Motorbiking the Laos countryside

The second group of Germans who added adventure to our time in Laos appeared in the form of a 45-year-old curly blonde Lufthansa flight attendant named Maurice, an ex-army man with boundless energy who had managed to phenegal an annual 5-month paid vacation from the airlines, and a 24-year-old medical student named Lydia, a squatter in an East German warehouse-turned-commune who traveled exclusively for the sake of witnessing authentic displays of traditional life in small towns.

Little did we know, when we met them, that this unlikely duo would inspire Bike Trip Number Two.

Bike Trip: The Sequel wasn’t as ill-fated as the first one I did in Spain. Nor did it use a traditional bicycle. No, this bike trip came in the incarnation of a motorcycle, which we rented for $8 a day, threw some clothes and a camera under the seat, and drove across the mostly-empty roads of rural Laos. My friend Sara, who’s confidently powered a motorcycle for 15 years, did the driving; I rode passenger.

These two Germans were staying at the same guesthouse where we lived in Champasak, a World Heritage site of ancient Khmer ruins, though we didn’t meet them until the four of us shared a cramped pickup truck ride out of town. They themselves had just met each other the previous day, when they began chatting in English at the guesthouse and slowly discovered they spoke the same native language.

They were planning on renting motorcycles and driving around the Bolevan Plateau, a rural, fertile crest of rolling hills dotted by small villages where freely-roaming livestock outnumbers the people.




Sara and I had been entertaining the same idea. We heard the waterfalls in the Plateau were magnificent, and we were enticed by the idea of visiting villages that couldn’t be accessed by public transportation.

Of course, we’ve seen plenty of travelers with badly skinned knees, sprained elbows, deep cuts on their face and exhaust pipe burns scarred across their shins. Each one has the same story: they’d never driven a motorbike before and rented one for the first time while in Thailand or Laos, only to skid out on gravel and win a souvenir lifetime scar.

We’ve long made fun of these people. “If you don’t drive a motorcycle at home,” Sara has always said, “don’t drive one on vacation.”

But with three experienced drivers and me as the passenger, the four of us joined forces, rented motorbikes and set off into the sunset. We completed a 3-day motorcycle trip without seeing a single traffic light. We were in far too rural countryside for that.

Biking through the Plateau was like being the superstar of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. In every village, at all times of day, naked Laotian children (the children under age 10 seem to be allergic to clothing) would race to the side of the road to wave at our passing motorcade. A smile would light up the kids’ face and they’d yell “Sabai Dee,” hello, as our tires sprayed desert dust onto their naked bodies. If we were steering across a curve, or honking at a herd of cows in the middle of the road, or for some other reason had to pass them without waving back, an extremely evident crestfallen look would appear upon their face, as the most interesting thing they’d seen all week breezed past them.

The trip went smoothly for the first two days. The villages all looked the same: sparsely populated ranch-style homes propped up on stilts to avoid the annual flooding. The grounds were covered with boars, chickens, cows, water buffalo, dogs, cats, and goats, and at night in the guesthouses we’d spot dragonflies, large geckos and toads. There were new waterfalls every 10 kilometers, and red dusty road accented by green palm fronds and the scent of wild jasmine.



By the start of day three, our clothes and hair were caked with red dust from the roads, and our stomachs were churning from the incessant bowls of rice-noodle soup, but we felt quite content.

That’s when everything fell apart.

Lydia knocked on my door early that morning. “I have to go to the hospital,” she said. She’d been vomiting all night, and her fever had risen to 38.5 Celsius (normal is 37).

We had been sleeping at a women’s union, the headquarters of a United Nations-funded NGO in which female volunteers travel to rural villages to teach Laotian mothers about public health practices. The ringleaders of the operation happened to be traveling by car that morning to Pakse, the nearest town with a hospital, 150 kilometers away. They volunteered to take Lydia by car; I would be left to power her motorcycle back.

Small problem: I have no idea how to drive a motorcycle. I had been riding in the passenger’s seat for a very good reason.

Next problem: I had to learn, immediately, how to drive one of these beasts, and I had to get us back to Pakse, a 150 km away, by no later than 4 p.m., so we can return the bikes and catch a bus north to the capital, where some friends from Boulder, Colo. were waiting to meet us.

“It’s simple,” Sara said, as she attempted to teach me the reins. “So you accelerate with the handlebar …. and your left leg changes gears … you can brake with your right leg, that’s the back brake … there’s also a hand brake that controls the front wheel ….. be careful not to skid out by applying the back brake too hard …. that’s the one you control with your foot …. and you can start in gear, but be sure not to rev it too much if you do …”

Simple? I needed Cliff’s Notes to remember all these rules. I needed a veritable “cheat sheet” to label all the buttons, bars and pedals. I’m sure that once you’ve learned how to drive, it becomes instinctual; like driving a car. But dammit, how was I supposed to make split-second traffic decisions when I couldn’t remember where the damn brakes are?

I turned the key, set the clutch in neutral and revved the handlebar; popped the bike into first gear and started rolling. Oh crap, how do I stop? And why is it so hard to steer at low speeds?



“You’ll do fine,” Maurice said. “Its easier the faster you go.”

“Great,” I replied as I began driving the 1st of 150 long kilometers. A wild boar scurried across the road, stopping directly in my path, about 20 feet from me. “Um, where is the horn??”

Laotian roads are a little like a video game: you never know what’s going to pop out at you. One minute, you’re in fourth gear, cruising along, feeling fine. The next second – why did the chicken cross the road? A whole pack of chickens crossing the road! You swerve, and try once again to remember where the horn is located. And which of these two brakes controls the front wheel?

Then you think with envy about all your friends who had the benefit of practicing motorbike driving in short spurts before they made their first long-distance haul. Ten minutes of driving feels fine; several hours at a stretch, and the stress starts eating at you.

Then, in the spirit of every long-distance bike trip I’ve done, the inevitable happened: it began to rain. A freezing cold, hard downpour.

Those of you who read this blog last spring remember that on my first bike trip – the one where Kim and I were trying to cruise across Spain on bicycles – we were met with rainy weather. It never rains in Spain, and it REALLY never rains in southern Spain, but when I jumped on a bike, the skies opened and a cascade of water poured out.

Well, the same is true for Laos. It’s a desert climate; cactuses grow and the roads are covered in dust. And it’s a hot, palm-tree lined climate, where people use umbrellas exclusively to shield themselves from the sun. What are the chances of a cold shower?

But of course, it did, and this time, we couldn’t delay our trip: we had to catch a bus from Pakse that night. So we rode through the rain, weaving around puddles, wearing nothing but a tanktop, the only clothing we had. Goosebumps were forming on top of my goosebumps, and I started loosing feeling in my fingers. Twice, we pulled over to warm up our hands by the heat of the engine. We’d park the bike, crouch down, and tap-tap-tap on the hot coating around the oil tank, trying to regain dexterity. At least the chattering teeth and the numb toes distracted me from my trepidation about the motorbike.

Perhaps I’m not meant to be making bike trips in foreign countries. But that’s not going to stop me from trying it again.

Local drug lord

We met Toby in the back of a pickup truck during a 4-hour ride to Laos’ southernmost islands.

“Sabai Di!,” Toby said as soon as he saw us: the Laotian hello. “Where you come from? Where you going?” His black shirt was worn and filled with holes. He twisted his short dreadlocks with one hand. His eyes darted around the truck as he spoke.

We didn’t know it at the time, but Toby would be the first in a string of Germans who’d make our trip to Lao far more fascinating. (The story about the next set of Germans will have to wait until the next blog posting).

He hardly stopped chatting during the scorching hot ride through the red dusty desert. He talked to anyone who would listen. He spoke to all the Laotians in the truck, even the ones who couldn’t speak English (or German), and he hardly noticed they spoke different languages.

When I started snacking, Toby asked for a piece of my donut, which he offered to a young Laotian kid sitting nearby. The little boy looked at him shyly, then quickly looked away, burying his face in his mother’s skirt. Toby handed the donut back to me.



Toby had been in Don Det, the island where we were both headed, for six weeks. He earned a good living in Munich working for a retirement home, but he wanted to leave it. He had fallen in love with the simplicity of Don Det and wanted to live there forever.

“It peaceful man!,” he said with a twinge of an accent. “You can make relax, play with children, talk with locals.”

Don Det, a small oval-shaped island clustered in a group of 4,000 Islands just a few kilometers north of Laos’ border with Cambodia, hasn’t yet experienced the trappings of modern life. Electricity, banks, and cars are a thing of the future. Don Det is one of the few places where locals haven’t yet learned to create a “tourist area” that’s segregated from where the villagers live. On this tiny island, all people live side-by-side.



Foreigners live along the Mekong River in straw-roofed guesthouses built from wooden planks, and spend their days swaying in a hammock on the front deck or floating on an inner tube down the Mekong. Locals live less than 10 feet inland, in single-story wooden houses lifted by stilts to avoid flood damage during the rainy season. The families sleep inside the homes at night and hang out underneath the homes during the day. Laos is the country that seems to have perfected the use of hammocks, which are strung underneath every village home. The front yards all bear cactus, geese, pigs, dogs, cats, and red desert dust. Each house has a small vegetable garden elevated into the air on stilts so that the chickens can’t peck at the crops. There has never been a car on this island.



The one and only “road,” a dirt path too narrow for cars, sees only light bicycle and foot traffic. There are no refridgerators. Boatmen arrive in the morning with deliveries of ice for the coolers. The closest ATM is 4 hours north; Toby was going on a day-long ATM run when we met him. Bugs swarm the night skies, flying into your eyes as you trod down the pitch-black path. You can’t even read by the light of your headlamp without inhaling nostrils full of bugs. So you go to sleep after dusk, listening to the barking geckos and a symphony of insect chirps, whirrs and squeaks, and you wake up at dawn when the roosters crow.



It’s easy to see how someone would love Don Det; much tougher to see how someone could spend six weeks there. We wondered, for the first few days, how Toby was entertaining himself on this small island. We didn’t have to wonder long.

On our third or fourth day there, Toby found me laying in a hammock at night, gazing at a clear, bright view of the Big Dipper. “Get up! Get up!,” he shook the hammock. “My friend is having a birthday. We are making a party!”

“Making a party, eh?,” I said. He was furiously shaking the hammock. He was not going to take no for an answer. I found a candle and began locking the door to my bungalow by flickering light. Toby paced impatiently.

“Come hurry!,” he said. “Wha – you don’t need to lock the door, no one here will take your things! Bho Pang Yan – no worries, this is Lao, no worries. Let’s go!”

We started walking down the familiar dirt path, the only road on the island. He called out to every man, woman and child as we passed. “Eh!,” he’d yell, and then he’d say something in Laotian. The men would laugh. He’d yell out another two or three sentences in Laotian, to more bales of laughter. Then he’d spot someone else, another local, and yell out again. He seemed to know everyone, and everyone knew him. He kept a brisk pace along the path, with me scampering at his heels to keep up.

After this happened several times, his sounds began to take shape in my ears. What first sounded like unintelligible garble began to form as words and sentences. And I started to realize that he was having the exact same conversation with everyone; he was repeating the same Laotian sentences over and over.

“What does supermao mean?,” I asked him, noting the word he said most emphatically.

“It means crazy drunk,” he replied, then kept his burst of speed along the winding pitch-black path.

We reached the “party,” the one and only café on the island that had generator-powered lights. About 8 people were there, drinking wine and smoking. Toby disappeared immediately. I struck up a conversation with an Indian girl, a blue-eyed Gujurati with a great sense of style. From my peripheral vision, I kept scanning for Toby. Something was up; I knew it, I could tell. Why had he been in such a hurry? Why did he disappear so fast? He wasn’t … normal.

I finally spotted him just along the path, deep in conversation with a tattooed Westerner. The guy took something from him, then walked away quickly.

I waited until the next break in conversation, then saddled up to Toby.

“So how are you staying here?” I asked. I didn’t need any pointed questions. He was all too happy to share information.

“You know the red pills?” he said.

I raised an eyebrow. “What pills?”

“You know, the red pills, the new ones,” he said. “People only knowing about them now. Maybe you don’t have in the States yet. Its so cheap in Cambodia! Only 8,000 kip! The pills have been in Cambodia much longer. But no one knows it here, man. So close to the border, 5 kilometers, 10 kilometers to the border. And you can sell it here for 60,000 kip. But don’t let them catch you at the border, man! One pill, one year! It’s bullshit!”

“One pill, one year?” I repeated. It was a stiff penalty, but I knew Lao, like Thailand, has tough drug laws.

“One pill, one year,” he replied. “But such good money, man. I stay in Don Det.”

I did the math. 8,000 kip is $1 US dollar. 60,000 kip is $7.50 US dollars. Toby was sticking his neck on the line for a profit of about 6 bucks. Minus transit fees.

But it made sense, all of a sudden – how Toby knew everyone, and everyone knew him. How he was so fluent at saying the same things in Laotian again and again, conversations that involved getting messed up. And how he kept himself occupied in these sleepy little islands.

I left the islands after 8 days. As far as I know, Toby’s still there. He says he’ll be there for another 5 years, that next time I come back he’ll own a house there.

“But not when they bringing electricity, man,” he says. “When electric come to Don Det, I get out.”

Ode to Bangkok

No other city on earth is as crazy, captivating and no-holds-barred as Bangkok. This mega-metropolis of 10 – 15 million residents hoists skyscrapers to rival Manhattan and sprawl to put Texas to shame. No matter how much you struggle to leave Bangkok, to explore Thailand’s world-famous white-sand beaches and topaz-water islands, the pulse of this urban megacore keeps you locked inside. Bangkok is truly the place where anything is possible, from mango vendors serving you 4 a.m. fruit to hawkers in front of bars holding enormous signs boldly proclaiming “we sell fake I.D.’s!!” (not that anyone needs one, except to take to their home country.) At both noon and midnight, you’ll find people clamoring in the restaurants, surfing the Web, watching outdoor movies or shopping from sidewalk vendors don’t differenciate noon from midnight. Bangkok is the land where street vendors sell everything: the Harry Potter book collection, roasted squid, and corn-on-the-cob. Foreigners come crawling to the city to satisfy their most eclectic desires. Want an affordable sex-change operation? Want a fake press I.D.? Want a Thai wife? No problem – this is Bangkok! Bangkok has it all! You can have your teeth whitened by top-notch dentists before noon, get a new tattoo in time for dinner, guzzle a bucket (literally) of hard liquor by 9 p.m., get your hair cornrowed at 3 in the morning, and then stay up until sunrise at an Israeli-owned internet café, where you eat hummus while downloading Weird Al videos on YouTube with your new Welsh friend, who chain-smokes and has two black eyes.

I love the city for its fashionable $2 streetside clothing racks, its $5-an-hour massages, and its 75-cent plates of pad thai. I recently spent a few days at Ko Samet, a beach with soft white sand, crystal-clear blue waters and perfect cloudless skies, and you know what I said upon returning to the traffic and congestion of the city? “I missed Bangkok!”

The only hint is its “officially” nighttime is when transvestites start roaming the streets. Short men wearing stuffed bras and hip-hugging dresses pose very convincingly like sexy young Thai women. They congregate at the bars and flirt with clueless Western men, who buy them cocktails all night.

I didn’t know this until I had been in Bangkok long enough that I must have unwittingly watched hundreds of them in action. “Look at the size of ‘her’ hands,” someone told me, “and look closely at the neck. That’s a man.” After that, my friends and I started playing a guessing game of “man or woman?” with every high-heeled, mini-skirted Thai we saw. I found myself wrong (or at least, outvoted) about 80 percent of the time.

Perhaps “man or woman?” is a game that’s better lost than won. The winners, who can always guess correctly, show symptoms of having been in Bangkok too long. Stay in Bangkok too long and you may morph into a white-haired aging hippie in the corner of a 24-hour vegetarian restaurant eating kale at 5 a.m. while muttering to himself about how expensive south China has gotten these days. (Yes, this guy is real. We met him at dawn after a red-eye bus ride from Ton Sai back to Bangkok. Which, by the way, was also when we met the Welsh guy with the two black eyes, who kept recommending the Massaman curry. Which, by the way, is delicious.)

After two months in repressive India, where everything shuts down by 8 p.m. and wearing shorts, tank tops or above-the-knee skirts is a no-no, Bangkok is a breath of fresh air. Here, reality turns upside-down, and its good to be on your toes – in this case, toes encased in spiky high-heels which you can buy from a street vendor at 3 a.m. Just remember: the girl shopping for high-heels next to you wasn’t necessarily born a girl. Need a cheap sex-change operation, anyone? I know just the place ….

Limestone cliffs of Ton Sai, Thailand

We had to wade when we exited the boat. There was no other way to reach land. Water sloshed above my knees, lapping against the edge of my skirt. My sandals began to sink into the mud, which I couldn't see beneath the murky waters. Still, we waded. Treasure lay ahead. We had to reach the limestone cliffs.

We were arriving in Ton Sai, a beach in Thailand with a pebbly, narrow strip of honey-hued shoreline. No one comes to Ton Sai for the mediocre beach. Hundreds come each year for the climbing. Surrounded by psychedelic stalagtites, and featuring more than 700 bolted routes, Ton Sai is a climber's mecca.

We had intended to climb at Raileh, the beach-next-door, which features equally good climbing routes and a much smoother shoreline. Unfortunately, everyone else had the same idea, rendering Raileh crowded and expensive. Worse yet, Raileh is filled with roaming vendors who interrupt you while you're sunbathing to ask, for the 10th time that day, if you want to browse their ugly selection of sarongs.

Ton Sai, on the other hand, has that laid-back, never-in-a-hurry ambiance that could only belong to a budget beach carved out for twentysomethings who stay for months. Everyone in Ton Sai is sculpted like a Greek god. It is the isle of beautiful people.

On our first day there, I scouted out the area and found a great climbing spot. It was in the shade all day, and there were no other people around! No lines!

I tried to lead a couple of 5.10's. But something felt amiss.

"Maybe you're not comfortable leading climbs," said a girl named Pete. (She spells it "Phet," and she's Thai, a native of an island about 1 hour north).

"Maybe," I replied. "Lead climbing is good for me, like eating brussel sprouts and paying taxes."

But something felt amiss. The rock was rough. The edges were jagged. Was I scared? Or was something wrong?

I figured out the problem the next day, when reading through a climbing guide.

"Shadow Wall: Dangerous and loose rock. Long draw-outs between protection. Questionable anchors, especially on multi-pitch routes. Not recommended!" the book said.

Well, whoops.

We switched over to another climbing wall, slightly more crowded, but with a sweeping view of the waters. The guidebook described several of its routes as "a classic! Don't go home without it!"

We spent a great day climbing. And then another. Then another. We found more good climbing walls. Made new friends from Britain and South Africa. Got recommendations. Explored even more rock walls. Took rest days to read Harry Potter on the beach. Discovered our favorite lounging, chill-out bar.

We meant to stay in Ton Sai for 2-3 days. We ended up staying for 10.

Such is life here.

***************************************

My friend wrote this story about Ton Sai, and it made me laugh so hard that I'm reposting it here:

“This isn’t going to work.” Paula said very matter-of-factly. “There’s a monkey blocking my way.” She said it as if she was talking about a traffic jam or a long line at the grocery store. (I guess we are just getting used to everything at this point.)

Paula was attempting to deliver some leftover shrimp and fried egg to a pregnant cat that she had befriended at our bungalow in Tonsai, Thailand. Unfortunately for her, the monkeys had other ambitions on the snacks.

“There was a big monkey right on the path, so I tried to go around our bungalow, but it darted around the side and intercepted me,” she said. “Why are you laughing?”

I am fascinated at how monkeys, from quite a distance away, can tell when someone is carrying food. They have such one-track minds.

“Ok. Let’s go,” I told her, smugly getting up from my beach-strung hammock. “We’ll get past the monkeys.”

We neared our bungalows and caught wind of an unexpected sight. The lone monkey had multiplied into a full troupe of monkeys – papa monkey, mama monkey, twin baby monkeys, cousin Earl the monkey. And believe me, they were causing havoc. A small female perched on our railing eating a banana peel that we had discarded, apparently unafraid of fulfilling every monkey stereotype. Another small monkey fished the remaining crumbs from a neighbors’ Pringles can as the neighbor looked on helplessly.

I have never taken a primate behavior class, but I have hung around enough bars in a college town to know how to make a dominant male behavior display, so I knew what to do.

I bared my teeth at the largest monkey I could find. Paula, meanwhile, coaxed the pregnant cat to a nearby bungalow. As the monkeys attempted to follow her, I held them at bay by making sustained eye contact, hissing and showing my incisors as needed. As ludicrous as this sounds, it worked. Paula was able to feed the cat in relative peace while I battled the monkeys.

What has my life come to?

South India in the wet season

Tropical South India is a totally different country than North India. Southern land is rich red clay. Its trees sprout coconut and banana and its rice paddies are flooded from heavy rains.

My parents, who are devout Hindus, went on a month-long pilgrimage to the holiest temples in South India last month. My friend and I tagged along.

Here’s a highlight from four weeks of “Parent Pilgrimage” -- a whirlwind tour of Hinduism’s most revered temples.

India has four temples that are the holiest sites in Hinduism. These are called the four “dhams,” and they are located in the north, east, south, and west. Earlier I blogged about our visit to the eastern “dham” in Puri, in the Indian state of Orissa. This story is about our trip to the southern “dham” in Rameshwar, in the state of Tamil Nadu.

My great-great-grandmother visited the dham in Rameshwar. So did my great-grandmother and my grandmother. Now I’m here with my mother. Five generations in a row.

Rameshwar is an island, connected to mainland India by a train that rides across the Gulf of Mannar. It’s only 20 miles from the nation of Sri Lanka, although the connecting ferry between the two countries stopped running more than a decade ago, deterred by civil war in Sri Lanka.




Hindu mythology says that the Lord Ram’s army once built a bridge connecting Rameshwar to Sri Lanka. The army was trying to rescue Lord Ram’s kidnapped wife, the goddess Sita, who had been kidnapped by a demon living on Lanka. According to religion, the rocks that Ram’s army used to build the bridge to Lanka miraculously floated, buoyantly, atop the ocean -- making bridge-building far easier.

Of all the Hindu myths, Ram’s story – written in the Hindu holy book Ramayan – is the one I carry with me from very early childhood. When I was a little kid, I slung an empty Pringles can across my back and pretended it was my archery pack, and I was a soldier in Ram’s army, fighting the demon of Lanka. When I was a little kid and I couldn’t sleep at night, I would repeat the name “Ram” to myself again and again, like I was counting sheep.




Then I started attending Catholic school. By fourth grade I decided I loved Jesus, and I set out to follow God’s Ten Commandments. I even prayed Hail Mary’s on the rosary – the full rosary, which takes about an hour -- every night for a month. I was the only student in my class who wasn’t baptized.

This worked until I was 9 years old and my mom took me to Pashupatinath, the holiest temple in Nepal. At the center of Pashupatinath is a giant statue of a golden bull – Lord Shiva’s holy bull, Nandi.

Seeing this golden bull reminded me of the “golden calf,” which, in the Biblical chapter of Exodus, the Prophet Moses warns the Israelites to never worship. Moses felt so vehemently anti-golden calf that he announced that God’s First Commandment is “thou shalt not worship any other gods besides me.” But the Fourth Commandment is to “honor thy father and thy mother,” and my father and mother were worshipping the golden bull. I was in a Catch-22: I could either obey the First Commandment or the Fourth Commandment, but I couldn’t obey both at the same time.



At this point, age 9, I got confused and gave up. I’ve never been particularly religious since.

Fourteen years later, I’m traveling with my parents on a pilgrimage around India.

As we rode the train to the island of Rameshwar, we saw what looked like rocks floating on the water. But they weren’t floating this time. They were flooded. The area surrounding Rameshwar had been submerged by heavy rains, and the streets turned into canals. Fences and poles stuck out from flooded plains.

Little did I know I was about to be submerged in water, too.

The temple at Rameshwar contains 22 wells covering a 2-kilometer area. At each well, a temple official casts a rope down into the abyss, pulls up a bucket of water, and dumps the entire bucket on the head of the person in line. Pilgrims come from across south Asia to get doused by well water. And so I figured – being part of a pilgrimage – I should too. I mean, when in Rome …. it wasn’t exactly a Roman bath, but it was definately a public bath.



About a dozen men, including 2 male children, all wearing black longis (long skirts) to show their religious devotion, joined my parents and I. Together we were led around the temple to 22 wells. Each well had a different name and signified a different god or geographic location. One signified the Ganges River; another signified the city where Buddha found his enlightenment.

We always let the Men in Black finish first. Then I’d get doused. Afterwards, my parents would get splashed on their hands and feet. And then we’d move on to the next.

And you know what? It felt a little like a baptism.

Five generations in a row.

Wedding Crashers

A television commercial for the U.S. Army once asked: "If your life were a movie, which would it be?"

Apparently, mine is Wedding Crashers.

At least, that's the new activity on the docket – crashing weddings. Specifically, lavish Indian weddings where the buffets stretch as far as the horizon, the bands (and there are several) play 1980's pop hits and the ladies vie to see who can wear the heaviest gold.

We stumbled upon this new activity in Goa, a former Portuguese colony that's now India's most popular beach resort (read: shoreline not covered with trash). Huge waves of foreigners normally spend Christmas and New Years sunbathing on Goa's shores, but the "high terror alert" – Goa has the highest terror alert in the nation in the wake of the recent Mumbai attacks – has kept tourism at bay. We went to Goa in spite of the red alert, hoping the beaches would be empty and the amenities cheap and plentiful.

As it turned out, we were right. For $2 a night per head, we slept in an ant-infested 13 x 9 ft. shack built from woven bamboo mats. Its roof was a single blue tarp with a few palm fronds thrown on top for decoration; its green metal front door opened directly onto the beach.

During the day we walk 100 ft. from our front door to a sandy lounge chair, where we recline under an umbrella by the ocean, drinking Coke, staring at the grey naval warships dotting the horizon. We'd see the occasional foreigner -- like that crazy Dutch woman who feeds chappati to all the stray dogs, whose skin is saggy from far too much sun -- but we'd also see rifle-toting Indian soldiers patrolling the shoreline or bunkered down behind sandbags. Searching for Pakistani terrorists?

We were the only customers at a local restaurant one afternoon when we struck up a conversation with the owner, Amaro Rodriguez. He's born-and-bred Indian who, like many Goan locals, bears a Portuguese name as a result of centuries of colonialization. Amaro mentioned that a friend-of-a-friend's wedding reception would happen close to our hotel that night. "If you want to come, meet me in front at 9 p.m.," he said.

We had our own longstanding evening plans – a dinner date with old friends whom we hadn't seen in a long time. Our party of five dined late into the night, and when we walked past the wedding reception on our way home, around 11 p.m., we knew there was no hope of finding Amaro.

Still, we wanted to go to that reception. The music was bumping. A line of parked cars stretched across the otherwise vacant road. Men in suits and women in evening gowns chatted on cell phones near a cobra-strewn rice paddy. Stray goats peered curiously inside.

We decided we should try to crash the event. We had – sort of, kind of, technically – been a little invited. And if anyone questioned us, we'd just say we were meeting Amaro.

We skirted the party to see if there was a good back enterence we could use to sneak through. Or maybe the kitchen enterance? We toyed with a few stealthier ideas, then decided the best disguise is confidence. With our shoulders back, chin up, head held high, we marched proudly through the front door. No questions asked.

Inside was a wonderland. Fountains sprayed against the foliage. Ice sculptures gleamed next to the ice cream buffet. A red carpet stretched across a miniature footbridge, opening into a sea of white linen-draped tables. Kids in tiny suits scampered on the swingset. A rowdy group grooved to live music. A swarm of Indians rushed to us like servants, asking if they could pour us tea / give us chocolate / help us find a seat.

From the haze, a very drunk Amaro stumbled toward us. "You made it!" he yelled like a victory cheer for his favorite team. "Come!" He grabbed me by the hand and led us to the bar. "You like wine?" My friend and I each took one glass and headed to a table. Before we could finish sitting down, Amaro was stumbling toward us with two more glasses of shiraz. "For you!," he said, then bolted from the table. He emerged a minute later carrying a full bottle of rather expensive red wine. "And this!"

"How exactly do you know these people?" I asked Amaro.

"Um, the groom played football – no, his brother played football with – I mean …," Amaro stumbled over his words.

Then he leans over to us. "There's a wedding here almost every night," he says, winking.

Ah. So we weren't the first to have this nefarious idea.

It's a shame we had to leave Goa after only a week. We could make wedding crashing a full-time preoccupation.

Inauguration Day

It's 1:30 a.m. as I write this from a dingy internet cafe in Bangkok. I'm here watching live online video streaming of President Obama's Inauguration. The computers have no sound, and my friend and I are the only Americans in this brown-walled building, but still the energy is palpable. We burst into applause at the silent computer monitor when Obama took his oath.

I interviewed Vice President Joe Biden once. Well, "interviewed" is a strong word -- I was one of three reporters in a room with Biden, and each of us could ask him one question. It was April 2007, when Biden was a Senator preparing his own Presidential bid, and he had just made a speech in Boulder, Colo., about foreign policy. During his speech, he said that there were certain issues he cared strongly about, and other issues he didn't care about quite as much.

My question to Joe Biden: what are the issues you don't quite care about?

He faltered and gave a run-around political answer: Well, what I really meant was that there are some issues, like Iraq, that I deeply care about .... he began. After a minute or two of talking in circles, he saw from the expression on my face that I wanted a straight response. So he gave me one.

Federal highway allocation, he said. He didn't care very much about divvying up money for highway projects. (I published this response in the newspaper that I wrote for at the time.)

Ironically, now that the economy is in tatters, the first thing that Pres. Obama and VP Biden will do in office is pass an enormous economic stimulus package -- which will include a HUGE federal highway allocation.

Funny how the world works, ain't it, Biden?