Hello everyone, we have made it to Sydney, Australia ! We haven’t had internet the last two weeks on the ship so no posts, but hopefully one soon. We’ve done a lot since Singapore. In all honesty though, we are both getting tired of being tourists. Sydney is beautiful but we may not tour it […]
Author: Ellen
Sapa Postcard From Ellen
Prologue Well, we are coming up on 4 months! What’s hard is burnout from making decisions! We are taking more days off, often due to colds, and letting others help plan and set up our activities. We actually don’t travel, as in pack up and move rooms that often. Maybe every 3 days at most. […]
Journey’s End Homestay
Journey’s End is an island on an island. It is in the far less populated Southeast, near the end of a road, in the hamlet of Chek Bae. It is a bit on the hippy spectrum, certainly welcoming, unpretentious, mellow, delicious, beloved by guests and neighbors, and family. It gets many repeat visitors, and is […]
On the Water
Here we were on the coast of the Gulf of Thailand, longingly looking at the water. We signed up to go out on a boat, but it had been too windy as of late, and the skipper had vetoed several days. Finally, it was our time. There were seven of us, the Austrians, Peter and […]
Happy New Year!
By now it’s the 2nd of the new year, and you’re probably waking up. Nonetheless, Happy New Year! We started the evening with a sunset. It just doesn’t ever get boring. There is a tradition here at Journey’s End, that we are all (staff and guests) invited to the landlord’s place across the street for […]
Koh Chang
Koh Chang (Elephant Island) is the third largest Thai island. It is on the eastern coast of the Gulf of Thailand. It is also not nearly as well known as Phuket or Koh Samui, between the western coast of the Gulf of Thailand and the Andaman Sea. For this reason, it is not as developed. […]
Merry Christmas to All!
Never have we wanted peace on earth more than this year! For those of you waiting for more posts, we’ve been a bit busy lately. Tomorrow is Christmas, and besides our proper English Christmas dinner, we should have time to do some catching up. One of the more curious things we’ve observed in Buddhist countries, […]
Luang Prabang à la Noy
We had such good luck with Noy on our waterfall quest, that we decided to use him again for a tour of the sights of Luang Prabang. Noy grew up in the country on a farm. His mother passed when he was quite young. His dad moved to Vientianne. When he passed, Noy was on […]
Of Butterflies, Bears, and Waterfalls
We met Noy when we downloaded “Loca” the Laotian ridesharing app. No “Grab” here. It’s a bit buggy, but it’s very affordable, and has worked well for us. As the salesperson many Lao are, he suggested we hire him to take us to a few of the Luang Prabang sights. At $50, this was cheaper […]
Dark House
Colloquially known as the Black Temple, today we headed out to the Baan Dam (translates to “Dark House”) museum. This is another “temple” from the imagination of a Chang Rai artist, in this case, a private art museum comprising a mixture of traditional northern Thai buildings with unconventional and contemporary architecture, designed by Thawan Duchanee. […]