Bearded bunny bringing beer, biking bodaciously

I haven't been able to post in the past few days because, for some reason, I have been unable to get into www.blogger.com from any of the terminals I've been at. Thank Shiva I was able to find this cafe and get in.

So, I WAS traveling around with Starr for about 4 weeks before we split up. She went on to Ho Chi Minh City to meet her friend Raquel and I took my time getting down the coast. She just sent me an email saying she's bored so the two of them are going to cross the border without me, and I can just catch up in a day. Thanks guys. Thanks a million.

So, I posted some pictures of me and this fuck Juan eating cobra. Here's the story, hacked out of an email I wrote to Daniela and my dad.

After Starr left for HCMC, I was so bored and lonely. I didn't think traveling alone would suck, but it was and it was only my first day away from her. I woke up early on the 22nd, Starr left, and I couldn't get back to sleep. So I had some tea and then saw the corpse of Ho Chi Minh. The tomb was freezing cold and it was crawling with guards. I still don't understand why, but one of them grabbed me by the arm right near his body, and pulled me slightly out of line, but only slightly. Then he let go. So I looked around and then confusedly just stepped back into line. I don't understand what that was all about. The guys in front of me got yelled at TWICE for talking. It's pretty strict in the tomb, a tomb by the way that Ho Chi Minh never wanted. His will was apparently very clear about being cremated. That sucks.

After I got attacked by a guard I walked through the museum dedicated to his life and his 'excellent morality.' It all seemed like interesting crap to see, but I was bored for just about all of it, so I wandered back to the lake near my hotel at 1pm. A few Vietnamese people tried to talk to me while I was sitting on a bench. Some old guy slapped both of his knees in front of me and gave me a thumbs up. Some woman wouldn't stop staring at me and when I waved at her, she blushed and covered her face in her hands. Then, some Vietnamese kid (he must have been 22 or so) started to chat with me. At that point I was wondering if the rest of my trip was going to be like this and I was thinking about abandoning it and just coming home. So this guy caught me at the moment I needed him the most. So he was like, 'what are you doing man?' and I started lying because every Vietnamese person asks me the same questions and I've found out my answers don't make a slight bit of difference in where the conversation goes. So I told him I was Canadian, and some other stuff, and that I was looking at the lake. 'Staring at the lake is fucking boring. Let's go drink Vietnamese tea.' I didn't really trust the guy but I figured fuck it, I'm whining that traveling alone is boring and lonely and then when someone wants to hang out and I have an opportunity to do something crazy, I turn it down??? Come on! So I went with him. He and a bunch of other taxi drivers were sitting in a park, drinking tea out of a cooler and smoking, so I had a cigarette with them and chatted about nothing important. Then he asked me if I had eaten anything weird. 'Nope.' 'How about cobra?' 'No cobra yet.' 'Well I have my bike here, i can show you a few cool things and then we can go by a cobra farm and try some.' I was unclear at that point if he was a tour guide and wanted money or something, so he said that he's studying English (his was quite good) and that the conversation was enough for him-to practice I mean. If at the end I wanted to kick him a few dollars for the use of his brother's bike, then that was cool too. Awesome! So we were off on an adventure and it was only my first day of being on my own! Hooray! I was making friends and soon I was gonna eat cobra!

He took me to some tiny rat-infested pond with a giant B5-2 standing tail-up in the middle of it. He was like, 'this is the plane John McCain was flying when we shot him down.' Awesome! Click. click. click. click. It was in my guidebook too but I wouldn't have been able to find it on my own. After some photos, he took me to a bridge that Gustav Eiffel designed when France still controlled the whole area. Click. click. click. The bridge was pretty stupid and ugly but it was on the way to the cobra farm. Now, I'm gonna tell this story and I want to end on a good note, so first I'll tell you all that this whole thing was a scam. When the bill came, it was for 2.55 million dong. More than $150. He said he had only been there one time before, with his English teacher from Boston (I was surprised but I couldnt ACT surprised because I had told him I was from Toronto) and they were in a big party so it didn't seem that expensive at the time, plus his teacher sprung for the meal so he didn't even see a bill (I don't believe any of it for a second. When we arrived it seemed like he knew everyone there and he knew exactly how to drive us there despite it being quite a ways outside of the city). So I got pissed, especially after he was like, 'all I have is 200,000 dong.' I only had 150,000 on me, so I was like, well I need to go to an ATM then. He drove me back to the main road and dropped me at a few different ATMs (the restaurant let us go and didn't even make him leave his cell phone or anything so they CLEARLY knew each other) and I kept acting like I was taking out money out but I just kept cancelling the transaction so I returned to him and said, 'bad news guy. my card doens't work.' 'Well, where have you been taking money out?' 'Near my hotel.' 'OK, let's go there then.' I figured this was genius because I was getting back to my hotel where I knew my way around (I hadn't a clue where we were) and then if things went really bad (they did) I could just give him whatever I thought was fair and walk away.

I knew I had to give him something but how much? The place we went to was nice. Don't picture like a shanty town with a cobra pit somewhere that you can pick your snake from and they serve it to you. I never saw any cages or anything and the building was a nice two-story restaurant with classy looking woodwork and fancy table settings. Also, before we left the restaurant I asked to see a menu and it said 100 grams of snake was $10, or 150,000 dong or so. So I figured about half would be ok. So I took out 1.2 million (70 bucks maybe) and gave him that. He wanted more, we argued, blah blah blah, I left. He kept trying to get me back on the bike so we could return to the restaurant together but that wasn't happening.

Now, I don't have a clue how much that cobra should have been, so I don't know if he was being honest and I fucked him over and left him with a giant bill he couldn't pay (only I really didn't since I paid my half anyway) but 70 bucks for what it was was OK I guess. I'm trying to only think about how cool eating it was and not about the scam part. I couldn't stop thinking about the money and realized I was letting it ruin what was a pretty awesome day.

OK, so the COBRA!!!!! We arrived at the farm, but like I said it wasn't really a farm. The owner, a woman, came out to greet us and was carrying a burlap sack full of what appeared to be a really thick coiled rope. She starts to open it up and I just jumped the fuck back. She pulls out this giant cobra, a few feet in length. She handles it for me so I can get a few pictures (click. click. click. click) and then shakes it to piss it off so its ear-flap things spread out. It looks FEROCIOUS. Especially being so close. I take another picture and she puts it back in it's bag. Her and her husband (or whoever) seem not to be afraid of it coiling up near their arms. They never let it just move around, they were constantly repositioning themselves and constantly moving it around as well, but even if it's head got up near their hand and brushed it, they seemed cool with it.

So Juan (the Vietnamese kid who is showing me around) starts to show me all the bottles of cobra liquor and crap. He handles a jar of cobra penises preserved in alcohol (for sexual prowess) and jars of alcohol with whole cobras inside, etc; We went upstairs and they began by serving us a bottle of cobra penis and ginseng in rice wine (they all kept saying rice wine but rice moonshine would be a more appropriate description... it tasted more like vodka or tequila than wine). Anyway, so we have a few glasses of penis and then they bring up our snake. It's a few feet long and they uncoil it, and holding it perfectly straight the owner takes out her knife and inserts it below the head and cuts it open length-wise, letting its heart fall out and dangle and beat in front of us. The blood is all collected into a jar with a funnel below the snake. The heart keeps beating and the snake's blood trickles down and all you can hear is my camera. After that, they add some alcohol to the blood and swish it around for us to drink.The penises and whatever else in the jars can be kept, but the blood always has to be consumed right after the snake is killed. So we both do a shot of cobra blood while the woman cuts out its heart and serves it to me on a platter. It keeps beating the whole time I drink with Juan. Then they take the snake back downstairs and prepare our meal, which consists of dishes with almost every part of the snake added. We had cobra spring rolls, sticky rice with its meat cooked in, soup with its entire spine coiled up in it, etc; They were tasty too. Cobra has a consistency like tough beef but the taste is closer to chicken, only not like chicken... I don't know how to describe the taste and I'm only saying that it tasted like chicken because that's what everyone says about strange meat flavors. It did taste more like chicken than pork, fish, or beef though. Like I said, it was tasty. So we ate all the dishes, had some more blood, some more cobra penis liquor, and then i ate the still-beating heart. That was obviously the high point of the meal and it was perfectly timed relative to the rest of the meal. I didn't eat it to begin with, even though it was the first part removed, but only after we had a few dishes did I eat it. How are you gonna top the eating of a still-beating heart? You can't. So it has to come mid-meal. Perfect. I put it into my shotglass, still beating, then poured some of it's own blood over it, and took the whole thing like a shot, without chewing.

After that she brought the bill and I've already said how it quickly turned into a fubar situation. Even if I had paid the whole $150 I would still be really glad that I went.

So now I'm in Nha Trang and I don't know what to do.