Discovery and Rediscovery I’m now back on May hilltop and after a very comfortable 8 hours of sleep in my own bed and a wake-up call from Buddy standing on my shoulder to lick my face, I am pleased to be in rediscovery mode this morning. The most important news this morning is that I managed to lose 8 pounds during my three weeks away. I suspect this was through a combination of eating Asian…
The Long Goodbye Today we are in Cambodia, tonight we will be in Bangkok, and tomorrow we will be back on our hilltop. The flight over to Asia took us 32 hours door-to-door with 20 hours of that in the air. The flight east tomorrow will take 15 hours in the air you should require about 22 hours at most door-to-door. But we are really starting our journey back today, so take that into account.…
Angkor What? There are some places that every tourist seems to go or have on their bucket list to go to. Such seems to be the case with Angkor Wat. Last year when we were at Abu Simbel in Southern Egypt, very near the Sudan border and literally at the far reaches of most touristic travels I have made, they had a panorama on the walls of the visitor center that showed the placement of…
Good Evening Vietnam It’s our last day in Hanoi and the weather continues to be overcast and a tad chilly (50s), which is not do bad for touring, but might not be the best Chamber of Commerce conditions to make you love a place and put it on a must-return list. This trip has not rocked my world like Egypt and Jordan did last year, but since I am most inspired by antiquities, I should…
The Heart of Darkness 125 years ago, William Conrad wrote The Heart of Darkness about a voyage up the Congo River (not named, but assumed) to meet up with a trader, Kurtz, who had gone native. It is the story of colonial rule in the darkest sense. The story was adapted during the Vietnam War and made into a movie by Francis Ford Coppola into the quintessential war movie called Apocalypse Now. What made these…
Good Morning Vietnam Good morning, Vietnam (with fond remembrances of Robin Williams). Before heading off to a long 3-hour bus ride to Ha Long Bay, on the northern part of Haiphong Harbor, in the Gulf of Tonkin, (all names that invoke 1960s newsreels), Mike and I went out to find an ATM. The streets of Hanoi in daylight are every bit as ragged as they seemed last night. Suddenly, this trip has changed from a…
Better Call Jane and John While on this trip it is impressive that we have big flatscreen TVs in every room, but the evening movie selection is not always so broad. Good thing I loaded up my iPad with the 5-seasonal series that represents a prequel to Breaking Bad, called Better Call Saul. It is a finely crafted story about a lawyer’s (actually two lawyers’) slippery ethical path and the unrequited love that accompanies it…
Landlocked in Laos The country of Laos sits right in the middle of the southeast Asia peninsula. To the north is China and Myanmar to the south is Thailand and Cambodia and to the east is Vietnam. This is a landlocked country that is not really an organically grown entity, but is rather the construct of the French colonialists who decided that in between all of those countries there was still room for one more…
Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh Today we are leaving the fun-loving, R&R haven of Bangkok and heading back into the jungle of my youth. No, I did not fight in the Vietnam War, I was just young enough to avoid that nightmare, but not so young that the draft and all that it meant in its life-changing transition did not touch me. While Jim Morrison was telling everyone to “Come on, come on, come on…
Bangin’ Out Bangkok Today was our day to spend an entire tour bangin’ out the sites of Bangkok. Unlike the last time I was here, many years ago, Tuk-Tuks and mopeds no longer dominate the streets the way they used to. There are still two types of Tuk-Tuks in Bangkok, the kind that the common working people of Bangkok might use as an economical way to get places where public transportation can’t get them, and…