The Mother of All Vacations

Pui awoke to my not so subtle suggestion "If you're going to make this plane you've got 3 minutes to get all your shit in the car!" This was the last day of her month long trip to the states; her plane was leaving back to Thailand in less than an hour; we were no less than 30 minutes from the airport. It was painfully ovbious that both of the alarms I set to wake us up had failed miserably. This is why you pack your bags 100% the night before. I would gander that I set the landspeed record in a monster truck record between Jackson and the airport. She made it through security exactly 15 minutes before the plane took off (mind you it was an international flight). And thus came an end to our adventure around America - showcasing the best and worst our country has to offer.

This would have been a great time for me to blog throughout the last month. We had new adventures just about every day and plenty of stuff to write about. Alas, I waited until I find myself sitting on a plane back to Thailand myself (a week later). So I'm just going to go for the list of everything. If you would rather not read and just check out the photos, here is the link.

Our journey took us from Jackson Hole WY through Yellowstone, Cooke City MT, Laramie WY, Boulder and Golden CO, Manhattan NY, Brooklyn NY, San Francisco CA, Marin, Las Vegas NV, Denver CO, Estes Park CO, Lander WY and back to Jackson.

• In 30 days we had 67 breakfasts, lunches, and dinners with different groups of friends. This was the most rewarding and exhausting part of the trip.


• Met my family (first time not on Skype). It went fabulously.


• Expored the city of Jackson in its enitrety.


• Hiked to the top of Jackson Peak


• Drove accross Yellowstone and saw the Old Faithful geyser erupt


• Spent the night in Cooke City Montana and enjoyed not having cell reception


• Got up super early and spotted grizzlies, black bears, wolves, eagles, moose, elk, deer, and bison at the North East entrance of Yellowstone


• Rode the Tram up Rendezvous Peak, made a Pui-sized snowman with 6 ft. snow drifts that fell on Sept. 6th.


• Drove down to Star Valley and played golf with my family. My dad made the best chicken either of us have ever had.


• Drove accross the state of Wyoming and stayed with a good friends in Laramie.


• Spent a day scrambing around Vedawoo climbing area. Summited a rock thingy.


• Went to a University of Wyoming football game. We lost 51-6.


• Did shots of Jager at the Library, the quintessential college dive bar.


• Walked around the campus and showed Pui where I went to school.


• Drove to Boulder, CO. Our friend from Thailand put us up. Made a Thai dinner for he and his family.


• Summited Green Mountain in Boulder. Bouldered around on one of the Flat Irons.


• Went climbing at the Boulder Rock Club.


• Visited the American Alpine Museum in Golden, CO.


• Drove to Denver and got a plane to New York. Had an awesome exploring the city for the next 5 days.


• Walked from 125th street on the Upper West Side all the way to Washington Square Park, zig zagging accross the city (I don't reccomend this unles you want your fiance to get really mad at you)


• Watched some pigeons crap in Pui's hair three times in 5 minutes (I got hit once). Uncontrollable laughter ensued.


• Went to an Off Broadway show :: Fuerzabruta: LOOK UP (it was killer)


• Introduced Pui to all my old favorite restauarants all over the city. I had a few 5000+ calorie days.


• Walked accross the Brooklyn Bridge


• Took the Staten Island ferry and explored Staten Island for 2+ hours.


• Went up and explored the Cloisters at the top of the island.





• Went to a Yankees game and got on the Jumbotron. The yankees lost like 10-3.


• Went and visited a friend in Brooklyn and went climbing at the climbing gym with him (where we also met the 17 and under female national champion - she is 11)


• Spent the better part of an afternoon drinking champagne and eating chocolate fondue.


• Hopped on a plane to San Francisco.


• Walked around a large expanse of the city, including Fisherman's Wharf, accross the Golden Gate bridge, the Castro, the Mission, etc.


• Met several good friends from Thailand who showed us some great sites: including Gierradeli Chocolate Factory, Twin Peaks late night (outlook of the whole city), 3 naked dudes walking down Castro street.


• Checked out Alcatraz



• Took a ferry to Sausalito and had way to much drink at a brewpub, watched a beautiful sunset riding the ferry back.


• Lost my wallet.


• Hopped on a plane to Las Vegas.


• Met a friend from high school who took us to what may be the best Thai restaurant either Pui or I have ever eaten at (this includes any Thai Restaurant in Thailand).


• Walked the strip. Twice.


• Ate at Denny's.


• Went to a Cirque Du Soliel at the MGM called KA.


• Did some 'light' gambling.


• Flew back to Denver and drove to Lyons (north of Boulder). Stayed with more friends from thailand.


• Drove back to Boulder and breakfast with Denali's family.


• Drove to Estes Park to check out the hotel they filmed 'The Shining' in.


• Drove to Wild Iris climbing area in Lander and scrambled around for the afternoon.


• Made a Thai dinner for my Mom and Dad which I think they really liked.


• Got Pui to the airport with no time to spare.

I want to thank all of our friends who were so kind to take us in, take us out, and have us over. Both Pui and I had one of the best months of our lives in no small part to everyone's generosity. I'll soon be putting together our wedding website and hopefully I can get everyone that we enjoyed hanging out with so much to come see us in Thailand in 2011.

My favorite thing was the people...

I've never really understood this when I hear other travellers talk about their travels. I've been to places I really liked the people, but compared to the food, the scenery or the activities, my selfish side has always opted for the the later. Cambodia was the probably the first time I've gone anywhere that I was more interested in interacting with the locals than I was seeing the sights.

First off when you come to Cambodia, make sure you bring a lot of $1 bills. The strip clubs are fabulous! Seriously though, the primary currency here is the American dollar. When you are cruising around the temples the children come out of the woodwork to sell you things and invariably everything costs around $1. Seeing these five year olds running around in the dirt with no shoes on with big smiles on their faces and it's impossible not to want to buy whatever they are selling. However after you've got your pockets stuffed with bottles of water, little Buddah statues, postcards, etc. you can only handle so much of the same stuff.

So on day two of temple crusing, Pui and I switched tactics. We went to the market early in the morning and loaded up on bags of apples. Whenever someone would come up to you to sell you something you just smile and hand them an apple. If they keep trying to sell you something (which is second nature), you just give them another apple. Usually after the second apple, they are smiling and talking about something else entirely. Of course, after the word gets out that there is somebody handing out free apples, you've got 10 kids getting queued up. No matter what, we were continually running out of fruit. I must say though at the end of the first few days of our apple giving NGO, it felt like we could cure the injustices that have befallen Cambodia with a car full of apples.

Then came the last day of the trip. Pui and I had already gone through all of the temples, seen all the local sites and had an entire day to kill. We both agreed that our favortie thing so far had been interacting with the kids in the temples and why not take our last day and buy all the fruit we could carry (roughly $100) and visit as many places as we could to hand it out. The basic plan was to visit the smaller temples first and then hit up the mother of all temples, 'Angkor Wat'. The morning went swimingly. We saw a lot of the same faces we had seen in the previous week and everyone was incredibly friendly and grateful.

When we got to Angkor Wat though, it was a different story. Our car was immediately surrounded by 20 kids trying to sell us things. When we got out of the car with fruit it turned into utter chaos, and not in a good way. Using our previous tacticts of just handing out one apple per person didn't work here at all. These were much more seasoned street urchins, many of whom were used to taking advantage of genorosity at the detrement to others. When it became obvious that some kids were ending up with 20 apples and others with none, we trusted some of the friendlier kids to hand them out (as obviously we were ill prepared to deal with the intracies of aid distribution on a wider scale). Surely they would be more fair with each other. Not even close! The second I would turn my back to get another bag out of the car, the kid in charge of distribution would bolt over to their house, hide the entire distribution bag and then get back in another line, begging for apples. They would stealthly switch between Pui and myself. We now had roughly 50 kids surrounding us with no way to remember who got what. So then I get the bright idea of starting a line. How could that go wrong? I get the kids in a line and then have Pui keep track of who has gone through the line. After about 2 minutes of this, you had the 'trickier' kids running in the opposite direction of the line, circling around and then cutting in front of the others. Then there was the great 'baby scam'. You would have some guy come up with a baby. Of course you're going to give a baby an apple before anyone else. However 30 seconds later I would see someone new with a baby. Six babies later it dawned on us that it was the same baby getting passed around to different people. I'm pretty sure that baby never saw any of those apples.

Seeing that I've been quoted as saying "I've been quoted as saying "I absolutely loathe misbehaved children. I simply dislike well behaved ones.", it's interesting that I loved hanging out with these kids so much. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to swing it yet, but I would like to get a non-profit going that is pretty much as simple as me collecting around $1000 and going to Camodia once a year for my visa run to buy a truckload of fruit for these kids. (also make sure you check out my new cambodian photos to the right)