the globeTROTTERS

Spirtituality is fascinating, enlightening and at the same time, confounding. Bill and I had traversed around many churches, synagogues, pagodas and temples learning about different religions and schools of thought. While I always really enjoy...

5/22 Great Wall at Badaling  This was a big day, we would be visiting the Great Wall of China.  This was one of the top sites of our whole trip.  The group was excited.  We got up early in our Beijing hotel and met up in the lobby. ...

On our first full day of sight seeing in Beijing, the five of us head over to one of the prime tourist spots: Tiananmen Square. Tiananmen definitely has an opposing feel to it, which I guess is the point. The place is huge, massive even. I mean, its a...

We arrived in Beijing by plane from Guilin. Having just chilled in Yangshou for a week we were well rested and ready for some sight seeing in big town Beijing. Our friends from back home (John, Damien, and Polly) would be meeting us in Beijing. John was...

After spending two uneventful days in Guilin, Chrissy and I head north to a town called Yangshou.  Two Brits had approached us in our Guilin hostel about going in together on chartering a boat to Yangshou.  This boat trip is one of the things...

Twenty minutes outside of Macau, we arrived at the border with mainland China. Both Macau and Hong Kong are considered Special Administration Regions for China and neither require a visa for US citizens. Bill and I got off the bus and were required to...

We have just finished up a luxurious few days in Hong Kong hanging out with our friends Stella and Eugene and celebrating Chrissy's birthday.  We reluctantly check out of our sweet Hong Kong Hotel and make our way to the ferry which will take us...

We arrived in Hong Kong just days before my 30th birthday. I had already freaked on my 25th birthday, so I felt relatively good about this one. That didn't stop Bill from a little payback. In November, about a month away from Bill's big day, I started...

We have just flown to Perth from Sydney to visit our friends Mel and Ryan, who we had met while traveling in Vietnam. We have traveled almost the length of Vietnam with these guys and at the end of our journey Ryan had proposed to Mel....

When Bill and I started to plan for this trip, one of the first questions we had to tackle was which countries we thought we might want to go to and which ones we would skip. We set about trying to find a good way to figure this out and decided that because...

Our time in India is coming to a close.  We have been here for over a month now and just finished a quick trip up the southern west coast.  Last stop is Mumbai (formerly Bombay in the British world). We get into Mumbai prettty late at night. ...

Kollam to AlleppeyChrissy and I just finished up a fantastic visit to Darjeeling.  Our time in India is winding down.  We still have some pretty cool days planned though and next stop is Kerala, way down towards the southern tip of India. After...

We were ready to make a hasty departure out of Agra and we promptly boarded a plane to Delhi and spent the night for a third time. The next morning, we got up and took a Jet Airways flight to Bagdogra, the city with the nearest airport to Darjeeling....

I had never seen a dead body burning. I don't think that it's anything that you are ever really prepared to see. Still, there we were, looking at someone's loved one burning. Sitting along the Ganges or "Mother River" we were in Varanasi, the holiest...

We get into the Agra station at 9PM and hire yet another auto-rickshaw dude to drive us to the Sheraton.  Yes, we are staying in a Sheraton.  Agra is tourist city and using some hotel points for a free hotel stay sounded like a good plan. ...

We got off of an overnight train from Udaipur in the town of Jaipur.  This is one of northern India's bigger cities.  We picked out a couple of hotels in the guidebook and set out on foot towards these places.  It was early morning and...

Leaving Jaisalmer, we hired a private car to drive us to Udaipur. Car hire around India is relatively inexpensive and can be a good way to get from point A to point B quickly with moderate expense and low hassle.   En route, we stopped at the...

When are just getting off an overnight train from Jodhpur.  The train is late and we reach Jaisalmer at 7:30 AM.  Jaisalmer (known as "The Golden City") is in the heart of the Thar Desert.  It certainly looks like a desert when we step...

We headed out on an overnight train from Delhi to Jodhpur, our first stop in Rajasthan. We had booked in 2AC - a sleeping car with 2 bunks on each side of the car lining the length of it - with air conditioning. On the train, we met Paul and Sharon, a...

We arrive in Delhi after a brief stop over in Bombay. India was the section of our trip I was most anxious about. When doing research on India people make it sound like you step off the plane and immediately get wicked diarrhea. Travel web sites recommend...

Post-Gibbon Experience, we were supposed to head back down the Mekong and into Vang Vieng, a backpacker's  mecca with lovely surrounds and tubing. The destination sounded delightful, but the journey didn't. I looked at a map. "Hey Bill, Chiang Mai...

Things always sound like a good idea when they are far away from actually taking place. Let's take, for a not-so-random example, a 10-day meditation program. Bill had originally penned that into our itinerary for Thailand. As we got closer to the...

Most trekking and tourism companies across Asia promote themselves as being ecotourism-friendly. We knew the concept - a positive or neutral effect on the environment – but we did not really feel like any of the companies that we had worked with to-date...

We splurged on an air ticket to Luang Prabang from Hanoi.  Budget travelers take the bus, but hey, we had a rough last few days in Vietnam.   We had been hearing wonderful things about Laos, almost from the beginning of our trip.  Laos...

We rolled into Hanoi by bus when it was still early enough in the morning to be dark out.  It had just finished raining and the roads were a little wet.  We got two guys on motorbikes to take us to our hotel.  Hanoi has a nice Hilton that...

The transportation gods shone down on us en route to Hue and what we thought would be more like 7 hours on the bus ended up being 4 hours. We stood there scratching our heads for a minute wondering why people were taking their luggage from the hold when...

Hoi An is a quaint little town just south of the center of Vietnam.  The town is known for it's historic buildings and cool architecture.  For budget minded folk, it is also the cheapest place in Asia to get clothes custom made. We...

Arriving at the travel agency to get our bus, we run into Jenn, the Canadian that we had met on our hellatious minivan trip back from Phu Quoc. She climbed into a seat across from us and the bus began to circle around the block. Three more times we circled...

We had spent a relaxing few days in Saigon, Vietnam.  The town is really nice and well set up for travelers.  One of the things we needed to do was get our India Visa sorted at the local Indian Consulate.  This crazy process takes a whole...

Saigon, present day Ho Chi Minh City.   Vietnam is one of the world's fastest growing economies and it shows. Since the mid-90s the Vietnamese have had a free market economy. Although the government is still Communist, there seems to be a symbiotic...

We had just taken a bus from Phnom Penh to the town of Siem Reap.  The trip was a rather long eight hours.  The bus seats were damn hard and uncomfortable.  We also had stopped at a few exceptionally nasty "rest stops" along the way, if...

Cambodia is often just a third or fourth thought after other southeast countries for most travelers. For a fair number of us, however, it will forever hold a place in our hearts that can be unrivalled. Less than 24 hours after we arrived in Cambodia...

There were about 200 too many backpackers in Pai for my liking.  Place was crawling with our fellow foreigners.  We wanted to do some hill trekking, which can be done from Pai, but only alongside the 200 other happy jokers.  So, we left...

Gerad dropped us off at the local bus station and helped us get onto the bus. As has been our repeated experience, locals tend to help the westerners out and make sure that we have a good seat. We have been thankful but a bit uncomfortable many a time...

Chrissy and I booked a flight from Phuket through Bangkok to Chang Mai.  We had just spent several weeks in various beach locations and were actually looking forward to doing something else. We got to Bangkok without incident but then had a long...

We arrived into Ko Phi Phi (pronounced Ko Pee Pee) just two weeks shy of the second anniversary of the 2004 Indonesian tsunami. Despite the new warning system in place, I still felt a bit nervous going there. Still, we had heard great things and...

Having just spent over a week in traffic crazy Bangkok, Chrissy and I were ready for a change of pace. We took an overnight train south to the town of Surat Thani. This is where you can catch ferries out to the islands off the eastern coast. We were...

Bangkok is a test of all of your senses. From the deafening noise of the car and motorbike horns to observing girly boys and old, western men with beatiful Thai women to smelling and tasting delicious Thai food to touching fine silks. You could spend a...

We had just finished up a fast paced few weeks in Egypt and next stop was Singapore.  Our round-the-world air ticket has some crazy segments with a large number of connections and lengthy layovers.  This segment was one of the worst and we were...

If you want to experience yin and yang firsthand, try going from a sleepy, laidback town like Lamu then immediately to the frenetic pace of Cairo. We were both excited and full of dread at the same time to go to Cairo. Obviously, it would be a crime...

The following day was spent on the water,  This was a wonderful day spent relaxing on the roof of the boat. Justin and I had lots of fun haggling with the dozens of row boats that paddled around our ship as we waited to go through the locks. It was...

We arrived on the island of Lamu after a torturous two-day journey from Zanzibar.  It was late evening and parts of the island were without power (this happens almost every night).  The streets in Lamu are very narrow with tall buildings bordering...

Our time in East Africa is coming to a close.  We have just spent a very quiet and relaxing week on Zanzibar island off the coast of Tanzania.  Continuing to explore the East African coast we head north. Travel in Africa is often difficult...

Leaving Stone Town, we hired a shared minivan to take us to Jambiani on the eastern side of the island. After about an hour and a half’s drive, Bill and I were finally dropped off at The Kipepeo (“Butterfly”) Lodge. We took off our shoes and set them...

Random fact: Freddie Mercury, legendary front man for Queen, was born on the small island of Zanzibar. One of the fun things about long-term travel is seeing where it will take you and having the time and inclination to change your plans on a dime....

We had just completed fifteen days of Safari in Kenya and Tanzania.  Thoughts of the pending Kilimanjaro climb had been running through my head since arriving in Africa.  I wasn't looking forward to this little bit of our trip at all. ...

Arriving to the Serengeti, we had high expectations. Like Da Vinci code proportions. And on some level, the park did meet our expectations and on another, it didn't quite pass the bar. The latter, I suspect, is largely because our driver, Joseph,...

We left Lake Manyara and traveled westward to Olduvai Gorge, a.k.a "The Cradle of Mankind". Olduvai is actually wrong - the original and correct name given by the local Maasai is Oldupai - in honor of the plant that grows in the area with the...

At the Nairobi airport, we were picked up by Bonie, a freelance safari guide. He immediately took our group over to the Carnivore restaurant in Nairobi to enjoy lunch. The Carnivore is exactly what it sounds like. They used to specialize in exotic game,...

I would guess that most everyone has head of the Serengeti in Tanzania. But perhaps less people have head of the Kenyan counterpart, the Maasai Mara. Having watched only a limited amount of National Geographic prior to our trip, I admit that I was not...