After 10 days of traveling around India’s Golden Triangle I think we might have an inkling of what it’s like to be a celebrity! Apparently, having your picture taken with a foreigner is a thrill, and we were very good-natured about it but wow, is it weird, especially when they want you to hold their…
View More
Our time in SE Asia is drawing to a close, but before we left we spent some time checking out the seaside city of Nha Trang. The Chams were the original inhabitants of Vietnam. Between the 2nd and 17th centuries, their kingdom extended from the coastline inland across much of modern-day central and southern Vietnam….
View More
If you need a reprieve from the oppressive heat in Southeast Asia, may we suggest heading to the highlands of south-central Vietnam and the city of Da Lat. Nicknamed “The City of Eternal Spring,” average temperatures are between 14 and 23°C (57 to 73°F), although April, the hottest month, has occasionally seen daytime temperatures as…
View More
In case you were worried about us following our last post, wherein I alluded to a potential problem with overstaying our visas, we are not in a Cambodian prison, nor were we unceremoniously deported and barred from ever re-entering the country. We were fined – $10 US / $13.50 CAD each. Fortunately, Howard still had…
View More
Much of our time in Cambodia this year was retracing our steps from a trip seven years ago. Kampot was completely new for us. Roughly 5 km (3 miles) inland from the Gulf of Thailand lies the riverside community of Kampot, the capital of Kampot Province. During French colonial administration it had been the capital…
View More
Seven years ago we had a one-day whirlwind tour of the Angkor temples. Now, as full-time travelers, we’re back for a more in-depth exploration. In the first century CE, Indian culture began taking root in much of Southeast Asia as more and more Hindu and Buddhist traders settled in the region. While the term “kingdom”…
View More
Why, you might ask, are we back in Southeast Asia after we made such a big deal about the heat in several of our posts last year? Well, a too-good-to-pass-up opportunity for a cruise from Singapore to Athens (with stops in Sri Lanka, India, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and Israel) presented itself last summer; this…
View More
After seven months in Asia we decided to make central Thailand our final destination, with stops in Bangkok and Hua Hin (Wha Hen), in particular because Bangkok is an airline hub, plus who doesn’t like a bit of beach time! Bangkok and Hua Hin are located in the area that was once part of the…
View More
For years Hong Kong has been one of those cities I always thought looked very cool, but never thought I’d visit. We originally had scheduled to be in Thailand from mid-July to early September, but due to some erroneous guidance from the Thai consulate in Vancouver that Whitney wrote about in our Chiang Mai report…
View More
Similar to neighbouring Laos, the area of northern Thailand was settled by Tai immigrants from China. In the mid-13th century CE several smaller kingdoms, scattered throughout the region that would later become Burma (Myanmar), Laos and the Thai highlands, were unified as the Kingdom of a Million Rice Fields, the Lan Na Kingdom. The royal…
View More