A year later, our buzzer label's still here | Photo by Lauren Girardin

On June 17, 2009 Todd and I walked through the door of our San Francisco apartment for the first time in 11 months and 8 days. During our round-the-world trip, we visited 15 foreign countries - not counting a day-long layover in Slovakia - often taking many weeks to explore each place (click to see our route). Moving mostly ever eastward, we've circumnavigated the Earth. We're a little dizzy, but that's probably due to all the gluten suddenly injected into our diet.

While we were away, America elected its first black President, the global economy collapsed, a labor union became a major shareholder in an American auto company, gay marriage was voted down in California but up in Iowa, all the bank names have changed, John Edwards revealed himself as a low down cheating dog, fancy ice cream became all the rage in San Francisco, and while it's barely rained in California, constant rains in New York are washing the beaches away.

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Laos is no paradise when it comes to getting bandwidth, back up drives, and camera cards. So, when our digital storage ran out somewhere on the road from Laos to Cambodia, it was a complex dance to clear space for new photo taking. So complex somehow that I missed backing up a 2 gig card of photos.

This was a test of the Ephemerratic spirit of our trip. Nothing makes digital photos more ephemeral than having no one else ever see them.

Though hundreds of photos are gone, I remember how good some of them were. Some you can imagine from our stories "On a chicken wing and a prayer," "Ain't no party like an island party," and "Rat soup."

Here, in exactly a thousand words, are just a few of the other missing photos that I can't get off my mind.

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Todd at our $3 a night bungalow on Don Det | Photo by Lauren Girardin

As Todd and I swing in our hammocks on the deck of our tiny river-side bungalow on Don Det island*, we see several unusually burdened boats float by on the Mekong River.

The first few are loaded with folding tables and chairs, the next with brightly painted carousel animals, and then one nearly sinking under the weight of a half-dozen giant speakers. It's when we see the second boatload of speakers that we get really curious.

No one seems to know for certain why there's a big party tonight, here in the rural south of Laos. One rumor is that it's a memorial – or maybe a birthday? – for a rich man. Another is that the party's a celebration to ensure the auspicious opening of a new business. A few tourists gullibly believe that it's a Beer Lao-fueled Full Moon Party, done up 4,000 Islands style.

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Mekong River, Laos | Art by Todd Berman

Hi Doug + Jana -

As Todd and I set off this morning on a tour of the Buddhist caves near Tha Khek, the tour agent asked what we wanted for lunch so he could tell our non-English speaking songthaew-taxi driver. When I boasted, "Wherever the locals eat," I forgot that we were headed to the Laotian countryside, where "local" is very local. Context is so important.

Noontime, the songthaew shudders to a stop in front of a roadside shack, smack in the middle of nothing. A woman waves us over to her open-air, rudimentary kitchen, and points to a steaming pot of what can only be soup. Nodding, I say "gai gai," the Laotian for "chicken chicken," always the safest bet.

While we wait for our lunch, I watch the oddly-common-in-Laos sight of a toddler playing with an eight-inch knife, blissfully stabbing the shack's floorboards. Todd's distracted by some action in the kitchen, leaning way back on his plastic stool for a better view.

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Caught in the act | Photo by Lauren Girardin

At some point, I deleted photos from a memory card, thinking I had transferred them to our laptop. Well, I was wrong. All the photos that would have gone along with this story, and most of the ones from the rest of Laos are gone, except for my memory of them. So, the photos below are from an earlier mini-van ride that was bad, but not as bad as this bus ride. If you sat through the Luang Prabang slide show, you've seen them already.

We should have known that something would go afoul when the chicken was brought on the bus–

No, wait. I shouldn't start there, with an awful pun. First, let me explain what Todd and I were doing on this particular bus, before I say anything more about the chicken.

That goddamn chicken.

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