Our trip was basically split into two parts: a cultural one and a beach vacation. Having left Penang, we were ready to head to the island of Phuket (pronounced POO-get), Thailand known for three things: its amazing beaches, limestone cliffs, and rampant prostitution. After our experience in Penang, (High Culture, Low Culture, Monkeys, and Ladyboys) we chose to make reservations at a hostel before arriving, as opposed to relying on Lonely Planet and pissy taxi drivers. Having evaluated a number of housing options, we went with a new hostel-- the Squareone-- in the largest town on the island, Pa [View Full Entry]

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From Kuala Lumpur, we decided to head north, going on the well worn, overland trail from Malaysia to Thailand. The obvious stop on the way was Penang Island, the oldest British settlement in Malaysia and a mini-backpacker mecca. While the spot seems kind of off the map for American tourists, it's become quite popular with tourists from the Arab world, wanting to visit a tropical, liberal Muslim country. Getting there from Kuala Lumpur was actually a lot of fun. We payed about $3 extra for a "luxury" bus that included large, fully reclining seats. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get much [View Full Entry]

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Fortunately, getting from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap no longer requires sitting on top of a speed boat in the middle of a giant lake for six hours getting sun stroke. Instead, for a quarter of the price, you can spend the same amount of time in a cramped, aggressively air conditioned bus while listening to the hits of Khmer Karaoke. The bus operators were even kind enough to include several microphones for those who wished to sing along. Luckily, nobody took them up on the offer. I was starting to feel under the weather, and sentimental Cambodian pop music along [View Full Entry]

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Columbus, Indiana is a strange place. It's an industrial, company town, home to Cummins Diesel, that happens to have some of the best architecture in the US. The philanthropist J. Irwin Miller offered to pay the architects' fees for the public buildings, not for their construction expenses. While this arrangement doesn't result in architecture on a monumental scale, it does result in clever solutions to architectural problems faced by many small, American towns. The best buildings in Columbus are Aero Saarinen's North Christian Chu [View Full Entry]

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I got up pretty late today... it's good having a full night's sleep after a 24 hour, stop to stop transit. Today we had two things on the agenda: getting suits made and getting a place to stay at our next location. Bangkok is incredibly humid.. it's like living in a steam room. I haven't been to another place like it. Luckily, we were staying in an air conditioned hotel so our acclimation is going a bit easier. Combined with the smoke from scooters, tuk-tuks, and poorly maintained cars, it can be an atmospheric nightmare. A number of people told me [View Full Entry]

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Note: I'm on a slow connection right now so I'll put the pictures up when I get a chance. Alex has some excellent ones on his blog Shoppers delight. Coming in directly from Cambodia, Malyasia feels like more like New Jersey than Southeast Asia. Kuala Lumpur, their "futuristic" capital city, is, like most capitals, not really intended for tourism. Nonetheless, we were able to get a cheap flight out of Siem Reap to Kuala Lumpur that saved us from spend 20 hours in a cramped bus traveling back to Bangkok. As soon as we got through c [View Full Entry]

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I decided to make the most of my few hours in Tokyo Airport before I boarded my flight to Bangkok. I wish I had more time here... just from looking at the landscape from the plane, it looks like a really interesting place. It seems every free, low-lying acre is occupied by rice fields. There's no sprawl, just neatly delineated developments. The people who work at the airport are impeccably polite and orderly. I was feeling thirsty so I went to the snack stand. Before I walked up to the drink refrigerator, I decided to go for the wildest looking [View Full Entry]

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My trip to Athens happened in two parts-- the first lasting two nights, and the second lasting one night and an afternoon -- separated by a two night trip to Mykonos. We our one first full day in Athens involved an eight-hour daytrip to Delphi. While our time in the city was piecemeal, I feel like I gained a tiny bit of insight into how to travel in Athens. As much as I hate to admit it, the most fun part of the city was the hostel. The Backpackers' Hostel in Athens was filled to the brim with travelers (strangely, most [View Full Entry]

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Dubrovnik was perhaps that city that I was most eager to see on the trip. I had read a little bit about and had seen a ton of pictures and figured that this would be a city that I'd really enjoy. The only problem with going to Dubrovnik is that the city is really remote. So remote, in fact, that if you take a bus there, the map seems to indicate that the bus will go through a few miles of Bosnian territory (if someone reading this knows whether or not this is the case, I'd be interested to know so [View Full Entry]

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From Ljubljana, our next destination was Dubrovnik. We had set aside June 11 to be our travel day to Dubrovnik, and figured we could board a bus to Dubrovnik or maybe even catch a cheap flight there. We were a little weary of taking a bus (trains don't connect to Dubrovnik) because it would be a minimum 14 hour ride. After visiting travel agency after travel agency, we decided that the best use of our time would be to take a two-hour train to Zagreb and from there take a cheap, 45-minute flight to Dubrovnik. Because we had heard that Zagreb [View Full Entry]

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