One Last Hoorah

After re-grounding myself in April, I met my friend Anne in Singapore for a rapid journey through five countries in Southeast Asia. It was fast, action-packed, and adventurous. A style of travel I’d have struggled to do on my own - and one that became pure delight in the company of a travel soul mate. You’ll see this rapid pace clearly in the numbers:

Cities This Month: 17; Total So Far: 157

Countries This Month: 6; Total So Far: 46

Countries I Ate Avocado Toast In This Month: 2; Total So Far: 40

Miles Walked This Month: 185.8; Total So Far: 3,657.0

An Adventure That Will Stay With Me For a Lifetime

If you’ve been following along, you’ll know that I became a bit destabilized in March and focused on re-grounding myself in April. I slowed down my travel, became less adventurous, and got back to good routines of wellness and productivity. I’m happy to report that it worked - and I returned to travel in May with potentially more vim and vigor than I’ve had since the beginning of this trip. In addition to our action-packed itinerary (prepare for a long update - like novella long), I also managed to finish a first draft of the book I’ve been working on, finished this ridiculously long monthly update (although I wasn’t able to keep up to date on my city guides), and maintained a basic fitness and meditation regimen. In many ways, having gone through the process of grounding stability in myself, I feel stronger than ever.

In Month Thirteen, I met my friend Anne in Singapore and we then moved rapidly through Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos. We swam every other day (including in four waterfalls), rented motor scooters for eight days (including a four day road trip with three flat tires), visited more temples than we could possibly remember (including Angkor Wat), road on a bamboo mat going 30 miles per hour along train rails, watched millions of bats leave a cave together at sunset, belly laughed ourselves sore in hammocks while I was deep into a psychedelic trip, kayaked on the Mekong river, and danced until the bars closed. I think for most people, this month could have been the adventure of a lifetime.

Within my month summary below, I’ve used my regular marking schema. I put asterisks next to the cities I will likely find reason to return to, exclamation marks next to the ones I got my fill of but found thoroughly charming and worth the trip, and left the cities that were a bit less remarkable to me without anything. Because I haven’t been able to write my city guides yet, you won’t find the regular hyperlinks to more details; if you follow the Exhausted Millennial facebook page, you’ll see those posts slow-drip out after my meditation retreat at the end of June. If you’re tired of hearing from me but are still curious about this month’s adventure, my travel mate Anne also kept a blog as we went. If you want to read about the month from her perspective, you can do that here.

• I started this month in Yogyakarta - where I had extended my stay to five nights to relax and catch up on work. I spent a long morning writing, working out and meditating, leaving briefly to grab food one last time at the local warung I frequented in my time there. In the early afternoon, I left to explore one more historic quarter of the city, only to find myself caught in a complete downpour within minutes of leaving. I was quickly soaked and on my way back to the hotel - where I would spend the rest of the day writing and watching comfort television. It was the last day of my period of re-grounding - and I did absolutely nothing adventurous.

• The next day, May 2, I had a flight to Singapore* in the morning. I woke up early, packed, and caught a motorbike to the airport (a one hour ride, which is not exactly comfortable with all of your belongings on your back). I arrived in the early afternoon and walked to the airport mall, which is famous for its indoor waterfall, and then headed into the city to check in at my hostel. I grabbed a bite to eat and spent most of the transit time writing.

• Around 6PM, I met my friend Jeremy at a hawker center (a street food market) near the old airport road. I had met Jeremy in Jordan where we had hiked Petra together. We became fast friends and have stayed in touch since - so I was excited to see him. We caught up, he corrected me on my incorrect pronunciation of the word Quay (apparently said key?), ate Michelin-starred street noodles (which were all right), and had soy pudding dessert. We shared stories of what we’d been up to over the last six months - and then headed back to my hostel to meet my friend Anne who had arrived while we we were out.

• As soon as I saw Anne, I squealed and ran in for a hug. We met in Croatia last September and traveled together for four weeks through Croatia and Bosnia. She’s a kindred spirit - a sister wife and a travel soulmate - and I was just so excited to spend May with her. She was tired, jet lag starting to kick in, and starving from the ride. We went to a local restaurant where she grabbed noodles and the three of us had Tiger Beer, talking about our itinerary and making wild dreams of buying a used motorbike and driving ourselves the whole way. (Thank god we opted not to because some of our transits were long). We decided to skip major cities, focus on nature, and picked Jeremy’s brain for advice on the region he calls home. Eventually, Jeremy went home and Anne and I started to walk back the hostel, stopping along the river for a couple of pitchers of beer and a must-needed heart-to-heart catchup.

• The next morning, Anne was slow to rise because of the jet lag. I took advantage of the time to finish April’s blog posts, work on my book, and do some research on the itinerary. I stopped at the 7-11 next door to buy us large Coke Zeroes, a tradition of ours, grabbed breakfast, and waited for Anne to wake up around eleven. We had a slow day, grabbing a late lunch at a nearby hawker center, visiting the historic Muslim quarter (which is so bohemian and cool), and taking a long walk around the city. At around 6PM, we split up because I had a date. I met Jason, a boy I had met on my last trip to Singapore, while Anne went to the Gardens by the Bay to see the light shows.

• There’s not terribly much of note about my date - but there are two things that stand out to me. One, sometime between the last time I saw him and now, Jason developed a habit of saying “Oh Darling”during sex - in the thick British accent of a 60 year old Royal woman. It was . . . Not a turn on. Two, it became clear at some point during our dinner that his parents were rich, so I asked if his parents were rich. He responded saying they were “comfortable,” confirming they were in fact rich. It was the first time I’ve heard someone use the word “comfortable” like this outside of tv and movies.

• While I was on my date, Anne stopped at the 7-11 to buy us some mixed drinks because the sale of alcohol ends at 10:30PM in Singapore. I met her around 11PM and we sat along the river drinking three vodka sodas each, casually listening to the club music from across the street. The more we drank, the more energetic we felt, and the more we started swaying to the music. When we finished our drinks around 12:30AM, we decided to “just pop in” to the clubs across the street. We ended up staying, dancing wildly on our own, until the bars closed around 2:30AM.

• At the end of the night, we found ourselves outside the bar chatting with two Dutch men we’d met earlier. As we did this, we kept noticing a group of Asian men making eyes towards us - a group that we’d seen and danced with earlier. One of them was cute and I suspected gay and looking at me, so Anne and I walked over to start a conversation. Slowly, one by one, each of them shifted from small talk into promoting a local bar and restaurant. Clearly, I had read something wrong. (This was not the only time in May my intuition of when men are flirting with me went devilishly awry).

• By time we were walking back, it was already around 3AM and we were hungry, so we stopped at a 7-11 to get some food. When we got in, Anne asked the woman working there if we could buy alcohol, and she looked at us completely unamused and said “Of course not.” It was worth a shot, I suppose. Once we had eaten our fill, we went back to the hostel and fell asleep.

• The next day we were woken up by a series of people in our dorm room having full-voiced conversations between 7 and 9AM - behavior that is widely taboo in hostel etiquette. But I suppose Anne and mine’s friendship did start with a dormmate having sex at 7AM in our rom, so it’s on brand for us. Nonetheless, we tried to fall back asleep and ended up waking up for real around 11AM. Our only goal was to figure out which bus to take the next day to Malaysia and then meet Jeremy again at night for the light show. Easy!

• We started the day with new large Coke Zeroes and walked to the bus station, stopping in pretty much every mall there was along the way (which is A LOT in Singapore) because it kept raining. We found the bus schedule, bought our tickets, and then headed to Little India, hoping it was another beautiful historic district. Sadly, it was not at atmospherically charming as much of Singapore - and is probably the only place in the city I would describe as a bit dirty - but we had a good lunch and then walked back toward Chinatown. Anne and I strolled its quaint streets and then grabbed a light dinner at its famous Maxwell Hawker Center where we would meet Jeremy. During dinner, we shared a table with an elderly couple from San Francisco, who casually brought up being really embedded in the city’s liberal culture. Anne made an off-color joke that they must have done a lot of shrooms - and I may never forget the older woman’s little mischievous smile and giggle.

• Once Jeremy met up with us, the three of us popped into a 7-11 to grab some beer for the light show and caught the subway to the Marina Bay Gardens. It was May the Fourth - and there was a special Star Wars show, which was so fun we stayed an extra hour to catch the second run. The three of us ended up hanging out in the gardens for three hours drinking our beers and talking about all the cultural differences we’ve come across in our travels. Around 10PM, we made the 30 minute walk back to our hostel and fell asleep much earlier than the prior night.

• The next morning, we woke up a bit earlier to catch our bus to Malaysia, packed, grabbed breakfast, and made our way to the bus station. A few hours later, we arrived in Malacca! - a city that Jeremy had recommended to us. We walked to its historic quarter with our bags in tow, passing the oldest Christian church in Southeast Asia en route, and then tried to find a place to drop off our stuff. After four hotels said they didn’t offer the service, Anne got pushier on the fifth and they relented - taking our money and letting us leave our things so we could explore the city without the weight.

• Malacca! was incredibly charming - with a house-lined canal that looks like it could’ve been lifted straight from the Netherlands, gorgeous street art, and a delicious night market. We wandered around, eating literally everything in sight, and then walked back to the hotel to collect our bags just in time to find the entire area swarming with loud black birds. I’m still not sure if they were terrifying or charming - but being completely surrounded by them was definitely an experience. We then caught a Grab (the equivalent of Uber) to our apartment a bit out of downtown.

• We knew we had splurged on the apartment - but we didn’t realize how much until we arrived. When we got there, we found a brand new construction luxury apartment complex complete with a full-size pool overlooking the bay, an outdoor gym, a game room, and high quality poolside seating. Plus, we each had our own bedroom and bathroom. For two backpackers, this was the high life. We spent most of the night at the pool - doing laps, watching lightning off in the distance, and using Anne’s underwater camera to take ridiculous pictures of ourselves. Best, because it was new construction, for most of the night we had the whole pool (and common space floor) to ourselves. So rich, so fabulous. (Bear in mind, we spent just over $30 for the night).

• The next day (May 6), the only thing on our itinerary was to get to our next destination: Ipoh. We had an 11:00AM bus, so we planned to have a lazy morning. We woke up around 8:30, ordered breakfast by delivery, ate a relaxed meal, and then spent an hour at the pool. (Unfortunately this time there were a lot of children there.) Around 10AM, we were packing and getting ready to head to the bus station.

• In the eight months since I traveled with Anne last, I had forgotten she can move at a bit more of a relaxed pace than me. After I finished packing, I found myself growing increasingly stressed about the time as I watched Anne get ready. We ended up leaving 15 minutes later than expected, around 10:35, and the drive was about 8 minutes longer than I planned. As a result of the two, we got to the bus station five minutes before we were set to leave, and found the correct terminal five minutes after the bus had left. It was an inconvenient moment for something in Southeast Asia to run exactly on time. (It was also the last time we missed a bus, as both of us course corrected a little after the incident - me scheduling with more buffer time and Anne paying a bit more attention to the time).

• The next bus heading to Ipoh was at 3PM, so we made a home in the McDonalds, each working a little bit on our blogs. This bus turned out to be late (of course), leaving around 3:30PM. Our five hour bus ride proceeded with an endless cycle of one of us saying we should listen to our music for a while and then ignoring that and starting talking again - usually about lovers past, neither of us sure which of us (if either of us) was actually disturbing the other from having some alone time. The ride turned out to be a delight - and the conversation cathartically healing.

• By time we got to the bus station in Ipoh, it was bordering on 9PM and it was a 20 minute drive away from the city center. We checked the bus schedule and found there were night buses to Hatyai (the city in Thailand I did high school foreign exchange in and where we were going next). We bought bus tickets for the following night and ordered a Grab to get to our hotel.

• While we were waiting for our car (which took about 30 minutes because two canceled), I tried to reach out to my Thai mom from the host family I lived with. I was planning to spend three nights with them in Hatyai (while I sent Anne to Krabi which has more to do for tourists), something I had confirmed a month prior. However, she hadn’t responded to me for a couple of weeks and I was becoming increasingly worried that they may not be there when I arrived. That she continued to not pick up my calls that night did not help with that concern.

• We ended up checking into our hotel around 10PM, a bit grumpy and hungry. We had a room with two twin beds - an arrangement we like to call our sister-wives setup. Whenever we didn’t have private rooms on our last trip, we’d inevitably end up buying beer or wine, sitting in our side-by-side beds, and watching movies. We decided it was the perfect opportunity for our first sister wives night of the trip. We walked to the 7-11 to grab beer, instant noodles and snacks and settled in to watch movies. Around midnight, we decided we wanted more beer and snacks, so we ordered A LOT of both by delivery. We drank and ate and watched movies for hours - not falling asleep until around 4AM. It was needless, excessive, and so lovely.

• The next morning we woke up around 10AM, a bit groggy and hungover, surrounded by nearly a dozen unopened bags of potato chips. (I was a little too aggressive with our delivery order). We only had one day in Ipoh, so we immediately began packing and cleaning up the room. Once my bag was ready, I noticed a sign on the door with the hotel rules - which included both no eating and no drinking. So, while Anne worked on finishing packing, I set about finding a nearby trashcan to throw away our many sins, succeeding at finding one about three blocks away. By 11AM, we checked out, left our bags behind the hotel desk, and took a Grab to our first stop.

• Around 30 minutes later, we arrived at a cave temple on the outskirts of the city. Beautiful and a bit forgettable, my greatest memory from it is the enormous lizards that walked around in the garden behind the cave. Each time we crossed paths with one, Anne would move closer to it for pictures, naming them each “Vene-moose,” as I sat back watching the interaction a little uneasily.

• After the temple cave, we started what was set to be an hour walk to our next destination - a second temple cave. Neither Anne nor I travel with local sims, so we could never call cars unless we had Wi-Fi. About ten minutes into our walk, I heard a loud smack and then heard Anne say “I think he just hit that guy in the head with a helmet.” As we walked forward, Anne proved to be correct, and we saw a large group of people, including one man holding a helmet and a second getting up from the ground bleeding profusely from his head. We hastened our pace to move by it quickly, deciding it was best to not intervene, and spent the next five minutes processing what we’d seen. Once the shock had passed, we bought ourselves Coke Zeroes to nurse our hangovers and continued on with our walk.

• About an hour later, we arrived at the second temple, only to find that it had closed thirty minutes earlier. Not for my first time, Google Maps had failed me with the hours of a location, and all we could do was peak through the gate. We decided to just get going to another destination that was a 40 minute walk away, stopping about ten minutes in at a roadside warung where I ate at least two meals worth of delicious Malaysian food. (So much young jackfruit and tempeh. So good.). The walk was mostly along a busy road on a narrow shoulder, making it a bit unpleasant.

• Eventually, we arrived to a mirror lake - which proved to be wildly disappointing. It was just a pretty basic lake with one viewpoint. It had been another 40 minutes of non-scenic walking essentially in vain. Luckily, though, Grab had a free Wi-Fi spot to order cars there. Unluckily, the Wi-Fi didn’t work on my phone for some reason, and Anne hadn’t yet downloaded the Grab app to hers. Eventually, I talked to two of the employees and they let me hotspot into their phone’s data, and thirty minutes after we started to try to order a car, we had one.

• We took the Grab back into Ipoh to a small arts and crafts market - where we would begin what proved to be a monthlong binge on new clothing for both of us. I bought two button-up shirts and Anne bought one. I then convinced Anne to try to find a jackfruit ice pop, only for us both to find out ten minutes later that Anne is allergic. We then wandered through the historic center of the city, exploring its many street art areas, monitoring the state of Anne’s throat every few minutes. (This was not the last time Anne ate jackfruit on the trip.) my favorite street of the city was Concubine Lane - which used to be the city’s alley of many excesses. Now, it’s just a charming strip dotted with restaurants and souvenir shops.

• Once we’d had our fill of the city, we got our bags from the hotel and took a Grab to the bus station, waiting in a McDonalds again for three hours until it was time for our bus. Ten minutes before our bus got in, at 11:50PM, my Thai mom finally called me back and confirmed that she was home and that she could pick me up when I arrived in Hatyai. Phew - that was a weight lifted.

• Our night bus was super luxurious - with seats that essentially lay flat and complimentary blankets. Anne travels with some really good sleeping pills, so we both took them. I don’t have many memories of the bus, but I remember we stopped near the border and someone came up to our seats asking for our passports. Groggily, I turned both them over, assuming it was for customs. Then, once he was gone, I became more alert and started to panic that I hadn’t confirmed who he was or why he needed our passports - and then spent the next 20 minutes worrying we weren’t going to get them back. It proved to be for naught, though, because he brought them back to us with our arrival forms filled out for us, ready for immigration (which would prove to be crowded and move slowly at 3AM.)

• We arrived to Hatyai*, my old home in Thailand, at around 7AM. My first task was to get Anne on a bus to Krabi, so we groggily walked with all of our things about 20 minutes to the bus station, stopping for coffee and snacks en route. We got there just in time for me to put Anne on a bus and send her off for three days at the beach. After she was gone, I found a small restaurant with Wi-Fi, had a light meal and called my mom to pick me up.

• My mom picked me up around 9AM and we immediately started catching up, not having seen each other since before Covid. She had stopped romantically seeing her long-time boyfriend, though she still lived with him in his house. Her aging parents had bought a house nearby and she took care of them everyday, and she was back to being more involved (non-romantically) with her husband - my old host dad. Because her life was more busy, she had decided to get me a hotel room instead of having me stay with her - a change I was grateful for because it would leave me with a bit more freedom. (Sometimes, when I go home, I can feel a bit trapped in a cycle of being shuttled along with my mom’s errands in her car. It’s both a delight and tedious.) The first thing we did was drive to the hotel to check in and drop off my bags.

• As a tangent here, the hotel I stayed at is owned by my host-dad’s family. It’s a strange occurrence that both sides of my adoptive Thai family are much, much richer than my birth family. I was comped a nice room in one of their four hotels in my city - a string of words I could never say about my family in the US. (Sometimes my dad gets free maple cream from his clients. I suppose that’s equivalent?)

• My mom drove me to my host dad’s automotive parts shop to say hi and we caught up for a bit, promising to grab dinner that night. She then took me to his house, where she had to feed his dog (a former stray named Dali who has yet to let me pet him), and I got to walk through my old bedroom. It offered an intense burst of nostalgia, especially because I found a picture of my birth family I had brought there fifteen years ago still resting on a built-in. At some point, my mom realized she had a K-Pop dance lesson in 10 minutes, so we quickly got into the car and drove to her cafe / dance studio. I found myself sitting waiting for her for an hour as she learned a dance routine. This is exactly the kind of drag-along I often find myself in when visiting home - and precisely why it was so nice to have a hotel room and some free time to myself this trip.

• After the lesson, we drove to get lunch at this secluded restaurant well outside of town that my mom loves. It’s a secret gem that has essentially no signage and people only learn about through word of mouth. It is absolutely delicious, and I’m so grateful that she takes me every time I go home. We then went to her house where I was able to do a load of laundry, play with her three small dogs, and then nap while she drove off to take care of her parents. After the nap, she drove me pack to my hotel and told me she’d pick me up later for dinner.

• For a couple of hours, I wandered through the area around my hotel - which used to be the commercial center of the city. There’s a nearby mall that used to be where all the teenagers spent their time, and where I used to go with all of my friends. It was all but shuttered now, only having stores open on one of its four floors - a consequence of bigger and newer malls opening in the city. It was sad to be in a place so familiar and so unfamiliar at the same time - a warm piece of my past that is now impossible to recreate.

• At around 6PM, both my host parents came to pick me up and we grabbed dinner at a nearby restaurant. My host dad had bought me a bag of cashews as a gift from the store next to his shop, a strange but warm symbol of affection. They dropped me back off around 7PM. I grabbed a few drinks and settled in to watch the new spinoff of Bridgerton, savoring my alone time. I fell asleep early and got, I think, nearly 12 hours of sleep - catching up after the prior couple of low-sleep nights.

• Not long after I woke up the next day, I had a text from my mom saying that she was already on her way. (To be fair, it was already about 9:30AM). She grabbed me and drove me to her parents house because they were going to come with us to Songkhla - the beach town and capital of my province and where one of my mom’s sister owns an automotive parts shop. (Everyone on both sides of my family runs an automotive parts shop. You’d have trouble guessing how rich they are given how often they’re covered in oil and selling car parts from small warehouse stores).

• As we drove along, my host grandpa kept asking me questions about US geography. He was particularly interested if there is a bridge to the Statue of Liberty - a question I couldn’t answer with certainty without Wi-Fi but one he kept looping back to regardless. (As a note here, my mom and her parents speak the southern dialect of Thai together, which I’m not fluent in and is also spoken much faster than the national Thai language, so I often struggle to really keep pace with the conversations between them. Being a little off-kilter with the language gap, I often found myself second-guessing if I understood something when my host grandpa would ask a question like if there’s a bridge to the Statue of Liberty - perhaps leading him to keep asking in a new way each time.)

• When we got near Songkhla, we stopped for lunch, and I remember my host grandma worked diligently to keep separating meat from vegetables in one of the plates for me, making sure I had enough to eat. I only had one grandparent growing up and she passed 7 years ago, so these kind of peculiar and sweet grandparent interactions are a real delight for me.

• After lunch, we dropped the grandparents off at the automotive shop. My mom’s sister, P J, greeted me with a wrapped gift, a sweet surprise. As I got back into the car with my mom, I joked that it was probably a towel - a longstanding joke between us because the surprise gifts at events when I lived in Thailand always seemed to be towels. It was not a towel, though - but instead a beautiful cotton shirt, scarf, and fabric. It was a really kind mark of affection. I often find myself incredibly grateful to have found such a warm, embracing adoptive family on the other side of the world. This was one of those days.

• After that, my Thai mom and I ate our way through Songkhla. First, we stopped at a cafe where I learned that a new trend in Thailand is fusion coffee - coffee mixed with juice. I tried orange juice and espresso and was shocked to find it refreshing. After that, we grabbed coconut ice cream and drove to the local monkey sanctuary where we ate in the car and watched the monkeys. We noticed the man selling bananas and peanuts to feed the monkeys had a monkey sitting behind him grabbing peanuts off his cart, occasionally taking pets from the man. We asked him if it was a pet monkey - and he told us it had originally been a labor monkey who picked coconuts but had been abandoned to the sanctuary, so it was very human friendly. Last, we drove the beach to see the shore and bought fresh coconuts. Stuffed with amazing, delicious food, we went back to the automotive shop and picked up the host grandparents.

• We drove the hour back to their house as my host grandpa continued to ask me questions about US geography. He seemed confident at this point that there must be a bridge to the Statue of Liberty. When we got to their home, they gave me a tour of the new house (which was gorgeous) and gave me several bottles of water. After that, my mom dropped me off at the hotel, where it started to pour and I settled in to watch the Bridgerton spinoff. At around 6PM, my host dad called to say he was downstairs with food for me - just one more incredibly sweet gesture. After I ate, I was bored and unwilling to go outside in the pouring rain, so I ended up popping on Grindr and found an older man from China staying at my hotel who offered me a free massage. Feeling a little risqué and adventurous, I took him up on it. (Maybe I did more, who is to say.) After, I fell asleep early again, still needing to catch up on sleep.

• The next morning, I woke up again with a text from my mom saying that she was on her way. Again, it was around 9:30AM and the timing was totally reasonable. She brought me to a medical massage school on the outskirts of the city where she had booked us both a 2 hour massage. If I’m being honest, it was pretty subpar - and left me craving a better massage.

• Afterwards, we went to pick up my host grandparents again to bring them to lunch. My grandpa again asked if there was a bridge to the Statue of Liberty, so I connected to their Wi-Fi and was finally able to confirm for him that there is not. He seemed disappointed. We drove into the city and my host grandma took a call from her son who lives in New Zealand. Speaking the Southern dialect, they began to talk about writing a will to make sure he inherited their house in New Zealand, roping me in because I’m technically a lawyer. I never even got barred in the US so I can’t provide legal advice back home - and I’m not certainly not qualified to to give advice on New Zealand trust law in a dialect of Thai I’m only vaguely familiar with. The whole experience was kind of stressful. (When I got home, I did look up the law a little and gave them my best advice).

• We ended up eating a late lunch separately because my grandparents wanted to get noodles at a shop with no vegetarian options, so my mom and I ate just the two of us. Afterwards, we picked the host grandparents back up drove them home. The whole way, my host grandma told me about a hotel in Bangkok near the airport they liked, insisting I save it and stay when I go. It was a charming display of affection from a woman who can be very unemotional. We dropped them off and then went to my mom’s house to play with her dogs for a while - and after she dropped me back off at the hotel where I relaxed for a few hours.

• Around 6PM that night, my mom and her husband again picked me up for dinner and we went to a charming restaurant in a wooded area. My host dad and I chatted about my work plans when I got home (and he finally, to his shock, understood that I had just taken a year and a half off from my career.) We talked about movies and television, the only topic we regularly discuss together, and I saved down a few suggestions from him. After dinner, they dropped me back off at my hotel around 7:30PM.

• When I got back to the hotel, I was still craving a massage - and I did something completely stupid. A guy who worked at one of the local massage spas had messaged me on Grindr asking if I wanted a massage, offering to come to my hotel and do a house call. It occurred to me that it had the potential to be a massage with a happy ending - an idea I’m not opposed to but wasn’t sure I wanted. I figured I was the customer and could decide later, so I hired him for a two hour massage. That turned out to be naive. When he got there, I told him I wanted just a massage. He started to give one half-heartedly, instead chatting with me in Thai and regularly touching me in sexual ways I didn’t want. A few more times, I told him I just wanted the massage, at least first - but the behavior continued and the massage was even more subpar than I had had in the morning. About 90 minutes in, he got more persistent in the sexual advances, eventually just taking a break from the massage and saying “I want you to fuck me.” In a typical me fashion, I decided to just roll with it; I decided to accept that the massage wasn’t going to happen and that I might as well have sex, even though I didn’t really want to. As soon as we were done, I paid him and had him leave - and started texting Anne immediately about the shitshow. At first she thought it was funny - me naively hiring a masseuse off of Grindr thinking there was a world in which it wasn’t sex work. As we kept chatting and she realized I had actually just paid someone to have sex I didn’t want but they did, she began to find it less amusingly, darkly joking “So, you paid to be raped?” While I’m certainly not traumatized by the event, the gist of her joke is true. Playing through my just-roll-with-it attitude, I did in fact pay someone to touch me in ways I didn’t want - and then paid him to have sex with him because he wanted it. (Anyone who dates men is long so overexposed to unwanted touching and consent by a loss of willpower that they inure to it. The whole experience hardly registered as non-normal to me as it was happening.) I certainly hope that I learned a lesson from it.

• The next morning, I was set to take a bus to Surat Thani to meet Anne - where we were going to meet my mom’s ex boyfriend and then catch a night train to Bangkok. My mom picked me up around the same time as usual and drove me to the bus station, making sure that I had a ticket for the next minivan and told me to wait for her ex-boyfriend at the station. After we hugged goodbye and said our emotional farewell, she handed me $60 in Thai baht and said “Spend it to have fun in Cambodia.” I know better than to fight with my mom about money so I just took it, genuinely moved by the maternal gesture.

• The minivan ride was an uncomfortable five hours but uneventful. When I arrived to Surat Thani, it became clear that the minivan station was not a space to be easily picked up - or to find someone, which was inconvenient because I had to arrange a meeting of three people. So, I set off to find Wi-Fi - only to completely fail. A young 20s Thai man saw me wandering around looking confused and asked if I needed help. When I said I was looking for Wi-Fi, he said he had ten minutes before his friend would pick him up and that I could hotspot on his phone. I got connected and found that Anne had had the wisdom to find a local cafe with internet near the bus station around the time she expected me to arrive and wait for me. (A master stroke.) I sent P. San, my mom’s ex boyfriend, the cafe location and walked there to meet Anne. Twenty minutes later, P. San came to pick us up. It was a moment of stress that settled into a shockingly efficient meetup.

• P. San brought us to a food market, where we ate everything in sight (including by far the best version of one of my favorite Thai deserts, kanom buang, that I’ve ever had), and then to the outskirts of town near the train station for a local donut my mom had recommended. After eating, he brought us to a cool bar along the river where we had some Thai rum and coke, watching the slow flow of the river and the objects floating on top, chatting esoterically about politics, leadership, religion, and being happy in capitalism. It was both warm and satisfying - and also a delight to realize that my Thai is still strong enough to have such deep conversations. Afterwards, he dropped us off at the train station, where we bought a few beers and had about an hour to wait.

• The train was comfortable and we each had an upper bunk bed to sleep through the night. What I’ll always remember from it, though, is that for two hours we sat huddled in Anne’s cabin drinking beers, giggling, having our own little cozy sleepover. It was just so cute. Another sister-wives moment.

• Our train got into Bangkok the next morning and we immediately set about finding a bus to Ayutthaya* - our next destination. I knew the bus station was near the train station - but I hadn’t realized there was no convenient walking path. We ended up having to cross the railroad tracks to get near the station, only to find out there were actually four stations going to different destinations all clumped near each other. The first three we stopped at, the person I asked for help pointed us down further, saying “the next bus station.” Eventually, we got there, and we walked into one of the ticket rooms to find a bunch of cashiers screaming out their destinations in a pure cacophony of sales noise. I talked to someone and found out which building we had to go to, walked there, got a ticket, and we were in a minivan within ten minutes. The ride was only about two hours - not particularly comfortable but not the worst.

• We got to Ayutthaya* in the hottest part of the day and, being me, I decided that we could walk the 30 minutes to the guest house. Unfortunately, Anne hadn’t yet acclimated to the Southeast Asian heat, and 20 minutes in it was clear she was fading and grumpy. We did finish the walk but I also learned my lesson - to just take a car when the heat is bad and we have our bags.

• There’s a good chance you’ve never heard of Ayutthaya* - but not long too long ago it was an important city. It is estimated to have been the world’s largest city just 400 years ago (passing a million people in the 1600s), probably the only modern largest city that has almost entirely been erased from public knowledge. This is largely because the city was razed by the Burmese Kingdom, forcing Siam to move their capital south to Bangkok. All that’s left of the old city is the stone structures (because the rest were burned down), and the stone temple ruins are just FANTASTIC. It’s one of the hidden gems of Thailand - a place very few tourists go, leaving the town quiet and not too touristy.

• Our guest house offered free bicycles, which is why we rented a room there. Once we settled in, we got on our bikes and started exploring the historic core of the city. We visited two of the three main temples and shopped - with Anne buying two skirts and two pairs of pants. I introduced her to Sai Mai, a strange regional dessert that is essentially firm (horse-hair like) cotton candy that you wrap in crepes. It’s super delicious - and super weird. At the end of the night, we walked through the city’s food night market, eating our way through whatever looked good - and then biked home. As we went, we both kept noting that it was the kind of quiet, bike-friendly, livable city that we could easily spend months in.

• The next day we took a slow morning, doing a HIIT workout together and eating a late breakfast at the guest house. We then got on our bikes and started our day by getting Anne passport photos (for our Cambodia and Laos visas) and stopping by the local market (where Anne tried her hand at eating jackfruit again. Surprise: she was still allergic). We then explored three more of the city’s major temples (which were each incredible) - and stopped at the Ayutthaya Floating Market. It’s an intra-city recreation of the the historic boat markets - and it turned out to be the good kind of kitsch. We took a boat ride through its canals, grabbed the other regional delicacy (boat noodles), and watched a traditional show of Thai dance and Muay Thai. As we explored, my bike chain came undone two times - and I found myself super grateful to be traveling with a Dutch woman. She had that chain back on in seconds. Overall, it was an absolutely lovely but not super adventurous day in Ayutthaya*.

• We got back to our guest house around 7PM and packed our bags to catch a Grab to Bangkok. Our bus to Cambodia was set to leave from Kao San, Bangkok’s famous backpacker street, the next day at 8AM, so we decided to change plans and spend the night there (even though we still had a room paid for in Ayutthaya). About two hours later, we got to Kao San and walked to our hotel, only to have Anne realize that she had left her phone in the car. I spent the next twenty minutes frantically trying to get in touch with the driver - finding myself infuriated by the Grab interface. When you clicked for help with a lost item, it told you to call the driver - but the call driver button didn’t exist. It was an endless, futile loop. Eventually, I found their Thai customer support number, and they were able to patch in the driver. Another 40 minutes later, he came back with Anne’s phone. It was then 10PM and we were stressed, hungry, and tired. Instead of partaking in the party scene of Kao San, we grabbed dinner and got two hour massages - one of the best either of us had ever had. We then grabbed a second dinner at 2AM (because why not?) and fell asleep late.

• The next day (May 14) was a simple transit day. We woke up, grabbed fresh fruit shakes, and got on our 8AM bus. The border crossing into Cambodia went smoothly and we got to Battambang* around 5PM. Once we arrived, we checked into our guest house - and found out its pool was better than expected. A delight.

• At this point in the day, we were both quite hungry, so we set out to explore the city a little and find food. Unfortunately, the town seemed to have almost nothing vegetarian (let alone vegan) - with every vendor looking at us like we were mad when we asked if there was anything without meat. About an hour in, we were both getting hangry - and we decided to just eat egg pancakes for dinner (I often eat vegetarian on the road). While we were waiting for our food, Anne made an innocent mistake of calling local dumplings gyozas - and, hangry, I was a little aggressively salty and a bit condescending in telling her that that was a racist conflation. Once we had food in us though, the hanger and saltiness faded, and we ended up having a productive conversation about how the West erases the cultural diversity of Asia - mixing it all into one thing that we vaguely think uses chopsticks. One of the things that makes Anne and I so compatible together is that when one of us gets grumpy, it never tips into anything larger than that. The other always manages to not take it personally and stay calm. It’s a beautiful balance.

• After our struggle to find food, we decided to shift to a fruit-first diet. The basic rule was that all we eat is fresh fruit unless we find something that we really want (which turned out to be a great plan for the next week). We ended the night swimming in the pool, drinking wine and beer.

• We only had one full day in Battambang* and we planned to use it for our first scooter adventure. I had made a reservation with a small family owned shop about a five minute walk away where we met a charming man, maybe a bit younger than us, who had a really beautiful British accent and a bubbly personality. (He said he learned English watching Harry Potter). He gave us his best advice for what route to take (which went beyond what we’d found in blogs). At some point in his description, he told us that a certain place was where Angelina Jolie had found her child - a vague description that left it very unclear to us whether Angelina Jolie had adopted an orphan or just stolen someone’s son. Because of that, for the rest of the trip, whenever we passed a group of cute children, one of us would inevitably say something like “Any of them you want to pull an Angelina Jolie on?” (As a note, I’ve now looked it up and found that Angelina Jolie met her son in an orphanage in the city.)

• The man then showed us how to use the bike. I hadn’t driven one since I was 17 - and I’m quite scared of driving them. So, I started by just practicing up and down the little village roads in his neighborhood, suffering the nervous stares of all the families who were sitting outside as I puttered along. Eventually, Anne got on the back of the scooter and I started driving toward our first destination. I was . . . Slow, unsteady, and choppy. Thankfully Anne was incredibly patient and encouraging with me. She alone gave me the courage to try renting one again, and she alone gave me the courage to keep with it until I got comfortable. (A week later, once I was a more confident driver, she’d share a meme with me that said - When I’m riding with my bestie, I’m not a passenger. I’m a survivor.)

• I drove along the riverside path with Anne behind me, which was a beautiful road that bounced between being paved and dirt. Our first stop was a small walking suspension bridge that crossed the river (and, to our surprise, was also used by scooters to drive across) and a nearby Muslim fishing village. It was clear the village didn’t get much in the way of tourism - and its local nature and the surprised reception of us as guests made it all the more charming.

• After the Muslim village, I drove us to our second destination: one of their three bamboo trains. When the trains aren’t running, the locals use the tracks to run bamboo mats with engines along them - which has evolved over time into a cottage tourist industry. Sitting on the bamboo mat, we raced through the countryside going up to 30 miles per hour for 40 minutes - an experience somewhere between Aladdin’s magic carpet and a Donkey Kong mini game. It was one of the strangest, most fun tourist attractions I’ve ever done. So weird, so cool. We even bought their kitschy souvenir t-shirts.

• We swapped drivers after the train. Anne proved to MUCH more comfortable behind the wheel - a natural driver. I turned out to be a better passenger because I was comfortable holding my phone while going and giving directions. She took us to our next stop - giant fruit bats. When we got there, we parked and didn’t immediately spot them, walking into and around a temple looking for them instead. We wandered around diligently looking for even just one - to no success. Eventually, we gave up and walked back to our scooter and noticed that, right next to where we had parked, there were three trees absolutely FULL of them. I’m talking hundreds of them - and we had just entirely missed them when we parked. They were so cool - and so big.

• Anne took the driver’s seat again to take us to our next destination - a ruined hilltop Hindu temple. We grabbed some sugarcane juice and bananas and made the slow, hot walk up to the top. The temple was charming and quiet - not too full of tourists - but also small. A nice detour but not worth a trip to Battambang* for.

• After the temple, I took the driver’s seat again and drove us to Mount Sampov - the area for the rest of our stops. By this time, I was becoming much more smooth behind the wheel (even easily maneuvering the steep incline and decline of Mount Sampov). We went to four temples - one being a Killing Cave from the Cambodian genocide. This small temple was centered with a display of skull and bones from people who had been murdered there; for me, a chilling display. While near the killing cave, a kitten befriended us, jumping right onto our scooter and into our bag. While Anne isn’t generally a cat person, she proved to be totally smitten with this one, carrying it around the whole time we explored the area. It was so sweet.

• When we got to the top of Mount Sampov, we decided to eat a few mangoes. We knew there were a lot of monkeys nearby but figured we’d be fine, so Anne laid down in a hammock and I took a chair next to her, slowly working our way through them. For a while it was fine; a few of the smaller monkeys would come look but never get close. When we were nearly finished though, one of the larger, older, male monkeys came walking over really close to us, right alongside the hammock, and sat near us. It was intimidating - but we kept eating. Then, slowly, at least two dozen other monkeys came and sat behind him alongside the hammock, all eying our mangos. (I’m talking feet from us, just a growing tower of monkeys.) I slowly took the bowl, stood up, and walked away from Anne in the hammock, separating the fruit from the monkeys. She joined me slowly and we rapidly finished what little was left, eager to avoid any mango-induced primate violence. We got through it safe.

• After the monkey incident, we headed to the bottom of the mountain to see the famous bat cave of Battambang*. There was a long row of plastic chairs facing the cave wall - with those closest to the path up the mountain starting to fill up with tourists when we arrived. Anne had the wisdom to move further down to take seats right in front of the cave entrance - a master stroke that no other tourist had the insight to do. Around 6PM when the sunset started and it got darker, a near endless flow of bats started flying out in a long stream, billowing into curves as they went. From our front row seat, we watched them fly out for 45 minutes - and they were still going at that point. There are apparently millions of bats in the cave. It was easily one of the coolest natural phenomenon I have ever seen - just memorizing.

• We then drove home and grabbed a light dinner (managing to find vegetable noodles this time). We bought a lot of fruit from this sweet old woman who cut it all for us; as we watched her, Anne said “If I’m going to Angelina Jolie someone, it’s going to be this grandma.” It became the second refrain of our recurring Angelina Jolie joke for the rest of the trip: “Any children you want to pull an Angelina Jolie on? None as good as Angelina Jolie-ing that grandmother instead.” After dinner, we dropped off our scooter and ended the night swimming in the pool again, drinking wine, and chatting excitedly about what an incredible, varied, unusual set of experiences we had just had in one day. It had been spectacular.

• The next day I woke up early and couldn’t fall back asleep (around 4AM), so I did a bunch of research for our Laos trip, swam a mile in the pool, and did some writing until Anne woke up. We had a breakfast of fruit, packed our bags, and got ready for another transit day - this time to Siem Reap*. Anne took one last opportunity to swim before we left, and around 10AM we were on a bus out of the city. This one was a little stop and go because one of the women behind was sick (which she attributed to food poisoning but we suspected was a bad hangover). It was also a little unpleasant for the last hour because Anne decided to make small talk with the elderly American expat next to me - who then kept talking to us for an hour despite us both saying “Thank you” and putting in our headphones in several times. Initiating conversation on a bus ride was not a mistake we made again.

• We got into Siem Reap* around 1PM and grabbed a Tuk Tuk to our apartment - a small two bedroom villa in the center of the city. The driver offered us a tour of Angkor Wat for the next day - and we decided to take him up on it. We wanted to go for sunrise, which required leaving at 4AM, and we thought it’d be safer at that hour in a rickshaw than driving ourselves on a scooter. Once we arrived and checked in, Anne and I looked at each other and said what we did every time on this trip when we had separate bedrooms: “Self sex break?” I think more friends should be so unabashedly sex-neutral with each other.

• Anne had only one thing she wanted to buy on the trip: a custom made three-piece suit. Unfortunately, we weren’t passing through any of the famous tailor towns and we weren’t staying long anywhere. So, I figured our best bet was Siem Reap - which was a major tourist destination and a place we planned to stay for four or five nights. Our only goal for the rest of the day was to find a tailor - and I had flagged a few in the city. We walked toward them and I immediately fell in love with Siem Reap - a bohemian, walkable, small city with cute river views and absolutely every kind of business you could need. We grabbed fruit and spring rolls as we walked, eventually getting to the area with tailors.

• The first four shops we went to were no-gos because they needed at least a week for a suit; to be honest, this is actually kind of nice to hear because the 24 hour turnaround in tailor towns is concerning for labor standards. Anne gave up and said it was fine, so we started walking back toward our villa because we had plans to watch a movie that night. As we walked, we passed one more small tailor shop and, at my nudging, Anne agreed to try one more. We were in luck because this man, who did all the sewing himself, was willing to make the suit in 4 days for $170. He was diligent in taking Anne’s measurements and honest in saying what he could and could not do. We made the order, scheduled a fitting and a pickup, crossed our fingers, and hoped it would turn out all right.

• On our walk home, we made a detour so that I could meet a boy in person who I had been chatting with on Grindr but wasn’t sure if I actually found cute, David. He was an Australian expat who owned a cafe in town and I suspected he was still there, so we popped by to see. I’m glad we did because he turned out to be much more handsome than I expected and had a really chill vibe. I was sold immediately on spending more time with him.

• After that, we went to the movie theater to watch Guardians and the Galaxy 3. I don’t know what all the critics watched to give it such terrible reviews - but we just disagree with them. We laughed and cried hard - and just delighted the whole time. It was exactly what we needed in the moment. After the movie, we ordered some fried street noodles to take home where we ate them with a six pack of beer, chatting as we went. The whole night, I found myself texting with David, finding a natural rapport, and planned a date for the next day.

• The next morning we woke up at 4AM, had some tea and coffee on our balcony, and then met the Tuk Tuk driver at 4:30 AM to begin our tour. The first thing he did was bring us to the ticket office where we bought three-day passes to Angkor. In Cambodia, they accept two currencies: the local Cambodian riel and US dollars. They only accept US dollars, though, if they are in pristine condition. Folds and especially rips can render them unusable. (I’m really not sure how it’s a sustainable ecosystem.) While we were buying our ticket, we saw a large American tourist at the other end of the ticketing area causing a scene, waving his money saying “They won’t accept my genuine American dollars.” He’s exactly the kind of American tourist I just can’t being stand. An entitled, privileged prick with no self-awareness.

• Once we had our tickets, the Tuk Tuk driver brought us to Angkor Wat for the sunrise. The colors and the temple’s reflection were beautiful against its reflective pond - but if I’m being honest, Angkor Wat itself is a bit underwhelming. After exploring it for a couple of hours, we returned to our driver and went for breakfast. He dropped us off at an expensive restaurant - a place he clearly had a kickback scheme with. We walked past the aggressive restaurant salespeople to smaller street food vendors and got a much more casual, inexpensive breakfast. I’m never a fan of these kickback schemes, at least when I’m paying the driver enough to not need the subsidy from it, so I was a little irritated by it.

• Our second temple was Wat Bayon - a gorgeous structure filled with large Buddha head and face carvings. It was by far our favorite temple in Angkor - just magnificent and unique. After Bayon, we explored a few smaller temples and then went to the Tomb Raider temple - famous for being a set of the movie. This proved to be our second favorite temple because of the way the jungle has started to really regrow into it. My favorite memory of this, though, was when we stopped at one of its photo spots and started discussing which order to take our pictures in. The man behind us asked if we wanted him to take a picture of us together and we both looked completely shocked - as if the idea was absurd. After a moment, we realized how ridiculous this shared reaction was and got the pictures together. For the rest of the trip, this became another running joke for us: “Do you want me to take a picture of you? Why would we want that? We don’t even know each other.”

• After the Tomb Raider temple, we stopped at two more temples and were surprised when the driver told us it was our last temple around 12:30PM. We had had a miscommunication and thought our tour was going to be all day - so at first we were caught off guard and a bit upset. Then, as we started to wander through our seventh temple of the day, we realized we were hot, tired, and had some serious temple fatigue. Our disappointment shifted to relief and we felt good that the tour was ending.

• When we got back to our villa, I scheduled my date with David for around 3PM. He picked me up in his motorcycle - which was a first for me, and for some reason it made me feel so young and rebellious. (Which is kind of absurd given how many motorbikes and motorcycles I’ve ridden on . . . But nonetheless I felt like I was having my Amanda Bynes’ What a Girl Wants moment). He took me to a cafe where I grabbed coffee and my avocado toast for Cambodia - and we talked about our lives, our dreams, and how to handle moments in life when we get a message from the universe that something needs to change. We compared notes on Khmer (which he speaks) and Thai (which I speak), learning a bit from each other about the languages. Afterwards, we walked to a nearby spa he likes and got 90 minute massages in a couple’s room, one of the best massages I’ve had.

• After the massage, he brought me to a hotel restaurant that his friend manages with a good plant based menu, and we slowly worked through a shared meal while we talked about philosophy, religion, psychedelics and self-compassion. It became clear quickly that going deep on big questions was a comfortable zone for us; what was a nice change, though, was that we got there comfortably without needing to overshare about ourselves. It was intimate but with not trauma dumping. When we finished dinner, we went back to his apartment and lied down on the couch, where I rested my head in his lap and he rubbed my hair. He didn’t know this, but headrubs are my absolute favorite, so it was bliss. I immediately became extremely sleepy, so after a lot of cuddling, he ordered me a Grab home. Maybe chivalry isn’t dead. Overall, it was the taste of romance I’d been craving - and it was a real delight to have an intimate experience that didn’t have to be sexual (especially after the shitshow that had unfolded in Hatyai).

• I expected to fall right to sleep when I got home - but Anne was there, so we ended up unpacking our nights over a bottle of wine. It’s fine. I’ll catch up on sleep at the meditation retreat. Or when I’m dead.

• The next day we planned to take a day trip to a jungle temple about 3 hours outside of the city - Koh Ker, and stop at a ruined Hindu temple on the route back - Beng Mealea. We woke up at 7AM to have an early start, ate some fruit and coffee, and then walked to the scooter rental shop where we got a larger bike for the longer trip. After that, we drove to a helmet shop that Anne had found on Google Maps. We had decided to buy our own helmets because rental helmets don’t usually cover your face or upper neck - and because helmets only have one crash in them and you never know if a rental helmet has already had it. When we got there, it looked to just be someone’s home - but we drove in and asked the woman watering plants if there was a helmet shop. She nodded yes and told us to wait there, walking into the house. A few minutes later, a very grumpy European man came out and informed us that they didn’t open until 8 and that he had just been woken up ten minutes earlier than he had planned. He then went inside, got ready, and let us into his small shop around 7:50AM. He turned out to be a German expat, and after Anne spoke German with him he warmed up considerably, even apologizing for being so grumpy in the morning. We bought two high quality white helmets that look a bit like storm trooper masks. Over the top and totally fun.

• From there, we made the three hour drive to Koh Ker, stopping about an hour in for a breakfast of fruit and noodles, and then about every half hour after to stand up and stretch our legs. Anne drove about 2/3 of the way - which became our standard ratio for scooter days because she’s a better driver - along roads that were mostly good (although the bumps and rocks often came unexpectedly.) The entrance path to Koh Ker is a long dirt road that is dotted on both sides by small, ruined temples - a really unique driving experience. Koh Ker itself is unlike any other temple I’ve been to in Southeast Asia; a pyramid built out of large stepped rocks, it feels more like something you’d find in the old Aztec empire than in Cambodia. We were literally the only tourists there and had the place entirely to ourselves. We had a quiet picnic alone at the top - which was full of butterflies and dragonflies - enjoying a sweeping view of the surrounding jungle. After, we relaxed in hammocks drinking Coke Zeroes before we started the long drive back.

• I took the first leg of the drive, heading back Beng Mealea, which was about an hour. When we got to the ticketing office, we learned that the ticketing policy had been changed to include it in the Angkor pass - even though it’s not actually part of Angkor. (Previously, it had been a separate ticket for $5). So, we had the options of using one of our three Angkor days to see this one small temple, spending another $35 to see it (getting a one day Angkor pass), or calling it a lost cause and just taking it as a pit stop. We chose the third and drank coconuts, cokes and water near the entrance, laughing to ourselves about how our whole day was a six hour scooter drive to see one jungle temple.

• Anne drove the remainder of the way back into Siem Reap*. We changed our path back and ended up on a really scenic, rural road with charming houses and farms on both sides, driving towards a gorgeous sunset. That 30 minute stretch made up for missing Beng Mealea, making the long trip feel worth it. She navigated the chaos of driving the urban core of Siem Reap* with finesse - skillfully not crashing with about six cars who just pulled in front of us. We got back around 6PM and returned the bikes. With the Southeast Asian heat and violent sun, it was a pretty exhausting drive. We were drained and both really wanted draft beer. So, we showered and made our way to Siem Reap’s colorful Pub Street. We grabbed a draft beer and then went to a rooftop bar for a mixed cocktail pitcher. While we originally planned to just grab a few drinks and go home, energy started to return to us as we sat on the roof deck - and it became clear we were going to stay out for a while.

• Someone on Grindr told me that there was a drag show at 9PM, so then we went to that gay bar to watch it. There was a group of older people sitting at the couches next to us - all women except for one very attractive older man. Anne noticed that he kept looking at me and told me, so I kept my eyes open to it and noticed him occasionally giving me what looked like sex eyes. Ever the wingman, Anne decided to send him a cocktail from me - only to find that the woman next to him came over and thanked us and started drinking it. Confused, we let it go. Later in the night, as he was walking by, we called him over to chat. He sat next to me and told me that he wasn’t gay, that the woman next to him was his wife and they were there with family and friends. In front of Anne, he told me I shouldn’t be embarrassed - while, I kid you not, resting his hand on my upper inner thigh. Completely befuddled by all of it, Anne and I decided to head to the club and dance, laughing the entire way in confusion about whatever family dynamic we had just jumped into the middle of.

• We ended up tearing up the dance floor until around 1AM when Anne got exhausted, more by the display of local women trying to attract western men than by physical fatigue. We started to leave the club when I got pulled over to a table of clearly gay local men by a cute boy. I decided to stay with them and Anne decided to go home, telling me to be safe. I nursed a beer and danced for another couple of hours with them until I became exhausted. When I was ready to leave around 2:30AM, one of them asked if I wanted to go home with them - which I did. I found myself in their hotel room having a foursome until around 4AM, at which point I walked back to our villa, grabbing a lot of fried street noodles on route. I sat on our balcony texting with my best gay friend (Connor) about the unexpected escalation of the night, filling myself with the greasy food. I finally got to sleep around 4:45AM.

• The next day we both woke up late, around 10AM, and had a slow morning. Anne wasn’t feeling well - stomach problems and exhaustion - and I just hadn’t slept much. We grabbed a lunch nearby and left for Angkor on a rented motorbike around 1PM to go temple hopping, with a plan to go to six that day. I drove the whole day because Anne wasn’t feeling well enough to drive. All the temples we saw were nice - but none were truly incredible. So instead of trying to describe them, I’m just going to share little moments from the day I found funny. At our first temple, we stopped to rest and have a sugarcane juice. There, vendors kept coming over and asking if we wanted something and I ended up buying a scarf that I thought my mom would like. Unfortunately, once I bought something, they all flocked to me and wouldn’t leave me alone while we drank our juice - no matter what I said. The entire experience felt like a flashback to the dozens of monkeys gathering around Anne’s hammock - just a swarm of people descending on me to take my money. The other two things that are funny to me are both to do with Anne’s stomach. We had to make a lot of urgent bathroom breaks throughout the day. During one of them, I just waited on the scooter and when she came back she was like “There were puppies!” I’m glad she got to have a bit of joy with that pit stop. The other was at the water temple on a small island in a manmade lake. It came on so urgently that Anne couldn’t wait for a bathroom, so she had to run to a wooded spot near the temple and shit in a bush. The bursts came on so frequently that they generated what would be another recurring joke for us for the rest of the trip: “Fart or Shart? Find out after this next commercial break.”

• We left Angkor around the time when the park was closing and went to Anne’s suit fitting. It turned out we put our faith in the right man because his work was impeccable. The only piece that needed any adjustment was the vest, which we had expected would be a challenge for him. After the fitting, we grabbed a dinner at a street food vendor and went to sleep early. I was meant to have another date with David but he ended up falling asleep mid-planning - and I decided to take the excuse to do the same and catch up on sleep.

• The next day we woke up earlier and took a slow morning, having coffee and fruit on Anne’s bed and waiting for her stomach to fully clear. (The situation was still very much Fart or Shart.) We took the free time to book our bus to Laos and our accommodations for our first destination there, and then left for our last day of exploring Angkor around 11AM. Feeling a bit better, Anne drove the first leg - but it turned out she wasn’t quite better enough to drive. She went way too fast, nearly zoomed through both ticket checkpoints, and once tried to go while my feet were on the ground and I was putting things away. It was bad enough that we switched drivers - which is saying something because she is BY FAR the superior driver of the two of us.

• In Angkor, we grabbed a lunch and then parked at the beginning of an 8 mile nature walk we were planning to do - one that had five stone gates and and four small temples. It had been strongly recommended to us by two people - but to be honest, it was just an average nature walk. The only thing of note was that in the last quarter we met a dog who showed us the rest of the way, waiting for us whenever we fell behind. He was super cute.

• After the walk, we went to pick up Anne’s suit with her driving. When we got there, she crashed hard (energy levels just plummeting and feeling faint) - in what seemed to be a flash of heat stroke bad enough that she couldn’t even enjoy that the fit of the suit was perfect. It was bad enough that it generated one more recurring joke - that we’d actually died on the walk, that the dog had been a hellhound, and that everything we were now experiencing was just a hallucination from the other side. For the rest of the trip, whenever anything would feel odd, we’d say something like “Ah, this is because we died isn’t it?”

• With Anne incapacitated, I drove us home and grabbed us dinner while she rested in bed. When I got back, she showed me that her legs had become completely covered in heat rash. It was bad. We ate our dinner with a hefty addition of salt and she fell asleep right away - taking much needed rest. I then went out to the local tourist market because I hadn’t explored it yet, buying a couple of shirts for myself. I ended the night stopping at a kefir brewery we had noticed two nights prior but hadn’t stopped into. It was incredible - just one more reason to love Siem Reap*. I got back around 9PM and crashed early as well. It’d been a busy few days.

• The next day (May 21) was our transit day to Laos - and was a learning moment for me that I sometimes should give my opinion when I think someone is making a small bad choice that could backfire. I’ve spent a lot of my life around narcissists - and small suggestions that a narcissist could be doing something better can be unpredictably explosive. So, I’m loathe to make them. Here’s what happened. We had a bus at 8AM and Anne had to pack in the morning - with her energy level still low. When she came out, I saw that she now did not have enough room in the bag she had brought, so she had packed her shoes in a plastic bag. In addition, she had decided to, for the first time of the trip, wear her truly piece of shit flip flops instead of either her sneakers or Doc Martin’s platform sandals. I thought to myself “She should really clip her shoes to her bag instead of keeping them separate” and “Those are probably not the right shoes to wear today.” But because of that nagging anxious voice that such suggestions can blow up in my face, I held my tongue. It proved to be a mistake.

• Around 7:30 AM, a Tuk Tuk came to pick us up to bring us to our minibus. We got on without issues and it drove us four hours uneventfully to a town closer to the Laos border and dropped us off in a restaurant, telling us another bus would come for us in 90 minutes. We had to unload our things in the interim and store them in the restaurant, so I piled mine in one place. We grabbed a small lunch and eventually the next bus came. When it got there, everyone loaded in quickly but Anne realized she had to go to the bathroom, so I grabbed all of my stuff and everything I saw of Anne’s, including a hoody, the suit and her helmet in my pile and her suitcase somewhere else. I made the mini bus wait for her and when she got there I checked with her that I had gotten everything: bag, helmet, suit, hoody. Here’s the catch: her bag of shoes wasn’t in my pile or with her bag. We’d forgotten it at the restaurant. Now the only footwear she had was her pink flip flops, which were actively falling apart.

• The next bus was super bumpy and uncomfortable - but luckily it was only 90 minutes to the border. For us, getting into Laos was smooth. We paid the $2 each customary bribe to leave Cambodia, paid the $40 each for the visa on entry, and then paid the $2 each customary bribe for them to give us our passport back. The process is widely known and was even briefed to us before we got in the bus that morning. Because we were prepared and followed all the guidance, our process was smooth and quick. Unfortunately, that was not true for everyone in the bus. One couple didn’t bring passport photos, four people didn’t bring enough cash for the bribes, and another couple tried to get around paying the bribe. Between the eight of them, the border crossing for the group took a full hour longer than it did for us. I’d learn later, though, that we got off easy. I’ve now heard a lot of horror stories about buses having to wait because people try to refuse to pay the bribe to enter Laos. The thing is - the border officials just won’t give your passport back if you don’t pay it. They will let you live in the borderzone before they let you pass without their $2. I’ve heard of some buses that have waited hours before abandoning these people at the border. I even heard of one Russian couple who refused to pay the bribe standing in front of the bus as it was trying to leave after waiting two hours for them, trying to make sure it wouldn’t leave without them. Amidst the people trying to refuse to pay, I heard a lot of murmur about not paying the bribe out of principal. The thing to me, though, is if the fee is widely publicized, known by the government, allowed by the government, and generally accepted as a part of the process - is it even a bribe anymore? Why would you try to enter a country if you knew the process of entry but knew you would refuse to comply with it? Also, I just couldn’t care less because it’s $2 and I was really really excited for our trip to Laos.

• Anyway, we finally left the border in a really nice van and the ride was only 30 minutes to the inland town closest to our destination - Don Det!, a small island in the Mekong River. We were set to take a ferry there, and I had pictured it as a large boat. It was not. It was a small, shallow wooden motorboat that felt like it could capsize if someone coughed. It was shakier than a kayak. Even though I was worried about my iPad the whole time, the boat ride was absolutely stunning. The area is known as 4,000 islands because the Mekong is absolutely packed with small islands in this region. The scenery as you travel through it is breathtaking.

• We got to Don Det! around 6PM and the first thing we did was stop at a travel agency. We confirmed ourself for a full day kayaking adventure the next day and bought our bus tickets for the rest of our time in Laos - locking down transit plans. After that, we grabbed a bag full of samosas (which appear to be a local speciality of the island) and some beer, and then took a Tuk Tuk to our guesthouse on the other side of the island (maybe 2 miles away). Before we bought our Tuk Tuk, a local had told us to be careful to not overpay because they will try to gouge prices - and told us what we should pay. The thing is, there was only one Tuk Tuk anywhere to be found. I did still barter to bring the price down, but as I did I just found it so strange that the driver was willing to barter at all. He was literally our only option besides walking with all of our bags (in Anne’s shitty flip flops). I also kept thinking about this local who told us that Tuk Tuk drivers gouge on Don Det because I’m still not convinced there was a second Tuk Tuk driver. This man could totally have been saying “Tuk Tuk drivers” as a way of generalizing a critique he had about a very specific man. “All the mayors in this town cheat on their wives.” Clearly, I have questions on this still.

• We got to our guest house just before sunset and found that it was gorgeous - with hammocks overlooking the river. We also found that there was an incredibly loud, endless thrum from some local insect. While Anne was asking the owner if the noise would stop, I fell on my usual coping strategy of telling myself “This is fine. We live with this now. We just have to adjust.” It turned out the noise would stop - around dusk - but it would return for about three hours every day. The loud bugs weren’t the only bugs, though, and we found out that once it became dark thousands of bugs would immediately flock to any source of light, making it impossible to sit under one or to use a mobile phone with any level of comfort. Also, during check in, Anne’s flip flops broke, leaving her now entirely shoeless in our small island village.

• We finished the night sitting in our hammock drinking a lot of beers. We just got drunk and looked out to the river, chatting about life. We fell asleep around 10PM, figuring out that the secret of peace on the island given the relentless bugs would be to just fall asleep when it’s dark and wake up when it’s light.

• The next morning we had our all day kayaking adventure. We got up around 7:30 but had a slow start because, in addition to still being exhausted and sick from the heat and the tummy problems, Anne had her period and was having violent cramping. She laid in bed taking pills until she was functional enough to begin the day. She’s a fucking trooper. We grabbed our rental bicycles from the guest house and biked down to the travel agency to have breakfast (which was included in the tour). Anne stopped at one of the local shops to buy a new pair of sandals - settling on a pair of horrendously knockoff Balenciagas that were too wide for her feet. We then got our breakfast, finding ourselves alone and hoping that was the case for the tour. Sadly, about ten minutes later, the most stereotypical mid-40s white American man walked in and sat at the table next to us. Unfit, unkempt, and wearing unflattering, ill-fitting clothes, he looked like he could burst out at any moment in a defense of Donald Trump. To our relief, he didn’t strike up a conversation.

• Around 9:15AM, our tour guide, a bubbly fun-loving local man in his 40s, joined us and gave us a waterproof bag to put our things in. He brought us down to our kayaks - each a two-person boat - and we started off with a 45 minute trip to the next island over. The entire path was gorgeous (all day), like the “ferry” ride from the day before, with small islands always on either side of us and the clean, green-tinted water of the Mekong flowing slowly all around. Like with most things me and Anne, we turned out to be very compatible at kayaking together.

• We got off at the next island over and took a short 20-minute nature stroll to the day’s first waterfall. Within 10 minutes of walking, Anne’s cheap sandals were already tearing up her feet and she was walking barefoot as much as possible. (It was going to be a tough couple of days for her feet). The waterfall turned out to be small but really cool because we could swim in it - and sit under the pounding water (which felt like a massage). Anne had brought her underwater camera and we, once again, took ridiculous thotty pictures of ourselves. There was a second tour group at the waterfall, a thick Australian around our age and a young fit Dutch man, and we talked to them briefly. When we got ready to go, I realized that my Apple Watch had come off at some point while I was swimming. I chalked it up to the universe as I’d been recently re-considering wearing it because I didn’t think it was good for my mental health to have all that data on my wrist all that time. (It has, in fact, turned out to be a blessing because I do feel more disconnected and mindfully present without it.)

• After the waterfall, we started a second nature walk toward a beach area where we were set to have lunch. As we were going, we noticed the other tour group coming behind us, riding some kind of tractor with a wooden platform instead of walking. With her feet already getting torn up, Anne hopped on and hitched a ride. At first, I kept walking - but when our tour guide hopped on as well, I followed suit. Just one more form of transit we can check off for the month: Plane, bus, minivan, car, train, bamboo train, motorcycle, motorbike, bicycle, taxi, Tuk Tuk, motorboat, kayak - wooden platform on a tractor.

• At the beach, Anne and I hopped in to go swimming while the tour guides made lunch (fried rice, vegetable kebabs and a baguette). We found ourselves talking to the Australian about our respective itineraries - at first finding him not insufferable. When lunch was ready we popped out of the water and ate with the whole group, quickly finding ourselves tiring of the topics of conversation among the three men. Once Anne and I finished eating, we jumped back into the water to swim alone. It revealed itself to be a good choice to abandon the group quite quickly - as I heard the American man in fact start to give a defense of Donald Trump and talk about how men are victimized in the #MeToo era and how unsafe it is now for men to have sex with women because they can just “decide at any time it was not consensual and accuse you of whatever they want.” It was a good thing we were a ways away from them and on our own because Anne - who used volunteer for a group that did consent training and awareness - was getting pissed hearing it. These were NOT our kind of people. These were the kind of people who travel to Southeast Asia and think to themselves “It’s so nice to be in a place where people understand how attractive I am.”

• After the lunch, we got back in the kayaks and boated for another 30 minutes - this time through an exciting section of rapids - towards the Cambodian border. We stopped at a rock where we could jump into the river from the top - and I shocked myself by being the first person in the group to jump. (My fear of heights has really come a long way this year.) Anne, who works with paralyzed people, including someone younger than us who became paralyzed jumping off a rock into water, did it - but had to gather herself for about a minute at the top because she found herself in a panic. It’s rare I’m the one of the two of us who is more fearless.

• After the rocks, we got back in the kayaks and boated to the mainland for the next waterfall. Our tour guide became even more playful during this stretch and the whole way we found ourselves splashing water at each other and he kept saying “Look, dolphins,” pointing anywhere he wanted. (There’s a nearly extinct breed of river dolphins in this region that you can see sometimes - but we didn’t.)

• On the mainland, we loaded our kayaks into a vehicle because we were driving next. While the tour guides were tying down the boats, the driver pointed out a family of leaf ants making their nest in a nearby tree (the first of many, many of these nests we’d see in our remaining time in Laos). They’re super cool and their tree nests can be enormous. We then drove to the largest waterfall in the area and, when we got there, everyone else in the group stayed at the first view point and got ice cream pops. Anne and I noticed right away that the first viewpoint sucked, so we grabbed sugarcane juice and started walking down the path to what proved to be much better viewpoints. We ordered a 2 pound mango and sat enjoying the view by ourselves while eating it until, 10 minutes later, the other three men finally followed us. They then followed suit and sat with us and also ordered mangoes. These men were not courageous leaders.

• After the waterfall, we drove back to where we caught the ferry and kayaked another 40 minutes back to our island, finishing what was an awesome, long, exhausting adventure tour. Once we were back, we biked to the Indian restaurant in town and ate an enormous dinner (which was incredible) while watching the sun start to set along the river. We finished eating before the colors began to bleed through the sky, so we went a couple of shops down to a bar with homemade (non-alcoholic) ginger beer. We sat there sipping them slowly while we watched the sunset. Once it was done, we biked back to our guesthouse and relaxed in the hammocks for about an hour, processing the day. We crashed early, around 9PM, once the bug situation started to get bad.

• The next morning we woke up and had a super slow start at our guesthouse. We had breakfast, coffee and tea, and just sat looking out to the river and writing until around noon. Then, we got on our bicycles to explore our island and the slightly larger one next to it that was connected by a bridge. For the first time of the trip, Anne had done more research than me, having looked through the map of the islands, flagging a few places to go. Thus far in the trip, she’d left the planning essentially entirely to me - being the chill tag along friend who just goes with it. (The funny thing is, back home, I’m usually the chill tag along friend because so many of my close friends and my family and most of my exes are neurotic planners.)

• Our first stop of the day was a fruit lunch - just smoothies and mangoes at a small stand on the way. After that, we continued along the big island until Anne saw what looked like walking paths and convinced herself they were to a waterfall she had seen on the map. We parked our bikes and walked along them, Anne’s feet getting more torn up in the process, to find not a waterfall but a small stream. It was cute, but maybe not worth the added cuts on her feet. (They were getting so bad that for the rest of the day, whenever we were sitting in the same place for a while, Anne would point down to her feet and show that her wounds were now feeding an entire colony of bugs.)

• Not far from the stream though, we did stumble into a public swimming beach in a lush green area. We jumped in and had it entirely to ourselves for 40 minutes, swimming and taking more ridiculous pictures of ourselves. When we were sufficiently pruned, we got back on our bikes and checked out the Old French Harbor (cuter than expected) and then started heading toward a secret beach Anne had seen on the map. The path to the secret beach was about a mile of pure jagged rocks which were miserable to bike on - and I found myself bitterly thinking “If Anne’s first plan is just us biking down these fucking rocks to some shithole . . .” But I had to eat my bitter thoughts because when we got there we found a truly gorgeous secluded beach that we had all to ourselves. We swam for another 30 minutes and took what are probably the best pictures we got in Don Det!. They’re thotty as fuck.

• After the beach, we started biking back toward the small island, planning to go to the Indian restaurant again. The restaurant hadn’t opened yet when we got there, so we thought we’d bike to a bar up the road that we knew sold shirts because we had seen gimmicky tanks that said “Been There Don Det” and really wanted to buy them. We both love puns. It turned out that only one bar sells them and this wasn’t the one - but it was owned by a really nice British expat. We ordered rice vodka because Anne had never tried it and flavored local whiskey shots (which were both terrible). The man started smoking a joint and offered us a toke - which Anne took but I didn’t (because my body doesn’t react well with weed.) We then picked his brain about the best places to buy drugs on the island (because I was feeling fucking reckless).

• After the bar, I decided I wanted to buy shrooms, so we biked to the bar he recommended as the best place to do it. I bought a bag, enough for a serious trip, and then we biked to the Indian restaurant for dinner. I took a small handful, thinking it’d be fun to microdose during sunset. We both grabbed a really large dinner and shared some beer - which I stopped craving one the shrooms kicked in and Anne finished on her own. We sat there savoring our meal for an hour or so watching the sun start to go down, just relaxing. Once we were done, we started our journey back home (which would complete the entire loop of both islands for the day). We stopped at the same bar so that Anne could buy a large joint; she can’t take psychadelics so this was the best option for us both to have a similar experience. We then stopped and bought the “Been There Don Det” tanks and stocked up on non-alcoholic drinks and samosas for our night. We got back to our guesthouse just as it was getting dark.

• Around 7PM, we settled into hammocks, and I started slowly eating my mushrooms while Anne started smoking her joint. Over the next hour, I worked my way slowly through the whole bag, doing it incrementally to make sure I didn’t take too much for me. Before it all really kicked in, probably around 8PM, we found out we had neighbors - two women who shared the balcony with us. They came home while we were in the middle of a giant belly laugh - and it became clear to us we were about to be pretty shitty neighbors. Whelp, it was too late at that point.

• Over the next three hours as the drugs really kicked in, I found myself riding the waves of the psychedelic journey. At some moments, I’d be squirming and stretching in my hammock like it was a womb. At other times, I’d be tracking some kind of hallucination - be it the vague belief that everything behind Anne was actually an impressive 4D screen, seeing our background as if it was actually a different time period entirely, noticing grid lines that made it look like we were in the Matrix, or seeing little Buddhas everywhere. Then, other times I was totally lucid. Over the course of the night Anne and I settled into a mantra during each of these lucid moments, taking turns saying the following lines: “I’m a fat baby. I live on air now. Time is a construct. My rocks had baby rocks. Where do rocks come from?” We’d then burst out into an enormous belly laugh each time. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed as much or as hard as we did that night. We continued repeating that mantra from time to time over our last week together.

• Around 9PM, my trip took a turn toward the paranoia and my waves started to include moments of “Did I take too much” or “Am I actively dying?” or “I guess this is a beautiful way to die.” In this moment, I pulled out my phone and tried to look up how long the trip would last - only to find I was totally incapable of seeing my phone as something separate from the air. I turned in my hammock and said “Anne, you need to be the one to do this. My phone is a construct.” She looked it up and was like “Fuck. This could last seven hours.” During this period, my body started to overheat, so I told Anne I was going to jump in the shower to get everything wet. I went to our bathroom and sat under the water for a few minutes, experiencing the room as some kind of portal. I went back outside with all of my clothes saturated and feeling a world better. Anne was like “You went in with your clothes?” And I said “I told you I was going to.” I settled into my womb hammock and said “I’m not going to die anymore.” And started our mantra with “I’m a fat baby.”

• After the shower, my hallucinations started to fade away and I moved into a period of intense relaxation - easily the most physically relaxed and mentally present and joyful period I’ve ever had in my life. Anne decided she wanted to go to bed now that the part she wanted to trip sit for had passed, and I stayed outside in my hammock, squirming and stretching, looking out to the river for an hour. Occasionally one the fishing boats would pass, looking absolutely gorgeous against the water. At one point, I went to the bathroom and found myself evaluating my reflection in a really detached way, thinking to myself “Huh, I guess this is what I look like. It’s really not that attractive. That’s fine.” At around 11PM, the relaxation started to tip into fatigue and I joined Anne in our bedroom to go to sleep. All in all, it was the absolutely perfect environment for a psychedelic journey - and it was an incredible night.

• If I had any kind of spiritual realization during my trip is was entirely related to my physical body. I had never had such intense, pure relaxation in my muscles - and I had never felt as flexible. I knew that because of my cPTSD my body is constantly in some state of tension, but I guess I never realized how severe it was because I had never experienced a loose physical state. I also knew that about half of flexibility comes from nervous system wellness - but I hadn’t realized how much of my inflexibility actually came from that for me because I had never stretched in a truly physically relaxed mental space. This was a very powerful experience for me - and I’ve gotten the sense in the two weeks since that just experiencing that physical state has fundamentally changed my body. Because it’s now experienced complete relaxation, my body is now able to relax more. I walk slower, I hold myself more casually, and I’m less rigid. I’m hoping that this plays well into my yoga teacher training next month.

• The next day (May 24) was another transit day for us. We woke up around 8AM, had breakfast at the guesthouse and packed our bags. Then we waited in our hammocks for our ferry - which was scheduled to arrive at 930AM but got in closer to 1030. The boat was totally full (every seat occupied) and its roof section was actively swaying the whole journey; I was mentally prepared for it to capsize at any moment. Thankfully, it didn’t, and we got to the mainland in tact - just in time for our 11AM bus.

• That morning, I had used literally every last dollar of our local currency cash to settle our bill at the guest house so I needed to go the ATM. There was one a five minute walk from the bus station, so I asked the driver if I could go before we left. He told me “we’ll go together,” so I got in and then watched him drive right past the ATM. That proved to be unfortunate.

• Three hours later, we got to Pakse - our next destination (the base for our four day scooter road trip) - during a complete downpour. Luckily, the driver dropped us off at our hotel, so we were able to check in and wait out the worst of the storm in our room. We had a few errands we needed to do - get cash, get Anne new sneakers, and attend a presentation at a scooter rental shop - so we got to work as soon as the rain slowed down.

• Finding cash proved to be a nightmare. We walked around the city for 30 minutes trying 8 ATMs, including one that shocked me every time I pushed the buttons, before finding one that would give me cash. Unfortunately, the transaction limits in Laos are ridiculously low, so I then had to find two more working ATMs to take out enough Laotian Kip for our road trip. (Luckily, we found these without as long of a walk). I was not my most delightful self in our search for cash.

• Getting Anne shoes proved to be way easier, and we only had to stop in one shop. The first two tasks were done by 4PM and the presentation wasn’t until 6PM, so we had two hours to kill. We decided to have Indian again at a restaurant we had seen near the scooter rental shop - and it turned out the be the best meal we had all trip. Their food was just fucking incredible. I definitely ate at least two meals worth of food - and could have gone for more.

• Around 5:45PM we went to the scooter shop to attend their nightly presentation on navigating the Bolaven Plateau* road-trip. By pure fluke, there were over 20 people there that night - even though the night before there had been 3 and the night after there was only 1. Neither Anne nor I are crowds people, so we were not thrilled with the density of us all packing around the French man giving the talk. While we turned out to also not like the French man very much (because he was very French and also made a bunch of mysognistic and culturally insensitive jokes), he did give us a lot of helpful information for the trip. He also did a bunch of racist fear-mongering that made us hyper alert for the whole trip that our bike might get stolen if we weren’t vigilant; we’re almost certain he blew the risks of this well out proportion. By 7PM, we had a map with notes and a confirmed four day rental of an automatic motorbike. We then went back to our hotel room, drank our last bottle of Thai wine, and finished watching The Prince of Egypt (which we had started during our first sister wives night back in Ipoh, Malaysia). We fell asleep early, both extremely exhausted.

• The next morning we slept in late and had a large breakfast at the hotel. We were set to begin our four day road trip through the Bolaven Plateau* - a mountainous region in Southern Laos with waterfalls, coffee plantations, and stunning mountainous backdrops. We knew our itinerary was light for day one - so we didn’t have to rush. We packed our bags and left the hotel around 11AM, heading to the motorbike rental shop where we dropped off our big bags into storage (because we were packing light for the road) and got our bike. Anne drove the first leg, about an hour and a half out of the city and to our first stop - a coffee plantation. The drive didn’t become scenic until about 50 minutes in - but then the roadside views broke open into the expansive, lush mountain scapes we were expecting. It was gorgeous.

• At the coffee plantation, I had a coffee and Anne had tea, both of which were grown on site and delicious. Then we took a tour of the grounds, learning how coffee is grown, processed and roasted - as well as learning about the other crops they grew there. It turns out I had absolutely no idea how coffee is made (or what the trees or berries looked like even). It was really interesting to see. It also turns out I had no idea that peanuts grew below ground; it was somehow shocking to see them that way.

• After the plantation, I took the next leg of the drive - about one hour to a small village with two waterfalls, Tad Lo. We got there and found that we were staying at this really charming set of bamboo huts overlooking a lake. They were whimsical - like something straight out of fairy tale. We started getting ready to go explore the village and the nearby waterfalls when I tried to step out of my hut - and misstepped. I fell hard on my ankle, rolling it pretty bad and finding myself needing to sit down in pain. For a minute or so I was really worried it could be a serious injury, but when the pain subsided I stood up and found that my ankle could bear weight. It was painful, but I’d gotten lucky that it wasn’t worse. (I’ve stopped working out on it since and am hoping it’ll be back to full capacity before the yoga retreat).

• From our huts, we wandered through the small village and stopped at two waterfalls - one of which we were able to swim in (entirely by ourselves). As was our norm all month, we spent the time taking fun in-water pictures of ourselves. Something that was inescapable as we explored the town was that COVID had shattered the local economy. We saw at least four really nice resorts that seemed to have closed, become abandoned and fallen into disrepair in the last few years. It was sad to see - and it was something we’d keep bumping across for the rest of the trip.

• After the waterfalls, we went back to our small resort where we ordered dinner. There was a small family of dogs living there (including one puppy) who sat with us while we ate, waiting for scraps to drop to the floor. (The puppy was less tactful than its parents and instead kept trying to just climb onto the table). After the dinner, he had a few beers on my balcony that sat over the lake, watching lightning out in the distance, and then went to sleep around 10PM.

• I woke up around 2AM to go the bathroom and found that my ankle had gotten much worse. When I tried to walk to the bathroom, it essentially couldn’t bear weight, and it was so painful that I struggled to go back to sleep. I said a small prayer that I would wake up to something better and eventually fell asleep. Thankfully, when I got up around 6 my ankle wasn’t as bad. It was still much more painful than it had been the night prior - but it was again weight bearing and functional. Lucky yet again.

• I spent the morning writing and waiting for Anne - who I ended up having to wake up at 8:00 AM because she had slept through her alarms. We left around 8:30AM with me driving toward our next stop: a small ethnic village that also had a small coffee grove. We got there about 30 minutes before their tour was scheduled to start (intentionally) and ordered a local breakfast of sticky rice and pumpkin soup along with locally grown coffee (for me) and tea (for Anne). Unfortunately, by time other tourists started to arrive and the tour was set to begin thirty minutes later, we still didn’t have our food. They pushed back to the tour for us so that we could eat, eventually getting us our food 45 minutes after we ordered. It turned out to be good that we held up the tour because another 5 tourists showed up in that period to join.

• We had been warned that this tour guide had a tendency to drone on philosophically for long periods - but we still thought it’d be worth it to learn about the ethnic village. The warning proved to pan out, and the tour guide was dry and tedious - often going of on tangents for 5 minutes at a time to talk about things like the origin of the word “gringo” in Spanish. While there were really interesting sections - like learning about their herbal and spiritual medicine, or hearing about their marriage, birth, and death rituals - by and large we found the tour to be a trudge. It was made worse because none of the other tourists were our kind of people - and they kept extending the tour with questions that had either already been answered or had a problematic framing. At the first easy chance (about 2 hours into the tour), we took the opportunity to sneak out and head to our next destination.

• Anne took the wheel for what was set to be an hour and a half drive to our next guest house, which included a 30 minute driving extension that had been recommended by the French man. As we went, it started to rain - but not so hard as to make driving untenable or unsafe - so we put on our raincoats and went on. The 30 minute added loop turned out to be the most scenic drive of the four days - with long, winding, steep, sloping roads that overlooked huge valleys, rice fields, and sweeping mountain views. It was not the easiest to drive, so I’m glad Anne had the wheel for it, but it was so worth adding it to the itinerary.

• After the extra drive, we stopped at a roadside stall to buy mangoes. Usually, these kinds of vendors are willing to cut them for you - but this one wasn’t. Instead, she handed me a giant butcher’s knife with a flagging handle and enjoyed the shit out of watching me do it myself. Jokes on her, though, because I’m perfectly adequate at cutting mangoes and we enjoyed them just fine.

• After we ate the mangoes, we went back to start our journey only to find that our rear tire was flat. I pushed the bike backwards a bit to a shop that sold some automotive parts only to find out a hard lesson: most shops can’t replace the rear tires of automatic bikes. So, we started pushing the bike onwards to find another shop. A nice local man on a bike drove up to us and asked what was wrong, and told us to follow him up the road. We started pushing the bike in his direction to where we had seen him pull over. When we got there, he told as that the mechanic wasn’t in and that we had to go to the next shop about 2 miles away. Seeing our panic, he offered to drive our bike there if we drove his - which at first we agreed to, only to find out his wasn’t automatic and neither of us knew how to drive it. But - now we knew we could drive on the flat tire for a while (even though our shop didn’t want us to). So, Anne got on our bike and drove it to to the mechanic shop at around 7 miles per hour. I got on the back of the bike of this nice man and he drove alongside Anne the whole time, watching her tire and making sure she was OK. When we got to the mechanic, he organized the repair and even bartered a local price for us. I tried to tip him because he had made a potentially stressful situation so easy - but he refused. He had just helped us because he was kind and wanted nothing in return. Within 30 minutes, we had a new tire and were ready to go.

• Anne drove the rest of the hour to our guest house uneventfully and we checked in around 5PM. We set our stuff down and decided to try to get to the two local waterfalls before sunset (our original plan, which had been thrown off by the flat tire). When we got to the first, we found it had closed ten minutes earlier; it’s only quasi-public as it is maintained by a cafe / shuttered guesthouse - and it’s only open when they’re open. We marked down their opening time to grab breakfast there the next day. Then, we went to the other waterfall, which was still open and we had it to ourselves for the whole 30 minutes we were there.

• At around 6PM, the sun started to set so we headed home, keeping our eyes open for food on the roadside. We didn’t really see anything, so we stopped at a small convenience store and grabbed a couple of soy milks, got back on the bike and started heading home again. Two minutes later, we got our second flat tire of the day.

• We agreed that Anne would drive the bike forward looking for a mechanic shop and I would walk behind her, catching up later. About a half mile in, I found Anne pulled into a restaurant talking to the owner. (She’s always very good at asking for help. Much, much better than me.) The owner and Anne were struggling with communication, so I took over because Laotian is close to Thai (and most Laotians can understand Thai because they consume Thai media), so I can ish get by in conversation. He called the closest mechanics in both directions and found one that was open - about two miles back toward the waterfalls. After talking it through, we decided I should drive the bike and get the tire repaired because I can speak with the locals. I chatted a bit more with the restaurant owner and ordered Anne a vegetarian noodle bowl and she ate while I took the bike to the mechanic, panicking the whole time that I was sitting dead or injured on the side of the road. (To be fair to her, I am really not a great scooter driver.) About an hour later, I was back to her with a new rear tire - the process having gone quite smoothly overall. I ordered myself a noodle bowl as well and then, to support their business for their kindness, we ordered several beers to take home and also gave them a generous tip. Overall, our day of two flat tires was not so bad because of the kindness of the locals.

• When we got home, we had another sister wives night, drinking our beer and watching Anastasia. It calmed our nerves and got us relaxed - and then we went to sleep early.

• The next morning we headed back to the waterfall that was closed the day prior and had breakfast. The restaurant and shuttered guesthouse (PS Guesthouse and Restaurant) was absolutely beautiful, with gorgeous wooden furniture overlooking a tranquil creek and waterfall-side wooden villas. I’d love to go back and stay there when they’re able to re-open. (COVID really did carnage to the economy along the Bolaven Plateau).

• After breakfast, we started what was going to be our roughest drive of the trip - a journey that included about 15 miles along a bumpy, mountainous dirt road that was the only path to get to a set of waterfalls in the jungle. After two flat tires in the same day, we were a bit worried. The first 30 minutes or so of the drive was smooth - along a well maintained paved road with stunning views that looked like a prehistoric nature scape. We were both feeling like the bike was driving less well - but chalked it up to a combination of hyper vigilance and the bike having just been partially taken apart by two mechanics. Then, we turned onto the dirt road and Anne quickly said “The bike feels off. Are we flat again?” I got off and looked at it and said “It looks like it may have deflated a little but it’s not flat. I think we’re OK.” I was wrong. Three miles into this dirt road we got our third flat tire. I really should have listened to Anne.

• We got our flat around a section of the road with a few village houses, so I asked the locals if there was a place to get it fixed. At first they said yes and brought me to one of the houses - and then realized it was the rear tire of an automatic and said they couldn’t. I asked to use one of their phones to call the rental agency to see if there were any options available to us; they had told us to call them if we got more than two flats, so we were optimistic there was a reason. There were no other options; he told me I had to take the bike all the way back up the dirt road to a mechanic on the main road. Anne and I decided that, especially in someplace so rural, I should be the one to take the bike. The locals offered to let Anne wait in their house - and I set off to get the bike repaired, leaving her in the middle of fucking nowhere in southern Laos along a dirt road. I was able to find a mechanic - and I had them call the rental shop, who told the mechanic to essentially double bag the tire (just put a tube within a tube). The shop didn’t have the right tube for an automatic, so they had to drive to the next town to pick one up; well two, because they were double bagging it. Eventually, it got done, I drove back to Anne three hours later. I found her alone in the house, having been left by the family with free reign there when they went to sell their pineapples. I was surprised because I mostly expected her to be fully integrated into their family when I returned, contemplating pulling an Angelina Jolie on one of their children who she now considered a daughter. The reality of finding her alone working on her blog was much less interesting.

• We said a prayer and drove to the jungle waterfalls, getting there around 3:30 PM, leaving us with only a couple hours of daylight. This was definitely suboptimal; we had planned to get there at noon because we had been told to plan for four hours of trekking. On top of that, we found that the one other tourist there was an American girl we had met at the tour of the ethnic village who we both low key despised. We just got the fuck over it and started trekking, finding the paths poorly maintained (and rough on my ankle) and the waterfalls pretty lackluster. Even the showstopper waterfall was just OK because viewpoint didn’t offer a great perspective of it. We called our loss around 4:30 and got back on the road, determined to get the fuck off the dirt road before dark.

• When the dirt road got within a few miles of the main road, we knew there were two additional less famous waterfalls. We had the time, so we stopped at both. The first had a gorgeous restaurant overlooking a really nice, wide waterfall. We would have loved to eat there but it wasn’t going to open until the next week - but the owner let us relax there and have the whole place to ourselves. The second waterfall was even cooler - as the resort there was built right into it. The restaurant tables were set out in the water along a shallow stepped area - and guests were literally dining in the waterfall. The guesthouse huts were alongside a wide lake area after the waterfall and you could literally jump in and swim from the bedroom. It would have been an amazing place to spend the night. Plus, the pictures we got swimming in this waterfall were some of the best of our roadtrip. If we were to remake the itinerary, we would have just skipped the bigger draw jungle waterfalls because they just weren’t worth the treacherous drive and instead have just cut into the better part of the dirt road for these two. Much easier, much safer - though even that stretch had large mud puddles that Anne had to learn to drive though. (Again, I’m thankful it wasn’t me driving it - though I had to walk through the mud puddles instead.)

• About 20 minutes later, we got onto the main paved road again and screamed bloody hallelujah. We decided to drive a bit past the next day’s destinations to spend the night at a nice resort with an infinity pool overlooking the mountains and a sauna - a bit of luxury we thought we deserved at this point. (The room was only $30, so it was actually within budget.) We drove until it was dark and managed to check in around 7PM, feeling both relieved and shocked that the double-bagged tire tube solution worked. We then had a massive dinner at their restaurant and spent 30 minutes in the sauna. We crashed early, exhausted from the day.

• The next day (May 28), we only planned to go to two nearby waterfalls and drive back to Pakse, so we were in no rush. We had a long breakfast at the resort and then spent two hours at the pool and sauna, taking our last set of ridiculous pictures with the underwater camera. We really saved the best for last when it came to waterfalls because both of them were epic. The first, our favorite, was massive and gorgeous - and easy to climb down and swim in. The second was more grandiose - with a 400 foot plummet in the jungle and a zip line adventure course built around it (which we didn’t do.) For our last time of the month, we bought matching clothes together - this time classic hippie jackets made out of thick, heavily detailed cotton. After the waterfalls we drove back to Pakse and dropped off the bike around 5 - thankfully not getting another flat tire. We went back to the Indian restaurant and had another amazing, enormous dinner, and then walked to the bus station where we had an 8PM overnight bus to Laos.

• We had both been told by other backpackers that the night buses in Laos were unusual because they assign two people per twin bed - but somehow it didn’t register to me as factual. It was. We got in and found out that Anne and I were assigned into the same upper bunk. (At least neither of us were sleeping with strangers.) When the bus started, it was so bumpy it felt like a plane in intense turbulence, so we decided to take a double dose of Anne’s prescription sleeping pills and knocked ourselves the fuck out, waking up 10 hours later when we were about an hour outside of Vientiane.

• The bus station in Vientiane is quite a bit outside of the city, so we had to take a taxi about 30 minutes to get to our hotel. We were able to check in early, thankfully, and we immediately went for a swim in the pool. (We of course made sure that our last hotel together had a pool.) We knew Vientiane didn’t have much to offer as a tourist destination, so the day was more about shopping and enjoying our last bit of time together. We got Anne a new suitcase because she had too much stuff for her backpack, got two-hour massages, and then walked through the night market shopping for clothes. We grabbed beer on our way home and had our last sister wives night of the trip, watching Miss Sloane.

• On our last day together (May 30), we spent a slow morning at the hotel eating our breakfast and going for a last swim together. At around 11AM we said our emotional farewell when Anne got in a shuttle to head to the airport - and I found myself alone again. I’d not fully kept up with my goals for either my book or the blog, so I got to work trying to catch up, spending a couple of hours writing. I then spent four hours walking through the city exploring its major tourist attractions, finding not a single one of them worth the walk. I got back, went for another swim, and finished the night writing.

• The last day of the month was a transit day for me. I had an early breakfast and then took a shuttle to the train station to go to Luang Prabang! - an old colonial town along the Mekong River that is Laos’ only UNESCO world heritage site. On the train ride, I tried to write but found myself distracted by the child in front of me. He kept peeking at me from over his seat. This escalated into him reaching back and touching my keyboard every 30 or so seconds. For quite a while, I found it cute, so I allowed it, made funny faces with him, and even changed my app from a word document to a drawing app so he could draw when he reached back. After about 30 minutes, though, I wanted to get back to work, so I told the child I was going to write and couldn’t play anymore. He didn’t stop though, and kept reaching back and touching my screen and keyboard in escalating ways, repeatedly not heeding verbal indications that I wanted him to stop or my gentle removing of his hands from my area, physically indicating him to stop. After a while, I was growing a bit irritated and really didn’t know what to do, so I woke up his mom next to him and asked her to help with her child. She did and he stopped. I’m still not sure I handled the situation well though. I tend to think that when a child is asking for attention it’s usually because they need it - and I ended up telling a parent her child was “bothering me and not stopping” (in Laotian) in front of him. I don’t feel great about it.

• The train ride was only two hours - but when I arrived I had to take another 30 minute shuttle bus into the city. The Laos trains are shockingly high quality but the stations are strangely far outside of the cities. The shuttle bus dropped me off in the center of the city and I walked about ten minutes to my guesthouse. It turned out the bathroom of my room had broken that morning - but they had made arrangements for me to stay at a different guesthouse and drove me there. Not an issue.

• I took a long walk through Luang Prabang!. The Mekong River views are particularly gorgeous there, accentuated by a sprawling, lush, mountain backdrop. The architecture style is very European, charming and feeling of a different time period, and the city is easy to walk around. My only real qualm with it was that it somehow felt too quiet - like a ghost town. I’d often walk down a street dense with businesses but be the only person walking there - not even a car driving by. It was strange - more eery than peaceful at points. It reminded me of walking through the Taipei airport in April of 2020 after the country had closed its borders; I was the only passenger walking through but all the shops were open - just me and hundreds of employees. Eeery.

• I then went back to my room and wrote again for another few hours, taking another break around 6PM to walk through the city’s night market and grab dinner at the night market street fair. I got back around 8PM, wrote a bit more, and went to bed early. A tame ending to a wild, adventure-filled month.

This was my last month of full-time travel. Now, I head to Chiang Mai - where I’ll take my three week meditation retreat and then stay in place for 8 days to just enjoy a city that I love and to catch up on odds and ends. After that, I transit through Bangkok to go to Rishikesh for my 26-day yoga teacher training. Then I end my trip. I transit through Dubai for three days and I fly back to Philadelphia on August 4, cutting my trip three weeks shorter than I originally planned so that I can spend time with friends and family before I start my MSS.

At this point, the whirlwind wild adventure of movement and excitement is over. Now it’s time to focus on my physical and mental peace in these retreats. I think they will be the best ending for this journey I could hope for.

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LIFE ON the ROAD continues to be A LEARNING PROCESS

Each month, I use this section to expand on mental stirrings that have felt impactful. This month I didn’t have many, though, as I was really just living in the moment having an adventure. I had a lot of esoteric conversations - but very little stuck with me intellectually. Here are the few things that cropped up for me as I wrote this month’s summary.

• Anne and I are great travel partners - endlessly supportive and patient when the other is struggling or fucking up. There were so many times this month when one of us would say something like “I wouldn’t be able to do this without you.” It really hit home for me the empowering power of a supportive, patient, accepting person. It’s amazing how far one person in your corner can push you to challenge yourself and grow in ways you couldn’t do on your own.

• But I’ve also thought about the opposite - how debilitating it is when someone is supposed to be in your corner but instead tears you down. For each moment in the month we built each other up, there was an opposite moment where one of us would apologize for something inane. I’d say “I’m so sorry I was manic and frenetic this morning” and Anne would say “You were literally totally normal. I didn’t notice anything.” Or Anne would be like “I’m sorry if I’m being annoying and extra right now” and I’d say “No, you’re making a good suggestion and we should do that.” Each of these moments were an imprint from times in our life we’d been shut down or made feel unacceptable over small things - ghosts of traumas past that forced us to feel ashamed for innocuous pieces of our being. As empowering as a supportive person can be, a disempowering figure has an equal and opposite force.

• I reached a point this month where I really feel like my self-growth journey of the year is rounding out - where I’m feeling secure and self-assured and calm. But in big and little ways, I’ve found that this version of being in practice is super similar to a version of me that existed at 18. In so many ways, I’ve looped back to an earlier way of being, but I’ve gotten there in a more authentic way. Where I used to have intellectual understandings of some things, I know have a felt-body sense of them. Where I used to live it out hypervigilant and neurotically, I now am mindful, slow and patient. I’m being a lot more like I was when I was younger - but I’m feeling a world different. For example - I used to appear carefree, but now I am carefree. I used to appear adventurous, but now I am adventurous. I used to appear easy going, but now I am easy going. It’s really hit home for me the difference between having an intellectual understanding of something and forcing yourself to act in accordance with that intellectual understanding - as opposed to doing it from a deep place of inner trust and understanding. The first can feel oppressive - like a cage of rules and guidelines - and the second feels liberating. They’re the same behavior but made for different reasons - and that really makes a world of difference.

• It reminds me of something I once read from a Buddhist nun - that change won’t happen authentically unless it comes from a place of inner wisdom. Following the wisdom of others without feeling it somewhere deep inside will always feel a bit oppressive, inauthentic. Things only feel good when they begin to blossom from the inside naturally. It’s a reminder for me to just let myself be as I am without pushing myself to be perfect - even if that thing that I am is just trash.

• Amidst with the rounding out of my journey, I’ve started to settle into this profound sense that almost nothing matters. It’s truly liberating.

All lessons from this month are rooted in having an incredible travel partner - someone who encourages and empowers me. Who brings out my best traits and cheers them on relentlessly, and sits patiently with me when I’m struggling, learning, or imperfect. That experience for me has been profound - and I’m so grateful to have had it.

I’m Very Over budget

If you’re wondering how much this is costing me - so far, for thirteen months in Europe, the Middle East, Christmas in the US, North Africa, India, New Zealand, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia, I’ve spent $28,161. I wrote about my budget here - but I’m now thoroughly and unrecoverably over budget - by about $3,600 - and I expect I’ll end up passing my $30,000 budget sometime this month or next (depending on when I buy my flight tickets to go home). New Zealand proved to be more than $2,000 over budget and I’ve recovered less money than I expected in Asia (largely because I’ve decided to invest in having more little luxuries on this leg of my journey). I’ve exacerbated this by starting to buy souvenirs this month - running down my $10 a day fixed expense pool as quickly as it was accumulating. The next two months should be much cheaper, though, because my retreats are inexpensive.

I expect I’ll end up slightly under budget for all parts of my trip except New Zealand, so I think my total spend will still be under $32,000 for the entire journey. It seems the $2,000 my parents gifted me for the trip will be put to use after all.

My Minimalist Pack Went Well and Has Grown a Lot

I’ve now finished my serious travel on my minimalist (one overhead backpack) packing and it’s largely gone well. I left with one weeks’ worth of clothes (7 underwear, 6 socks 7 t-shirts, 2 shorts, 1 jeans), including some options for colder weather (1 thermal long sleeve, 1 rain coat), two pairs of sneakers, flip flops, one workout outfit, one swimsuit, a kneepad for yoga and workouts, my iPad, my Kindle, chargers, a dirty laundry bag, a few K95 masks, and a bag of toiletries (including an electric body groomer and a supply of inhalers). In my first month, I did pick up a few new items, including a puffer jacket (because it got really cold in North Africa), a new pair of pants (because my jeans were proving too baggy), two small bags (a fanny back and a drawstring to carry when I’m out and about), thin material shorts (for casual wear), new socks (because some of mine had holes) and a shawl of sorts (for cool but not cold weather). In month three, I also picked up a travel mug for coffee and wine.

Overall, there are a few changes I’d make to the pack if I had the opportunity to do it all again. I’d drop the thermal long sleeve in favor of only keeping a puffer jacket, swap out my shorts for lighter, thinner material shorts, and remove one pair of thick pants (in favor of something light and flowing for temples). I’d also have left my extra pair of shoes at home, now seeing that I didn’t need them, and have packed fewer t-shirts because those are easy to wear for many days and it’s fun to build up a shirt wardrobe while traveling. I wish I could have made more just-because-I-like-them purchases along the way.

I may be solidly in a backpack traveler at this point - and am unlikely to return to using a rolling suitcase again anytime soon. The small backpack has just made easier for me to walk where there aren’t many sidewalks, to move quickly, to get in buses or trains with my bag, to take motorcycles and scooters, and to explore with my luggage when necessary. It took me a couple of months to get used to the added physical strain of the backpack - but I’m now thoroughly sold that it’s superior to a roller bag. It’s allowed me to be such a more nimble, flexible traveler.

With all the shopping I’ve done in the last month, my bag is now thoroughly stuffed. I’ve added two pairs of elephant pants, five button up shorts, two t-shirts, three tank tops, four scarves, a long sheet of cotton fabric, and a motorcycle helmet. I know it’s going to keep growing because I still have to buy an all-white wardrobe for my meditation retreat and will likely buy some fun shit in Chiangmai Mai. I won’t be surprised if I buy a second, smaller backpack to expand my space as I’m nearly out.

At some point when my energy stores are back up, I’ll post a bag 2.0 blog about more minimalist packing. I suspect this will come out in the long tail of posts I write once I’m back in the US reflecting on my time abroad and adding more resources like sample itineraries and transit advice.

KNOW ANYONE ELSE WHO WOULD LIKE THIS?

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