18 April Almost dying carrying my bag across the border, I got in the bus on the other side and promptly went back to sleep, trying to block out the hairpins and horrible sick feeling. We arrived at some point after dark in Pak Xan where I collapsed into bed. 19 April I woke up feeling worse than the day before. Good thing we only had a 4-hour bus ride! We arrived in the morning in Vientiane, the Lao capital, where I slept through most of the day. I watched a bit of CNN between sleeps. In the evening we went [View Full Entry]

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13 April Leaving the tailors and silversmiths behind, we headed off to the town of Hue. Along the way we drove through beautiful scenery, passing Lang Co beach and making a top at the top of the Hai Van Pass, a former American outpost. Of course, any time a pass is involved, there are a load of hairpin curves and a load of hairpin curves make me a bit ill. So instead of being able to stare in awe at all of the scenery, I had to nap. Around midday we met up to experience something truly Vietnamese: motorbikes! The Vietnamese [View Full Entry]

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06 April In Chau Doc... The evening after the exhausting day in transit was pleasant. We hired a boat out on the river which brought us up close to scores of houseboats and fishing boats and provided beautiful views of the rickety stilt houses along the river bank. We made a stop at one of the floating villages where houses are not boats, but stationary. Inside, they look like typical houses with hammock beds, dining rooms, dogs, and roosters. Unlike typical houses, most of these have captive colonies of fish living beneath them. Holes in the floor on the porch reveal [View Full Entry]

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31 March We left Bangkok early in the morning in a minibus headed for the Cambodian border. Despite the lengthy journey, things were kept interesting inside the bus with an incident involving pickled mango (read: sticky sugary juice was all over the bus and vain attempts at cleaning it with wet wipes and trying to siphon the juice from the pickled mango bag into a yogurt container were disasters) and the discovery that thin boxed breadsticks advertising themselves as having a sweet corn flavor do, in fact, taste EXACTLY like sweet corn, minus the butter running down one's chin. We arrived [View Full Entry]

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30 March Arrived at some horribly early hour to the Bangkok airport. I couldn't actually say what time it was since I slept through the local time announcements on the plane. After getting a fancy new stamp in my passport and picking up my very chubby backpack, I hopped in a bright pink taxi headed for the city center. Bangkok's taxis are like Skittles - one company has bright pink taxis, another orange, others green, bright blue and the most boring are the dark green and yellow. They're very easy to spot AND they have meters - a pretty big novelty [View Full Entry]

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At least I think I'm clever... 28 March Arrival in Calangute in Goa, a teeny beachy resorty state on the Arabian Sea. We had a beautiful dinner on the beach followed by cocktails with my Bumchum at the hotel. 29 March Last day in India :( After breakfast, I headed out with Lucy and Laura to shop our cares away. I bought a nice bracelet and two fake silver rings. (In two weeks time, the bracelet will have broken when I drop it on a tile floor in Cambodia and the rings will have turned brassy). Laura and I had delicious [View Full Entry]

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24 March Yes, I still love Indian trains. We arrived early to Bangalore, India's Silicon Valley where we promptly boarded a bus to Mysore (which is not an eyesore!). After a great lunch, we hopped in a tuktuk to the state-owned silk factory. If you ever thought a tuk-tuk seat with room for three people only holds three people, you would be wrong. They hold seven. After the disappointing discovery that we could not watch them make silk in the factory but instead could only buy loads of silks, we left. In the late afternoon, we took a pair of tuk-tuks [View Full Entry]

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19 March Ambassador taxis took us from the train station to our beautiful little hotel, only a few minutes walk away from the beach in Varkala. The beach is only a huge flight of stairs down a massive cliff. It's stunning, wonderful, with warm waters and the go ahead to wear swimsuits! Unfortunately I didn't spend much time there. The fever from my intense mosquito bite allergic reaction skin death kept me in bed, close to cold showers and a tv. 20 March Much of the same. Beautiful views once I'd climbed out of bed. Fever on the edge of breaking. [View Full Entry]

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15 March An early morning taxi ride from the heart of Delhi dropped me at the Delhi airport. Flying in India is an experience in itself. After showing your ticket at the door, a nice security guard lets you in far enough that you can put your checked bags through a scanner where they're tagged and have a plastic band put around them (think heavy duty cardboard box with the annoying thin plastic bands around it making it semi impossible to get at the goodies inside). Then you check in. And then I sat around for a while. Unbeknownst to me, [View Full Entry]

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14 March We started the day with a rooftop breakfast watching eagles fly around over Delhi. From the hotel we walked a couple short blocks to the metro station. The Delhi metro is fantastically cheap and super modern. However, if you go out the wrong exit of the station, you could end up walking heaps further than you'd planned. Not that that would ever happen to me... After about a 25 minute walk in the heat and sunshine, we arrived at the India Gate. It's an impressive monument to British Indian Amry soldiers and the home of the Indian Army's Tomb [View Full Entry]

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