Topic Archive: 'Travel'

Finally posted the itinerary and photos from our summer trip to Quebec & Ontario.
Activities included:

Visiting friends
Cycling 100 miles of scenic converted rail line
Genealogy research in rural Quebec
Consumption of many and varied animal parts (not to mention: chocolate, cheese, poutine, et al.)
Ice wine tasting
Quebecois Folk music concerts
Watching Beluga whales from the breakfast table
Niagara falls in a [...]

We’re back home. (Boo.)
We’ll post our photos as soon as we sort through [all 1500 of] them.
Update: the photos have been posted.

Heading to Phuket airport now. A mere 32 hours after we board our plane (Phuket -> Bangkok -> Tokyo -> JFK), we’ll be back in snowy New York.
For this final travelblog entry, I wish I could write something witty or amusing. But ending our trip has me so bummed that all I have [...]

Today’s plan is to:

have breakfast on our private veranda
beachcomb
bask by the pool
eat as much coconut ice cream as possible
get a beachside Thai massage
order fruit drinks by the coconut-full
lament that this is our last day here

We snorkeled the Similan Islands today. Remarkably, the breathtaking underwater landscape we saw (heaps of beautifully colored fish and coral) really did resemble the glossy posters in the tour company’s sales office!

Traveler’s Tip of the Day: When getting your hair cut in Thailand, don’t ask for it to be cut “short.”

After a few more hours of kayaking this morning (had some great wildlife sightings), we headed to Khao Lak for the final leg of our trip. We’re now at a 5-star resort just north of town, on a sparsely populated tract of white-sand beach. The contrast from last night is stark–we no longer [...]

Besides kayaking, we’ve been doing some trekking here. Today’s hike was through a deep limestone cave, through which two different streams run. Thousands of bats, dozens of cave crickets, several large spiders, a few cave toads, and water deeper than our heads. At some points, I had to swim with one hand, [...]

Today we arrived at our quaint “floating bungalow” in the remotest corner of Khao Sok national park. This is the third bamboo bungalow we’re staying at on this trip–and not the only one that hasn’t been on solid ground.

When we checked in for our flight to Phuket, the boarding passes which were printed had the wrong destination on them. No problem; the check-in attendant just crossed out the wrong destination and wrote in the correct one. I considered crossing that out in turn and writing “Hawaii” instead, but Sara convinced me [...]

I spent the day at the Preak Toal bird sanctuary. (Or, more accurately, I spent the day traveling to and from the Preak Toal bird Sanctuary today.) Sara was sick, so I went alone, and alone I was: the only other visitors were a group of Cambodian university students on a science class [...]

It was a fun day, but it’s been an unpleasant evening. Sara has some nasty food poisoning–from some jackfruit she snacked on this afternoon, we think. Doesn’t look like it’ll let up any time soon.

Last-minute change of plans this morning–we took a detour to visit Beng Mealea, the “Jungle Temple,” which was only opened to tourists in 2003 (after it was cleared of land mines). Today, with the native flora encroaching into and intertwining with the half-toppled stone structures, the temple looks like something out of an Indiana [...]

The ruins of Angkor are… overwhelming. We spent the entire day exploring it by remork (cousin of the tuk-tuk), and we’ve barely scratched the surface. The thing is, we haven’t even seen the main temple yet (which is a bit like visiting Agra and not seeing the Taj Mahal first)–we’re saving that for [...]

Just arrived in Cambodia–how different from its neighbors!
I’m not sure which of today’s events is more exciting:

using our Cambodian e-visas (ugh, people with regular visas got through immigration faster than we did; though, presumably, they spent more time/effort getting their visas than we did–at least they better have!), or
the delicious french fries we had with [...]

Returned to Luang Prabang today by public bus. Tomorrow, we fly to Cambodia.
This afternoon, I finished reading Cambodia: Report From a Stricken Land, which almost made me cry–partly because Cambodia’s past 30 years have been so horrific, and partly because all of those horrors were man-made, and avoidable. I’m feeling emotional about visiting [...]