Jarrod and Sara’s Site

Hello everybody! We’re officially back on U.S. soil and it’s great to be home.

After taking the 14 hour night bus (our last night bus ever? hopefully not…), we spent the last two days of our trip where it all began, in Bangkok. At this point we were ready to head home, but sad to be leaving such a great place and ending this unbelievable trip. We used the last two days to gorge on all the incredible food that we will be missing so much: red, green, and panang curry, fried morning glory with oyster sauce, chili chicken and basil, chicken and cashew nuts, beef noodle soup, pad thai, spring rolls, and big Beer Changs were some of the last minute culinary highlights (all with steamed rice of course). We hope that we’ll be able to find the right ingredients and duplicate some of this at home, but we fully enjoyed these last days as though we’d never eat again. We also went on a last minute shopping spree for little stuff that will remind us of our trip when we return home. Shopping here had the advantage and disadvantage of showcasing the art of bargaining. While everything here (except at the downtown modern area of town which was outrageously expensive) was pretty inexpensive, every single little thing you purchase, you have to negotiate for. While we think we got pretty good at it, this gets really wearing after a while as each vendor has different styles and you have to haggle over everything as most of the starting prices are 50% higher than you actually need to pay. Sometimes with the right people, this could be fun and friendly, and both parties are happy afterwards, but sometimes it can get unpleasant and you want to just say, “Just set a price so we don’t have to spend 20 minutes trying to buy an incense holder!”

The last day we mostly spent in the real, local markets where everyone was super friendly and don’t have the same attitude towards travelers as they do in the more touristy areas. A prime example of how friendly the people can be (which can easily get lost sometimes as you feel like a “walking dollar” everywhere you go) happened on our last day. We had breakfast and while talking to the waitress, we mentioned that we wanted to find a market that sold sticky rice steamers so that we could try to make it at home. She seemed to think this was great and ran into the kitchen and talked to her co-workers about where the best place to buy something like this would be. She came back, sat down, and drew a map and gave us detailed directions to the store and wrote down what we wanted in Thai so that the store clerk would understand. We found the store later in the day and after getting strange looks browsing through the “houseware” section of a small store that rarely sells to anyone but locals, we showed the owner the piece of paper and she got all excited and started talking and laughing and carrying on (in Thai) before running into the back room and coming out with exactly what we were looking for. She didn’t speak any English, but she was talking directly to us a mile a minute as she ran around the store and showed us exactly what we needed and how everything fit together. She was incredibly excited that we were buying this and when she didn’t have one of the things that we wanted (but didn’t really need) she ran to the front of the store and grabbed a young Thai customer who she knew spoke English and had him translate to us extensive directions on how to get to another market on the other side of the city. It was amazing and so fun and a great final local experience to end the trip. The big wicker steamer was kind of delicate and we needed to carry it by hand for the rest of the day and onto the airplane, and at least 4 different local people (including the immigration officer at the airport) either stopped us or pointed and talked excitedly amongst themselves that we had bought this. We think a few of them may have thought that we believed this was supposed to be a hat as they seemed to be really amused.

Anyway, the flight went smoothly, and we arrived in New York City Saturday morning completely out of sorts as we’d been up for about 40 hours with only a 4 or 5 hour “nap” on the plane. We had a great first meal back at a diner with my brother Evan and his girlfriend Katy and were thrilled to eat home-fries and drink a bottomless cup of bad, but perfect, diner coffee.

After the final bus ride of our trip back to Boston, we were picked up and brought back to Westford for the absolute perfect homecoming meal with both of our parents: a second Thanksgiving Dinner. Turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, carrots, cranberry sauce, American beer and wine and strawberry cheese cake for desert… best meal imaginable when coming from three months of Asian cuisine. Thanks so much for treating us to that feast, we had such a great first night back.

So that’s about it. We’re real glad we were able to keep people posted and hopefully it was interesting to hear about some of the things we experienced. Looking back at the beginning, we weren’t sure that we would keep up with this, but we’re so glad we did as it will really help us remember some of the highlights of the trip. Thanks again Mark for setting this up, we never would have had the initiative otherwise. And thanks so much to our parents for being so supportive and helpful in making this trip happen, we’ll never forget it.

So we’re home, we’re getting our cell phones set up, figuring out where our winter clothes are (its cold in New England), and enjoying drinking tap water, making our own coffee, having access to flushable toilets with seats and toilet paper, driving our cars, Dunkin Donuts, having hot showers that aren’t taken using a hose and a drain in the middle of the bathroom floor, and so many little things that we took so for granted before and surely will again. We can’t wait to see everybody, thanks so much for keeping in touch. See everyone soon!

Jarrod and Sara

Well, we’re leaving this afternoon to head back to Bangkok to get ready for our long flight home. Southern Thailand has proved to be an excellent place to spend our last few weeks after traveling non-stop for 2+ months. We were occasionally worried before we arrived as we’d heard various reports of both how great the beaches were and how over developed and crowded it had become. We loved it. I could see people who had come here 10 years ago and then came back, not liking what had changed, but there are so many places and options, if you cannot find a good time here, you’re pretty jaded. We spent the last 7 nights on two islands that had anything you could have wanted: big resorts and crowded, yet beautiful, beaches with beach bars and restaurants and massages on the beach as far as the eye could see, and on the same island, small bays with even more beautiful beaches that we shared with maybe 5 to 10 people. It was a perfect mix.

We spent 6 of the 7 nights on the island of Ko Lanta, which is a good sized island (40 minute drive from the furthest point north to the furthest point south), that is home to, as I mentioned above, almost any type of beach atmosphere you could want. We chose to stay in Khlong Jak Bay almost at the southern tip of the island in the less developed area. After making your way south on a paved road, the road suddenly turns into a crazy dirt/powder/sand pit with huge and plentiful bumps and very steep hills. This portion of the road is about a mile long and is great because it keeps this area from getting too built up (which will change soon I’m sure). At the bay we stayed in, there was one fancy, but small, resort, and two simple bungalow operations that had rooms, a restaurant, and access to the beach. We loved the place we stayed as it had a friendly, laid back staff of thai kids, clean, comfortable rooms, a nice open air beachfront restaurant (choose to be in the shade or have a table in the sand on the beach), and a beautiful beach (no rocks, clean, clear, deep, blue water, perfect for swimming). This was like Ko Jum in that there isn’t a lot to say about what we did…. we went to the beach…. all day, everyday, and I couldn’t imagine it would be possible to be more relaxed without passing out.

One day we walked into the national park area and enjoyed stunning views of the cliff-lined coast, really nice, lush, rainforest, and a few troops of resident monkeys. The monkeys were cool to see, but they are not nearly as innocent as they look. One one trip, we got off the motorbike for about 2 minutes, to take a picture or something, and though we were standing 10 feet away we didn’t notice one little punk hop onto the bike and start sorting through my backpack. When we saw it, it was trying to bite into one of the pockets. I ran over and shooed it off as Sara laughed and snapped photos (she found it more amusing than I did). Other than that excursion, we took a motorbike and went the length of the island to check out all the beaches and concluded that ours was our favorite anyway, so we stopped and had an awesome lunch at this collection of bamboo huts on top of a cliff overlooking a beautiful, empty beach. It was the simplest place but the setting was so ridiculous. I think we had grilled shrimp, papaya salad, and two pineapple shakes, it was delicious and probably cost $6. Apart from riding the glorified moped on incredibly treacherous hilly, dirt roads, where it didn’t belong, we loved cruising the rest of the beautiful coastline of the island on a bike, so fun and relaxing.

The one excursion we took was a great one. We booked a snorkeling trip to the tiny, uninhabited, marine reserve island of Ko Rok (unfortunately we had no money left to dive). Most people take this as a day trip, but we learned that you could rent a tent on the island and that almost no one did. The girl at our guesthouse explained that people on vacation don’t like to sleep in tents, which is probably right, but it was really perfect for us because we were 2 of the 5 people who were camping on this island overnight. After spending the day with the day trip group doing some really nice snorkeling in the type of place that you see on postcards, we went ashore to have a big buffet lunch with the group. After lunch, all the people and boats left, and we were alone on a ridiculously beautiful beach, there was not a single other person on it (don’t know where the other 3 people were, and there was a group of national park employees at the camp ground a little ways from the beach. We couldn’t believe it. We stayed on the beach by ourselves the entire afternoon and had a great time.

We fully expected and looked forward to a quiet night by ourselves on this deserted island… it didn’t quite work out that way. Just before dark one of the park employees came over and invited us to come party with them as it was another of the employee’s birthdays. We debated this a little as we weren’t really looking for a party night, but the “restaurant” where we were going to get dinner was where they were hanging out and it was the birthday girl who worked in this “restaurant” (a few picnic tables seemingly opened for the 5 people camping here), so we decided to check it out for a while. It started as one of the most awkward experiences we’ve had… and continued that way, but turned into an awesome time. When we arrived they had just started eating and insisted we join them on a huge picnic table where they had spicy, glass noodle salad, small, whole grilled fish, and some kind of squid soup with a black broth that was mildly frightening. We felt super awkward because there were about 12 of them, and only about 4 spoke a little English, and we didn’t want to eat too much or too little and didn’t really know the etiquette. This was quickly resolved however as they were all our age and in full party mode, drinking lots of beer and whiskey, and basically kept shoving food onto our plates and watching to see if we thought things were too spicy. After we got more comfortable with them it was a blast, but the first 10 or 15 minutes we felt like aliens being observed while we ate, but they were super friendly about it. Just when we thought dinner was over, we were surprised to see them carrying in a huge (3 foot long) grilled barracuda wrapped in tin foil that had been cooking this whole time. We learned that this was the main course. Everyone basically just took turns eating portions directly off the fish and dunking it in a really spicy chili sauce. It was heavenly. After dinner the dancing started and the drinking continued… and they wouldn’t let us put our beer down without forcing a fresh one on us (they were really twisting my arm). Sara got a surprise when she took a sip of her Heineken and realized that it had been diluted with Thai whiskey, her face was priceless. This is apparently a common mix here and it was actually pretty good. After the initial awkwardness, we found it to be just like a small party at home (a drunken, rowdy one) where everyone was laughing, dancing around like idiots, and singing horribly. We were able to communicate pretty well after a while and I even taught them some American dance moves. It was a blast and an interesting experience we definitely won’t forget.

Well that’s about it for the islands. They were a great place to spend time and we’d recommend them to anyone. We’ll be home in about 2 days, we can’t believe it. Its been such a great trip but we’re really excited to be coming home. We’ll probably write one more of these when we get into New York or back home to wrap it up. Can’t wait to see everyone!

Jarrod and Sara

What’s up again everyone. Heard there was more snow, sorry to some, enjoy to others. I know most of you will hate this, but we really miss snow and hope we get bombarded in March… sure it won’t happen though… sorry. Anyway, we hope everyone’s doing well and enjoying the winter as much as possible.

After our dive trip, we had traveled back to shore and arranged for the dive shop to drop us off at a bus station so we could head further south to the town of Krabi. We were in a minivan with a few other divers, mostly older people who were heading back to luxurious beach resorts. Surprising to us, and shocking to most of the people in the van (who couldn’t believe we didn’t know where we were going or where we would spend the night), the van stopped and the driver pointed to someone’s front stoop, on a fairly main road, and said, “There’s the bus station.” We shrugged our shoulders and grabbed our bags and I said, “The bus is going to stop there and take us to Krabi?” he smiled and said (though didn’t speak english well), “100%” and then jumped back in the van and vanished. We were just off a sensational 4 days and were optimistic as we walked up to the place and saw a man sitting on a small chair outside. We asked him if this was the bus stop and he didn’t understand a word of English and looked at us like, what do you want? We then said, “Krabi?” and he grunted, smiled, and pointed to a little table and signaled that we should sit and wait… so we did. We had no way of communicating, had no idea whether the bus would come in 30 minutes or 5 hours, so we sat and waited and found the situation pretty amusing. We were encouraged when a few locals started to congregate there for no apparent reason and we figured they would be waiting for the bus too. Then a bus came, that was not going to Krabi, they got on, the man signaled to wait, then he jumped on a motorbike and took off. We got a little nervous at this point, but he returned a half hour later and motioned for us to wait more. Fortunately, we waited for about an hour and 45 minutes and a really nice, air-conditioned bus with reclining seats stopped and charged us peanuts for the 4 hour ride to Krabi. When we arrived in town at 10 at night with no place to stay, we walked around for about 10 minutes and found a real nice room for a good price. It is so easy to travel here, if you are patient, everything just falls into place… for the most part… and I probably just jinxed that, but it was real nice.

The next day we had breakfast at a really good cafe (May and Mark’s) and we were talking to the friendly woman owner about islands to visit. She said that if we wanted a quiet, undeveloped place, with beautiful beaches, that was not very expensive, she would recommend Ko Jum. Since that is exactly what we wanted, she got on the phone and arranged a pick up for the following day to take us to the ferry and booked our bungalow on the island. Pretty good service for a cafe…

Ko Jum was fantastic. We knew it would be cool when during the ferry trip, all of a sudden 4 long tail boats came roaring up to the side of our ferry with a number of yelling Thais aboard each. Sara thought they might be pirates and it sure looked like that was a possibility, but when one of them yelled, “Andaman! Andaman!” and we saw the sign on the boat for Andaman Beach Resort, we realized that this was our pick up. So we tossed our bags onto the small boat and jumped from the ferry onto the small wooden long tail boat that would take us to our resort beach. Best hotel pick up ever. We spent 5 nights there at a really nice, simple “resort” that had about 30 concrete bungalows that were clean and comfortable. It had a big open air restaurant right on the beach, and thats about it. The long strip of beach we were on had about 10 of these types of places, all similar, some more rustic, wooden tree house type things, one really plush resort, and most somewhere in between. The rest of the island was fairly empty with two little villages, one main road (dirt, only saw 2 cars while there for 5 days), and a few other beaches with similar simple set ups. There was no television, or internet, and some of the places had just received electricity. The beach itself was really nice, though some parts were really rocky and not great for swimming. Sara loved it because there was an inordinate amount of coral, shells, etc. washed up on the beach and great for beachcombing. The water was warm, clear, and clean and the weather was amazing.

There’s not really a ton to tell you guys about this place. We basically spent our time here, swimming, eating, drinking, sleeping, reading, writing, and lounging. It was the best. The biggest outing was renting a motorbike for the day and driving through a beautiful forest on a dirt trail to the other side of the island where we had a great lunch and did all the same stuff… just at a different beautiful beach. Great quiet, restful, beach week… we loved it.

Next we moved on to Ko Lanta….

See you guys soon!

Jarrod and Sara

What’s up everybody? Hope everything is going great with you back home. We can’t believe we’ll be back in a little over a week. Thanks again to Mark for setting up this blog, its been a great way to keep our family and anyone who’s interested updated about what we’ve been up to. We’ll probably only have two or three more after this, so I’ll try to finish it strong.

(Sorry for the lack of pictures on this one, the Internet here is slow and expensive. Not a good combo for uploading pictures and only a few came through, we’ll try to add more later.)

After a marathon two days of traveling (and a great rest day in Bangkok) between Cambodia and Southern Thailand (4 buses, and a border crossing) we hopped on a small speed boat that would deliver us to the liveaboard scuba-dive boat (South Siam Divers 4), where we would spend the next 4 days and three nights. Before I continue, I would like to interject that this was the one real splurge of our trip (besides the whole trip itself). We booked and paid for this before we left… not a normal budget backpacker activity… it was a really, really nice start to the tropical honeymoon portion of our trip before returning to $10 a night “value rooms”.

For anyone who dives or has any desire to at some point, this trip would be one of the highlights of a dive career, and we would recommend it to anyone. The Similan Islands are part of a national marine park that protects them by requiring dive and other boat operators to avoid damaging practices that would hurt the coral reefs. There are no buildings or inhabitants on these islands, and fishing is strictly monitored. This has resulted in the place being absolutely pristine, in the sites we dove at least, with beautiful healthy reefs filled with tons of different types of hard and soft corals and just teeming with hundreds of species of fish and other wildlife. The following list will probably not mean much to everybody but some of the highlights of the things we dove with are: white-tipped reef sharks, sting rays, green sea turtles, tons of shapes, sizes, and variety of grouper and parrottfish, pufferfish, boxfish, moray eels, sea snakes, scorpian fish, lion fish, butterfly fish, batfish, nudibranches, seahorses, frogfish, various shrimps and gobies, tons of soft coral anenomes with clown fish (think Nemo and his reef house), just ridiculous amounts of all different tropical fish, and huge schools of various fish that swarmed around you while passing through. These are just a few examples and its fairly impossible to try and describe the completely different world we were in there, but it was simply spectacular.

I also want to take this opportunity to thank Sara for being such a trooper. She loves to dive (but not as much as I’m obsessed with it) and it does make her nervous each time we get ready to enter the water. During the 4 days we spend a total of about 14 hours far underneath the surface of the ocean on 15 dives. These were not easy 30 foot, bubble-blowing dives either. Almost every dive was 80 to 90 feet deep, (my deepest dive was 112 feet, hers about 105) and they all lasted about 50 min to an hour each. The currents at some of the sites were really, really strong, more than we had ever experienced or expected. At one site we literally held on to rocks as we swam into the current to rest (imagine a cartoon person hanging out of a flying airplane) and at another we felt like we were in a washing machine as the current surged in and out against the various rocks. We always had a guide on these dives, thankfully, or it would have been fairly terrifying. And though I was afraid I might have lost her when we ascended from a particularly brutal (and stunning) dive site and emerged in a school of literally thousands, if not tens of thousands, of lightly stinging jelly fish (where we waited for the boat to pick us up for 10 minutes in 5 foot waves and emerged with small welts on our exposed arms, legs, and on my neck/face), she didn’t miss a single dive and she loved it (even the night dive!). You totally gripped it Sara, you’re the best.

Besides the diving, we had a beautiful room with ocean level view, the boat was big, nice, well organized, and not too crowded. The other people on the boat included a mix of people from Thailand, Japan, Germany, Austria, England, Switzerland, and a group from Russia. The food was fantastic, which was particularly great for us since we have been living on small portions due to a small budget. Here it was all prepaid, a huge buffet for breakfast, lunch, and dinner along with free coffee, tea, and toast with various condiments including peanut butter (which we had missed dearly) that you could serve yourself 24 hours a day. This was a huge novelty for us as we’ve been eating out 3 meals a day for 3 months.

I am probably rambling now because we loved this trip so much, but two other cool highlights… We spotted a turtle while moored between dives, jumped in with snorkel and mask and hand fed it banana and cabbage while swimming with it for about 30-45 minutes. It was so friendly and fun to swim with in the open ocean, so great. Also, on one of the dives the guide told us about a cleaning station on one section of reef where if you swam to the right spot these little fish would clean your ears and any exposed skin by biting the bacteria or whatever off of you. I forgot about this and as I was checking out a certain section of reef I felt something in my ear and shooed it away, then felt something on my leg and looked down to see two of these cleaner gobies feasting on the peeling skin of my knee where I had gotten a bad sunburn while motorbiking. It sounds gross but it was really funny and cool to see. The dive guide got in close and took out his mouthpiece and a troop of little shrimp walked into his mouth and did a teeth cleaning, hilarious to watch.

It was a great trip, one of the highlights of this or any other trip we’ll ever take.

We can’t wait to see everyone soon.

Jarrod and Sara

What’s up everybody? We’re in Southern Thailand right now, having just returned from a ridiculously great scuba dive trip (I’ll write about this next blog) and wanted to check in to update everyone about the second and final part of our Cambodia trip.

We basically spent three days in Siem Riep, Cambodia, which is the home base for thousands of tourists to explore the various Temples of Ankor. Siem Riep itself is a little strange in that it is a huge, western, touristy, resort oasis in the center of Cambodia. The rest of the small portion of the country we saw was covered in vast farmlands and extremely poor towns and villages. So it was both nice and strange to arrive in the town that had guesthouses, huge plush resort hotels, restaurants, shopping, bars, etc.

The first afternoon we arrived we headed right into the complex and watched the sunset at a large temple on top of a hill overlooking the surrounding countryside. This place in particular was really beautiful and a great start to the trip. The place was packed with tourists as this was one of the most common places to watch the sunset at the temples, and we were a little worried that it would be like this everywhere.

For our first full day, we hired a tuk-tuk for the day to take us to a number of temples. We started early to catch the sunrise and were picked up at 5am. It really seems impossible to describe the places and hopefully the pictures we put up will do the place some justice. The temples were mostly built in the 1100-1200s and it was so amazing to see how massive and detailed the construction was. The temples were all constructed of huge pieces of rock (like a puzzle) and the solid construction has left the buildings incredibly well preserved in many places. As great as the preserved sections were, we actually thought the best temples were the ones that had been overgrown by the jungle. These were the types of ruins we both had imagined when we thought about a lost city in the jungle. Again, hopefully some of the pictures will give you a better idea, but these huge trees, that are a few hundred years old, grew directly out of the top of the rock walls so that it looked as if the roots were holding the walls up. Others grew out of the floor in the middle of temple common areas and courtyards. I don’t really know how else to describe it but it was like something out of Indiana Jones. Part of the movie “Tomb Raider” was filmed at one of the temples, Bayon. We were also pleasantly surprised that, although this place has thousands of tourists visiting it at any one time, because there are so many different temples in such a huge area, it really didn’t seem too crowded. There were lots of people at a few of the main temples, but other than that, it was really peaceful and you could explore a lot on your own.

The next morning I awoke at 5:45 am as if it were Christmas morning. We had talked to the owner of a large Irish bar who said that we were more than welcome to have breakfast on the second floor of his bar and watch the Super Bowl when the bar opened at 6:30 am. We arrived and I couldn’t believe it when I turned on the TV and there it was, the Pats game! the Super Bowl! first game I’d seen since Thanksgiving! The bar itself was beautiful and had a decent size TV, and Sara and I had the entire place to ourselves except for our incredibly nice, private, waitress. We feasted on omelets, home made bread, and huge cups of delicious coffee, and a few beers for me (it was the Super Bowl) while watching the game. We even moved the couches around a little bit for a better view, I think they were more curious about our game watching enthusiasm. I don’t believe I sat down the entire second half and was enjoying the game so much, especially when they scored the go ahead TD towards the end of the game. I can’t write or even think about the end of the game. Sara captured the event with a few photos and the first one shows the go ahead TD, the second shows… you know.

After the game, I pretended it was just a bad dream. I couldn’t have just watched the Super Bowl at 6:30 in the morning in Cambodia, couldn’t have happened… this day was more of the same, except we rented mountain bikes to explore the closer temples on our own. This was a great way to explore the temples as you see more along the way and it was just more fun riding around on our own trying to find various places. At many of the temples, young children (5-12 yrs old) hang out outside and at some places they try to sell things (postcards, magnets, bracelets, etc.) and at other ones they seemed to just be playing (we assume their parents worked or lived nearby). Once you got past their sales pitches, it was great to be able to hang out and talk with them as most were incredibly smart and spoke English well. Most said that they had learned English from tourists, which it pretty amazing considering how well some spoke it, others had learned it in school. While part of seeing this was really sad because the children were poor and most didn’t go to school, they were such great kids and it was nice to be able to interact with them and hear them talk about themselves. It was also great to hear that many of them aspired to a career in the tourism industry, as thats one of the few opportunities they have to escape poverty (to a degree) in Cambodia.

That was about it for the temples. I think we both felt like it was one of the most unique and visually stunning places we’ve been. It is a difficult place to describe adequately, but we would both highly recommend it.

We miss everyone a lot and hope you are doing well. We’ll be home soon, can’t wait to see everyone!

Jarrod and Sara

Hello everybody, hope you’re all doing well and not letting the winter get to you too much. We just arrived back in Bangkok and are about to enter the last phase of our trip in Southern Thailand. The last week or so was spent traveling in Cambodia and it was an excellent experience, with our time basically split between the capital, Phnom Penh, and Siem Reap, where the Temples of Ankor are located.

The first day we spent in Phnom Penh after taking a boat up the Mekong from the Vietnamese border. This journey and border crossing went very smoothly. It wasn’t nearly as nice as the Mekong trip in Laos, but it was still a nice introduction to Cambodia and we got to see a lot of the riverside village life along the way. In Phnom Penh, we spent the first day exploring the city and checking out the markets and a few sites. While it was different and was a large city, we didn’t really find too much to see of interest in the city itself (at least compared to the other big cities in Southeast Asia). The best part was probably going out to lunch at a place called Friends. This place was set up to provide training for young adults in Phnom Penh and all the profits went to a charitable foundation for the progaram. They run the whole place themselves, cooking the food, providing the table service, etc. and the younger workers are taught by older kids who have already gone through the training and are learning to be supervisors. The food and service was amazing and the place was full. It is a great program to get children into the exploding tourism industry in Cambodia. The other highlight was probably going out to dinner in a local Khmer restaurant that was completely packed (we were the only westeners). It had three floors and there was not an empty table in the place (which is rare here) and it had a great energy as it was loud and people were merrily eating and doing a lot of drinking. We found the food pretty good, and although similar to other countries around here, it had a unique style. We made it back to the hotel early and relaxed there as there were a lot of big gatherings/parties going on around the place we were staying and we didn’t want to be walking back through them late at night (we were probably overly cautious here because of stories/stereotypes we’d heard and read, but we weren’t in a backpacker area and it just didn’t feel nearly as safe as other places we’ve been).

The second day we spent here was pretty depressing, but we’re glad we were able to learn some of what happened here at the places they actually happened. We started the morning by taking a tuk-tuk ride to the Killing Fields. Here we basically walked around on a small self-guided tour of the small park like setting where the Khmer Rouge performed thousands of their mass executions. The first sight is a large glass enclosed monument of the victims of the genocide. It is basically shelves containing the skulls of the victims from the excavated mass graves (half have been excavated to date). Having them in front of you, especially due to the sheer volume, was very sobering. After that we walked through a path around the mass burial sites and they had various signs explaining what had happened where and how it was arranged. It was a very eerie place in that, now, it is extremely peaceful and it looks like a park, except for the excavated circles that look like bomb craters where the people were buried. And it was also located directly opposite a large fence from an elementary school where we could hear and see the kids outside playing, very surreal.

After that our guide for the day, dropped us off at the S21 museum. Another eerie place. This was actually an old high school that the Khmer Rouge turned into a prison/interrogation facility. Here we watched a short documentary and then walked around and saw the whole facility. Basically, the classrooms were subdivided into tiny, tiny cells made of brick or wood that you could go inside and see. There were also small classrooms that were left as is and were used as interrogation and torture rooms. Many of these had sort of abstract drawings of what had taken place inside. They also had many rooms that contained the pictures (like mug shots) of all the people housed there, that were taken by the prison controllers when they arrived. It was difficult to see the actual faces of the people after you had just learned what had happened to all of them, especially since it was all types of people: young children, teenagers, adults, and elderly, both men and women.

I don’t really know what else to say about this. It was pretty horrible to imagine that people can do these types of things to each other. We felt it was a good experience to learn about this (especially since it happened 30 years ago, but seems like something from the middle ages), but we were happy to leave.

Thats really it for our quick trip through the capital. Sara and I had a much more enjoyable stop seeing a more inspiring part of the Cambodian history in Siem Riep, where we went next.

Again, hope everyone is doing well. Keep in touch.

Jarrod and Sara

One of the highlights of southern Vietnam and our last stop, was the city of Can Tho. Located in the heart of the Mekong Delta, it is famous for fresh fruits and vegetables, fresh fish and prawns, and river living. We arrived here and took a tour of the river in our own small boat with our driver Loung, a really nice and funny lady.

She picked us up at 5:30am so we could catch the sunrise while heading to the floating market. It was really peaceful on the river and Jarrod and I were both surprised at how many people were already up and working at this early time of day. Most had already completed their daily walking and aerobic exercises before starting the working part of the day.

I was surprised at how busy the market was! There were boats everywhere, bumping into each other, and people using their feet and other body parts to either push off or stay connected during sales. There were also people climbing over a few boats to get to the one they wanted and one man even jumped into the water to swim to his desired boat for a sale. For sale there were mostly fruits and vegetables, flowers for the upcoming Tet Festival (Chinese New Year), some meat, and even some food vendors selling drinks, soup, and quick stir fries. It was really bustling, colorful, loud, and awesome.

After the market Loung took us through the smaller canals where we looked around at river life passing by the boat. There were people washing clothes in the river, taking baths, cooking dinner, minding children, and fishing. Loung pointed out the many different kinds of fruit trees to us including mango, papaya, jackfruit, starfruit, lychee, coconut, river cocoa, banana, and pomelo (to name a few). She stopped at a friend’s house to show us how they make rice noodles. This was really interesting since we have been eating them for a while now. They first boil down rice to a fine liquid, cook it on something like a big round skillet into a really thin pancake, lift it off of the skillet with this cool cylindrical bamboo thing, and then let them dry in the sun for a few hours before putting them in the slicing machine. We had a new appreciation for our new favorite Pho noodle soup after seeing this long process.

We liked the houses along the river in the small canals. They were built up on stilts to accomodate for the higher water levels during the rainy season. It was really sad though to see all of the poverty here. Some of the houses were simple shacks made from whatever materials available; wood, tin, tarps, or concrete. They had sloping floors and I noticed one that had a door that wouldn’t close because the floor was so slanted. Many looked as though they would slide into the water if a strong wind came through. It was strange to see such a conflict between the beautiful natural landscape, and the extreme pollution in the river and canals where sewers, and it seemed, people’s daily garbage, was dumped directly into the river. Despite this, however, every single one of the children we passed was waving and yelling an enthusiastic hello and people seemed to be enjoying their lives in this peaceful area.

Now, we’re off to Cambodia. Hope you’re all doing great, we miss you.

Sara and Jarrod

 We’re still in the low key town of Can Tho in the Mekong River Delta in Southern Vietnam before heading to Cambodia in two days, so I’m trying to get all caught up on the blog…

So to get from Saigon to Phu Quoc Island (a small island off the southern tip of Vietnam) we decided to once again try to save one of our precious travel days left by taking a night bus… so at 10 pm we boarded a sixteen passenger mini bus to make the 8 hour trip to Rach Gia, where we would board the ferry at 8 am the next morning for the island. Bus drivers do not get paid by the hour (I assume) because our driver got us there in 6 hours and 15 minutes after driving like he had a plane to catch for 6 hours and we arrived at a random bus station in Rach Gia at 4:15 in the morning.  To back track, the ride itself was interesting, for some reason we thought that we might be able to sleep on the bus a little bit… big mistake. To relate it to a road trip at home, imagine that you hopped in a little bus (or big van) for a trip from Westford to Acadia National Park in Maine, during the hours of 10 pm and 4:15 in the morning. On the bus, your driver had some sort of shrine on the dashboard that flashed different colored bright lights constantly for the entire ride like a disco ball. He also blasted (not exaggerating) asian pop/elevator/love song type music for the entire ride. He also drove (though probably his only choice) on the most unbelievably bumpy roads for at least 4 of the 6 hours (for Westford people, think of the dirt roads around Edwards Beach on Nab lake). And we were squeezed in with 16 people and their luggage. We didn’t sleep a wink. When we arrived at the bus station, we then in a daze had to deal with the normal crowd of a half dozen motobike drivers trying to tell us where we needed to go and where they could take us and how long it would take and all in very little English (they had a few things that they could say (Motobike? Ferry? Phu Quoc? You go now? Can’t stay here? Too far, no walk, etc.) and they couldn’t understand anything we said). This we’ve learned how to handle very well, but after not sleeping and not knowing where we are, etc. it is a little overwhelming/aggravating. But we made it to the ferry station for a good price after some serious “negotiation”, i.e. threatening to walk (even though we didn’t know where to go or how far it was), sitting down at the small cafe that had a bunch of people who didn’t want us there, and waiting for the crowd to thin out, and then making it as clear as possible where we needed to go and what we were going to pay them. It was a tough way to start the day, but not something we get to encounter at home so interesting at least.

Phu Quoc Island was fantastic. Typical hot, sunny, tropical, palm tree lined beach island, with a strip of beach developed for backpacker type tourists (simple bungalows with a fan and not much else for $12 per night) and a few resorts for the rich ($235 per night rooms).  The rest of the island had one small town and a few scattered village type communities all connected by a series of dirt roads and a couple main paved roads. This was the type of place that people are always saying, “you’ve got to get there before it becomes all high rise hotels up and down the island, ” and we hit it at a good time. Just enough development that it had places to stay, eat delicious, cheap seafood, had three dive shops, and you could easily find an area of beach with no one around.

One day was spent exploring the island on a motorbike, that we rented for the two of us ($9 for the day, no paperwork, here’s the keys and your helmet, good luck), and drove up the coast looking for the perfect spot of beach and the perfect lunch. We probably drove way more than we should have as we’d never used a motorbike to explore a new place before and loved it (well I did, and Sara I know did also, although a little nervous at first), and there was so much empty coastline we just had to keep going. We eventually found a “restaurant” which was a family’s home on the beach with not a another home or building in sight in either direction. We ordered grilled fish, vegetables, rice, and cold beer and were able to swim in the ocean completely by ourselves while they cooked one of the best meals we’ve eaten on this trip. If we had longer here, we could have done this every day for a long time and not gotten sick of it.

The other day we were there we went diving. The diving was different than most places we’ve been in that the focus was on small fish and various critters (crabs, lobsters, nudibranches, shrimp, etc.) and it also had really nice coral. The bad part is the reason that they have no big fish is that they’ve totally overfished the place, but I guess the good part of that for diving is that there were huge schools of tiny fish that you usually don’t see because they’ve been eaten by larger fish). The dives were really easy, as they were very shallow (about 20 feet) and had no current, so we were able to dive for about 55 minutes each dive. It was a great practice for our big dive trip in a few weeks in the Andaman Sea in Southern Thailand.

It was a great few days of beach stuff after a lot of heavy travel while we moved quickly and often through Vietnam. I’m sure there are lots of places like this still in the Caribbean and I would love to find them. Great place.

To finish and to give you an idea of the very, very small price you have to pay to travel without a set tour or itinerary,  and on a tight budget: Here is the quick synopsis of what it took to get off the island after finding out the night before we needed to leave that all the boats back to the mainland were booked for the next few days. (us: “So when can we get a boat back?… ferry booking desk: “Oh, don’t know, its high season.”… us: “We need to leave at some point can you sell us the next available ticket?”… them: “Maybe, come back in a few days, the boats are very full, its the high season.” Great.

- Woke at 6:00 to catch a mini bus with people who had tickets, we were overcharged because we didn’t already have a ticket and we couldn’t say no, leverage is huge.

- Arrived at the station where two of the four boats leaving that day were preparing to leave and hoping that we could pay/bribe our way on. Asked at the first boat which seemed to be all locals and the person wouldn’t even listen, just told us to leave. (This was also after the ferry ticket person said that we should try this, we didn’t just assume we could do it, although I was confident that they would take us for a little extra money) We walked to the other boat and waited a while thinking that maybe once the ticket holders were on board they would take us and our money and tell us to stand in the back of the boat, which would have been great. Sara saw someone who seemed to be selling tickets a little ways from the boat, and I went and asked him to buy tickets. He was real nice and said to go to the ramp and give the man some money and he’ll let you on without a ticket. I went up to this person and he nervously said no and motioned me away. I went back and told the other guy and he said he didn’t know why but too bad. Then he walked over and told another random guy who came over to us and asked if we needed tickets. I said yes and he said he’d be back in 5 minutes. At this point we figured we were going to be on this island for a while or we were about to be asked for an enormous amount of money to get on the boat. But he came back with two supossedly sold out tickets and nicely, but suspiciously, offered them to us for face value. I made it clear to him that he had to walk us to the boat and make sure we got on (in my head that the tickets were real) which he agreed and we got on the boat no questions asked.

-After the boat ride, dodged motorbike drivers and bought a ticket to Can Tho. While we were in line to buy this ticket however, they were swarming around us swearing that there were no buses to Can Tho, that the buses were no good, that they could get us there quicker, etc.

- We took a quick ride to the main bus station and waited for 30 minutes while motorbike drivers grilled us about where we were going, why we were taking a bus, how expensive the buses were, etc.

- Took an uneventful (finally) mini bus to Can Tho (3 hours)

- When we arrived in Can Tho we dodged motorbike drivers and arranged a taxi to the hotel that we said we had a reservation at (we didn’t have a reservation, but otherwise they will take you to a hotel of their choosing where they can collect a commission from the hotel) and finally arrived at our hotel after 5 different modes of transportation and 8 hours of total travel time.

The way to and from the island was a complete pain and these two particular trips, we only found it amusing after the fact, but it was so worth it and somehow those travel days are a really good part of the trip. Not sure why exactly, but they are. (And traveling through Southeast Asia in general is very easy, this is just an example) Hope this was somewhat interesting, damn this coffee here. I’m never going to sleep tonight, but we’ve got to catch a bus to the border early tomorrow morning…

We miss you guys and may not be able to check in again for a little bit, while we are traveling quickly through Cambodia. Hope everyone is doing real well and we can’t wait to get home and see everyone. Please keep us posted. Go Pats.

Jarrod and Sara

After a few rainy days in Central Vietnam, we arrived in the mountainside town of Dalat, known to the Vietnamese people as a popular honeymoon spot.  With the gorgeous mountains, vegetable and flower farms, and coffee plantations, it soon earned our praise too.  It felt a little like an old ski town with lots of chalet houses sloping down the hilly streets.  The people seemed really happy, smiling readily and always entertaining cute little kids.  We really enjoyed our hotel which was quite a steal at $10 a night with hot water, TV, and free breakfast.  It was a real treat to have such luxury.

Our first afternoon there we strolled along Xuan Huong Lake passing many local people taking their daily exercise walks, always in pairs.  There was a nice paved path along the perimeter with nice landscaping and people watching.  That evening we headed to the central market to check out the goods and have dinner.  Jarrod found a great vegetarian buffet where we had a plate of veggies, tofu, and rice for about a dollar each.  I never knew tofu could be cooked in so many different ways and shapes, it was all really good.  The market  had great produce and also sugared candies (kind of like sour patch kids).  The mulberry was our instant favorite.

The next day we went on a trekking tour called the Thrill Seeker.  Our group was small with only one other couple and our guide, Lum (who was great by the way if he is reading this!).  We had great weather with blue skies and just the right temperature for hiking.  It is one of my favorite hikes of the trip because of the varied terrain; we went through pine forests, coffee plantations, and vegetable farms before finishing up at a waterfall.  There was one really tough uphill part, but the reward was fantastic views of the valley below with river running through it, and also a picnic lunch.  We ate baguettes (I never imagined how many baguettes I would eat on this trip, no chance of eating low carb here) filled with cucumbers, tomatoes, soft cheese, and pork pate.  Fruit for desert completed the meal perfectly.  Somehow, things just taste better when you eat them in a picnic.

Lum explained the life of the coffee bean to us from tree to mug.  First the coffee berries and picked from the bushes when the berry is red.  The outer shell is removed and the slimy inner bean washed then dried on tarps for three days in the sun.  The bean is naturally a white color, then turns brown after roasting.  We saw some of the farmers carrying 50kg bags of coffee beans on their shoulder across this really scary wooden planked wobbly suspension  bridge while holding onto the wire handrail with only one hand.  I was afraid for my life using two hands and a little backpack, what a wus.  In town there were some wholesale coffee shops where you could buy the beans and they roast them on site for you.  The delicious smell lured us in from the street, now if they only sold coffee to drink life would be perfect.

From there, on to Saigon…

Love you and miss you, Sara and Jarrod

 Hello everybody, just got back to civilization and realized we were falling behind on this again. Hope everyone is doing well back at home, putting the beer on ice and getting the food ready for the Pats this weekend. I can really not even believe that this is the season I am missing. Haven’t seen any of the playoffs, and unless I can find a sports bar catering to Americans in Siem Riep, Cambodia (unlikely, all the sports bars play is soccer…), I will probably be missing the Super Bowl as well. If anyone has Tivo…. please record!… and I jealously hope everyone enjoys the game.We were recently in Saigon (officially known as Ho Chi Minh City, but everyone refers to it as Saigon) the biggest city in Vietnam. We really enjoyed this city quite a bit. After the uptight, aggressive, constantly in your face Hanoi (which I still enjoyed, but was also ready to leave after a few days), Saigon is quite different. In general, as we went south through the country and the weather grew warmer, the people seemed to be more mellow and Saigon (deep in Southern Vietnam) was no exception. The people were much more laid back, friendlier, smiled more, the city was much more spread out, it had sidewalks that you could actually walk on - this made a huge difference - and there seemed to be more to do. A stereotypical example of the difference is: in Hanoi, the motorbike drivers (who wanted to taxi you around) would follow you and you would have to tell them no firmly three or four times before they left you alone, in Saigon, the motorbike drivers would wave to you while lying on their motorbike and drinking an ice coffee, and when you said no, they would smile and wave again as you walked by.

The first full day we were there, we went to the biggest market in the city to browse. This has become one of our favorite things to do because each of the markets is so unique (if you get past the t-shirt and souvenir stalls). Its great people watching and the markets, especially this one - Ben Than Market - usually have great food stalls to eat at. These are the equivalent of a food court at a mall at home, but much more lively and they have a much more diverse mix of foods. Besides the stalls to eat, there is also the food market section where individuals and restaurants come to buy meat, produce, etc. This is always an interesting place to walk through, as I walked through this particular food market I saw the following and many more: a person shaving the remaining hair off the lower leg of what I believe was a goat with a Bic razor, cow tongue, cow brain, cow intestine, pig heart, tons of snakes still alive and slithering in little buckets, tons of different fish, along with candy, baguettes, fresh coffee, and fruits and vegetables. These places never get old to wander through (except the smell).

We next visited the War Remnants Museum, which is a very popular museum (mostly tourists) about the American War, as the Vietnamese refer to it. This was a little difficult to digest as it had quite a few photos and videos about the lasting effects of chemical warfare. Basically it was in a large building that you walk through and look at photos and read information displayed throughout. Outside, there was a collection of U.S. tanks, helicopters, etc. and an exact replica of the “Tiger Cages” that were used by the South Vietnamese on P.O.W.’s. While this museum obviously only showed the atrocities of one side and only showed the effects of the war on people from one side, it was strange to see these things as a tourist from the country who they were at war with such a short time ago.

We also visited the Reunification Palace, as its now known, where the Saigon regime’s headquarters were. For the most part it was a typical capital building. It was weird to see the gates and then to inside see the famous pictures of the North Vietnamese crashing through the same gates with their tanks to take over the capital at the end of the war. It was also interesting to walk around the basement’s tunnels that housed the rooms where they supposedly orchestrated the war. The rooms contained a mix of large maps of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, telecommunication equipment which looked like it was from the stone age even though it was used so recently, and empty rooms with nothing but simple telephones on a bare desk. It obviously had been stripped of most things and I’m sure looked a lot different during the war, but we both said that it was incredibly easy to see people working furiously in all the rooms, talking into radio equipment, running back and forth between rooms delivering important pieces of paper, looking at maps, and smoking tons and tons of cigarettes. It could have been totally different, but thats what we both envisioned when we emerged from the basement and talked about it. We could also have just seen too many war movies.
Thats about all for Saigon. We filled the remaining time walking around for hours exploring different parts of the city, drinking potent Vietnamese coffee while watching the motorbike traffic (its art to watch the traffic flow in this city of 3.5 million motorbikes with no traffic rules), eating lots of good food, and drinking cold beers on the sidewalk, while watching the city, and meeting different sorts of travelers. Great place to spend time.

Again, we really hope everyone is doing well, and we miss you guys. A little over a month to go. Keep in touch and we’ll see you soon.

Jarrod and Sara