Pictures and Small Snippets of Travel

Here is a picture of one of Val's many puss bites. She was up to a total of 8 at one point and I had 3 at my worst. This is pretty standard look for 3 days into the puss affair. They go away after about 3 weeks and leave nearly no trace except for the scar tissue and the redness that we are hoping will leave as well.


To the right is a photograph of us taken as we ride through the Vang Vieng countryside in Norther Laos. We were on our way to visit some small local tribes, with an ultimate destination of two caves. One was so cavernous that you could walk back 600m and after the first 20 meters you couldn't go any on w/out a flashlight. It was pitch back and dead silent. The other cave was one in which we has to literally swim to in order to access. But, more on those later.

Here I am with our friend Motoki from Japan, the one on the far left, and my other friend Wall, from Thailand. Wall was impressed that Motoki and I were successfully able to beat all of the local kids from Laos at the Ice Cream Fair in games such as: milk the golf ball out of the fake cow udder, soccer, dress up in a lifesize ice cream suit and sumo wrestle, shoot hoops, find more golf balls in the bucket of colored balls than the other challengers, etc. You get the idea.
We won a 3 inch high stuffed animal keychain of Wall, that we promptly misplaced.


Here is out hideout in Don Det, 4000 Island, Laos. Two people, two hammocks. Check out the granola that we found. Epic lightnight storms every early evening let to beautiful cristal clear skys during the evening. Not a bad set up for $1.00 a night, and to think that these German girls we saw haggled down from $1.00 to $0.75 successfully. We didn't know whether to congratulate them for a job well done or throw our granola at them.




Here we are in Angkor Wat. We're tired. Very. We'd been getting up 3 days in a row much too early. Earlier than the Tuk Tuk drivers and so early that the clubs were still vomiting out people from the night before and as we we're leaving out guest house, people were on their way home from the bars.
We were up early to see the sunrise at Angkor, but, more importantly, we were able to grasp the beauty and sanctity of the place w/out the masses of tourist and hordes of kids pushing this that and the other. Also, we beat the heat, which would come funneling in around 1100AM, but by that time, we'd already have logged 7 hours of touring and nearly 20km of biking for the day.