Tom's Asian Adventure! - ThomasUlch

Tom's Asian Adventure!

Hey! Just prepping for the trip and I thought I’d share. So two weeks till I fly and I am still getting things together. Had a last minute thoughts of needing a better back up camera for the trip and a second camera for the weddings I am shooting. Which has led to the almost purchase of a Canon 7D. I want to go to the 5D and stop upgrading, but that will have to wait till next year. So for now it’s the 7D with the 50D as back up. Next year, it will be the 5D with the 7D. Much more respectable but MUCH more expensive : ) Along with the camera scramble is the new battery/cf card/extra charger scramble. Poor planning to make this decision this late but oh well. On top of all that, waterproofing everything is... tedious. But necessary. I usually keep an apartment and base out of it for my travels in a region. But because of time constraints and geography, I am moving this whole trip. (the longest time I will be in one city is about 5 days) Carrying everything on my back. (I’ll post picks of all my crap soon) As such, EVERYTHING has to be bagged and double bagged. My clothes I don’t care about, but how much would it suck to get 3 weeks in and lose my camera or laptop. *shudders* So I am now a regular at both Bivouac and REI. Man, gear has changed since my Army days. Some great stuff out now. So that’s the skinny on the packing side of things. On the actual trip stuff, the itinerary is pretty much set. Fly into Bangkok on the 26th (at midnight after a 26 hour travel day. Sucks!) Spend 2-4 days in Bangkok primarily to get a Vietnamese visa. Then go north. If I get the visa early, Chiang Mai. Which I hear is pretty cool. If my visa takes over 2 days, it’s straight to Chiang Khong on the Thai/Laos border. Then down the Mekong in a slow boat, stopping for the night in Pakbeng then on to Luang Prabang. 3-4 days in LP then I am going to fly to Hanoi. I was going to go overland by bus, but the possibility of losing 3 days to bad weather made my decision for me. In Hanoi, I’m going to check out Halong Bay on an overnight boat (yep. just like that one you heard about on CNN last month that sunk, killing like 6 people. *note to self, request an upper cabin) and to Sapa (a mountain village nearby) as well as checking out Hanoi. From Hanoi, it’s a 15 hour train ride down to DaNang. The plan is to spend 3-5 days checking out the DaNang/Hoi An/Hue area. Then prob. another flight down to Saigon/HCMC. 5-6 days checking out the Mekong Delta area and the city itself before taking a local bus from HCMC to Phnom Penh in Cambodia. I want to see the Killing Fields before taking a boat up the Mekong to Siam Reap and the temples of Angkor Watt. From Siam to Reap back to Bangkok by overnight bus then a flight to Phuket to spend the last few days of the trip checking out coastal Thailand. Whew! Now all of this is completely subject to change due to weather or sickness etc. but this is the plan! Anywho, I just wanted to get you all in on the trip. I am getting stoked and I wanted you to be a part of the excitement as well! Thank you all again so much for your support!
A blog about blogging. So I have never done this sort of thing before. I do comment on the photos on my website often. For example, my if you read the galleries form my Central American trip, they tell the story of each trip. Really I like a lot of those stories better than some of the photos. And as an instructor at the U, I tell stories all day. It’s pretty much my job. But the whole blogging thing always seemed a bit... masturbatory to me. I mean, who gives a shit about your what ever. But here I am now, sitting in the Mug, over-caffeinated and typing away while waiting for my next final exam. I guess all I can say to make myself feel “better” about it is to give this disclaimer: “Read if you like, if not go...” Depending on how well you know me, you know what comes next : ) Really, I am a storyteller and I am going to share the stories of this trip (pre-during-post) with you. This may be sacrilegious to a “photographer” but the point of my photos is to tell stories. I think that images are timeless and don’t “need” to be explained or expounded upon BUT (and this is a big but : ) why I roam around is to see things. Things that I don’t usually see and then share these observations. With you. If you care to listen.
So I’m catching you all up on the trip so far. The flight in sucked. I was as usual 3 hours early so I just chilled at the airport, no big deal. So after my 3 hour wait we finally board the plane and as we are getting ready to pull away from the gate, the planes electrical system completely fails, So we sat at the gate for another 2 hours with no lights or ac while they fixed the system. So the whole time thing sucked and the no air con really sucked and then there is the thought of “what if the system fails in the middle of our 14 hour flight?”. Unsettling to say the least : ) But no worries. We even flew over Alaska! It was cool to see snow covered mountains just a few hours before arriving in the tropics. So we got Japan and I realized that the flight from Japan to Bangkok which I thought was a couple hours was in actuality 7 more hours. Ouch! But I did have an empty seat next to me on both flights. Score! I remember coming home from Venice a few years ago where I shared a 3 seat row with two people who were both easily over 250. And I was in the middle. And the kid sitting behind me threw up all over the place. So, always look on the bright side of life right? So we arrived Bangkok at about 1:30 am local time. Customs and visa procedures were the fastest I have ever been through. Except for the time I arrived at Charles de Gaulle in Paris and approached the customs guy with my passport in hand and he looked up at me from his coffee with disdain and waved me through without even opening my passport. I had been chatting with some folks on couchsurfing.org and it turned out that a woman (Sophie) was on the same flight as me so we linked up to share a taxi. As soon as you walk out of the airport the heat and humidity hit like a big, warm, wet washcloth. After the freezing temps on the planes it was... memorable. Got a taxi to town cheap. 400 baht, like $17 US. By the time we got to the hotel (Sophie hadn't booked so she just stayed at the same place as me) it was like 2:30 am. So we dropped off our stuff and thought it would be a great idea to go grab a beer.
We sit down at a local joint outside trying to acclimatize and order a couple. When the waiter brings them out he is careful to pour them into coffee mugs, really to the point of overflow, and then take the bottles away. Turns out that you aren't supposed to drink after 2 in Bangkok and the cops will hassle you, so coffee mug beers it was! As we were drinking, a couple Aussies in sill hats at the next table call us over. I won’t bore you with the details, but MANY beers we had. And MUCH smack was talked. Mostly by the Aussies about how American beer is weak and Americans don’t know how to drink etc. Well you know how that goes. Nine big beers and 2 hours later I had done my best to dispel these falsehoods. Not that I wanted to drink that much, but I had to take one for the team right?
Random streetside bar.