Jul 21, 2008
Posted By Tynan
Man do we have a lot of catching up to do. This rapid fire traveling schedule doesn't leave us with all that much time to contemplate and write. If we aren't checking in somewhere, we're checking out and trying to catch a plane. We were worried about where we'd stay in Hong Kong. It's a famously expensive city and we intended to be there for about ten days. ...
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Jul 21, 2008
Posted By Tynan
Todd's experience running with the bulls was a lot better than mine, so I'm going to let him dazzle you with that story. The tradition in Pamplona is to sleep in the park, and then run with the bulls the next day. This is a convenient tradition because we didn't want to pay for hotels anyway. We walked as far away from the festivities as possible, which go ...
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Jul 15, 2008
Posted By Todd
On Fridays, everything in Qatar is closed. It's like Sunday in the US with three times the service interruption.
We had no idea, so when our flight landed in the wee hours Friday morning, the entire city was shut down. We had the wrong address and ended up in the industrial section 20 minutes out of town. The sprawl was incredible -- LA has nothing on ...
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Jul 6, 2008
Posted By Tynan
As our stack of plane tickets gets thinner and our passports get more and more inked up, we've started thinking about what we're going to do next year. A repeat? Take some time off? Some combination? This sort of travel is self perpetuating. If I had ten places I really wanted to visit before leaving on this trip, I now have twenty. Most people we meet are travelers, ...
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Jul 1, 2008
Posted By Tynan
When you're on the road for this long you get good at rationing. In our case, that applies to batteries and to food. I just last week ate a vegan food bar that I bought in LA in the beginning of March. We don't plan far ahead, so we never know exactly when we'll be able to buy acceptable food. Batteries are the same way. We're on ...
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Jun 29, 2008
Posted By Todd
Why take a 24-hour train over a 4-hour bus?
Because it's the last running train in Cambodia. Because it's packed with locals transporting fruit to the capital. Because you can ride on the roof!
The train from Battambang to Phnom Penh used to run three times a week, but these days goes just once on Sunday. We took a taxi 150 km for the privilege.
When ...
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Jun 25, 2008
Posted By Tynan
In a stunning display of forward thinking, we decided to go to the Vietnamese embassy to get visas. Ideally we would have gotten them for China as well, thus enabling us to take the train all the way through China to Hong Kong, but there wasn't time for that. We went on Friday. It takes four business days to get the visas, so we'd have them the following ...
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Jun 20, 2008
Posted By Tynan
Okay so I just wrote about half of a really long post about how awesome Thailand has been... and then it got deleted somehow. It's a shame when things like that happen to computer geniuses like myself. So... from the top. Todd and I reconvened on the small island of Koh Phi Phi (where The Beach with Leonardo DiCaprio was filmed). But this time we had company. ...
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Jun 16, 2008
Posted By Todd
The Atlanta Hotel in Bangkok is within walking distance of the tailor district, the Siam Paragon, and Lumpini Park. It's also right next two of the three red light districts of Bangkok.
When the owner's son took over, he decided to make it "Bangkok's Bastion of Healthy Tourism." The guy must have had some pretty traumatic sexual experiences.. he clearly has a complex.
Staying there, you're also constantly ...
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Jun 12, 2008
Posted By Tynan
As you can clearly tell from the little asterisk on the itinerary on the right, Todd and I parted ways temporarily for a few days. His cousins were in Thailand so he headed up there by plane and seaplane from Singapore while I intended to take a train all the way there. Things didn't quite work out that way. I made a video on my phone (go e90!) ...
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