Chiang Mai, Thailand

We left our sleepy beach resort to catch a flight up to Northern Thailand and the city of Chiang Mai. Chiang Mai is surrounded by mountains and is popular among tourists as a jumping off point for trekking and other outdoorsy excursions. It is also a large and interesting city in its own right, filled with interesting temples, and teeming with markets and delicious food.

Katherine enjoying her whole fried fish in a Chiang Mai food market.

Blood soup with pork from a food stall.

One of the many beautiful temples in Chiang Mai.

We jumped right into the city after arriving late afternoon with a street food tour of several night markets. We happened to be joined on our tour by a lawyer from New York - it's a small world! Chiang Mai is in the midst of its rainy season, and unfortunately we had a huge monsoon downpour during the tour. Luckily we were prepared with ponchos on hand (thanks Mom) and soldiered on, enjoying a lot of different food options that were very different from the typical Thai food we see in the US.

Street food tour with Michelle, a recovering big law firm lawyer.

Street food stall.

Eating in the rain.

The next day was something we had been looking forward to all trip: the Elephant Nature Park. We had done some research prior to the trip and decided that we did not want to go to a place that offered elephant riding as the elephants are often treated very badly. Instead, we chose a park devoted to rehabilitating elephants damaged by tourist and logging industries. We had a full day tour that included feeding, bathing and walking a small family of elephants. The staff here uses only positive reinforcement to control the elephants, so we got them to accompany us on our walk by carrying bags of bananas and feeding them to the elephants whenever they started to stray off the path or get too distracted by mud puddles. We spent so much time with the same elephants that we could really observe their distinct personalities as they interacted with us and each other.

Our elephant-for-the-day knew exactly where the bananas were kept.

Katherine after being sneezed on.

The elephants enjoying a mud bath.

Post mud bath.

Happy, muddy elephant.

In the afternoon, we went white water rafting for a bit before returning to the elephant camp to watch some of the babies play. Elephants are not full grown until they are twenty years old.

The next day we just walked around the city, visiting temples by day and a Saturday walking street market at night. After almost a month in Asia we were not super excited at the prospect of another tourist night market, but Chiang Mai's markets put all others we have seen to shame. We walked for what seemed like miles down streets packed with food and clothing vendors, snacking as we went.

Busy street market.

The following day we had a full day cooking class at a farm about an hour outside the city. We made five dishes, and even pounded our own curry paste. A common theme of this trip has been eating so much that we can barely move. The next morning we got excellent massages ($9 an hour) and headed off to our final destination.

Aleenta Hua Hin Hotel (Pranburi, Thailand)

After several weeks of busy travel we were definitely ready for a break. Luckily our first stop in Thailand was a few days at a beach resort in Pak Nam Pran, a tiny fishing village about a three hour drive south of Bangkok. The area sees few Western tourists, but is a popular weekend getaway spot for wealthy Bangkok residents. We stayed midweek, thereby securing a great deal at a really beautiful eco resort called Aleenta.

The tiny resort is a collection of beachfront villas with amazing views at the edge of the totally deserted stretch of beach. Our villa came with a hammock, a porch, a front lawn, and a jacuzzi plunge pool and was about twenty feet from the ocean at high tide. The resort also has amazing food, with entirely local ingredients including vegetables, fruit and eggs from the resort's own farm. It was definitely one of the bigger splurges of our trip, but we would have spent about ten times as much at a comparable resort in the US.

The view from our room, including our private plunge pool, loungers, and hammock.

Sunrise from our room.

The first day, we began a quick post breakfast walk to check out the resort's other wing a few hundred meters down the beach, but we ended up walking all the way to the mountain at the end of the beach. We then noticed a trail going up the side of the mountain, and so started scrambling up rock in our flip flops to make it to the top. It was terrible planning as we didn't have sunscreen, water, money, or proper shoes but the view from the top was worth the climb. Luckily we met a British family at the top who directed us down a less steep path that ended at the main road (but still left us with a half hour walk back to the resort).

The mountain we climbed, as seen from the hotel; also, the all-but deserted beach we enjoyed during our stay.

"Oh, that doesn't look very far...."

The climbing wasn't easy, especially in flip flops!

The view from the top.

If only we had brought our selfie stick!

We spent most of the rest of the day hanging out in our villa and watching the ocean. There were some beautiful houses on the beach near our hotel, and people would let their dogs out onto the beach to play all afternoon. We probably saw more dogs than people on the beach. The only problem with the beach was the massive jellyfish we kept seeing in the water. After seeing one that was at least two feet in diameter we abandoned plans for a swim.

At least the water was nice to look at.

It was still rainy season, and a wonderful summer storm rolled through.

The next day we biked along the coast into town. Afterward, Josh went with the resort manager to tour the farm. The manager recommended that we buy a roast chicken for dinner from one of the stalls a ways down the beach. So we biked that way around dinner time and somewhat dubiously claimed a full barbecued chicken from a grill on the side of the road. It tasted amazing, and cost next to nothing.

Barbecue street chicken.

Our resort was very close to Khao Sam Roi Yot National Park. We took a morning excursion there to hike a steep trail that leads to a series of beautiful beaches and then a set of large caves, including one with a Buddhist shrine in the center (Phraya Nakhon Cave). We were there early enough in the morning that we beat the crowds, and we spotted some langurs (in the primate family) chilling on a tree on the path.

Hiking through Khao Sam Roi Yot National Park.

We stumbled upon some langurs in the national park.

Three little langurs jumping on the bed.

"The Thinker."

We hiked up a mountain...

... and then down into a cave...

... to find a temple built in the middle of it.

Even though we stayed fairly active at Aleenta, it was still a nice break from the sightseeing grind. We could easily have stayed another week, and would definitely return in the future if not for the 24 hours of travel required to make it there.

Grill-your-own-satay night at our hotel.

Siem Reap, Cambodia

Siem Reap marked the midway point of our travels, and gave us both a few high points and low points of our trip, as well as a few great stories. Such as: the time we got locked inside an Angkor temple during a monsoon and the guards lost the key; the time we went for a leisurely horseback ride through the country and Josh (almost!) lost his camera and Katherine got thrown into a ditch on the side of the road; and the time we showed up for our flight to find it had been canceled and they had no record of our tickets.

Most people come to Siem Reap for one reason: Angkor Wat. The city exists mainly as a home base for temple visits, and we did not find many reasons to otherwise recommend it (although it does have great restaurant options - we had a six course tasting menu at a restaurant that is on many "Best in Asia" lists for $28 a person).  

"Pub Street," the main backpackers downtown area, was far more touristy and less authentic than any place we'd been so far, so we didn't spend much time down there.  

Siem Reap's Pub Street.

Our hotel, on the other hand, was a 10 minute tuk tuk ride away from town, down a dusty dirt/clay road. It was worth the trip, though, for a beautiful resort with multiple pools and a gigantic room.

Our hotel, the Navutu Dreams Resort.

We started bright and early on our first day at Angkor Wat with a tuk tuk driver assigned by our hotel to basically be at our beck and call for the week, and also hired a guide for the day. The temples were incredible to see, although not surprisingly were often unpleasantly crammed full of tourists. Our guide was very knowledgeable about the history, and it was interesting to learn about the alternating Hindu and Buddhist control over the temples over time and how the city of Angkor was lost for 500 years after the capital of Cambodia was moved to Phnom Penh to be further from the Thai border. 

Waiting for tourists to pose (and pay).

We also learned about how virtually none of the tourist money spent at Angkor makes it back to the Cambodian people. Cambodia made Vietnam seem rich by comparison. There were unfortunately many children begging and selling trinkets outside of temples here. We were advised to never buy anything from a child here as it just encourages more parents to send their children to work (and even heard stories about parents deliberating breaking their children's legs to attract more money).

The temples are all in varying states of repair, and although there are ongoing restoration efforts everywhere, some of the more popular temples are ones that are still in a more natural state and have trees growing through walls. One, the Ta Prohm temple, was used extensively in the "Tomb Raider" movie, and has been left in much the same condition as it was found, with massive trees growing in and on the temple walls.

The monsoon season finally caught up with us here, and we were climbing one of the temples when the skies opened on us in a torrential downpour. We tried to wait it out, sheltering in archways, but the rain just did not let up. We finally just climbed down in the rain, waded through pools of water to the exit, to find the doors chained shut. Apparently when it rains this heavily, the guards close the temple so no tourists get hurt climbing, but these particular guards did not bother to get the tourists who were already inside out first. Then, apparently, the person with the only key to the gate went off on a motorbike to lunch. Eventually the guy with the key came back, just before we got to the point of climbing over the fences.

The temple, before the rain started.  We should've known to be wary with those storm clouds during rainy season.

Monsoon!

Soaked to the bone.

The next day we went back with just our tuk tuk driver to see more temples. You can spend weeks here just seeing temples, but after two days we ended up a bit "templed out." The fatigue from two weeks of travel was also starting to kick in for us at this point.

Driving through the Angkor Temples area with our dedicated driver for our entire stay, Mr. Thon.

Another highlight included seeing the Phare Cambodian Circus, which has its own training school that trains and educates under-privileged youth:

We thought it would be fun on our third day to take a scenic horseback ride through the countryside. Unfortunately the trip ended poorly, with Katherine's horse bucking her off into a ditch on the side of the road. The next day we had planned a day-long motorbike trip to a temple in the jungle, but that unfortunately had to be canceled in order to recuperate. The fall also made the tuk tuk ride over a bumpy dirt road from our hotel into town pretty painful. Luckily our hotel was a nice resort so we could relax there by the pool (it was a serious upgrade from our Saigon hotel, which we tried to spend as little time as possible in).

We didn't love Cambodia the way that we loved Vietnam, but we also saw an incredibly small portion of the country. After a few days in Siem Reap, we were ready to be off to Thailand.