Places we loved

One of the most common questions we receive when talking about our trip is "What was your favorite country?" That's a really tough question because each country was so different that it's hard to generalize and say one was best. However, there were definitely places we'd love to revisit. Here are the countries we'd revisit and why:

India

We loved India. The food was outstanding, the people interesting and friendly and sights and activities were varied enough that there was always something fun to do. Even though we were there for five weeks, we only saw a fraction of the country, essentially the southern third. India would probably rank at the top of the places I'd easily revisit again. I'd probably concentrate on the North, combining it with a visit to Nepal (which we sadly didn't make on this trip).

Thailand

We spent 15 days in Thailand but that wasn't nearly enough time. Thailand is a wonderful place to visit - the people are so nice, the food is amazing and the variety of geography makes it place with something for everyone. We spent most of our time in the mountainous north and I think on a future visit, I'd like to concentrate on the beaches and islands and the interior in the east, visiting Cambodia along the way as well.

Australia

Australia is another very large country with huge diversity of geography. Although it's not as exotic as say Thailand or India (and certainly not as cheap), it was a very fun country with wonderful people. Again, even with a month on the road there, we only saw a fraction of the country. On a future visit, I'd love to see the west coast, visit Adelaide and Sydney and do some trekking in Tasmania.

New Zealand

Being the country we spent the most time in (two months), I feel like we saw most of the country. It helps of course that it's a fairly tiny country with only four million people. We loved the South Island and on a revisit would probably concentrate further there. We missed the iconic Milford Sound, and were not set up to do any backcountry hiking which would be a definite on a future visit. I'd love to do some kayaking too, maybe a multi-day mixed hiking/kayaking trip would be awesome. Or, given more time, I would love to hike Te Ararao.

Turkey

Turkey was a great surprise. We fell in love with the country and would highly recommend it as a place to visit. We concentrated on the western side of Turkey but on a future visit I'd love to see the center and east. We loved the food, the people and the all the amazing things to do and see.

Europe (including Iceland)

We spent about two weeks in Greece, two days in Italy, two days in Switzerland and four days in Iceland. Obviously that was not nearly enough time, and we would love to revisit Europe. I'd love to do some hiking in Switzerland, spend more time in Italy, and visit new places we didn't make it to this time (i.e., Spain, Portugal, Austria, Germany, various places in Eastern Europe, etc.) We also really loved Iceland and could revisit there. It would be fun to drive the entire Ring Road. We also enjoyed Greece, but would probably revisit Turkey before we went back to Greece.

In a future post, I'll talk a little about the places we didn't love so much, and I will end this post by saying that we're excited to be back in the USA because we love touring around our own country as well. There are still places in the US that we haven't been (Hello, Alaska) that also rank high on the list of places we'd love to visit.

No boat for us

We are leaving for Laos in about an hour, taking an overnight bus directly to the town of Louang Phabang. We had originally planned on taking a two day "slow boat" trip down the river, but the river levels are too low for the slow boats. Apparently, speed boats are still running and will make the trip in one day, but they can only take four passengers because of the water levels. Some fellow travelers we met in Chiang Mai (who's blog is quite good, by the way) alerted us as a comment on our last blog post that the boats were canceled, but we would probably have come up here anyway, as our 15-day visa for Thailand runs out in a couple days. Our super-friendly guest house sells bus tickets that include the border crossing ferry so we've decided to just go with that.

We spent the night at the border town of Chiang Khong, which is a nice enough town, as far as border towns go. We got off the bus around 8PM and were met by the owners of the Baan Rimtaling Guest House, a Thai woman and a guy from Florida, who as it turns out, can talk your ear off. We were lucky to get the last double room in the place, which at only 160 Baht (less than $5 US) is quite a steal. Plus, they ran a decent restaurant, so after the seven hour bus ride from Chiang Mai, we enjoyed some good curry and beer.

The water levels of the river are quite low, which we could see in the morning from our guest house:

We went for a short walk around town this morning, saw some monks buying cell phones (see our pictures), and Jaimee bought some yarn (surprisingly hard to find around SE Asia) and got a massage. Overall, a decent stopover.

Update: It turns out that just like airlines, buses also get overbooked. The bus to Laos was overbooked by two people, so in exchange for free dinner at the restaurant tonight and a discount on a room with our own bathroom (it's amazing what becomes a luxury after awhile), we decided to stay another night and head to Laos tomorrow.

Temples and Markets

After spending five days and nights here in Chiang Mai, this turns out to be our longest stay in one place since WWOOFing in New Zealand. We've wondered around, visiting all the temples inside the city, and last night we went to the Night Market, an area of town that becomes a huge outdoor shopping pavilion from 5PM onwards. There's a Sunday Night Market that we plan on visiting tonight, although since we're not really in the market for t-shirts, fake Tiffany jewelery, fake Rolexes, jade elephants, wooden bowls, etc. we don't plan on buying anything. It's fun to look around though.

Today we took a little side-trip out to Wat Doi Suthep, about 10 miles outside Chiang Mai, which was more of an adventure getting there than actually seeing the temple.

We went to the meeting place where taxis take people out to the temple. As we approached the line of waiting songthaews (pickups with benches in the back) we were beckoned towards a group of tourists waiting nearby. Apparently the songthaew drivers like to get around 500 Baht ($15 USD) per trip, and the trucks hold about 10 people so if it's full it costs 50 Baht each. The driver doesn't care if it's full - he just wants his 500 Baht, so when we approach the group (a Polish couple, a Korean man, and a mother/daughter from France) the driver is negotiating prices for the trip. He's also trying to sell side-trips to other temples, palaces and the like, some of which the Polish couple wanted, but the French lady did not. Being that we spoke the best English amongst the group we became lead negotiators. We brokered a deal to leave immediately for 60 Baht each for those that wanted just the temple, and 80 for the Polish couple to go to both the temple and the palace. This seemed like a fair deal, and we were ready to go when the Polish couple said no, they wanted 50 for the temple and the palace. The driver walked away disgusted. Luckily, four Chinese walked up and we all agreed to just go to the temple only for 50 each and let the Polish negotiate their palace tour separately.

The temple was quite pretty, but extremely touristy (should have expected that I suppose). It was also under going some renovations:

We walked around the grounds, had some pineapple and fried bananas, and came back to town.

Tomorrow we leave for Laos. We plan on taking a bus to the border town, spending the night on the Thai side, then crossing over in the morning where we hope to take a two-day boat ride down the Mekong river to the town of Luang Prabang. At least that's our plan...

Update: We added some more pictures, including some of our visit to the excellent Sunday Night Market.

Dreaming about Curry

We are now relaxing in Chiang Mai, in the North of Thailand. We took an overnight train from Bangkok, and although we had an upper bunk again like we did from Hat Yai to Bangkok, this train ride was much more comfortable. The air-conditioning was not freezing us out and the ride itself, although 13 hours long was on-time and relatively pleasant.

Chiang Mai is quite a contrast to Bangkok. Although it's a bustling city with all sorts of traffic the weather is much cooler. It gets hot during the day, but the mornings are very cool; we noticed it right away getting off the train around 7AM.

The train station in Chiang Mai was a zoo - everyone offered us ride, places to stay, tours. Since we didn't know where we were staying we decided to walk the 2 km into town, especially since the weather was so cool. Apparently people don't walk in Chiang Mai; we had to dismiss tuk-tuk drivers and taxi cabs every 100 feet or so.

Walking into town

Eventually we got into town and after looking at one grungy guest house, found Libra House, a very nice place with a lovely courtyard and free wifi! The rooms are small, but adequate, and at 200 Baht per night ($6 USD) it's certainly within our budget.

The only thing of note we've done here is take a Thai cooking class. We had a great time at this class. The class took place on a farm about a half-hour outside the city. They picked us up in the morning, we went to the market to look at the ingredients we'd be using that day, then went to the farm. The class was outstanding. We made green and red curry (from scratch, using a mortar and pestle), tom yum soup, spring rolls, phad thai, papaya salad and mango with sticky rice. We ate part of what we made for lunch, but also brought enough home for dinner later! The class is run by Thai Farm Cooking School and it comes highly recommended.

Other than the class, we've been eating yummy food, drinking lots of fruit shakes and reading in the hammocks at the courtyard of our guest house.

Here are the pictures, mostly of our cooking class, but a few of the Chiang Mai itself. Maybe if we get motivated we'll see some of the temples outside the city, but for now we're just enjoying relaxing and not doing too much.

Six Months

Today marks six months of traveling since we left Seattle on August 15th of last year. Our first adventure in the Enchantments of central Washington seems far away in both distance and time from our current adventure in Bangkok Thailand.

From Langkawki, Malaysia we took a ferry to Satun, Thailand, where after a fairly painless border crossing (didn't speak a word to the customs agent), we bused it to the town of Hat Yai where were caught an overnight train to Bangkok. Pulling into the dock at Satun, this is our first view of Thailand:

From Bangkok

Public transport in Thailand is interesting to say the least. If it has a motor, people use it as public transportation - motorcycle taxis, "tuk tuks" - small vans or converted three wheel motorcycles, boats of all kinds, vans, taxis, etc. For example, they packed 12 adults into the back of a two-wheel drive Toyota pickup (not an extended bed truck either) to get to the bus station in Satun. (Why they don't just put the bus station near the ferry, I don't know...) We took this picture, pitying the poor people who had to ride in it before we realized we were taking one as well:

From Bangkok

The train ride was not very comfortable, but what 17 hour train ride is? We bought a 2nd class "sleeper" car, but that's a misnomer; someone comes through around 9PM and converts all the seats into "beds", essentially five foot, 10 inch sofas (I'm six feet tall). Plus, the only seats available were upper bunks, right next to the air-conditioning vents. It was like sleeping outside in the winter it was so cold. I actually pulled out my 25 degree sleeping bag, which had been pretty useless since we got to SE Asia and crawled inside it to try and sleep, although with the florescent light on right above my head, there wasn't much sleeping.

Once in Bangkok, we worked our way over to the area of town where our couchsurfing host lived. We took the subway (yes, Bangkok has a subway), the sky train (ditto) and finally a taxi. We later realized taking a taxi the whole way would have been both cheaper and faster, but what did we know?

Our host, Nuch, met our taxi (the taxi driver had to call her on the cell since he couldn't understand our instructions or read the English script version of the address), gave us the keys to the apartment and said she was "busy" and had to go. We let ourselves in to discover one room with a double bed, a small empty wardrobe, and a bathroom. We didn't understand what was going on. Did she live here? Were all three of us going to sleep here? Only when she came back three hours later did she tell us this is an extra "apartment" that she has for family and friends. So, we had the place to ourselves.

The neighborhood reminded me of the Puerto Rican/Dominican neighborhoods of New York City (do these even still exist?) because of all the mid-rise apartment buildings, lots of little convenience stores and tons people on the street. Nuch says she likes having couchsurfers stay here because they get to see how real Thais live, as opposed to the touristy (or sex business) areas. There certainly were no tourists in this area, and we've enjoyed the relaxing atmosphere of having our own apartment. Our first evening we caught a beautiful sunset off the roof of her building (we're staying on the 12th floor):

From Bangkok

I was still feeling kind of sick our first full day in Bangkok so we took it easy just wandering around and not doing too much. I started feeling better toward the evening and we went to the Khao San district and had an amazing organic vegetarian Thai buffet at May Kaidee. I think after a few days of not feeling well and not eating very much, I was ready for scrumptious healthy food. I shoveled in loads of curries, spring rolls with peanut sauce, tempura vegetables, noodles, rice and salads. It was super tasty, amazingly fresh, and lucky for us since they only do the buffet once a week on Saturday. And the best part? It was only $3 a piece, including fruit shakes!

Yesterday, we took the canal boat by the apartment out to a floating market, a meeting place along the river where every weekend hundreds of boats meet up along a dock and form an impromptu market to sell various products and food. We had a scrumptious lunch of rice, noodles and spring rolls (we could live off these things!) before taking a three hour canal tour. Our boat was a low slung affair packed full of holidaying Thais. It was Chinese New Year, after all. We got squeezed into a bench built for much shorter people, right next to a young man who was "on the spectrum." Jaimee believes she is a magnet for people like this. You know the ones; personal space issues (either you are in their space or they are in yours), always facing the wrong way, and that nice mumbling and singing. While sitting beside this fellow he spread way out in the seat causing us to have less than half the row for the two of us. Then when we piled back into the boat after a stop he was RIGHT behind Jaimee, exhibiting his personal space issues again... The best part was when there was a big splash (the canal was full of fish) and his family wiped the water off his face for him. Jaimee felt nervous because a family that jumps to at a time like that only does it for one reason - to avoid a meltdown.

From Bangkok

The tour was pretty lame - there was a guy who would talk about all the sights (including at least 10 temples), but he only spoke Thai (maybe that's why we were the only white people on the boat?) and one of the stops included a visit to a zoo where there was a snake show.

Before ever complaining about conditions in American zoos again, I'll realize the animals could have it much, much worse. This zoo was depressing, and although it was kind of amazing how close the snake handlers got to the snakes, we also felt kind of bad for the snakes. Here's one performer with three cobras:

From Bangkok

We're staying one more night in Bangkok before heading North to Chiang Mai tomorrow night. We plan on heading up there to see the forests and mountains of Thailand, as well as take some cooking classes at a farm we read about on the Internet. To be able to make anything close to the amazing green curry we've been devouring here would be awesome.