way down to the street. It was a Sunday, and the city was still mostly closed for business. We were quite easily able to find a cab, and we explained to the driver that we needed to head to the Ekamai Metro Station. We were not sure where that was, but we knew there would be a bus for the Cambodian border leaving from there at 9:00 am.

It turned out to be quite a way from Dane’s place, and by the time we got there, there was little time to acquire breakfast and coffee. With most of the shops closed, and even the noodle sellers still getting their vats boiling, we found ourselves strolling into McDonalds and purchasing two McEgg sandwiches and a couple of coffees.

It took what seemed like an hour for the sandwiches to emerge, and when they did we thanked them and hurried to the bus stop. When we got there, the rest of the passengers were already filling out their emigration cards: one for Thailand and one for Cambodia.

This was a special bus, just for visa renewals. You see, dear reader, it is true for people from many countries that Thailand issues on-the-spot 15-day visas upon overland entries. Thus could we gain the extra days we needed to fix Scott’s cycle by entering Cambodia for a moment and promptly returning to Thailand.  True, this would require the purchase of a Cambodian visa, but it was one of the only ways to re-legitimize our presence in Bangkok.

With our cards filled out, we forked over some money and our passports to a very sharp Thai woman who was running the operation. She was the kind of woman who is just solid gold for any organization of which she is a part. Organized, edgy, kind and mothering at times, and an all-controlling Voltron-type at others. Sort of like my mom. With her at the helm we felt great, and soon drifted off to sleep.

We awoke somewhere in eastern Thailand when the bus stopped at a convenience store/gas station complex.

It was then that we began to realize our fellow riders on the bus were all of a particular ethnic background, and were speaking a language that was somewhat reminiscent of Spanish. We later discovered that they were Filipinos. Why such a large crowd of Filipinos were all investing nearly $30.00 on a bus to the Cambodian border, a visa into Cambodia, and a ride back was beyond us. But, as always, we invite speculation in the comments.

We were all told to get off the bus and not to come back for 10 minutes. “Yes Ma’am,” we replied, and proceeded to wander the vicinity, checking out the surrounding timber farming operations, and purchasing a few cans of coffee from the shop.

When we returned back to the bus, lunch had been prepared and laid out for us.

We struggled for a bit at the calculus of picking up the trays that now sat on our bus seats and negotiating ourselves into position with the trays on our laps. With that success we could tuck into lunch and begin to wake up.

We were driving through beautiful country, though markedly poorer than anywhere we’d been in Thailand to date. The surrounding jungle grew thicker, and low laying mountains appeared in the distance. Meanwhile they played American crime thriller movies at maximum volume on the bus’s formidable entertainment system.

When we finally reached the Thai-Cambodian border crossing, we found it to be quite modest. A large reasonably ornate arch covered the Thai side, emblazoned with imagery of the king and the royal crests. The crossing was a stretch of gravel road. The Cambodians appeared to be building a competing archway, but it was still under construction, so was currently just a large cluster of scaffolding.

No one appeared to be working on it. Thai people in cowboy hats were crossing the border, perhaps to gamble or buy duty-free items. In addition, a reasonable traffic of gentlemen and women with wheelbarrows transporting all manner of goods flowed back and forth from both sides. The border itself was marked by a 30-foot-deep trench, at the bottom of which some water stagnated.

The border crossing was a bridge over this trench, and after we were stamped and officially exited Thailand, the same woman from the bus was there to meet us. She took our passports and hurried off, leaving us with only photocopies of our essential documents, bearing a passport size image our face stapled to them. “Back here in 10 minutes,” our woman explained “for shopping.”

We made our way across the bridge and were soon swarmed by children begging for money. We then realized that this was the first time in the past month or so that we had been confronted with pan-handlers. Thailand had been almost completely devoid of them. We wandered through the duty-free store, which certainly did feature rock bottom prices. A carton of L&M brand cigarettes, for instance could be had for a little over $3.00. That’s nearly the cost of one pack in Bangkok.

Back on the Thai side of the trench, our fine woman was handing all the Filipino passports back, and had yet to lay into Scott’s and my U.S.passports. Using this time as productively as possible, we chatted with a burly Dutchman with tattoos covering his arms who shared stories with us about working on offshore oil rigs in Angola.

“What are you doing in Thailand?” We asked.

“As least as bloody possible,” he replied, nursing a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger.

We loitered for a bit longer, taking in a number of strange royalist shrines that were there, along with an interesting set of rooster statues. When we finally got our passports back, they had brand new Cambodian visas, smelling like freshly applied paste, issued, signed,  stamped, and voided in the same instant. We gave our passport copies and pictures back to the Thai authorities, who dutifully logged them and filed us away. Then returned to the bus.

On the ride back, we spent most of our time watching “The Hangover” at maximum volume, followed by a violent serial killer flick, “Law Abiding Citizen” starring Jamie Foxx.  The hangover had subtitles that seemed to have been translated into a foreign language, and then back into English.  The film became surprisingly more enjoyable with this unexpected feature.

When we were not transfixed by media, we spend our time talking about what a strange place Las Vegas is, and what a strange place America is, and how much there is to both love and hate about our country.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Singapore, the shipment of parts which would save AsiaWheeling from stagnation and inoperability was stirring and assembling itself, poised to board some mixture of trucks and planes, and make its way to Bangkok where we would be waiting in Steve’ s (may his beard grow ever longer) apartment, to spring into action and resume AsiaWheeling.