Warning: This is very, very long. Don't read half way and skip to the comments to bitch about how long it is. I'm sure this note will encourage many of you unoriginal fuckers to do just that, but I like to give my readers warning nonetheless.

Somewhere between Hanoi and the coastal city of Nha Trang, the train heaved to a stop, jolting me awake in my bunk as it had at every previous station. It was some time around 2 a.m. on Dec. 26, 1999, two days after my arrival in Viet-fucking-nam, man.
Voices and banging erupted in the narrow corridor outside my sleeper cabin, which I shared with three bunkmates, all native. Then the door slid open, and a young Vietnamese man looked in, and then looked straight at me.
    I’m not entirely sure what he said, but I think it was something along the lines of “What the fuck are you doing in my bunk?” The man repeated the question, seeming to grow a little irritated, and I shrugged, one hand wandering toward the razor sharp Gerber pocketknife I had hidden under my pillow. Then one of my bunkmates, a quite, smiling little guy traveling with a bird in a bamboo cage, spoke up. He seemed to explain things sufficiently to the intruder, because after a brief discussion the stranger withdrew back into the corridor, sliding the door closed behind him after casting a final, somewhat guilty look back at me.
    I waved in appreciation at my savior, who smiled back pacifically, and we faded back into sleep.
    The Vietnam War ended when I was around six years old, but it left America with a hangover that lasted well into my teens. All the peace marches were fading (not like we had many of those in Mobile, Alabama, my hometown, where they burn hippies) but you couldn’t throw a rock without risking sudden death at the hands of some traumatized vet. Well, that’s how the movies made it seem, at least.
    My father, rendered half deaf in a scooter accident when he was a teenager, never served in the war, and my two uncles who did never talked about it, and managed to move on with their lives without going Rambo on anybody. The point is, I had no direct connection with the war, no battlefields to visit in memoriam.
    I had not come there to mourn America’s military defeat, but to celebrate capitalism’s big victory. I had come there to party.
    This was my second big trip during my time living in Japan. I had had a bumpy time in Thailand the year before, and I initially planned to spend my week-long Christmas vacation in Hong Kong, thinking it would be a bit easier. I was told, however, that it would also be pretty boring for an entire week, and then a friend of mine told me about the boat trip in Nha Trang.
    His description sounded almost mythical, particularly since he had just heard about it from a friend. For almost no money, he said, tourists are loaded up on a small boat, taken out to an island in Nha Trang Bay, and fed beer and pot until it oozes out of their pores. Or, as the official Nha Trang Web site puts it, “The meal [served during the trip] is included. The drinks and the shit are in optional.”
    I couldn’t resist.
    So I booked the flight, paying more than $100 just for the special tourist visa, and set out on another solo adventure.
    After a somewhat chaotic, one-night layover in Taiwan, I touched down in Hanoi on Christmas Eve. It was remarkably cool there. The bus I rode into town shared the highway with locals on scooters carrying dead livestock strapped to the rear fender. At one point I remember seeing a guy driving a horse-drawn, flatbed wagon with Volkswagon van tires.
    After checking into some weird little hotel, I spent a full day in Hanoi, wandering aimlessly. The beggars there are kids, almost always boys, some of whom hawk “Good Morning, Vietnam” T-shirts under the ubiquitous Communist propaganda banners. Everybody wanted American dollars. I didn’t spend the local currency until near the end of the trip.
    Let me give you a brief description of Hanoi traffic before moving on. It never stops. It is a constantly flowing river of metal, and I think I saw one intersection with traffic lights in that entire city. Crossing the street meant playing human Frogger, though, thankfully, the drivers are used to it and tend to move very slowly. For this reason, if any of you are planning a trip over there, I recommend that you employ the “cyclo” bicycle taxis. They’re cheap and, while they still scare the shit out of you, they know what they’re doing.
    The drivers can also be helpful guides, as I later learned in Nha Trang.
    So, I booked the trip on the aforementioned train, foolishly opting to save a few bucks by taking the local train. The one that stops at EVERY station, it would seem. The toilet was a hole in the floor, and, while the scenery was beautiful, I had to glimpse it through gaps in the metal mesh that hung over the window. On the bright side, a porter rolled a cart loaded with beer, snacks and decent meals to our room about three times a day, so I never really had to leave it.
    And absolutely nobody spoke English, except for one middle-aged woman who popped into my cabin to practice her language skills for a few minutes before getting off at Hue. I spent a lonely, weird day and a half on that train before reaching paradise.
    Well, maybe not paradise, but certainly one of the nicest beach towns in Southeast Asia. Beautiful beaches lined by respectable bars and restaurants. I quickly made friends with one of the cyclo drivers who usually stood outside my hotel. He spoke serviceable English, having learned it from an American soldier during the war. He took good care of me, even making sure to rescue me from a bad scene at a place called the Log Bar involving a really unattractive hooker who was blatantly sleazing all over me and this Australian guy with whom I was playing pool. But let’s not dwell on that ugly scene.
    Finding the mythical boat trip turned out to be remarkably easy, in that the desk clerk simply asked me if I wanted to go on it. Well, she didn’t mention the details, but it was only $15, so I signed up.
    Remember that price. The experience I’m about to describe cost $15.
    A bus picked me up directly from the hotel the next day, along with a sizeable group of young American and European backpackers. They hustled us past the crowd of beggars on the pier – including one with a mutilated face that stood out from his peers – and onto two ramshackle wooden boats, the fleet of Mama Hanh’s Green Hat Tours.
    Mama Hanh herself was there to direct the party, and we set out into the bay with the Vietnam flag, a yellow star on a red background, flying off the stern of each vessel. There were benches for sitting on the lower deck, but when we reached our anchorage point we were ushered up to the upper deck, essentially the roof of the boat, and invited to grab nicely chilled beers from a barrel of ice.
    Then Mama Hanh cranked up the sound track to “Pulp Fiction,” and, maybe 30 minutes after the party started, I heard somebody behind me say “Holy shit, is he going to smoke that?!” “That” was a double ended monster joint with a hole punched in the middle for inhaling. The legend had just become reality.
    Now, don’t go thinking this was your regular pothead party with people laying around drooling. Mama Hanh’s constant theme was “Don’t be lazy!” As soon as things started getting too hazy, she kicked us off the boat.
    It was time for the floating bar, of course. Essentially, most of us jumped into the blue waves below, followed by some rather sketchy life preservers that were filthy (I had to wash a cockroach off of mine, but just one) and hard, but which did save us from having to exert energy unnecessarily. The floating bar itself was basically two slabs of foam taped together, where Mama Hanh served up some really foul tasting, potent cocktails garnished with massive pineapple rings.
    And then we floated, in the water and in our heads, passing the now ubiquitous and varied joints.
    Eventually we re-boarded the boats, and around noon Mama and her crew (which included a young American girl) served up a massive feast that was promptly devoured. I posed for a picture with Mama, in which she bit my nipple. Hard. Twice, because the drunken bastard who took it for me fucked up the first attempt.
    So, that’s how it went for the rest of the day: drinking, smoking, dancing, swimming. We changed locations at one point and moved to an island with some kind of museum that looked like a giant conch shell. Some local girls came onboard and painted peoples’ toenails, the Vietnam flag on one big toe and the flag of the person’s native land on the other. Life was good.
    By evening they brought us back to the dock, rolled us ashore and into the buses for the trip back to our hotels, though they invited us back for a party that night at Mama’s favorite bar. I went, but I was too wiped out to stay long, and I had to get up early the next day to catch my flight back to Hanoi and then home to Japan.
    My cyclo driving buddy took me to the airport the next morning, handing me his address so I could write letters, but I was never able to read it because, yes, it was in Vietnamese. Though I kept that piece of paper for a couple of years after coming back to the States, I never got around to writing, a fact of which I am not proud.
    As an epilogue, I’ll say that I fear some dark fate has befallen Mama Hanh’s Green Hat Tours, because the Nha Trang Web site also includes this ominous note: “In 2001, the sulfurous one reputation of Mama Hanh caught up with and the authorities decided to avoid the sunstrokes to him during some time… Glass bottom boats tours are also offered.”
I’m not sure what that means exactly, but it doesn’t sound good. Wherever you are, Mama, thanks for the memories, and the ring of tooth marks around my hairy areola.