The End: More Argentina, Peru, Chile and Even More Argentina

It’s over. There is no way I am going to be able to sum up what this whole trip meant to me while I’m sitting here on the plane from Buenos Aires to Miami, especially after going to bed at 6:30 this morning and checking out of my hostel at 10:00 a.m. (what’s a last night in Buenos Aires without a discoteca, right?). I’m afraid there is also no way that my laptop battery is going to last long enough for me to write the usual running narrative of the last six weeks, so I’m going to go quick and dirty with a (gasp) bullet-pointed list of the best stuff. Here are the highlights:

• Mendoza: I wound up liking the city of Mendoza itself more than the wine tour that everyone seems to go there to do. The small, wine-drenched valley that Hope and I toured in Hungary was much more accessible than the eleven kilometer stretch of highway that one has to ride down (while huge trucks go careening by you) on the famous wine tasting tours at the vineyards around Maipú (just outside Mendoza). The wine was good and the drunk cycling was an adventure, but the day I spent strolling through Mendoza’s massive public park was decidedly more enjoyable.

• Rappelling: I took a day tour from Mendoza that involved a two hour hike, followed by three separate rappels (the first was around twenty feet, the second around thirty, and the third was over one hundred and fifty vertical feet), followed by a two hour soak in the local hot springs. The whole day was X-tremely awesome. Check out the pictures!

•  Buenos Aires 2.0: It turns out that when it’s not cold and rainy, a city can get a lot more charming. My second pass through BA was brief but the sun was out, the flowers were blooming and…well I’ll just say it: the women were wearing a lot less, and smiling a lot more. That is one attractive city. I only stayed for twenty-four hours the second time around, and still didn’t have time to really fall for her, but she definitely started to grow on me.

• Cusco, Peru: The jumping-off point for treks to Machu Picchu was way cooler than I expected it to be. As it was formerly the capital of the Inca empire, the Spaniards felt a particular need to fill Cusco, which sits at around 10,000 feet above sea level and is surrounded by mountains that reach even higher, with more than it’s fair share of gorgeous, colonial-era churches. It was a colorful, energetic and beautiful place to explore; despite the constant harassment I got from anybody selling anything from horse treks to back massages. The food was good and spicy as well, something that I had really missed since Southeast Asia.

• “Salkantay” Trek to Machu Picchu with Val: Val Khislavsky, a good friend from my semester abroad in Italy, made a last-minute decision to take a break from her new job and hike to Machu Picchu with me. I’m so glad she came. The five-day trek (which is the cheaper and slightly more intense version of the “official” Inca trail) was definitely the hardest I have ever done (our top elevation was over 15,000 feet), and the weather wasn’t exactly copasetic (cold rain was virtually constant) but Val’s company took the edge off of the hard parts; and sharing the absolutely gorgeous views along the trail as well as the experience of actually seeing the Inca city that the conquistadors never found with a good friend made the trip seem that much more special.

• Valparaíso, Chile: My decision to go to Chile was based entirely on the fact that Mike Oxton, a friend of mine from Bowdoin, had just finished his six month English teaching program there, and was planning on traveling for two weeks that happened to start just as my time in Peru ended. Although we met up in Santiago, Valparaíso was our first real destination. Aside from visiting one of Pablo Neruda’s old houses (which is now a museum), Ox, Rachel (one of his friends from the program) and I did little more than wander around the colorful coastal city, spend some time at a nearby beach, and eat lots of delicious seafood…and that was all we needed to do. Valparaíso just gives off a great vibe, what can I say? Maybe my pictures explain it better than I can, but it definitely makes the highlight list.

• Bundor Brewery in Valdivia, Chile: Valdivia, which lies around twelve hours to the south of Santiago, sits on a spit of land right where two rivers empty into a series of coastal inlets. It’s a small town, but the seafood is excellent, it has a lively university crowd and also has something that has been very hard to come by on my trip: good beer. Spearheaded by the mass-marketed products of the long-established Kuntsmann brewery, Valdivia has a rich brewing tradition that stretches back to the early 19^th century. Although the fat cats at Kuntsmann wouldn’t let Ox and I see their factory, we did manage to talk our way into the bowels (or liver?) of another operation. You see, Ox is actually a casual home-brewer himself, and I just so happen do enjoy drinking good beer as well as learning about how it’s made, so when we realized that the address on the back of one of the beers we sampled was walking distance from our hostel, we hatched a plan. We headed to the “brewery” (basically a big shack behind a local brew-pub), knocked on the door and introduced ourselves to the owner (in the style of George Costanza and Kramer playing Art Vandelay and H.E. Pennypacker) as “two young entrepreneurs from Boston who were interested in starting our own brewery, and could we please take a look at your operation?” We wound up with an appointment the next day for a personal tour of the entire factory (which consisted of two store-rooms and a third room with three large tanks that had formerly been used in cheese-making), conducted by one of the founders of the company himself. He turned out to be a great guy who was very eager to share his micro-brewing experience with us, and give us advice for our future (and completely fictional) enterprise. Although we felt a little bad about stretching the truth, it really was awesome to see a small, artesian company that (in my humble opinion) is poised to blossom into a legitimately successful enterprise; and the two free beers weren’t half-bad either.

• Perito Moreno Glacier near El Calafate, Argentina: Bariloche was absolutely beautiful, and seeing the Southern Wright Whales in Puerto Madryn was pretty sweet as well, but the true highlight of my second run through Argentina (this time the Southern half), was the thirty kilometer by five kilometer, hundred foot-tall, two hundred foot-deep, constantly moving (at up to two meters a day) chunk of ice that is the Perito Moreno glacier. The thing was just stunning to look at.. You can actually see enormous blocks of ice falling into the lake as the glacier slowly creeps forward into the water, and I took a tour that involved actually strapping on crampons and walking around on it for an hour or so, followed by a glass of whiskey served over freshly hacked-out glacial ice. Although I rushed through Bariloche and Puerto Madryn, putting in about 32 bus hours inside of four days in order to see Perito Moreno, I have no regrets. It was awesome.

• My Last Night in BA: After spending four days wandering around the city on my third and final visit, I finally had my truly fantastic night out in Buenos Aires. On Saturday night, determined to celebrate the end of my trip, I convinced a group of Chileans, three Brits and a Danish guy that I had met at my hostel to go out in Palermo, a neighborhood of BA that I had only wandered in the early evening but seemed like a fun place to “hit the town.” We started with a midnight dinner at what turned out to be a pretty crappy and overpriced restaurant right on the Plaza Palermo Viejo, but soon found our way to an absolutely packed discoteca, where we literally danced for four straight hours. The music ranged from House of Pain to Rick Astley, the group I was with was a ton of fun, and the sun was coming up when we finally left the place to find the streets still chalk-full of Argentinean party machines. My stroll through San Telmo’s colorful Sunday market later that day finished the job: I now really do think that Buenos Aires would be a sweet city to live in (for a short time anyway, don’t get too nervous, Mom).

So there it is. A lot happened that’s not on that list, but I think I’ll be seeing most of the people that have been following this blog inside the next week, so I’ll be able to fill in the rest face-to-face. Right now I feel pretty much how I expected to feel: I’m sad to see such an amazing trip end, but incredibly grateful that I had the opportunity to take it, as well as the support I’ve gotten from my friends and family, from the first time I brought up the idea to my last Skype conversation with Mom. I’m really anxious about what my next step is going to be, but wicked excited to see everyone back in Boston. Like I said, I’ll need some time to get a good perspective on the trip as a whole, but when I do I’ll try to put it into words here. Until then, I think I’ll end the post with some facts about this crazy trip that I put together when I was really bored in some airport somewhere. Enjoy.

 

Sam’s Trip: Fun Facts

Total time away from Boston: 9 months, 1 day

Total countries visited: 21

Number of flights: 31

Total hours flying: 105 (4 days, 9 hours)

Total hours in buses, dolmuses, louages etc.: 290 (12 days, 2 hours)

Farthest North: Helsinki, Finland (~lat 60º 11’)

Farthest South: Río Gallegos, Argentina (~lat 51º 30’)

Total distance traveled (roughly measured w/ Google Earth): 52,500 miles

Argentina, Part One: Buenos Aires, Rosario, Iguazú Falls, Resistencia and Salta

Well, this feels different. I’m starting an entry less than a month after I finished my previous one. It’s strange to be writing about two weeks of travel, but I guess it means that this post doesn’t have to be, as Bassett so kindly put it, “the next Great American Fucking Novel.”

I only wound up staying in Buenos Aires for three days. Down here it’s creeping towards summertime, and I knew that a lot of the places I wanted to visit in Northern Argentina would be ridiculously hot if I didn’t get a move-on. The time I did have in the city was fun, although I didn’t fall head-over-heels for the place like I thought I would. The weather didn’t help (it was actually cool and rainy for most of my time there), but I think the critical factor was time. I only got a chance to explore two of the city’s numerous neighborhoods, I didn’t experience a weekend night out on the town, and while I found some cool people at my hostel to hang out with, I didn’t get to know a single local. Don’t get me wrong, the city amazed me in a lot of ways: the cool mixture of colonial and modern architecture, the delicious steak, the Avenida 9 de Julio, with eight lanes of traffic on each side of a huge, central pedestrian area; but I just didn’t have the time to develop a personal connection to the place, and I didn’t have a Daniel/Anita/John Dillingham waiting for me to show me the ropes.

From Buenos Aires I took a bus to Rosario, Argentina’s third-largest city and the birthplace of both Argentina’s flag and Che Guevara. I spent the better part of my first day in Rosario walking along the river and hanging out at the artificial beach with two law students from Buenos Aires and a guy from San Diego. The water wasn’t exactly appetizing as far as swimming goes, but we had a tasty meal and a few beers and couldn’t help but notice that Rosario’s reputation for having the most beautiful women in the country was...well deserved.

That night, about fifteen other law students from Buenos Aires arrived at the hostel to join the two guys I hung out with at the beach. I joined them all for a night out, and got a pretty good taste of Argentinian nightlife which has a slightly different schedule than what I’m used to, to say the least. Everyone woke up from their afternoon nap around 8:30pm, followed by some pre-dinner drinks (Fernet Branca and Coca Cola…disgusting). Dinner happened around 11:30pm (about ten pizzas) and was followed by some post-dinner drinking (more Fernet and beer). Then (around 2:30am) we went out. The club was just starting to fill up when we arrived, and by around 4:00am it was packed. We stayed until the place closed, and walked out into daylight. It was a good time thanks to the company of the law students but to be honest, the music was TERRIBLE.

After missing one bus thanks to my first encounter with food poisoning (if you’re ever in Rosario, do not have the arroz con pollo at Café Naranjo), I spent an extra night in Rosario recovering and set off for Puerto Iguazú on Monday. The bus ride was eighteen hours long, and took me right to the northeastern corner of Argentina, where the country shares a three-way border with Paraguay and Brazil. It was a long ride up just to see a big waterfall, but it was definitely worth it.

Just before it joins the Río Paraná, the Iguazú River (which defines the border between Argentina and Brazil) hits a series of natural barriers that stretch its width to around two kilometers. The basalt plateau over which northern parts of the river flow then abruptly ends, and the entire river drops as much as 180 feet all along the edge of this cliff. Las Cataratas de Iguazú, as the Argentines call them, are easily the single most amazing part of the natural world that I have ever seen. I was fortunate enough to arrive just after several large rainstorms hit areas of Brazil that feed the Río Iguaçú (as it’s called on the Brazilian side), so the water level was high and the falls were thunderous. Like the other amazing things I’ve seen on my trip so far, words won’t do justice to the way I felt when I saw the falls, and pictures will probably only provide a taste of the overall experience of seeing that much water fall that far in the middle of a subtropical rainforest. All I can say is I’m so glad I made the eighteen-hour detour on my way from Rosario to Salta, and if you ever find yourself in Argentina, you should definitely do the same.

I decided to break up the twenty-two hour ride from Puerto Iguazú to Salta by stopping in a small town called Resistencia. It seemed like a good idea at the time, since Resistencia lies almost exactly half way between the two towns, and the Lonely Planet bills it as an interesting mix of rugged frontier town and artistic haven (the town is littered with over five hundred sculptures by local artists). However I arrived on Halloween night only to find that there were exactly zero other independent travelers in town. This usually is not much of a problem (see Tunisia), but I had really been looking forward to finding a cool gringo Halloween party somewhere, and that was not in the cards in Resistencia (nor was any real nightlife to speak of). It was also way too hot. The town sits on the edge of El Chaco, which is an enormous expanse of arid, uninhabitable, thorny scrubland. The temperature during the day stayed above one hundred degrees, and not even the locals ventured outside. This made my attempts to walk around and see some of the statues pretty much futile (while the sun was shining anyway). So there it is, I really have enjoyed almost every place I’ve been in one way or another, but not Resistencia. It just kind of sucked.

Fortunately, Salta was a solid improvement. An overnight bus got me to my hostel at around eight in the morning, and since my room wouldn’t be ready until the afternoon, I mustered up the energy to go for a little hike. A quick ride on a public bus took me to the suburban town of San Lorenzo, and from there I found my way to a small nature reserve. The entrance fee to the reserve got me a map and a nice hike through some temperate forest (which was strangely infested with cows…only in Argentina) and up to a viewpoint where I could see the huge, dry valley that the Salteños call home. After Resistencia, it was literally a breath of fresh air, although it wasn’t exactly cool out. Temperatures around noon in Salta still hit about ninety-five degrees. 

Aside from meeting some cool/hilarious travelers, the highlight of the rest of my time in Salta was definitely an all-day excursion to the small town of Cafayate that I booked through my hostel. The minibus picked us up at seven in the morning, and most of the following twelve hours was spent on the road. The town of Cafayate itself was nothing to write home about, and we got a couple of relatively lame winery tours along the way; but what made the trip spectacular was the scenery. I had absolutely no idea that this kind of countryside existed in Argentina. Barren desert, huge red and yellow rock formations, vast plains with massive mountains rising up behind them…I haven’t spent any time in the southwestern U.S. so I can’t make a direct comparison, but this was pretty gorgeous stuff.

Adding to the memorable quality of the trip was a fifty year-old Swiss woman named Catherine. She had come out to the bar with us the night before (leaving her husband and daughter at home), danced her ass off, refused to leave at three in the morning when we all went home, and finally got back to the hostel just in time to depart for the trip. She remained raucously drunk until about eleven o’clock, making dirty jokes in Spanish with a heavy French accent while the guide was trying to teach us some geology, and then passed out on her husband’s shoulder practically mid-sentence on the way to lunch. Classic.

Last night I left Salta, taking another epically long bus trip (eighteen hours this time) to Mendoza. Despite the length, the ride wasn’t that bad. The bus was almost empty, so I stretched my tall self across four seats and slept like a baby. We crossed more desert than I ever thought existed anywhere in South America, but now that I’m in Mendoza (which is still in the desert, but is fed by massive irrigation canals that utilize runoff from the Andes), green is everywhere. The central park (two steps from my hostel’s front door) is huge, and the larger streets seem to have more trees than buildings. Tonight I have my second all-you-can-eat asado (barbeque) in three nights, and tomorrow I’m going on a bicycle tour of the province’s wineries. Life’s tough.

Last Weeks in Europe: Northern Italy, Tunisia, England and Spain

I’ve had some truly great hosts along the way so far, but I have to say Anita and her family gave them all a run for their money. You can chalk it up to my bias towards anything Italian, or my desire to escape ninety-degree heat every day, but the ten days I spent with the Ruggeri family was pretty much heaven. It took me less than four and a half hours to get from Napoli Centrale to Bologna Centrale thanks to Italy’s slick high-speed train, the Freccia Rossa (Red Arrow), and Anita picked me up there, all smiles. It was hot as hell in Bologna, but Anita said the weather su (up in the mountains) was much nicer. Her family lives in Monzuno, a small town about forty minutes outside (and a few thousand feet above) Bologna. I was absolutely beat (I had only gotten a couple of hours sleep the night before) and sweating profusely, so su sounded like a great idea.

In the ten days I spent with Anita and her family, I only left Monzuno twice: once to explore Modena for a day (Anita had an exam there), and once more for a night out in Bologna in which I happened to see pretty much every Italian person that I had been friends with during my time in Bologna under one roof. Aside from these brief trips, my daily routine consisted of getting out of my queen-sized bed (Anita’s brother was out of town, and I stayed in his room on the top floor of the house) around noon, eating a delicious lunch (either prepared by Anita or brought over by her boyfriend, who worked at his father’s seafood restaurant), taking a long walk with Anita and then enjoying a delicious dinner with her family.

I had some great conversations with Anita’s father, who had just gotten back from a two thousand kilometer drive along the northwestern coast of Africa with his wife, and who took an instant liking to me on account of my traveling habits. He had some great stories about his trip, and also left me with some sage advice about how to go about looking for jobs…whenever it is that I get around to it. Both of her parents made me feel at home from day one. They struck the perfect balance between being incredibly generous hosts and not making me feel like I was imposing on their normal life in anyway. Aside from taking time from her studies to go on some great walks around the hills of Monzuno with me, Anita also spent an afternoon teaching me how to make tortellini, which was a ton of fun. I even got to contribute a little to the family business by helping fill small bottles with black ink for an afternoon. They were easily the most relaxing ten days I’ve had in a long time, and some of the most enjoyable as well.

After Monzuno, I spent three days in Cinque Terre…well, I basically spent two days in a hostel bed with a terrible fever and a splitting headache and one day actually exploring one of the most scenic (and touristy) areas in northern Italy, having recovered surprisingly quickly from what I figured was either Swine Flu or Italian-Family-Withdrawal.

Considering it was technically the off-season, I was impressed by the number of foreigners that still filled the five small coastal towns that sit inside the Cinque Terre nature reserve; but even the huge groups of German senior citizens decked out in unflattering athletic gear couldn’t spoil the place for me. Sure, it was a tourist trap, but it was also pretty damned beautiful. The views weren’t as grandiose as the Amalfi coast, but the area was less developed, so the small villages did a better job of holding onto their charm. I was still feeling too weak to tackle the whole trail that connects the five towns, but I think the few miles I did walk combined with the dip I took in the crystal-clear water polished off the last of my “withdrawal” symptoms. The next day I took a train down to Rome, paid a quick visit to the coliseum and enjoyed a huge plate of spaghetti alla carbonara, and then hopped on an early evening flight to Tunis.

Sarah Antos, a friend of mine from high school, has been living in Tunisia for almost four months now and is pretty much the only reason I even thought to go there. I had originally planned to go to Sardinia after Cinque Terre, but a few e-mails from Sarah changed my mind and I bought a ticket on TunisAir’s French-only website (a bit of an adventure in itself) just before I left Anita’s house. In the end, I’m pretty sure I made the right call. It was great to see Sarah, and Tunisia was one of the most interesting countries I’ve visited so far.

Sarah kindly booked my hotel in Tunis for me, which was just outside the city in a picturesque suburb called Sidi Bou Said. The whole area perches on a big hill that overlooks the Mediterranean. All the houses are painted bright white and have blue, arched doors and window shutters. Although there were hordes of tourists in the area, my hotel was a great place to relax during the day, and the view of the Mediterranean (which looked flatter and lighter-colored in Tunisia than it did in Cinque Terre) was beautiful.

I spent a long weekend in Tunis, touring the Bardo museum (which houses the largest collection of Roman mosaics in the world, no big deal), wandering through the medina (the former walled-in center of the city, now an insanely crowded marketplace), and enjoying cups of tea at night with Sarah and her boyfriend. I knew next to nothing about Tunisia before arriving, but I have to say the sophistication of the capital city surprised me. Some of the suburbs looked like Mediterranean versions of Newton, only with wider streets (and probably a lot less Jews), and the downtown area was a good deal easier to navigate than most Italian cities (although that’s not saying much).

Another thing that I knew little about before I got to Tunisia was Ramadan. I knew it was an Islamic holiday, that it lasted for a few days, and that it involved not eating during the day…or something. Where my 17 years of liberal, private education failed me was on the details. Ramadan lasts a full month, is observed by over 90% of Tunisia’s population (though a small percentage cheat, apparently), and involves not allowing anything (food, water, even cigarettes) to pass over your lips between the hours of four in the morning and seven at night (these hours change depending on when the holiday falls in the solar calendar, but that’s what they were this year). That’s fifteen hours a day, and it’s not like Tunisia is an easy place to forgo hydration, especially during August and September (this year’s Ramadan dates). What this means to the average non-Muslim traveler is that food and drink, although you can find them, are hard to come by during the day; and if you eat or drink in front of the locals while the sun is shining, get ready for some nasty looks. Also, don’t hold your breath if you’re trying to catch a cab around sundown, since every driver in town is hauling ass back to his wife or mother to break the fast. In addition, people generally become more and more irritable as the day goes on…not that I blame them. In the end, I’m really glad I got a chance to see an entire country put itself through such an incredible test of faith, although I have to say that the day-to-day reality of being there...well, it kind of sucked.

From Tunis I headed south to Douz, which sits at the very Northern edge of the Tunisian Sahara. In one of her e-mails to me, Sarah had mentioned that I should (and I quote) “get my white ass on a camel” and see the desert. The Lonely Planet that she lent me said that Douz was the place from which the desert was the most accessible, but also said that the real Sahara (complete with massive dunes as far as the eye can see) lay a few hundred kilometers further south, around an oasis called Ksar Ghilane. The guidebook also says that the only way to get down to Ksar Ghilane without your own private four-wheel-drive vehicle was by hitchhiking, but added oh so helpfully that hitchhiking was a common practice in the desert, and not at all an unreasonable mode of transportation. More on that later.

Because I didn’t have the money for my own private car, I decided to hedge my bets in Douz by taking a less “authentic,” but very easily arranged trip into the desert. For about thirty five US dollars, I got a two-hour camel ride out into the desert, a full Berber-style dinner, a nice campfire, and a good night’s sleep under the stars (interrupted, just my luck, by a twenty minute thunder shower). Although we saw about two hundred people leaving Douz to do the same thing (probably just out of earshot from our campsite) and the dunes weren’t exactly massive, the trip was fun, the scenery beautiful, and I feel like I did get a good (if brief) taste of life in the desert.

After spending a few hours of the next day shopping around Douz for the cheapest way to get down to Ksar Ghilane, I decided that my best bet was to head east to a tiny town called Matmata. By my reckoning, it looked to me like Matmata laid directly on the tourist trail between the beaches of Jerba (formerly Odysseus’s “land of the lotus eaters,” currently a major tourist area) and my ultimate goal of the perfect desert view. Matmata is a speck of a town in the middle of one of the most alien landscapes I have ever seen. It is surrounded by red mountains that jut out of the ground, completely bare except for a smattering of boulders and tiny shrubs. The town is famous for its cave dwellings, which were used as Luke Skywalker’s desert home in Star Wars (the actual cave used for the set is now a cheap hotel, see my pictures). I figured even if I failed at hitchhiking, at least I could tell my friends I spent the night near Tatooine. When I arrived, I checked out a few cave dwellings, met up with a group of Brits and Aussies who turned out to be amazing detectives when it came to finding cold beer in a hot desert during Ramadan, shared a few drinks and dirty jokes with them and went to bed in my cave.

The next morning I woke up early, had the hotel’s complimentary breakfast of a bland baguette, two packets of fig jam and caffe au lait (which was exactly the same as every other Tunisian hotel’s complimentary breakfast), walked about a half-mile to a tree by the side of the road that lead to Ksar Ghilane, held up my shoddily-made sign, and stuck my thumb out. I was optimistic. This was an adventure!

After seven full hours of standing under that tree, about two hundred bemused looks by passers-by and approximately three conversations with the few gentlemen who were nice enough to stop but were not headed in my direction, I had a few ideas about what to do with my Lonely Planet’s cute little boxed text about the joys of hitchhiking in Tunisia…mostly involving saving Matmata’s bathrooms some already-hard-to-find toilet paper.

I had some dinner in town (at the only open restaurant, where I was the only customer) and skulked back to my cave in defeat. I had missed out on the ideal desert view, but I still had a few days left before my flight to Spain, and I figured I shouldn’t waste them. The next morning I headed north to Kairoan, the fourth holiest city in Islam after Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem (who knew it would be in Tunisia?). I enjoyed two nights and a full day of wandering around the town’s central market (which was much more enjoyable than Tunis’s medina, to be honest), touring the Great Mosque (which was impressive to say the least) and checking out some enormous basins that had been built around 700AD as water catchments for the city. My last night in Kairoan was a Friday, and Ramadan was set to end the next day, so even though the daytime mood was a little bleak, there was a palpable sense of excitement around the cafes that night.

I caught a bus back to Tunis’s Southern bus terminal on Saturday afternoon, and got thoroughly lost on my way into the center (it should have been a quick walk). By the time I realized I had wandered to the wrong side of town, the sun wasn’t far from the horizon, and the streets were absolutely insane. Traffic was deadlocked, cars were constantly honking, the streets were full of people frantically selling as much food as they could, women hurriedly buying last-minute necessities for the most important meal of the year, and men pushily making their way home as quickly as possible. I managed to understand some of the French directions given to me by a shopkeeper, and finally found my way to the hostel I had chosen, which was right off of a large plaza at the southern edge of the medina. By the time I had dropped my bag in my room, showered, and sat down at a café overlooking the plaza and the Port de France, the constant roar had diminished to a few muffled noises. After another half-hour, as the sun fully disappeared, the most centrally located plaza in downtown Tunis was dead quiet.

I drank a pot of mint tea and a bottle of water and waited for the city to come back to life, which happened slowly but beautifully. By about nine o’clock (when I started to wander around and look for food) the center was buzzing again. Everyone seemed to be in a great mood and all of the kids were dressed in their new pho-designer clothes (the last night of Ramadan is sort of a Muslim Christmas morning, Sarah had explained to me). The change in mood from an average night was definitely noticeable. People seemed not just satisfied after a long-awaited meal, but proud of themselves, and each other, for making it through the last month. It was a very cool scene to witness.

After a few more days in the (now much friendlier) capital city and a last meal with Sarah at a delicious French restaurant, I took a cheap but inconvenient flight from Tunis to Barcelona that put me in Spain around one in the morning on September 23^rd. I crashed in what turned out to be a great hostel not far from La Rambla, spent the next day wandering around the park up on Mont Juic (a part of Barcelona I had yet to check out), and the following night remembering how to party (and how to speak decent Spanish) with a really cool Argentinian dude.

After my big night out in Barcelona, I dragged my hung-over self onto a bus to the small Catalonian town of Balaguer, which was about two hours southwest of the city. I had arranged to do another week of “help exchange” with a guy named Jordi, who lives in an apartment in Balaguer, but has a beautiful, enormous garden/orchard just outside town, as well as a few hundred olive and almond trees a little further down the road. I spent about four hours of each day working for Jordi (anything from collecting walnuts to clearing out brush to harvesting olives and almonds), and in return he gave me three square meals a day (every meal included a delicious, fresh salad from his garden) and a room to myself. I had lots of free time, some of which I wasted by watching endless episodes of The Wire (Sarah gave me all five seasons on my computer before I left Tunisia…worst idea ever) and some of which I spent wandering around the small town. It was a nice, relaxing week, and I feel like I learned a lot from Jordi about sustainability. He had an organic answer for everything.

From Balaguer I headed to Zaragoza, where I only spent one night and most of the next day, but was thoroughly impressed. It’s hard to describe what I liked so much about the city, but the combination of a not-too-crowded historical center, impressive modern architecture and some really nice public parks and plazas made it seem like a place where I could easily live. I had a good night out with some Americans and one German girl who were all about to start as English teaching assistants there, and spent the rest of my time just wandering around the different parts of the city. Then I took a scenic, four-hour train ride to Madrid, where I finally settled into my hostel at around eleven o’clock at night…just in time for dinner and drinks. After three days of checking out the major sites in Madrid, and three nights of way too many tapas, I took a miserable Ryanair flight up to London Gatwick airport and the last night bus to Oxford, where Hope met me at around one in the morning.

If you look up “British stereotypes” in an encyclopedia, I’m pretty sure you’d just find a bunch of pictures of Oxford. The place is ridiculously British. Every pub is That British Pub, always called the Something & Something (The Eagle & Child, Lam & Flag, Angel & Greyhound just to name a few), the houses are all made of elegantly crumbling, moss-covered bricks, and the colleges (Oxford University has over twenty separate colleges) are right out of Harry Potter (as in they literally filmed the Harry Potter movies here). The weather on my first day was, appropriately, cold and rainy, although after that it did clear up.

My week in England was a lot of fun. I had a good time out at the pubs and restaurants (there are some really tasty ones in Oxford, I have to say) with Hope and her friends, and when they were occupied with school activities, I bummed around Hope’s apartment and wandered the city on my own. I also took a day trip up to Manchester to see Matt and Emily, a couple that I met in Cambodia and again in Laos. I had told them that I wanted to see what English beer was all about, and that I had never had meat pie before, but was keen to try it. They met me at the Manchester train station with two meat pies from their favorite place in hand, showed me around town for a few hours and then took me to their favorite pub to try their favorite beer, followed by a delicious meal at their favorite local Greek restaurant. It was an awesome afternoon, and proved once again how much more enjoyable a place can be if the locals show you around.

After Oxford, I had one last week in Spain before my trip through Europe was complete. I flew from Gatwick airport to Malaga, where I wound up relaxing for three days with some really cool people that I met in my hostel. I spent my last weekend in Spain back in Granada (I visited Mike there a year ago when he was on his semester abroad), which was great. I got to soak in the atmosphere of Granada’s Arabic neighborhood, the albaicín, which I have decided is my favorite neighborhood in Spain. I also got to reconnect with Daniel, Mike’s host from his time there. He’s the guy that originally gave me the idea of a round-the-world trip when he told me about the one he did a few years ago. Granada has definitely secured its place as one of my absolute favorite cities in the world, so while it was sad to spend such a short time there, I know I’ll be back before too long.

One quick night back in Madrid and one twelve-hour flight (which actually didn’t seem that long, thank God) later, and here I am in Buenos Aires. I arrived last night, and so far highlights have been eating three delicious pieces of steak in one sitting (I left the hostel looking for a quick snack before bed, and that’s what I found) and about five hours of wandering around this ridiculously huge city earlier today. I still feel like I haven’t quite left Europe for some reason, but I think that finishing this entry will help me close that chapter. Today is the seven-month anniversary of my departure from Boston, and I have exactly two more months before I leave South America. I hope they’re good ones.

Catching Up: Laos, More Thailand, Sweden, Finland, Turkey, Hungary, Tuscany and Campania

So I guess it’s become a regular occurrence by now, but I feel particularly bad about putting this entry off for as long as I have. It’s been over a month since I left Southeast Asia (and almost two months since I left Vietnam), and I’ve had a lot of great experiences that probably won’t make these pages, but I’ll try to distill the last two months of my life into something interesting, or at least mildly entertaining.

On June 25^th, the 50-person turbo-prop plane that I had booked through Lao Airlines (the model was actually called a Fokker 70…confidence inspiring, no?) landed at Luang Prabang airport in Northern Laos. Laos is a country I knew little about before leaving for my trip (I think my only knowledge came from an episode of Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations). However, everyone I met as I traveled through the rest of Southeast Asia said it was awesome. Some people talked about the temples, some people talked about the beautifully unspoiled nature, and everyone talked about how incredibly laid back everybody was. From what I could tell in my six short days in Luang Prabang (the cultural capital of Laos), they were a ll right on. Luang Prabang is a small, touristy town that sits at the junction of the Mekong River and one of its larger tributaries (which I believe is called the Red River). The town contains more Buddhist temples than you can shake a stick at, and was also the former seat of the Kingdom of Laos. As a result, the whole place is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This means that although there are practically more tourists than locals in town, it has at least developed in a (relatively) tasteful manner. Aside from visiting about a dozen beautiful temples (most of which you can see in my pictures), one of the high points of my stay in Luang Prabang actually involved a trip out of town to a gorgeous waterfall. The waterfall (a major tourist attraction as well as a popular local hangout) was absolutely beautiful. I had a great time hiking around it with Anchorette (a Dutch woman who I met in Hanoi and actually wound up traveling with for a couple of weeks) and Matt and Emily (a British couple who I had met in Phnom Penh and ran into again in Luang Prabang almost a month later). After our hike, we jumped in the water around the base, and I ventured out onto a slippery tree limb to try a rope swing. I hadn’t seen anyone else try the thing, and it was a good 15 feet above some water that was not that deep. These kinds of things are not usually my forte, but after about three minutes of hesitation (and in no small part because these two really cute German girls were egging me on), I went for it. It was awesome! Everyone cheered, and Anchorette got a great picture of me too. I felt pretty brave…until three six-year-old Laotian kids sprinted up the limb after me, launching themselves off the rope without so much as batting an eye.

My time in Laos was so short that I really don’t know what else to write here. I do know that it is a place I would love to go back to and explore more. I think there are some regions of the country that are about as far from the standard tourist itinerary as you can get, and the people are all so incredibly laid back…it just seems like a great place to go and drop off of the map for a while.

From Luang Prabang, Anchorette and I flew (again in a trusty Fokker 70) to Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand. I spent a few days there, enjoying the awesome street food, checking out a few cool temples, and taking a cooking class from the female, Thai equivalent of Mussolini (which was scary, hilarious and educational). We also happened to be there for the Buddhist festival that celebrates the start of the rainy season, for which there was a pretty sweet parade complete with about 50 floats and great costumes (from traditional Buddhist attire to cross-dressing “lady boys”). The town was cool, but to be honest, my mind was already on the next leg of my trip. After an eleven-hour bus ride, and one last day in Thailand (which ended with a delicious dinner courtesy of Jang and her entire family), I flew out of Bangkok just after midnight on July 7^th.

I had been in touch with Chris Bixby (my roommate and one of my best buds from Bowdoin) while I was in Vietnam, and we made typically last-minute plans to meet up in Southern Sweden on July 7^th. Because I was already flying direct from Bangkok to Helsinki, this meant that all I had to do was land in Helsinki, fly to Copenhagen, Denmark via Riga, Latvia (courtesy of AirBaltic and yet another pair of Fokker airplanes, this time the even smaller Fokker 50!), and hop a 45-minute train from Copenhagen to Lund, Sweden, where Bixby’s contact family (from his time studying abroad in Stockholm) had a summer cottage. Three flights, one train ride and five countries in about 18 hours…no big deal.

After nearly two months in Southeast Asia, I don’t think I could have picked a better place than Scandinavia for some good old culture shock: people were almost all tall and white, almost everyone spoke great English, the climate was mild and all modes of transportation were clean, safe and efficient. Despite the sharp contrast, however, Sweden was a ton of fun. Bixby and I spent one short night in the summer cottage near Lund (which was beautiful…see the pictures), four long nights at an outdoor music festival between Lund and Stockholm (no pictures of this because I lost my camera in a mosh pit…damn), and another six days in Stockholm. Bixby’s contact family hooked us up every step of the way, giving us a place to stay in both Lund and Stockholm (their kids were home alone in the capital for the summer, so we stayed with them), and even lending us camping gear for the music festival. The festival was an absolute blast, and included artists as varied as the Dropkick Murphys, the Killers, the Madness (“our house, in the middle of our street!”) and Ludacris (his first gig in Sweden, pretty ridiculous). We met some really nice (and hilarious) Swedes as well as a few Finns, we drank a lot, and we pretended not to notice that we were at least 4 years older than most of the people there. Stockholm was fun as well. We got a chance to relax, do some laundry (thank GOD), party it up at a few clubs and see a good part of the historic old town, which is quite nice…ok, it’s no Rome, but worth a visit. Oh, and the cheese! Such good cheese! I got a little too excited about it, and ate way too much of it, but it was the first time in almost three months I had seen the stuff.

From Stockholm I took a ridiculous overnight ferry to Helsinki. I say ridiculous mostly because it was described to me by a number of (admittedly pretty drunk) Swedes at the festival as being an anything-goes, all-night party boat, but in reality was more of a window into some cheesy disco scene from a low-budget 1980’s porn movie. Still, it was pretty entertaining to watch the Bulgarian cover band set the scene as a guy in his mid 20’s spent about two hours trying to dance with and smooth-talk a group of girls that could not have been older than 15. More of a good story than a good time, but the views at sunset from the deck somewhat made up for the terrible music and skeevy atmosphere.

I had one day in Helsinki, part of which I spent walking around and checking out the impressive old town (I liked it a little more than Stockholm), and part of which I spent with a Finnish girl who Bixby and I met in line at a liquor store in Sweden. Linda took me to her favorite park, her favorite Ice Cream place and one of her favorite restaurants. Overall, it was a good day.

The next morning I flew to Istanbul where I met up with Hope, who would be my travel companion for the next three weeks. Our time together started out with a bang…well, more like a thwap. We checked into our hotel in Sultanhamet (the historical quarter of Istanbul) and wandered past the Blue Mosque, the Hagia Sofia, the spice market, and down to the waterfront. Hope had never been to Asia before, and we had no big plans for our first day, so we decided to take a ferry to the Asian side of the city (Istanbul straddles Europe and Asia on either side of the Bosphorous). Literally within five minutes of setting foot in the Asian continent, Hope tripped and fell flat on the solid marble sidewalk. She fell so hard and so fast that I thought she had broken at least one bone, if not several. In fact, her bones were fine, but her chin was not. A crown-shaped claddagh ring (you know those Irish rings that everyone in Boston wears if they have a drop of Irish blood in them?) that she wears on a necklace went straight into the underside of her chin. The result was a small but very deep puncture wound that started bleeding…a lot.

Hope waited next to a busy intersection, bleeding like crazy, while I ran to get two bottles of water and as many napkins as I could find. By the time I got back, she said a few dozen people had gawked at her, a bus driver had pulled over and given her a single tissue paper, and about five people had pointed her in the direction of the nearest hospital. After one attempt to get a consult at said hospital (where the only English-speaker was an Iranian patient who looked to be deathly ill), we looked up the “American Hospital” in Hope’s Lonely Planet, hopped a ferry and a taxi, and within about an hour she was stitched up and good to go. Throughout the whole thing, Hope was a complete champ. Minutes after she fell, we were already cracking jokes about it, and after she got the stitches it was like nothing ever happened…except for the occasional joke I made at her expense. I couldn’t resist, her bandage was pretty hilarious looking. It was definitely not the best experience, but it did make for a pretty good “my first time in Asia” story for Hope.

The rest of our two weeks in Turkey went a lot smoother than that first day. From Istanbul, we worked our way south down the Asian coast through Çanakale (near the ruins of Troy), Selçuk (near the ancient town of Ephesus), Fethiye and Faralya (two small coastal towns). Our last stop along the Mediterranean was Antalya, a popular tourist destination with a really nice old quarter, some tasty restaurants and a great archaeological museum. From Antalya, we headed inland to see the surreal rock formations and cave dwellings of Cappadocia (see the pictures here, words don’t even begin to describe how cool-looking this stuff was), and finally back to Istanbul. As far as ruins and mosques go (of which we saw a ton), I’d say the most impressive were Ephesus (which is one of the best-preserved cities that remains from the Roman era) and the Hagia Sofia, which has a dome about the size of St. Peter’s in Rome, but is almost one thousand years older. My reaction when walking into that place was comparable to the first time I saw St. Peter’s, or maybe even the first time I walked into the grandstand at Fenway Park…pretty awesome.

The most fun I had in Turkey was definitely on our first (and only) day in Cappadocia, when Hope and I were looking for a good way to see as many of the bizarre rock formations and gorgeous valleys as we could in a short period of time. We had the idea of renting a scooter, but when we let it slip that neither of us had ever ridden one, the rental agency was not having it. Instead, they suggested we take a tour on an ATV. This seemed pretty tacky at first (the Lonely Planet guide simply calls these 4x4s “objectionable”), but our friends at the agency (everyone at every agency in Turkey is your friend) gave us a pretty solid price, so we decided to take a two-hour tour of the major sites.

We were told to stay behind our trusty guide (who was on a scooter), and what immediately followed was the slowest and most embarrassing drive through town I could have imagined. We figured out later that he was probably making sure we weren’t just going to kill ourselves the second we went faster than five miles per hour, but it did not set high expectations for the rest of the ride. Things changed quickly, however, when we got off-road. He took us up some scary, steep, rutty hills, through the occasional mud puddle, and down into some pretty X-treme valleys, all at a pretty good clip. Every time we buzzed by a group of people peacefully walking along I felt like a huge asshole, but I can’t lie, the rest of the time I was having an absolute ball. Hope did her best to take pictures of the gorgeous landscape that surrounded us without flying off the back of the thing, and we stopped occasionally so our guide could give us some background information. By the end of the ride, we were covered in dust and hungry as hell, but I honestly couldn’t stop grinning for a good two hours. It was wicked fun.

From Cappadocia, we took a twelve-hour overnight bus back to Istanbul. Hope flew out the next day and I flew out a day later, but we met up again in Budapest for another week of fun.

We had fun in Budapest, although I have to say it wasn’t a city that grabbed me the way Istanbul did. There were definitely some cool sites, including a cave church, some a really nice cathedral, and a park (actually about 15 minutes outside the city) that was basically a graveyard for old statues from the communist era. Maybe because it was summer time, and a large portion of the population was out of town, but the city didn’t seem to have the exciting vibe I had been expecting. Still, the sites were cool, the food was delicious, and the company wasn’t half-bad either. Our “double bedroom” in the hostel was also a ridiculously spacious apartment, complete with a kitchen and private bathroom…so that didn’t hurt either.

After seeing most of the major sites in Budapest, and finding ourselves with a couple of days left over, Hope and I decided on a whim to check out a small town in Northern Hungary called Eger. There wasn’t much information available on the town, but it seemed like a nice enough place, it was in the middle of Hungarian wine country and there was a small B&B that had a room available at the last minute so we went for it. Even though the quaint historic center of the town could be crossed on foot in about ten minutes and it wasn’t exactly nightlife central, we wound up having a great time in Eger. We checked out a historic castle that had taken part in Hungary’s many battles against the Ottoman Empire, and we rented bicycles for an awesome day trip to Beautiful Women Valley.

The women in Beautiful Women Valley, also translated on some signs as “Valley of the Nice Women, did not turn out to be particularly nice or beautiful. They did, however, serve cheap wine…good cheap wine…and lots of it. As it turns out, the “valley” (one of Eger’s main tourist attractions) is actually more of a large cul-de-sac around which about thirty or forty wine cellars are carved into a small hillside. The idea is that you can walk around this small park and sample some of the best wines Hungary has to offer (which turned out to be pretty damned good, by the way)…it’s kind of like the Epcot Center, but with more alcoholism. The places will give you a glass of wine for around fifty cents, or they’ll charge you a fixed (and very reasonable) rate per liter if you want to bring your own vessel (some Hungarian families were stopping in with five-gallon gas cans). We arrived on our bikes at about one o’ clock in the afternoon, “tasted” seven different kinds of wine, and barely managed to pedal ourselves the half-mile back into town at around four o’clock (unrelated side-note: fixing a derailed bicycle chain is much easier before drinking nine glasses of wine).

The next day we hopped a train to Budapest and said our goodbyes. Hope got on a train to Vienna, and I took yet another top-notch discount airline flight (this time on Hungary’s  Wizz Air) to Rome. I was sad to be losing an awesome travel companion, but I was also pretty excited to be back in a country where I understood the native language and could just kick back and relax…on a goat farm.

My plane touched down in Rome, and everyone on board immediately burst into enthusiastic applause. This was followed by an hour-long wait for my bag at baggage claim. When it finally arrived, my contact lens solution and the strap that I use to put the thing over my shoulder were both missing…for no apparent reason. I was definitely in Italy. I spent one brief and practically sleepless night in a shitty hostel by Rome’s Termini station, where I met my brother the next morning. Mike and I spent the better part of that day getting to Anghiari (a small town in Tuscany, near Arezzo), and our host picked us up around six o’ clock.

I had found Brent through a website called Help Exchange (www.helpx.net), an online directory for people who offer free room and board in exchange for some kind of work. He runs a small artisan goat cheese-making operation, and staying with him for a week turned out to be an awesome idea.

As you might guess from his name, Brent Zimmerman is not exactly your quintessential Italian goat farmer. He was, however, a top-notch host for Mike and myself, and his farm was a great introduction to the whole Help Exchange experience for me. He was born and raised in rural Michigan, but has been living in Italy for the past twenty years with his partner (both business and otherwise, as Mike and I quickly figured out) Alessandro. Alessandro does most of the number crunching (he is from Milan originally, but holds an MBA from NYU), and Brent runs the farm with the help of Valerio (a rough-around-the-edges-but-softie-on-the-inside Romanian guy) and his enormous white dog named (what else?) Boner.

Brent also has one more quality that separates him from your typical Tuscan goat farmer: he works like crazy…all the time. Although he was reportedly having a “lazy week” when Mike and I stayed with him (the month of August is more or less a universal vacation time in Italy), he still kept himself busier than most people that I know with full-time jobs. He made cheese deliveries, spoke at luncheons, showed us some cheese-making basics and “slept in” until 6:30 a.m. every day…I’d hate so see this guy on a “busy” week. Mike and I helped out when we could, cleaning the cheese room a few times, “helping” Valerio with the cheese-making process (who was incredibly patient with our uselessness), and even doing some roadwork on a property a few miles from the farm that Brent and Alessandro rent out (see the pictures, it’s gorgeous). Mike and I had a two bedroom, two bathroom guesthouse to ourselves, and we had a great time. The scenery wasn’t too shabby either.

After our week in Tuscany was over, Mike and I made our way down to Naples, where we met our parents for ten days of full-on vacation. It was great to be back with the family again and, despite my Dad’s nasty cold, we had a lot of fun exploring a part of Italy I had never seen before. The city of Naples itself, apart from being pretty damned hot, was almost empty. The month of August, like I said, is vacation time for Italians, and the big cities empty out pretty much everywhere, but especially in the South. We were only there for two days, but we managed to get some tasty seafood and (of course) some delicious pizza (served the right way, no meat, no cheese, just delicious tomato sauce, garlic, oregano and a dash of olive oil). We also saw the archaeological museum, which has an absolutely incredible collection of ancient Roman sculpture.

After Naples, we spent two nights on the Island of Procida, just off the coast. The small island is actually the most densely populated in the Mediterranean, with around 10,000 inhabitants and a lot more visitors (I think we found about half of the people that were missing from Naples on this little rock). Seen from a distance, or from on top of one of it’s own small peaks, it’s an incredibly beautiful island, with dramatic cliffs falling away into gorgeous water, dotted with the occasional crowded, pastel-colored harbor, but from the ground level, most of the island is more like a large-scale rat maze. Houses crowd the tiny streets, and taxi rides around town approached some of my experiences in Southeast Asia as far as overall ridiculousness is concerned. We continued to eat tasty seafood, however, and we also spent a day on a nice (if crowded) little beach with crystal-clear water.

From Procida, we hopped a ferry and a taxi to a rental car agency, I got the keys to our new car, and we drove south and across an impressively large mountain range to Ravello, a small hill-top town overlooking the Amalfi coast. Our rental house was absolutely beautiful, and the view from our porch was tops. I have to say that the Amalfi coast in general raised the bar for what I now consider a “nice view.” Enormous mountains, covered with lush, terraced vineyards crash into some of the most beautiful water I’ve ever seen in my life. I’m sure a lot of other people can describe it better than me, and my pictures will help, but I’m not sure they even really capture that beauty fully. It was unreal. In Ravello, we relaxed, ate well (including an amazing meal on my birthday at a two-star restaurant called Rossini’s), and got lots of sun. We also explored some towns in the area (Amalfi, Maiori, Minori, and Atrani), spent a day at Pompeii (which was incredible, see the pictures), and even rented a small motor boat to catch a view of the coast from the water. Driving on the roads around Amalfi was definitely an adventure, and I think I enjoyed doing it a lot more than my family enjoyed coming along for the ride, but I managed to go the full six days on the incredibly twisty and narrow roads without putting a scratch on our car, so that was good. After traveling on a budget for so long, I honestly felt kind of spoiled on this “grown-up vacation”…but I can’t say I was complaining. It was a lot of fun, and I’m really glad I got to see my family.

Fuckin’ hell, that was a long one, huh? As I finish this, I’m sitting on a high-speed train from Naples to Bologna, where I’m going to meet up with Anita, one of my Italian roommates from study abroad. As usual, I’m bummed that the last part of my trip is over, but I’m also excited for the next step. Although my plans after Bologna are completely up in the air, possibilities include Sardegna and/or Tunisia...not too shabby, right?

My Dong Is Strong

I’m sorry Vietnam…you can’t have a currency called the Dong and not expect me to make at least one joke. Especially when one dollar fetches roughly 18,000 Dong, meaning that about US$65 made me a veritable Dong millionaire. Hilarious. And no, it never got old.

Well, now that that’s out of my system, I’ll pick up where I left off. As I said, the bus ride to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) from Phnom Penh was relatively uneventful, with the exception of one river crossing when our full-size tour bus drove onto a ferry with another full-size tour bus and about 50 Cambodian kids who spent the 20-minute ride trying to sell us snacks and drinks through our windows. It was more of a funny experience than anything, but it was also my last taste of the level of poverty and lack of development that I saw all through Cambodia.

The first thing I noticed on my way from the border to Saigon was that Vietnam (at least the part of the country I saw from that bus) is years ahead of Cambodia in terms of both population growth and industrialization. In a matter of minutes after leaving Phnom Penh on my way to the border, I saw the road change from clean tarmac to a dusty mix of dirt and asphalt, and the relatively well-built apartments replaced by shacks made of scrap wood with corrugated tin roofs. The scenery on the Vietnamese side drew a sharp contrast: the road was clean and smooth, houses were all made of either brick or steel and concrete, and larger businesses like Honda dealerships (selling scooters, not cars) began popping up well before we reached the city limits. Given what I knew about the condition that the country was left in after the American war, I was amazed at how good the it looked only thirty some years later. This first impression only strengthened when I arrived in Saigon.

I had arranged to meet up with Jon Dillingham at a café shortly after my bus arrived in the “backpacker neighborhood” of downtown Saigon. Remember Charles and Susan from California? Jon is their son. Although we had been in touch for a week or so via e-mail and his father basically grew up with my mother, I actually hadn’t seen Jon since some Thanksgiving dinner when I was about five years old. In our e-mail exchanges he had generously offered to put me up in Saigon, but to be honest I was worried that I would be imposing on a virtual stranger. Jon pulled up on his old (but awesome) motorcycle, practically parked it on the café’s front steps, and within five minutes of our first conversation, I knew staying with him was a good call.

After we dropped my bag at his place, Jon gave me the best possible tour anyone can get on their first night in Saigon: a half hour-long, mad-cap dash through all the major neighborhoods of the city on the back of his motorbike. Saigon is stunningly beautiful. The wide boulevards and pleasant architecture left behind by the French combine with the steamy weather, flashes of neon on the newer buildings, dozens of street vendors and the endless swarms of motorcycles to create a completely unique atmosphere. I was sold on Saigon almost instantly.

During my five-day stay at their place, Jon and Hue were beyond hospitable. I had breakfasts, lunches and dinners at some of their favorite restaurants and street-side food stalls and enjoyed two fantastic home-cooked meals at Hue’s parents’ house. My expectations for the food in Vietnam were high, and I really can say that they were exceeded. The bowl of pho that I had at a back alley food stall at 7:30 a.m. one morning was one of the most delicious things I have ever eaten. Ever. In addition to eating well, Jon, Hue and I also visited the Cu Chi tunnels together, a touristy but amazing look at some of the Viet Cong’s infamous engineering feats. Jon also took me for a walk in a rural area about 45 minutes from Saigon one morning that gave me a chance to take in those typical Southeast Asian rice paddies on foot, which is even more scenic and much more enjoyable than speeding by them on a bus. Jon and Hue pointed me in the direction of the better museums and monuments, which I explored when they were working. They were both fantastic hosts and Saigon was an incredible city. It wasn’t easy to leave.

My first stop outside Saigon was Nha Trang, a beautiful eight-hour bus ride to the north. The seaside city was more like Florida than Vietnam, with high-rise hotels lining the entire coast, more western restaurants than I could count and some hilariously trashy (and fun, to be honest) dance clubs on the beach. It was a good place to swim, sail and get a terrible sunburn though, and the all-day boat tour I took of four nearby islands was fun as well…even if it was trashier than the beach clubs. From Nha Trang, I booked a Vietnam Airlines flight to Danang, a riverside town that was short on tourist attractions but had some great street food and a more laid-back feel. From Danang, I headed to Bach Ma national park, which wound up being a great break from the frantic pace and smothering heat of the rest of Vietnam. Bach Ma Mountain is about 5,000 feet tall, and there are a few guesthouses right at the top of the mountain that have private rooms for about ten dollars per night. I really can’t describe how heavenly it was (after a month of constantly sweating my ass off) to enjoy a meal and a good night’s sleep in the 55-degree mountain air, surrounded by pine trees.

A Vietnamese woman named Chau, the only other guest in my hotel at the top of Bach Ma, was heading towards Hue (my next stop as well) the next morning, so we both began walking down the mountain road together. Just as we began to get tired, a minivan passed us. We waved it down, and Chau spoke with the family, who also happened to be headed towards Hue. We agreed to chip in about three bucks each for gas, and we had ourselves a ride.

Chau and I spent the next day touring Hue, which was once the capital of the Vietnamese empire. Aside from being nicely situated along a river with some nice mountains in the background, the old Imperial citadel was a great place to wander around. We also checked out the tomb of one of the last Emperors of Vietnam, which was impressive and located in some very nice countryside. I only had one full day in Hue, and I definitely felt like I missed out on a fare amount.

From Hue, I took a hellish overnight bus ride up to Hanoi. I don’t think anything has ever been more poorly named than this thirteen-hour “sleeper bus.” The concept seems great: instead of rows of seats, there are two levels of “beds” in which you can recline almost all the way back, making sleeping much easier. However, if you happen to be about twice as tall as the average Vietnamese person, you spend an entire night tossing and turning, trying to avoid physical contact with a sixty-year-old man who is sleeping next to you and smells like a dirty sock that someone peed on. I think I can safely say that my iPod was the only thing keeping me from throwing myself out of my postage stamp-sized window while the bus was barreling down Highway 1. When I arrived in Hanoi, I jumped into the first hotel that had an air-conditioned room (it was one hundred degrees and humid) and collapsed for about six hours.

Hanoi, in my opinion, lacks a lot of the charm of Saigon. Throughout my time in Vietnam, other travelers had been telling me that the people in the capital city were the rudest in the country. I have to say they were right. It’s not that everyone there was a huge asshole, but the percentage of people in shops and restaurants that were less than polite was much higher in Hanoi than elsewhere in Vietnam. Considering the relationship between their country and the West over the last one hundred years or so, I can’t say I blame them at all, but the attitude did combine with the ridiculous heat to make for a less than pleasant stay. That being said, the street food and bia hoi (fresh beer that street vendors serve up at about twenty cents a glass) were great and the overnight tour of Halong Bay that I booked through my hostel there was a great time (the pictures pretty much tell the story, so I won’t go into tons of detail about it here).

On my way to the Hanoi airport on June 25th, I had the distinct feeling that I was leaving Vietnam way too soon. I knew I would be able to come back some time, but I also selfishly hoped that it wouldn’t be developed beyond recognition by the time I returned. I felt the same thing that I feel about Cuba, that Vietnam is a country that could easily lose what makes it so amazing in the next five or ten years. I hope I’m wrong.

Cambodia

Once again, I’ve failed to update regularly…oh well. In an effort to avoid a ridiculously long entry (don't get your hopes up too high, this one's still pretty long), I’m just going to go through Cambodia on this post, even though I’m already more than halfway through my time in Vietnam. I’ll pick up where I left off.

My last night in Bangkok was great. Jang treated me to yet another delicious meal followed by some galactic bowling with her boyfriend. I hold her fully responsible for the great time I had in that crazy city. It really makes all the difference in the world to have that combination of a friendly face and a native speaker. I packed my bag late that night, and took off from my hostel at 6a.m. the following morning. I left my small duffle bag behind, and am now traveling ultra-light with a few changes of clothes, essential toiletries, my frisbee and my laptop crammed into my small daypack.

The eleven-hour trip from Bangkok to Siem Reap (the town in Cambodia closest to the temples at Angkor) was definitely an adventure. The plan was to take the public bus from Bangkok to Aranyaprathet (the border town in Thailand), arrange “private transportation” from the town to the border itself, walk across the border and finally hop a bus from Poipet (the border town in Cambodia) to Siem Reap. Apparently scams to rip off unsuspecting backpackers like myself abound along the entire route, so my real mission was to make it to Siem Reap with as many of my hard-earned greenbacks in my pocket as possible. Sounds like fun, right? It actually was, but didn’t go exactly according to plan.

About three hours into my surprisingly comfortable and swift bus trip towards the Cambodian border, the bus pulled over to the side of the road and the driver pointed at myself and a couple of other people, and then pointed at a (much less comfortable-looking) bus on the other side of the highway. I was suspicious, and kept asking whether that bus was going to Aranyaprathet. The bus driver pulled out one of the least reassuring (and most common) combinations of body language that you see in this part of the world: he cocked his head to the side to indicate that he didn’t understand a thing I just said, then said “yes, yes” and motioned for me to get off the bus in a tone that unmistakably said “I have no idea what you’re trying to say, just get off the damn bus so you’re not my problem any more.” I got off the bus and began to cross the highway, fully expecting both buses to ditch me in the middle of a vast expanse of rice paddies. Fortunately, the driver of bus number two got out and waved me across. Bus number two was a solid step down in comfort. There was no AC (not much fun in 95-degree heat), a few crying babies and a woman directly in front of me who kept taking whiffs of some kind of concentrated, eucalyptus-based liquid that made me feel like I was swimming in a pool of Vick’s vapor rub.

Fortunately, the ride to Aranyaprathet was only another hour or so. I ate a quick lunch at the “bus station” (a tin roof with a few food stalls and some plastic furniture) and found my “private transportation” to the border in the form of a stoic 60 year-old man on a motorbike. This was my first time on the back of a motorcycle, and I think it was my driver’s first time with a 6’-4” passenger with a 30lb backpack. It was a little nerve-wracking, but we both survived just fine. He was, however, also the first in a long line of people to try to rip me off.

Instead of taking me straight to the border crossing, my driver took me to an “agency” where a smooth-talking, well dressed Cambodian guy with a fancy laminated ID card tried to tell me that he worked for the Cambodian government, and could arrange a visa for me for the small fee of 1000 Thai baht (about US$30). I knew from talking to other travelers that this was...well...bullshit, and that a visa could be obtained on arrival for only US$20. The little bastard was persistent though, and before I finally convinced my driver to take me to the real border, he shouted “fine, you try at border, you pay much more! When you come back, I don’t help you, I charge you more!” One scam down. How many more to go? My “trusty” driver then took me to “the border”...again. This time, “the border” was actually the Cambodian consulate, where a uniformed official informed me that I could apply for my visa for a mere US$30. I politely declined his offer, saying I would take my chances. Two scams down. I returned to my moto driver, who seemed to understand that I wasn’t likely to fall for any more shenanigans and took me to the actual friggin border.

As I walked towards the Thai border office where I would receive my exit stamp, about a dozen more “travel agents” approached me, waving visa forms in my face. As I brushed them off and kept walking, they all went through the amazing transformation from being my best friend and border-crossing advisor to pissed-off con artists who threatened to leave me high and dry when I inevitably came back for their help. Getting stamped out of Thailand was easy (and free), as was declining more offers for “help” as I walked across the dusty no-man’s-land towards the Cambodian visa office.

Even though I had been told to expect it by fellow travelers at my hostel in Bangkok, the blatant corruption amongst the uniformed Cambodian border officials still surprised me. A large sign directly above their office clearly read “TOURIST VISA: 20 USD,” and yet the guy behind the counter looked me straight in the eye and asked me for 1,000 Baht ($30). I expected this, and had a lone $20 bill ready in my hand. “This is all I’ve got,” I lied. “You no have passport photo, must pay extra. 1,000 Baht.” I shook my head calmly: “I only have twenty dollars.” He paused, then said quickly “twenty dollar and two hundred baht.” Are you serious!?! I was actually haggling with a customs official! Priceless. I shook my head one more time, and got him down to twenty dollars and 100 Baht (about US$2.50) before I gave up and paid the man, feeling I had at least escaped in better shape than most from this scam (is this number four or five? I forget).

Feeling pretty good about my performance thus far, I walked into Poipet. My only previous experience with a border town came on my cross-country road trip with Bassett, Dave, and Homans in 2005. We made a quick stop in Nogales, New Mexico and walked into Mexico for lunch and a tequila shot. The town we found on the Mexican side of the border was…well let’s say it was not a place in which we wanted to spend much time. Poipet made our stroll through Nogales feel about as shady as a walk down Newbury Street in Boston. The level of poverty in rural Cambodia can be shocking, and Poipet was no exception. It was a rough place, and I didn’t envy anyone who had to spend more than a few hours there.

After standing near a group of westerners for five or ten minutes, declining every offer for help I received (I had heard that many people get suckered in to paying around $50 for transportation to Siem Reap, but that the three-hour trip could cost as little as $10), I decided to put my trust in a reasonably well-dressed guy who was steered me towards a bus and assured me he could get me to Siem Reap for $10. This first bus only took me about 400 feet into town, where it dropped me off at a “travel agency” (a reasonably clean room with a ticket window and some plastic chairs). At the agency, I was informed that I could take a taxi to Siem Reap now, but if I wanted to take the cheaper bus, I would have to wait three hours. I said I would be happy to wait (much to the taxi driver’s chagrin), sat down in one of the chairs and turned on my iPod.

The bus left only an hour later (three hours my ass), once enough Westerners had showed up to fill it. Sadly, this was the one place where I failed the scam test, as they managed to charge me 500 Baht for my ticket ($14 instead of the promised $10 fee). My sleep-deprived brain didn’t do the math until about 20 minutes into the bus ride, and I was too lazy to put up a fight over four bucks. Oh well, you can’t win ‘em all. Naturally, the bus “wasn’t permitted” to go all the way to the center of Siem Reap, so they were “forced” to drop us about seven kilometers from the city, where hungry tuk-tuk drivers were conveniently waiting. I piled into a tuk-tuk with a Swedish guy, a Finnish guy and all of our luggage, and finally made it to the hostel I had reserved just before sun down, passing at least three or four full-sized buses in downtown Siem Reap. Eleven hours, four buses, one motorcycle taxi and a tuk-tuk…that was a trip.

The rest of my two weeks in Cambodia was really great, with a three day break of crappy intestinal illness in the middle. I think my pictures do the best justice to the incredible temples around Angkor, so I won’t say much about them here except that I think everyone should try to see them at some point in their lifetime…they’re that cool. Siem Reap itself was actually a nice town with some good restaurants and bars and very friendly locals (a common theme in this part of the world). I hung out a fair bit a Swedish guy and two Irish girls who were my roommates at the hostel there, and who provided a nice break to the constant sightseeing/eating/sleeping cycle that is easy to get caught up in when you’re traveling alone. From Siem Reap, I took a gorgeous boat ride down a couple of rivers and across the Tonle Sap (Southeast Asia’s biggest lake) to an old colonial city called Battambang. The boat ride was a great way to see the true rural, water-based side of Cambodia. Battambang itself turned out to be less than impressive, although it was a good place to rest up while I battled the aforementioned intestinal illness (Pol Pot’s revenge?).

From Battambang I took the bus to Phnom Penh to check out the Genocide Museum and the Killing Fields. Having just finished Hiang S. Ngor’s biography, Surviving the Killing Fields (which was a great read, by the way), it was really moving to visit the sites of some of the Khmer Rouge’s worst atrocities. Not what I’d call “fun,” but interesting and very compelling. Once again, my pictures probably do more justice than words here. Other highlights from the capital included causing trouble with a hilarious Irish guy named Nike (pronounced like Mike, not the shoes…go figure), and meeting Barry.

Barry is the only New Englander I have met on my trip so far, and as it turns out he was born and raised in Brunswick, Maine…what an amazing coincidence! Barry and I had a great conversation about all things Maine when I met him at a restaurant near my hotel, and he told me that he’s been running a bar in Phnom Penh for about a year and a half. As he paid for his meal, he said I should swing by the bar tonight if I felt like it; it was just up the street, the one with the neon yellow sign. What a nice guy! Later that night, I was wandering around the city and decided to take Barry up on his offer. I found the bar just fine, but was a little…troubled…when I read the neon sign: “Knickers & Liquors.” This made me suspicious, but I decided to give Barry the benefit of the doubt and went in through the tinted glass doors.

My worst suspicions were confirmed when I walked inside. I was greeted by an enthusiastic chorus of Cambodian women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one, all of them “stylishly” dressed, all of them clearly “on the job” if you will…and there was Barry behind the bar, the pride of Brunswick, Maine, serving cold beer to a lone sixty-year-old British guy. I was already inside, and Barry had spotted me, so I had what has to be the most awkward beer of my life, trying to chat casually with Barry about Maine and financial planning (his next career path, apparently) while turning down offers of “massages” in broken English from a Cambodian girl that would not leave my side. Definitely one of the more surreal experiences of my trip thus far.

That was it for Cambodia. From Phnom Penh I took a (much less complicated) cross-border bus trip straight to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam where I began a part of my trip that I had been looking forward to ever since I first planned to come to this part of the world.

South Korea, Back to Japan, Hong Kong and Bangkok

Wow, so it turns out I kind of suck at updating this blog on a regular basis, huh? I apparently also suck at getting a good night’s sleep before taking an important flight. Not a wink of sleep before the flight from Boston, about two hours before the flight from LA, none before the flight from Seoul to Hong Kong, and now about 45 minutes before my 8:55a.m. flight from Hong Kong to Bangkok. Oh well, maybe it’ll make for some interesting writing.

So yeah, it’s been over a month since my last entry and a lot has happened. As with my last post, I’ll let my photo albums do most of the talking (if you click on the pictures and go to my flickr page, there are captions too), and use this to relate my basic travels and the occasional good story. So, I’ll pick up where I left off: the Korean wedding.

The wedding was great, and that whole Saturday was probably the most enjoyable day I had in Suwon. Jack and I woke up at the crack of noon, put on the cleanest dirty shirts we had, and strolled down to the 7-11 where we met up with several of his American coworkers. After a few breakfast beers, we were shuttled to the wedding by some of the Korean employees from Jack’s school. The wedding itself, as well as the reception afterward, were not the no-holds-barred spend-a-thon and raging all-night party that are currently in style back home; but the ceremony was quite beautiful (if completely unintelligible to yours truly) and the buffet was delicious. An absolute highlight of the ceremony was when one of the kindergarten-age classes that the bride taught got on stage and sang a song for the happy couple. They were all dressed in white tutus and little white suits, and not a single one of them could carry a tune. Adorable. After the all-you-can-eat brunch that followed, we Americans took advantage of the gorgeous weather to wander back into town on foot, stopping at the park to toss a frisbee and a football around for a couple of hours. A rousing game of poker at Jack’s apartment followed, and I subsequently won the coolest claw machine prize I could possibly imagine: a golden Chinese dragon boat…that was also a lighter! We capped off the evening (and early morning) with some delicious fried chicken (Korea gives Alabama a run for its money, believe it or not) and a solid night out at the bars.

The following Wednesday, I headed up to Seoul for a long, long weekend. This was my first trip to the capital where another Bowdoin alum, Jason Cha, put me up in his apartment and showed me a good time. Cha was born and raised in Brooklyn, but his parents are Korean and he speaks the language fluently. He also likes to party…a lot. Fortunately for me, he shares with most people on this continent a certain genetic…how should I say…disadvantage when it comes to drinking, so his insane nights out usually just left me tipsy at the worst (with one sake-soaked exception). In addition to partying, Cha also helped me navigate menus at the Korean restaurants and was the guy behind the best meal I had in Korea. More on that later.

I went out that Friday night at the foreigners-only casino in Seoul with Cheddar and his coworker Jacob (the shorter guy in the pictures), as well as Jake Murray (another Bowdoin alum) and Cha. Jake was the big winner in the casino that night, turning 40,000 won (roughly $30) into 700,000 won (about $550!) in one of the most ridiculous good luck streaks I’ve ever seen. A few bars later, and Cheddar, Jacob and I wound up staying “the night” (5a.m.-7a.m.) at a Jimjilbong. Jimjilbongs are the Korean version of an overnight spa. They cost roughly $10 per night, and are a great place to sleep off (and sweat out) a long night of drinking. After perhaps 10 minutes of sleep at the spa, we took off on our one-day tour of the DMZ.

The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), as well as the Joint Security area (JSA), at the border between North and South Korea are probably second only to Cuba on the list of most interesting places I’ve visited. I don’t want to go into a full-blown description of the place here, but I’ll just say that being able to physically cross the border between North and South was really a privilege. These are two countries that share a common history reaching back thousands of years, but have spent the last 50 years almost completely cut off from one-another. Families that have been split apart from their relatives in the North for a generation make frequent pilgrimages to the border, but can only leave flowers and scraps of cloth with notes on a barbed-wire fence. There is a seemingly contradictory feeling around the whole place that combines the fear of (and readiness for) an all-out North Korean invasion with the intense desire for peaceful unification. Despite the all-nighter I pulled on Friday night, I was wide-awake for the whole nine-hour tour. Beyond that, I’ll let my pictures do the talking, and encourage anyone with some time to at least check out the Wikipedia Entry on the area.

The next big adventure was a four-day trip to Japan with Jake and Cheddar. Tuesday, May 5th was a national holiday in South Korea, which is apparently a rare occurrence. Being one of Cheddar’s very few opportunities for a real vacation, he was determined to make the most of it. A few cheap airline tickets later, and we were headed to Osaka, Kyoto and Tokyo for a weekend blitz (poor word choice?) of the land of the rising sun. Of the cities we visited on this tour, Kyoto impressed me the most. Beautiful and authentic temples and Shinto shrines are found at practically every corner, and a real sense of calm and an appreciation for nature, culture and tradition permeate the town despite its considerable size. The nightlife seems to center around small, pleasant bars and eateries packed into back alleys; and some of the streets are downright scenic, with brick sidewalks, rows of cherry blossom trees and pleasant streams running alongside them. I was apprehensive at first about backtracking to Japan, but Kyoto made the trip thoroughly worth it.

The number one highlight of the rest of my time in South Korea was a visit that Jake, Cheddar, Cha and myself took to Seoul’s wholesale fish market. Korea’s version of Tsukiji is maybe half the size of its Japanese counterpart, but is (in my opinion) even cooler. Nearly all of the fish for sale in the airplane hangar-sized building that houses the market are still swimming in tanks, and each vendor is associated with a different in-house restaurant. This means that you can point to a fish (or in our case, three fish and an octopus, thanks to Cha’s ability to haggle in Korean), and inside 20 minutes said fish has been killed, gutted and skillfully turned into the freshest sashimi you’ve ever had right before your eyes. The rest of the fish is tuned into a fiery stew that you enjoy after eating way more sashimi than you ever thought possible. All of this was washed down with a few cold bottles of Soju, a rice whiskey that, in the words of Tony Bourdain, “Koreans drink an unholy amount of.” What do you have for an appetizer before starting this amazing meal? How about some diced octopus tentacles, so fresh that they are literally still wriggling around and clinging to the plate with their suction cups. Yeah, it was weird, but it actually tasted delicious.

The squirming octopus tentacles and fresh sashimi were my last meal in Korea, and a damn good one at that. However, following said meal with an all-nighter at a dance club and a rushed trip to the airport to catch my flight to Hong Kong was probably not the best decision I made. As my flight took off from Incheon airport I felt the tentacles in my stomach, now soaked in a healthy mixture of gin, whiskey and tequila, striving to escape. Still, I survived the flight without major incident, and the meal stands as one of the most memorable and enjoyable meals of my trip so far.

Hong Kong, like Tokyo, was supposed to be only a two-hour stopover for me on my way from Seoul to Bangkok. I decided, however, to spend a week there to see what the financial capital of Southern Asia was all about; and as with Tokyo, I’m pleased as punch that I did. My best description of Hong Kong is as follows: take all of the buildings in Manhattan and put them on the island from Jurassic Park…then add about 3 million Chinese people…and subtract a few dinosaurs. I had a sense that the climate in Hong Kong would border on tropical, but I had no idea that the city (as well as the surrounding forest-covered mountains and islands) would be so damned beautiful. The endless, bright and bustling maze of shops and restaurants in central Hong Kong and on the densely populated Kowloon Peninsula (where my hostel was conveniently located) was amazingly easy to escape from. A 40-minute bus or ferry ride could take you to a serene beach town on the other side of Hong Kong Island or a beautiful hike through the jungle atop Victoria Peak. The views from these areas were always impressive, and when I did delve into the labyrinth of crowded alleys that surrounded my hostel, I was rewarded with amazing food and cheap bootleg DVDs. Overall, it was a great place in which to get lost, and the added bonus of a few nights out with Danny Joseph (a family friend who was finishing his semester abroad at Hong Kong University), made the trip decidedly enjoyable.

As I finish this entry, I’m sitting in the common room of my hostel in the middle of a Bangkok thunderstorm. I have been in Thailand for five days now, and I can already tell it is going to be one of my favorite countries in the world. The weather is mercilessly hot and humid, and because I’m American, street vendors and tuk-tuk drivers are constantly pestering me to buy their goods and services. However, the vast majority of people here are hard-working, honest and friendly in a way that reminds me of the smaller towns in Latin America, and the combination of frantic streets and serenely gorgeous, ornate Buddhist temples is starting to hypnotize me. And the food, oh God the food! Thai restaurants in the US don’t even hold a candle to the fresh, tangy, spicy concoctions that are sold on every street corner for $1.50 or less. There are a lot more westerners in Bangkok than any other Asian city I have been so far and frankly, I see why. In addition to visiting a good chunk of the tourist spots in the last few days and wandering from food stall to food stall, I have also been lucky enough to share a few great meals and even a trip out of the city to a beautiful riverside town with a certain Jang Boonyarat. Jang lived in my dorm both freshman and sophomore years at Bowdoin, and has been living in Bangkok (where she was born and raised) since graduation. As much exploring as one can do on one’s own, there is no replacement for the company of a native speaker, thinker and eater to multiply one’s enjoyment of a country. Jang has been a great tour guide so far, and I’m looking forward to a meal with her family tomorrow night.

Yikes, that was a long one. My apologies for being so shoddy with the updates. Hopefully I’ll be more consistent in the future, although as Annie Cronin wisely pointed out, it wouldn’t really be me if I were. On Sunday I venture across the border into Cambodia to explore Angkor Wat and the temples around Siem Reap. Apparently the border crossing at Aranya Prathet can be an “interesting” experience. I think the real adventure is about to begin.