I’m going to be honest: Dan and I didn’t really like Bali. Partly this was our own fault. When we were planning the last part of our Asia itinerary it seemed like a great idea to finish with some relaxing beach time. In our minds Bali conjured images of sublime natural beauty and calm tropical beaches with bathtub-warm water. Unfortunately, we didn’t bother to do enough research to confirm whether that image was accurate. So imagine our disappointment when we…
First of all, my apologies for anyone who is getting confused as I do these posts out of order. I’m really trying to get all caught up on Asia so I can focus on Europe but I still have three posts to go including this one. To recap: from Singapore we flew to Jakarta and from there we took a breathtakingly beautiful train ride across Java to Yogyakarta. Yogyakarta is an awesome little city. After the chaos and grit of…
The first four months of this adventure simultaneously flew by and felt like they lasted a lifetime. I still have three more posts to write about our last stops in Asia but it feels important to take a moment and reflect on what we’ve seen before our time in Southeast Asia becomes a distant memory. So how do I sum up our travels so far? Well we recently got the opportunity to go home for a couple of weeks and…
Singapore is one of the most unique and interesting places I have ever visited. I’ve been struggling to write this post because I’m not sure my words and photos can sufficiently capture what is so special about this city but I’m going to give it a shot. Our First Night We arrived in Singapore on a quick flight from Kuala Lumpur. It was pouring rain that afternoon so we hung out at our hostel for a while hoping we could…
From Penang our plan was to continue moving south, stopping in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Jakarta. That seemed like a lot of big cities in a row so before we embarked on that urban adventure we hopped over to the peaceful island of Langkawi for a few days of beach time. Langkawi doesn’t warrant its own blog post because for four days we did nothing but lie on the beach, read, swim and eat cheap Indian food. It was a…
Penang, Malaysia – I fell in love almost as soon as we got here but getting here was a bit of an adventure in and of itself. From Bangkok we took an overnight train south through the Thai peninsula to the Malaysia border. Trains don’t cross the border so we had to disembark, go through immigration and board another train to take us to Butterworth where we could catch the ferry to Penang. We arrived at the Malaysia border station…
After Vientiane our plan was to head south to Malaysia, Singapore and, eventually, Indonesia. However, all of southern Thailand lay between us and the next part of our adventure. We wanted to travel by train and, logistically, it made the most sense to break up the journey to Malaysia with a stop in Bangkok. This had the added benefit of giving us a few days to get reacquainted with a city that totally overwhelmed us when we visited it four…
After our two day trek we returned for one more night in Nong Khiaw. Chatting with Dan over dinner that night it suddenly hit me: I was ready for a city. The thing about traveling in Southeast Asia is that so many of the popular tourist towns (such as Hoi An, Chiang Mai and Luang Prabang) feel like they’re designed for visitors. In our experience it’s in the bigger cities that you feel like you can actually blend in a…
Laos is a sparsely populated, rural, landlocked nation whose geography is mostly defined by rivers and huge mountain ranges. Unlike other countries in Southeast Asia, there are no beaches or ultra-modern mega-cities to attract visitors. Instead, the draw here is the unique and awe-inspiring natural beauty. Therefore we knew that hiking would be the best way to truly see and get to know Laos. Trek #1 We did two treks in Laos. The first was a day trip from Luang…
My apologies for the long delay since my last post. I came down with a nasty cough which lead to me not sleeping for many nights and, turns out, blogging is really hard on little to no sleep. Once I was out of the rhythm I found it really hard to get back into it. For that reason I’m skipping ahead a bit to talk about the last place we visited: Jakarta, Indonesia. When we got to the end of…