Cam t'Asia

Day 0, 7:00am: I wake up, grab my stuff, and head out to eat breakfast. I'm excited to take the two day slow boat that travels upstream along the Mekong river from Luang Prabang to the Laos-Thailand border. I've heard from many people that it's one of the most pleasant journeys they've taken in southeast Asia, and it sure as hell beats another long bus ride . Day 0, 7:30am: Lori emerges from our dorm. We discuss whether or not we still have time to catch the boat. It leaves at 8:30, and we opted not to buy advance tickets from a travel agency in town to save a bit of money ($4), so we're supposed to get to the pier early. I figure we're cutting it close, but it's low season so we might be alright. Day 0, 7:50am: Another girl from the hostel, Esmee, is taking the boat today, but she has a ticket so she is waiting for the tuktuk to pick her up from the hostel and take her to the pier. We ask Bram, one of the hostel employees, if we can ride in the tukt

"You have to do X while you're here." I can't count the number of times I've heard that, from other travelers or people touting tours on the street. You can't come to this city and not go to this museum, or this waterfall, or this temple. Yeah? Watch me. The reality is, my travels are my own, and I don't have to answer to anyone or live by anyone else's itinerary. I can't spend two or three days in each city I visit, or do 29 countries in 29 days. It's not fun for me. I need chill days. Sometimes, I even need chill weeks. Don't get me wrong, I do love doing the touristy stuff and visiting the "must-sees" most of the time. But for me, it's way more important to take my time. If there are a few attractions that are each several kilometres away from where I'm staying, I'll take a whole day to visit each of them and walk, rather than get a tuktuk to cart me around to all of them in one day. As a result, I tend to spend

"My husband is with me. Honey! Come here. He and I are just here for a few weeks..." "Yeah, we've been best friends since we were children, so we decided to travel together after university..." "We actually met on an app for people looking for travel buddies..." "...are you here alone?" One of the most common questions I've gotten over the course of my time here (other than, "What's your favourite place?") is if I'm traveling alone. Some people ask it with a sense of wonder, others with concern, others with a mixture of surprise and pity. After talking with other solo travelers about it, it's not uncommon - we all get asked this question, with these tones, and most of us have the same response: an enthusiastic "Yep!" This is the first time I've traveled by myself, and I've loved it. I make my own schedule, and I don't have to answer to or worry about disappointing anyone else. I take ch

One of the weirder places on my mom's tour through Sri Lanka was a three day stop in Beruwala, on the west coast about 60km south of Colombo. It's a beach town, so stopping there makes sense in theory. However, we were there in June, which is the rainy season in the west and the south of the island, which meant it was low season. And it was really low season there: there was almost no one around, and I got questioned several times about why I was there at all, especially in low season. Of course, the double edged sword of being somewhere in low season is that with not many other tourists around, prices are lower and there aren't hundreds of people trying to take selfies with Buddha everywhere. There were no hostels here, so I splurged for a nice guest house called Isabella's. The owners here were German but they weren't there in low season, so a few local ladies ran the place in their absence. The most notable thing about Isabella's was the breakfast, which

I've been asked several times if I had any scary experiences while traveling. There haven't been many, but two of the most memorable ones involved animals. There were tons of times that creepy insects or lizards scared the hell out of me, but those were just jump scares that lasted a few seconds and subsided when doors were slammed, sinks were blocked , or, if necessary, guts were sprayed on the floor. However, there were two standout experiences involving animals that were slightly larger. The first time was in Indonesia, on the island of Lombok. I had a nice routine of walking an hour to a beautiful white sand beach in the morning, getting some lunch, and spending the afternoon reading and swimming there. One day, I was en route and I spotted a macaque monkey about 50m away from where I was walking. I had seen many macaques before, some up close and personal on the river safari with Osman , but usually they were just doing their thing and minding their own business. This

A while back, I wrote about some memorable fails from our experience trying out many different foods in Japan. Here are some dining experiences that turned out a little bit better: We ate a lot of sushi Japan is, of course, known for sushi. While I've enjoyed stuffing my face with sushi at the all-you-can-eat places back home, I was excited to try the "real thing" in Japan. Just like back home, there are places that range from relatively cheap to pretty extravagant. The cheap ones tend to be the "conveyor belt" sushi places, or kaiten. Here, there's one large bar with a small conveyor belt that everyone sits around, and moving along it are plates containing a few pieces of sushi each. The plates are differently coloured, with a code on the wall matching colours to prices. If you go for the cheapest ones, you can eat 20 pieces of sushi for around $10 - not bad. We tried to mix it up between some of the cheaper, plainer options, like tilapia and some myst

I was only in Japan for 10 days, half of which were spent in Tokyo, the other half in the north chasing cherry blossoms. However, in those 10 days, I noticed four distinct aspects of the culture there: Nerd culture is everywhere This was very evident in Tokyo, and I'd hazard a guess that it is in other parts of the country as well (e.g. Kyoto, where Nintendo headquarters is located). There is an entire district in the middle of Tokyo called Akihabara, or Akiba, that is dedicated to all things nerdy, which here is mostly anime, electronics, and video games. At night, "electric town" looks like something straight out of a sci-fi movie - neon lights, tall buildings, and giant anime characters everywhere. There are huge 8 floor buildings dedicated solely to manga, whether it's the comics themselves or action figures derived from them, and grown men in suits browse these places just as (or more) often than the younger people you would expect. Other electron

If you go to southeast Asia, odds are you'll go to many temples. Most of the temples are Buddhist, some Tao, some Hindu, and probably some others. The temples are, by and large, beautiful: ornate trims, packed with symbolism; Buddhas in many different positions, which all mean something different; the smell of incense in the air; stories depicted on the walls through elaborate images; gold and gems reflecting brightly. One thing I wasn't expecting, however, is how it feels to walk through these places. I'm not religious or spiritual, but there's been an unmistakable "bigger than you" feeling as I've explored these places. The air feels almost thicker to walk through, like there's some ethereal presence there. I get a slight pit in my stomach. The high ceilings and the Buddhas and other statues towering over me make me feel small. My footsteps seem louder. The best example of this was the rock temple in Dambulla, Sri Lanka. I was lucky enough to walk

Travelling alone makes you more of a target for scams, especially here in southeast Asia, so after a few months on the road, I was used to this and just assumed most people were trying to scam me in some way. Usually, this was true... but sometimes it wasn't. One of the first rules to live by out here is to always ask the price of something before you agree to it. Often in the case of transportation, someone will ask you where you are going and then, once you tell them, herd you onto a nearby vehicle without another word. Especially in the case of taxis or tuktuks, this is dangerous, because if you don't know the price beforehand, the driver can make up basically anything they want when you arrive at your destination, and you have no choice but to pay - it's not like you can say no and walk away at that point, like you can before you get in. I had a minor slip up in Colombo when I asked the price of a bus before I boarded it at the station. The driver told me, but for

The journey from Malaysian Borneo to Indonesia was not as straightforward as Dana and I had hoped. We were in Semporna, a port town in the southeast corner of the province, in hopes that we could catch a boat to Bali after doing some diving. The journey turned out to be a lot more convoluted than that, with many stopovers in "less travelled" places. Semporna is where we discovered how famous we were. Most divers elect to stay on nearby Mabul island to get to the famous Sipadan dive site, but we chose to stay ashore in Semporna and make a longer journey by boat to do our day of diving. As a result, everyone from shopkeepers to fishmongers hooted things at us as we walked by, whether we were heading to dive in the morning or looking for a place to eat dinner at night. They spoke amongst each other and pointed at us, sometimes with an excited tone, sometimes with a mocking one. Dana is tall, blonde, and Belgian, so she got most of the attention - generally people couldn't

I went to Borneo because I pictured it to be lush and green, wild and untamed, teeming with rare birds and mammals. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case, at least not in the province of Sabah on the Malaysian side, where I decided to spend my time. It /was/ mostly green, but for a different reason: acres upon acres of palm tree plantations. Palm trees has always been a pleasant sight for me: they meant tropical weather, beaches, and coconuts. Here, though, seeing the organized mass production of them was a total eyesore. The reason why there are so many of them, I learned, is because palm oil is the biggest export in Malaysia. The country actually pays its debts in palm oil instead of money. People make relatively good money working in the palm oil industry, and even more if they agree to grow palm trees on their own land. However, a huge cost of this industry is that it endangers the amazing wildlife that used to thrive here. The Kinabatangan river is a great spot to do river

One of the cooler things to do in the Sabah province of Malaysian Borneo is a safari along the Kinabatangan river. At the suggestion of a group of 4 Germans I befriended near Kinabalu national park, I contacted a man named Osman, who ran a homestay and did two daily river safaris. They had seen some amazing sights on his safaris: pygmy elephants, tons of monkeys, even a clouded leopard eating a proboscis monkey in a tree (which is basically once in a lifetime). Osman allegedly took David Attenborough out on the river, was an extremely talented guide, and had a very nice family. However, I read some reviews of his homestay on TripAdvisor and there were several pretty alarming ones about his temper. The Germans had said he was a bit crazy, but didn't mention anything about a fiery temper. I decided to go anyway on their recommendation, and the assumption that the reviews were being a bit dramatic. After contacting his wife, Yanti, through WhatsApp, I boarded a few local buses to g