Archive for November 11th, 2011

Stop.. So We Can Rob You

The title says it all.  For what it’s worth, the land route from Bangkok to Siem Reap (the home of Angkor Wat and other cambodian temple complexes) is one of the most unabashedly corrupt places on earth (as far as we’ve seen.) It is so corrupt that an entire web site (it took Hazel and I about 2 hours to read the whole thing) has come into existence with the sole goal of guiding helpless travellers through the gauntlet they will experience taking this trip.

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Our Wedding Map

First things first, all of the photos in this post are by Jason Fukura – he was our awesome wedding photographer and you can check out his website here.

It has taken me a long time to get to this post, but it’s a really special one!  Justin and I spent a long time dreaming about heading off on this trip.  We made lists of places we’d like to go, messed around with possible routes and looked up activities.  About six months before we left home we got married and decided that the wedding was the perfect chance to get some great travel ideas from our friends and family.  Each person who came to the wedding got a card and a little sticky arrow and we had a giant laminated map hung in the entry of the reception.  Throughout the evening people filled out the cards telling us where we should go and why and then stuck their arrow (numbered so we could match it up with the cards) to the map.  At the end of the night we had lots of great ideas and a really fun map!

So, now that we are nearing the end of the trip I wanted to post the list of locations our nearest and dearest suggested to us and to highlight which ones we made it to in our travels.  We were flattered that many people picked their hometowns (for those of you we didn’t visit, we still want to come!) and loved all the ideas (and reasonings!), but we’ll need to make several more trips to make it to them all.

Here they are!  Places we have been or will go to are in bold and I’ve tried to link back to our blog posts about the ones we have already visited and I’ll come back as we get more written and update the links for the other bold ones.

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Our plan, once we took the bus and catamaran back to Bangkok, was to fly up to Hanoi and begin our exploration of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.  But a number of factors made us change our plans.  First, I got sick right when we arrived, and we agreed that we shouldn’t leave the city till I got better.  Nothing like having a case of food poisoning on a cramped plane!

The other thing was the typhoon looming over Vietnam.  It had just hit the Phillippines, causing widespread damage, and was predicted to make landfall just east of Hanoi.  We thought long and hard – should we cancel our flight?  Knowing the airlines, it would be a big hassle, and we’d end up a lot poorer and without any set plans.  Eventually we decided that yes, we don’t really want to fly into a hurricane, so we called Orbitz and asked to cancel.

Much to our delight, the carrier we’d booked with (Qatar Airways) allows cancellation for no fee!  That’s right, we got off scot free, paying only the Orbitz booking fee in the end.  This allowed us to give me a nice recovery break.  Eventually, we decided to take the land route over to Siem Reap, Cambodia where we’d get to see one of the amazing sights in South East Asia – Angkor Wat!  Another bonus came from delaying our trip to Vietnam: I got to experience my first coffee to go served in a plastic bag.  Interesting.

Brew In A Bag