This morning I woke up at 4:15am and hired a moto driver to take me to a hilltop temple named Phnom Bakheng to see the sunrise. As I climbed up the hill over crumbling rocks and misplaced boulders it became obvious that I was a bit early for sunrise. I was the first person on…
The rest of my photos from Vietnam are up in the gallery for your enjoyment. I think you will agree that the design photos are especially fabulous. Vietnamese posters were much more prevailent in the South and used a style that the Russian Constructivists would have used if they were working in the 1970’s.
After nearly three months of travel it was time to hit the beach. I am not a beach-lover really, but I decided the southern town of Sihanoukville would be a nice place to relax from traveling for a few days. I arrived in the late afternoon after a five hour bus ride and decided to…
I?ve heard that Phnom Penh is a rough place. Cambodia has been through so much, so recently, that I was surprised to see any kind of prosperity or Westernization. It turned out that the Cambodian people go on with their day, remembering the past but looking forward to a bright future filled with tourists? dollars.…
Saigon (AKA Ho Chi Minh City) contains about three million motorbikes. Between the bikes, tuk tuks, cyclos and buses it?s a pretty busy place. We knew about the fall of Saigon and the airlifts off of the American Embassy in the 1970?s which is why it?s amazing that the locals are so welcoming to American…
I’ve been hearing a lot of griping lately about my sketchbook section not being up. Just for you guys I stayed in Saigon a few extra days holed up in my room resizing images and coding the pages. I can’t tell if the hotel maids are amused by me or just annoyed. In any case,…
I’ve been heading South through Vietnam for the past three weeks. My cousin flew in from Chicago to travel with me so I’ve been a bit busy riding motorbikes, sailing around Halong Bay and getting 3 piece green suits made to update my site. New blog posts are on the way but in the meantime…
The first thing that anyone mentions when talking about Hoi An is the clothes. The town started out with a few tailor shops but as it?s reputation grew more tailors opened to cater to the increasing number of tourists. Now there are hundreds of tailors and droves of tourists coming to town just to get…
We flew into Hue to save ourselves the 12-hour train ride. I wasn?t quite sure that my cousin (who?s over six feet tall) would fit into a sleeper compartment so the 6:30am flight from Ha noi was a sacrifice he was willing to make. Hue was the seat of the Vietnamese government up until Ho…
My train from Sa Pa was faster than I like–arriving in Hanoi at 4am. I stumbled out of the train half asleep and sat on the dark corner outside the station until daybreak. The moto drivers were very confused by me but I didn?t want to speed off on a motorcycle in the dark when…
Sa Pa is a fairly small town surrounded by mountains near the Vietnamese border. Leaving China was a bit shocking, even though there were many similar minority groups it felt very different. The Vietnamese and Chinese majorities act and treat foreigners very differently. A much larger amount of people spoke English as soon as I…
I really cornered myself in the Yunnan Province. The province?s main city, Kunming, is quite large but outside of the main highway between Dali and Kunming the roads are rough and slow. The area I was in was much closer to Laos and Myanmar than the Vietnamese border I wanted to cross. My options were…
It?s hard to believe that I?ve been travelling for two months straight. In the grand scheme of things it hasn?t been long at all, but I imagine that it must seem like an eternity to most people back home (especially my mom). Halloween passed with no fanfare this year. People who know me well will…
After a bumpy 12-hour night bus from Kunming to Jinghong I had finally arrived in my last destination in China–the Xishuangbanna Region. My main reason for coming here was to see the ethnic minorities in the smaller towns. Jinghong, a ?modern? Chinese city, was my base since most buses originate from there. It?s streets are…
I can now say that I?ve traveled by hard seat in China. Hard seat is basically the lowest class of travel by train. The seats aren?t terribly hard–they could be wood. But 7 hours sitting on a bench in-between two middle age Chinese men and across from a couple that fought the entire trip was…
Dali wasn?t somewhere I really wanted to see but it seemed like a good enough place to stop. Only 3 hours from Lijiang, the minibus passed large fields with people working, picking crops by hand. The actual town doesn?t have much to see, only a few town gates which are being recreated (along with the…
Lijiang is a smaller town dubbed ?the Venice of China? because of it?s many canals, stone bridges and cobblestone alleys. The journey here was interesting–a 12-hour train ride from Emei into the Yunnan Province followed by a breathtaking and often terrifying 8-hour bus ride over the mountains. The usual bidding war over me, the only…
It?s not really getting any warmer as I head south. I?m still carrying around the coat I bought in Xi?an and the scarf and hat I bought in Xiahe. My first short stop from Chengdu was Leshan, a town which is overpriced and moving as fast as it can toward Westernization. Towns like Chengdu and…
Chengdu isn?t somewhere where there are a lot of sites to see, but it?s a large city on my way South to the Yunnan Province. From Xiahe I took the same 6-hour bus ride back to Lanzhou followed by a train ride that lasted over 20 hours. On the bus I sat next to a…
Hopefully nobody was too worried that I was somehow “detained” in China. I am now in Chegdu and it has been a bit more difficult than Japan to connect to the internet (and upload files) so it has taken me a while to post new entries. I am backdating them so please check out entries…