The Town of Tubers

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This is where all the young travelers come to get their ‘captain-messy-pants’ on. Interestingly, as we drove into town we noticed everyone seemed to have some sort of injury or other; numerous girls with exhaust burns on their legs, several people with their feet bandaged up, one guys in crutches and even a girl with an eye patch. What is with this town? When we arrived dark clouds gathered above us and left me with an ominous feeling. Moments later, Dana realized he left his backpack with all our valuables in the back of our tuk-tuk (camera, computer, our photos backups, passports, money, etc). He noticed right away and sprinted after it, leaving his flip flops behind. Fortunately, he caught up to the driver just as he was taking the ‘prize’ out to show his buddies. Unfortunately, running barefoot on black pavement in 40C weather resulted in the sizzling of Dana’s feet and he had massive blisters preventing him from walking for days. When he hobbled back to where I was watching the rest of our bags he looked like a cripple. The women at our guesthouse lathered his feet in tiger balm to speed the healing of his blisters. It covered up the smell of burnt flesh at least! Dana was only one of many victims injured by this town. Since we couldn’t do much with out walking we played with kittens and later went for a bike ride to the ‘blue lagoon’ to swim. He could at least peddle with his heals. Once there you could hike up into a cave. Dana, not being one to watch me clamor up alone, hobbled up behind me. It was a huge cave, quite cool looking and had several Buddha statues inside. That afternoon we left and spent the next 30 hours on a bus to Vietnam. We had to take a local bus as the VIP ones were full. We did end up with 2 seats each so we could lie flat to sleep, but they blasted this horrible music all night. Since we spent the last of our money on the bus ticket, we sat at the lunch break looking hungrily at everyone else eat. These nice shirtless Vietnese men bought us a seafood lunch of shrimp, whole squid, beef and more! They didn’t speak a word of English so we just smiled lots and Dana did a shot of some mouthwash-strength liquor at the end (thank goodness I’m a woman and don’t have to do those silly, I’m-so-tough rituals men do).

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