On November 3 my around the world trip came to a finish. After 292 days, 27 flights, 20 World Heritage Sites, 12 countries (14 if you count Hong Kong and Macau), 35 tigers, 5 pairs of sunglasses, and too many bowls of rice to count, I was back where I started; my hometown of Marine in Illinois. I've regaled my mates back in London with many stories of my hometown over the years, so I thought it would be fitting to write an entry about it when I returned. Having thoroughly procrastinated, I figured the time was right. Melloncamp can sum [View Full Entry]

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As September came to an end, so did my time at the Tiger Temple. I wanted to stay long enough to witness one of the female tigers give birth, but my Thai visa had run out and I was racking up the fines for each day I overstayed. Just my luck, she ended up giving birth two days after I left, but I would be back to visit. I had about 3 weeks to travel until I had to be in Singapore so I decided to head up to Laos. My journey from the temple involved a scooter, a tuk tuk, [View Full Entry]

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I arrived at the Tiger Temple just as the day's activities had ended. The temple is located in Kanchanaburi province, which is about 2.5 hours west of Bangkok near the Burma (Myanmar) border. The local bus I had taken from Kanchanaburi had dropped me off along the highway and I was about halfway into the two kilometer walk to the temple entrance when one of the staff members spotted me and gave me a lift in his pickup truck. The volunteers were all tucking into their dinner when I arrived and I quickly made introductions. Robyn, whom I had first spoken [View Full Entry]

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We arrived in the small airport at Phnom Penh and sought out a tuk tuk to take us into town. I had met an Austrian couple in Ko Phi Phi who recommended the lakeside for a fun atmosphere in Phnom Penh. The view from there is supposed to be brilliant at sunset. We arrived in the rain and I went to hunt down a decent place while Thelma watched the bags. The reality was that this place is probably one of the cheapest areas in town for backpackers. The rooms went for as low as $4 a night and they were [View Full Entry]

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The hotel we were staying at in Phnom Penh had a partnership with a homestay in central Cambodia. It was on the way to Siem Reap, so we figured we would stay there for one night en-route to Siem Reap. After a few hours on the bus, we arrived at a small roadside town where we transferred to scooters and were shortly at the homestay. The homestay had maybe a dozen different units for people to sleep in. Each one was a wooden hut on stilts. There was no electricity other than a car bettery that we could connect a light [View Full Entry]

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We arrived in Bangkok just as the evening was approaching. As our taxi made its way from the airport down the new expressway flyover and into the city, I marveled at how modern everything seemed to be. Skyscrapers dotted the skyline and new roads seemed to flood into the city. The place seemed very clean for such a large population; around 8 million. After we had checked in, Thelma and I went out to explore the area around us. We were staying in an area called Silom. This area was a strange mix of office buildings and red light districts. We [View Full Entry]

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Our arrival into Thailand began from Kuala Lumpur on an overnight coach. We were unlucky enough to get the back seats and felt every bump of the way. After crossing the border, we headed for Krabi where we booked a ferry for Ko Phi Phi, a popular trio of islands off of the Southwest coast of Thailand. Ko Phi Phi Don is the biggest of the three and the only one with overnight accommodation. The locals just refer to it as Pee Pee. By the time we finally arrived on shore, our travel time had come to 20 hours since leaving [View Full Entry]

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After the Philippines, we headed towards Malaysia. We only had one week on the Maylay peninsula, so we focused on Kuala Lumpur and Taman Negara. Thelma has a friend, Rani, who lives in Kuala Lumpur, so we spent a week with her exploring the city and the jungle. Kuala Lumpur felt like the most modern city, besides Tokyo, that I had been to in Asia. I wasn't even afraid to drink the water. It was a very clean city and didn't seem as big as I imagined it would be. There aren't too many major tourist attractions in KL, but the [View Full Entry]

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I was sad to leave Boracay. It has probably been the best beach I have ever been to. However, we had a flight to catch. Next stop, Thelma's home town of Valencia on the island of Negros. We caught a small prop job airplane from Boracay to Cebu. This must have been the smallest commercial aircraft I have ever been on. I think there were maybe 15 passengers on board. There was sort of a partition between the passengers and the cockpit, but I could still see the left arm of the pilot as he guided us through the skies. The [View Full Entry]

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I had gotten used to hearing all sorts of things outside of Thelma's house during the night. There seems to be a constant howling from dogs, and the expected rooster wake-up call; even the occasional falling coconut. On one Sunday morning though, I was woken at 4:30 am to a horific squeeling noise which made the hairs on the back of my neck stand straight up. I went outside and crept down the twenty stairs behind the house to the back of the property where I found the prisoner lying on the ground. She was hog tied, literally, and looking pretty [View Full Entry]

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