Many of our free hours lately have been spent planning a myriad of trips:
- A 3-day Murchison Falls trip this coming weekend
- A beach trip to Zanzibar and Mombasa at the beginning of August
- Western Uganda gorilla tracking and volcano climbing in late August
- Tanzania safari and possibly some Arusha-area hiking for the middle of September
We are flying back home to Seattle after the Tanzania trip, from Dar Es Salaam via Dubai and San Francisco (yay Emirates).
Planning travel in East Africa is certainly interesting; for one thing, it’s extremely expensive, and for another, it feels as though the tourism infrastructure is 20 years out of date. Just two fun examples, I’m sure we’ll have many more over the coming weeks:
- The economy here is entirely cash-based. We booked our gorilla tracking excursion through a company whose office is located a bit south of Kampala, on the way to the airport. They wanted payment for our gorilla permits ($500 each!) in advance, but they would only accept a bank wire transfer or cash. Due to the Barclay’s ATM transaction limit, it took 5 ATM withdrawals to retrieve the required cash, and it came out all in 10,000 UGX notes (less than $5 per note). So Kenny had a stack of bills about 2 inches tall stuffed in his pockets for our drive down to Lubowa to deliver the cash. On the plus side, we got a very good exchange rate.
- Kenny is trying to book us a flight to Kilimanjaro Airport in Tanzania. He found the website of Precision Air and filled out their contact form, which sent an email to… someone. When he didn’t hear back, he searched and found a direct email address to send his inquiry. He received a response a few hours later, stating that his flight had been booked and that it will be cancelled if we don’t pay by August 11. Of course, we may only pay by cash or wire transfer, and their office is in Tanzania. Not sure how we’re going to manage that one, as we won’t actually be in Tanzania until after the flight.
I can’t wait to find out how our Tanzania safari operator wants to be paid.
We’re back in the Motherland. After five days touring around London and environs, and yet another red-eye, we’re in Delhi. We’ll be here for a couple of days playing tour guides for our good friend Gio, including a one-day stopover in Agra. Of course, Kenny insists that we will have a meal at the new and improved Khan Chacha. I just can’t wait to try Indian mangoes.
On Tuesday, we head down to Bangalore to join the fun for Sean and Archana’s wedding festivities. I can’t wait to see them and to revisit the neighborhood where we lived for two months this past fall. I’m also extremely excited to take all of the folks coming in from the US shopping for Indian wedding clothes. We already have ours, of course.
Posted on
April 30, 2010 in
Thailand by
lauren.
Tags: ajws, bangalore, boston, burma, delhi, india, itinerary, london, mae hong son, new york, thailand, volunteering.
We have only 10 days left in Thailand. I know it will be extremely difficult to leave. On the one hand, I do feel a bit ready to move on from our small town. It is lovely, but after three months I certainly feel like I’ve seen what it has to offer. On the other hand, it will be very hard to leave my volunteer assignment. Not that I didn’t accomplish my goals – on the contrary, the staff and I have accomplished a lot more than we expected. I just know that I will miss them horribly and I want to continue helping them work for democracy in Burma. The separation will also be a poignant reminder that while I’ve been here helping them voluntarily, this cause is their life and they can’t just leave. In fact, they can’t really go anywhere.
Here is our plan for the next six weeks. As usual, it’s ridiculous and it involves a lot of flights:
- Thailand: We have one more week volunteering in Mae Hong Son, then we head to New York (via Chiang Mai, Taipei, and San Francisco).
- New York: We’ll be in New York for about a week for Kenny’s sister’s wedding. We have a bunch of errands to run — AJWS post-mortem at their office, get new India visas, get yellow fever shots for Uganda, etc. — but we’ll also get to spend time with family and friends while we’re there. My parents are also coming to the wedding. I’m excited to see my Dad again so soon, and I’ve promised to take my Mom on the Jewish tour of New York (Lower East Side, Brooklyn, etc.).
- Boston: We will have four days in Boston to visit our dear friends Julie and Damian, and their newest addition, Sophie. A few friends from Seattle will be joining us.
- London: On our way to India for Sean and Archana’s wedding, we arranged for a four-day "layover" in London. Kenny has never been to Stonehenge, so we will probably try to squeeze that in too. It will be a weird, very first-world tourist experience in the middle of this year of Global South adventures, but hopefully New York and Boston will help with the transition. I expect that we’ll spend more money during four days in London than we typically spend in four weeks here in Thailand.
- Delhi: Delhi always seems to be our gateway to India. Gio is meeting us, and we’ll spend a couple of days showing him the sights (and we need to take him for a celebratory meal at Indian Accent). Then we plan to make a day trip to Agra, since we promised ourselves we’d see the Taj Mahal this time. It’s going to be HOT, but I suppose it can’t be much worse than April in Northern Thailand…
- Bangalore: The main event for us in India is Sean and Archana’s wedding in Bangalore, which promises to be an all-out traditional Tam-Bram affair. After the wedding, we’re all heading to a Jungle Retreat in the Nilgiris for a few days.
- Kampala: On June 11, we’ll fly from Bangalore to Dubai to Addis Ababa to Entebbe, in order to start our next volunteer assignment, which is a technology for agriculture project, based in Kampala.
We left Mai House this morning and finally made it to Kampot around 4PM this afternoon. Since there’s no direct boat, what would be 35km as the crow flies entailed:
- 8AM->10:30AM: boat ride from Phu Quoc to Ha Tien
- 10:30AM->1:30PM: bum around Ha Tien waiting for our visas and the bus, and spending the last of our dong. Turns out that 50,000 VND (< $3) on the streets of Ha Tien can buy you 4 baguettes, 1 tomato, 1 cucumber, 1 red chili, 2 dragon fruit, 1 star apple, 4 oranges, 2 mangoes, and a mini sponge cake.
- 1:30PM->1:45PM: bus from Ha Tien to the Vietnam/Cambodia border
- 1:45PM->2:15PM: border formalities, including switching our Vietnamese bus crew to a Cambodian one
- 2:15PM->4PM: arrive in Kampot to complete our “1.5 hour” bus ride
After we dropped off our belongings at the lovely Hang Guesthouse, we rode their free bicycles into the tiny little town and unwound with a blind Khmer massage (a local specialty). It was so intense that Lauren dubbed it a “Khmer Rouge” massage.
Tomorrow we’re planning a hike up to Bokor Hill Station, the most popular tourist attraction in this part of Cambodia.
We are luxuriating at a serene beach on Phu Quoc Island for a few days before making our way back towards Thailand for AJWS orientation. Our original plan for the trip back north was:
… a boat from Phu Quoc to Rach Gia, and then another boat up the Mekong into Cambodia. Stop in Phnom Penh and potentially Battambang.
This was, of course, before we had done much research related to boats up the Mekong. After doing some reading, it turns out it takes almost a full day to even reach the Mekong. We decided that a shorter boat ride from Phu Quoc to Ha Tien and then a few days in Kampot, Cambodia would be much more pleasant. We spent some time scouring the Lonely Planet and various web forums today for information on boats, Cambodian visas, border crossing process, and overland transport to Kampot. After sketching out how we might orchestrate the border crossing, we took a stroll out to the main road from the beach and saw this:
Easy transport options from Phu Quoc to various destinations in Cambodia
So we’ll probably just scrap all of those plans and book transport from here to Kampot with John for ~$30/person on Monday.
Of course, none of this research would be necessary if there were a boat from here to Kampot. Apparently such boats actually exist, but Gerard at Mai House warned us to steer clear of these as they are highly illegal and usually unsuccessful at making the crossing (but they do successfully take your money). As a result, what should be a 45 minute trip will be a six hour multi-transport adventure, thanks to international borders and historic territorial disputes.
Kenny pointing out the absurdity of our six hour border crossing trip to a destination only 30km away
After our two nights in Kampot, we’ll have two more in Phnom Penh and then we fly to Chiang Mai via Bangkok.
I can’t take any credit for the title, that one’s all Matt… but he’s clearly not the only one to come up with this joke. As seen in the Lao Airlines magazine:
What happens in VIentiane, stays in Vientiane
We are in the Luang Prabang airport, waiting to board our flight for Hanoi. Our current plan for the remaining weeks of our pre-volunteering holiday:
- Two to four days in the Hanoi area, which will probably include some time in Ninh Binh and/or the national park nearby. We’ll skip Halong Bay because we’ve been there, and Sapa because it’s apparently quite cold there right now.
- A few days in Nha Trang, because nine days in the Thai islands just wasn’t enough beach time.
- A few days on Phu Quoc island for the same reason.
- About two days in the Mekong Delta area as we make our way towards Cambodia (this may involve a night in Can Tho and another in Chau Doc, but we need to do more research).
- One day in Phnom Penh before we fly to Chiang Mai to start orientation.
We’ve had nine glorious nights on the beach here on the Andaman Sea (first Phuket, and now Ko Lanta). Now that we are tan again, we are ready to go see some temples. We have a full travel day ahead of us tomorrow: mini-bus (including two ferries) from Ko Lanta to Krabi airport, short flight to Bangkok, slightly longer flight to Vientiane, Laos.
We don’t know how long we’ll be spending in Laos and we don’t have a guidebook yet (unless you count the really bad one that we downloaded the other day). But we have booked two nights in Vientiane and three in Luang Prabang, although based on everything I’ve heard I expect that we’ll extend our stay in the Luang Prabang area for a few more nights.
The last 2.5 weeks in the US have been fabulous – we made the rounds to visit all of our family in Seattle, Los Angeles, Miami, and now New Orleans. We got to meet our adorable new nephew Jadon and attend Rob and Jenna’s fabulous Miami Beach wedding.
On Friday, we head back to Los Angeles for one night, and then out to Bangkok (via Taipei) on Saturday morning. We have 5 weeks to travel around Southeast Asia before our AJWS orientation on February 14. We are thinking of something like this for our itinerary:
- Get out of Bangkok as soon as possible and head to the beach. Last time we were in Thailand, we visited Phuket, Ko Phi Phi, and Ko Samui. This time, we may try Railay, Ko Phangan (but no Full Moon Parties for us), and/or Ko Tao.
- Make our way north through Chiang Mai, potentially stopping for a cooking class and to see some of the temples that we missed on our last visit.
- Stop in Chiang Rai and/or other interesting towns in northern Thailand.
- Make our way, either over land or by boat, to Luang Prabang, Laos. The boat option sounds interesting, but from the reports I’ve been able to find, may not be particularly safe or pleasant (supposedly the boats sometimes sink). As a fallback option, we could always fly from Chiang Mai to Luang Prabang.
- After some time in Laos (trekking? visiting temples? I don’t have a Laos guidebook yet…), head into Vietnam. Unfortunately I think a long bus ride is unavoidable for this part of the journey.
- Consider trekking in Sa Pa or other northern Vietnam activity out of Hanoi. We’ve already been to Halong Bay, but I’d consider going again if the weather is really nice (it was cold and foggy last time).
- Spend a few days in Nha Trang, one of my favorite beaches in the world. I need to remind myself whether or not Nha Trang is more beautiful than Mandrem, in Goa.
- Fly to Phu Quoc Island, off the southern coast of Vietnam. More beach time.
- Depending on time remaining, consider taking a boat from Phu Quoc to Rach Gia, and then another boat up the Mekong into Cambodia. Stop in Phnom Penh and potentially Battambang.
- Plan to arrive back in Chiang Mai for AJWS orientation by February 13. We don’t want to arrive much earlier, because our 60 day visa + 30 day extension will just barely get us to our US return flight on May 12.
- After orientation we’ll head to a small town near the western border, where we’ll be based for 11 weeks doing volunteer work.
If you’re still reading, and you’ve been to any of these places, we’d certainly love tips!
We have a little over two weeks remaining in India. It’s incredible how the time has flown. We had originally planned to spend our final two weeks in the north, perhaps in Rajasthan and/or Agra. However, we’ve decided we haven’t quite had our fill of the south (or its tasty cuisine), so the new plan is to defer our tour of the north until our next India trip. Yes, the Taj Mahal will have to wait, but does give us a nice excuse to come back.
This is the new plan:
- Attend our friends Chandrika and Kirill’s India wedding in Bangalore this Saturday (we already had the honor of attending their US wedding in September). I’ll get to show off the two sarees I purchased last weekend.
- Fly to Goa on Monday for a week on the beach. We’ve booked the entire week in Mandrem, but could potentially check out early if we decide we want to see some other beaches.
- Back to Bangalore on Monday 12/14 for a couple of days with Sean and Archana.
- Fly to Delhi on 12/17.
- Fly to Seattle via Chicago on 12/19.
Then, as originally planned, we’ll have a week in Seattle, and a few days each in Los Angeles and Miami making the family rounds (including my high school reunion, meeting our new nephew, and Kenny’s stepbrother’s wedding). I’m really excited to see my family and friends – I miss everyone even more than I thought I would. I know I’ll miss India too, but it looks like we may be back as soon as June.
We are still working out the details, but here are our current ideas for the fall:
- 1 week in Shanghai – this is a work trip for Kenny. He’ll be in the office during business hours, and we think we’ll have social engagements with his co-workers in the evenings. I’m just going along for the ride. I’ll probably do some sightseeing on my own, and may spend some of my free time trying to flesh out some details for the fall (like finding places to stay).
- ~2 weeks in Nepal (with a 3-day layover in Delhi) – this is our “vacation” – since we haven’t taken one since December, and we’re both currently wound up like tops, we thought it would be nice to take some time without any responsibilities to do some trekking and unwinding. And we’ve heard that Nepal is a really beautiful place to do this.
- ~2 months in India – we expect to spend most of this time volunteering (probably in Bangalore with our friend Sean, but this isn’t set in stone yet). On the weekends, we may make some short trips to other cities in the south – we definitely want to visit my former boss Vivek in Hyderabad. We’ll probably spend the final week or two touring in the north.
- ~2 weeks in the US – we’ll be back in the US late December-early January, starting in Seattle, then a few days in Los Angeles followed by a few days in Miami.
After that, we’ll head out to the next destination. We think this will be somewhere in Africa, and we have various feelers out for NGO work in a few different countries. Some of those feelers may actually materialize as volunteer opportunities in Asia (Thailand, Vietnam, even back in India), so we’re keeping open minds.