Thanks everyone for the birthday wishes! We arrived in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia the night before my birthday-so I had a Bornean Birthday. Matt brought me breakfast in bed (the backpacker lodges' complimentary toast and milo), we toured the Sunday market, and read our books on our hotel's roof deck. After our Malaysian dinner (Mee Goreng) we even found some chocolate ice cream cake for a birthday dessert! Back to the Philippines. After our introductory week in Siargao, we made our way over to Dumaguete, Negros to spend the holidays with our friend Wilson. Wilson is a friend from Miami, who is originally from the Philippines, but is now studying for his PhD at RSMAS. When we were talking about our prospective travels last summer he mentioned that he would be home for Christmas and New Years ... read more

We decided to see Malaysia primarily because Kuala Lampur (it's capital) provided a convenient place from which to fly to the Philippines and because we could travel there overland from the Thailand beaches. We had very few expectations or pre-conceptions upon arriving...in other words-we had no idea what to expect. Malaysia is divided into two landmasses-Peninsular Malaysia which occupies the southern portion of the peninsula hanging down from Thailand, and Borneo, which shares an island with Kalimantan in Indonesia. For this portion of our trip, we only saw the Peninsular part. From Koh Lanta in the south of Thailand, we took two minivans and a ferry to reach Pulau Langakawi (an island off the very northwestern coast of Malaysia). We expected gorgeous beaches and more chill guesthouses like we had left in Koh Lanta. Instead, we ... read more

I'm going to take a quick break this blog from documenting our journey to provide a quick update and recap the first two months of our trip. We've been getting a lot of similar questions by e-mail and are starting to set our future plans, so I'll just take a few minutes to address those! On November 18th, we finished what to us feels like the "1st Half" of our trip, despite time-wise being only about a third into our actual trip. We arrived back in Bangkok, completing our circuit of the mainland SE Asia countries. We spent four relaxing days in Bangkok, re-packing our suitcases, chilling (we signed up for the Bangkok equivalent of a Blockbuster card and caught up on some movies-which randomly seemed to be dominated by Will Smith characters!), shopping (and mailing ... read more

We’re back again and slowly trying to catch up. In an attempt to use our time efficiently here in the internet cafe, Matt is going to publish a photo blog (so he can start uploading the pictures) while I write a separate blog. Our last blog left off in Ho Chi Minh City. This was the end of our Open Tour bus ticket, and so we started off on our own to explore the very south of Vietnam and the Mekong Delta. While the Open Tour buses were easy and convenient, the minibuses we negotiated for ourselves were adventurous and confusing. It seemed we were always transferring from one to another and were never quite sure that we were headed in the right direction. Our ultimate goal was Phu Quoc Island, in the very south, but ... read more

Hello again! Almost a month after our last blog we finally sit down to start writing again. The internet in Vietnam was slow at best, and after fighting with it for hours to e-mail our moms and let them know we are still alive and paying our credit card bills, we couldn't convince ourselves to spend another few hours uploading pictures and writing a blog. So, now that we have found decent internet we will begin to recount the stories of the past few weeks. We'll start from where we last left off and write a couple blogs to catch up both for the sake of your attention spans and ours. In our last blog we had just arrived at China Beach and were desperately waiting for the rains to subside (we later learned that these ... read more