Looks like we've made it to the end

It's late afternoon now, and we're at the free internet cafe in Narita airport, contemplating the end of our extended little jaunt around the Far East. Surprisingly little to say: of course we wish we were still on the road for another 4 months like we'd originally envisioned, but in the end, sprinkled with mosquito welts and, I'm sure, all kinds of water-borne microbes, we're happy to be heading home to familiar surrounds, not to mention the land of cheap sushi and Triple-O burgers, and of course you, our friends, whose lives have all surely moved on while we were gone, haha.

Risking irrelevancy, I will try to play catch-up and post a few more times, but in any event, you'll probably get it straight from the horse's mouth when I see you in person anyway. My only regret is not having written more Sun articles: how often does a bumpkin like me get to bore a readership that size?

By the way, somehow we are bringing home that roll of toilet paper you can see in the title graphic. And it should be noted now, that Nazma did, on many occasions, brave the squaties with total success, major satisfaction, and incessant bragging afterwards.

Continue to stay well, everyone, and see you soon.

It pays to check your email

Our last few hours in Bangkok were spent on a computer terminal frantically hunting for accom in Hong Kong. We ended up not prebooking anything, deciding to wing it and head back to the hotel we'd stayed at before. Big mistake.

So our first 3 hours were spent back at the Mansion, with Nazma guarding the packs while I raced up and down 16 floors, asking at and getting rejected at every guesthouse. This was a competition: other backpackers could be seen across the central courtyard, trotting along the outdoor corridors in their own vain rummage for rooms. Nazma found out from one of them that Hong Kong is in the throes of a series of trade fairs until the end of April, and places that aren't already full are sporting newly doubled rates. Alrighty then.

Finally we bunkered down in a grim little triple, with the requisite phone-booth shower/toilet, for a whopping HKD400 ($59CAD). We secured the room after a large, very hairy man was seen leaving it. We discovered that he'd already christened the toilet for us, remnants of his golden shower leaving amber trails down the side of the bowl. Thank you, Sasquatch. After almost 4 months of ups, downs, twists and turns, as we dumped our bags on the third bed and sat down things seemed about as low as things had ever been.

Nazma went off for some retail therapy while I tried to troll the internet for a vacant cot somewhere in the city that wouldn't cost us hundreds of dollars (seriously: the Holiday Inn wanted $370CAD a night!). Lo and behold, my cousin Joanna had written me to say her mother is out of town, and why don't we stay with her. A grown man crying in a public place is never a pretty thing, no matter what the movies might say, and I will never show my face again at that internet cafe.

We'd already paid for the roach hotel, so we managed to doze a full night tucked into our Vietnamese silky sleepsheets. First light saw us beelining toward the nearest subway station, to be whisked off to an unexpected, serendipitous salvation.

Lanta sunsets and lightning storms

Arrived at Ko Lanta yesterday afternoon and brought the storm with us: within a half-hour of arriving, the fastest thunderstorm we'd ever seen blew right over us and headed out to sea. It joined up with two other storms somewhere south of Ko Phi Phi, we figure. Nice dinner entertainment!

How I learned to stop worrying and love the water bombs

Well, we arrived in Bangkok safe and sound and it's been a wild last few days. Songkran did indeed begin in earnest the evening of the 12th, and it's just been getting crazier and crazier. But in the end, it isn't the drunken falang-fest, nor the massive unauthorized groping we'd feared. 99% of the people plugging the streets are Thai, and the few falang who didn't move up to Chiang Mai can't be bothered with other foreigners. The Thai are very good-natured: if you don't want to be smeared in their chalky paste stuff, or soaked with bottles of icy water, just put up your hand and smile.

In the end, we didn't do much of that, and as a result we (and especially Nazma) found ourselves in the middle of the scrum, clothes soaked and faces muddied beyond recognition (we were only missing the cucumbers over our eyes). The cheeky ones said hello before they coated our faces with goo; some looked genuinely sorry and apologised first, and then coated our faces with goo anyway, like someone was holding a gun to their heads.

The chalky paste stuff was apparently for good luck, and the saying about the water goes: the wetter you get, the happier you'll be. If these maxims hold true, we should be set for life. Here's some locals reloading their little plastic goo buckets.

All in all it was a great laugh: we spent all day doing laps up and down the main drag, watching the crowd packed in shoulder-to-shoulder, the unbelievably stupid passenger cars trying to get through the chaos (and getting muddy handprints all over their paint jobs as a result), and the shiny happy people dancing, dancing, dancing away, Thais and tourists, ladyboys and sexpats. That having been said, though, we're getting our asses to a mall tomorrow. Happy splashing!

Honeymoon suite

After a comfortable (!) overnight train ride we arrived tired but jubilant in Sapa, in the northwest corner of Vietnam close to the Chinese border. Mountains, terraced agriculture, and clouds, clouds, clouds.

We arrived at the last of three hotels we'd inspected and found wanting, and trudged dutifully up the stairs to look at the room before committing. The room looked like most others -- faded glamour, dainty lace canopy/mosquito net above the bed, vaguely grimy undusted corners -- but what clinched our $6 was the soft-porn tiling in the bathroom. After the incredulity had subsided, two questions sprang to mind:

• Why did the hotel designers decide to include this? They even had to rework the rest of the tiling in the bathroom extensively to do so.
• You can't one-off these things: who's buying these things in sufficient quantities to justify their mass-production?

I could understand a poster, even a naughty lithograph, but having pornographic ceramic tiles doesn't quite smack of strong long-term-planning abilities.

I thought the man looked rather skanky with his long greasy Fabio hair and half-shaven chest, but Nazma was quick to point out that she's not the classiest dame either. A match made in heaven, fornicating in our shower.

Soggy Songkran

We're pretty dumb. Our clever little scheme to escape Vietnam by retreating to safe, familiar Thailand has totally backfired, as we forgot about a little thing called Songkran.

Songkram is the Thai New Year, and is characterised by:

• everyone travelling everywhere at the same time (i.e. no transport or hotels)
• everyone throwing buckets of ice water over everyone else, especially tourists

It's the Water Festival, and everyone partakes, which would normally be fine. But apparently the Festival has been somewhat hijacked in recent years by drunken foreigners who are out to create as much mayhem and many wet t-shirts as possible. This means unrepentant gropings, general pandemonium, and not a few deaths from traffic accidents, caused by stupid people dumping ice water on passing motorbikes, causing the drivers to swerve into buildings or oncoming traffic.

Only in this part of the world would you have to plan around something like this. Our options now are to hole up in our hotel room (if we can find one), escape the city (if we can find a bus), or escape the country (Nazma's looking up flights right now). If you don't mind separatists and possible bombings, the Muslim south apparently is a safe haven.

Mind you, Giant Water Fight still beats Boring Commute To Work. Some people come to Thailand especially for this, and we wouldn't mind joining in the festivities (it's mid-to-upper 30's in most of Thailand). The worry is having to sleep on the soggy streets for want of a hotel, and injury after being drenched for the millionth time by some stupid falang on a passing flatbed. Keep your fingers crossed.

The finish line

After a long afternoon of internetting and agonising on the couch of a JAL office, we've finally set a return date to Canada: 25th April. This will involve evacuating Hanoi (by plane, not by chopper) on the 10th April to a rather unexpected destination: back to Bangkok. There we've got 11 days to delay reality (on a beach perhaps) before heading back to Hong Kong through Macau. China's out - too expansive, expensive, and pointless if we're just using it as a cheap conduit homeward. And in the end, not so bad: the flights we've stitched together come to a paltry $150 CAD each. Isn't Google's currency converter a hoot?

Road to nowhere

So for whatever reason, we are getting booted out of the country (along with everyone else who got their visa at embassies in Cambodia) on the 10th April. Ostensibly some big National Congress meeting or something (btw, did I mention that the Party is Life?), though now that we're in Vietnam no one has heard anything about it.

Long story short, if we could stay in the country another 2 days or so, all our stitched-together flights back to Hong Kong would click into place nicely. However, now we're T-minus 1 week and are having some trouble figuring out how we're going to evacuate, as we're now missing flights by as little as 30 minutes.

Also, China has suddenly become this big, money-guzzling proposition, especially if we're only entering to transit to Hong Kong. However, the alternatives (budget airlines to Seoul, backtracking to Bangkok, rotting in a Vietnamese jail) are equally unattractive.

As I write this, though, the tour lady at this internet cafe has taken it upon herself to start a frantic search for flights to Bangkok. The scent of commission must be thick in the air.