Do you know these people?

---REWARD---
Finding long lost acquaintances

Huong 1992 Vietnam

Do you know these people?

Gilles 1994 Mozambique

    No, they don't owe me money.
     Over the years I have met people with whom I have only had brief contact but wish that I had at least exchanged addresses because they were amazing people. I figure through the power of the internet I may be (very, very) lucky enough to have someone stumble on to this page and know these people, unlikely as it would be.
    From time to time I may add people on here, but for now these two stand out in my memory.
    Sure, it is a one-in-a-million chance, but it's worth making this ugly-looking web page because you never know... Besides, stranger coincidences have happened to me before in this small world.
    For your consideration, this incident:

Exhibit A

Does this pineapple-cutting
technique look familiar?

Ironically, I suspect both Gilles and Huong are in France.

Gilles is a native Frenchman who has worked all over Africa for French companies. I met him when I was hitchhiking in Mozambique and he picked me up and we drove all day. He has an incredible sense of humor and is very much at ease in a sticky situation. He was based in Harare, Zimbabwe at the time. (More about that day and that situation is on my Mozambican pages).

Huong is Vietnamese and I met her through a German friend named Sabine who was living in Saigon at the time (1992). They shared a house near the airport. I heard a rumor that she might have married a Frenchman and emigrated. (Maybe she married Gilles! I need to make that happen if I find them both.)

As far as a reward, well, I'll have to think of something. How about free web page design? HA!

Small World, Exhibit A

    I met these two nuts in 1994 at a hostel in Knysna, South Africa a few hundred miles up the east coast from Cape Town. They had shipped their motorcycles from Germany to Nairobi, Kenya and biked south through Malawi, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe.
    The stories they had! I thought I was being adventurous, but my experiences couldn't hold a candle to theirs. Usually they didn't even stay in hostels; they camped out.
    I only met them one evening and we didn't get around to exchanging addresses. I was hitchhiking back west to Cape Town and they were heading up north to Nairobi--a very long way. I took this photo just before they started out and wished them well.

Knysna, South Africa 1994

Cut to 1995.

    I am watching a concert by a Led Zeppelin cover band in the main square of Pécs, a town in the southwest of Hungary near the Croatian border.

Bruce, pondering life after Hungary (I used to be an English teacher there and I returned to have some cheap surgery. It's kind of an involved story, but some hospital photos are here. (Also, sub-parenthetically, mountains of thank yous to Bruce Abrams--artist, diplomat, and eternal searcher for the definitive Mickey Rivers website--for letting me stay with him for so long while I recovered. Maybe he will complete his website someday.
     I digress.))

Who do I see walking in front of me but one of the same dudes I saw in South Africa!!
    He said that soon after I left them in South Africa all kinds of bad things happened and their bikes finally died near Johannesburg. They went home and he found another friend to do a short tour of Eastern Europe, and it was by luck that our paths crossed.
    I still don't know his name.
Now how about that!?

Pécs, Hungary 1995

=

Take me back to top. I am mesmerized by this simplistic web page design

Follow the foot back to kentfoster.com

I have a sudden, inexplicable urge to see
Hungarian pig killing photos