Best of March

Best Meal: At the celebration of a new home in Muong Ngoi, Laos: Beef salad (cold chili sauce marinated pieces of meat with cilantro, mint, green onion, carrot dipped into with balls of sticky rice)

Best Run: Circling the "old city" of Chiang Mai, Thailand (we spent several days in the north of Thailand before boarding a flight to Brisbane from Bangkok). The old city wall circumvates the central area of the city and is a cool run to scale ruins while dodging cars and motorbikes.

Best Hidden Talent: I am a master at shadow puppets. This discovery brought to you by 3 hours of boredom in Lam Namtha, Northern Laos, when the electricity in the town cut out for an entire night during a monsoon rainstorm.

Best Swim: 10 minutes before my birthday ended and in no need of better motivation than to savor the last moments of my day, my South African surfer friend Dominick joined me in a race across the Nam Ou and back.

Best Quote about Swimming: "Everytime I see you two, you're trying to swim somewhere impossible." - Nathan the Aussie

Best Tribute to Insomnia: On the evening of March 30th, 2008, Gina and I prepared for a 16 hour train ride by staying up all night (it was spent at the Night Bazaar in Chiang Mai followed by a trip to the pub followed by reading Anita Shreve in our 90 degree guesthouse digs)hoping that we would then sleep all day on the train ride to Bangkok. It was, again, 90 degrees and in our broken 3rd class train seat, sleep was hard to come by. So, we get to Bangkok at 10 pm on the 30th and decide not to spend the money on a guesthouse. We hit the pub again, this time with backpacks. We head for Bangkok International at 2 am. We can't check in until 5 am, so we eat yogurt, play with the automatic sinks while meticulously brushing our teeth, decide to chain our stuff (and ourselves) to metal benches. We take a nap from 3-4, are entertained by a Canadian sugar-loaded energy drink addict, go through security to find out that we need to go online first to get our Australian visas. We play on expensive airport computers. We go through security. One more uncomfortable bench nap. Flight leaves for Hong Kong: 11 am April 1. 8 hour layover in Hong Kong. Pass through immigration to play with Champ outside. Promptly get kicked out of parking area by Chinese security. Attempt to make our 2 days without showers seem better by frequenting the duty-free perfumeries. Promptly get kicked out just as I am slathering on anti-aging pro-retinol $100 mosturizer that turned out to be a facial masque that I should have washed off. We do yoga. We run through our terminal. We try on all of the sunglasses we see. We read magazines. We drink tea. We eat noodles. Finally, our flight leaves to Brisbane: 11:35, April 1st. After absorbing Cathay Pacific food, a sad excuse for merlot and a return to McDreamy via Disney movie, we end the spell. 1:25 am, April 2nd: I sleep. Well. Or at least good, considering.

Best Bike Ride: Around Lam Namtha, Laos. We spent all day exploring a waterfall, having lunch roadside with a native tribe, pausing for fruit at the heat of the day, biking accidentally into the butcher's yard.

Best Repeated Dinner Option: All you can eat vegetarian buffet for 4,000 kip (50 cents) in Luang Prabang.

Coolest Repeated Dinner Option Company: 4 girls studying early childhood development at Yale who were accompanying their professor for a World Health Organization summit on prenatal and early childhood care and education in Laos.

Best Gina Quote: We shared with a couple other backpackers the simple joy of having a fridge in a tropical climate guesthouse, talking about how good it was to be able to buy your own yogurt and store it, eating it promptly upon wakening. When these two other backpackers talked about how much they thought it would completely suck to live in NYC on practically no money, Gina shrugged and said "Eh. You get a fridge. You put your yogurt in it."

Best Hike Around a Waterfall: Kuangsi Falls, near Luang Prabang, Laos. I thought we were going to get eletrocuted. Or fall off the mountain. Luckily, neither did, although I almost fell out of a tree trying to reach a rope swing and Gina was determined to swim in the crystalline blue water, thunder or not.

Best Book: "Reading Lolita in Tehran" - Azir Nafisi

Best Picture of Cute Man Taken on the Sly: Our victim was Victor from Austria. He was our bus buddy from Vientienne to Vang Vieng. He gave me his old ipod headphones when mine broke. I swooned. And Gina just kept taking these: (pictures of sleeping Victor...coming soon!)

Best Day of Forgetting I Was An Adult: Tubing down the Nam Song river in Vang Vieng.

Best Cave: The acoustics brought chills as Gina and I sang in a cave once used to hide and treat wounded soldiers in the Indo-Chinese war.

Best American Activity that's FUNNER Overseas: Bowling in Laos.

Best Break In: On one particular very VERY hot day in Chiang Mai, Gina and I attempted to use a swimming pool at the four star "Royal Orchid Hotel" as there are no lakes, rivers or oceans close to North-Central Thailand. We attempted to ask a receptionist if we could pay to use the pool, but since her english faltered, we forged ahead; changing into our suits in the staff lunch room, doing laps past some wealthy scandinavianly speedoed senor citizens, making up a name under which we were staying (Gina: "Our last name? Ummm...Anderson. Our room number? Well...our parents have the key. Their first names? Ummmmm...) jumping ceremoniously back into the olympic sized piece of heaven when the security guard finally came to give us the boot, attempting to offer small sums of money to stay poolside (or at that point, yelling offers to stay in the exact middle of the pool). Consequently, dejectedly squeaking our tevas through the marble lobby.