Thank You Pui, Nok & Family!

Thank you for everything Pui, Nok, Nan, Tann, and your mom for the delicious food. We had fun eating dinner with you the first time we saw you. That was the spiciest soup I've ever eaten!
It was also great to see your house and neighborhood, as well as meet Nan and your mother when we came back to Bangkok. Oh, and your yogurt was delicious!

Some colorful desserts at the market. Coconut balls and Jello cups with basil seeds.

Feeding the fish in the river. They went CRAZY when we threw in these cheesy poofs that where made for fish.

Pai

We loved Pai! A really curvy road takes you through the mountains of Northern Thailand from Chiang Mai up to Pai. It's a small, cute, hippie style, laid back town with comfy chill out spots, friendly people, and live music. The surroundings are great too. Very green and tropical. Too bad that the nice spots always come with a lot of mosquitos.

We rented a motor bike to check out the nearby hot springs that fill and heat some nice pools, rode by an elephant camp and checked out a little canyon. Not quite the Grand Canyon but it still looked kinda cool, and you can walk out on some of the narrow ridges. We didn't get to see any of the waterfalls because the dirt roads are not really drivable in the rainy season unless you wanna be sliding out right and left for 6km and get all mud splattered. Riding around on the motor bike was lots of fun though! We didn't really think about it before, even though it's obvious, but the locals have completely different shaped heads than we do. The helmets were really round, so they were super tight in the front and back, but very loose and big on the sides.

Didn't know Elephants crossed their legs...


This is a baby banana tree or something that looks like one. Some hotels offer free mini bananas for their guests. A perfect breakfast or snack any time of the day!

Chiang Mai

Find Semu!

Laos

We made a quick stop in Vientiane, but our real destination was a small town in the mountains called Luang Prabang, highly recommended by some good friends. We weren't disappointed, Luang Prabang is a great place to chill, eat and buy local crafts at the night market. Good thing we need to keep on traveling and carrying our stuff, otherwise I would have bought much more, this is Christi speaking of course ; )
The scenery of Laos was beautiful, lots of steep mountains and green landscape. It was cool to see many tiny straw hut villages along the way.


A chubby Buddha in Vientiane, the capital of Laos and also capital of French bakeries. Mmm, loving the chocolate croissants.


The view from Wat Phu Si in Luang Prabang was awesome. You get to see the Mekong river on one side and this small river on the other.




There are tons of monks in this town, here is a typical one walking with his sun umbrella. I also like the renovation scaffolding out of bamboo.



Crossing the Mekong River on a small ferry boat back to Thailand. This was a small break in our 25 hour bus ride from hell with no air conditioning. Half of it was bumpy dirt road. It was well appreciated and Semu just couldn't resist practicing with our new toy we picked up at the beginning of our trip in Hanoi.

We almost lost our Uke already by getting off the night bus half asleep. Luckily the bus station lady called the unfriendly bus driver and he turned out to be nice enough to bring it back.

The last leg of our bus journey was actually quite nice because a very friendly young Thai lady, Amber, was teaching us some new Thai words and practicing her English. KHAP KHUM KAA!!

Floating Market near Bangkok

It was fun visiting a Floating Market. The colour and variety of offered goods was just great to look at. We were surprised to see that they have cooked food as well, we were expecting just fruits and vegetables. All the cooking was done on the little boats as well. And the fruits were tasty!

Angkor Wat Temples, Cambodia

Cities on the way to Cambodia

The cities we went through on our way from the Central Coast of Vietnam to Cambodia were interesting but not that exciting so we're just gonna put some impressions here below:

A typical sea food restaurant in Nha Trang with fresh fish and other sea food and the BBQ right next to it. Semu loved the hot n spicy sea food soups.


Colorful mystery drinks at the market in Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City.


A Vietnamese lady in the typical pajama pant outfit selling litchi and grapes.



Barbecued grasshoppers spiced with chilli in Phnom Pen, Cambodia. Mmmmh delicious! Just kidding, we were too scared to try.

We also decided to book our long distance buses with the hotel travel agencies offering bus rides to everywhere instead of hassling with local transportation...it's much easier...but we wouldn't recommend the sleeper buses. Especially if you get in as the last person getting stuck in the back seat, almost getting thrown out of the seat every single time the bus hits a small bump or pot hole in the road. And believe me, there are many.

Hoi An

After a 16 hour night train ride from Ha Noi to Danang and getting harassed by different taxi drivers at at the train station, we escape to the city streets trying to find a cheaper taxi that would take us to the public bus station somewhere else in town. We got super lucky and a bus picked us up on the side of the road. Dropped us off again two minutes later so we could catch the same bus, but in the other direction. Finally after a long travel day we made it to the historic city of Hoi An.

Hoi An is super nice and kept up. Someone must really be taking care and organizing the old town part of town. It's motor-free, what a relief!
It must be the world's capital of tailored clothes stores. No joke, about 3 out of 4 stores are selling custom suits and dresses. On our last day as we were biking out to the beach we actually got side tracked and ordered some clothes for our selves. On the way back from the beach our pants & skirt were ready to be picked up. We got pretty lucky with our custom orders, they mixed up the colors and all, but in the end it all fit just fine and even looked all right : )

The beach was great with it's palm trees for much appreciated shade and the locals set up little mini "restaurants", which were a bunch of little plastic chairs (kids size) and a food cart, selling noodle soup.
The water in the South China Sea is warm like a bath tub. We were hanging out in the water for hours. SWEET.
*christi

Hanoi, Vietnam

We stayed in Hanoi, Vietnam the night before. It was a really crazy mix of old Asia style with fast paced city life. You almost have to just close your eyes to get across the street because there are never breaks in the motorcycle traffic. They just go around you as you cross. Crazy!

Making Our Own Way

OK, so we had a pretty good adventure yesterday. Well.... not good, but it was interesting.
After staying in Hanoi, we wanted to go out to the famous Ha Long Bay. There was no shortage of hotels, restaurants, and random people offering us tour packages that ranged from as low as $60 per two day tour, to $160 for the same thing. We're pretty adventurous, right? So we decided to just figure it out as we go and not book a tour. We've done that so many times, we thought it would be easy. Not so easy this time. Had trouble showing the cab driver where the bus station was because he spoke no English and didn't know how to read a map.....Had a hard time figuring out where to pay for the bus and which bus to take because nobody spoke English. One guy new the name of the town and put us on this little mini bus with no one in it and some other town name written on the front. Hmm...a bit fishy. But the air conditioning was on so we decided to wait a bit. Others finally started getting on and we said Ha Long to enough people that we were now fairly sure it was the right bus. Of course no one spoke English except this fourteen year old boy who could say, "My name Soa, where you from, how old?"
Oh, it was just great when I tried to ask him, "How long does it take to get there?"
He says, "Yes Ha Long."
"No, HOW long?"
"Yes, Ha Long," he repeats as he points down at this bus.
It gets even better when I needed to use the restroom a few minutes later. You see, this "bus" was slowing down and veering off to the side of the road every time they saw some people standing there, and then they'd yell out the name of the next town we were going to. They really wanted to fill up ALL of the seats, including the overturned plastic box on the floor. I tried explaining to the lady collecting money that I needed a restroom break. Nobody understood a word I was saying.....I resorted to mime. They still didn't get it! They just looked at me funny. Luckily they stopped to pick up more passengers after not TOO long. I just jumped out, tapped her on the shoulder, pointed to the nearby bushes, and did another little mime. Chrisi said they all started laughing when they saw me jump behind the bush.
This was the full on locals way to go, as we were finding out. Then, when we were just about to the town, the bus pulls over and everybody is trying to tell us to get off by pointing and saying Ha Long. They also pointed somewhere and said taxi. It looked like we were on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, but there were a couple taxis there so we took one and drove to the dock.
Guess what? When we got there, we found out that the boat we wanted left about an hour earlier.
We had to get a room for the night, but it turned out ok in the end. We booked a six hour tour through our hotel and had a great trip today. The place was amazing. Here are a couple photos from today: