Photos of Thailand.

The Grand Palace and the Temple of the Emerald Buddha. Bangkok's most famous site.


Me and a couple of friends at the Grand Palace.


Sunrise on Ko Pha Ngan beach.


The full moon party starts while the moon is still waxing gibbous. We prefered the parties beforehand, because on full moon night all the tourists from Ko Samui arrived, and packed out the beach. Here are some dancers at dawn before full moon night.


We would usually arrive at the beach around 11pm, and party it up until about 4am. Then we'd go back to our hotel to clean up and shower, before heading back to the beach for sunrise, then breakfast. Here we are all spiffy looking as the party winds down.


Had Rin was full of trauma centers and doctors clinics. The most common injuries among tourists were wiping out on their rented scooters or stepping on broken glass. It was ridiculous how many people we saw bandaged up or on crutches.

We're back in Bangkok. We took the boat from Ko Pha Ngan to Surat Thani, and then the night train to Bangkok. We picked up our tickets to Cairo/Montreal this AM. We paid $750 CDN each for a one way trip from Bangkok to Montreal with an 18 day stopover in Egypt. Holy smokes, what a deal!

OK, plans for Egypt include Cairo, Luxor, Aswan, Abu Simbel, and the Sinai peninsuala. We are keen to check out the burning bush of Moses fame.

Thai beaches are a fine place to plan a trip of biblical proportions. Bangkok is an exciting place to prepare. Photos soon.

Cookbook photos on the world wide internet!

As some of you may know, Hania took cooking classes in Japan from a friend of ours, Sugako Kusakabe. They cooked, I took photos of all the food, and then we all ate.

Now those recipes and photos are appearing in the Nikkei newspaper. You can view them in the online edition on May 21, 28 and on June 4, 11, 18, 25. Check out:
http://www.nikkei.co.jp/kansai/

You’ll need to navigate to the specific page, but the newspaper is all in Japanese, so treat it as a game when you try look for the page. This is what life in Japan was like for us – a big puzzle to solve. Happy searching.

My mother tells me that I haven't written a post since May 6. My apologies, but we've been on a travelling roller coaster ride. Lots to tell.

Bangkok was fun for the 3 days we spent there. I showed Hania the sights, as this was my second visit to the city - the Grand Palace, Wat Pho, Wat Arun, checking out markets and cruising down the river. Bangkok is still as polluted as last time, but I was surprised at how much the prices had gone up. We also visited travel agents, but we didn't have any luck booking onward flights.

So it was, we took yet another sleeper train to the south of Thailand, to Chumphon, and then hopped on a ferry to Ko Phangan, home of the legendary full moon party. Needless to say, we partied like rock stars for the next few day. The moon was already waxing gibous when we arrived in Hadd Rin, so I spent the next 3 nights out on the beach staying up until sunrise. The actual full moon night was overcrowded with tourists arriving from Ko Samui, but the previous nights were a magical blend of natural beauty, happy travellers, and a heck of a party.

Now we're at a quieter part of the island, at a place that has a cottage feel to it. Our cliffside bungalow has a huge deck and a hammock taboot. At night we open all the windows and sleep under the mosquito net, listening to all the night sounds. The place is called the Sanctuary. It also offers spa services, and something called colonic cleansing (which has led to lots of jokes and sniggering.) The weather has recently turned overcast, but we're still enjoying the chillaxin' here.

Internet services on the island are chunky and slow. We spent much of the last week searching for airfares on the world wide internet, a slow and frustrating process. Twice we found excellent flights, but couldn't book them because you had to be a US citizen, or they required a paper ticket which could not be mailed outside of Canada. Finally we contacted Air Egypt directly, and I'm happy to say that we have a reservation to fly to Cairo on May 28, and then to Montreal on June 15.

So yeah, we fly Egypt in a week. We are very excited! Especially after being ever so slightly stressed by the hassles in getting this flight. Our plan is a few more days on this island, then up to Bangkok to pick up our tickets, and then to Egypt. Return to Canada is set for June 15, so we'll be back in Toronto sometime at the end of June. Hoopla!

Greetings from Bangkok, the city of angels. I'm really pleased to announce that the goal of the trip has been met. We made it here all the way from Osaka, Japan by land and by sea - no air travel. We took boats, buses, trains, minivans to complete our overland journey in 65 days.

The last leg of the journey was from Chiang Mai to Bangkok, so we decided to do it in style. We took the train to Bangkok, aboard Thailand Express, first class. Had our own sleeper compartment, which was very civilized, after weeks of enduring other people's snoring and the funky smell of their feet.

So the big question is what next? Our finances are OK, but we only have about 6 weeks left to travel. The next stop will definitely be some Thai beaches, but which coast to hit? Maybe both. Then there is the question of whether to visit Angkor Wat in Cambodia - all reports are that it's an amazing place to go, but it's really gotten touristy and expensive. Right now we're not quite in the right head space for that, but maybe in a few weeks.

Other options are going down to Malaysia and Singapore, but I'm not sure how much more constant travelling I want to do. R&R is a priority before heading home. The big temptation is to always go a little further down the road, but at some point you have to have to cut it short and save the next country for another trip.

Today we also checked out a couple of travel agencies for flights back home. Options include flying home through Manila, Tokyo, or Frankfurt - not the most exciting stopovers. The one flight that has us excited is the possiblity of having a stopover in Cairo. We're going to ponder that option for a bit.

Here are the photos from the Gibbon experience. Like it mentioned earlier, it was a fabulous place, just needs some effort to get just exactly perfect.


On your mark, get set . . .


Whee!


Dawn over the jungle. The view from our tree house.


Two monkeys. No lice was found.

Photos of our trip to Vang Vieng. Lot's of fun to be had there.


Route 13 to Vang Vieng. A winding road through mountains.


The view from the balcony of our hotel. Notice the karsts and the beautiful people.


This is the crazy airstrip the Americans built. A popular hangout for chickens.


A view of the river in Vang Vieng.

The Gibbon Experience - probably the most mixed experience we've had on this trip. It's only been in operation about a year, and the vision behind it is brilliant. Take a forest preserve in the middle of nowhere that's home to an endangered species of monkey. Build a few treehouses 40 meters up in the canopy of the forest, and connect them all with a series of zip lines - steel cables that you attach yourself to and whiz over valleys. The longest zip line was 450 meters long, and 200 meters high. What a thrill to ride. The achievement of what's been created is outstanding.

This project has the potential to become a leading example of how eco-tourism should work, but they have a few kinks to work out. The people we met who were managing the operation were incompetent, and the staff badly trained amateurs. When you're paying $130US a night (huge in a country where you can travel for $10US a day) you have certain expectations, like first aid kits being stocked with supplies, a food box that doesn't have rotten supplies, water that doesn't run out twice during your stay, guides who don't panic when evacuating you in the middle of the night during a rainstorm. Our treehouse didn't have a fire extinguisher, and we spent 3 days telling the staff it was missing, and they kept arguing with us that it was there, but they never came by to actually check it out themselves. As we left they confirmed what we had been telling them all along - our tree house had no fire extinguisher. The basic expectation was that it would be a safe experience, and it was not.

Still, what an amazing place to spend a couple of nights, issues notwithstanding. Photos will be posted soon, and more updates to follow.

The last week or so has seen some full on travel from us. We took the slow boat up the Mekong river - a two day voyage from Luang Prabang to Huayxai, with an overnight stop in the village of Pakbeng. Cruising upriver at a gentle pace was a wonderful way to travel, watching the landscape slip by. It was our third boat trip of the journey, the other two being Shanghai to Osaka, and along the Yangtze river. On the Mekong we were occassionally passed by speedboats that did the same trip in about 7 hours. But these little deathtraps, that held about a half dozen people wearing lifejackets and crashhelmets, were not for us. Zipping upriver in a wasplike earsplitting motorboat that looked ready to flip and disintegrate at any wrong turn was not for us.

The slowboat always arrived behind scehdule and after dark, so we had to settle into whatever guesthouse we were herded into. The first in Pakbeng was a flophouse where I had to put a padlock on the door to lock it. But for $2 a night what do you expect? The second place in Huayxai was twice as good - $4 a night - but at least we had a toilet and a hot shower in our room.

So we arrived in northern Laos again, and our next stop was the rainforest preserve.