Just a quick note mainly to let you know where we're at and where we're headed next. We've been in Bangkok for the past few days, mainly for the purpose of picking up my wedding dress (yay!) and to get a flight to China. We leave in the evening on April 4th to fly direct to Shenzhen where we will begin our China adventure. One thing we did new this time in the big city is spend a day at Siam City Water park - it was not the wisconsin dells, but a great way to beat the heat. Bangkok is [View Full Entry]

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After about an hour long bus ride, we arrived in Phitsanulok, a town convenient to hang out it because it's on the railway and also has very reasonable and nice accomodations. We decided this would be a good place to find a room with A/C and maybe even a TV to spoil ourselves a little bit. After some searching we ended up in a place recommended by our guidebook called the Lithia (?) Guesthouse. We got a great room (clean, large, comfy bed, TV, AC, hot shower, and even a refrigerator!) that included a free breakfast for the low low price [View Full Entry]

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On the way to Sukhothai, the bus passed through the "old city" where the Sukhothai Historical Park (and all the interesting ruins) is located. We debated getting off there but weren't really sure so we continued on to the "new city" bus station which is about 12 km away. We were greeted by the usual group of tuk-tuk drivers wanting our business and after hooking up with two other travelers we worked a deal with one of the drivers to take us all to the guesthouse area. After checking several of them, we got the impression that prices were being jacked [View Full Entry]

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Cooking, dancing, boxing, zipping, trekking, rafting, elephant riding, and saving lives - You can do all that and more in Chaing Mai! We arrived by train at 8:00 AM and took the first day to get oriented, find a place to stay, find A/C checkpoints, and start looking at tour companies for all the many activities available here. The A/C checkpoints were easy because all the maps show the 7-11 locations and they always have nice cool air and are popular with foreigners, hence why they are on the maps. After getting settled in and checking out our entertainment options we [View Full Entry]

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In order to see the infamous "monkey town" of Lopburi, we had to go a bit out of our way and take a bus from Kanchanaburi to Suphinburi, which was a public regular bus (meaning no A/C and seats like on a school bus), definitely not the tourist trail. Then from there we hopped on a bus to Lopburi, this one was probably about 70 years old, so was the driver though, which made it a slow ride. Fortunately there was only about 6 other people on the bus so we were able to switch sides of the bus (from sunny [View Full Entry]

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Another history lesson! Back during WWII when Japan occupied most of southeast Asia they decided to build a connecting rail line between Thailand and Burma to provide a better supply route to their troops during the war. Since Japan took over the region they had over 60,000 POWs from Australia, Great Britain, Holland, and the US to use as slave labor to complete this very ambitious project in a rediculously short period of time. They also hired around 200,000 (estimated) Asian laborers (from all over Asia) who were promised good pay and good working conditions, neither of which they got. A [View Full Entry]

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Having no desire to ride a bus for 20 some hours down the winding mountains to the Thailand boarder we decided to get plane tickets. Sounds easy right, not a chance in this Country. Loas is the is the least developed country we have ever seen, well Cambodia and Boliva may have been worse but I never stuck around long enought to find out because bumpy dirt roads really don't appeal to me. It's hard to imagine, but we are so use to being able to do what we please and not worry to much about money and Loas really showed [View Full Entry]

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Are all things you will find in abundance in The north east region of Loas. Before I explain the title I must warn fellow travelers about the 8 hour very windy road up to the high plains. It seem like the maxium road grade over here is a lot lower because we only gained maybe 3000 feet or so in 150 miles and it took 8 hours. Do the math, we were going fairly slow because we were practically doing figure eights to get up the mountains. Luckily I popped some motion sickness pills before we headed out and Cara did [View Full Entry]

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On March 10th we got a flight from Siem Reap to Luang Prabang, Laos, which was a quick 2 hour flight. Flying in was really beautiful as the scenery here is very different from anywhere we've been. After paying our dues to enter the country (and we had to pay an "exit" fee out of Cambodia), we got our visas and walked out of the airport to find a whole bunch of bored taxi and tuk tuk driver waiting for gullible customers. First I should mention that we read in our guide book that the only ATM in Laos was in [View Full Entry]

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After a long bumpy ride to Siem Reap, the taxi car stopped and transferred us over to a tuk-tuk. The tuk-tuks here are a bit different in that they are actually like little carriages hooked up to motorbikes. The bike tuk tuk driver drove us around looking at places to stay and we settled on a cheap guesthouse just outside the center of town. For those who don't know, the currency here in Cambodia is Riel, but they actually use US dollars just as much or actually more than Riel. Basically they don't deal with coins so anything less than $1 [View Full Entry]

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