Tonight will be the last night that we sleep in a “land-base” hotel. Tomorrow we board the Celebrity Solstice for a 13 night cruise to Sydney, Australia. We will not have internet access while at sea, and may have it at port, depending. We will be stopping in Bali, Darwin, Port Douglas, and Airlie Beach […]
Continue reading Singapore – End of the Road, Start of the Sea
We are enjoying Malaysia. As we’ve mentioned, it is Ramadan, so we get to hear the muezzin go on long extensive riffs in the evenings. The other night he went on for over 30 minutes. That takes some serious effort. We flew to Kota Kinabalu yesterday, and I’ve finally got internet, so we’d talk about our […]
Y Lin Ho, Lao Chai, and Sapa Market Thursday morning arrived and it was a beautiful sunny day. At 9:00 Sece (sp?) showed up for our tour. The driver was none other than Tommy’s brother. Sece is “White” Hmong, and was born and raised in Y Lin Ho. Sapa is the largest city she’s been […]
Postcard from Ellen – January, 2025 Hello everyone, I haven’t been blogging as much this trip. I realized it’s partly because there are so many followers I have been feeling self conscious. But also because, like many of you the craziness around the USA has gotten me very down at times and I wanted the […]
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 […]
The Golden Triangle is only an hour and a half away from Chang Rai. We took off in search of coffee for the way out. Stopped at an Amazon. No relationship to the Amazon we know so well, but very common in Thailand. We were told that the Golden Triangle is more or less a […]
It is Thanksgiving this day, not that you’d notice in Thailand. In honor, and absent any evidence of turkey and stuffing, we decided to do a Thai cooking school. We also couldn’t help but hear the screams and cries of children during recess at the school next door. Chang Mai Our hotel was located across […]
Continue reading Northern Thailand Magical Mystery Tour – 7 – Chang Mai
Day 5 was the vaunted trip to Pai. Vaunted because there are over 762 curves–most of them hairpin and switchback. Apparently it was built by the Japanese during the 2nd World War. However, we needed to start with a stop for morning – Coffee There are tourist traps, and there are tourist traps. I think […]
Continue reading Northern Thailand Magical Mystery Tour – 5 – Pai
After a fairly mediocre breakfast at our hotel, we headed off to Nan, in Eastern Thailand near the border to Laos. It was progressively hillier as we made our way toward mountains. Gone were the rice paddies and now we were surrounded by, I kid you not, corn fields. Sometimes there would be a few […]
Continue reading Northern Thailand Magical Mystery Tour 2 – Nan
It’s Thursday. Day 1 of our Magical Mystery Tour across northern Thailand. today we head from Chang Rai to Phayao, via the home that Lek grew up in. In Phayou, we will relax at the pool, watch a sunset, then visit the night market for some street food. Stop 1 – Hemps on Thailand Although […]
