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Week #33 ~ Recap
103 miles, 8 more tuk-tuk rides, 16 temple ruins visited, 1 awe-struck moment watching a million bats fly from their nests, 1 visit to a Khmer Rouge site, 4 traditional food artisans visited, 1 circus performance, 1 foot massage, 2 rest days, 5,000 pictures taken that can never convey the entire experience, $368.41 UNDER budget.…
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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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Week #32 ~ Recap
687 miles, 1 flight, 8 crazy tuk-tuk rides, 4 roof-top beers, 2 countries and their respective capitol cities, 2 temples, 1 bike ride, 2 street food suppers, 1 floating market, 1 railway market, 2 royal palaces, 350 steps up to our first Khmer ruins, 1 bamboo train ride, 2 long-tail boat rides, 2 sets of…
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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…
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Week #31 ~ Recap
721 Kilometers, 2 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, 1 museum, 1 national park, 13 temples, 1 water taxi, 1 rice barge dinner cruise, 2 night markets, UNDER budget by $186.78. Sometimes when you drive up to the top of a mountain, all you see is clouds. We drove to the highest point in Thailand in Doi…
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Elephant Love
I didn’t expect to have such an emotional response to seeing the elephants at Maetang Elephant Park in Chiang Mai, Thailand. I couldn’t stop my eyes from filling with tears as they gently took the bananas and sugar cane from my hand. Or my heart from swelling as I carefully washed their skin in the river. They were…
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The adventure begins… Chiang Rai
The prelude to our Southeast Asian tour actually started with two nights in Bangkok in an attempt to adjust to the Indochina Time Zone (only 14 hours ahead of Denver, Colorado). But our first actual stop was Chiang Rai, Thailand. Greeted by our guide, “Danny” ~ Mr. Pongsatorn Jitpraphai, as we came off the short flight…
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Chasing royalty: Sukhothai and Ayutthaya
Thailand has a long history of Kings (yes, only kings), uniting varied provinces and leading with foresight and pragmatism. One of these kings ~ the third king of the Phra Ruang Dynasty, Ram Khamhaeng, ruled Thailand in the late 13th century, he invented the Thai alphabet and according to some sources is credited with the…
