KDP16

Well being back home is certainly nice, but even with all the extra time it is difficult to find motivation to finish this up. Since I am back home, this will be the last post to wrap up the last few weeks of my trip. Picking up where I left off over a month ago... My last entry left of with me leaving Luang Prabang after a week there. My next destination was Phonsavan, an 8 hour bus ride southeast through the mountains. The bus was not uncomfortable and we drove over and around some very beautiful mountains on a very winding road with a lunch break at a little village at one of the crossroads. About an hour out of Phonsavan we came down from the mountains and into rolling hills covered with reddish dirt ... read more

Well, I've finally found some time to sit down and update the blog. I left off with my arrival at Khao San Road in Bangkok. Khao San Road was probably one of the most overrated places I have been to, if not the most. When you read about backpacking and where to go, what is cheap and popular, Khao San road inevitably makes an appearance. I can't say that I see why it is so popular, mostly for its reputation I think than anything else. Frankly I couldn't wait to leave. Its always crowded with the party crowd, hawkers, women sticking those damn wooden frogs in your face, guys selling fake id's and diplomas, touts for tailor shops and tuktuk drivers. The bars and restaurants in the road and the next road over were horribly overpriced, ... read more

Cambodia was the next stop on my journey. I took a speedboat from Chau Doc, Vietnam, to Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital. The ride was comfortable and we only stopped twice, once at the Vietnamese border point and once at the Cambodian. Neither took especially long. Phnom Penh is right along the river and I had picked a hostel not far from the dock so I was able to bypass the crowd of tuktuk drivers waiting for us. I didn't have to walk especially far, but it was in the middle of the hottest part of the day when we arrived. Phnom Pehn felt very much like the Vietnamese cities I had been to. The archictecture is very similar, in the French Colonial style. While there were plenty of motorbikes, there were more cars than I ... read more

New photos uploaded from China and Vietnam. See them here: url=https://picasaweb.google.com/100175618216559178179/Vietnam?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCPT70fzeo86mNA&feat=directlinkVietnam url=https://picasaweb.google.com/100175618216559178179/China?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCKfmyor41rjvHA&feat=directlinkChina... read more

My next stop down the coast of Vietnam was in Hoi An. Less than a 4 hour bus drive from Hue. Hoi An is a fairly small city with a compact ancient town. Besides the attractive ancient town, nearby beaches and beautiful countryside, most visitors to Hoi An come for the numerous tailors. There are several hundred tailors in the city, most of them concentrated in the old town. Hoi An is a great place to get a custom tailored suit, shirt or even a whole wardrobe (if you can carry it all back with you) for very cheap prices. I had a suit and shirt made, good quality and materials, at a cost of $110. It was all made in a day, with a couple fittings and minor adjustments over the next couple days. Overall ... read more

I wrote most of this yesterday and planned to finish it this morning, but that didn't happen for a variety of reasons and I am too lazy to go through it and change what I had written, so I'll just add a bit about today here. Sorry if it is a bit of a mess. Today I was supposed to leave for Hoi An, a small city about 4 hours south of here. After hearing plenty about the flooding in Thailand and other parts of SE Asia, I had some firsthand experince with it today. When I woke up, the road by my hostel was covered in water. My hostel is near the end of the block, close to a main road that was still dry, so it wasn't bad by me. Farther down the road ... read more

Yesterday morning I arrived in Hanoi, just after 5am. I spent the previous day in Nanning, a boring city in the south of China, fairly close to Vietnam. For backpackers and tourists, Nanning seems to serve as a gateway to Vietnam from China - there isn't much other reason to go there, at least for backpackers, and they all had the same feelings. Before Nanning, I spent the previous 10 or so days in the Guilin area. The city of Guilin is not especially exciting - it has nice parks and rivers, but the main draw of the area is the Longji rice terraces a couple hours northwest and the Li river area south of Guilin. After I first arrived, I spent two days in Guilin to see the city. There is a decent night market ... read more

Shanghai, the largest city in China, has a very different feel from the rest of China I have experienced so far. I could almost imagine that I was no longer in China. Of course, there were plenty of things that constantly reminded me that I was still in the Orient. I arrived in the middle of the day on a 20 hour overnight train from Xian. After looking around the station for a while, I managed to locate the ticket office so I could book my next major train trip - from Hangzhou, my next destination, to Guilin. There are a variety of automated ticket machines, all with an english mode, but apparently you need a Chinese ID to use them, which makes them pretty much useless. The main ticket office was located across the street, ... read more

Its been a while since I've been able to get a decent computer with a working internet connection. At the time of my last post I was in Datong about 10 days ago. Since then, I've been through Datong, Pingyao, Xian and Shanghai. Right now I am in Hangzhou, about an hour south of Shanghai by the fast train. I'll start where I left off before - Datong. Datong is a dirty industrial and mining city about 6 hours northwest of Beijing by train. When I bought my ticket, the only tickets available were for sleepers on the daytime train. I had hoped to avoid day trains and buses as much as possible so that I would lose as little time as possible on the road or rails. That is not always possible, especially at the ... read more

The flight to Beijing from Seoul was uneventful. Gimpo Airport is only about 15 minutes on the airport subway line from my hostel in Seoul and the check-in and security process there was really easy. A few hours later I was landing in Beijing. Immigration and customs was easy as well - just show them the passport and visa and you are good. An airport express train took me pretty close to my hostel in Beijing. It was only a short walk from the station to the hostel, well it is supposed to be short. I ended up going in the wrong direction before realizing my mistake, but it wasn't too bad. I got to see a small part of the city and I didn't walk too far off course. The hostel - Sanlitun Youth Hostel, ... read more