Finally!
I am now
home back in Boston, and as promised, I am going to give an overview of my last
month travelling. There’s a lot to mention (partially why this post is so
delayed… the task felt daunting), but I’ll try to keep it as short as possible.
Mostly, I wanted to write this for anyone who ever has any interest in
travelling around Southeast Asia and wants good travel recommendations—or,
anyone who just wants an idea of what it would have been like, had they done it
J
First, to
finish up with Thailand…
Devon and
I first travelled to Chiang Mai, a popular tourist destination in the north of
Thailand. If you have one week in Thailand, I recommend you spend half of your
time in the south at the beaches (Krabi, not Phuket!), and the other few days
in Chiang Mai. It is a blast: city-like in that it has something fun to do each
day, but still quaint and architecturally (and historically) interesting. Here
are a few top recommendations of things to do in Chiang Mai:
1. Elephant Jungle Sanctuary—Devon and I spent the afternoon feeding elephants
bananas, rolling around in the water with them and giving them a bath, and
eating a buffet lunch of our own. So cute!
2. Thai Secret Cooking School—the woman is so sweet, taking you to the market in the
morning to pick out your own fresh ingredients before showing you how to cook
Thai basics like pad thai, spring rolls, and curry. It was SO delicious and
such a fun way to spend the afternoon.
3. Zoe in Yellow—a really fun club/bar area, mostly filled with tourists… great for
socializing, and you can find quieter areas to drink beer or louder areas to
dance, depending on what you want.
4. Wat Phra That Doi Suthep—a beautiful gold temple at the top of a mountain, and
even after all the temples I’d seen, something still worth checking out for the
view of the city!
5. Wat Umong—some
underground tunnels with Buddha statues.
6. Sticky waterfalls—if you have an extra day, these are so fun!
Honestly (this’ll sound pathetic, I
know), we spent the rest of our time lying by Gaby’s pool or heading to the
mall/movie theatre. We were really desperate for a break. I also probably
shouldn’t give any food recommendations, since we mainly stuck to eating great
pizza, Mexican food, and salads… but this was what was so lovely about Chiang
Mai… it had a LOT of options: day-time activities, night-time excursions,
work-out classes, and restaurants, depending on what you’re looking for.
Oh! And, most importantly… if you ever visit Chiang Mai, stay at Squirrel Hostel. You won’t regret it.
This was probably my favorite hostel I’ve ever stayed—they placed movies on a
projector in their yard every night, and each night we were there, the owner
texted me in the morning to ask what I wanted to watch. They had cute lights
strung from tree to tree, popcorn and other options for drink and food, and we
paid $6 each for the entire 6-person bunk bed room to ourselves. We used her
laundry machines and her free bicycles to get around the city. She also drove
us to the airport, no charge. Seriously—such an amazing, cozy, home-y place to
stay!
After Chiang Mai, we headed with our
friend Heidi to Pai. We’d heard a lot about Pai, and the rumors all seemed to
be true: it’s a bit of an artsy, hipster, tourist-created “chill zone” about
three hours from Chiang Mai. Although certainly not the most authentically-Thai
place we’d ever seen, it was unique and authentic in it’s own way… hammocks
swinging from trees in gardens with tea and cats, Bob Marley music playing
along the market street, foreigners milling about with dreads and zero makeup,
etc. etc. As Devon kindly (and perfectly) put it, “this is the type of place
where people come and don’t shower for a couple weeks, and sleep in the dirt,
and then say ‘backpacking, man,’ isn’t it?”
Here are a few top recommendations
for things to do in Pai:
1. Rent motorbikes and drive around Pai… we saw the ‘Pai’ sign and took pictures by it
before ordering coffee overlooking the mountains; visited bamboo bridge; visited the land
split; and visited the canyon
(pictures below… all SO worth checking out… beautiful and unlike anything I’d
ever seen).
2. Wake up for sunrise. Although it was a little cloudy when we did it, it was
still a great way to spend the morning… we paid a songtaew driver to take us,
but looking back, I think it would be cheaper to drive your own motorbikes if
you still have them.
3. Eat at Om Garden. Delicious, organic, healthy… (very un-Thai).
4. Take a day trip to Lod Cave in the afternoon. We’d heard that, at sunset, all the
bats in the cave leave to go find food at the same time all the birds from
outside come in to sleep, and there’s this massive collision… although I don’t
think we saw anything that dramatic, we still got to see hundreds of black
birds flying in circles so dramatically it looked like a bees nest had been
kicked over (except, of course… birds).
5. Motorbike to hot springs. Yes, you will think that maybe you might die on this trip,
flying almost vertical down mountains and then almost tipping backwards as you
try to get your motorbike up the next vertical mountain… but it’s a fun
adventure all the same.
After Pai, we spent a day (and about
$20) checking out the White temple and Black house in Chiang Rai. With extra
time, the White temple is in itself worth the trip to Chiang Rai. It’s
stunningly, shockingly beautiful, with haunting details like piles of hands coming
up out of the ground.
After returning to Chiang Mai for a
day or two (and one more pool day), we left Thailand and headed across the
border to Vietnam (an easy process, especially if you pay to get your
visa-on-arrival online ahead of time).
Vietnam
We started in Hanoi. The city was
surprising in so many ways. Many of the shops along the street sold the same
thing—random things, like clocks or mirrors—and looked identical (indicative of
the Communist government, I was told). But there were also many beautiful
French-styled buildings, and I loved the architecture. Also, if you didn’t
already know this—Vietnamese traffic is INSANE. They have 6-way intersections
without a single stop sign or streetlight. The whole premise of driving in
Vietnam is pretty much, drive when you
want, where you want, and hope you don’t get killed. Surprisingly, it works
better than you’d think, except it made crossing the street a ridiculously
dangerous feat where we’d flap our hands like penguins to signal the drivers to
slow down, and weave in and out of crossing motorbikes, barely reaching the
other side of the street alive.
Devon and I spent the first day
visiting the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum,
the Temple of Literature, and the Hoa Lo prison. If you have a couple days
in Hanoi, this is definitely a good first day, especially if you walk to each
place on foot. It gives you a good idea for the layout of the city, and there’s
a lot of really interesting history behind each attraction.
After that, we took a 6-hour long
bus ride to Sa Pa. We’d signed up for a 2-day, 1 night trekking adventure with Sa Pa sisters—definitely recommend. We
were able to personalize our adventure and climbed up a mountain the first day
to see some of the most beautiful sites I’d ever seen; then we stayed overnight
in a local family’s house, eating authentic home-made Vietnamese food and
paying for a hot medicinal bath in the family’s brown bucket. I was shocked to
see that some people still live like this, cooking over some charcoals in the middle
of the kitchen floor and washing the dishes in a soap-y mess in the corner. Our
trek guide even told us this crazy story about how women are often kidnapped by
men if the men want to marry the women but the women don’t like the men. She
said: “I was kidnapped three times. These are boys I’d been in school with
since elementary school, but they were unhappy because they liked me but I had
another boyfriend. If you don’t escape in 3 days, you have to marry them. You
can escape by pretending you are really in love with them, and offering to cook
them breakfast, for instance, and then running out the door when they aren’t
looking. So I did this twice, but the third time I escaped, my uncle told me,
‘you are 17-years-old… you cannot escape again. No one will ever want to marry
you.’ So I went back and married the third guy.”
“Do you love him now?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, yes!” She nodded firmly.
Her friend, another local woman who was married, said, “I used to be afraid to
go to the market to get kidnapped. Now, every time I go, I pray someone will
kidnap me!” They all laughed casually about it.
After our Sa Pa adventure we spent a
few more days in Hanoi, exploring the city, eating from ‘top’ restaurants we’d
heard about on TripAdvisor, etc. Honestly, 4 days in Hanoi was too much for us.
We were excited to get out of the city.
I highly recommend one other thing
while you’re in Hanoi: sign up for a cruise along Bai Tu Long Bay (the sister to Ha Long Bay, which is the more popular
one). Bai Tu Long Bay has the exact same views as Ha Long, but it’s not nearly
as touristy (at least, so we were told).
We signed up with Halong Sapa
Experts and spent the day kayaking along the bay before being treated to
Happy Hour on the cruise, a cooking class, and some of the most delicious food
I’d eaten in all of Asia. Even our cabins were beautiful, looking more like
5-star resorts than most other places we’d stayed.
After that, we journeyed to Hoi An, a small historically Chinese
port that is now a beautiful and colorful canal-side town. This was definitely
our favorite part of Vietnam. It was a beautiful little town, much like Epcot
at Disney World. We spent the first day riding bikes to a beautiful beach not
more than 3 miles from our hostel. The second day, we went on a bike tour
through rice terraces (we stopped to both ride buffalos and push buffalos
through the wet rice fields, helping turn over the rice so that new rice can
grow) and then drifted in wooden boats along a bamboo river. Our guide then
took us to his house to eat delicious homemade food (SO good) and showed us how
to cook Vietnamese pancakes. The third day, we shopped and all ended up buying
tailor-made dresses (we could pick the style and the fabric design) for $13
total—and all the dresses (and rompers) were finished within hours.
Cambodia
The next day, we flew to
Sihanoukville, Cambodia. We spent the first day lying on the most beautiful
mainland beach I’d ever seen. We ate at some cute hippie restaurant for dinner
and woke up to take a ferry to Koh Rong Sanloem, an island off the coast. We’d
decided to ‘ball out’ for this trip because it was the last leg of our journey
together, so we spent $80 ($20 each) to stay at a beautiful villa called ‘Sweet
Dreams.’ The villas were stunning, and it was the most peaceful, quiet, calm
24-hours we spent travelling. We spent the entire time lying on hammocks
reading and sitting on swings in the light blue ocean and swimming and kayaking
and then reading some more; we ate all our meals at Sweet Dreams (didn’t really
have an option).
After our relaxing mini-vacation, we
took a bus to Phnom Penh (because it was halfway between the beaches and Angkor
Wat), spent the day there (nothing much to comment on, except that Big Little Lies is a GREAT TV show), and
then continued to Angkor Wat. We were able to pay $5 each ($20 total) to rent a
private songtaew driver for the entire day. Not only was this so worth the
money, but it was also nice because we didn’t need to pre-plan anything. Since
our driver is from the area, he knew exactly which temples we should see. We
woke up to see sunrise at Angkor Wat (I hated the early wake-up, but I’ll
admit, it would be difficult to see Angkor Wat any other way… the heat of
mid-day would be stifling). After sunrise (and MANY pictures), we went to Preah
Khan (which has trees growing right through it) and Ta Prohm (Tomb Raider movie). We’d planned on
driving around all day with our songtaew driver, but the thing is… how many
ancient ruined temples can you really see, before you’ve felt like you’ve seen
them all? After seeing Angkor Wat, the others didn’t seem exceptionally
impressive. We checked our watches: 10 a.m.
“Could you maybe… take us back to
our hotel now?” We asked our driver. “Is that lame… like, do other people ever
come to Angkor Wat and only see…3 temples…?”
He said, “Some people only see one.
It is not lame. That’s okay. I can bring you.”
We went back and jumped in the pool
(MUCH needed… I’ve never felt heat like Cambodian heat), grabbed lunch (with
wet towels on our necks to keep from passing out) and then our sweet songtaew
driver drove us to our next hostel, no cost (since we’d technically paid for
the day). We spent the rest of the afternoon watching Big Little Lies and preparing for our departure the next morning.
We said goodbye that night and I
woke up the next morning, got myself to the airport, and flew to Dubai. A
family friend met me at the airport and brought me back to her house. I will
say this about Dubai: the city itself is stunning, and unlike anything else I’d
seen before. The buildings are all sand-colored and elaborate and every 10 feet
I saw Aladdin-Palace-esque architecture. The city is also fascinating for so
many other reasons: first, barely anyone there is from there, so it is essentially a huge melting pot of the richest
expats from all over the world—the richest Indians, Chinese, Americans,
British, etc. It is also just so elaborately expensive: in Cambodia, I probably
spent $50 total for the entire trip. In Dubai, I spent $100 on one taxi ride
that couldn’t have taken us more than 5 miles (granted, I think we were ripped
off).
My friend Gaby met me there.
Although we had a fantastic time at the one excursion we’d planned (a Desert
Safari with Dune Bashing, Sandboarding, Camel Riding, and BBQ Dinner… $85 for a
6-hour excursion), for the most part, Dubai was out of our budget. I spent $30
on plain spaghetti (the only thing
I’d thought I could afford at the
mall), and we did zero shopping, but still spent another $100 on our uber ride
home later. We spent the last day walking around the spice souks, and that was
fun. The city was truly magical at night, too—just stunningly beautiful,
especially across the water.
The desert excursion was great. We
spent 2 hours driving up and down sand dunes in a 4-wheeler, tipping at times
onto only two wheels and feeling like any minute we’d tip over completely. Then
we rode camels (in a quick circle), sandboarded (the SLOWEST activity I’ve ever
done… you had to try really hard to move at all down the sand), got some henna
tattoos, smoked some sheesha, ate some dates, watched a girl belly dance,
talked with the nice Indian family we sat next to, ate a barbeque dinner, and
went home. It was definitely worth the money for all that was included.
Then, finally, that Thursday
morning, I journeyed home. Weirdly enough, the entire thing feels like it
already didn’t happen. The strangest part is, it feels like that area of the
world doesn’t even exist when I’m back in America. Southeast Asia is almost never in the news. Besides the few
Facebook messages I’ve exchanged with my students, I have no idea what my
students are up to. People just don’t talk about it much here, or if they do,
it’s because they know a friend’s mother’s sister once travelled to Vietnam for vacation. It isn’t widely explored by
Americans, but hopefully this blog post helps make it sound slightly more
do-able, because it is insanely cheap
to travel around Southeast Asia (even for a month), and just as importantly, it
will be eye-opening and different from any other trip you take in your entire
life.
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