After 49 days of travel we've managed to make it back to our home away from home. The trip was wonderful, but Adam and I can both say we are immensely glad to be off the "banana cake trail" and back in China. Before I begin, I'll apologize for the lack of pictures. Kassy was kind enough to leave her digital camera behind last year which I of course forgot to bring on the trip. It was probably for the best seeing as how it would have inevitably been lost. When you're as forgetful as I am, you learn not to become to attached to anything. Coming out of the trip, I lost just about everything except weight and my passport (this is arguably my greatest achievement to this day). If the U.S. government ever comes up with a way to get a passport tattoo, I would would pay an exorbitant fee. I had taken about thirty photos of the trip with my phone before it was stolen in Vietnam. The picture quality on the phone was comparable to a disposable camera in an hookah den, so it's no loss really. I'll probably just post some photos of places we went from google images and say that the people in the background are us.
This trip was quite different than the year before. For one thing, I was mostly traveling with just Adam which had its pros and cons. First of all, there wasn't room for much social loafing. Furthermore, you meet a lot more people when you're traveling in pairs. For whatever reason, in my sophomore year in college, I got hooked on this idea of wanting to go to Finland (which for those of you who aren't geography majors, isn't actually part of Scandinavia) for a semester. I heartily pursued it until I got to the paperwork process. I am seriously regretting my lack of perseverance. I meet a dozen or so Fins on the trip and in my experience they are the salt of the earth. I had quite the opposite experience with the Australians.
The banana cake trail that I mentioned above refers to the most common destinations in southeast Asia for young back packers. One of the most common reasons for travel is self growth and discovery. I strongly believe that traveling to a new country can have a profound effect on personal growth, however, achieving personal growth requires more than just traveling there. Many times the popular thing to do in these destinations is to go snap a bunch of pictures of all the main spots during the day, buy some local clothes to wear, then end the night by going to some foreigner bar to play beer pong and compare the number of stamps that are in ones passport.The cultural experience/self discovery is nice in theory but can be a bit disillusioned, kind of like hippie communes in the 60's. I realize that it's a little high and mighty of me to declare what a cultural experience is for somewhere else, and maybe that's wrong. I can say that the culture in a lot of these places have morphed to fit the comforts of the traveler when it should be the other way around. It isn't to say that these destinations aren't worth visiting, or that there are no foreigners there worth meeting.There wasn't a single spot we regretted visiting, and we meet at least one great person in every place we went.
Another difference about traveling small, is that it is easier to travel around. Getting two people to decide on what to do and is remarkably easier than five. Adam and I didn't spend more than four days at any one spot, which means we got to see a lot more.The downside of traveling with fewer people is that your going to pay more. Bookings for anything become cheaper the more people you have, and there's a lot of strength in numbers when it comes to haggling a taxi, especially in the end when you divide the cost.
Ok that's it for now, I'm planning on writing about each place individually and I'll try to post a blog about once every four days.
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