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Vang Vieng: Laos’ one-time party center no longer “Death in Paradise,” thanks to crackdown

Me at my hotel on the banks of the Nam Song with Laos' towering karsts in the background.

In 2011, Vang Vieng’s small hospital recorded 27 deaths in the river. This does not include unreported deaths or people dying after getting emergency transported to Vientiane, the capital. Keep in mind, the Nam Song is not the Colorado. It has no rapids. The Nam Song (“song” means “river” in Lao) is as peaceful as a Swiss summer. The only white water that was ever on the river was the beer foam that splayed a one-kilometer swath from all the bars that lined the banks.
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Laos: My 100th country is slowly emerging from its poverty-stricken communist cocoon

Laos remains a center for Buddhist study despite communism's past efforts to curb religion.

“Why Laos?” I always like that response. It means no one knows anything about it. It’s the capital of one of the few communist countries left in the world. It has emerged from a past so provincial it hardly had any street lights in 1998. The government, following China’s lead, opened its arms to tourism and limited free enterprise in the 1990s under a reform called the New Economic Mechanism. The number of tourists jumped from 14,400 in 1990 to 4.68 million in 2015.
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Bangkok: After 30-year absence, tastes remain the same in Sodom & Gomorrah East

Wat Arun, "The Temple of Dawn," symbolizes Thailand's Buddhist foundation but underneath lies a pulsating sub-culture.

Welcome to the land that morality forget. Bangkok is where visions are blurred, not only through the haze of too many Singha beers but the vast tolerance of a Buddhist culture and tourist industry run amok. It’s where a he is a she and a she can do things I didn’t learn on the streets of Eugene, Ore. When I started traveling in 1978, Bangkok became my gateway to the extremes of Asia travel. It guided me through an education that hardened me on my way to visit 100 countries.
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Q&A: Through Eternity tour guide Luca De Angelis

Luca De Angelis, center, has a master's in archaeology.

I will do regular Q&As with tour guides at Through Eternity, Rome’s outstanding tour company for which I started blogging in December. I’ll talk to them about insights into their jobs, their lives and Rome. This month it’s Luca De Angelis, 38, a Rome native.
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Ten wild things I didn’t know about Michelangelo

It took Michelangelo 4 1/2 years to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

The advancements Michelangelo took art during the Renaissance stood out like the Sistine Chapel when compared with what came before and after him. It’s one of the many things I learned about Michelangelo during Luca’s five-hour Vatican tour. It was part of my new part-time gig: blogging for Through Eternity, one of the top tour companies in Rome. He told me so many things about history’s greatest sculptor that you won’t find in guidebooks or even “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” Michelangelo’s biography I devoured in my youth. Here are 10 things I learned that I will never forget:

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Myths of the gladiators: Through Eternity tours sets the record straight

The thumbs down was not an indication to kill a fallen opponent.

I learned a lot about gladiators from books, particularly Daniel Mannix’s excellent 1958 tome, “The Way of the Gladiator.” However, I learned even more from Through Eternity’s Colosseum, Forum and Palatine Hill tour. Over five hours, it started with tours of the Roman Forum and Palatine Hill. At the final stop at the Colosseum, tour guide Gracelyn Monaco blew away a lot of myths people have about the famed gladiators. Forget what you saw in the movie “Gladiator.” It was accurate but didn’t tell the whole story.

It wasn’t nearly as violent as the real thing.
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Traveling to Italy in 2017? Here’s my top 10 list

The Archipelago di La Maddalena just off the north coast of Sardinia is just one of many less-trodden destinations in Italy.

Here I present you with 10 places that you probably have never heard of, let alone never made your bucket list. So here’s my collection, in alphabetical order, of lovely, interesting, off-the-beaten-path places to visit in Italy in 2017. Print it, put it under a refrigerator magnet and know you’ll never eat a better pizza than outside on a warm Italian night.
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On the road in Serie D: 4th Division Trastevere flying high in Italy’s soccer lowlands

Snow and freezing temperatures greeted ASD Trastevere on its five-hour road trip to Puglia.

His 35-year-old face is weathered, in kind of a rugged Italian sort of way. He has a perpetual scruffy beard. Lines are forming around eyes that have seen too many patchy soccer fields, tiny towns and lonely roads.
Stefano Tajarol has the look of Serie D.
This is the bottom branch of Italy’s soccer tree, hanging just above the rubble of amateurism. Serie D has 162 teams spread from rural Sicily to the foothills of the Italian Alps. Francavilla. Ghivizzano. Darfo Boario. They are towns you’ll never see in a guide book. They’re all trying to climb atop one of nine divisions for promotion to Lega Pro, Italy’s third division where there are higher salaries, historic stadiums and — gasp! — television.
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New Year’s Eve in Stockholm: Sauna, Swedish meatballs and a beautiful blonde

Stockholm is one of the most romantic cities in Europe. Being dark for 17 hours in winter doesn't hurt. Photo by Marina Pascucci

Those views changed on this trip. Stockholm will never make the cover of Budget Travel magazine or the to-do lists of hygiene-challenged backpackers. It will, however, continue to be a world leader in progressive thinking and healthy living. I couldn’t think of a better place to end the last year on earth before Donald Trump blows it up after Xi Jinping flips him off on Twitter.
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“The Young Pope” will be major smash hit in U.S. — whether I’m seen in it or not

Jude Law plays a smoking, right-wing conservative pope.

If you’re a fan of Jude Law and Diane Keaton, if you’re a fan of Oscar-winning director Paolo Sorrentino (“The Great Beauty”), if you’re a fan of twisting sacred institutions such as the Catholic Church, do not miss this series. Sorrentino, a native of Naples, turns the church inside out. As the real, modern Catholic Church makes major strides toward the modern world under current Pope Francis, Sorrentino’s pope wants the church to revert practically back to the Inquisition. Basically, Law plays the first pope who is a complete, 100 percent dick.
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My Xmas gifts for 2016 or, if Trump likes coal …

trump-yelling1

I will be delivering lots of presents Saturday night. I will mostly sprinkle them around Rome but also have a special delivery to New York. Does Trump Tower have a chimney or does Donald Trump let his Mexican house cleaners in through the lobby door? Here’s my list of gifts for all those who were naughty and nice in 2016. Guess who was the most naughty.
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