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Dax told you in his last post how we arrived in Bangkok. Overland travel is not for the fainthearted and certainly accounts for our most exciting travel days (just wait until we tell you how we left the city). As with Beijing, we were a little overwhelmed by the magnitude of the city’s hotel scene, so we chickened out and played our Sheraton card….aaaahhhhh. Heavenly respite. Because Tom has been a major traveler for many years, he enjoys wonderful benefits with the Starwood chain…at least for the next two months. The Royal Orchid Sheraton on the river upgraded us to a luxurious two room suite with two bathrooms, an awesome river view, and decadent daily fruit plates. The big kids had a normal room next door, but they didn’t mind. They weren’t sharing beds, had free internet on the first floor, and a choice of five different types of pillow. The only problem with this little setup was that we didn’t want to leave the hotel. We ventured down the street to the 7-Eleven every now and then for a Slurpee and some snacks, but for the most part we stayed in. This was a good thing, especially since we have some major planning to do for the next month of the trip. The more comfortable we got, the more ambitious we became. Here’s how things evolved: flights are cheaper to India from Singapore, so let’s go there. The cheapest and most interesting way to do that is to exit Laos into Thailand, take the train back to Bangkok and on through Malaysia to Singapore. Fun! Two more countries than we had planned on. And since Tom and I have been to both before, we know what to expect. Flights to Bali from Kuala Lumpur (a stop on the train route) are really cheap, so maybe we should throw in a few days on one of favorite islands as well. A third unexpected country. Sure, why not.

We raced to submit our Indian visa applications along with the small fortune it costs Americans to get them to the Bangkok embassy. We had planned on doing this in Chiang Mai, but we realized that with the Christmas and New Year holidays thrown in, we’d be stuck there for almost two weeks waiting to get them back. (They take a long time and a lot of money to get here if you’re not Thai.) With India rapidly approaching, we didn’t feel we had that much time to devote to one place. So we left the paperwork in Bangkok with the assurance that they would hang on to the visas for up to three weeks and blazed off an overnight bus to Chiang Mai.

The bus turned out to be lovely–fuzzy neon seats and blankets, a stewardess who brought about 743 snacks, goofy Thai movies on the TV–but the amount of sleep we got on board was inversely proportional to our size. Asher and Kieran zonked while Tom and Dax tossed and turned. McKane and I were somewhere in between. The darn thing traveled two hours faster than we expected so we pulled into the Chiang Mai bus station at 6:00 am…in the dark. We had expected daylight, a taxi ride to the city, camping out in a cafe, and hunting for a hotel. Instead we wrapped the little kids in their silk sleep sacks for a nap (they’re the blue blobs in the picture below), poked around online, bought a SIM card for the phone, and woke up a bunch of guesthouse desk clerks with our calls. Who’d have guessed that Chiang Mai–not a beach town–would be packed for Christmas–not a Buddhist holiday? Or that the annual flower festival which the guidebooks say happens in February is actually a mega event this year in honor of the king’s 80th birthday and in full swing right now? Certainly not us. After many, many calls, one nice man who didn’t have rooms told us to come to his guesthouse where he would help us find something. With the sun now shining and the birds singing, our prospects seemed good. After a thorough scouring of the neighborhood, we came up with a few nasty rooms and some just so-so ones. We drove back and forth in tuk tuks and pick up trucks checking out some others but finally ended up in one of the so-so places. Miraculously, another more upscale place had a few last minute cancellations, so we moved the next day.

My point, and remember, I always have one, is this: travel is an emotional rollercoaster. The ups and downs come as rapidly as you change settings. A single bad meal or transaction with a taxi driver can blacken your outlook, while one good night’s sleep or a chance encounter with a friend can make you feel invincible. Right now we’re somewhere in between. After sleeping on a bus, wandering a city in an exhausted haze, and crashing in a flourescent-lit, amenity-deficient guesthouse (about what you’d expect from $10/night rooms), we no longer wanted to add new countries to the itinerary. We didn’t want to go anywhere. We wanted to veg for a week or two or three. Now that we’re in a more comfortable place where we get free breakfast, have access to laundry facilities and 24-hour in-room wifi, we’re regaining our confidence. A couple more days of this and we’ll once again be dreaming of riverside shacks in Laos and beach huts in Bali. Stay tuned to see where we end up. If you have an opinion as to where we should go, be sure to post a comment here or shoot us an email.

Oh…and we actually did more in Bangkok than I’ve led you to believe. We saw Eragon with Thai subtitles and played video games in a mega mall, visited the Grand Palace, and lit incense for a few impressive Buddhas at Wat Phra Kaew and Wat Pho.

Technorati Tags: Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Family travel, Grand Palace, Wat Phra Kaew, Round the world, Round-the-world, Royal Orchid Sheraton, RTW, Starwood, Thailand, Wat Pho

After our little stay in Siem Reap, we had decided to do as most travelers in the area and head out to Bangkok via bus or taxi. Now we had heard that Bangkok Air, which has a monopoly on the Bangkok-Siem Reap air route, had convinced the government not to fix up the roads, but we had no idea what we were really in store for: Route 6, the roughest, most unpaved major road running through Cambodia into Thailand.

Let’s backtrack a little to the day before we embarked on our little journey down Route 6. We were in a rush. We wanted to leave the next day from Siem Reap to Bangkok on a bus or if necessary take a few taxis. After bumping into some friends we originally met in China, we found out that there was an $11/person non-A/C bus heading out at 7:30 the next morning. Tour busses in this part of the world are notorious for ripping people off, so we didn’t know if we could trust this bus (which we later found was a ‘mini’ bus that traveled in a squad with other mini busses). We headed to travel agents. Each gave us a different price for the same bus. It seems no matter where in southeast Asia you are, people are just going to want to rip you off. We looked around for a little while longer and ran into some more people we had met previously, these on the boat from Vietnam. They were having trouble finding a hotel in Thailand for Christmas, maybe a sign for the future… We went back to the hotel and started calling around about taxis. After seeing that everybody wanted us to prepay in cash, a dangerous practice, we decided to send Dad to the gas station where the taxis hung out in the morning. He ended up getting two taxis for a reasonable price to take us to the Cambodian-Thai border town of Poipet, which locals say rhymes with toilet for a reason. From there we’d get a bus to Bangkok. We woke up early, loaded up, and got in our taxis–Dad, Mac, and Asher in one and Mom, Kieran, and I in the other.

We started driving out of town on Route 6. As soon as we got outside the city, the road deteriorated from nicely paved asphalt to dirt and rocks. The cab shook and a rock smashed into the windshield. The driver, who didn’t speak a word of English, tried to gesture that it was fine. We weren’t so sure. Kieran fell asleep easily enough but I had a harder time. The bumping and rocking of the car was making it impossible to sleep, so I decided to just listen to my IPod. The scenery on the roadside was amazing so it was another reason to stay up. Rice patty after rice patty after rice patty. Farm after farm, and then of course your regular gas station. Another reason to stay awake was the fact that we nearly crashed into a few trucks and cars throughout the ride. The rules of the road are minimal so every move is dangerous. But you should watch my dad’s video for more on that. I was extremely surprised that motorbikes managed to stay driving on the road. The state of it was appalling and one would have expected them to all crash and create a hailstorm of rocks. Now we knew that there was a conspiracy to keep the roads bad, but none of us could have known they meant this bad. The road was entirely dirt, the only smooth part being the bridges which were constructed of metal plates. Every turn, every acceleration felt like we were going to launch in the air and crash into a rice patty on the side of the road. A few near crashes, a lot of rocks in the windshield, some rough sleep, and a feeling of anger towards a certain airline, and we arrived at our destination, hoping for better roads on our next adventure.

Luckily we found these roads on the way to Bangkok. The government bus was very nice and got us to the city quickly. Good for us, we needed the rest after the previous car ride.

Technorati Tags: Cambodia, Family travel, Overland travel, Round the world, Round-the-world, RTW, Siem Reap, Thailand

When we were in Hanoi, we visited Vietnam’s National History Museum, which contains a variety of ancient statues on open air display. Coming off a month in China where people tickled Buddha bellies, stuck fingers in Buddha ears, and generally disregarded any posted rules, Asher thought the Vietnamese relics were fair game. It was difficult to make her understand that 700 year old artifacts are to be admired from a distance, not poked, prodded, ridden, or kicked. Cambodia’s spectacular Angkor complex proved more fulfilling for the kids, since its myriad temples, ranging in age from roughly 1100 to 800 years, were made to be climbed, traversed, and touched.

Fortunately, our guide, Ponheary, is an expert on all things Angkor and Cambodia. Before the rule of the Khmer Rouge and in the days before the land was peppered with landmines, Angkor Wat was her playground. She ran the corridors, scaled the staircases, and searched for treasure inside the sacred walls. At first I worried when the kids tired of ancient Hindu stories and their attention wandered to grassy courtyards and stacks of fallen stones. I hoped Ponheary would not be offended by their limited attention spans, but she was unphased. She was quick to help them catch crickets, showed them which stones were safe for climbing and jumping and pointed out the best places to play hide and seek.

The kids were thrilled on our second day of Angkor touring when Ponheary brought her 3-year old nephew FeeFee along to watch the sunrise over Angkor Wat with us. It took him a little while to warm up to us, but soon he was giggling, chasing, and jumping like a regular Andrus. The kids had so much fun with him that morning that they asked Ponheary to bring him the next day as well. He joined us in the morning and even brought along a toy truck to share with Asher.

Most other tourists seem to enjoy kids, even ours. They usually find them a novelty and in some situations go so far as to praise their behavior. Because it is holiday time and school is out in countries around the globe, we’ve run into an increasing number of them. One particular group, however, was not impressed with our brood or a few others at Wat Prohm, the jungle temple of Tomb Raider fame. Somehow three American families had converged at the same spot at the same time and all wanted to take the same pictures. The first two families posed their kids in the doorway in a highly efficient manner, taking perhaps three minutes total for their shoots. A small group of ***nationality hidden**** tourists shouted “Bravo” as the second family completed its shoot. I thought they were sincere. Why wouldn’t they be? The kids were adorable and well-behaved. Tom then hustled our kids in and took another two minutes to snap our pictures. One of the waiting tourists had had enough and rudely shouted, “Could you move? We are trying to take pictures here.” Tom asked, “Oh, you want pictures of the kids? I’ll be happy to get out of the way.” He was being facetious. He had picked up on the man’s nastiness, which I had missed…probably because of the accent. I was still coming off our experience in China, where each of the 1.5 billion inhabitants wanted to take pictures of our kids, so why should these people be any different?

After we finished, we waited to see what possible photographic masterpieces could warrant such boorish behavior. Had they wanted to take pictures of their wives or their friends in this scenic, world famous spot? Nope. They just wanted pictures of the spot itself, something they could buy in a postcard and that provided no proof they had ever been there. Ponheary apologized and expressed her regret that she understood their language and the anti American insults they were hurling at us and the other families. (You might be able to guess their nationality by now.) One member of the group whom we had met before actually apologized to McKane on the way out for her travel companion’s breach of travel etiquette. We took some consolation in the fact that it wasn’t just us they disliked; when we got to the next good photo spot, one of the men rudely and impatiently chased two young women out of the way for the same offense–having the nerve to take their own pictures in a place they traveled thousands of miles to reach.

Grandma Lorelie has taught us that everything is worth documenting and we refuse to visit a place without creating a visual reminder that we were there. We are truly sorry that these fuddy duddies couldn’t find any joy in temporarily well-behaved kids creating memories with their parents. It’s ok though. We’re in good company. We’re far more inclined to hang out with these Chinese kids who understand that pictures can and should be fun.

It’s hard to tell what the kids, especially the little ones, will take away or remember from this year. When they look at the pictures they might remember, “Hey, that’s where we caught that praying mantis,” or “That’s the time we kicked the sand,” but there’s also a chance they will remember the Naga, the mythical Cambodian serpent, or how the Hindu king destroyed all the faces of Buddha in the temples. They might even realize that the buildings they visited were more than 1000 years old. No matter how you cut it, the takeaway has got to be worthwhile…unless of course you’re a grumpy old tourist from an unnamed country who gets his kicks harrassing happy travelers.

Technorati Tags: Adventure, Angkor Wat, Cambodia, Family travel, kids, Round the world, Round-the-world, RTW, Wat Prohm