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…
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 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…
Luang Prabang is a beautiful little town located on a peninsula at the intersection of the Mekong and Nam Kahn rivers in northern Laos. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site and thus retains much of its colonial architecture. I could feel the French influence more strongly in Luang Prabang than anywhere else in Southeast Asia thus far. Walking some of the streets I could almost fool myself that we were in a European village. But then a little Buddhist…
Chiang Dao Dan and I arrived in Chiang Mai about a week before our friends were scheduled to meet us. That amount of time, combined with the three days we would overlap with them there, seemed like a little long to spend in a city we’d already been to. We did some research and decided that the nearby mountain getaway of Chiang Dao would be a good break from the city for a couple of days. We hopped on the…
Back in 2014 Dan and I took our first big trip together. We spent two weeks exploring Thailand, spending a hectic day in Bangkok followed by almost a week in Chiang Mai and then a week on an island beach. We had been dating for a few years and things were getting serious. Although we weren’t living together yet, we were starting to broach the subject of maybe moving in together. At that point we had never spent more than…
I mentioned in my earlier post about our time in Hue that the food we experienced in Vietnam was unique and wonderful but that I had been doing a terrible job documenting it. With that in mind, I made a more conscious effort to document what we ate when we returned to Hanoi from Halong bay. When we got back Varshan left to go on a two day motorcycle ride, leaving me, Dan and Megan to really dig into the Hanoi…