Happy Lunar New Year from Hanoi. Tet celebrations are going on in the city and urchin miscreants are setting off crackers on every street corner. They like to throw them at the feet of passing tourists.

Seems the last photo contest was a trifle on the difficult side. A natural response to your quick success the first time around. Only Fletcher had a correct answer; the others were (from the top): a girl in the village of Pakha, some five hours’ hike outside of Meung Kwa in northern Laos; Lisa at Meung Kwa’s Saby Saby restaurant (on the veranda); Lisa outside the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne (fooled ya); and, Pat, Lisa at a coffee shop on Aljunied Road in Singapore. Tough yes, but you displayed such web acumen the last time around …

We just left Laos and we loved it. People-watching was the best. Everyone is very cordial, very kind, always smiling even when you bombard them with dumb questions.

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Kids in Laos have invented a new game: flip-flop throwing. They skip them along a flat dirt surface or in the road, going for distance. There is money involved, apparently lots. These kids can really throw, too. Next to Bocce it seems to be the national pastime.

We spent most of our time in Laos taking it easy — the other national pastime. We took a lot of photos — of cats and puppies and moths and ants and small children, their distracted parents, monks on cell phones, monks smoking cigarettes, monks checking email. Market textiles, steam tables full of vegetables, colorful doors, colorful tuk-tuks, colorful temples: Lisa has been a snap-happy fool. Shrines. Hills fuzzy with bamboo. The warm light of a massage parlor. Store fronts spilling onto the street offering bottled water, soy sauce, umbrellas. Whole fish, eyes glazed, crusted with salt, simmering on a barbecue. An old woman sweeping a train platform with a one-handed grass broom.

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When people ask me what Vientiane smells like, I will say: bandanna. Or surgical mask. A style question, really.

Once out of the capital we could breathe easier, literally. We took a trek into the hills of northern Laos to visit a tribe of Akha people who had only once been visited by Westerners (the subject of a later post). The air is cool and fresh, with a tinge of barnyard from all the loose pigs and chickens. The hills are covered in unmanaged forest, quite green even in the dry season, trees tied up in lianas and trails overgrown and crossed by cobwebs.

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On the way back our driver, who didn’t speak a word of English, stopped unexpectedly to buy some porcupine meat. I’ll never forget the thud, thud, thud of the butcher knife as a woman used its dull edge to lop off the porcupine’s spines. They spun in the air and rattled like sewing needles at our feet.

They also had civet cats. Large dead ones. As we barrelled down narrow mountain roads back to Luang Prabang women would dangle them out their front doors to entice us to stop. Must be good eating, the civet cat. The thought of SARS only occurred to us later.

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In L.P. we met a guy named Tooi who wore a Red Wings jacket. He bought it in D.C. I took that as a sign the Wings will win the Cup this year. And that I might actually get to see some playoff action.

Tooi was a nice guy. He fixed our van before we left town for our village trip, and posed for pictures with me.

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Until we reached Laos every country we’ve visited on this trip has been a “left-side-of-the-road” country. That doesn’t mean Laos is like America. Laos is more like a “both-sides-of-the-road” country.

The roads in Laos necessitate this. The road south of Udom Xai is so full of holes, rents, distensions and axle-busting subsidences it looks like America never stopped bombing. But it’s the blind turns that wake you up, when your insane driver takes them at 90 kph with only a perfunctory beep of the horn.

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Drivers here hit the accelerator when you or I would hit the brake. Seems to be a Rule Of The Road.

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So many young people in Laos makes the place feel young. But it’s still a relaxed place. That is, until the heavy metal concert that rattled our windows on our last night in L.P., celebrating New Year. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard a Lao cover of “Symphony of Destruction.”

Back in Hanoi, music and celebrating continue through the weekend. It’s the Year of the Golden Pig, allegedly an excellent year to have a baby. We’re not convinced. But we’ll be in the thick of things tonight just the same. The Year of the Golden Pig only comes around once every 60 years. Happy 4,705 everyone.