So I have been blogging my brains out lately, and today I brought our memory stick to the internet cafe for the purpose of uploading said blog posts, and I realized that I forgot to save them to the stick, and they are all still on the stupid computer. This is bad, very bad.

Tomorrow, we go up north to Bahir Dar, Lalibela and Gonder. With any luck, I can upload them there, but if not, you’re out of luck until Thursday, when I will upload 43987592834798798 posts for your love.

Happy Ethiopian Easter!

T and I are in the back of a taxi on the way to the airport, with the windows open so we can breathe in the thick tropical air for the last time. We are wearing seatbelts for the first time in months, which is good because we’re playing chicken with buses, veering around cars and flashing our brights at oncoming traffic. As we drive, I start to think about India.

India is a study in paradox and a constant assault on the senses. It is both maddening and endearing. It is filthy and spectacular. We have given beggars food and had kids share their food with us. I have wanted to punch a sadhu and hug a monk. I have had pervy men leer at me so creepily that I was afraid to be alone with them, and had women hold my hand so warmly that I didn’t want to let go. I have said my name, my country and no thank you more times than I can count. We have seen the Himalaya, the Ganges, the Rajasthani desert and the crashing waves and lazy backwaters of Kerala. We have taken pictures of strangers and been in strangers pictures. We have seen kids chase us to say hello and watched children cry when their parents make them greet us. We have seen the chaos outside the Golden Temple and the silence outside the Dalai Lama’s residence. I have seen more men peeing openly than ever in my life and seen women swim fully clothed. We have smelled the aroma of curry and the stench of urine. We have seen cows handfed chapatis and then watched them root through trash to find food. We have seen piles of rubbish and feces on the streets and the magnificence of the Baby Taj and Udaipur’s floating palaces. We have seen Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Muslims, Jains and Christians. We saw black dirt and belching smoke and more colors than I ever knew were in the spectrum. I ate the best food ever and still managed to lose weight. We have been followed, tugged on, and heard the desperate pleads of barefoot children and been asked for chocolate and pens by immaculately dressed kids just for the cheek of it. I have been driven to laugh, cry and scream in anger and frustration. We have shaken hands with innumerable men and kids and seen the shy smiles of women of all ages. We have seen dozens of people sleeping on the streets and we slept in the home of a wealthy family. We met Punjabis, Gujaratis, Rajputs, Keralans and Maharastrans. We have seen anger, resentment and lust and felt kindness from complete strangers. We have traveled in bicycle rickshaws, auto rickshaws, taxis, cars, trains, planes and buses.

We got all this, even from our sanitized view of India—the white man’s English menu flashpacking version. We know a woman who saw prostitutes and a dead baby in the Ganges. We saw none of these things; maybe we didn’t look close enough. I told a friend of mine that India had beaten the hell out of us, yet still lured us back in. She said, you have to love those abusive relationships. She nailed it exactly. One day we are exhausted by the poverty and filth and poverty, and the next we are invigorated by the vibrance of the architecture and the sweetness of the people. I don’t know if we will miss India, or if we will come back. Either way, we will never forget it.

Given that getting to McLeod Ganj was a nightmare to begin with, we figured that getting out would be equally difficult. Unfortunately, we were right. We were faced with a dilemma: take a 12-hour bus to Dehra Dun and then another 1-hour bus to Rishikesh, or take the 5-hour bus to Pathankot and then a 12-hour train to Rishikesh. We had heard some terrifying horror stories about the buses, and weren’t too keen to test our luck on night bus, so the train it was.

But first, back on the bus. The porter climbed atop the rickety bus and attached our bags to the rails. After feeling relatively sure that the bags wouldn’t fly off during the journey, we got on the bus. There were only a few people on, including a Stunningly Beautiful Teenage girl and two of her friends, sitting opposite us. When we got to Dharamsala and stopped at the bus station, the girl started speaking to me. Her name was Radha and, as with so many locals, she was just trying to test out her English, I think. T got off the bus to go look for some snacks for us, and she started talking to me.

When we would hit a lull in the conversation, there would be a pause and then I would hear a little voice saying Allie? And she would have another question, about T or where I was from, or if I wanted to come to stay at her house. Sadly, our train was already booked, so I couldn’t. About halfway through the ride, she leaned forward and asked for a snap. We thought she wanted us to take a picture of her, but she wanted a picture of me instead. We didn’t have any, but I appreciated the thought. I loved Radha.

The bus ride was spectacular on the way downhill, past snow capped mountains and hollowed-out valleys and through electric green fields. Suddenly, the bus started getting really crowded, to the point that T literally had his face lodged firmly in the belly of a round Sikh man . More and more people kept cramming themselves in and eventually the Sikh man looked down at T and smiled, saying, This is India. It sure is, dude.

After several inexplicable stops, including one during which the Sikh man told us to get off and then returned, yelling GET BACK ON! GET BACK ON!, we got to Pathankot. As before, T and I were the only original passengers. As we were standing to get off the bus, an Indian man smiled at me. I smiled back, and as I was passing him, he took my hand and kissed it. Uh, ok. Then he got off the bus and shook hands with T. T started to climb on top of the bus to get the bags, and the guy kissed my hand again. Then, out of nowhere, he hugged me. So I’m standing there with a stranger grabbing me, my husband climbing up the back of an Indian bus, mouthing DO YOU HAVE EVERYTHING? (please note he was not asking ARE YOU OKAY, BEING MOLESTED BY THIS TOTAL STRANGER?). It was right then that I decided to stop smiling at Indian dudes.

Of course the bus was an hour late, meaning we had only about a half hour to get to the train station. We took a bicycle rickshaw across town, with a tiny old man pedaling away down pot-holed, darkened streets. We got there in time, but weren’t sure whether we were confirmed onto the train, because the trains passenger list said we were waitlisted. Then, we got on the wrong train. Again. Fortunately, there were already people in our seats, or else we would have gone to Kashmir: about 12 hours in the wrong direction.

Eventually the right train arrived, and we found people in our seats again. We had booked third-class sleeper seats, and were assigned two bottom bunks. When we got onto the train, three women were sitting in our seats. Exchange, they said, pointing to their top bunks. Fine, fine. We just wanted to sleep anyway, and it was already 10pm and we had been on the bus for five hours.

This might have been our dumbest move yet. Giving the women the bottom bunk allowed the to chatter away as long as they wanted. Yak yak yak for hours, and then they finally went to sleep. Of course, two of them snore like freight trains; one with kind of a nasal snort and the other with a deep, rattling phlegmy breath. Yippee. Then, just as T and I went to sleep, one of them turned on the fan, which woke us right up. I fell asleep again and then woke up to my blanket being thrown on me, apparently because it was dangling too far over the edge.

Eventually, we fell asleep but surprise! At 5am, the light came on. Apparently, it wasn’t enough that these women took our beds, talked and snored all night and then turned on the fan so that they were comfortable, they decided to wake us up BEFORE DAWN as well. Never in my life have I wanted to smite someone so badly. AND THEN, they bought some damn chai. If you know me at all, you know the one thing I cannot abide is nasty mouth noises. I have to physically leave the room if someone is chewing with their mouth open or snapping on gum. Guess what? These women were champion tea slurpers.

Just as I was contemplating throwing myself out the window onto an oncoming train, they decided that 6am was an excellent time to start calling their friends and wishing them a happy birthday. Because EVERYONE wants to hear happy birthday at 6am!

I am never doing anything nice for anyone again. I don’t care if they are 90 years old—next time, if someone is in our seats, they are moving straight away or they will face the wrath of the thighs.

After the Shatabdi to Amritsar, T was convinced that all Indian trains serve food. They do not. Here’s the picture of T when we arrived in Rishikesh, on about 3 hours sleep, having eaten half a bag of chips in the past 24 hours. There is no hair gel in his hair; that’s all sleep, or lack thereof.

We got up early to get our $3 train ($3 total, not each) to Pathankot and were promptly surrounded by no less than 20 Indian teenage boys who encircled us and stared, for no good reason, for an hour. A train arrived and we got on, thinking it was ours, until one of the teens told us it was going to Delhi. Good thing, too, since it was skanky as hell. Finally, our train arrived and left, an hour late, and it was equally if not more skanky than the first one.

We sat on a wooden bench for 3 hours, and halfway through a family got on and we made friends with their two little boys. The two little boys wanted to sit next to the window, so one sat next to the man across from us, and one sat across from T. After a while, the mother told the eldest boy to give us some cookies, so he graabbed the package and thrust it onto T’s knee, laughing his little head off the whole time. In return we tried to give them some Maine postcards, which the little one happily clutched and the older one kept trying to give back.

Then another family, with 4 kids, got on and started begging. I’ll tell you what–India gives poverty a whole new name. They had a beautiful baby girl naked from the waist down, and a little boy and two other girls. One of the girls was carrying empty plastic bottles, and the oldest girl and the boy were, of course, begging. Obviously, they saw us and promptly stood there calling me Didi (which I think means auntie) and poking me in the leg until T gave them 6 rupees (about 20 cents).

Normally, we try not to give money to kids because they are just being pimped out by their parents instead of going to school, but after a while, it became apparent that we had to give them something or they would never leave. When we got off the train, our little boy friends said goodbye, calling out Goodbye Didi, and the beggar children’s mother started following me, pulling on my shirt and also calling me Didi until T gave her another 10 rupees.

Then we got in a rickshaw to the bus station, where we had hoped to get a tourist bus to Dharamsala, but when we arrived, the national bus was departing and the porter was screaming NOW! NOW! Thus, we were ushered onto the departing which was filthy, with about four inches of grime on the floor, along with peanut shells and orange peels and God knows what else. The driver stuck my bag under the back seat and T spent the next 3 hours holding onto his. We got a 3-person seat to ourselves for about 2 1/2 hours, until the driver made T put the bag in his lap so other people could fit on.

The drive was completely manic and sometimes terrifying, and we spent a great deal of time passing people on turns and careening around cliffside roads on two wheels. It seemed as if we stopped every 30 feet for a dropoff or a pickup, and the porter would blow a whistle, and the bus would slow down so people could hurtle themselves on or off, like a very low-rent version of a London bus.

We got to Dharamsala and then were put onto another local bus which was just as bad as the prior one, except T and I were in the back seat this time and T had to sit with his feet on top of the bags for about half an hour because the bus was jam-packed with schoolgirls and Buddhist monks. The journey from Pathankot is about 80km, and it only took about 4 hours. It seems Indian public transport is even more efficient than Cambodia’s. Oh joy.

When T and I went to buy our bus tickets, we started at our hotel. $15, the man said. Outrageous, we thought! So we trekked all over Battambang for tickets elsewhere. We went to the Phnom Penh Surya Bus Company, on whose dirty buses we had previously traveled. $13, the woman said. Insanity, we thought! So we went back to the hotel and bought the $15 tickets, under the assumption that for $2 extra per person, the buses must be cleaner and nicer than the ones we had already seen.

Ah, the naivete of youth (or near-youth). We arrived at the bus station and were promptly ushered into the waiting room, which was filled with 3 European woman and a Malaysian man. Dozens of Cambodians stood outside, waiting for buses. We waited for about 45 minutes before a man started screaming “Bangkok! Bangkok!” and waving his arms wildly at us.

We went outside to discover that there was a virtual scrum of people trying to get onto the bus, and we were at the end of the line. So much for arriving 45 minutes early. When we handed our bags to the porter and got on the bus, I almost stroked out. The bus was already full, with plastic stools in the aisles. Oh no, I did not pay $15 to sit my big badonk on a plastic stool to the Thai border. The driver pushed past me and started making the locals move. He put T and the Malaysian man in the very back row, in seats that were meant for 5 people but fit six. He pulled someone out of a seat next to a monk and tried to make me sit there, at which point the monk almost stroked out. Instead, the man sitting across the aisle from the monk was put next to him and I went into his seat. Two people in front of me were pulled from their seats and one German (or Spanish?) girl sat in there, and her friend pushed past the Italian girl who was next in line, told her “They’ll find something for you,” and sat down. And so the poor Italian girl was put onto the step at the back of the bus, in front of T and the Malaysian, sitting on the floor.

Now, I know I am prone to exaggeration, but I kid you not: this was the grimiest, filthiest, nastiest bus I have ever seen and I almost cried when I thought about how we paid $4 extra for it. I didnt want to touch ANYTHING. There was an adorable woman sitting diagonally across from me (who offered to share her seat with the Italian) who kept turning to smile at me. I would smile back, and at one point, she reached over and stroked my leg. Have I mentioned I love Cambodians? If it wasn’t for that woman, I done would have lost my damn mind. At one point, I was longing for the GREYHOUND. That is how low we sank on this bus.

Fortunately, it operated as a local bus in the same way as the others, and it wasn’t too long until the Italian girl took the seat of a departing Cambodian (which was good, because I was going to offer her my seat halfway through and I didn’t much fancy sitting on the crusty, disgusting floor). Halfway through, most of the people on the bus got off, including my friend and the man sitting next to me, and T and the Malaysian were able to move forward into human-sized seats.

 After about three hours, we made it to the Thai border at Poipet, which was a relief. Having said that, I should add that while this bus was nasty as, it was not nearly as painful and exhausting and wretched as the bus from Siem Reap to Poipet, along the road from hell in the bus without A/C behind the Frenchman who smelled of ripe Camembert. For seven hours.

We managed to get through Cambodian immigration with little hassle and then went to the Thai side, where it was slower than George Bush trying to solve a math problem. It took FOREVER. This is where I started to get seriously stroppy. Eventually, T reached the desk at the front and went through. I reached the desk and the immigration man looked at my passport and looked at me. Looked at the passport again and looked at me. Held the passport up to me and looked quizzically. Yes, dude. Thats me in the passport. That’s me after a shower, with clean clothes on, with makeup and A/C. This is me after 3 hours on Satan’s Own Buslines, in 90 degree heat, having waited for an hour to get to this desk, sweaty and starving and needing to pee. Give me my damn stamp already.

And then we had to wait some more, on the Thai side, with all the whiteys also wanting to go to Bangkok. For another hour. We were given giant tags that said BANGKOK and told to wear them at all times. The good news was that they had clean bathrooms there. The bad news was that when I went to go to the ATM to get us some money, I had given T my tag, and the man in charge yelled “WHERE IS YOUR TAG?! PUT ON YOUR TAG!!” and were I not so exhausted and crabby, I would have strangled him to death and done a little dance over his dead body.

Then the ATM did not work. This is a recurring theme with our American bank account on this trip, and no matter how any calls I make to the bank, they still manage to screw it up at precisely the time when we need money most. I won’t say anything bad about the bank because my uncle works there, but I will say that Hugo, please find another bank to hire you because I really, really am wanting to blow yours up.

Eventually, T managed to get some money from either his English account or our Aussie bank (this is the beauty of living in so many countries, apparently) and I was fed. T also bought some provisions (Pringles and oranges, who would have guessed?) for the road. And then we got onto the Thai bus. The Thai bus was (and always is, after Cambodia) sheer heaven. It was a double decker! With soft, cushy seats! And people who sell food to you ON the bus! On roads that do not primarily consist of potholes!

We got to Bangkok at about 10pm, having left Battambang at 12.30. As usual, there was a glut of taxi drivers standing around the bus, waiting to overcharge us by double digit percentages. We spoke to two, who said they would not take us using the meter. With the third, he tried to say no and I just walked away. I AM IMMUNE TO YOUR SNEAKY TRICKS, THAI TAXI DRIVER! I am also exhausted and grumpy and just looking for someone to kill, so I have no problem if you want to volunteer! My trick worked, as it so often does, and he agreed to the meter.

When we got to the guesthouse, the taxi fare was 71 baht. The driver had originally tried to charge us 200. That alone pissed me off and I was seething. I just wanted to go to bed and watch some CNN and sleep for many hours. We went into the guesthouse to check in. T had called the guesthouse from Cambodia and was told that he needed to email them his credit card details to book the room, because we were checking in so late. Emailing them the info meant that he needed to find their website, email them, wait for a code in response, and then check in, all of which he did. So imagine our surprise when they had the room booked for THE WRONG NIGHT.

And that is when I lost my mind. T had emailed them the correct night, but apparently that was too confusing, so they booked us in for the next night, and now they were full. This is when I started saying “JESUS CHRIST!” in very loud tones and dropping my bags on the floor very loudly. I did not quite achieve Haley rage, but I was not far off. It was almost 11 at night, we had been traveling for nearly 12 hours, and EVERYONE IS EITHER INCOMPENENT OR TRYING TO ROB US!

Probably terrified of my fury, they managed to book us a room down the road and promised us free breakfast and bag storage the next day. Thus, I crossed them off my list of people to kill. T and I went for a wander to find something to eat, but given that it was 11pm, everything was closed except for the street vendors selling chicken satay. I love me some chicken satay, but I wanted to sit down and try to regain my sanity. We passed a pizza place, but they wouldn’t take cards. Then, just as we were about to pass our hotel again, there was a golden retriever, just sleeping in a driveway. It was like a sign from God. I told T I was going to pat it and he couldn’t stop me (at that point, I doubt he would have tried), so I did and peace returned to my heart. We just went back to the hotel for sandwiches for dinner, and we checked our email and went to bed. And, fortunately, no one died, including myself. But we were close, so close.

On what was meant to be our last night in Phnom Penh, T and I decided to go to a local Indian restaurant for dinner. BIG MISTAKE. I had a mango lassi, and we shared two dishes for dinner. As soon as I tasted the lassi, my brain said something was wrong, but my stomach overruled it, crying, “ME LIKEY THE LASSI! LASSI BE GOOD!” As you can see, my stomach is not as wise as my brain, and it soon paid the price.

I awoke the next morning with my first case of Delhi Belly. I had not expected it to come in Cambodia, but there you have it. It started with some truly disgusting burps that tasted like rotten egg, and progressed from there. T took one look at me and made an executive decision to stay in Phnom Penh and not get the bus to Kampot. He went downstairs to speak to our friend at the front desk, who kindly changed our tickets despite the fact that we were supposed to be leaving in an hour.

It was a full 48 hours before I could even consider eating another meal, and two more days in the beautiful Relax Guesthouse (I have never been so grateful for good cable in my life). I spent most of the time moaning about how stupid I was to stop taking my digestive supplements and swearing to take them every day to follow. T was the best nurse ever, going out to buy me some crackers and 47 cans of Sprite, and not kicking me in the head for ruining our plans. This is why I married this man.

I don’t ever want to eat Indian food again. That could be a problem in about two weeks.

We awoke on our second morning on Don Khone, thinking we were at least mildly prepared to get down to Phnom Penh. We knew it was a long day and weren’t even sure how far we could go. We bought tickets from Mr Pan the night before, but were informed we could only go as far as Kratie, so we bought tickets to Kratie.

At breakfast, we met Roger and Nadine, a Dutch couple who was going with us to Cambodia, but were allowed to go to Phnom Penh, for some reason. At breakfast, we also met a very sassy American woman in her mid 60s who was traveling through Laos and Vietnam and Cambodia ALONE. Her husband doesn’t like to travel, so every couple years she takes a trip by herself; she’s been to SE Asia, India, Egypt, Indonesia, China and Israel all by herself. When I heard that, she became my hero in life (I can overlook the fact that she liked Mike Huckabee. Or can I?).

At 8 am, the five of us got onto a longboat (the American woman was going to a waterfall) and cruised back past all the little islands and the seagrass and the water buffalo, to the jetty. We were directed up the hill from the jetty, where about a million other Westerners were standing in a big clump. Suddenly, I got a very bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. What if Cambodian transport hadn’t improved at all in two years?

My fears were soon confirmed when three minivans pulled up and we piled 9 of us into each van (discounting the driver). We all squished in, and we soon became very closely acquainted with Roger and Nadine. They are almost done with uni, but decided to take a year off to travel the world and figure out what to do with their lives. They’ve done China and SE Asia so far, and are considering India and Nepal.

The bus bumped up and down for about a half hour down a dirt road until we reached Lao immigration. Lao immigration at the Cambodian border is a shack that looks a lot like the ones in Maine, for kids to wait for the bus in the winter. We cleared the Lao side, then walked about 500 meters down the dirt road to an identical shack on the other side of the road for Cambodia. T paid extra for us to go to Phnom Penh (we ended up paying an extra $10, just because Mr Pan was too distracted to get us the right tickets, thus, I have put out a hit on him.) And then we sat. And sat. And sat. For about three hours, we sat in an increasingly large group, just waiting around for no apparent reason.

Just when I was about to expire from dehydration, they decided it was time to go, and three minivans appeared from the other side of the border. They tried to fit everyone for Phnom Penh into one van, which clearly wasn’t happening. So then they just started throwing bags on top of buses and putting people in, regardless of where their bags were.

And so there we were again, T and I crammed into the back seat of a slightly larger minivan with an Englishman and an Aussie who kept falling asleep on T’s shoulder. We drove for an hour to Stung Treng, when we abruptly stopped and were ushered into some cafe and told to eat. Only our bus had arrived, and we were a little concerned about our bags, which were on a different van, but suddenly a Cambodian man came staggering over, carrying them and calling, “WHOSE BAGS IS THIS?” About 10 minutes later, the other two busloads of people crawled up, sweating and looking miserable. It turns out our bus just drove across the bridge, but they were all put onto a boat to cross the river, and then told to walk for about a kilometer with their bags in the blistering sun. For once, we chose right.

After an hour at the cafe, we were put onto two new, bigger buses and told we would go to Phnom Penh. There were some single seats by the window, so I claimed one for me, and the one in front for T. Unfortunately, there was an extra Cambodian driver who spent the entire ride sitting in the aisle between T and Roger and Nadine, so my planning didn’t work so well.

The exciting news was that there was a TV on this bus, so we started watching that movie with Jet Li and Aaliyah until we hit the dirt road at Kratie, when it was abruptly turned off. after the dirt road, the driver put on a whole new movie, and funnily enough, it was a Chinese one T and I saw on our flight to Beijing, about Vietnamese gangs and Hong Kong cops. We stopped for a quick break about an hour into the movie and when we got back into the van, the driver put a whole other movie on—another movie with Jet Li and Jason Statham, which we got to watch all the way through.

Apart from the movies, the most entertaining part of the whole trip was the Aussie from our first bus, who is a world champion sleeper. He somehow managed to fall asleep on the dirt road, which is a feat in and of itself, but he then managed to sleep as his head clunked against the window repeatedly. We would be watching the movie, and then CLUNK, and he would sleep right through. I think he should enter a competition or something, because I was getting a concussion just listening to him.

The least entertaining part of the ride was when we were careening down the road at about 70mph and CLUNK. No, not the Aussie’s head…a dog. T says the driver looked upset (I couldn’t see him), and I certainly was, but we kept on trucking down the road at a rapid pace and didn’t even slow down. I’m hoping the dog was completely fine (unlikely), or that he died on the spot. Poor pup.

Finally, 12 hours after we left Don Khone and 6 after leaving Kratie, we arrived in Phnom Penh. I am sorry to report that transport in Cambodia is not even remotely improved from 2005, and if you don’t believe me, just ask my crippled body.

So, after 12 hours on the bus to Pakse and an hour waiting around, we finally hit the road to Si Phan Don. It turned out that the kind-faced man was right about one thing: we arrived at Si Phan Don before noon, meaning that the entire journey from Pakse took 17 hours. I love me some public transport.

We were on the bus with three French couples and an English couple. We knew we were ultimately going to Si Phan Don (Four Thousand Islands), but we weren’t sure which one, because our ticket kept changing. Our original ticket said Don Khong, which was a large one in the north. We did not want Don Khong, so we were pleased when they changed it in Pakse to Don Det, without us even asking. They just collected our original tickets and handed us a new one with a new destination.

It turned out that it didn’t really matter which island we wanted to go to, because no one else had any idea where we were going either. There was one French couple in the bus who was insistent that we go to Don Khone. We passed the turnoff to Don Khong and the bus driver asked if anyone wanted to go there. Yes! Yes! The French couple wanted to go, so down the bumpy road we went, to the river. When we got to the river, they realized they wanted Don Khone (it was all a little confusing and more than a little annoying, after 12+ hours of transport). So back down the bumpy road we went, to the jetty to Don Det and Don Khone.

At the jetty, they directed a bunch of us to a wooden longboat, and we filed in. We floated slowly down the river, past small islands and large rocks, by half-submerged water buffalo and seagrass. We floated between two islands, and the boat docked at the one on the left. We all got off the boat, and the Frenchman was practically apoplectic about being at the wrong island. He was swearing and calling the driver nasty names (behind his back) until T pointed out that we were actually on the island he wanted. Dumbass.

A woman greeted us almost immediately and asked if we needed accommodation and when we said we did, she took us to a guesthouse, which was one of a series of basic cabins along the riverside. Our room was clean and simple, but just across the yard was a kicking Lao wedding going on, with some more crazy Asian pop blasting from the speakers. The lady informed us the wedding would be over at 6, and apologized profusely.

We walked down the road toward the bridge to Don Det and stopped at a toll booth that was charging $1 for foreigners who wanted to cross the bridge or walk under it. Pissed off, we decided to have lunch at the restaurant just before the toll booth, where we watched the river drift lazily past. To T’s horror, there was no Dark Beer Lao in Si Phan Don. When he recovered from the trauma, we made our way back to the room, where we both passed right out from exhaustion, even sleeping through the Lao rap next door. We woke up later, covered in sweat but just in time for the sunset. I’m not sure why, but sunsets in southern Laos and Cambodia are the most amazing I have ever seen. It looks as though the entire sky is on fire.

Just after sunset, the guesthouse turned the generator on, so we finally had electricity. We only had power from about 6 to 10 pm, and it came on and off without warning. We also had no hot water, which was kind of a shock to the system, but very useful in the heat. Because there is no universal power on the island, the restaurants are pretty basic and simple, and all offer almost identical menus. The food was okay, but nothing particularly spectacular, though it must be said that T had some lovely fried noodles on our first night, when we waited until dark and then sneaked past the toll booth, like the criminals we are.

The next day we were feeling highly ambitious, so we decided to rent bikes. I’m not sure what’s wrong with us, if were both missing chips in the brain or something, but we will never learn that it’s always a terrible idea to rent bikes. It’s almost as if we are abused spouses or something. No matter how badly the bikes beat us, we keep running back. Perhaps we should seek psychological help.

We decided to bike to the waterfall, and then bike along some of the paths on Don Khone, and maybe across the bridge to Don Det. We paid the toll at the bridge and went on our merry way. It was really hot, with a blistering sun, but we decided to go anyway, because WE LOVE BIKES! The waterfall is the biggest in the region, with various tributaries all feeding together into giant gushing falls.

Of course, it was not enough that we just look at the main waterfall…we decided to go to the beach for more adventure. We couldn’t find the beach, so we ended up climbing down over all kinds of burning hot rocks in our decrepit flipflops until we finally found it. The beach was a large stretch of sand leading down to the river, which was far too turbulent to swim in. Walking back to the main path, T directed me to the woods, where he told me we should go, based on some footprints and bike tracks. I suggested we go to the obvious path with two bikes already sitting next to it, and he said condescendingly, You have to follow the signs. Guess where the signs led us? Into the middle of the friggin’ forest where no one had ever set foot before. We tramped through the woods and the dried grasses and sticks and leaves for about 20 minutes before we found our way back to the main path. Signs, please. Thats the last time I let boy scout testosterone dissuade me from COMMON SENSE.

If only that were the end of our troubles. We stopped for some drinks to rehydrate ourselves after our rock climbing/extreme hiking experience, and on the way back to the bikes, my sandal fell apart. Still motivated to be ACTIVE!, we hopped on our bikes and took a right, down to the beach. The freshwater dolphin tours leave from the beach, but we decided to wait until late afternoon to try those, because the dolphins are around more in the morning or late afternoon.

And then we made our fatal mistake. On the way out from the beach is a sign that has the name of a village, 4km away. 4km is NOTHING! WE HAVE BIKES! WE ARE YOUNG AND STRONG! Off we went. Stupid, stupid, stupid. The road was narrow and full of rocks. It eventually led to a village, but not ours. We ended up biking through the village until we came to a point of land full of Japanese tourists on bikes, who shook their heads at us and said, No go. Back we went, taking a different road this time after the village (mostly because I couldn’t stomach the bumpy rock road). We biked through some woods, and some children ran up to us and asked for money, which was weird, because we haven’t seen much begging. We rode past them, and then we discovered why they were asking.

We were stuck. The road led to a metal bridge that had collapsed onto itself. I almost cried. So we walked our bikes down a hill, through a beach, and back up a hill. We kept riding, past two more bridges. On one, T took each bike and carefully walked across the fragile bridge, with me following (but not at the same time, lest the fragile bridge collapse under the weight of T and the thighs). At the third bridge, we walked around and were trying to lug the bikes back up a dirt hill when an angel appeared. A Dutch or Scandinavian girl, all alone, popped her face over the top of the hill, laughing and asking “Maybe not such a good idea with bikes?” She helped us get the bikes up the hill and told us it wasn’t so far to go back to town. We are both pretty sure she had a halo.

And so on we went, sweaty and dehydrated and hungry. We got to a T-junction and almost had simultaneous strokes from the stress of not knowing where to go. We kept going straight and almost cried when we reached our first village in ages. I’m pretty sure we terrified the woman in the town who owned the restaurant where we stopped. We pulled in, with matted hair and dirty faces, and choked out water. The poor woman handed us some and stepped way, way back. Rejuvenated by the water, we kept going. When we finally reached the village, I would have cried, were I not so exhausted and dehydrated. It was 4pm and we left for the waterfall before 11. Never in my life have I been so happy for a cold water shower.

I mean it this time: I am never, NEVER, renting a godforsaken bike again. Please, don’t let me do it. Punch me in the face instead–it would be less painful.