Vietnam

Ho Chi Minh City

: Jimmy John Lal touchin’ down in Viet-fuckin-Nam!

: 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

: House in the hills

: One more view of the foggy valley

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