After years of painstaking research, months of planning, endless vision quests, and the guzzling of innumerable beers, Tim and I finally assembled an ideal itinerary for our epic journey. It looked something like this:

June 4th: fly to Tokyo
June 5th: fly to Ho Chi Minh City
June 5th - 18th: on foot, make way 1800km north to Hanoi
June 19th: fly to Tokyo (arrive morning of the 20th)
June 20th: stew in horrible airport, fly to Sapporo

Peachy, just peachy.

Perhaps none of my spirit guides were blessed with the gift of speech. Quite possibly they didn't take a liking to me. Or maybe the error was mine in that the cosmos' answers become twisted when one induces vision quests through the guzzling of innumerable beers. The why is not terribly important. What is important is that a singularly vital piece of information was not transmitted to me:

A night in Tokyo inevitably results in financial disaster.

The plan for the night of the 4th is to crash with one of Tim's friends, a guy I'll call "Mike", probably because that is his name. Mike is making mad cash in the real estate game and generally living the American Dream, which has apparently been outsourced to Japan. We deftly navigate Tokyo's public transit labyrinth and meet Mike at a station near his place. I was told that he lived in a shoebox-sized apartment in spite of his Scrooge-esque wealth. But people pay $40/night to sleep in a coffin-sized hotel "room" in Tokyo, so any free place to stay is good. But as we approach a swank building whose newness is evidenced by the sheen of wet concrete, Mike informs us that he's upgraded to a space-age bachelor pad. Indeed. The only thing missing is Esquivel on the stereo. Mucho muchacho!

Thirty minutes later, the evening is well underway. We are drinking a posh English liquor called Pimm's that tastes vaguely like root beer when mixed with 7up. We are enjoying this stuff from some guy who allegedly strapped 5kg of said stuff to his body in LA and flew to Tokyo, somehow living to tell the tale and sell the stuff at a hefty profit. (Don't worry, mom, it was only pot.) We are basking in the glow of the plasma-screen TV and in awe of the bathtub that tells you when it's filled. We are adrift in a sea of opulence, too happy even to wonder why the fuck we are living in The World's Ugliest City and praying that one great day our students will realize that "I like cat" is grammatically incorrect.

Thoroughly primed for a quality evening, we set off. Whoa, is that gin in my gin & tonic? In Sapporo we are slaves to the nomihoudai (all-you-can-drink) specials offered by most bars. A low-cost, quantity-over-quality experience, the cocktails are notoriously weak. You'd probably be better off ordering some fruit juice and hoping it ferments a bit before the evening's over. This gin & tonic probably contains more alcohol than a two hour nomihoudai's worth of drinks. (It also cost about as much, but that's beside the point.) Delicious! We end up hitting four or five establishments. Along the way, we watch and then celebrate Japan's victory over Bahrain (making them the first team to quality for the World Cup), I have a deranged conversation with some middle-aged drunkard, and the friendly bouncers at some club let me pass in spite of my blatant dress code violation. (What the hell is wrong with shorts? They are skirts with an inseam, and skirts are perfectly acceptable. Some club-savvy hipster explain this to me, please.)

At 5:30AM, we end up back at Mike's. Our flight leaves at 11:00AM, and it takes ninety minutes to get to the airport. I set my cellphone's alarm for 8:00AM and promptly pass out. I woke up as Tim made his way to the bathroom. I checked the time. 9:30. Well, damn. If we'd left at that very moment, maybe a miracle would have occurred, maybe the plane would have been delayed, maybe the airline staff would've taken mercy on our poor hungover souls and given us a ticket on the next flight. That was the best thing to do. But we did not do that. Instead, we called our utterly useless travel agent. Then we called the airline, several other travel agents, and anyone else we thought might be able to help us, to no avail. We had no choice but to buy tickets for the next flight to Ho Chi Minh and hope for some sort of refund on the ones we'd failed to use. As panic faded, our hangovers returned and the reality of the situation dawned on us. To console ourselves, we went to Subway. It was good.

We spent the rest of the day relaxing, cursing ourselves, and trying to piece together what exactly went wrong. I realized that my phone was on manner mode. So the alarm did go off, but only vibrated, not nearly enough to rouse me. Mike had apparently passed out with alarm clock in hand, in the process of setting his alarm. Tim, trusting that his travel partner was not an idiot - a mistake he would not make again - didn't set an alarm. From that horrible day forward, we made a blood pact: Never Again.

The next morning we woke up about five hours early. Got to the airport and pled our case one last time to the ticketing gals. No dice. Open wallet, remove credit card, hand it over, stare at $1300 receipt, wince, sign, see winged $100 bills flying away in thought balloon, try to ignore pit in stomach, get boarding passes, clear security, clear immigration, wait, wait, wait, board plane, fly away, fly to vietnam, accept reality, leave worries on tarmac.

Never Again.