Crystal’s Adventures is pretty amazing. She’s in Asia on a grant this summer (she’s in grad school at Tulane, although I don’t know her degree program); in May she wrote for an adolescent health website in Bangkok, after which she and two friends traveled overland through Laos to Hanoi, where she’s working on a sustainable community development grant proposal.

This sounded a little scary and exciting to me, as somebody whose only knowledge of Laos and Hanoi comes from old Doonesbury comics. Crystal’s account–which is well-written, clear and reasonable–makes it evident that this is a batshit loonball psycho death trip. Also that she is an action hero. Check out the part where she watches a cargo truck flip off a mountain, almost has her own bus do the same, stays in a house that uses old bombshells for dishes and scares a biker gang into carrying her down the mountain for three bucks. Man!

I found Crystal’s blog through her domain-co-resident and fiancee, Clinton Roosevelt Nixon, a name very familiar to indie RPG geeks who don’t read this. My Nobilis ballers may recognize him as the guy who wrote The Shadow of Yesterday (and, ergo, invented Keys).