My trusty Honda Cub ran out of fuel again tonight. That's four times now. Four times in the last four weeks or less since I got the thing. It's not the bike's fault, of course. Sure, it doesn't help any that there's no fuel gage. Or that anybody can just come along, lift the seat, unscrew the cap (the tank is conveniently located under the seat) and siphon away at their leisure. But back to the story. (It's not very exciting, sorry). Before my tank is about to give out the bike starts stuttering kind of and then the engine cuts out, as you'd expect, really. You get about a good 5-10 seconds of warning before you're left on the shoulder scratching your head. Although the first time this happened I had no idea what was going on and walked it to the nearest sua xe (moto mechanic) thinking I'd broken the thing, and he (the mechanic) is there tinkering with the engine and the spark plugs and everything for a good ten minutes until he lifts the seat and checks the tank and gives me that You're a f***ing retard, mate look and gets his assistant (who may have also been his son) to drive off and fill a coke bottle or something with fuel for double the price. I learnt my lesson. Sort of. It's happened four times now. I should probably start putting in more than 50,000 dong ($2.50) worth at a time. Doesn't help that I live a good half hour from the city centre either. The place I'm where currently staying isn't even technically a district, it's a county for chrissake. South of here is the Mekong. But I digress. So basically I had to walk my Cub, drunk, a kay or more along this big arse highway to the nearest petrol station. Lucky for me the bike doesn't weigh much and it was night and the traffic was relatively light. This is the part of the city people come to race their pimped-up stripped-down bikes. About two ripped past me going probably a hundred (which is ridiculous for the size of these puny things) in the time it took me to reach the servo. Even on a highway in the middle of marshy nowhere you get people strolling along on mysterious errands. People fishing off bridges, people just sitting on their parked bikes hanging out, smoking and looking off into the distance or young couples (in pyjamas, might I add) getting all romance away from the family unit, and people just strolling along to seemingly nowhere.

I'm afraid I'm losing my Australian accent. Sometimes I wonder if I ever had one to begin with. (I did, and still do). I'm tutoring the child of the friend of a friend in English from a textbook and I find myself enunciating words like "car" and "shower" with a disturbingly American bent (but, really, you try enunciating a word with a hard "r" at the end and try not sounding American). But It's worrying. Last time I came back from a bout in supple and sweaty Indochina I was calling thongs "flip-flops" and roundabouts "traffic circles" as a matter of course. These things happen.

In other news I've been listening to a lot of R.E.M. lately. Going through some kind of nineties nostalgia phase. Getting all moist eyed with any film that has Winona Ryder in it (not really). In reality I never even listened to R.E.M. or Radiohead or any of that good sheeit. But there was Jumanji. There was that.