South East Asia Travels Part 1

Hey Everyone,For those of you that don't already know, I graduated from Business School this past May and will be starting work as a Management Consultant for Booz Allen Hamilton in New York in October. When I accepted the job I realized that this would probably be the last time for a long while when I could take some serious time off so I decided to take off for three months and travel around South East Asia. I am now a little more than a month into my trip and am having a great time.

The trip started with a really long but uneventful flight from Los Angeles to Bangkok where I arrived a little before midnight. I spent a couple of days in Bangkok trying to reacquaint myself to the noises and constant motion of being in large cities in developing countries while also seeing a couple of tourist attractions including the Royal Palace. After two days in Bangkok I was off to Angkor Wat in Cambodia via the most painful busride/scam.

The busride cost about $2 and in theory was supposed to be 10 hours long, leaving Bangkok at 7:00am and arriving in Siam Reap (outside Angkor Wat) at 5:00pm. In reality the whole route was designed to milk a bunch of tourists of as much money as possible during a 16 hour fiasco. The trip started with a 6 hour bus ride to the Cambodian border where our bus just barely outpaced the children that were on their bicycles outside waving to us (the trip should have taken about 4 hours). During that leg of the journey we made a forced lunch stop at an overpriced tourist trap restaurant and once we neared the Cambodian border it was time for another stop to get Cambodian visas. At this point, rather than taking us to the Cambodian consulate directly we instead got dropped off at another tourist trap near the Consulate so we would have to get our visa's through the bus company which just happened to add an extra 20% surcharge.

From there it was off to the hustle and bustle of the land border crossing between Thailand and Cambodia which is always fun. For those of you that have never crossed a land border between two developing countries it is amazing all of the things going on and how hectic a situation it is. After about a total of 2 hours between leaving Thailand and arriving in Cambodia we were on our way again. At least for a few minutes that is until we stopped at another place where we were coerced into changing money at a moneychanger affiliated with the bus company who offered really bad rates. After yet another hour of waiting we continued on the final leg of the journey to Siam Reap.

We finally arrived in Siam Reap at around 11:00pm and were taken to a hotel outside of the town where the hotel owner tried to force us to stay in a cockroach infested room that looked like it hadn't been cleaned in a month. After a lot of arguing with the owner I along with a German guy and a French guy decided to just walk away and try and find some sort of transportation to a different hotel in town. After a few minutes we flagged down three moto drivers that took us to a Guesthouse that the French guy knew about. We arived to the guesthouse around midnight to find it locked up with no one in sight. Since our moto drivers already took off we decided to make a bunch of noise in the hope of waking the owner up. Eventually it worked and we were given a room at "Smiley's Guesthouse".

The next morning we went to Angkor Wat to see the ruins of the Khmer empire and within 5 minutes I realized that the hassle of the day before was well worth it. Angkor Wat is an area of Cambodia with dozens of temples that were constructed over a period of several hundred years by the Khmer people. The temples and palaces are some of the most incredibly massive and intricate buildings I have ever seen. It's mindblowing to imagine what some of the ruins must have looked like in their prime. Another remarkable aspect of the ruins was the way nature had started taking back what man had made with gigantic trees growing straight out of the walls of some of the temples. Without a doubt, Angkor Wat is one of the most impressive man made places I have ever seen.

After spending 3 days exploring the ruins of Angkor Wat I went to the Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia where I wandered around the town and saw a number of sites including several locations that pertained to Cambodia's recently very violent past including the killing fields and the S21 prison. S21 was a prison where basically any educated Cambodian was taken to be tortured and killed as the Khmer Rouge tried to eliminate any possibility of being overthrown. In fact, only 8 people in the course of around a decade of the prisons use made it out alive. Not the most uplifting of attractions but it was very fascinating to hear about such a dark chapter in humanities recent past.

From Phnom Penh it was off to Sihounakville to enjoy the beaches in the south of Cambodia but due to incessant rain (it is the rainy season after all) I only stayed one night before continuing on to Vietnam. One good thing about this stopover was in Sihounakville I met three British travelers (Gavin, Ellie and Tiggie) who were following a similar route to myself so we decided to join up for a while. The journey to Vietnam was via a slow boat on the Mekong river. The trip took a full day passing by really picturesque fishing villages and rice paddies before arriving in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. I spent a few days in the Mekong Delta before going up to Saigon.

Saigon was a lot of fun and it was really interesting to hear the other side of the story from the Vietnam war. It's amazing some of the atrocities commited by the US against both the people and the environment in Vietnam that are never really discussed in the US.

After Saigon I started north along the coast of Vietnam stopping in 5 different cities before arriving in Hanoi (Mui Ne, Dalat, Na Trang, Hoi An, Hue). In total I spent about 2 weeks during this part of the journey and during this time I saw some incredible places and did some really cool things. In Mui Ne I watched a flotilla of fisherman going out in what looked like wicker baskets for fishing at Dawn as well as wandered amongst some spectacular sand dunes. In Na Trang I enjoyed a beautiful beach and went SCUBA diving amongst some incredible coral reefs. In Dalat I wandered around a peaceful mountainous town and saw some really cool temples. In Hoi An I rented a moto and drove out to some ruins about 30 miles from the city past some of the most amazing landscapes imaginable. And in Hue I took a boat trip on the Perfume river visiting a number of cool temples and palaces.

The trip up the coast ended in Hanoi where I arrived 5 days ago. The next day I left for a 3 day boat trip to Halong Bay which was mindblowingly beautiful. Halong bay is made up of several thousand limestone islands and islets that makes the water an irridescent green color. That in contrast with the beautiful blue sky on the way out was remarkable and I can only hope that some of the photos I took can do it a little bit of justice. The delicious 8 course meals we were served on the boat throughout the trip weren't half bad either...

I arrived back to Hanoi yesterday and I spent the past two days exploring the city and the surrounding area. Tomorrow I will be going to take a look at Ho Chi Minh's preserved body and the former POW prison known in the US as the "Hanoi Hilton" and then on Wednesday I will be off to Bangkok to start the next part of my trip which will include Thailand, Laos, Malaysia and Singapore.

For those of you that actually made it to the end of this message I apologize that this email is so long but I have sort of been slacking and this is recapping a full month of my travels. I will try to be better at sending them off a little more frequently in the future so they will not be nearly as long.