Euros Ate My Dollars
Ben and Brittany are two 25-year olds on an unscripted trip around the world. Taking their time in each place, they're planning to make their way through destinations in Europe and Asia before returning home to Virginia after 8 months. (Interview with Ben and Brittany)
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The mo' problems we see
Shiny. Shiny and new and big. That’s America.
Driving home from the airport, I was amazed at how wide the roads are. How you actually have room to drive on them. How clean and new everything seems. How open and spacious it all is.
There are things I appreciated immediately after landing in the great big U.S. of A. I can read that entire sign! I know how to work a pay phone! I can eat uncooked food and not get typhoid! And there is so much diversity here! Any given crowd is full of so many colors of people. You don’t really appreciate how great that is until you experience being an outsider in an ethnically homogeneous country.
Hoi An: Hello, you buy someting?
Wake up! We are in Hoi An. We would like for you to get off of the bus now to look at this hotel. This hotel has pool, bicycles, is your home away from home. It is very cheap, very nice. The places in the center of Hoi An are many more expensive and very bad.”
I woke up from the brief nap I’d been enjoying on the bus ride from Hue (say it: Hway) to Hoi An to find that the rickety bus had stopped in front of a large hotel just outside of the old city center, and a bus company representative was starting his sales pitch. Unfortunately, along with those friendly convenience store stops you have to endure when riding a bus in SE Asia, you also have to put up with stopping at some hotel that has bribed the bus company.
“Seriously?” I said to Ben, groggily. “We have to deal with this crap again?”
Run DMZ
The overnight bus from Hanoi south to Hoi An ain’t a thing of beauty. On the plus side, it actually contains beds, which is a first for us on any overnight bus experience. But on the other hand, the proximity of the beds in the rear of the bus forces unwanted stranger spooning, the potholed roads ensure that half your night is spent airborne, the driver incessantly honks the loudest horn in the universe the entire night, and there is only a six-hour respite from blaring Vietnamese karaoke on the speaker system. When the karaoke resumed around 5:00am, Brittany got mad enough to climb down from her bunk, clamber over the tightly-packed rows of prostrate passengers, and make it to the front of the bus to ask the driver to please turn the karaoke off, at least until sunrise. He deemed her request worthy of no more attention than a shoo-ing hand gesture, which has been an impressively bottomless source of daily anger for her ever since.
Shrouded in Mystery: Halong Bay
For a country that’s so skinny, Vietnam has an awful lot of UNESCO-listed World Heritage sites. Foremost among these may be the jewel of the north: ancient, foggy, beautiful Halong Bay. The Bay is a short 3-hour drive east from Hanoi, but feels like a different planet. In one morning, you can leave the cramped, noisy, motorcycle-packed city streets behind, and discover a world where jagged limestone formations rise up through the water and mist, and secret caves and grottoes wait to be explored. After seven months of travel, I don’t think that anything we’ve seen can top the natural beauty of Halong Bay. If you’re searching for ghosts, sunken pirate ships, or sunken pirate ship ghosts, THIS is where you need to look first. And if the Scots still haven’t found Nessie (we’ve been away for a while), then it’s surely because she’s moved here.
Luang Prabang: Him want to marry you!
It strikes without warning and without mercy. Even the most experienced travelers succumb to its monstrosity. We did not heed their warnings: convinced of our invincibility, we threw caution to the wind. But the dreaded Bangkok belly will not be evaded.
I’d go into more detail, but I REALLY don’t think you want to know.
Trekking Adventures in Thailand: Day 1
The third best thing about Thailand is the food, from mangos with sticky rice to noodles with EVERYTHING. The second best thing about Thailand is that Enrique Iglesias doesn’t live here. But the BEST thing about Thailand is that we can actually afford to DO things here! Last week, we took a 2-day trek into the hills north of Chiang Mai, as part of a package deal that included elephant riding, hiking with a local guide, whitewater rafting, bamboo rafting, all our meals, and accommodation in a hilltribe village. Total price: $30 each, or about 20 euros for you silly people back in the Old World. Do you realize what 20 euros would buy you in Western Europe? Do you?? Well, neither do I, because I don’t think they make euro coins that small. It’s like the half-cent on sales tax that always gets rounded up at the register. Moral of the story: travel in wonderful, affordable SE Asia, and whatever you do, don’t let Iglesias find out about it.
1,000 Words
Ah, Chiang Mai. After Bangkok, Thailand’s second largest city is like a breath of fresh air. Picture me sitting on the sunny patio of a cafe, drinking Thai iced tea, eating fresh mango, and writing in my journal, as I whimsically sigh “ah…Chiang Mai…,” and you’ve got a pretty good idea of how I spent my time in the city.
We took a train through the rice paddies and beautiful countryside of Northern Thailand, to arrive in Chiang Mai sometime last week. We became so enamored with the city we extended our stay multiple times. Ben has deemed it a Special Place, a hard-earned title in our book, alongside Chania and Charlottesville. The Thai are proud of this city, and consider it the cultural and culinary capital of the country. Which probably explains why we like it so much.
What’s on the Menu at Bangkok’s Chatuchuk Market?
Donuts, vipers, and neckties. You’d really think you’d need to visit three separate stores to complete that shopping list. Not so in Bangkok’s (in)famous Chatuchuk Market. The best piece of advice that Lonely Planet ever gave us was to set aside an entire day for the market experience.
We arrived at 10:00 on Saturday morning to find an area the size of a fairground full of shoppers elbowing for room in the innumerable rows and columns of shop stalls. It is certainly madness, but there is a semblance of method. The grid is (mostly) categorized into clusters of similar stalls. To your left might be toy stalls, then clothes stalls, followed by an illegal cock-fighting ring. On the right, art stalls, food stalls, and pet stalls. Those last two overlap more than I’d prefer.
Bangkok block!
You can’t breathe. Exhaust fumes from the thousands of speeding cars and motorcycles choke your every attempt in this oppressive humidity, and turn the cloudless sky a hazy gray. You look up anyway, and see the cement underbelly of the SkyTrain track snaking between two high-rises up the street. You can feel the vibration from the train rushing overhead, but its roars are obliterated by the blaring car horns as a tuk-tuk driver caroms his way across eight lanes of traffic, and skids to a stop in front of your sidewalk. He shouts to you in broken English to get in for a ride, but you keep walking, and resist the urge to pull the city map from your pocket. The neighborhood you’ve wandered into has no street signs anyway, and looking lost will quickly attract every taxi tout and con artist in the city. About all you can be sure of is that you’ve managed to find yet another sex-trade district, and it’s gotten so hot this afternoon that you’re now visibly sweating through your second shirt of the day. But nothing can bother you this afternoon, because you’re on your way in flip-flops to visit a Buddha statue you hear is longer than half a football field, and you’ve got a plastic bag of fried banana slices in your hand. Welcome to Bangkok.
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