Travelin’ Shoes

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Time flies when you’re not doing anything worth writing about. But that is about to change. Faye and I are on our way back to Guatemala for a couple of months. As I have noted before, Guatemala is familiar territory for us. But things change, sometimes for the better, sometimes not. The rainy season this year was particularly bad. Mountainsides collapsed, wiping out roads, covering homes and killing people. The little village Faye and I met in was hit pretty hard, and the main road has been closed for repairs the past couple of months. So it is with some … Continue reading →

Changing Gears

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Ah, back home and time to change gears…and a few other things. I’ll be working on this site for a bit so it will be able to do some things better. But it is probably going to get worse before it gets better, so if something isn’t working right, please check back later.

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A Little More on Myanmar

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This trip to SE Asia is just about over. We’re back in Bangkok for a few days of sightseeing and shopping, then we fly back to the Great Frozen North (where, from what we hear, it has been unseasonably warm. Though, if history is any guide, temperatures will plunge and snow will begin falling as soon as we step off the plane.) This will be my last post for this trip, but I wanted to say a little more about Myanmar. A reader took issue with my perceptions of the country saying, basically, that I was missing the trees for … Continue reading →

Stupa-fied in Myanmar

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We’ve been in Myanmar almost three weeks. It feels like the place we were looking for on our trip to SE Asia. How could one not like a country with Spirulina Beer? We got on the plane in Bangkok not knowing quite what to expect upon our arrival in the Yangon, the capital of Myanmar. Myanmar has the reputation of having one of the most authoritarian and oppressive governments in the world, a military regime that came to power in 1962. What would the oppressed people be like, and how would we be treated, we wondered. A lot of travelers … Continue reading →

Southern Laos

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Most of the past week we have spent in a state of pleasant lethargy (which only partly explains the gap since my last posting). We made it as far south as we could go in Laos, to an island in the Mekong River. The island, Don Khon, is one of a group called the 4000 Islands. The name may be accurate, at least in the dry season when the river is low. But only a handful of the islands are big enough to be inhabited, and most disappear during the rainy season when the river rises 10-15 feet. There are … Continue reading →