Trip to the hospital

It's time to let you and the rest of the world know what's been going on in Vietnam during these past few weeks. I'll start off by describing the events that led to Rich's sweet new look.

We left you, the reader, in total suspense during a previous blog saying we were off to rent scooters to head to Da Lat for the weekend. We apologize for our tardiness. Anyways, this was 2 weekends ago, and long story short, we never made it to our final destination. We ended up leaving about 2 hours later than planned and ended up taking the wrong route, which left us with about 40 km more to travel than the regular route.

It is important to note that these roads were straight ridiculous with some of the craziest traffic and wreckless driving imaginable. Picture 18 wheelers and huge tour buses passing each other on dirt roads, while scooters are driving at you on the right driving against traffic. We equated it to playing a video game, but probably a little more fun. Needless to say, our first incident came when Dave got a flat tire in the middle of nowhere as the sun was going down. Luckily we pulled over and happened to stop right next to a mechanic shop/restaurant that was able to fix us up within 45 minutes. This is where Rich started to weird out the little kids that were so enthralled at the site of 5 decently big white guys in the middle of their desolate, poor village in Vietnam. Insert pic of live pigs and calf's strapped to the back of scooters (no joke).

At this point, it was getting dark and we still hadn't reached the half way point of our alleged four hour journey. We knew from this point that we still had a pretty treacherous mountain climb ahead of us, and all we could see in the mountains was lightning and massive black clouds rolling in. What would normally signal to the average human being as a a reason to either turn around or stop for some reason didn't register. We did not even think about stopping. In fact, we were laughing at how awesome our situation was and how incredible the experience had already been up until that point.

30 minutes later, our trip was stopped prematurely and involuntarily when our friend Ryan skidded out on a patch of sand, causing both he and Rich to hit the deck. Miraculousyly, both were had relatively minor injuries considering the circumstances. Well, I guess if you call a stage 3 shoulder separation and a severely road rashed leg and foot, then we're good. Long story short, we spent most the night in an extremely depressing hospital waiting for the "doctor" to patch our two friends up. We never reached our final destination, but at least we have a damn good story that came out of it.

Let's play the kiddie game: What's wrong?

One of my favorite games as a child was to look at a photo and try and pick out the things that were wrong. Let's look at a recent photo of me and play the game:
Well, What did you see?

1. If you saw a weird cowlick in the back of my head. 1 pt for you. At this point I had not taken a shower for a few days. Not a great idea in 'Nam.
2. If you saw a mustache. Good for you. But that is not wrong, but incredibly right. If you marked it as being wrong with the picture, then you failed. Take away all points.
3. If you saw a creepy elbow in the top of the picture. 1 pt for you. Really, whose elbow is that? Random elbows in pictures are certainly wrong.
4. Right nipple. Everyone knows that I was only born with one nipple (the left one). I had to photoshop this bad boy in. 5 pts for you.

5. Bad Shoulder. If you missed this, then you probably need your peepers checked out. That is a level III and/or possible level V separation my friend. It is what happens when you try to drive a scooter across Vietnam and the dude in front of you crashes and to avoid wrecking into him you decide instead to blow the crap out of your shoulder. At least now I can say: "oh, this bunk shoulder, got that ol' injury back in 'Nam".

A stones throw from our hotel, this is how we ended our long day of work on Thursday. Full moon and amazing sunset. Life is good.

....off to Da Lat, about to go rent 5 scooters and trek through the mountains and navigate the crazy traffic.

Until next time.

The thing is....

...well, really when you get right down to the heart of the matter, the thing is that you are in a barrel of "herbal water", that actually feels more like Slimer's undercarriage from the hit film Ghostbusters, in the middle of a seedy, happy-ending type massage and sauna parlor in Vietnam... it's about to get weird.

Coolest business name ever?

Just when you thought you had seen it all, well, now you have! As we were walking down the beach front in search of a good place to grab a coffee, a moto scooter suddenly veers off the road as if he had run out of gas and had finally found a place to refuel. As most of the time when a local stops the very out-of-place foreigner in Vietnam on the streets, they usually want something in the form of money. Or, in this case Dong. This guy happened to be an "experienced" tour guide and wanted to talk us into doing a hill side scooter tour. What was interesting wasn't his pictures, which were actually amazing, but was that he aptly called his venture "Eddy Murphy Easy Rider - Adventure Tour - Fucking Cool". Incredible. You know when you are able to use two well known pop culture references followed by the expression "fucking cool" as your business name, you've got a pretty good command on the English language humor. That's the beauty I guess of doing business in an emerging economy; you can use the most outrageous English words and phrases known to man, because, hey, who is going to f*cking understand you?

Currently I'm in search of the next most ridiculous thing out there on the streets of Nha Trang and Vietnam. Maybe a scooter adventure to Da Lat this weekend will bring more enlightenment.

Until then, let's get weird.