More Squid Jerky

After riding through the rain, I get to Buon Ma Thuot just before dark, and am completely, wholeheartedly disappointed with the central highlands at this point. They're really, really lame. No mountains at all, and not much to do. Somehow I got it into my head that Buon Ma Thuot would be cool.

The only thing it has going for it is its history - when it fell to the North Vietnamese, it supposedly triggered the collapse of the rest of South Vietnam.

So I walk down the street and as occasionally happens a guy sitting at a food stand gets my attention and invites me over, immediately pouring me a shot of rice wine. Not really wine. Closer to whisky in potency, I think. So I end up sitting here for probably over an hour, and for the second night in a row eat dried squid jerky with a complete stranger who talked to me because I was a foreigner. The important part: all told I drank probably a liter of the booze on my own.

I get up this morining just in time to still see the morning, and decide to head out on the moto ride to the next town, because this one's bunk, and in my hangover I'm not going to get anything accomplished anyway - especially being that I almost got hit by about every single moving thing around on my way to the market to buy pants on account of I was still sort of drunk.

I head out around 1:00 on a trip that's said (by the hotel guy) to take 4 hours. I decide to do this trip so late because though overcast, the weather is slightly better than in previous days, when I'd been riding in rain for at least some of the ride. About an hour into it, DOWNPOUR. On the bike it feels like bullets hitting me. At least I have my sierra designs raincoat - except that my sierra designs raincoat hasn't kept water out since the day I bought it, 5 years ago, and for some reason I have still carried it around all these years. The other day I actually passed up the opportunity to buy coat and pants that work for $10 for some reason.

So I'm absolutely soaked, FREEZING, riding in the goddamn rain about 150 kilometers from where I'm trying to go. So I decide to stop at the next hotel I see. The next hotel I see is 150 km down the road.

By the time I get to Dalat, it's dark and I'm frigid, but I still have to run around to find a cheap hotel, which takes forever, and then I immediately strip down for my much anticipated shower only to jump in and find that it's cold. I had to wait for the heater thingy to heat up, so I assumed the fetal position under the down comforter in my cheap ass room while listening to the outright screaming of every single member of the zillion person family staying two floors down. Incredible.

Then I went to dinner and choked on a pepper and suffered and coughed while it burned my throat.