Author Archives: Brandon and Mandy
The Angkor Temples
The hardest part of this blog post is going to be which of the hundreds of pictures we took to share. Seeing Angkor Wat and it’s surrounding temples was a top five moment for us on our trip. We did our research and took three whole days to explore, so we didn’t feel rushed, too tired, and we had plenty of time left in the day to explore the famous Pub Street in town. Our hotel hooked us up with a tuk tuk driver who picked us up everyday and took us out to the temples we wanted to see. He even had an itinerary in mind that closely mirrored what we wanted to see anyway, so we sat back and let him drive us around, starting with buying our passes into the Temples. A three day pass cost $40 U.S. each and was worth every penny.
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At first Cambodia appeared to be just another country in southeast Asia and since we’d spent so much time here, our expectations weren’t high. We’d of course be seeing the famous temples of Angkor, including the namesake Angkor Wat, but that would all happen on our last stop in the country. We still had a few cities to see first. The temples are what this country is on the map for. What other secrets would lie in wait for us? Well, the first thing we would discover is that you cannot pull $86,000 U.S. out of the ATM’s here.
And now a video from a helicopter ride over a glacier in New Zealand
Hallo there! Here is a video Mandy knocked together of the helicopter ride we took over the famous Franz Joseph Glacier in New Zealand! We have another post coming up soon about our time in Cambodia, so stay tuned!
The River People
The leisurely pace at which the boat strolled down the Mekong would have put us to sleep if it weren’t for the intense heat of the jungle surrounding us. Two 9 hour days of travel allowed Mandy to read an entire book. I couldn’t keep my eyes off the shoreline because I had never seen anything like it. The river looked like something out of Charlie’s chocolate factory.
Paradise is a cheeseburger in Chiang Rai
It took 8 hours to get from Chiang Mai to Chiang Rai. When our bus finally rolled into town, I was…..concerned? There was nothing charming about what we were looking at. This was third world country stuff. We were in Guatemala all over again. We knew this would be our last stop in Thailand since our 2 month visa was about to expire and maybe that was clouding our judgement since we had seen some amazing things in this country but with all that being said, guess what? We loved Chiang Rai.
Thailand Part 5
Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai, our last two stops in Thailand, were some of our favorite time spent in the country. The taxi dropped us off at our hotel just outside the city center of Chiang Mai. I said hello in Thai to the lady working the front desk, who looked at me strangely and said, “Oh no, no no. You say like lady boy.” There are two different ways to say hello in Thai, one for a woman and one for a man and I had apparently spent almost two months in Thailand walking around saying hello to everyone like a girl. Awesome.
Thailand – Part 4
The line to get off of Koh Tao and onto a boat that would take us to the mainland and then onward to Bangkok was a mile long. It’s controlled chaos. Tourists are freaking out, thinking they’ll miss their boat and so they start doing stupid things like trying to cut the line. The locals are trying to keep everyone calm, but you could tell they were used to this mess. It was so very hot and it didn’t help that you’ve got your bags to carry with you. When the line started moving, we eventually got to a bend in the line where we would find cover from the afternoon sun and a girl tried to cut in front of us. I didn’t mean to yell at her, I promise, but…well she got the idea and headed towards the back of the line. Once we got on the boat it started raining on us, but it was a nice relief from standing in the hot sun for a couple of hours.
Thailand Part 3
Koh Pha Ngan is known around the world for it’s famous full moon parties, but from what we read about them it’s become such a shit show now that we were glad we were not going to be there during the full moon. We were there however for the half moon party which is much more tame and our speed.
Thailand Part 2
It was raining buckets when we left Phuket. Our hotel took us down to the bottom of the hill because the minibus we had booked couldn’t make it up the hill. We felt like we were back in Central America. The bus went around picking up people from all over the city before finally departing, packed to the gills. A few locals got dropped off along the way so we got some breathing room before finally arriving in Don Sak to take the ferry out to our next island adventure. Unfortunately, this would be one of the the absolute worst experiences of our entire trip, and hopefully we never have to go through something like this ever again. A word of warning though…If you’re eating lunch or something, don’t click the jump ahead button…
Thailand Part 1
If New Zealand and Nepal were on Mandy’s list of places we absolutely could not miss on this trip, Thailand was mine. I’ve been wanting to see this place since I first started reading other bloggers’ posts about it, years ago when we started planning this trip. There was something magical about it. A devoutly buddhist population with a reputation of being the most friendly in Southeast Asia, delicious food you won’t find anywhere else, and, of course, the parties. Full Moon, Half Moon…just because it’s a Tuesday….there’s always something going on in Thailand. I wanted to experience as much of it as I could and that’s why we got our 60 day visas here. We’d use about 53 of those days before we left and it was everything I had hoped it would be and so, so much more.
2crazybackpackers 