My Awesome Gap Year

I’m here in Vang Vieng! I took a van ride here from Vientiane and met a group of Canadians. We’re splitting a riverside bungalow. The town is very peaceful and full of chickens and kittens and cows that block the roads. The weather could be better though.Yesterday, we went on tubes and floated lazily down the river through stunning limestone cliffs and lush vegetation. If you ignored the several bars spotting the banks playing loud music and the occasional power line, it really was a majestic experience. Floating down, listening to the crickets and frogs, it was timeless; it felt like it could have been thousands of years in the past. We did stop at a couple of bars with rope swings and zip lines and dancing and had loads of fun.

Vientiane, Laos is the most laid-back capital city I’ve been to. After bussing to Bangkok, then going up through the Thai-Lao border (and getting ripped off by visa services), I finally made it here. And I’m glad I did. My guesthouse is right by the river, and I love it here.

Since Laos was occupided by the French for a while, it has a lot of French influence in its road names and architecture. This blend of styles is very interesting, and results in good French restaurants. There’s barely any traffic and the weather isn’t too hot, so I felt safe enough to rent a bike and explore today. (In Chiang Mai, I had a biking horror story. I don’t think I’ll rent a bike anywhere that has bad traffic again.) I found something very similar to Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, and it had great views from the top! I met some monks at the top and we talked about where we’re from. They were really interested in what I thought about Vientiane. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been waiting for a package my dad sent me to arrive in Chiang Mai (it came today dad!), so while I waited I decided to take a $2.50 bus ride up to the “paradise” of Pai for 2 days instead to play with the elephants. The elephants were amazing. I rode one bareback for 2 hours and then played with her in the river. Yes, elephants really do like to spray you with their trunks! And she liked to duck down and roll to try and knock me off her back into the water… to bad for her I can hold on to an elephants ears with remarkable strength. If you ever get the chance to play with an elephant in the water, do it! Truly an experience of a lifetime. Pictures to come!

True story: Yesterday, on the bus leaving Pai, I realized that I hadn’t gotten sick yet on this trip (except for a fever one night in China). This made me very happy, beating my brother who got sick on his first day in China. Smug, I wrote it down in my journal: “Given what I’ve been doing on this trip, not being too careful about what I eat, etc, I must have an immune system of steel to not be sick. I’m impressive!” I got to the Chiang Mai bus station, found a new hostel (my last one sucked), got a room and sat down to eat chicken in coconut milk. Then came the nausea. And it all started- an epically miserable night full of throwing up once an hour, fitfully tossing in bed, not being able to sleep, and somehow having vivid illusions of being chased through alley ways by giants. I couldn’t even keep down water. And I was the other kind of sick, too- you can guess. I’ve kept down toast, but I’m still feeling pretty terrible. And it’s all because I had to go ahead and gloat about my immune system.

I love Chiang Mai!

It’s such a beautiful and interesting place. And very relaxing. I’ve been having a laid-back 5 days. I’ve gone to see Buddhist temples and took a cooking class yesterday, where I learned to make dishes such as hot and sppicy prawns, spring rolls, and fried bananas.. Now when I come home I can cook Thai food focr everyone! 😛 There was another Seattle girl in the class.Tomorrow, I’m thinking of renting a bike and exploring outside the city walls.

I’m not sure how much longer I’m going to spend in Chiang Mai. Or even exactly where I’m going next- perhaps Vientiane, Laos. That’s the freedom that comes with not being told what to do!

Well, it’s just me now.We left Beibei in Shenzhen when we went to Hong Kong on Saturday. Then on Sunday, Gustav and Cameron left me to go back to Beijing. I miss them. 🙁 I’m very grateful to have started my trip with in a group.

Hello from Dali! This city is by far my favorite place in China. The air is clean, it’s beautifully placed in a valley by a lake, and the drivers are slightly less crazy. (We actually felt safe enough to ride bikes yesterday!)

Today we rode horses up the mountain. It was fabulous fun, although a bit scary. It was really steep in some places and sometimes their hooves slipped, but we got out of it alive.

Read the rest of this entry »

The old man is snoring.

Yeah, the weather in Kunming is terrible today. Rain, thunder, lightning. Actually, it feels a lot like Seattle. 🙂 A major road is flooded, so we had to skip our bus ride to Dali today and go tomorrow instead. I can’t wait!

So what’s been going on with us? Well, in our last days in Xi’an we spent our extra time wandering around the city and exploring. We found the bird market, which is aptly named because every 3rd stall sells birds (from parakeets to chicks to pigeons!) It also had a lot of turtles, rabbits, and crickets.

Read the rest of this entry »

It takes FOR EVER to upload pictures here, so I’m just going to post a few for now!  

cool metal design!

Read the rest of this entry »

Hello! Right now we’ve been stuck in Xi’an for 5 days. Our original plan was to leave after 3 days via train to Kunming, but all the tickets have been sold out until the 13th. So we made the choice to take a plane instead! It leaves on the 9th. This isn’t a bad city or anything, but we’re anxious to get going! Read the rest of this entry »

These past few days have been awesome. We took a train from Beijing to Datong, a very industrial city without much natural beauty. Our hostel was right next to a coal burning facility. The countryside around the city was gorgeous, with farms and fields and milk cows pulling carts loaded precariously full of produce. We visited the yungang grottoes. They were a series of 20+ amazing man-dug caves, full of thousands and thousands of Buddhas, big, small and miniscule. One Buddha was even 17 meters tall- an absolutely breathtaking monument.The next day after the grottoes, we went to see the hanging monastery. I can’t even describe how it felt to walk up to the side of a vertical cliff and look up to see an entire building perched on its wall. It was breathtaking and astonishing to walk on it. And terrifying. My best guess as to why it was built on the side of a cliff would be to avoid flooding from the nearby river. How it was done, I have no clue.That same day, we took a 16 hour train ride to Xi’an. Beibei ‘reserved’ 4 tickets the day before, and at 5:20 pm we were waiting in our hostel lobby for our tickets to be delivered for our 5:48 pm train ride. I don’t know why they had to be delivered. The lady finally came and gave us 3 tickets. What happened to the 4th one? I don’t know. All I know is that we made a mad rush to the station and underwent a lot of confusion as Beibei talked to several official-looking men outside the gates in Chinese. After 10 stressful minutes we finally went to board the train, Beibei sans ticket. Later we learned that he bribed the men with 300 Yuen to let him board. Hey, it worked. I spent most of the ride sleeping. On the top bunk of 3, I was sweltering hot and the fan mysteriously stopped working an hour into the train ride. Miserable is a nice way to put it. Read the rest of this entry »