Hey Friends!!! Thanks for tuning in again! These post may be a little out of order, but this one concerns July 2nd and 3rd.

Yesterday was pretty much awsome. We ran into this young Lao dude named Say (pronounced "sigh") at the tourism office in Thakek. A really nice guy who spoke pretty good english and we really hit it off. As mentioned before, we went on a great trekking adventure with him and in the course of hiking like 40 km through the jungle with this guy it came up that he works in the tourism office part time and fishes comercially on the Mekong the rest of the time. Long story short, he invited him to come fishing with him yesterday and Evan and I being who we are naturally jumped at the chance.

We fished out of his motorized canoe for most of the morning, first pulling a small trawl net allong the bottom (caught a bunch of small catfish and ciprinids (minnows)) and then we set his gill-net....all 1.5 km of it. Basically, we motored all the way to the Thailand side of the river, and then Say simultaineously rowed and payed out the gill-net all the way back to the Lao side. We didnt anchor the net, just kinda drifted down the river, fishing probably 3/4 of the channel. We drifed down about half a mile, then pulled the net, but only got one catfish that was about 15 inches. There we many other boats doing the same thing, plus other people fishing in just about any way you could imagine (trot lines, traps, pots, wiers, hook and line, castnet, etc)--to say this river gets some fishing pressure would be putting it mildly. The diversity of catfish is amazing, we caught 7-10 differnt species in a couple of net sets. After that we sat on the bank with a bunch of Say's friends and family (some of who actually speak english pretty well) and BBQed all the fish (even down to the minnows) and ate them with chilli sause and sticky rice, and spent the rest of the afternoon drinking Beer Lao and Lao Lao (Lao moonshine whiskey--not for wimps) on the bank of the Mekong. Pretty much a perfect day in my book.

Today we rode 85 miles from Thakek to Savannaket. That puts us around 520 miles total for the trip. Fortunately, we were well rested after a few days off our bikes and it was a good and mostly flat road. Still, it was a hot day and kind of a push. But we arrived in good shape and went out for an exellent meal of sweet and sour chicken, spicy green papaya salad, and fried frog in red curry topped off with a couple of beers and a bannana split (the bannanas here are excellent). Savannahket is the bigest city we've been in since Vientiane--it was the capital of southern Lao during French rule and you can tell theres still a lot of $$ in this town (relative to other places we've been) along with a lot of run-down French architecture. I think we'll head south again tomorrow towards the city of Pakxe--its about 150 milesaway so it may take us 2 or even 3 days to get there, but we have it on the authority of the folks in the tourism office in Savannaket that there are plenty of guest-houses between here and there. They better not be screwing me around either because I spent half an our helping them re-write an ecotourism grant proposal this afternoon. You get some odd requests when you are one of the few native english speakers in town...