The three of us set out by foot from the roadside, sharing a backpack between us and lugging over a dozen liters of water for the two-day jungle trek. Our guide, Pen, a young Lao man, led the way up the dirt road on into the jungle, informing us at the first little river crossing… Read More Stepping Back in Time
We left late on a Friday night, freed from school obligations by the impending midterms week which arrived in conjunction with the May 1 holiday, and instead came into Kuala Lumpur late, where we whiled away our 8 hour layover at the food court cafeteria under some fluorescent lighting. After this seeming eternity we boarded… Read More Laos!
The second portion of our trip in Guangxi Province began in Longsheng, the winding riverside town that operated as our main operations base. With a map drawn on a napkin and the advice that it would take 11 hours to reach the Longji Titian, some the the most famous rice terraces in China, Andrew and… Read More The (short) Long March
Due to a combination of a three-day weekend and our amazing foresight as teachers to ask for an extra day off on either end of said weekend, my co-teacher Andrew and I were able to escape the increasingly warm and humid confines of Shenzhen to journey out into the Chinese countryside. Our destination was Guangxi… Read More 我的休假在广西省/My trip to Guangxi Province
From the airport in Krabi we bade farewell to Thailand and journeyed southern on to Singapore, the glittering city at the end of the Malay peninsula, and one of the only first-world level stops on our trip. We got in late night and hopped a cab into Little India, where we haggled with our hotel… Read More Last stop: Singapore
Our last stop in Thailand was the island of Ko Phi Phi, a small hilly strand of land surrounded by the sea in the south of Thailand. The area is part of a marine national park and as such development is ‘limited’ to the largest of the islands, though the extent of the development is… Read More Middle of Somewhere
If it hasn’t been clear already, the whole of Southeast Asia seems to be washed over in a massive trade of tourists, coming both from its nearby neighbors and the Western countries, driving up costs along the way and at times souring an experience. If there is a midpoint for all of this, it is… Read More At the Epicenter: Bangkok
Hours later we arrived into Siem Reap, which is in essence a large boomtown perched on the northern shores of the Tonle Sap. It is a tourism center of Cambodia and this is evident in the many, many, many Western faces crowding the city center’s pleasant streets and the global assortment of restaurants. Not to… Read More Onwards to Angkor
We boarded an early morning bus headed out of Saigon to Cambodia’s largest city, Phnom Penh. The drive was nice and slow, moving along through the countryside and across smoothly paved roads making for a pleasant enough ride fueled by pistachios and choco-pies while watching the water buffalo outside. Near the end of the ride… Read More A Holiday in Cambodia
Leaving Hanoi, we hopped rides on the back of a pair of motos whose ambitious drivers careened around slower vehicles, in a race against time to get us to the train station. We boarded our 30-hour train bound for the bottom end of the country, prepared for a 2 night and 1 day excursion down… Read More Saigon: Where Americans don’t get stared at
Zak Abroad 