Time to go, my work here is done

Honestly, I've got to leave Laos now, because it will never be better than this.

And, honestly, I will have photographic evidence in about 2 weeks or so, I swear.

Picture this. I'm driving down the street with our friend Erin and Mark Thornburg, a guy I know from A-100 (State training class) in for 36 hours from Islamabad, Pakistan (long story for another post...probably the next one actually). Driving down a small side street that passes a lovely restaurant called La Silapa (for those of you who have been here).

Anyway I'm driving kind of slowly, because it's a narrow road, and there are cars and motorbikes parked on either side, making it even narrower. And thank god I was driving slowly. I passed something on the right side of the road, slowed to a stop, turned to my passengers and asked (and this is a direct quote)

"...did you guys just see a monkey riding a weiner dog?"

Turns out they hadn't. So I backed up a bit and we took a closer look.

AND I SWEAR, there was a monkey riding a weiner dog. And as I explained to some skeptical people at a party later on today, it wasn't riding John Wayne style, sitting up in the saddle surveying the vast Wyoming plains (or whatever), he was more Tobey McGuire-style in Seabiscuit, hunched over and holding on tight with both hands.

The great thing is, the dog didn't seem to care at all. He was just kind of standing there, as weiner dogs are wont to do, with a monkey riding him.

My camera was not around, but Mark got a great picture of it. As he is on two-week holiday in Thailand now, I won't have photographic evidence of the weiner dog-riding monkey for some time. But honestly, I can die happy now.

Seriously, I've got two events in the past 10 or so months that are quite something in my long list of monkey encounters.

"Is that a man washing a monkey?"

and

"Is that a monkey riding a weiner dog?"

And that doesn't even count the glasses-stealing monkey.

I have to confess that a co-worker said that if I told y'all about the weiner dog and the monkey right away, the blog might be taking a bit too much of a monkey-centric tone. But honestly, who in their right mind would ever think there were TOO MANY stories about monkeys anywhere?