The good, the bad and the ugly (cont...)

OK, I lie again. It is all good stuff in this entry, no more bad and ugly.

First of all I want to introduce you to "the gangs of Vietnam"

- Thảo, Hà, Tường, Trung, Thành and Kiên are from around Washington DC area.
- I (Nguyên), Tín and Hoàng (Ut or BeUt) are from North Carolina.
- Hà and Thành are brother and sister.
- Kiên and I are long time friends.
- Tín is my cousin.
- Hoàng is Tín's cousin.
- The others, i do not sure about the relationship but i know they are friends of the other and my friend too. ( I took advices of my dentist to keep my teeth intact 1. Brush my teeth twice a day 2. Have my teeth checked every 6 months 3. Do not get into people's business)




Above are pictures of new river gorge bridge. We will have our raft passed under this bridge.

Breakfast:

We knew that the trip on the river would be long and require some physical activities, so we tried to start our day with an enormous breakfast. We got Vietnamese food, every people gathered around the table, we ate, told jokes and mainly made fun at the others. The foods were delicious. Big "thank you" to Ha, I believed she did all the cooking.
Damn, for a guy who loves eating like me, just keep my fingers crossed "hope that my wife will love cooking just like Ha".

Dance with the wolf wannabe:

So my long time buddy wanted to get my food off my chopsticks. So i turned my back around and tried to block him off. He reached for the food again. I blocked him again and Ut got the "food dance" with her camera. So nice, "the wolf wannabe" wanted to get the food from "the real wolf ;)".

"Good luck buddy, maybe you will do better when the 'wannabe' is not there any more. hahahahaha"

Playing rescuers:

OK, breakfast was over. We were standing outside the cabin and enjoying the fresh air of a typical mountain morning. We suddenly heard some car's engineer from a near by cabin. It turned out that some Indian guys got their car stuck and they were trying so hard to pull it back out.

We screamed cross the woods to check if they wanted any help.
"No, we are OK !" The Asian Indians answered.
"Damn, you not only need muscle but also brain" Thanh, a guy in my group whisper in Vietnamese :D.

It took those Indian guys another 10 minutes before they turned to us for help. We did an amazing team work, pushing, pulling, speaking in all kind of languages but English (except the cursing part. Hahahaha).

We finally pulled the car off the hole and we were so proud of ourselves.
We were ready for the whitewater rafting.

Sorry, no picture to prove that we were heroes. You should blame Ut on this.

She was shocked when she found out "how much muscle her rafter-mates had" that she could not take any picture.

The best:

Justin was our rafter guide. He was the best. He was on the back of the raft with tattoos all over his body. He did help us to get most of the exciting passes or surfs from the river.

We could not control taking pictures so we just got a few of them from one of our surfs. We took turn to move to the head position, where we could got the most of the water into our face.

We did work very hard as a team to move the raft around. Trung did say "We are working as hard as slaves, and the best part is that we did pay to be like this ..."

I will try to upload the video to youtube so you guys can see how wonderful the trip was. But this is the summary:

- We did sail the raft over some rapids with high waves

- We did sail the raft and had it dropped down from a 5 ft high

- We did jump off the raft to swim and float cross some safe rapids (We might add some extra water to the river too, but i would never tell who did it ...)

- We did jump off the a big rock around 20 ft above the water level. Two thumbs up for Trung, he is afraid of the height but he did it.

- We did help the others, pulled them into the raft (just like pulling a sack of potato)

- We did get a lot of kick backs from the river. Kien actually got the last gift from Justin. Justin directed the raft over a rock and the bound back force kicked Kien off his position (I were the only one saw it, so do not pass this around, please !!!).

- We saw another raft got flipped over when they passed a rapid. (Wow, i wish it happened to us).

- Some of us got bruised (Ut) or beaten up by the paddle of our beloved team mates. I was not a victim but ... hahahaha ;) You know what i mean, right ! I swear, i did not mean it :P

Youtube: "Clip 1"
Youtube: "Clip 2 Youtube disabled the music"
Youtube: "Clip 3 Youtube disabled the music"
Youtube: "Clip 4"

We got off shore in the afternoon and we asked the video man to take a picture of us with Justin.

He did a perfect job "I messed up only one picture, the last one, of you guys, Justin and the beautiful view of the bridge".

The better:

We came back to the cabin all wet, hungry but very very happy. We did have a wonderful day on the river. We went to take shower (i don't have any pictures of that, so stop wishing, hahahahaha).

We came back to the cabin when Ha, Thao and Ut already had some food cooking on the pan. The food smelled so good, so we took out a case of beer and rewarded ourselves for a perfect day.

Wow that was just the appetite, we had the grilled fish for the main meal, we rolled the fish with some rice noodle, pine apple and rice sheet. The beer helped the food disappear pretty fast. And you could see all the happy faces in the pictures.

The drunker(s) and the singers:

We all got a bit tipsy and we decided to went down to the bar for some live music and maybe some dancing to celebrate the 4th-July.

Ooop, looked like I was the only one got drunk after 1 beer.

It started to rain. They had some good live music but it was not our taste so I, Kien, Tin and Ut decided to go home and had our own live music.

Ha called me several times to tell me that the music at the bar got better and people were dancing down there. We got lazy to walk in the rain so we said that we were happy with our home band.

Ha decided to bring the whole team back to the cabin (what a powerful girl, i like it). Kien was playing guitar and he was the star of the show. We sang a few more songs before we realized that Kien was kind of a bit drunk to play more guitar.

We turned to a karaoke program on Thanh's laptop. It was fun, the South ascent fought against the North and the central ascent, but people could still recognize we were singing Vietnamese.

Oh, no, i was wrong again. They started to sing English songs now. I had no idea why Trung covered his face !!!

Kind of amazing, huh ? Seriously, no sarcastic here.
Alright, you don't trust me, right ? I know it. So :P

Big sister and Morning coffee:

It had been raining since we went to "sleeping bags" the previous night and it was still raining in the morning of July-05. I waked up but still staying on my bed and watched Ha. She was doing a great job of being a big sister, a house hold care giver. She was preparing another amazing breakfast for the rest. They were still sleeping in their sleeping bags. Girl, you earned all the honor medals. Thank you so much, Ha. I would definitely go on any trip with you ( really, i do care for my stomach).

I did not see Kien around so i called him on his cellphone. He was driving back from a country coffee shop and he asked me if i wanted to get some coffee too. I did not want to make Ha feel uncomfortable so i got into the car. Kien took me to the restaurant and told me about the nice cashier over there. He was right, the cashier was pretty but she also had a wedding ring on her finger.

We got some coffee, talked a bit then got several phone calls from Ha and Ut so we drove back to the cabin and had breakfast with others. Ha cooked some very tasty food.

So every time you see this pretty lady, give her a pat on her back. She earned it.

No paintball game but wait..."Bang bang, my baby shot me down ...":

Ha told us that because of the rain, we canceled the paintball game. We felt a bit sad. We did have a great previous day so we all expected to have another fun day. Well, could not ask for too much, should be happy with what we had.

So we started to pack our stuff, clean the cabin to checkout. We went out and tried to back the camaro to the drive way but got a bit trouble there.

I did drive it a little off the gravel drive way + the rain from the previous night => the camaro sank into mud.

We asked other guys to move their cars away from the camaro so we could have extra space to pull it off the mud, beside that we did not want the gravel from the camaro damage other cars.

My long time buddy Kien was in his car, we were standing in front of his car and the camaro. We tried to estimate a good way to pull the camaro off.

Kien did push hard on the gas pedal. Tuong got some mud on his jacket. Tin jumped off and did not get any. I was like a sitting duck and got all the mud from head to toes. My damned friend did not know that he was doing a great job of shooting mud-balls. He kept trying harder on the gas pedal to pull his car to the drive way.

And that was my mud-balls game. I lost the battle and Ut had the battle result with her camera.

Yeah, you saw some beer bottles in the picture, but they were not the root problem. Kien was not SUI (Shooting Under the Influence) when he mowed me down with his car + mud machine gun (just like 007's car).

Tin was trying to say "Hey, i did not do this but i like it :D"

And i was like "i was so glad those were not rocks"

"Winner takes it all". So, i took my stuff for the depart ... to the bath room

I was promising a "I will be back ... for more ... mud"

And walked to the bath-room for another show-down 10 minutes later...

The wolf-wannabe WON this battle :D

He was in the red sweater walked in front of me.

The "real wolf" was mowed down with "mud-ball machine gun".

Way to go Kien !!! ;)

and finally THE END:

A picture is worth a thousand words. So i put 2 of them here. Yeah, i don't want to type any more ....

Bye and see you guys later.

If you found anything here that is not 100% correct, please DO NOT contact me.