This was my first trip anywhere with a girlfriend. My female friends said the trip would make or break the relationship. My guy friends said I was bringing sand to the beach. Karen's friends said she was crazy to travel to another continent with a guy who wouldn't even leave a contacts case at her apartment. As excited as I was while packing, a little part of me wondered if I was courting disaster and should be traveling solo like I had talked about so often in my twenties.

So Karen and I landed in Thailand with a strict itinerary that included scuba diving, seeing a shitload of temples, and returning to Los Angeles not hating each other's guts. And to our surprise, we traveled along with no major emotional blow-ups or vacation horror stories. I felt a smug satisfaction as we approached the last day of our trip in Bangkok. The plan was to blow the last of our baht on knockoff jeans and an upscale curry dinner, then get a good night's rest before our morning flight.

But that afternoon, I flipped through my travel journal without finding any seeds for a novel. I clicked through my digital camera and found only the photos I imagine a million couples take each year on the same travel route, more family-album than Vice Guide to Travel — nothing in there to elicit awed, envious comments on Facebook. I'd shot my vacation wad with this trek and we'd had an experience not so different from one my parents would have.

The first vacation of my thirties, and all that was missing was the fannypacks.

Flipping through our Lonely Planet book for "off the beaten path" activities, the lame irony of the whole exercise frustrated me even further. Coming to a section on the red-light districts, I wondered aloud if we should check out a sex show. I felt sheepish telling my girlfriend I was even considering them — much less asking her to join me. So I reassured her I wasn't some kind of pervert and, quoting a couple innocuous lines from the guidebook, I promised her that I was only as game for it as she was.

"I mean," I added with all the maturity I could muster, "it is part of the culture."

Karen was nonplussed. "What do you want? Line-dancing and bestiality?"

What I wanted was to get my Graham Greene on. I remembered my old college roommate talking about his solo trip through Southeast Asia. The hostel hook-ups, Full Moon parties, firearms, drug deals with tuk-tuk drivers. Karen and I had seen too many temples and not enough cockfights. One story that stuck with me entailed my friend getting hit in the face with a live goldfish shot out of a stripper's vagina. Karen stared at me. "Is that something you really need to experience? Really?"

Before I'd thought of the implications, I said, "Yes. Yes, it is." She protested, but I pointed out that she'd picked the restaurant for dinner