It's All Coming Back to Me Now

Lately I've been struggling to get out of bed to get to school and I take an extra deep breath before I walk into each classroom to face a room full of rowdy students. I find myself daydreaming for the summer days when I was globetrotting across Asia and exploring new places. Thank goodness this weekend we have our first break in the semester - a four day weekend - holler! Nell and I are off to the island of Koh Mak, a very small island in the Trat province near Koh Chang. If the Google Images of the island weren't enough to convince me, I discovered that every beach bungalow for rent seems to feature its own hammock outside - sign me up!

To reminisce a bit on my summer of freedom, I put together a video of all of my trips in the Tour de Asia - Thailand, Cambodia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam - it's all coming back to me now! Check it out below...

Summer Vacation, Asia Style

Starring: Nell Riccio, Meghan Hart, Emily Rall, Amy Wallace, and heaps of cool locals. 

Song: "Go Do" by Jonsi

Summer Vacation: Asia Style from Sarah Rall on Vimeo.

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam: Two Motorbikes, Two Girlfriends

The next morning we were on the move once again, this time via bus from Phnom Penh to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam.  Thankfully, this border crossing was much easier and because we had secured our Visas in advance all we had to do was walk across the border and get back on the bus.  As soon as we entered the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City we were swamped by motorbikes.  I had heard that Vietnam was full of them, but HCMC has entire lanes dedicated to motorbikes.  Also, the amount of stuff that people can carry on their motorbikes will blow your mind, I saw people riding along with: a refrigerator, 10 large car tires, 3 small children and a dog, it's amazing that these bikes can stay upright.  We were also told by our guide that motorbikes are a good sign of status in HCMC, if you have a good motorbike, you have a beautiful girlfriend.  And...if you have 2 motorbikes, you have 2 girlfriends! : )

I won a Twitter contest the day before we left for our trip thanks to Art of Backpacking for a $200 hotel voucher that goes very far in Vietnam, so we got to stay in a nice hotel in perfect location in HCMC. While in HCMC we sampled all of the local delicacies (well, not dog meat or fried baby birds) including fresh pastries and baguettes, Pho noodle soup, crushed rice dishes, and lots of iced coffee. One of my favorite things about the city was the process involved in crossing the street, there are no stoplights so cars, food carts, cyclos, and motorbikes are coming at you from all angles.  The best strategy is just to start walking and assume that people will swerve to avoid you, and if you're feeling local just put out your hand up and bat the cars away.  We also relied on the locals to escort us across the street, we would wait until someone came up and then just kind of stalk them across the street - it worked out great! We also took a cyclo tour and had fun sitting back and watching the bikes zoom by while we checked out the Post Office, the Opera House, and Notre Dame Cathedral.

One day we took a trip to the War Remnants Museum - an extremely interesting experience to see the Vietnam War presented from the Vietnam perspective.  As an American, you can't walk through this museum and not feel a tremendous amount of guilt.  Reading about the atrocities that occurred in Vietnam during the war and seeing it presented through such gruesome photographs and personal stories was a very difficult thing.  It was especially hard to walk through the section dedicated to the victims of the Agent Orange chemical attacks by the American forces, and to learn that people are still being born with birth defects and disabilities because of the chemicals spread over 30 years ago.

On our last day in Vietnam we signed up for a tour of the Mekong Delta.  For $10 we took a boat ride along the Mekong, checked out a coconut candy plant, took bike rides around a local village, had locals take us down the Mekong canals by canoe, and got to pose for a photo with a boa constrictor - or some version of a very large snake. It was really interesting to see how people live in the Delta region and to be able to see what life is like in the Vietnam countryside. Up next: off to explore some SARs!

Tour de Asia by the numbers...

I have returned from part 1 of my epic summer adventure! It was a whirlwind trip with two of my best friends that was full of delicious food, beautiful scenery, crazy characters, lots of shopping, immigration lines, jazzercise, Asian beer brands, florescent body paint, dim sum, tuk-tuks, flash mob dances, tour guides, and jumping shots. Sadly, it ended this morning with a tearful good-bye to Megh at the Hong Kong airport, but it was so much fun having a visitor from the US and checking out so many amazing places together, definitely a trip I'll remember forever.

I'll post some more details on each stop later, but for now here's a breakdown by the numbers of my 3 week jaunt around Asia:

• 3: Countries visited.  Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam.
• 2: Special Administrative Regions (SARs) visited. That would be Macau and Hong Kong, which are SARs of China. 
• 10: Cuisines sampled.  While my life in Thailand revolves around rice or noodles, the rest of Asia sure has a lot to offer.  I ate some of the best meals of my life in the past 3 weeks, including a few Michelin starred hot spots.  It was definitely a treat for the taste buds! We tried out some Cambodian, French, Vietnamese, Chinese (Cantonese), Italian, American, Thai, Mexican, Australian, Portuguese - delish! 
• 16: Passport stamps added. With lots of back and forth and in and out for the odd day trips, the trip to Bangkok a few weeks back to add pages to my passport certainly proved to be necessary. 
• 13: Modes of transportation.  Tuk-Tuk. Cyclo. Minivan. Chartered Bus. Longtail Boat. Airplane. Ferry. Cab. Bicycle. Canoe. Songtow. Car. Elephant. 
• 1: Number of poisonous snakes held. Yep. For some reason we decided to take a photo with a boa constrictor. Booyeah! 
• 348: Impromptu singing sessions.  Megh and I tested our harmonization skills and Nell attempted to tune us out but joined in with the occasional high note, for some reason we were human jukeboxes for the entire trip, not necessarily a bad thing in the land of karaoke. 
• 5: Currencies used. To put our singing skills to good use, we decided to make up a song for every currency: Thailand - "I like big BAHT and I cannot lie" (Sir Mix-A-Lot). Cambodia: "I've got RIEL" (J-LO and Ja Rule). Vietnam: "Let me see that DONG." (Sisqo). Hong Kong: "DOLLAR, Dolla bills y'all" (Wyclef and Akon).  Macau: "Who's down with MOP? Yeah you know me" (Naughty by Nature). 
• 5: Types of accommodation. From the room full of dead creatures in Koh Kong to the 3-floor private apartment in Phnom Penh, we definitely hit some highs and lows in our choices of accommodations.  There were mosquito nets, hotel slippers, overnight buses, dead cockroaches, bunk beds, cold water showers, beachfront views, t-shirts as towels, and outdoor toilets. 
• 896: Pictures taken. My camera ran out of memory the very last night of the trip -success! Here's a very small sample and a couple of my favorite shots from the trip. 

What time is it? Summertime! It's our vacation...

Summer has arrived! (Yes, the title of this post does reference a song from High School Musical, mai pen rai.)  Although the 90+ daily temperatures that seem to stay in Suphanburi year-round might lead one to think otherwise, there is an actual summer in Thailand, school is out and vacation is on!

I've had a most excellent adventure living in Thailand the past 5 months, (I can't believe it's been that long), and now the time has come for the real travels to get started.  After 2 weeks of teaching summer classes to a few of the students, I'm packing up my big backpack and hitting the road.  Here's a quick glance at my itinerary over the next 5 weeks:

Starting this Friday: Megh gets here (so, so excited)! Checking out Suphan, a day in Bangkok, and then on to one of Thailand's many islands, Koh Chang. From there we head to Sihanoukville and Penom Penh in Cambodia before crossing another border and heading back to Vietnam to explore Ho Chi Minh City.  The final destination on our tour is Hong Kong.  Nell and I get back to Thailand on April 5th and on April 7th my sister Emily arrives (again, so, so excited!) and we're off to Southern Thailand to dive in Khao Lak and camp on Maya Bay before heading North to Chiang Mai for Songkran and then back to Cambodia to see Angkor Wat before returning to Suphan for more summer classes.

CRAZINESS! 


I'm so blessed to have the opportunity to see all of these amazing places.  I'm super excited to see more of Asia, take on this continent with my two favorite redheads, hang out with my sister, eat new food, do some serious snorkeling, and check out night markets around Asia.   While I'm gone I'll try to post updates when possible, and prayers for safe travel would be much appreciated.

Until then, I've put together a video of some of the sights and sounds of Thailand from my first 5 months.  This is my first attempt with iMovie, so don't expect too much, but enjoy!


Sanuk in Thailand from Sarah Rall on Vimeo.

Vietnam: Thai Tour Group Style

Last week I was living the dream. I was part of an Asian tour group, to an Asian country, complete with matching bucket hats and luggage tags and a 20 hour bus ride bursting with karaoke.  Although the tour guide only spoke Vietnamese and Thai and I could not understand (mai kow jai) a lot of what was being said, I still immensely enjoyed my experience in Vietnam.  As soon as we drove into Vietnam from Laos I was blown away by how beautiful it was, and also, how different it was from Thailand.  I guess I was expecting it to be "same same but different" since it is a fellow Southeast Asian country, but right from the start I realized it was no place like home.  The people, the language, the food, the currency, the music - it was all new. We stuck around central Vietnam, and I'm already itching to go back and see the Northern and Southern parts of the country, but here's some of the highs and lows from the trip to Hue, Da Nang and Ha Noi:

Highs:

• Hoi An: I am obsessed with this town.  From the Ancient City (a UNESCO World Heritage Site) to the amazing markets and streets flooded with custom design clothing shops to the French bakery that sold chocolate croissants, a-ma-zing.  This was definitely my favorite stop, the market was full of people and bursting with color (delicious fruit! silk lanterns! fresh flowers!) and I definitely dropped some serious Baht/Dong/Dollars there (Vietnam accepts all three currencies).  
• Dipping my toes in the South China Sea: Growing up in landlocked Missouri (unless you count the Muddy Mississippi) I've always had a deep love for oceans, and one of my favorite things is to get my feet wet and watch the waves.  We arrived at our hotel in Da Nang pretty late, but the moon was the perfect light for a little adventure to the beach.  After spending a few minutes trying to figure out exactly which body of water we were in, I was happy to enjoy the moment and listen to the waves as they rushed ashore. 
• Motorcycle city: I had heard that Vietnam was full of bikes and motorcycles, but I didn't expect to be that impressed because Thailand has a ton as well, little did I know the number of bikes in Thailand pales in comparison to Vietnam, the streets were teeming with two-wheeled forms of transportation, even the Vietnam version of a tuk-tuk looks like a bike with a wheelchair seat strapped on the front. It made for some scary moments in the market where I thought I might lose a foot or two while trying to purchase a conical rice-paddy hat, but luckily, I survived. 
• Shopping spree: Traveling with 80 Thai teachers from school only added to the greatness of this trip, it was so fun to interact with all of them outside of school when they often seem so intense.  They really let loose on this trip, and I quickly learned that Thai tours are all about three things: eating, shopping, and bathroom breaks.  Our bus made stops every hour or so to fulfill one of these needs.  I wasn't exactly planning on going wild at the markets, but what can I say? I was inspired by my fellow teachers and their excellent bargaining skills.  My apartment floor is currently covered with gifts I picked up for my family and friends (and myself, let's be honest) and I don't even know how to begin to distribute them. 

The Lows:

Apparently Vietnam imports bananas from Laos.

• Bus time: there was a lot (a lot, a lot) of time spent on the bus. I could barely walk straight when I finally arrived back in Suphan at 4am on Sunday.  While the roadside scenery in Laos and Vietnam was beautiful, captivating and so vastly different than anything I'd seen before, it was hard to appreciate after 20 hours of full blast Thai tunes and the tour guide yelling dirty jokes in Thai into the microphone.
• America's history in Vietnam: When we first entered Vietnam and the sprawling hills, everything I'd learned in my history classes about the tough battle fields of Vietnam was suddenly so realistic- huge hills, dense forest, winding roads, etc.  Our tour guide pointed out as we were rounding one curve that there were no tall trees in the area because they had been destroyed by America's bombs during the war.  It was hard not to feel guilty.  We also had the opportunity to check out the Vinh Moc tunnels in Hue, a village created 30 meters underground to shelter people from the bombs.  Amazingly, 60 families lived in these tunnels and 17 women gave birth there!  Luckily, the underground villages were never hit by America's bombs.

Striking a pose at the Vietnam/Laos Border

Sa-nguan Ying Teachers!