My first taste of Vietnamese traffic on the way to our hotel from the airport
Excuse me sir, there is no way you can see where you’re driving with a tree balanced on the front of your automobile
The Park Hyatt Saigon – I know some people who know some people who got us a couple free nights up in this bitch…wanna fight about it?
Hotel lobby. Am I sure this is the underdeveloped ‘arsehole of the earth’ country my uncles fought in forty-something years ago?
Pool in the hotel courtyard with an immaculate lawn that was being clipped…
…by this poor son of a bitch who was doing it by hand with scissors.
Vietnamese cashier is appalled that Kathleen had the nerve to whip out her Dong in the middle of the bank
A sudsy breakfast accompanied by the smooth musical stylings of Blondie on the piano sitting behind Tim there in the hotel lobby
Roadside sickle & hammer
Shitty photo telling half the story here. This dude’s riding with like ten fuckin’ buckets balanced on his bike.
Steppin’ into a bunker leading to the Cu Chi Tunnels – a 75-mile-long complex of rat holes that the yellow man used to pump the white man full of lead
Semi-underground, thatched-roof bunker leading in to the Cu Chi Tunnels which would’ve been impossible to distinguish from other jungle brush by passing planes. The two phrases sandwiching the Vietnamese flag and Ho Chi Minh translate to, “Nothing is so precious as independence and liberty,” and, “Advance! Total victory will be ours!”
An entrance to the tunnels from the bunker alongside a map showing the network of underground passageways over there on the left
Model showing what the underground tunnel system would look like if you could see it from the side. These things went pretty fuckin’ deep
Vietnamese guerillas and soldiers were able to breathe and release exhaust from food being cooked underground thanks to little holes like this on the surface. Unlike this one however, most had bamboo extensions raised above the ground to prevent flooding during the rainy season.
Vietnamese soldier demonstrating for us how easy it was for him to pop out of the tunnels and kill our fellow Americans thirty-somethin’ years beforehand
These tunnels are outrageously tiny…guys who lived down there during the war must’ve been major badasses
Our tour guide Mai. Yes, she rocked a bowl-cut. Here she is showing us one of the many savage “booby twaps” that employed bamboo spikes slathered in doo-doo-butter so that if the initial impalement didn’t do you in, the fecal infection would soon after.
Gettin’ tanked with the O’Shaughnessy’s
Gettin’ jacked and tan in the Vietnamese jungle – not now chief, I’m in the fuckin zone
In my opinion, the most wicked of the “booby twaps.” After rollin’ down into one of those your ass would be left lookin’ like a bloodied piece of Swiss cheese – no doubt.
Window Trap
Mai showing off the door trap with a little too much enthusiasm for my liking
Guns, guns, guns…
K-Money poppin’ off an M-60 at the Cu Chi firing range
It costs a dollar a bullet to shoot here and twenty dollars worth of bullets lasted about three seconds. If you hit the target at the end of the range you win a t-shirt or some shitty prize of the like
To pass an afternoon, we hired some cyclo drivers to pedal us around the streets of HCMC
The trees lining some of the streets in Saigon are absolutely ginormous
Some sights around the city…
Your typical main street in Ho Chi Minh City
Munging is the national pastime in Vietnam and family outings to the morgue for mouthfuls of magic are fairly common…based on a hunch after seeing this sign
Motorbikes blowin’ by a temple
Some celebratory beers with our perverted cyclo drivers on Tet. During our tour of Ho Chi Minh City, the only message these guys knew how to convey in English was where to get “a good boom-boom in the mouth.”
Can’t tell what’s whiter – that blinding light above my head or my pasty white, mid-winter, Midwestern American skin
The mighty floral dragon. Despite waiting around for ten minutes, couldn’t get a single pic without this self-important ho jumping in front of every shot I snapped
Street decorations
Goat Boy!
A nice, big and well-crafted flower pussy
Flowers, flowers…
…and more flowers.
Pretty lights
Cyclo ride down Flower Street
Taken during the middle of our frightening street-crossing at an intersection somewhere near Quach Thi Trang Square. Without red lights or stop signs, the only way to traverse a thoroughfare is just goin’ for it and hopin’ the infinite amount of people comin’ at you on motorbike are able to avoid converting you to a human pancake
So many people
This chick in front of the Confucius statues creeps the hell out of me – somethin’ out of an opium-induced nightmare
Statue of General Tran Nguyen Han ridin’ Mustang Sarry
Mobile ciggy vender hustlin’ squares with long, black-painted pinky nails for:
a) Removing Earwax and Boogers
b) Clitoral Stimulation
c) A status symbol
d) All of the Above
Vietnamese Monument at the Moc Bai border crossing into Cambodia
Hanoi
Pretty basic street in the capital city
Massive rendering of Vietnam
Statue of man on toilet making a smell?
One of the many early morning badminton games being played on the streets of Hanoi. I’m not sure if some people were too poor to buy rackets or if they preferred a challenge but I saw a few intense gamers kicking the shuttlecock with their feet and playing hacky-sack-style badminton
Park area along Sword Lake
The residents of Hanoi are up and out exercising on the streets by the crack of dawn every day. Livliest, most active people I’ve ever seen in the early AM – even saw guys doing pull-ups on streetlight poles
Turtle Tower sitting on an island in the middle of Sword Lake
The Huc Bridge in Sword Lake – “Huc” meaning “Morning Sunlight” Bridge
View over the lake
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Tim Osh throwin’ down a cold one at a place called Legend Beer
View of the madness that is Vietnamese traffic as seen from Legend Beer
There are no lanes, no traffic lights and no rules. Cars, bikes, buses and pedestrians come at each other from all angles. Great show to watch while takin’ a blow-off day, sittin’ around gettin’ hammed off Legend Beer
There is no amount of anything too large or such thing as too many people for a Vietnamese person to try to carry along on his/her bike
Our waitress that served us at Legend Beer while we got drunk, watched traffic and…
…saw how many toothpicks we could get to stick in Tim’s travel beard and eyebrows.
During our Legend Beer bender we actually witnessed a collision in which one woman’s leg got smashed up pretty bad and the other driver just immediately took off. After hobbling around for a minute, inspecting her bike, the woman clambered back on the hog and took off like nothing had happened
Rural spot where the bus broke down on our way from Hanoi to Luang Prabang, Laos
Old rusted out Commie propaganda
Biker boy
Sapa
Sapa is a town in the far northwest of Vietnam and, as we found out, even more foggy and cold than Hanoi had been
Strange monument obscured by fog
A street in Sapa during a temporary break in the opaqueness
Uncle Ho continues to inspire his people through Communist propaganda years after his passing
Thirty foot visibility walking down to a village called Cat Cat
Feel like Victor Charlie’s gonna come poppin’ out any minute now
An ethnic minority girl selling stuff near Cat Cat. Surprisingly she spoke some of the best English I’d heard in all of Vietnam
She was a shit-talker too…followin’ us for the entire walk and busting our balls along the way
Arachnophobia? Bunch of spiders manning a massive wall of web spanning the distance between two trees
Another sales girl trying to make us take sloppy seconds by trying out the jaw harp she’s playing in the picture
Cat Cat Village
Bamboo piping ran through the village with water flowing from top to bottom. Possible anti-flooding system?
Waterfall in Cat Cat Village
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Stone crib
Suck It Cat Cat Village!
Family outing at the “laundromat”
Village woman sewing some shit up lookin’ real fly with my Blublockers on
We decided to go rogue and walk through some muddy-ass rice terraces to see the real Vietnam
Mother with child strapped to her back
Rice terrace – A terrace is a piece of sloped plane that has been cut into a series of successfully receding flat surfaces that resemble steps for the purpose of farming
Bunch of dudes toiling away in the fields
Terrace fields decrease erosion and surface runoff and are effective for growing crops requiring much water such as rice
There was no shortage of water out in these muddy-ass fields
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Tim Osh gettin’ ahead of me on the path responsible for the destruction of my Nikes
Yakkity yak, don’t talk back
There was no one around on our passage through the terraces until…
…we reached a tiny village and were invited into the shack house of some locals to get warm around the fire and get guilted into buying homemade change purses.
Woman just outside the village on the dirt road back to Sapa
The next day wasn’t as foggy, rainy and as generally shitty as the day before so we rented motorbikes with our Polish buddy Konrad and took ’em up in the hills
Burnin’ down these country roads
Little mountain house there on the right
The fog in these hills and valleys is so unpredictable. Up there beyond one hill but before the other is some very, very thick fog clouding up the otherwise clear-weathered day.
Volcano-lookin’ rice terrace in one of the valleys
Roadside residence
Not a bad view to have when stepping out the back door of your house right there
No matter how rural this house is, satellite television is a must have
Sick view, brah
The steps of giants
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Don’t go chasin’ waterfalls…whatever that means
Random dude climbing rocks to get a better view of the falls
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Unfortunately, we strayed back into the fog while up in the hills
Tim Osh doing a good job of not slipping into the river while traversing a line of stepping stones
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In the thick of it
Creepy tree
“THAC TINH YEU”
Konrad the Pole and the Oshman the Clevelander lookin’ all hard n shit
Tiny farm house back out of the foggy obscurity
Little towel-headed kid who’d been helpin’ his mom in the picture previous
