To finish our time in Thailand, we had eight nights on the beautiful island of Koh Samui. Being the budget travel lovers that we are, we bought our bus tickets at the movie theatre in Bangkok (a little random, but it worked) and then headed on a 13 hour bus/ferry/bus/songtaew combo that brought us to…
Month: December 2013
Shopping in Bangkok
We took an overnight bus from Chiang Mai to Bangkok, where we headed to our hotel before exploring the shopping metropolis of Bangkok. We spent hours exploring the massive malls of Siam Paragon, going to the movies and shopping nearly every inch of the massive MBK mall (pictured above). We were exhausted after all of…
A weekend in Pai
We decided to take a weekend family trip with Reuben’s sister Sacha to Pai (pronounced Bye) – a cute little town in the hills. It was quite a road to get up there – hundreds of curves later we were very happy to find ourselves at Coffee in Love where we watched the sun set…
A thousand floating lanterns
Sacha invited us to join her and her friends at Yi Peng, which is a Buddhist festival where floating lanterns are released to make merit. Our adventure started at 3pm, when 15 of us headed to the university where the festival was going to be. Because it is a Buddhist festival, we were required to…
A month in Chiang Mai
What else did we do in Chiang Mai aside from spend time with Partners and with Claire, Doug, Olivia and Sacha? Well, we connected with our friends Matt, Michelle and Josiah again (last spotted in Colorado) and met new friends Kim and Kenneth who are working on an HIV/AIDS project called Radical Grace. We were…
Spending time with Partners
We spent November in Chiang Mai, sharing our time between Claire and Doug’s house and Sacha’s house – we feel really fortunate to have such amazing friends and family hosting us. Both of us have been to Chiang Mai lots of times, so we didn’t do many typical tourist things but instead spent our time…
Over the border into Thailand
We had a long day of travel to get over the border into Thailand – firstly a bus that took us to the border in Cambodia (and averaged 30km an hour over 6 hours…extremely bumpy roads!) then a mini van to Trat, and then another mini van to Rayong. There, our day’s travel was rewarded…
Koh Rong – a little piece of paradise
We took a mini bus from Kampot to Sihanoukville, where we transferred to a two hour boat trip which took us to the stunning island paradise of Koh Rong. Koh Rong is pretty basic – restaurants and guest houses run on generators, there are no cars or roads and there isn’t much to do but…
Down by the riverside in Kampot
We spent two nights at the delightful riverside town of Kampot. We stayed at Olly’s Place, where for the total of $5 USD a night we had our own grass shack, a communal area right on the riverfront to hang out in (pictured above) and could rent a scooter right next door. We spent our…
Cambodia’s memorials
We spent five nights in Phnom Penh, mostly because we were waiting for our visas for Thailand (four days was the absolute quickest we could get them due to the King’s birthday, and we needed visas because our next stop was two months in Thailand). We had originally planned only three nights there, but we…
Meandering Kiwis 