Category: On The Road
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Sydney ~ 1st impressions from down under.
Sydney is cool. 4 nights and 3 full days were definitely not enough! Circular Quay, the Opera House, the Sydney Harbor Bridge, the ferry to Manly, Manly beach, shopping, fun neighborhoods like Newtown, Darlinghurst, and the Rocks, Hyde Park, the Botanic Gardens, great food, great public transport….and that was just three days! Imagine what experiences…
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Week #38 ~ Recap
570 miles, 1 major city, 1 ferry ride, 1 ocean drive, 2 caravan parks, 1 state park, 6 live kangaroos, 1 campfire, 215.06 over budget. Between the rental costs, gas, and campground fees, the campervan has been more expensive than what we normally spend on lodging which has pushed us into budget overages, but it’s…
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Saigon and the Mekong Delta
Which is it: Saigon or Ho Chi Minh City? Depends on who you ask, and according to our guide the names are interchangeable. Younger people seem to prefer Ho Chi Minh, our guide preferred Saigon, so that’s what we will use in this post as we go forward. Scattered through Saigon and the Mekong Delta…
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Flower Lanterns and Basket Boats in Hoi An
Something magical happens in the tropics after the sun goes down. The inky evening takes the edge off of reality and the lights of the shops radiate warmth. The sounds in the air are filled with people laughing and glasses clinking. In the case of Hoi An, there is also the added delight of the…
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From city to sea, Hanoi to La Han Bay
We’ve been looking forward to this portion of the trip almost as much as we anticipated the month we spent in Italy. We think that Vietnam could be our jam….mostly for the food, but hopefully for other stuff too. A city of 8 million people, Hanoi is everything we expected of Southeast Asia ~ great…
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Siem Reap: more than just another pretty temple
If you think all there is to Siem Reap is just a bunch of ancient temples in Angkor, think again. Don’t get me wrong…there are A LOT of temples and each one is spectacular and unique. The temple complex of Angkor Wat is the world’s largest religious structure, made up of over a thousand buildings…
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Monkeys and trains and bats ~ Oh my!
Or alternatively………”If you were cool ~ you’d be Battambang”. This small city in Northern Cambodia is just big enough to be comfortable for Westerners and just small enough to support artisans practicing their livelihood for local and tourist alike. The backroads were full of farmers making their living growing and harvesting Thai chilis, corn, potatoes,…
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Drivers Education
If you take whatever you learned in drivers ed in high school, any expectations about right-of-way, or meaning from stop lights and stop signs, and throw it out the window, you will start to understand how traffic flows in Thailand and Cambodia. Intersections without a concept of right-of-way take on new excitement when everyone just…
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Phnom Penh ~
Most of us in the West ~ particularly Americans, think of Cambodia through the lens of the Vietnam War and the 1984 movie “The Killing Fields”. We found Cambodia to be much more than this recent history. When you don’t know anything about a country a day-long tour of its capital city can be very…
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Bangkok ~ challenging by day, lovely by night.
When you go to the tropics there is only so much sun one can handle. Honestly, between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m., Bangkok was hot, humid and uncomfortable. Between the hours of 7 p.m. and 7 a.m. it was lovely as long as there was a breeze. One night in Bangkok and the world’s your…