The end of the road...

Yes folks... it's finally over.
After 5 months of travel, I've moved to Chicago to find a new job, a new apartment, and a slightly new life.

Right now it is a balmy 0 degrees outside and has been snowing all day. Lovely.

Neither Justin or I have a job or a place lined up, but but we'll both find our way sooner or later.

So thanks for reading, and if I head off into the great beyond again, you'll know where to find out about it.

Just in case you were interested, I've posted links to all of our online photo albums from our trip (beginning with the road trip from DC to California, and continuing all the way to Laos). Just click on the link to see them.

Bests,

Maeve


--------------------Photo Links

The road from DC to Seattle

Chicago

Seattle #1

Seattle #2

Portland

California

Nevada

Beijing, China

Xi'an and Chengdu, China

Emishan, China

Vietnam # 1

Vietnam #2

Cambodia

Thailand

Laos

Finally! Internet!

Dear friends,

I've finally had some time to organize and post up another round of photos.

Here is a link for our Thailand photos. I am working on the Laos photos and hopefully they will be up in a day or two.

So what now? Well after Bangkok we sneakily flew to Guam to surprise my dad on his birthday (the whole "go to the beach at Pattaya" thing was a ruse) and spent three lovely weeks there with family, friends, and the beach.



After returning to the US, I spent some time with my brother and Jessi in Healdsburg, while Justin went to see his family in Nevada. I'm a currently in DC, visiting with friends and taking one last pass at the job market before heading to Chicago in early February. I've already sent off an application or two to a gallery and an architectural firm in the Windy City. I hope someone takes interest soon.

Oh Bangkok, you busy busy beast you.

After a relaxing two weeks in Eastern Thailand, Laos, and Chiang Mai, we've returned to Bangkok for a few days. This place is a nightmare. Not a place for vacationing at all. Between the constant shopping and very hard bargaining, the rude taxi and tuk-tuk drivers who try to rip you off or refuse to use their meters, and the sheer size of the city... it is just a headache.
We've done the last of our serious shopping, and went to see the huge reclining Buddha at Wat Pho (one of the most amazing things to see... pity it is in Bangkok) and the giant standing Buddha. Tomorrow we head down south to Pattaya to visit Justin's cousin who lives there. Although it is the beach, we are planning on relaxing and lounging around the his house for a few days, maybe paying a visit to the water once or twice, and recharging for our return to Bangkok the night of the 18th in order to get up and head out the following day.
Finally, we'll get in to Guam on the 20th... after a 4 hour layover in Manila.
What a trip it's been.
I may not update until we've made it safely home to Guam...

Clean teeth for all!

Deja vu anyone? We're back in Thailand again... We took a rather effortless trip from Luang Prabang, Laos to Chiang Mai, Thailand via Laos Air. The other option was being stacked with people, rice, grain, chickens, and whatever else was agriculturally in vogue at the minute onto a barge that would slowly drift to Thailand in three days... or more... depending on the weather. Given the fact that our time is beginning to run out and our waning sense for adventure... we flew. On the plane we met Cyrus, a middle aged recently divorced East-coaster, who became our new travel mate. We settled arrived in Thailand during the King's week long birthday celebration (and the king may just be more popular than Buddha here) and the Chiang Mai flower festival AND the official "Start of the Thai Tourist Season Celebration". The city was completely packed with Thai and foreign tourists... but we managed to find a hotel room after a bit of a search. Chiang Mai is famous for it's night market, a daily affair, and we spent our first night in the city walking down the night market street wondering how many silk ties we really did need (in the end we bought none).
Chiang Mai is also famous for dentists. Seeing as my lack of health insurance and throbbing pain in one of my back molars spelled financial ruin, Justin and I checked out local dentist rates. Much to our surprise and dental joy, they were relatively low. So after two stints at two different dentist clinics I manged to get a cavity filled and my teeth cleaned, polished, sealed and whitened for just under $200 US. I'm sure the cavity came from long overnight train rides in China... the country is really that dirty. After our teeth had been properly assaulted, we searched the city for some painkillers, and fumbled around the Weekend Night Market (a different affair from the daily one) until we found a lady making waffles out of a street cart and called it a night.
We also rented a motorbike and took it up to the mountain top temple of Doi Su Theph, just outside of the city. The ride up is entirely switch backs and steep, sudden inclines so it was a site to see and experience it itself. The temple is one of the holiest in Thai Buddhism, and surrounding the golden central stupa are several sets of large heavy prayer bells... that I had the pleasure of ringing... all of them. The whole place was very noisy and crowded with Thais.
That night we met up with our friend Cyrus and went shopping at the Weekend Night Market. There were generally more Thais than foreigners at this market, and that worked out on our behalf as the prices were then lower. We had a very good time and went a little overboard with the shopping... but you're only in Thailand once, eh?
After Chiang Mai we'll take the night train down to Bangkok for some last minute shopping, temple viewing, and a trip to Ayuthaya, the ancient capital, before flying home to Guam!

Laos... land of the lost

If anyone feels the need to share my childhood travel experiences in places like Thailand and Indonesia make sure you head to Laos in the next year. Laos really reminds me of Thailand and Bali about 10-15 years ago. To give you an example: when we arrived in Vientiane, their capital, they had just begun to install sidewalks... really. Vientiane was a very quiet city with a midnight curfew still in effect... so we did very little during our time there. There was a large golden stupa, the holiest site in Laos, that we went to see. Legend has it that Buddha's collar bone is buried beneath the stupa.
From Vientiane we took a long bus ride to Vang Vieng, a small town in the mountains that now has only one function: tourism. It really isn't so bad as the town is only composed of three streets, the prices are all very reasonable, and the entire draw of the town is river tours. The river that curves around the town has one 6km stretch that is calm and wide enough to allow for very relaxing tubing. To make things even more interesting the locals have set up bars on the river banks so that you can float down the river, from bar to bar, drinking and eating as you go. These "bars" can be anything from a rather large establishment with several different thatched platforms jutting over the river to relax and drink to one guy perched on a rock in the middle of the river with a bucket full of ice and beer yelling "BEER LAO". The larger bars have trapeze swings. You climb up to a platform and swing out over the river, quite high up in the air really, until you decide to drop into the water. A rather disastrous idea I would think to have at a bar... but everyone seemed to be fine and no one got hurt while we were there. We also did a kayak tour of the river, which included one section where we were again put in inner tubes and using a guide rope we hauled ourselves into a cave that the river ran through. At parts the ceiling was just a few inches above our heads, at others roughly 100 ft. We went about 200m back in the cave in our tubes, it was completely dark with the exceptions of our headlamps, and one of the coolest things I've ever done.
We continued our northwesterly route and wound up in Luang Prabang, the UNESCO world heritage town and gateway into Northern Thailand. Luang Prabang reminded me a lot of Ubud, Bali. The town is fairly quiet but there is a decent amount of shopping, food, and tours all geared to tourists. What surprised me the most was the amount of Thai tourists that were there. We spent our first day in the city lounging around, doing very little. At night the main street becomes a large night market with people from the neighboring hill towns arriving with their goods and wares for sale. Laos silk is really beautiful, and we spent several nights and a fair amount of money negotiating with the vendors. Unlike the Vietnamese and Thais of Bangkok, the vendors in Laos enjoyed old fashioned bargaining with lots of smiles and playfulness that I haven't seen yet on this trip. We got some very good bargains and had a lot of fun in the process. We also decided to splurge a bit and went on a day long tour with a private guide that included an elephant ride, swimming at a beautiful waterfall, and 4 hours of kayaking down several small rapids back to Luang Prabang. The rest of our days we lazed away... Luang Prabang is the perfect down to do that in. If we felt adventurous we went on walks... at one point we followed a French tour group and ended up at the top of the town's central hill to watch sunset from the steps of a temple.
Like the rest of Asia, Laos too is bound to change soon. This trip has been a testament to how rapidly Asia is westernizing and how tourism is becoming a major economy, especially for a tiny poor country like Laos.
Although our trip is not entirely over, I am already starting to count the days until we arrive on Guam just in time for Christmas. Believe it or not, I miss the silly Christmas music played in malls and the lights and decorations that get put up just after (and these days well before) Thanksgiving. I know we'll be there shortly and the time will fly, but part of me just wants to go home now and start the party! Hehe.

I took some extra time out of today to update photos:
I fixed the second batch of Vietnam photos so now they include more of the Cu Chi Tunnels, and added some photos of part of our trip to Cambodia.

Vietnam #2

Cambodia (for now...)

argh

I just typed up a very long post detailing our trip from Bangkok to Laos, but then the computer I am on went and crashed, deleting the post before I could put it online.

So yes, we are in Vientiane, this city has no sidewalks but decent chicken. Tomorrow we go deeper into Laos.

I finally found an internet connection to attempt to put some photos up. Here is a brief collection from Vietnam.

Vietnam (from Sapa to Na Trong)
Vietnam... some photos from the Cu Chi tunnels... more to come later

Here a wat, there a wat, everywhere a wat wat.

The last two weeks have been quite interesting. We arrived in Phnom Phen and were whisked off to our guesthouse... a trendy little place with loads of nice people and good food. We only spent the night in the city, and the next morning we were off to Shianoukville to catch up with our Swedish friends at the beach. We stayed in a guesthouse that was literally just a large cushion on a floor to serve as a mattress and a fan for each room. The roof was thatched, the bathrooms were a trek to get to, and we locked the "room" with a padlock. Sadly, a flock of jellyfish (or a school, group, gaggle... whatever the proper word is for a lot of floating, stinging, jello-like blobs) attacked the beach the day we arrived, making the water hazardous. We lounged around for three days with our friends, then took the bus back to Phnom Phen.
In the city we visited (in one day) the Killing Fields, S-21 (the largest Khamer Rouge prison and interrogation center), the Russian market, the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda, and Wat Phnom. The Killing Fields and S-21 were the most interesting of the day... there wasn't much to see at the Killing Fields other than large pits in the ground that were once the mass graves of over 8,000 people... but it was very strange to be there. I expected it to be huge and sterile like a German concentration camp but it was a very small area that resembled more of an overgrown fairground. S-21 was a very different story. The compound was a high school before the Khamer Rouge took over, and it really looks like my high school on Guam: cement buildings with open air hallways and stairwells with rectangular holes cut through the cement for ventilation. Before interrogating people the Khamer Rouge took photographs and also made prisoners write a "biography"... some of them several hundred pages long. Then they were chained up, beaten, and eventually taken to the Killing Fields to be executed. Hundred of prisoner's photographs were on display, as well as photos taken by the Vietnamese "liberators". It was a very sobering experience.
After a few nights in Phnom Phen we took a bus to Siem Reap, the town outside of the temples of Angkor. In Cambodian (and Thai) "wat" means temple. We spent three days touring the wats of Angkor. The first temples were built in 900AD... the last around 1400AD. The most famous is Angkor Wat... the king's private (and HUGE) temple. We were up two mornings in a row to see the sun rise over Angkor Wat, and we sat on the steps of the temple every evening to watch the sun go down. During the day we were driven around by our tuk-tuk drivers (Paris and Chiang... the greatest guys) to various temples throughout the 200km temple area. We weren't able to seem them all (we'd need two weeks for that... maybe more), but we did manage to see quite a bit. I can't say too much about them other than that it was the best experience on this trip so far and as an art/architecture nut one of the best in my life. Unlike ruins in Europe, you can climb all over the temples and your experience is only limited by the number of stairs you are willing to climb and ledges you are willing to ease yourself along. Absolutely fantastic.
Today we took three different buses to get to Bangkok. The difference between Thailand and the rest of South Asia is immediately noticeable... paved roads with signs, tall buildings, houses with different architectural styles and BILLBOARDS. The advertisement on the highway from the Cambodia side to Bangkok was just choked with billboards. It feels like the US. We are currently staying just outside of the Kho San Road area... once the "backpacker's ghetto" but now more of a bustling tourist center. The dollar isn't as strong as it was two years ago, so things are drastically more expensive here that we thought they would be. I'll have to limit my shopping... sadly. We are traveling in the company of a Norwegian couple (Aina and Andre) and a Swedish couple (Hedvig and Thomas)... Aina and Andre we met way back in China and Hedvig and Thomas in Vietnam. We've spent most of our time in Cambodia as a happy little group of six, but now in Bangkok we will all be going different ways. Justin and I aren't sure where we are headed just this minute... tomorrow we'll have to do some research and see how difficult it is to get to Laos... and if we'd rather go to Burma and get off the tour circuit that we've been on since Beijing.
Asia's reputation of always being on the bring of technology isn't holding up as neither Vietnam or Cambodia had connections that were not run by a hamster and a wheel. Hopefully, I'll be able to upload some photos tomorrow on this connection... which doesn't seem too poor.
Tomorrow calls for Padthai and some (limited) shopping. Hurrah for Bangkok!

Almost out...

We've made it all the way down the coast and arrived in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City is just too long to say or type). This place is chaos. We plan to do a short trip to the Cu Chi tunnels tomorrow, some last minute shopping, and then take either a eight hour bus to Phnom Phen or a two day boat trip. Still haven't decided yet....
Here is a very brief summary of our last week or so in Vietnam:
In Hoi An, city of tailors, we spent several days getting things made. The city itself was pretty run down, having just survived a typhoon a few weeks before, and the beach was too rough for swimming as another one was on its way... so we spent all of our time at various tailor appointments. I ended up with a three piece suit, dress shirt, two winter coats, two dresses, a top, and three pairs of pants. Justin weighed in with two suits, a jacket, and five shirts. As usual, the most expensive thing was postage... and we had it all sent to the states so we don't have to drag it with us the next six weeks.
We then took a night bus to Nha Trang, a beach town. It was the off season, so nothing was heavily populated, but it was pretty boring. We ran into our Norwegian friends, Aina and Andre, as well as happy group of Swedes that we met in Hoi An... they made the place much less boring. The city is mostly owned by expats... so the prices can be pretty high.
From Nha Trang we took a long, hot bus ride to Dalat... a town described by our guide book as the "Paris" of Vietnam. It was a hole. We spent one day motorbiking around to water falls and got caught in a rain storm. It was fairly uneventful.
Vietnam is turning out to be rather disappointing as a travel destination. The more and more we see of it the more it feels like a poor man's Guam... or what Guam used to be about 50 years ago. Its just beginning to make me homesick. We are really looking forward to Cambodia!
On a side note, our hotel room has CNN and we are actively watching the US election results. COME ON DEMOCRATS!

Hue... city of something or other

As we continue our southward adventure through Vietnam we are discovering some things stay the same, no mater where you are in this country.
The first thing is that little children everywhere want to be your best friends. The second is that all noodles appear to be instant noodles... all the "fresh Vietnamese noodles" we read about in our guide book still allude us. Thirdly, every price we (other wise known as "white people") pay is anywhere between 50% to 400% higher and when we point this out, most vendors refuse to give any type of discount or engage in a bargaining game. They'd rather keep their product. It is strange, annoying, and often at times really upsetting. We've also be told we can't go down certain streets, on certain boats, certain places, because we're not Vietnamese. It feels a little... well racist.
However, we have been managing to have a very good time here, as long as we aren't trying to buy anything. We took a bus to the town of Ninh Binh and a motorbike out to an area known as Tam Coc. Here there are large limestone rocks jutting out of the rice paddies, similar to the rock islands around Catba and Halong Bay. We got into a little two person boat and were rowed among them. It was beautiful. Then our guides took us to another pagoda, where a bunch of school children lead us to their hide-out atop one of these huge limestone rocks. When we got to the top they put flowers in my hair and continuously asked us the same questions that every Vietnamese child must have learned in school: How are you? What is your name? Where are you from? What time is it? What is your telephone number?. It was a very good time and the view was incredible. We drove on these tiny roads in between rice paddies and little villages... it was very very nice.
Today we are in the ancient city of Hue... which is proving to be somewhat of a dud. We rented a motorbike instead and left the city, got lost in the rice paddies, and had our palms read by an old Vietnamese woman who had been married to an America. My palm says that I will live to be 79, I will have only one husband, I will not have a good job until I am 25, but when I get that job I will stay with it for 27 years and make lots of money. There are three boys that have loved me, but I have not loved them. That Justin will be my husband and he will be a good one. I will be married at 28... have one son and make my parents very happy. So there you have it folks! It was a blast driving through the little muddy streets with all of the village children running out to say "Hello!".
Tomorrow we are going to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) from the Vietnamese war (here it is the "American War" and the day after we will take a bus to Hoi An, the city of tailors. I still have yet to find a place with a connection decent enough to upload photos :( Hopefully in Hoi An.

Vietnam! Ho Chi Minh!

So our first week in Vietnam has passed, and we have passed it rather well. After our brief stay in Sapa, we took a night train down to Hanoi. Hanoi is one of the craziest cities I've ever been too.. the traffic alone is complete chaos... but it is really rather charming. We were stationed in the Old Quarter of the city, where most of the hustle and bustle of daily Hanoi life goes on. There is also excellent shopping. The next morning we took a bus, and then a boat to Catba Island, off the coast of Halong Bay. We spent a night on the island, then spent the next two nights on a small boat that we rented out with two other couples we met in Hanoi and Sapa. It was a pretty good time, complete with meals, kayaking, snorkling, caves, and glow in the dark plankton. As restful as our three days at see were, Catba was a bit of a tourist trap and there were a few scams along the way. For example we were told that everything was included, except for the drinks on board the boat. We agreed to this and brought our own stash of water, and bought a few drinks while on board. At the end of the trip we were presented with an outlandish bill to be split between the three couples that included no only the few drinks we purchased, but everything the captain and his mate decided to drink. And they drank quite a bit. It was pretty annoying. But that just seems to be the game when you are a tourist. We came back to Hanoi today to do some light shopping, and are headed off to Nimh Binh tomorrow. I would have pictures, but this computer won't load Facebook for me so I can't upload right now. Hopefully in a day or two there will be pretty photos for all of you to look at. Tonight we are going to nurse our sunburns and enjoy Hanoi.