Capture Features: Crawling and Sprawling throuh French Indochina

Stephenson fell in with some British thru-hikers on the overnight train and got into a bad whiskey drunk. His journey through French Indo got of to a brutal and unforgiving start.

It took 90 minutes to get past customs. The sun in Laos shines like a science bomb. Pure white light. Make you feel like you got a vapor hangover when you're sober as God on day six. I didn't see any movie theatres in Laos and I know why too. You walk out of a matinee at 2pm in downton Laos and you're immediately blind and probably dead too.

A truck picked us up from customs and drove us to a flophouse 20 minutes outside Vientiene. We all stood in the bed of the truck. The wind was hot and dirty on my face. Red dust was everywhere and I ate a Vietnamese sandwich, exhausted but strong. There were strange brown lint balls on the sandwich that would not be chewed. I swallowed some and picked some off. Everything moves slow in communist Laos. Everything barely runs. People move slow. Taxis move slow. The roads are so bad you have to move slow. It's hot and the money is worthless and nobody knows how to dance. If anyone in Laos is reading this, my advice would be to start the Revolution sooner rather than later.

Reed knows the management at the Mounty House and they put up with his beastly ways so he stays there and gets ripped off and sleeps on sandbag mattresses. Stephenson was badly hung over under a sun too close and vomited immediately after stepping off the truck. He apologized profusely and dumped buckets of water on the puke and over his head.

We went to Mr Thanvas house where Gary could finally unload his 2 rolling suitcases full of punching balls, Marti Gras beads, sweatpants and Double Bubble. The women prepared food for us. It was a bowl of congealed pig blood and a plate of noodles. The noodles looked safe. I took a chopstick full. It tasted bad and rotten in my mouth but I got down a few bites down. Stephenson took 3 noodles. He's a master of subtlety and when I saw his eye twitch and his adam's apple jump I knew something had gone seriously wrong. He sat sweating for a time and then rose with forced calm and walked into the bomb crater dirt intersection and puked his mind out. Later we talked about the noodles and he described them as TART AND RANK which may have been the truest food review I've ever heard. A few days later we were served the same dish again a couple hours north. APOCALYPTIC might be a better word, Stephenson said. We sat down wind of the noodles and I agreed that in the End of Days when the sky is on fire and the world is ruled by cockroaches and stray dogs with rent flesh the place will probably smell something like those noodles.

Dinner was fried pork and sticky rice and an entire fish on a plate that was delicious. The women keep your beer full and iced and we danced in traditional fashion for many hours.

We got into talking about Fear and Loathing and I asked Stephenson to find the two words that best sum up this trip. He said crawling and sprawling. Crawling and Sprawling through French Indochina.