Back in BKK

Hello all!! As I type, I'm sitting in my nice little hostel in Bangkok, listening to the fountain murmur in the courtyard and feeling the morning breeze through the open patio doors. It's nice to be back!

I left Luang Prabang after a few days and headed down to Vang Vieng, a town just down the Mekong River. Probably the oddest thing in terms of Laotian tourism, this town is known for having tons of restaurants filled with low tables and cushions and big TVs up front playing nonstop episodes of Friends. After frying my brain for a while with that, I took off on what I thought would be a simple 3 km walk to a cave I'd seen on my map. Of course, 10 minutes out I realized I'd forgotten the map, then I couldn't remember the name of the cave, so I figured I'd just find it. I walked for a loong time until I finally came to what I thought was my cave. After a swim in the cold-water lagoon, I hiked up to the mouth of the cave-- a scary, super-rocky, straight-up route. Once inside, I scrambled along the slippery rocks and admired the reclining buddha that was inside. I'm thinking to myself, 'this is a cool cave!' and then I noticed the sign in white chalk: "cave --->" So I went deeper into this gnarly mountainside until I got to the real cave-- a pitchblack (good thing I'd brought my headlamp, AC!) place with tons of cool rock formations and what seemed like no end. I walked back far enough to start to lose sight of the light at the mouth, and far enough to get a little scared by myself. That was probably the first moment on this trip that I'd cursed solo traveling-- I do better with someone to egg me on! But it was a gnarly place and really unexpected-- I had no idea it would be so agro. After I got back to my bungalow, I checked the map and found out that the cave I had been to was actually 7 km out of town, for a round trip of about 8.5 miles. Finally-- some exercise!

The next day I left Vang Vieng via the Mekong River, headed for Vientiane on kayak. Again, this was an experience that turned out to be a bit more adventurous than I'd thought. Our group of 7 foreigners and 3 guides went through class 3 rapids on kayaks that had seen better days, wearing life jackets that were probably 20 years old. It was really fun though (and I was the only one besides the guides who didn't tip over!), and was much better than sitting in another bus for 3 hours. I didn't stay in Vientiane long, as I'd heard it was missable, but flew out the next morning for Phnom Penh in Cambodia.

Phnom Penh is a busy, crowded city that I didn't really take to. I chose to go for the historical aspect of it, though, as there are a number of memorials for victims of the Khmer Rouge there. I went to the Killing Fields and the Tuol Sleng Museum (the S-21 prison), knowing full well how depressing it would be, and it was much as I'd expected. I think it's important to know the history and important to see what has been done, but they are places I'd like to forget.

After a day and a half in the capital, I took a bus up to Siem Reap, the gateway town to Angkor Wat. The first morning I took a bicycle into the complex and explored three of the temples, meeting up with a nice English couple along the way. It's amazing to see how huge these places are, and to think that so many people used to live and work in this complex. My favorite temple of the first day was the Bayon, a place with 216 of these smiling faces-- very cool and kind of eerie.

The second day I took a tuk-tuk into the complex at 4:30 to see the sunrise at Angkor Wat. It was well worth it, and turned out to time the whole day perfectly-- most of the temples I visited that day were nearly deserted. The best temple of Day 2 was Ta Phrom,













the 'jungle temple' of the bunch, and so so cool. I nearly had the place to myself as I poked around the ruins, climbing over tree roots and taking tons of pictures. Ta Phrom is so fascinating how it's been utterly claimed by the jungle-- it was my favorite all around. I went to 4 more temples after that and beat the crowds at nearly every one; it was a great way to see such a popular tourist attraction.


My third day in Siem Reap I decided not to go to the temples and instead had a totally enjoyable day hanging around the town. I ran into a couple I'd made friends with at the Thai-Lao border and we all went off for $4 hourlong massages given by the blind-- it was the most amazing massage I've ever had.

I left to go back to Thailand after that via bus. I've heard a rumor that airline companies have bribed the Cambodian transit authority to not improve the roads from Siem Reap to the Thai border so people will be motivated to fly instead of take the bus, and after a 6-hour pothole-fest over a dusty road, I believe it. Our bus didn't have air-con (though I'd been assured that it did when I booked it), and by the time we got to the border you could run your finger down your face and leave a trail of clean skin through the dust. After a somewhat confusing border crossing, there were 11 of us from the dustbowl bus who were all headed to Ko Chang, an island just over the border. By the time we got to the town where the port was, the last ferry was long gone and our driver took us to a guesthouse in what appeared to be the middle of nowhere. Luckily, we had two very strong-willed Lonely Planet-wielding women who convinced the driver to take us to a place in the book, where we all stayed. We all had dinner together and took the first ferry the next morning to the island.

I loooved Ko Chang, especially after running around Cambodia and Lao for so long. I stayed in a nice bungalow complex that had a great restaurant, a clean beach, a massage center (I had another good one there!) and fast Internet (almost unheard of so far in SE Asia). There were fire dancers at night, and even though they're pretty standard on the islands, these guys were amazing-- the best I've seen. I had a great time just chilling out and meeting people on Ko Chang; it's definitely a place I'll go back to.

I left Ko Chang to go to Chanthaburi, a town on the way to Bangkok that I'd heard was the gateway to a great national park with a beautiful waterfall hike. When I first started planning this round the world trip, the first guidebook I bought was for Thailand, so I read about this hike about a year and a half ago and have been obsessed with it since then. I definitely built it up a bit too much in my mind; the town was mediocre and out of the way, and I got scammed from all angles getting into the park, and then the hike was nothing to write home about. But I had a nice swim after the hard hike, so it wasn't a total loss.

Now I'm back in Bangkok and am meeting up with my friends in just one hour! I'm excited to see them, but it's also kind of weird, since I'll be leaving Thailand so soon. I've got about a week and a half, though, so I figure that's at least 15 more servings of pad thai! =)

I Brake for Buddha

Hello all! I am writing from a little backpacker town in Laos called Luang Prabang, and lots has happened since I left Chiang Mai. First I went north to a little hippie town called Pai, which was lush and gorgeous and set in a little green valley. I stayed in the absolute lap of luxury (for about $10 a night)-- a bungalow with 24 hour electricity, a fan, a flush toilet (!!!), soap for hand washing, and a towel. I barely knew what to do with myself. In Pai I did a lot of eating, some walking through the rice-paddy filled landscape, and an elephant trek. Looking back, I've got to recommend that anyone faced with the choice should absolutely choose the shortest option possible. It's my own fault for chooosing the 3-hour option, which was about 2 hours and 45 minutes too long. The elephants are beautiful creatures, but once you've spent about 10 minutes with its poor spine wedged into your pelvis (because you're riding bareback, of course, with nothing to hold onto), moving at a very slow and lumbering pace, the novelty just about wears off. But it was fun, at the end, to get into the river with them and have them spray water at me through their trunks and see the little baby one play around in the mud. So all in all, it was a good time.

After I left Pai, I made my way east to the Thailand-Lao border and got on a bus to a town I needed to pass through to my ultimate destination, Muang Sing. I think the first sign that I wasn't in freaking Kansas anymore was when the bus driver careened, full speed, through a crowded construction sight, throwing his trash out the window as we sped by. The rest of the four hour ride was spent flying around tight curves and blaring the horn at everything and anything that got in our way-- small children, skinny cows, water buffalo, other cars, dogs, chickens, and more construction equipment. After this leg, I got into a songthaew for the 2 hour ride to Muang Sing (1 truck + 2 wooden benches in the back + seemingly limitless passenger capacity = songthaew). The first thing I knew, a hill tribe woman probably no older than me, in traditional dress (colorful headdress with bright silver coins and all), was insisting that I eat some of the sticky rice and unidentifable meat that her and her two adorable little boys were eating. We spent the rest of the ride smiling and nodding at each other, and she and her boys got off somewhere before Muang Sing, next to a steep path that led up to the hills.


I originally went to Muang Sing to join up with a 2 or 3-day trek up into the hills to see some of the countryside, but when I got there I found out that I was almost the only foreigner in town and that I would have to wait around until more people came if I wanted to go. I went back to my guesthouse to think about it (since I'm feeling a bit of a time crunch), where I immediately met two middle-aged crazy-talking Johnny Walker-drinking gonzo documentarists on a buddha pilgrimage. One of them had bought an old wooden carved buddha statue in Bangkok a few years ago and is obsessed with returning it to the temple from where it was stolen. From the style of the carving, he tracked it down to the Muang Sing region, and the next day he and his friend (a BBC producer, who was filming everything for the eventual documentary) had hired a songthaew for the next day and were going to drive around until they found the right temple. After dinner and lots of talking, it seemed only natural that I would go with them, and so I was officially christened the 'deputy de buddha.'
We left early the next morning and for the next 10 hours drove through the most beautiful countryside I think I have ever seen. We stopped at about 9 wats, met some monks and lots of curious young novice monks (who our guide told us never see foreigners, and it showed-- they followed our every move), and ended up picking up a ton of people on the side of the road.
Sharing a songthaew with all these local people was definitely the highlight of the day-- it felt like we were in National Geographic. The most interesting-looking were the hill tribe women-- Hmong and Akah-- some with the headdresses, some toting naked little children, and others carrying heavy baskets as big as them. We would pull over, they would jump in back with us, and we would proceed to smile and nod at each other until they got off. Most were very shy and didn't want their pictures taken, but I started showing the young mothers pictures of my neices and nephews from my camera and made friends pretty easily that way. In the end, we didn't find the home of the buddha, but we did see lots of interesting things and made it all the way to the Lao-Myanmar border (where I bought lunch for 7-- the two guys, me, our guide, our driver, his wife, and a random guy who was riding with us at the time-- for $5). Other highlights: waving to packs of tiny little children along the road, who would wave back yelling "Sabaidee! Sabaidee!"; the enormous amount of animals on the road, most of which couldn't care less that we were trying to get by; seeing two very small boys (probably about 3 years old) riding together on a water buffalo; seeing young girls about 4 or 5 years old carrying tiny babies on their backs in cloth slings; the hilarious amount of potholes (it took us 10 hours to drive a total of 140 km). It was a good day!

The next day I left Muang Sing to begin a 2-day journey to my next destination, Nong Kiaw. The first leg was a 2-hour songthaew ride back to Luang Namtha, where I switched over to an actual bus for the next 4 hours to Udomxai. I thought this would be a major improvement over the songthaew (you know, cause I'd have an actual seat and all), but it really wasn't, seeing as how I had a Lao guy asleep on my shoulder for the entire 4 hours. I had heard that Udomxai described as 'a bus station and 10 brothels,' so I wasn't surprised to learn from a Swiss couple on my bus that you had to be very careful which guesthouse you stayed in, because many of them, even the nice-looking ones, are actually brothels. They gave me the names of a few that their guidebook said were safe, so I remembered one name and checked in. Though I could see it was a dump from the beginning, it wasn't until I returned from dinner that I realized just how bad it was: no windows, cigarette butts on the floor, wads of gum stuck to the floor and walls, horribly stained sheets, bugs crawling around on the pillowcases, stains on the walls, and this for a toilet
(oh- and they turned the water off after a certain time at night, so it was unusable anyway). Among all this squalor, however, and for no apparent reason, there was a TV in the room with HBO and movie channels. So I spread out my sleep sack over the bed (thank you Aunt Susan for recommending I bring one, and Elise and Chad for the gift!!), watched 2 movies, and spent the next few hours worrying about the flimsy doorlock, laying fully clothed on the bed with the lights on, just praying to God that I wouldn't roll off my sleep sack in my sleep. I got up at 6:00, walked back to the bus station, and spent the next 3 hours waiting for my bus there. An experience, for sure!

From Udomxai it was another 4 hours to get to Nong Kiaw, and the 'bus' we took was actually a passenger van with added seats-- a vehicle that probably was originally designed to fit 7 that somehow the bus officials managed to squeeze 17 adults into. That even wasn't so bad until the teenaged girls in the van took out their cell phones and started playing schmaltzy Lao pop music (3 at a time... different songs competing, of course). I have never been so grateful for my iPod than at that moment.

Along the way, we would pass little valley villages surrounded by corn that would have big official-looking signs in Lao but with one English phrase: "Project to plant replace the poppy." Apparently that area used to be a major drug producer, but the government has been cracking down on it in recent years. It must still grow somewhere, because I met very few Akah women who didn't try to sell me opium (don't worry, Mom, I just said no).


Once we got to Nong Kiaw, life improved immeasurably. It's a tiny little town surrounded by huge limestone peaks covered in green, right next to a brown river. I stayed in a nice bungalow and walked around a bit. The children in this country are so sweet and beautiful-- I passed two very little kids with umbrellas who yelled 'Sabaidee!' and waved their awkward little 2-year-old waves until I was out of sight. I had heard that there was an interesting cave nearby, so I started walking down the road to find it. I came across 2 little girls that pounced on me, asking 'cave? cave?', and they led me to it. What I thought would be an easy walk actually involved fording a river (where I picked up my first-ever leech) and literally crawling on my hands and knees under thick underbrush. The cave was very cool-looking, with lots of stalactites, and one of the little girls even brought a weak flashlight so I could poke around a bit.

The next morning I boarded a boat for the 5-hour ride down the river to Luang Prabang. We waited for a while at the dock, and a pack of little naked boys, about 4 years old, were swimming around us in the brown brown water, waving and yelling and showing off. Some women were down there washing clothes, and when they would make suds with the detergent the little boys would grab handfuls of it to make beards for themselves. Kids are the same all around the world! Also on the dock was a man with a water buffalo and some little girls with nets, catching tiny fish. Quite the send-off!

Yesterday I went up to a set of waterfalls with a French girl I met, and we hiked to the very top for some gorgeous views. We looked down to the first basin and saw a bunch of people swimming, so we eventually found our way down there, too (but had to walk across the waterfall near the basin-- very wet and kind of scary). So we jumped off the rocks, swam around a bit, peeked over the side to the bottom, and basically got back to nature, which was really nice.

Tomorrow I'll leave for Vang Vieng, then head further south to the capital, Vientiane. From there I'll fly to the south of Cambodia, to Phnom Pehn, then make my way north to Siem Reap, then head back into Thailand to meet my friend Amy and her husband. Life is good and I'm having a blast, but I'm looking forward to seeing some familiar faces! Hope all is well with all of you, and thanks for all the emails and well wishes.

Sawatdee!

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Greetings from Thailand! Life has been grand these past few weeks. I spent my first couple of days in Bangkok, then headed south for the islands of Ko Phangan and Ko Tao. On Ko Phangan I literally did nothing besides eating, sleeping, reading, and talking to new friends. Accomodation consists of bungalows on the beach, complete with big porches and hammocks. This picture is from my bungalow's porch on Bottle Beach, which is a pretty deserted place on the north of Ko Phangan, accessible only by boat.

After 6 days of living like a complete bum, I decided it was time to get moving, and I traveled to Ko Tao with a friend I'd made on Ko Phangan. Ko Tao is famous for its scuba diving, and it definitely delivered. I saw a lot of creatures I'd already seen in the Great Barrier Reef, but on my first day we dove to 30 meters and saw loads of sharks-- way bigger than the sharks I'd seen in Australia, and much less afraid of us.


After a few days on Ko Tao, I headed north to Chiang Mai, a beautiful, relaxed town in the far north of the country. I took a really cool full-day cooking course yesterday; we started with a trip to the local market to buy the supplies we'd be cooking with, and then cooked and ate for the next 6 hours. We made Chiang Mai curry (delicious!), spring rolls, deep-fried banana, fried rice, and papaya salad. I got a cookbook with lots of Thai recipes, so you should all be expecting elaborate dinner parties when I come home.


Another day I went to a big temple up on the hill above Chiang Mai, Wat Doi Suthep. It was pouring rain the entire day, but the temple was beautiful and I loved all the buddhas!

Other than that, I've spent my time in Chiang Mai shopping. There is a gigantic night bazaar, and another market held only on Sundays that's intimidating in its massive size. My instinct to buy everything I could possibly be interested in because it's all dirt cheap has been tempered by the fact that I simply cannot fit another thing into my backpack. I may start looking into how to send things home, though. =)

This last photo is from the student market, and I'm basically posting this for AC's benefit. You were right about the mannequins!



That's it for now! Tomorrow morning I leave for Pai, a small town near here, and then I'm off to Laos. Miss you guys!

Bears. Beets. Battlestar Galactica.

Hello loved ones! I am in rainy Sydney at the moment, but am leaving for Bangkok in a matter of hours. After I left the coast, I came down to the city and have been enjoying myself as much as is possible for a traveler with no car in the pouring rain. I was put in a room with these 3 funny British guys and we ended up watching a ton of the British version of the Office, so that, coupled with the addiction Laura and Constance and I had in NZ, officially makes me an Office fan. Watch it!

So in Sydney since I've been back, I saw the Dalai Lama speak (in the pouring rain... I stood for 4 hours until I could no longer feel my fingertips or toes), went to a bunch of films at the Film Festival (including one about Kurt Cobain with a ton of footage of Seattle... so funny to have been watching that in Sydney!), walked through the art gallery, saw a piano performance at the Conservatorium of Music, and saw the hugest pelican (is that a pelican?) on the face of the earth. I was going to have someone take a picture of me next to it, but decided against it, as it could probably eat my arms for lunch. So things have been good, but I'm excited to get out of the rain and off into the Thai heat!

Your Friend, Jacquie Cousteau

Hello all! I wrote that last post a while ago but haven’t had a chance to put it up until now. I am currently in a place called Townsville, and I’ve been having a really fun/crazy week. After leaving Melbourne, I got into Airlie Beach, which is an ugly tourist town, but is the gateway to the Whitsunday Islands, which are gorgeous. I flew in last Wednesday morning and left that evening on a big sailing boat with about 20 other people. I made friends with a group of Irish people my age right away, and we had a blast on the boat for the next 3 days—sailing around, snorkeling, scuba diving, playing cards, watching Finding Nemo, etc. Everyone else on the boat was really cool, too. Definitely the highlight was the scuba diving, though. We sailed out to the Great Barrier Reef and I went diving three times; the best sights were the whitetip shark (only about 4 feet, but cool all the same), the giant clam that snapped shut when my instructor waved his hand above it, some gigantic colorful fish called napoleon maori wrasses, some crazy-looking white fish with unicorn horns, and some bright red brain-looking coral. I hadn’t been diving since my certification (in Vancouver.. while it hailed, sleeted, and snowed on our surface intervals), so this trip was absolutely an improvement on my past dives.
The day after our dive trip my Irish friends and I just lazed around in Airlie Beach, and then came on the bus up the coast. I stopped off in Townsville, and they went on to Cairns. I got in pretty late Sunday night and left straightaway early Monday morning to do another dive trip, this time to the SS Yongala, which everyone around here says is in the top 10 dives in the world. It’s a shipwreck from 1911, and it was unbelievable—definitely the best dive I’ve ever done. We went down twice and saw turtles, snakes, eels, a gigantic school of barracuda, clownfish (Finding Nemo fish!), and a couple of really majestic, slow-moving manta rays. It was amazing. We swam all around the ship and right next to the masts. You can’t see any of the wood anymore, since it’s all covered in coral, but the structure of the boat is still there. I think about 150 people died in the wreck, and my instructor told me the skeletons were still in the boat until about 20 years ago (you can’t swim inside the ship anymore).

I’m going to take a couple of rest days here and then I fly back to Sydney on Thursday. I’ll just have 5 days in Australia left at that point, and I’m going to go hear the Dalai Lama speak (he’s doing an Oz tour this month), go to the Sydney Film Festival, and walk around some more. Then it’s off to Thailand! I can’t believe how quickly time is passing.

Thanks everyone for the nice birthday wishes and the emails. Hope you all are well and are enjoying the summer!

xoxo,
Sheri

From June 5

Greetings from Oz, loved ones! My last few days in New Zealand were pretty tame—Constance, Laura, and I went for a hike in Glenorchy, stopped for Thai food in Dunedin, walked around the botanic gardens in Christchurch, and made friends with some little blue penguins at the Antarctic Center.








I couldn’t believe I was leaving NZ already! It felt like I had just arrived. Much as I like Australia so far, I still miss New Zealand.

I arrived in Sydney and had a bit of culture shock—even the big cities on the South Island of NZ are pretty small, and Sydney is such a huge, international city. I spent a day walking around, and then left pretty quickly, looking for something smaller. I’ve been in Melbourne for the past 5 days or so, and it’s been nice to be in a city with relatively few sights—I’ve been lazing around, sitting in cafes, walking around, etc for most of my time here. The other day I did go on a trip down the Great Ocean Road, which is meant to be designed after the 101. It was pretty, but the highlight was definitely seeing the koalas in the eucalyptus trees,
seeing two kangaroos boxing in the fields (no joke!), and hearing the kookaburras sing. The last couple of days I’ve been hanging out with my friend Shehan, who I met in NZ. He used to live here, and he’s been showing me around—we’ve seen some really great live bands and have been eating awesome food. Tomorrow morning I’ll leave for the northern coast to go for a scuba trip for a few days. I’m excited to see some sharks!

Hope you are all well! Thanks for the emails and well wishes.

Love,
Sheri

Bonjour, mes amis! Constance, Laura, and I are in the French town of Akaroa right now, in a hostel called Chez La Mer on Rue Lavaud, about an hour outside of Christchurch. In the past few days, we’ve been getting our adrenaline on with skydives from 12,000 feet and 400 foot bungee jumps. The bungee jump was by far the scarier of the two, including a harrowing drive in a rickety bus up a steep and narrow dirt road, as well as a gondola ride out to the pod from where you jump (which swings when the wind hits it—of course). All the fear was totally worth it, though—the rush of swan diving off a metal platform straight towards the river 400 feet below you is indescribable. The skydive was awesome, too, but involved less moxie—you basically get pushed out of the plane with your instructor and don’t have to do anything but scream. My skydive partner took us down head first, though, and we freefell for 45 seconds before the chute was pulled, and we did a ton of spins on the way down, so it was definitely not boring.






Other things I’ve been up to: a really cool kayak trip out in Milford Sound, in Fiordland National Park in the southwest. It was misty and cold in the morning, but by afternoon the clouds had burned off and the views were amazing.
We even saw dolphins up quite close—they would swim under our kayaks and surface a ways out. Of course the best part of the trip was our sea kayak couture—very fashionable.

Also, we took a hike up to the top of a hill over Queenstown for some nice scenery and, in a lovely twist, some amazing apple strudel. I have become obsessed! I am eating it every chance I get. =)

I just have a few more days in NZ—I cannot believe how quickly the time has passed. The things we have done have been totally fun and exciting, but the best times have been getting to know new people and making friends from all over. I’m so happy I don’t have to go home yet! and that there’s more to come. Miss you all! Take care of yourselves.

xoxo,
Sheri