Skipping ahead to January, I was reading a blog post that included tweet mentions, and lo and behold: there was Jodi. Once again I clicked back to her blog and found out that she had moved to Chiang Mai, Thailand. At the time, Stephanie and I were sketching out our next few months and saw that we might be in northern Thailand sometime in March. So I gave Jodi a heads up.
To make a long story short, we arrived in Chiang Mai, got settled, emailed Jodi, and found ourselves in the middle of cabal of travel bloggers, including Shannon O’Donnell of A Little Adrift, Travis Ball of Flashpacker HQ, Wes Nations of Johnny Vagabond, James Clark of Nomadic Notes, and of course Jodi of Legal Nomads (not to mention a few non-bloggers, Paddy Mangunta and Jeff Boda). It was a veritable meetup!
I have to admit, after 7 months on the road, it was a little surreal to hear people casually tossing around terms like “SEO”, “affiliate marketing”, and “analytics” again. On the other hand, it was super cool to be warmly welcomed into this geeky group, who shared with us their favorite barbecued pork at the Sunday Night Walking Market, invited us out for drinks, and gave us something to look forward to nearly every night of the week.
East meets West: Rudy’s Bar-B-Q “Sause” with Thai barbecued pork and coconut water from the Sunday Night Walking Market
We were a little nervous after we learned—a few weeks before our cruise—that a junk boat sank in Hạ Long Bay (also spelled: Halong Bay) killing 12 people (11 of them foreign tourists). We’ve put a lot of things at risk by going on this adventure, our lives not consciously being one of them.
Water buffalo on the way to Hạ Long Bay
We reassured ourselves that the high cost of our tour ($250/per person for three days and two nights on the bay) compared to the cut-rate boat that sank, was an indicator of quality. We chose one of the smaller luxury junk boats that ply the bay, the Prince III, part of the Indochina Junk family, with only 4 double cabins. Cruising with us were two couples our age, one from Singapore and one from Australia, and an older, but no less energetic couple from England. Everyone got along swimmingly.
Our junk, the Prince IIICarrot garnish lesson: Justin’s plane vs. chef’s craneFloating houses flying Vietnam flags
What did we do in Cambodia besides be awestruck by Angkor? We toured a silk farm. We visited the new Angkor National Museum. We got $5 foot massages. We went horseback riding in the Siem Reap countryside. We shopped for kramas—the traditional Cambodian checkered scarves. We handwashed our clothes. We honed our bargaining skills. We worked on our upcoming travel plans.
One silkworm said to another: “Salad again?”A single thread is made up of 40-60 strands of silk from the cocoon of the silkworm, which is killed before it emerges to prevent breaking the continuous filament (ergo, silk ≈ vegan)Creating a very fancy patterned silk scarf (or krama) on the loomRiding horses through the rice paddies around Siem Reap
We sat on the roof of the boat to Siem Reap, CambodiaThe Tonlé Sap is the largest freshwater lake in Southeast AsiaWe were towed through the channel to the port of Siem Reap
Of all the places we’ve been and will go on this trip, Cambodia is the only country that I’ve traveled to previously. In fact I visited twice, both times for work, first in January 2003, and then again in May. Those dates are interesting because that’s not long after I started my blog. So there’s a record to look back on.
It’s funny to see my growth even in the 4 months between those two trips. I took 120 photos during the first trip, with my 2 megapixel Kodak, though hilariously most of them I took out the window of the plane—only 54 were taken on the ground in Phnom Penh. The shear absurdity of the journey itself (3 layovers!) partially accounts for the number of windowseat shots: Raleigh > Detroit > Tokyo > Bangkok (overnight in hotel) > Phnom Penh.
I was a shy photographer (I still am), and I was also likely overwhelmed by my first exposure to Southeast Asia. It’s hard to know what to capture when everything is different. At the time I didn’t see my blog as an outlet for photography. In the early days, embedding photos in posts was a hassle—blogging was all about text!
However, two months before that first trip I set up a web-based photo gallery (which I’ve long since converted to blog posts) so I could more easily share photos with friends and family. Realize this was before Flickr and most photo sharing sites existed. The photos I chose to share from that initial trip represent a pretty random smattering of things I saw and was able to quickly capture without drawing too much attention to myself: parked scooters, gas in glass soda bottles, shacks by the side of the river. It was a world I was wholly unfamiliar with. And of course my primary purpose there wasn’t to traipse around and explore. So I snapped what I could in the short time I had between work ending and dinner.
These were the blog posts from my first trip to Cambodia:
My second trip, only 4 months later, paints a very different picture. For one, I was there over Memorial Day—a rare three day weekend which I was encouraged to use to visit Angkor. I blogged more during the trip. And I took a lot more photos. Nearly 800. Of course much of that was due to the Angkor visit—over 500 photos. But still, not counting that excursion, I was taking a lot more photos, and not just out the plane window. It was as if I finally realized what a rare opportunity I had, and what an interesting place Cambodia was, and I wanted to capture as much as I could to share with friends, family, and the internet at large.
These were the blog posts from my second trip to Cambodia:
