Ladies and Gentlemen...

... that's pretty much how Ngoc would begin any group discussion.

It's also what Nigel, or Wallaby, started saying on the night train to Hoi An when he arrived with more beer from the dining car. He may not have been Wallaby yet. He got that in Hoi An. I forget who called him it first. But he kept up the "Ladies and Gentlemen" all the way to Bangkok. Some of us tried it on too, but it never sounded as good as when Nigel said it. Must be his super cool Australian accent.

Hoi An and the night train were responsible for a few of us getting nicknames along the way. I am proud to say that I named a few myself. And yes, I also got one. Several others picked up nicknames along the way, but not everyone did. No particular reason, just worked out that way.

But how about I introduce you to the groups, before I start spilling the beans.

Above is the Vietnam group. From left to right they are:
Wendy, Jessica, Pamela, Patrick, Kieran, Seth, Linda, Phil, Nigel, Merlina (you can only see her legs, and a bit of her blue shirt, but trust me, the rest of her is there too), Caroline, Sue, and Hyunra. Missing is our guide Ngoc as he is in front of this crew telling us a bit about the Forbidden City in Hue, and me, as I'm taking the picture, and do not own a selfie-stick like Nigel and Merlina do. Hang on, Eliska is missing. She was taking pictures of flowers behind Ngoc.

It's amazing what you remember.

Or fabricate. You choose.

And this is the group from Cambodia.

Left to right we've got:
Nigel, Pam (new Pam from Australia, Pamela from above who is from Brazil only did the Vietnam leg), Ian, his wife Gemma, (they're from Wales and I like his voice even more than Nigel's), Christina (she's Swiss, and coincidently is from the same town in Switzerland that Patrick is from), Alysha and Esta (two more from Australia - about 60% of Intrepid's clients are Australians, go figure it's an Australian company and they seem to like to travel, oh, Intrepid's the group that organized this tour, highly recommend), Patrick kneeling down in the front with some of the homestay kids, behind Esta is Virgina, Pam's friend, (the Pam in this photo, cuz that would be just too confusing if it was the other Pam), and there finally we get Eliska , with most of her boyfriend Kieran's head behind her (and trust me, just like Merlina, the rest of his head is there too), they're also Australian, there's Seth in the hat he stole from his mom Linda, oh, and hey, there's me, then Phil, father of Seth, husband of Linda, and farmer from Devon when he's not busy having his geneology explained by a Canadian who doesn't know it, more homestay family, Linda, sans hat, it having been stolen by Seth, and then Merlina, girlfriend of Nigel, and lastly the homestay mom and her littlest one, who is sans pants.

I don't think Seth took them.

Missing from that photo is our guide for the Cambodia leg, Channa. She's taking the picture.

Oh, so, Wendy's from Australia, as is Jessica. Caroline and Sue, who you can see below all nice and smiley, are from England, and their friend Hyunra is from South Korea.

And I'm Canadian. But you already know that.

So that's everyone. And so you don't have to squint I'll give you a few not full group shots so you can get to know all of these lovely people a bit better. And this way, when I start telling lies about them all in the next set of entries on the trip you'll know who I'm maligning.

These are in no particular order, other than the one that they are in, I guess.

That's Hyunra and Caroline being paddled around in a basketboat by a fishing village near Nha Trang, Vietnam, that we visited on Day 8. (I made notes.) 

Another note about that particular point of the day was that we saw cuttlefish mating. But this is a kid-friendly blog so I won't get into that.

Yes, kid-friendly. Don't look so surprised. Mind you, I've played Cards Against Humanity with my sons, so my definition may be a bit skewed.

Anyway, I was in a similar boat with Patrick and our paddler, who by the way, makes manouvering one of those baskets look deceptively simple. It's not. I tried. I sucked.

That's Jessica and Pamela under a waterfall at the mudbath spa place we went to in Dha Trang. This shot I had planned.

The shot I took before it was an absolute fluke, and is the result of not realizing that my camera was on shutter priority and that the speed was cranked up to 2000. I had done that the day before for some very valid reason that I no longer remember, but expect had something to do with how bright it was and wanting to not have all the colour washed out of the shot.

Jessica got the nickname of either Jessie J or Brady, due to her renown as an old-west gunslinger, and her having three daughters with hair of gold, like their mother, the youngest one with curls.

Actually she braided everyone's hair. 

See, fabrication may be more fun.

Pamela got the nickname of Cupcake. It just fit.

Here we have Merlina, Eliska (neat names eh?), Kieran, and Nigel. This was taken at Halong Bay on our boat trip around the bay. It was our first destination after leaving Hanoi, and we were all pretty camera happy taking shots of each other.  All of us except Jessica, who, lounging in a deck chair for much of the time, had adopted the strategy of having people send her shots that they'd taken.

Wise woman that Brady.

The enthusiasm for taking pictures of each other quieted down as the days progressed. Which is good, as there was lots of other stuff to be taking pictures of.

That's Ngoc. My mom likes his smile. I told him this. They're getting married next week. Neither of them know this. So ssshhhhhh, don't spoil it.

I can't say enough good things about Ngoc, but you'll hear alot of them in future entries. For now, let him remain the international man of mystery that you see before you.

That's Patrick. My roomie, and a pool shark. Patrick's been a chef for years, has served in the Swiss Military, did a lot of break dancing, and has a pretty cool tattoo on the shoulder you can't see.

I called him Muffin. It stuck, right up until Phil abbreviated it to Muffy.

That's Muffy again, under a waterfall that he and I were, it turned out, not supposed to have hiked up and behind in Cambodia. Channa said we were being naughty. She said that alot. I was deliberately going for that effect this time by the way. See, I can learn.

Wallaby at some point started calling him Eucalyptus. I still prefer Muffy.

Caroline, through no fault of her own, seemed to avoid getting a nickname. I'm sure she is quite grateful for that.

Why?

That's Big Balls.

Good enough reason?

Wendy came by the name Big Balls quite honestly. We were playing pool at an Aussie bar in Hoi An one evening and Muffy (though he was still Patrick at the time and hadn't gotten to Muffin, though it happened moments later) was explaining the basics of the game. High ball/ low ball. Thing is, Patrick started learning English a few months ago, and while his progress is truthfully astounding (as in you'd never know he hasn't been speaking it every day for years), there are some subtleties that illude him. In this case high and low ball were big and small ball.

So, when Wendy, who is like 5 foot nothing if that, sinks her first ball and it's the 11, and she very excitedly jumps up and down shouting "I'm Big Ball"...

Well, how was I supposed to pass that up?

This is a bunch of us somewhere, I think Dha Trang again, but maybe not. We're happy. See. And no, Big Balls is not actually that short, she just tucked under and around to get in the pic.

That's the night train to Hoi An.

Patrick and I were roomies in the hotels, and Pamela and Wendy were roomies in the hotel, so Ngoc put us together in the cabin, produced a couple bottles of vodka, and told everyone we were where the party was.

While not christened on the train, certainly the event leading to Phil being named Crusher occurred here. Phil liked to squish beer cans (empty ones thankfully) by standing them up and then jumping on them and crushing them into little pancakes. Which turned out to be quite a useful skill as there ended up being a lot of beer cans needing to be disposed of by the end of the ride.

Jessica has one of the most expressive faces I've yet to encounter, and the pink hair helps too.

See?

Mind you, as the trip continued her hair became decidely less pink. It was a sad passing.

This picture of Kieran was taken at an old tiger arena in Hue. Kieran, Eliska, Nigel and Merlina spent a lot of time together, and with Nigel as Wallaby, Kieran soon became Wallaby Jr. This name happily stuck until one night in Dha Trang where Eliska so helpfully commented that he had the physique of a paperclip.

And so Clippy was born.

Linda upon seeing this picture I took of her at our home dinner in, I think it was Hoi An, commented "Well, that decides it. I've now entered that stage in my life where I am decidely odd-looking."

Linda got nicknamed, by me again, Speedo, after telling her traumatic story of seeing a large man wearing a very small bathing suit cleaning himself up after the mud bath. A harrowing tale indeed, and one that should not go unrewarded, hence the nickname.

Linda's a mental health nurse, so she's pretty equipt to deal with this sort of thing. Good thing too, as there was lots of it. Merlina is also a mental health nurse. You can never have enough. Now if only my cousin Jennifer was along they could have started an international singing group.

This is lunch on the boat in Nha Trang when we went out on a cruise around some of the islands and did some snorkeling.

Lunch was delicious, and was also where I learned the incredibly valuable lesson that your eyes are not the worst thing you can touch after tearing hot peppers apart with your hands.

Enough on that.

This would be the moment when Crusher became Party Phil. And I think that stuck for the rest of the trip. The new name. He lost the beer coaster moments later.

This is also where we discovered our love of "beer towers" and where I felt the more like Merry than ever before. "It comes in towers?"

Above and below are the Aussie bar that gave birth to so many of these wonderful names, including my own. Eliska, on the far left, narrowly escaped and did not really get one that stuck. Merlina, tucked beside Nigel on the right, also avoided one, though eventually they collectively became known as "The Wallabies", which is only fitting as we were trying to convince them to get married in Bangkok. Nigel had full-heartedly agreed with then Wallaby Jr acting as ring bearer, and me being the best man. Yep, best man. Me.

But that's because I had bought the beer.

Below are all of our names, and a whole bunch of other words that I don't care about and neither should you.

That's Wendy when we were in a canoe paddling along a small river in one of the islands in the Mekong Delta. Yep, best man, and got to paddle a canoe.

And that's a few of us on Ta Hien Beer Street in Hanoi. I get the sense that there's one of these in every town. Just like Elm St, but minus the dude with the razor glove invading your dreams.

This is the lot of us in Cambodia, at our homestay, with the kids who performed some traditional dances and sang some songs after our dinner.

This was the day that had started with visiting the Killing Fields and S21, and had us cut up and haul away a tree blocking the road (there's us below having succeeded in said tree work), all before getting to this homestay. We were split into two homes with eight of us or so in each common room. I can't speak for the other room, but I imagine they all felt the way the people I was bunking with that night felt when we finally settled in. It could not have been only one day.

But it was.

Oh, so on the left is our driver for the area around Phnom Penh, and then Ian, and Patrick, and in the middle there is Channa, our wonderful guide, me, Nigel, and Phil.

Channa will henceforth be referred to as Giggles. That one was a joint effort from me and Phil. She was always giggling. Well, not always. Sometimes she was pretty bossy, but in a good way. Kinda scary mind you. Especially as Giggles is about the same size as Big Balls. 

And this is at dinner somewhere in Cambodia.

And at Tha Phrom, the second of the temples we visited at Angkor, near Siem Reap.

After visiting several temples that day many of us went zip-lining, and that's a few of us having survived it. We all survived it mind you. I just don't have a picture of the others.

So that's Gemma, her husband Ian, me, Christina, Eliska, and Alysha.

I'm the only one of this lot who got a nickname, else I'd be sharing them with you.

And that's Christina, chilling out on the boat trip we took in Sihanoukville, where we did more snorkeling and I did not have to deal with hot peppers.

And there's Esta and Alysha. Same boat.

And that's Ian and Gemma at the zip-lining, up in some tree somewhere. I'm not sure if it's them or Eliska and Kieran that I have to thank for suggesting we all go off and do this. Not what I would have picked out to do myself, but really happy to have been able to do it.

And that's Phil, at the entrance to the Silver Pagoda in the Royal Palace complex in Phnom Penh.

So I realize I didn't get pictures of everyone separate from the big group shots. Dang. Now though you should have a pretty decent idea of who I'm talking about when I start in on what we got up to over the past few weeks.

Here's a few other personalities from along the way.

The bride of the wedding going on right outside our hotel in Phnom Penh. Seriously, to get to the hotel door we had to navigate our way through the reception, which by the way, lasted for two days, and started at 5am on the second day.

But it was fun. At one point I was working my way through and an elderly lady took me by the arm, made me slow down, and had me escort her through to her table, smiling up at me the whole way.

I smiled back.

And that's the buffalo I should likely not have petted on the nose.

And James commented that he wanted to see more dogs. So, here you go James.

See people, comments are heard.

And this is the homestay family.

And this it the family that ran the restaurant Ngoc took us to one evening in, I think, Halong City, or Bai Chay as it is properly called, according to the trip notes.

They were busy taking pictures of us, all lined up at the table cooking and eating our food. Seemed reasonable to take their picture too.

These are the kids singing at our first home dinner, the one where Linda decided she had entered her "odd" phase.

This is the very large spider in the bathroom at one of the places along the Mekong river where we went for lunch. It was big. It deserves to be included. I'm glad I'm a boy.

And these are words written on the chalkboard where we were eating our lunch at the Buddhist monastery/pagoda in Hue. Given that it's in English my assumption is that it was there for our benefit. Which, for whatever reason, leads me to share the nickname that was bestowed upon me.

Evil Bastard.