Let's Go Home

It turns out that there is a time to go home...

Our trip through Asia was fabulous, and as I look back on everything, there isn't much I would change, but travel does get tiring and I'm ready to go home.

It turns out I learned a few things.

1.  Even though each country in Asia is different, much of Asia is also the same. Buddha statues abound. Karst mountains are beautiful, but start to feel the same after seeing them in China and Thailand, so I skipped them in Halong Bay. Did I miss out? Probably so, but a lighter wallet and two previous karst adventures crosses them off my list.

2.  I miss the diversity of the United States...both in food and people.

3.  Travel is fabulous, but for me, the next time I do a big trip, I want to go with a few more people. Traveling on your own is indulgent, easy, and a huge learning experience, but it's also a little lonely and hard to do everything by yourself. My weakness was at the end of the day. I managed to get us everywhere, see and do the things we wanted, but at the end of the day, I needed someone to take over on dinner...someone who wanted to find great places to eat and new foods to try...when I was too tired to see to that last detail--and one that I very much missed.

4. I used to want to go on a big around-the-world trip, hitting every continent and crossing off all the UNESCO World Heritage Sites or exotic excursions, but now I think a good solid three months at a time is a better way to go. Maybe as I get better at this, the time will expand.

And finally, here is my Top 10 List of Favorite Experiences:

1.   Snorkeling at the Surin Islands 
2.   Hiking Tiger Leaping Gorge
3.   Loy Krathong Festival
4.   Hiking from Jinshanling to Simitai on the Great Wall
5.   Angkor Wat, Ta Prom, all the ruins at Siem Reap, Cambodia
6.   All of our biking experiences
7.   All of difficult experiences I had in learning how to travel, which made me a better traveler
8.   All of the interesting people I met
9.   Riding an elephant
10. Caving in Taman Negara

Interestingly, I think most of my favorite experiences were a little off the beaten path. Not completely hidden gems, but sometimes the harder treks, or the tours most people don't take, or the moments you weren't really expecting to be fabulous.

One moment I seem to remember with great fondness is watching the sunset at Siem Reap. One of my guidebooks suggested watching the sunset from a specific vantage point. We were tired from the heat of the day, but climbed a hill along with a bunch of other guidebook reading souls and found a perch on some ruins. I wasn't quite certain what we were really looking for, and to pass the time, I struck up a conversation with a young man who was on the last leg of his round-the-world tour. He and his girlfriend had mainly toured South America, and he regaled me with tales of Angel Falls, Easter Island, the Galapagos, and more. After awhile the crowd fell quiet and I realized everyone had their cameras out. I pulled mine out and saw what everyone had been waiting for. The sun was a perfect, tiny little disc just above the horizon and the sky turned into ribbons of color. I shot picture after picture, experimenting with different angles until the sun set and darkness seemed to fall rather rapidly. Was it the most beautiful sunset I had ever seen? Probably not, but somehow it was just a remarkable moment and I was there to take it in, in some little corner of the world.

Finally...Heavy Duty Shopping and Water Puppets

We put off shopping for nearly the entire trip, picking up only the easiest, most lightweight trinkets, so that we would not have to carry them around. But we have finally arrived in Vietnam and I sense that our trek is pretty much over, so we are abandoning almost any sense of visiting tourist places and decide to indulge in ... shopping!

Old Town Hanoi is a lovely place to give in to the shopping bug. Our hostel is located on a busy, narrow street right near a giant night market. The room is large, clean, and filled with teak furniture. The floors are slick, marble tile. The bathroom is decent. It's a better room than you would think from the entrance.

We decide to stay for several days, and nearly immediately start to explore the shops. According to Lonely Planet, Old Town has small streets dedicated to different trades, so we set off in search of lacquerware and pottery. It turns out that things are a bit more of a mishmash than LP would lead you to believe, but the shopping is still fun. The quality is not exceedingly high, but the prices are pretty cheap. I made the mistake of changing money into Vietnamese dong. I later learned that it would have been better to buy in American dollars as merchants prefer the dollar. They will take the dong, but then you always have to calculate what rate they are giving you.

I march poor Kinsey from shop to shop, unable to decide what to buy. I end up buying a rolling suitcase for about $15 just for our extra purchases! Kinsey gets a cute red silk skirt with a black silk top. I buy a lot of silk sleep sacks for Christmas presents. The vendor is happy to sell me 12 of them for about $4 each. As I walk away, the vendor next door tells me she will sell me sleep sacks for $2 each (!) so I buy 12 more! Christmas shopping is done!

Somewhere along the way, we end up going to see the famous Vietnamese Water Puppet Show. The stage is set over a pool of water and the puppeteers stand in the water to manipulate the puppets. As a result, there are a lot of water-themed puppets, like fish, fishermen, ducks, and water oxen. The stories are really just short vignettes, but they are all clever and very charming. Kinsey ends up buying a dragon water puppet after the show.

And, with Vietnam having a French influence, we managed to find a nice French cafe, where we while away a few lunches and watch the Vietnamese scene scroll by...

This is what what the streets of Old Town Hanoi are like. Motorbikes rule the street. There really isn't much sidewalk room, so you walk in the street while the motorbikes whizz by inches away.

Little hole-in-the wall restaurants spill out into the streets everywhere. Hygiene looks questionable, but the social aspect is very appealing.

Exhaustion Sets In...and a Lighter Bank Account

By the time we hit Vietnam, I have pretty much thrown in the towel and decide to cut short our Asia trip. Money is getting low. We could stay and do some sightseeing, but frankly, I am becoming a little jaded and tired of the Orient. The big draw near Hanoi is a trip to Halong Bay, but all my research concludes that it is just another bay with karst mountains, similar to the Li River in China and Phuket in Thailand. Spending money to see yet more karst mountains is not particularly appealing. There are other small tours throughout Vietnam that could be fun, but again, most of them are similar to other things we have already seen or done--such as going on a bike tour or visiting quaint artisan villages. The only things that are specific to Vietnam that I really want to see are the Cu Chi Tunnels and some of the war sites, but honestly, the thought of dragging us through more train rides and travel just for those, has dampened my enthusiasm considerably.

So I decide to give up on really seeing Vietnam and just spend a few days in Hanoi and then fly home. In keeping with our original Asia Bucket Trip tickets, we are allowed to change the dates of the flights as often as we want, but we have to hit every destination that we originally booked. Hence, we have to fly out of Ho Chi Minh. When I first conceived of the trip, I thought we would travel overland from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh, but now that I have scrapped the overland, I have to buy airline tickets instead. Luckily, short flights in Asia are generally not very pricey.

Meanwhile, we have a few days to kill in Hanoi...and I am in the mood to go shopping!

Cambodia 3

TBA

Cambodia 2

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From Wealth to Poverty...Which One Should You Visit?

Flew to Cambodia

It's So Expensive, We're Not Doing Much Here

Hotal

Night Zoo

Toy Museum

Singapore Flyer

Down in the middle of the complex is a good array of restaurants along with a few shops. We ate dinner at an American/Western sports bar.

Credit for all of these pictures: Kinsey

Views from the Singapore Flyer

Rush Hour

Downtown Singapore. You can see that there's a staggering amount of construction going on right in this area. Look at the bottom of the photo, running parallel to the traffic lanes, you'll see a nearly finished pedestrian bridge in a double helix shape. The little patch in the water is a soccer field!

Off to Singapore

Bus

What's a Rainforest National Park in Malaysia Like?

TBA

Up the River into the Heart of Darkness

Taman Negara

Why Did We Come to Malaysia?

If you had asked me before the trip what we would want to do in Kuala Lumpur, the only thing I could have answered would have been to see the Petronas Towers, once the tallest building in the world. After perusing the guidebooks, I didn't come up with much else, so I kept our time in KL to a minimum. Perhaps I shorted our time a little too much, but I was also having a harder time deciding on the right hostel, so we were only going to get a half a day in KL before shipping out to Taman Negara National Park.

The desk clerk at the hostel told me that there were a limited number of tickets to go up to the Skybridge of the Petronas Towers each day. The tickets were free; however, the ticket giveaway started at 9 am and usually ran out by noon. By the time we had arrived and checked in, we would not be there in time to get tickets. So, we decided to hit the mall across the street--mainly because we were starving--and go to the Towers later.

The mall did not disappoint. It was huge. It had Starbucks, McDonalds, Krispy Kremes, a movieplex, a huge amusement park with a giant roller coaster, and best of all, a giant Borders. We wandered floor after floor after floor. I can't say we bought a lot, but it was fun. Malaysia is interesting because of the obvious mix of Muslim and Western influences. It almost seems as if half the women are completely covered, and half are not.

Later, we managed to figure out the monorail system and got to the Petronas Towers. At night, it's incredibly beautiful. You can go inside and the first few floors have high end shopping--lots of western designers. There's also a Chili's there and a nice food court.

Petronas Towers--once the tallest building in the world, currently ranked 4th. The Towers are 1483 feet tall with 88 floors. In comparison, the Empire State Building is 1250 feet and 102 floors. 

Even though, the Petronas Towers is one of the tallest buildings in the world, you can only ascend to the Skybridge that spans the two buildings (Level 41).

Anyone want a durian? If you've ever smelled one, imagine if the entire truckload was opened at once!

Days Off in Luxury

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Snorkeling the Surin Islands

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John Gray's Sea Canoe Hong by Starlight Tour

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My First Beach Vacation--Phuket, Thailand!

It's 95 Degrees...and This Is the Cool Season

Bangkok

DAY 3

Maybe I'm Getting Too Cavalier About Traveling...

Bus to Bangkok

Cycling Sukhothai

Despite the hard sell for a driver, I opted for biking in Sukhothai...and was immensely glad I had made that choice. Once our tuk-tuk driver dropped us off at the bike shop, I could see that almost everyone bikes, and it's the best choice for seeing the grounds. 

Rental bikes in Asia are usually utilitarian standard affairs. No multiple gears. Sometimes the seats don't even adjust so you have to find the bike that best fits you before you take off. Nevertheless, it's just fun. The terrain at Sukhothai is as flat as a pancake. The sites are connected by paved or well-kept dirt and gravel roads and the area for the ruins is fairly small and contained. 

We had just missed the Loy Krathong celebration that takes place at Sukhothai, so the grounds were very peaceful, with only a handful of tourists and a local school group or two, taking in the sights. With a map in hand, we were able to see all of the different ruins, plus most of the outlying ones by mid-afternoon, although there were a couple that we just couldn't seem to find, even though we kept asking questions and biking down odd roads only to turn back convinced that it surely couldn't be this far out.

For lunch, there were a few places to grab food, but the food vendors were a little rough around the edges (translation: questionable hygiene). If the food doesn't look too appetizing, just subsist on strangely flavored potato chips and soda.

There are a lot of stray dogs roaming around Thailand. These were some of the cuter ones we encountered, but many of them are pretty mangy and disease ridden.

How to get home? The tuk-tuk drivers congregrate near the entrance.