Hong Kong Lights and Delights

I (Kenzi), was really excited to see Hong Kong. You know how some places just sound better to you than others? It seems to me that everyone has specific travel preferences, and they change over time. And Hong Kong has been on my list ever since we visited China in 2011.

Hong Kong at night from Victoria Peak

It is hard to exaggerate how fun it is to ride in the top of a double decker bus. 

Bill riding in the front of the top level of a double decker bus around Hong Kong. 

We ended up in Hong Kong because we were looking for cheap flights back to the US for the holidays and getting from Hong Kong to LA was relatively cheap, so we decided to spend a couple days there to finish this leg of our round-the-world travels.

Hong Kong did not disappoint. We packed our two days there pretty full which was easy to do. Hong Kong is clean for a huge city, modern, well organized, has nice public bathrooms(!), excellent public transportation, and seems quite diverse.

Hong Kong means "fragrant harbor", which definitely applied in some places. Bill was bothered by the smells on "dried fish street", an entire street full of shops selling every possible variety of dried fish you could imagine, but I thought it was too fascinating to be bothered by the smell.

Some of the mysterious, smelly treats you can purchase on "Dried Fish Street".

More treats from Dried Fish Street.

We started by visiting the Hong Kong Museum of History, where we spent several hours learning about Hong Kong's interesting history. HK is a series of islands as well as a small chunk of the Chinese mainland. It is some of the most densely populated land in the world, as evidenced by oodles of high rises.

Bill in front of HK's History Museum

This picture doesn't really capture it, but the displays at the museum were really magnificent. 

As for HK's history, there was the Han dynasty, the Tang dynasty, then the Ming dynasty, and the Qing dynasty. The first westerners to the area were the Portuguese in the 1500s. Hong Kong has a deep natural bay making it ideal as a shipping port. The Hong Kong people were doing great, selling lots of goods to the British in the late 1700s/early 1800s and not purchasing much from them, until opium happened. Lots of Chinese, not just the Hong Kong people got addicted to opium. The Qing government tried to stop importing it because of all the problems it was causing, but the Brits waged war, leading to two Opium Wars. At the end of the first Opium War in 1841, Britain ended up occupying Hong Kong island and they established a "Crown colony". There were only about 7,500 people living on Hong Kong island at that time. After the second Opium War, the Brits took over the Kowloon peninsula which is the mainland area just to the north of HK island, as well as a bunch of other islands. In 1898, the Brits got a 99-year lease for the Hong Kong territory from the Qing leadership. The British occupation was not entirely smooth, but could have been worse...

And it got worse... when the Japanese occupied Hong Kong during WWII from 1941-1945. This was a particularly ugly time which involved starvation from food shortages, forced labor, and general suffering for the HK people. The UK resumed control of the HK territory once the war was over in August of 1945. At the end of the war, there were about 600,000 people in the Hong Kong (almost 1/2 of what it was at the beginning of the war).

Hong Kong underwent lots of modernization after the war. It also received lots of skilled immigrants from China and became a major financial center, which it still is today.

The British lease of Hong Kong expired in 1997. At that time, Hong Kong was transferred to the People's Republic of China. As you can imagine, this major transfer had plenty of bumps and starts. Hong Kong is a "special administrative region" of China and still maintains a high degree of autonomy. The population is now about 7.5 million people.

Anyway, sorry for all that, but HK's history is just super interesting. So needless to say, we learned a lot at the HK History Museum. Similar to Kuala Lumpur, another big international city, Hong Kong has lots of malls! So we ventured out to visit one. It was a "vertical mall", meaning that it was probably 13 stories tall, but each floor wasn't too huge. There, we braved a restaurant where we ordered foods we couldn't understand at all, most of which were delicious.

Just one of the fun displays at the mall we visited in Hong Kong. 

The next day we took a ferry over to Lantau island, which is part of Hong Kong, but is actually larger than Hong Kong Island itself. We caught a bus around the island to catch all the views from the island of the surrounding sea and islands. Then we arrived at the Po Lin monastery stop, where we climbed up the hill to see the giant Tian Tan Buddha (aka the Big Buddha), a large bronze statue of Buddha. It was very impressive!

Climbing lots of stairs to get to the Tian Tan Buddha (Big Buddha). 

Po Lin Monastery as seen from the hill where the Tian Tan Buddha sits. 

Bill and Big Buddha. 

From there, we caught the Ngong Ping 360, which is an aerial tramway that goes from the top of the mountain down to Tung Chung, near the HK airport. It was definitely the longest cable car I've ridden, and it had amazing views.

View from the Nging Ping aerial tram

More views from the aerial tramway. 

Then we took the Metro back to Hong Kong and rode the iconic funicular up to the top of Victoria Peak. Victoria Peak was originally occupied by wealthy British estates because the views of the city are incredible from the peak and the temperature is a bit cooler. The funicular was built in 1888 so these rich people no longer had to be carried up the mountain on sedan chairs. Today, of course, there's a large viewing platform on top of a 6-story mall at the top of Victoria Peak, so you can catch all the great views while dropping lots of cash.

We managed to catch a spectacular sunset lighting up Hong Kong from the top of Victoria Peak. And that pretty much sums up our brief time in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong as seen from the top of Victoria Peak. 

The sunset from the top of Victoria Peak

Bill was pretty excited to ride in a 787. 

Our flight was mostly empty flying from Shanghai to LAX (strange and wonderful)

We are now home for a couple weeks for the holidays, and thoroughly enjoying Western toilets, smooth Western roads, and our favorite Western foods (pizza, I'm talking to you!).

We'll leave for Cartagena, Columbia in early January to spend the first couple months of 2017 in Central and South America before we come home to resume adulting.

Happy holidays everyone!

Indochina Highlands

Indochina? Embarrassingly at one point we were checking in for a flight and we didn't know that mainland Southeast Asia is also called Indochina. If you knew that, bravo to you! If you didn't, you can save yourself the embarrassment.

Suiting up for the main event: ziplining!

Anyway, our SEA adventure wrapped up with some fun in the "highlands" of Laos and Thailand. The intent was to fly from Bangkok to Luang Prabang in Laos but I (Bill) ran out of pages in my passport and the airline refused to let me board... after they already checked our bags, after we'd already shuffled through security and customs...

This was pretty irritating especially considering I signed a form saying I would take responsibility for whatever the Laotian authorities did with me (meaning if they decided not to let me into Laos I would pay for a flight out, spend a night in jail whatever). Kenzi thought this foul up was on us and so we shouldn't have been entitled to a refund. While yes, the oversight was ours, I cheerfully said I would be happy to take responsibility for whatever happened, it was them that denied me boarding when I was ready to go for a flight I paid for. They eventually agreed to this logic and fully refunded our flights, which was the only silver lining to this since those flights were expensive.

The other fallout from missing our flight to Laos was that we missed a Mekong river boat cruise we wanted to take and lost about $75 in non refundable hotels. It could have been worse...

Instead, we flew the next day to Chiang Rai, northern Thailand, a couple hour bus ride from a land crossing into Laos, where, oh big surprise, I had absolutely no trouble getting into Laos.

Sunset over the Mekong from Laos, across the river is Thailand

Northern Thailand isn't what I'd call mountainous but it is hilly for sure. The highest peaks we saw were around 8000 feet, the valleys are as low as 1500 feet. The temps are notably cooler and the mosquitoes not nearly as plentiful but still out in enough force to make us reach for the bug spray.

Cool dragon banister in Laos

Hanging out with some Buddhist monks in training (novices) in Laos

The entire purpose of going to Laos was to do the Gibbon Experience. We randomly got seated in a Kathmandu restaurant with another gap year couple and they couldn't say enough good things about the Gibbon Experience, so we added Laos to our list of countries to visit.

In short, the Gibbon Experience means ziplining through the jungle to tree houses, yes: you even zipline into the tree houses. The longer explanation is that they have 336,000 acres of land that they work to conserve. They built an elaborate zipline course with tree houses where they feed you and you spend the night. With the income from the zipline course they are able to pay for people to patrol the area to prevent animal and timber poachers. When they find poachers they try to convince them to grow crops instead and then they buy the crops whether or not they need them. Pretty cool.

They offer two trips, 2- and 3-day. We did the 2-day trip. Day one you hike for a couple hours before you get to the zip lines and from there you are hiking and zipping across rugged valleys. After Slovenia and Nepal we know how arduous it is to cross mountain valleys and it's just amazing to take a zipline across an expanse that would take hours to cross by foot. The ziplines range in length from 150 feet to almost 1800 feet. It is of course spectacular fun. On several of them they let people go two at a time if you like. For us this makes for an experience a lot like riding in our plane back in the US where we are seated tandem style (one in front of the other). We got some video and it came out pretty well:

The idea of the gibbon experience is to see gibbons (monkeys) but we really didn't see much wildlife other than this scary, and evidently poisonous centipede:

Centipede seen on the trail! He's about 8 inches long. 

We saw a few spiders but otherwise our treehouse/forest excursion was relatively wildlife free.

Heading off into the jungle!

Cute, happy kids we saw while hiking

Before heading to the jungle they showed a video about what to expect and what the rules were. In the video, they said as long as the sun was up we could zip as much as we wanted... so after checking in to the tree house, I headed off with some other travelers and did about 40 zip line rides... and arrived back well after dark. I got scolded a bit, but what fun!

The jungle view from the tree house

Hanging out in the tree house

The whole Gibbon Experience was very well run. They do a great job of making everything about the experience wonderful.

Walking out of the Jungle through a very dense bamboo stand

From there we took a long bus ride back in to Thailand and spent three nights in Chiang Mai (beyond Chiang Rai), a city that is host to lots of adventure travel, but our target was the Elephant Nature Park (ENP).

ENP is a world renowned organization that rescues elephants from generally crappy circumstances in Thailand and Myanmar. They have about 70 elephants, most of which have some sort of abuse in their background although a few are natively born within the park.

One of the few elephants born in the park

I really didn't know about this but every elephant that gives rides, works in a circus or hauls logs from the forest goes through a nasty "breaking" or "crushing" process where the elephants are chained up in a massive structure and basically treated badly until they behave the way a trainer wants them to behave. They are starved, beaten, and sustain wounds, among other awful things. Some of the rescues are older elephants that just weren't able to perform any longer for their previous owners because of blindness or old age, and so the park takes them in. The park also has many elephants that stepped on land mines laid on the border between Thailand and Myanmar, some of them still have bandages on their legs from this:

Elephant with a bandaged leg from a landmine

Each of the elephants has a "mahout", a person that reads their body language and generally makes sure the elephant is well cared for.

After the floods in 2007 many dogs were abandoned and the park took in 300 of them, and they are just sort of everywhere lazing about and very docile.

Baby elephant and a dog enjoying a nice day

As if 70 elephants and 300 dogs weren't enough, they have a herd of water buffalo roaming around too (saved from the slaughterhouse), we got to see them cross the river where half way across they all would lay down for a bit and enjoy the water:

Water buffalo enjoying the river

All in all the place was very special, I struggle a lot with finding balance between taking care of animals and taking care of people, and for sure there are people suffering in Thailand but its good to see that some work is being done to save these beautiful massive helpless creatures from suffering. At the same time the park employs a tremendous number of locals so in some respects it is a win-win.

We had a spare day and so we took a very docile kayaking trip through the jungle outside of Chiang Mai. Really nice time:

Kayaking in the jungle outside of Chiang Mai 

Next up: Hong Kong, thanks for reading!

Thailand: Livin' the dream

Hello family and friends! We just spent a really wonderful eight days in Thailand. Thailand's beaches are the beaches I've been dreaming about my whole life. And we've seen some really nice beaches in our travels, so that's saying a lot. Despite the fact that I (Kenzi) spent the whole time sick with a nasty head cold, we loved Thailand for its warm water, warm air, beautiful beaches, turquoise water, yummy food, cheap massages, and... wait for it... special guests Jadyn & Ryan!

Reunited with Jadyn & Ryan! 

An incredible sunset from our beach on Koh Lanta

Jadyn and Ryan, my sister and brother-in-law, are the family members whose home in Murrieta, CA, has become our home base during this year of big adventures. They graciously hosted us during our two months at home and will host us again for the holidays. We have met some really nice people during our travels, but nothing quite compares to the familiar faces of our closest loved ones.

They arrived in Bangkok in the middle of the night. Bill taxi'd to pick them up at the airport since I was nursing my cold. The next day while I rested, the three of them saw some sights around Bangkok: the Grand (Royal) Palace, Wat Pho (Temple of the Reclining Buddha) and the river taxi along the Chao Phraya River.

My people with the giant reclining Buddha at Wat Pho in Bangkok

Fires how on the beach in Koh Lanta, not sure how these guys keep a full head of hair...

The pink elephants outside the Grand Palace in Bangkok

Some of the boats they saw on their river tour

Just like all the Southeast Asian countries, Thailand has a long history but the recorded history goes back to about the 1100s, when Thailand (formerly called Siam) was ruled by the Khmers (the same Khmers who built Angkor Wat in Cambodia). Thailand also had other groups of people such as the Chams, Mons, ethnic Malays, etc. Thailand is largely Buddhist, so there are lots of beautiful wats (temples) around. But just like in Cambodia, there is a strong Indian/Hindu influence here as well. During the 1700s/1800s, when the rest of Southeast Asia was being colonized by the French and British, Thailand is the only country that stood firm and was never colonized. However, they must have had some British influence since they drive on the left side of the road.

Something that is immediately noticeable upon arrival in Thailand is that it is a country in mourning. Their king of 70 years, Bhumibol Adulyadej, passed away on 13 October at the age of 88 from a long illness and the country has entered a year-long period of intensive mourning. This mourning is readily apparent from a tourist's perspective because there are billboards everywhere with his picture, and black and white banners/ribbons everywhere. Apparently everyone wore black for the first month, and many still are. Most people are now wearing a black band or ribbon on their arm. There is a tribute to the king in or on every hotel, every airport, and many businesses. On our flights around Southeast Asia, there is even a brief tribute to the king over the loud speaker before the safety briefing. He was a beloved king and the country seems quite shaken by his passing. Even now, six weeks after his death, the TV channels are still running coverage of his life and death. And while most of the grief seems heart felt, it is interesting to note that there are laws in Thailand prohibiting people from criticizing the king or the royal family. Nonetheless, given all the divisiveness in the US right now, it was kind of nice to see people unified around the loss of their leader. The king's presence and loss was felt even by us tourists throughout our time in Thailand.

Tributes to the King were found all throughout Thailand

Another tribute to the King 

From Bangkok, the four of us headed south by taking a flight to Krabi and then a van ride (including a ferry) to the islands of Koh Lanta for five days of relaxing and adventuring. We took a Thai cooking class, went on a snorkeling excursion to Phi Phi and Bamboo islands, rented scooters in order to explore the island, and Jadyn and Ryan spent a morning riding and feeding an elephant (we already have some elephant time booked for later on so we didn't go on that particular adventure with them). The rest of the time was spent walking on the beach, getting massages, swimming in the nice warm ocean or nice warm pool, eating delicious food, watching night time fire shows at the beach bar next door, or just generally relaxing.

All of us jammed into a taxi with our luggage on our laps, on our way to the airport to catch our flight to Krabi

Jadyn and Bill working hard to make dinner, while Ryan and I were excellent cheerleaders!

   

Dinner: fried money bags, Massaman curry, chicken satays with peanut sauce, mango sticky rice for dessert. All was very yummy! 

The view from the boat on our snorkel excursion to Koh Phi Phi 

An amazing beach on Bamboo Island

Koh Lanta exploration by scooter

Jadyn and Ryan riding their elephant friend 

It seems that every country's tuk tuks are slightly different. This is what they looked like in southern Thailand. 

Fire show on the beach in Koh Lanta, not sure how these guys keep a full head of hair...

Our 2-suite bungalow on Long Beach on Koh Lanta, Thailand

So basically, Thailand - what's not to love? Well, one itty-bitty-little-teeny-tiny thing: you can ask Ryan about ALL his mosquito bites because they especially liked him. Thailand was really the first time we used our bug spray faithfully, and it was definitely a necessity. But overall we felt it was a small price to pay for the blissful island life.

Bill's parents, Joan and John, sent some money to Thailand along with Jadyn and Ryan so that we could all go out to a nice dinner. We chose a restaurant called Black Pearl because it was associated with the cooking school where we took our Thai cooking class. Turns out it was cheesily themed after the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. It didn't really matter though because the food was really good. Thanks Joan and John!!

Joan and John, thanks for the delicious dinner at the Black Pearl! 

We loved our time in southern Thailand and definitely hope to come back someday.

Up next Laos and northern Thailand!

Cambodia: The Empire, The Horror and The Lexus Redemption

If you look at a map, Cambodia is second to last in the competition for Southeast Asian coastline, and coastline usually correlates pretty well with prosperity. Cambodia, once home to a massive empire, then victim to horrifying auto-genocide, is notionally a poor country but as you ride around the capital you wouldn't know that, it seems like everyone drives a Lexus SUV.

We traveled from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap via boat which was far more comfortable than a bus and at 24 knots actually took about the same amount of time:

The bizarre looking boat from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap, very pleasant ride

Along the way there are floating villages. We saw children splashing in the water and generally enjoying what looked like a very different upbringing than I (Bill) had.

Floating villages outside of Siem Reap

The Empire

The Khmer Empire ran from 802-1431 CE and encompassed most of Southeast Asia. The wealth reaped from the empire fed the construction of what is the world's largest religious site, Angkor Wat.

Angkor Wat, the largest and most visited of the Cambodian Temples

Technically speaking Angkor was the name of the ancient capital city this sits just outside of modern day Siem Reap. Each of the many temples have individual names like Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom, etc. Hindus and Buddhist both worshiped in these temples but eventually Buddhism became the dominant religion although Hindu influences remain. The site has some 72 major temples, Angkor Wat being the largest but even the "small" temples are close to the foot print of Saint Peter's in Rome and Notre Dame in Paris.

The smaller temple of Baphon, much smaller than Angkor Wat

The larger temples seem to go on forever. The odd thing about these temples is that they weren't meant for large congregations, so the spaces and passageways are small and almost claustrophobic, especially when hordes of tourists are packing in.

A shrine at the center of one of the many temples we saw, crowds like this were thankfully rare.

These sour looking guardians lined several of the causeways to the temples

Many of the temples had moats, not sure why but if you're going big you might as well have a moat, and then when you make a bridge/causeway across the moat you should line it with scary guys like above.

Many many faces on the Ankor Thom temple, really impressive.

I found the faces on the temples to be amazing, while not all the temples had faces many did, and they were sort of half smiling like they had a secret.

Many of the carvings are hard to make out but these dancing ladies are hard to misinterpret

One of the things that makes Angkor so interesting to see is that some of the temples have been abandoned for centuries and the jungle is gradually reclaiming them. Massive trees crop up out of the temples in many places. It makes for something that looks like an Indiana Jones movie, and are in fact used in several other films.

In the end Nature will take it all.

Entry way to one temple is taken over completely by this tree/strangler vine

Eventually the Khmer Empire fell and much later Phnom Pehn became the capital of modern day Cambodia.  I am making huge generalizations here but we were shocked to see so many SUVs running around Phnom Penh, along with many other hallmarks of prosperity. Perhaps my bar is too low but: paved streets, traffic lights, lavish palaces, and nice hotels on the cheap!

Cambodian National Museum in Phnom Penh

With all that praise said, the capital city only has a few attractions that are must see. The royal palace is quite nice and makes for wonderful pictures. The king still lives in the Palace, even while tourists run around with selfie sticks although his section is cordoned off. One of the craziest things was a temple in the Palace that had a floor made of silver ingots. About 8 inches square they weigh a few pounds each, in addition there were several Buddhas made of solid gold. Quite the display of opulence for a country where the average person makes less than $1000/yr. The National Museum is decent too but Phnom Penh's other main attraction is much darker.

The Horror

Cambodia was in a precarious position after the Vietnam War in 1975. They had reasons to be paranoid as the Vietnam War spilled over into their country. The US dropped a tremendous number of bombs on Cambodia and had some secret bases within Cambodia that were doing all kinds of secret things. After the US left, Cambodian paranoia was harnessed by the Khmer Rouge and it's unknown leader Pol Pot.

Khmer is the word for the Cambodian people, Rouge is Red, so the Khmer Rouge is the Communist party of the Cambodians. There are communist parties all over the world so what's the issue? The difference here is that their leader, Pol Pot, saw the "great leap forward" that Mao tried in China, which led to the death of some 50 million people, and thought, ah, we can do much better.

Through sheer charisma Pol Pot was able to start a popular revolution with the ultimate goal of everyone being farms workers. No more of these aristocrats living off the hard labor of the peasant class. So after gaining military strength in the countryside, the cities were taken by force and evacuated. Hospitals, factories and schools all shuttered. Everyone was forced to go work in the fields. It sounds crazy but it's just the start of the crazy. Days later cities with millions of people are ghost towns.

Cambodians were tortured in this school which was turned into a prison, hung from a gallows and waterboarded in sewage. Graves are in the background. 

After the evacuation of the cities, Pol Pot, still unknown to most of the country, merely just pulling the strings from behind a curtain, had to rid the country of any outside influence. Torture was used to force completely false confessions of conspiracies and co-conspirators with the CIA, KGB and who knows what other organizations. After the confessions, the confessors were taken out to what is now called "The Killing Fields", brutally executed with whatever means were at hand, typically a blunt instrument to the skull, and buried in shallow graves.

A few of the many skulls unearthed at the Killing Fields nearby Phnom Penh, most show signs of violent deaths

Co-conspirators were then dragged in and went through the same process. The first to be brought in were the intellectuals: doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists and anyone with glasses... Pol Pot had the twisted idea that organically the farmer's ingenuity would somehow magically do all the things that happen in the cities, medicine, education, manufacturing... of course this didn't happen. Living standards got worse and worse and the dwindling modern resources became more and more scarce. This process continued for years in what is now called "Auto Genocide", a population killing themselves off. The scale of death and suffering didn't give any pause to Pol Pot. Out of paranoia he invaded Vietnam and his forces were quickly vanquished although remnants loyal to Pol Pot roamed the jungle for decades and the Khmer Rouge had a seat at the UN for decades as well.

The Killing Tree where children were bashed to death

Somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of Cambodians died between 1975 and 1979 all for the poorly thought out vision of Pol Pot. Cambodia's capital of Phnom Penh is where you can see the genocide museum along with the killing fields where the executions took place and where the mass graves are located.

Memorial Stupa to the victims of Cambodia's genocide, it is filled with bones of the deceased.

The exhibits  at the Killing Fields memorial were very plain and I didn't see any agenda other than to try to tell the rest of the world that bad leadership has dire consequences.

The Redemption

With such a dark past it was encouraging to see that Cambodia seems to be doing well. The capital is bustling with activity and there appear to be some significant signs of wealth, we saw luxury SUVs everywhere, Lexuses to be exact. This might just be a product of the circumstances but at least someone is doing well in Cambodia. We hope that the prosperity makes its way to the rest of Cambodians that are driving the local version of a tuk-tuk that is nothing more than a trailer attached to a motorcycle.

Our typical mode of transport in Cambodia, they called it a tuk-tuk but is really just a trailer and motorcycle.

While in Siem Reap, we took a "tour" of the countryside on quads or 4-wheelers with our friends, Dylan and Lauren that we met in Nepal.

Intrepid riders of the Cambodian country side!

We just happened to cross paths again in Cambodia again, and got to have dinner with them several times. Riding quads was good fun. Kenzi had fun waving at the kids along the way and I had a good time splashing through this ditch they filmed us driving through.

We also partook in the "Fish Spa" where fish nibble away at the dead skin on your feet, it was something that got outlawed in the US about a week after someone started selling it but in Cambodia they're not shackled by regulations or norms about sanitation, so here we are getting our feet nibbled on by fish. It really tickles at first, but you get used to it after about 30 seconds.

Me trying to get over the tickling fish...

For some reason they prefer my feet... 

So tourism has become a big part of Cambodia's economy and hopefully that will continue to be the case. We really enjoyed our short time in Cambodia and there was so much we didn't do.

Next up: Thailand!