northerly bound

Archived from the past, here is a little Vietnam stuff... un-proofread I'm afraid! I've got a bus to catch in a few minutes.

Vietnamese internet cafes were rough, the connections very slow and the computers extremely moody, so blogging was difficult. I had this archived for weeks. Here's a few photos, and an abbreviated timeline and trajectory through Vietnam.

(approx mid December)
SO we have made it a fair distance north up the coastline of Vietnam and now find ourselves in the lovely little ancient city of Hoi An. Nha Trang was a nice beach city that grew on us rapidly. Our first impression wasn't great, but we found the less touristy areas, and where we liked to eat and settled in quite nicely. We went on a fun boat trip, did a little snorkeling, made a bunch of new friends. We were in the first hostel we've found, they aren't common in Vietnam, so it facilitates making friends. Nha Trang was great ...but then the weather turned and became rather cold and stormy. Too cold and stormy to do any more stuff on the water, so we continued up the coast to Hoi An.

Hoi An is a UNESCO site and the old city is car-free, just scooters and bicycles. Beautiful old teak houses and narrow little winding streets, it's really quaint. There's about 200 tailoring shops and cute places to eat. Maybe my favorite market so far, they have beautiful vegetables and herbs here. This is our favorite place in Vietnam so far.

We seem to have gathered a little crew of people on the same route up the coast and on the same time line, and it's nice to have a group of people that we're hanging out with now. Jen (USA), Drew(USA), Carina (Norway), Marina (Russia) We'll continue on together to Ha Long Bay for Christmas. We have quite the bus ride ahead, we take an 18 hour bus ride up to Hanoi tomorrow.

Today we all got bikes and rode out of town to Cu Dai beach, known during the war as "China Beach". It's too bad the weather wasn't great, cloudy and a little too breezy, but we had a nice ride and it felt good to visit the ocean.

The Vietnamese are known as skilled tailors, and Hoi An is the tailoring capital of Vietnam, and I totally succumbed to the tailors and had some stuff made to be shipped home tomorrow. A silk-lined wool winter coat, 3 cotton summer dresses, a dressy silk top and a silk bathrobe. All for $120. Such a treat, I'm extremely happy with everything I ordered. I've never had the experience of verbally describing something I want, and having them draw sketches until we're on the same page, take a million measurements and tell me to come back in 24 hours. A couple fittings later, perfection, with excellent workmanship. There are also a lot of cobblers here within incredibly cool samples to choose from and beautiful leathers... Jon got his first suit made, a totally slick cashmere pinstripe, and a bunch of beautiful shirts.

After Hoi An we spent 24 hours on buses headned north, breezed through Hanoi and off to the astoundingly beautifiul Ha Long Bay, where we spent Christmas and a few days. Unforgettable.

We would have loved to do some climbing, there are amazing deep water soloing routes and a great company that takes you out by boat....and the routes aren't even that difficult. Deep water soloing means you climb with no rope or protection and just fall into the water. Unfortunately it's winter there, and while the water temperature isn't bad the air temperature was in the mid teens and we were chilly. So no water activity aside from a bit of kayaking.

As soon as the sun set we were unprepared and didn't have enough warm clothes! It was chilly. It really was an amazing place. It deserves so many stories, but I would really like to just cover the ground we made and get anyone who cares to follow our trajectory caught up.

By this time we were reunited with the crew we'd been on and off traveling with up the Vietnamese coastline, Carina, Drew, Jen, Tess and James. We then headed back to Hanoi for a couple nights, which was great fun, and then all took another epic long busride south. 21 hours later, and a totally surreal and bizarre dawn border crossing in the mountains of Laos and we arrived in Vientiane, the Lao capital.

Nha Trang

So we went to Da Lat. Da Lat is in the Central Highlands, our bus climbed windy (motion-sickness inducing for several people on our bus) curvy roads for hours to get there. While Da Lat sounded great in the guidebook and really inviting, we didn't stay as long as planned. The milder temperatures sounded refreshing but it was downright COLD - dreary and grey, like Vancouver in November.

It's really pretty in Da Lat, but everything to see of interest is really spread out and the best way to see everything is by motorbike tour, and in the drizzly chilly rain we couldn't muster up much enthusiasm. So we stayed a day and continued to Nha Trang.

(By the way, the tourist-class buses in Vietnam are awesome, over air-conditioned to FREEZING temperatures, but comfortable and efficient. Courtesy neck pillows and bottles of water and pee breaks every hour and a half.

Nha Trang is a pretty crazy city...now that we're here it sort of feels like how I imagine Florida beach towns to be, only... in Vietnam. Lots of Asian tourists, fewer backpackers, lots of hotels, a lot of party culture. Sounds lame, no? Well, admittedly our first impression wasn't great, but as the day has gone by we're more excited. The beach is astonishingly beautiful, and the draw of Nha Trang is that it's the kickoff point for no less than 71 magnificent tiny islands for snorkeling and diving, with little or no development on them. Boat trips are very affordable and Nha Trang is considered one of the best value places for PADI certification in the world, in terms of cost and and quality/health of the coral reefs. So we'll stay for a bit. Maybe do our scuba courses. We're settled into a great, cozy hostel with all kinds of perks, a block from the beach. We'll do a few boat trips and maybe our scuba courses.

It certainly doesn't have the undeveloped charm of Koh Chang, but we'll withhold judgment until we see some of these islands a few kilometers offshore. The water here is clear as gin.

Saigon

It's GRITTY here, makes Bangkok feel like we were just at kindergarten. Aspects of the chaos remind me of Delhi, there are almost no traffic lights. You can sense a lot of people are in survival mode, and it's way busier, dirty, hot, crowded. Yet you have all these remnants of colonial french architecture, elegant buildings, French-style cafes. Some people are very kind, but there is definitely a higher crime rate and Lonely Planet book advises to be very aware for bag snatching and pickpocketing, even from children. A lot of the smiles come with the attempt to swindle the most possible cash out of you. I can't say I blame them. We are both open minded about the traveling that lies ahead but feel that our first impression is that there is more hardness, toughness, to the urban Vietnamese than the urban Thais.

There is plenty of physical evidence of the war in the people...I've already seen lots of birth defects in limbs, similar to thalidomide, which I presume is result of fetal chemical exposure. There are also many amputees, people with no feet or legs panhandling, more than I've ever seen before in one place. To this day there remains unexploded land mines in rural areas, some of the people are too young to have been in the war, so I wonder if it was land mines.

I've heard Vietnamese cities are a bit hard...that the joyful traveling really happens in more rural areas. We've been here three days, done some really interesting sightseeing, and head north to a city called Dalat tomorrow. After that, the coastal city of Nha Trang for the beach.

I've been rather forlorn all eveing because I lost my ipod today. I left it in a cafe and didn't realize until our tour bus was well on the way back to Saigon. Impossible to retrieve off a tiny rural island in the Mekong Delta. The bus rides will be way less pleasant from now on. :-( Stupid, stupid girl.

I've been cut off -this internet cafe is closing. I don't have my camera cord with me, so no photos today... more soon.

Pai in the sky

This will be a quickie....

After Chiang mai we headed to the idyllic little mountain town of Pai, and stayed 4 nights. We love it here! Had we any idea how much we'd love it we would have allowed more time. We're begrudgingly heading back to Bangkok to catch our flight to Vietnam on the 8th.

I may just try to make it back to Pai at the end of January for the Pai Reggae Fest. We met some amazing people. One woman we met at the hot springs has recently built a very impressive new wood-fired forno in her front yard, and wants help learning how to bake western stuff in it, so there is the potential for some fun cooking. I really want more of Pai.

Yesterday was the king of Thailand's birthday, and for a country that loves its royal family so very much it's been very festive. It also means it's a long weekend, and the trains are all full, so we have a 12 hour bus ride to look forward to. We tried booking the train almost a week ago, and it was ALREADY full back then.

Pai is tiny, under 6000 residents, but it's a big holiday destination for Thais. Set in a wide valley of lush farmland, the pace is the most relaxed we've seen yet. Great food, lovely people, a vibrant arts and live music scene, it's incredible. I promise to upload a few photos soon.

Only setback - a couple days ago I was completely waylaid by terrible traveler's sickness, most likely foodborne. For nearly 24 hours I couldn't leave our guesthouse. I'm much better now - it's incredible how once you return to health how grateful you are to have it!

We rode an elephant!

I will expand on Pai and upload some photos when we get to Bangkok.

much love!

How do I feel about the food?

I know I've had very few things to say about the food, so it's about time I wrote down my thoughts! In no particular order, stream of consciousness style.

A month of Thai food never really got boring for me. It's very diverse, and the flavour profile fresh and bright. Curries for breakfast and/or lunch, noodles at least once a day, and lots of bright tangy soups.

While Vietnamese food is lovely, I have a hunch it will start to get tiresome at some point for me. Don't get me wrong, I do love it - but I think Thai is more varied and there are way more vegetables in everything. The curries in Thailand always have a couple different eggplant varietals, green beans, a few fresh tomato wedges, sometimes cauliflower. Vietnamese is really a protein and starch with a minimal veg content, and tons of bright fresh herbs.

I became addicted to extremely spicy food in Thailand. With Thai food you have such a range of flavours in balance, that the chiles sit atop a solid foundation of flavours and are supported by them, it's not just a blast of extreme capsicum heat by itself. I came to the point where I felt like I was often being served food with the farang level of chile, and began ordering "Thai spicy please, not farang spicy" to which servers would invariably snicker and look skeptical, and then rather impressed when I was happy and handling it well. Chiles when paired with sour (from lime juice) and salt (from fish sauce) is a lot easier to tolerate than on their own. Ordering from street vendors I could get a smile out of the most surly, tourist-fatigued cook when I'd encourage them to give me the real deal.

I came to LOVE a perfect Tom Yam Kai, with a silky chicken broth, tons of aromatics (lemongrass, galangal, keffir lime leaf, chili) and lots of veggies. I never felt this way in Canada, I'd had it before but didn't go nuts, but eating it here I think it may be my Favorite Soup Ever. The difference is how much of those aromatic herbs are actually in your bowl of soup. It's normal that you have a rather large heap of inedible woody herbs left at the bottom of your bowl when you're done, there is a LOT. It's a very loud soup, because of the chiles, but there is still a delicate balance in a good Tom Yam. The harmony of all 5 flavours: sour, sweet, bitter, salty, umami.

I used to feel this rhapsodic about Vietnamese Pho, however, now that I'm having them both regularly in their place of origin I think I love the Tom Yam more.

The Thai street food is amazing. From the getgo we ate a lot of street food. It costs next to nothing and is prepared in 2-3 minutes in front of you and the casual spontaneity of it is lovely. People tend to just sell one thing and do it well... fried noodles, fruit shake carts loaded with fruit, spring rolls, noodle soup, fried chicken, grilled meat on skewers. What made the grilled meat so fantastic is in part because they're cooked over these incredibly compact, efficient little charcoal barbecues.

When I had the occasional craving for sweets I'd track down Muslim rotee, very common in the north but a little hard to find in Bangkok. Amazing thin sweet crepes fried in ghee on a big circular cast iron griddle with various choices of sweet fillings- Jon and I were really hooked on banana-egg, but you can get jam, or nutella, raisins, condensed milk.

Som Tam is a very firey green papaya salad that I love. Grated papaya is thrown in a mortar and pestle with green beans, tiny tomatoes, green onions, fresh garlic, roasted peanuts, dried shrimp and a pinch of sugar, a LOT of lime juice, fish sauce, and chiles. They usually ask how many chiles you want. Farang (foreigners) usually want half or one whole chile per portion, but I came to like two. The key is that it's all bruised together in the mortar and pestle for a while, the raw green beans break down a little and crack, the sourish tiny tomatoes and little pink dry shrimp begin disintegrating, the gritty sugar starts to macerate the raw garlic and it just all comes together. This salad is hot, refreshing, and I became nearly obsessed in my pursuit. A Northeastern Thai variation that I was unable to brave replaces the little shrimp with a couple whole little black freshwater crabs, which have been preserved in salt. They're usually just torn in half and thrown into the mix. I just couldn't do it.

Vietnamese street food is a little less varied, and there is simply fewer vendors, too. We seem to need to search for them when we want a snack, whereas in Thailand they were everywhere.

What we had come to miss and were overjoyed to have again is good bread, and exquisite coffee. The iced coffee in Thailand is very good, but even better in Vietnam. I love what sweetened condensed milk does for espresso.

The occupation by France left a legacy of excellent bread knowledge and execution. There are vendor carts selling very respectable croissants and danish, financiers, baguettes and other nice pastries. Fantastic bakeries are everywhere here in Saigon. I will be the size of a walrus in no time if I continue to eat pastries every day.

Last night we bought a bagload of fruit from a vendor and went at it with my swiss army knife while watching the National Geographic channel in our room - it's the first time we've had a tv the whole trip. We had a few mangosteens, a sapodilla, a rose apple and a bunch of rambutans. The mangosteens and rambutans were amazing. We chose the sapodilla and rose apple because we wanted to demystify them but we were a little disappointed. We didn't love them. For some reason we're both still balking at the stink of durian - we're oddly wimpy about trying it. It smells horrendous. I love that people are forbidden from bringing durian on airplanes.

The most common Vietnamese vendor in Saigon is Banh Mi, the bizarre but amazing Vietnamese submarine sandwich. An armload of crunchy baguettes sits on the top shelf of the cart, and across the other shelves the mise en place includes: sliced meats like BBQ pork, sandwich meats of mysterious origin, a weird but not unpleasant take on pate, and a basket of eggs which they will cook up in a tiny wok over a little butane burner into omelette format. Also mayo, chiles, a pickle mix which usually consists of daikon and carrot, a plate of sliced cucumbers, tomato, onion, a big bowl of glistening cilantro sprigs, lettuce. There is also stacked boxes of Laughing Cow cheese. My favorite breakfast of the moment, which I had today from a Banh Mi vendor, was beautiful - she assembled it in about 3 minutes, with no direction from me at all: baguette, plain omelette drizzled with soy sauce and chile sauce, cilantro, cucumber, tomato. It cost less than a dollar. The key was that the eggs were perfectly cooked..lightly beaten and just set, so there were still pockets of runny yolk and creaminess. So good.

While I find myself missing the food in Thailand, I will be in Vietnam for month and I know I will be blown away soon. The Pho we had last night was one of the best I've ever had, which is fantastic since the first two we had here were so underwhelming, and actually didn't even stand up to many of Vancouver's offerings. Last nights bowl compensated by far.

Where were headed in a few days, Nha Trang, (after we spend a few days in Dalat) is known for its seafood.

To be continued!

Chiang Mai.

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Chiang Mai is really pleasant. It's not too hot, not too busy or crowded, easy to navigate, rather less costly than other places we've been and the food is good. People are welcoming - it is evident that many Thais are feeling "foreigner fatigue" as they are bombarded by enthusiastic travelers from all over the world - I don't blame them. However Chiang Mai doesn't seem to mind, and we feel welcome as opposed to just tolerated.

We thought we'd only stay a few days, but discussed it this morning and agreed that with no pressing need to go anywhere immediately, we should stay. Enjoy it until we become restless, as for the moment it's charming us every day.

Days have been languid, but we are doing a fair bit. Chiang Mai is a hub for a lot of trekking tourism, but for the most part it's rather out of our price range. In order to properly enjoy all the countries we're visiting we need to be cautious not to overspend in any one place, and Chiang Mai is a city where you could spend a lot of money on excursions and adventure tourism.

There's been lots of walking, exploring, reading, talking to people. A few highlights:

An afternoon spent at the Baan Kingkaew orphanage was good times. We went with a new friend named Teddy, a Lao-American we met. Teddy grew up in Chicago, but now calls New Orleans home, and he's near the end of a year long trip. He was going to the orphanage to play with the kids, having recently donated a soccer ball and invited us along. Jon and I made cash donations and spent a couple hours with a group that was about 3 or 4 years old. The orphanage was beautiful and the staff kind and affectionate, and the kids utterly hilarious. We were exhausted after! The sad part is that despite the loving nature of the staff there, there are 53 kids that want and deserve attention. They're craving physical contact, because as well as running around playing we did a whole lot of cuddling, they pounced on us for cuddles immediately.

The temples are beautiful. We're going to another one tomorrow in a national park. So far my favorite has been Wat Phra Singh here in Chiang Mai.

The Tiger Kingdom is a big touristy tiger zoo. It's got a successful breeding program and rescue project and it's a big slick place. You can pay to interact tigers which are under no sedation of any kind. They divide them into age categories and the adult tigers cost less, presumably because people tend to be more afraid of them? We chose the adults because, well, they're so impressive. The kittens sure were cute, though.

I could not predict how intense and...emotional (and counter-intuitive) it would be to be in the enclosure with them. It was amazing. The only control tool the trainers use are tiny bamboo canes and when the tiger is too playful or they want to reprimand them it's a gentle tap on the nose or cheek - a very light tap that the tigers barely seem to notice. We were under strict instructions to keep our hands away from their paws, throat and face. Their trainers do play with him, and can read their behaviour well, but obviously the tigers aren't allowed to let loose with random tourists. The tigers are segregated by age during the day but combined to play together after the facility is closed to the public every day.

When I was lounging beside Edward (we were placed with three brothers from the same litter, 21 months old, Edward, Leonardo and Oliver) he rolled onto his side for a belly rub. To my absolute delight after a few moments he began to purr loudly. Eventually he rolled onto his back and swung his face around towards me, completely exposing his throat for a good chin scratch, purring away. His mouth was inches from my calf - I'm not going to lie that suddenly I had a huge adrenaline/fear response and had to control myself from not jumping up...I had to take a deep breath and respond to the trainer who told me to move my leg away. The sad part - I really wanted to give that soft white chin a scratch. He wasn't being the least bit aggressive, but I was always aware I was sitting next to an alpha predator! All for about $10, believe it or not.

We went to a snake "farm", where they house many of the worlds scariest snakes to produce antivenin. We saw a king cobra show and handled a bunch of Burmese pythons. The cobra show was crazy, it still had it's fangs and venom and was several meters long. At one point he slithered out of the ring and the "charmer" had to catch him. There was no barrier between us and him, we were in a little seating area and it was ridiculously unsafe. At least we knew they had antivenin there, heehehehehe.

Yesterday Jon and I went to the awesome Crazy Horse Buttress with a very impressive climbing company called CMRCA. They were awesome. We're both very beginner climbers and this was a great opportunity to take a good top-rope course so we feel like we can start to accompany our O'hara friends more competently. Our instructor Taw is on the Thailand National Climbing Team and we loved him. Calm, patient and encouraging, a super nice guy. We feel a lot more able to join people who are leading and not need to be shown everything. We climbed a couple different 5.8 routes and feel good about our day. We were three in our class, a guy named Trevor from California was with us, and Taw had an assistant instructor with him named Ooan. Pretty sweet teacher-student ratio! The whole day cost us $85, the setting was stupendously beautiful and we feel that the course was a really good decision. Their bouldering gym is sweet and really inexpensive and we've dropped in a couple times cause it's like half a block away from our guesthouse, making it a nice option when we have a few hours to kill.

After we got back to Chiang Mai from Crazy Horse we went for dinner and some beer with Trevor and it was the Sunday Walking Market, a weekly street market in Chiang Mai. It's really cool and I wanted to shop!!!

Alas, I keep trying to upload the video of tummy-rubbing the tiger but it just won't work, I think it's too big, although photos are uploading nice and fast on this computer. I'm going to try to send it in email format to you all.

So next we go to a town called Pai, and we're in no rush to get there. Soon enough we will train back down to Bangkok and fly to Vietnam on the 8th. We like Chiang Mai so much we're going to hang out for a few more days. Tomorrow we're going to a botanical garden and to a temple that sits on top of a hill.

Hope you're all well. It's Eryn's birthday tomorrow!!!!

Khao Yai National Park + Ayuthaya

So last night I wrote for an hour, a detailed, inspired update about the last little while. The ancient computer I was writing on crashed and I lost it all. Needless to say it was frustrating.

We've just spent a great day walking through the vast ruins of Ayuthaya in the heat, and find ourselves with a few hours to kill before we catch a night train to Chiang Mai, so I'm going to start over.

Khao Yai National Park was incredible. It's a wild piece of wilderness only a few hours from Bangkok. In some regards we didn't know what to expect, and wondered if it would be highly developed and kind of theme park-like in areas. Not even a little, it's a 2000+ sq km piece of wild, dense jungle, and I have a hunch that it will stand out as one of the highlights of our whole trip.

The park has lots of trails running through it, but we opted to splurge on a day and a half of guided tours through our guesthouse, Greenleaf. The value for what we spent was outstanding, our guides taught us a lot about the area and we saw far more wildlife than had we just been hiking on our own.

On our first day we spent some time hiking and tracking wildlife, and saw:
Gibbons (a treat - they're quite elusive and require a good eye and ear, they never come down from the canopy)
pig-tailed macaques
Great Hornbills ( maybe 8 or 10 throughout the day...this is rare to see so many)
barking deer (didn't hear them bark though!)
samba deer
a gigantic black scorpion
Bear Cat (the largest of the civets, totally resembles a cross between a bear and a cat)
water monitors
an amazing array of beautiful butterflies

Khao Yai is the best place in Thailand to see Asian elephants that are still completely wild, and 200+ elephants live in the park. The group from our guesthouse that toured the day before we did saw an elephant...but alas we did not, despite seeing much evidence of elephants in the form of trampled forest and dung. As it is breeding season they are covering a lot of ground in the park right now and sightings are commonplace. We were hopeful, but quite honestly, it was such a fun day we didn't mind.

The next day was a half day tour, and we were taken to a delightful spring for a swim. There's no beach nearby, the park is in Northeastern Thailand, so it's the best place to go cool off...and there wasn't a foreigner in sight, we were surrounded by picnicking Thai families. Exquisite crystalline waters, it felt so great! Before long we were invited to join a random Thai family for some food, they were feeding us the spiciest food possible and cackling away, surprised that we liked it, and pouring us shots of Thai rice whisky. One of those magical moments of connection with no common language at all - so special.

After the spring Mr Nine took us to a very special place... There is a temple just near the park boundary that is built above a network of deep underground caves. I have yet to hear of anyone that knows of it, it's not in any guidebook weve heard of. I have a hunch that Greenleaf makes generous contributions to the temple for the privilege of bringing his small groups down there. We walked down a long steep scary ladder/stairway into the darkness and found an expansive network of quiet, still, warm caves. Walking around just with headlamps I felt like I was on another planet. We felt privileged to visit such a place.

Mr.Nine spent nearly an hour with us down there, showing us how to walk softly so as not to disturb the community of intriguing insects and the bat colony. (There are actually three different bat species in these caves) The monks have set up many altars and shrines throughout the caves, and there is a tiny room that you need to crawl into with a damp rug where the monks go for a 7-hour seated meditation in the still darkness. I wasn't scared down there - it was extremely peaceful. We were introduced to an enormous tarantula about the size of my fist...we needed to be very slow and cautious, not because she is dangerous but because she's very shy. Apparently she's lived there for years and would never jump at someone, but sudden movements or heavy footsteps make her shrink back into her big fuzzy white nest.

After this we left to drive through endless dusty crappy roads through farmland until we got to a hill, and walked to the edge of a cornfield. We stood about 50m under the opening to another cave, and right on schedule, at 6:20, a shockingly beautiful ribbon of two million wrinkle-lipped bats flew out. The sky was clear, the dazzling full moon was out and as the sky changed to darkness we stood for a half hour watching this endless cohesive stream of bats. Mr.Nine had brought a container of pineapple for us and Jon, Pedro from Columbia, Henrik from Denmark and I just stood transfixed watching the bats. The soundtrack of beating wings and cicadas was beautiful.

It happened to be a major festival day in Thailand - it's actually the reason we postponed our trip to Chiang Mai and timed Khao Yai as we did. Later that night we were just hanging out having a beer with Henrik and Pedro when our guesthouse hosts invited us into Pak Chong to join them. We were stoked! The festival was happening on the grounds around the temple...we expected it to be rather austere. Quite the opposite! It was actually pretty rowdy for a Buddhist festival!

Fireworks, midway games, monks handing out blessings everywhere. An endless lineup of carts serving tasty snacks. A muay thai ring with a huge crowd watching people fight. A small karaoke stage. A big stage with a beauty pageant of local girls?! This was seriously fun people watching. We were the only foreigners in sight. Lot of firecrackers and fireworks. Awesome.

The next morning we said our goodbyes at Greenleaf and took a class 3 train (under $1 fare) for 3 hours to Ayuthaya. A fun ride sardined in with hundreds of Thais. It made me really aware of how cold and detached North Americans are with strangers....it was a very social train ride. The nice guy next to me shared his totally new and unfamiliar fruit with us, and helped me when I bought a pomelo - vendors walk the aisle nonstop selling tasty food and drinks. The pomelo, a citrus sort of like a green grapefruit the size of a large melon, was peeled, so I thought I was in the clear. The next layer of skin is a very fibrous membrane and I seriously could not get through it. Buddy showed me The Way, and we had a good giggle.

So glad we came to Ayuthaya....this modest city of 137,000 people was once a very powerful city, the capital of Siam in the 1300s, and it's been very cool. It was a long sweaty day in the sun walking for hours through the ruins and visiting temples and I feel like I have a better understanding of the history of where I am.

In 3 hours we board a sleeper train bound for Chiang Mai, 12 hours to the north. We're stoked for Chiang Mai for lots of reasons, and looking forward to a respite from the heat.

short pit stop back in Bangkok

Just back from a lovely island in the Gulf of Thailand called Koh Chang. Our first impression was that the beaches were beautiful, but it was very crowded and overdeveloped, tons of obnoxious partying foreigners. Made a move and it turns out that the east coast of Koh Chang was really quiet, only a few restaurants and places to stay on that coastline, it was idyllic and restful.

We really preferred that side of the island. We found an amazing place to stay called the Treehouse. It was dirt cheap for a really simple bungalow, that was basically just a thatched hut on stilts with a porch and a hammock, there wasn't even glass on the windows and only electricity was two lightbulbs that only turned on at night. It was basically camping and we loved it. Lots of time on the beach, went kayaking... it's a beautiful island.

We left Koh Chang to come back to Bangkok to pick up our Vietnam visas, which took nearly a week to process. Bangkok is draining, it makes me kind of cranky. There is a lot about it I love, but it's busy, the air quality is terrible and it's just plain chaotic.

We've had a bit of a stressful 24 hours of constantly changing plans - we were originally heading south but based on a few conversations with people who were just there the weather turns out to be pretty crappy, so we thought to head up to Chiang Mai, a really interesting city in the far north of Thailand, but it turns out that there is a major festival for the next 3 days. This would be awesome except the trains are all full and the bus takes FOREVER to get there. Accommodation prices also spike like crazy during this festival, making it kind of too expensive to go. So we've been doing a lot of time consuming running around in the heat trying to make plans and it's worn us out a bit.

Instead we are heading to Khao Yai national park, described as one of the best parks in the world. It's only a few hours away so we'll do a couple days of hiking and hopefully see some cool wildlife. After the park we'll spend some time in a nearby city called Ayuthaya, a historic world heritage sight, the old capital city of Siam nearly 1000 years ago to do some sightseeing. Then head up to Chiang Mai afterwards when the festival is over. We'll stay in Thailand until Dec 8th, our one month Vietnam visas are from the 8th onwards.

We're both healthy and well!

Arrived safe and sound in Bangkok!

So here we are! WOW!

Arrived safe and sound to our reserved guesthouse in Bangkok, in the heart of the travelers mecca of Khao San Rd. It's clean and pleasant and the staff are kind and friendly.

Our economical flight proved that you get what you pay for - we can't say it was particularly comfortable in the grubby old plane that China Eastern flew us in. We have never seen a plane with a shared-use bar of handsoap before!!! Eww. But it got us here. (that was on the Shanghai-Bangkok leg of the trip). The Shanghai airport was expensive, hot and stuffy, grumpy and irritating. By contrast the MASSIVE four year old BKK airport is dazzling -cool, green and leafy with live orchids everywhere, pleasant helpful staff. It is without question the most beautiful and efficient airport I have ever seen.

We checked in a little after 4am at the Tuptim guesthouse, 24 hours after leaving Vancouver. Exhausted. Had showers, a beer and some food and the neighborhood was still wide awake as the sun came up. Surreal to say the least. Went to bed and slept for a few hours.

Today has been very mellow, recovering from the trip out. We awesome 30 minute foot massages ($2.50) today and wandered around getting our bearings.

Khao San Rd, Bangkok is a travelers destination where you can get outfitted in all the gear you need, from bikinis, fake birks, fake North Face backpacks and a pair of convincing fake Ray Ban aviators, all for under $50. There is so much tempting shopping. Lots and lots of tasty food, places to sit and people watch and drink beer - but if you're not drinking your face off or shopping there isn't much to do and the novelty wears off quickly. All it's good for is networking, making travel plans, booking transport and getting organized. As soon as our Vietnam visas are ready we will head south to Railay/Krabi, Ko Phi Phi and Ko Lanta, hopefully in a few days. We CAN'T WAIT to get down south on to the beaches.

Tomorrow is Vietnam embassy, and the Royal Palace.

I shall check in when I can. love to you all.