Ko Ta Kiev is a remote island off the southeastern coast of Cambodia. It is all but undeveloped – there’s 4 or 5 bungalow resorts catering to backpackers, but no roads, no electricity, and no running water. The next island over has a cell tower, and if you hold your phone at the right angle at midnight under a full moon you can just pick up a signal.

The island is gorgeous, with clean sand beaches, unspoiled jungle, and a laid back atmosphere. It was the perfect place to relax for a few days after that REI trip.

The only trouble with all this is that I got sick! It came on slowly, day by day, but by my last night I was tossing and turning with a fever. When the only bathroom is a squat toilet 150 meters away from your bungalow, it gives a whole different meaning to “the trots”.

I don’t know if it’s something I ate, or just the accumulated stress of 2 months of traveling catching up with me. But, a couple of people in the REI group had something similar the last couple days, so I’m hoping it will follow a similar pattern and resolve quickly.

I have now returned to the mainland on schedule. My original plan was to head to Phnom Penh, spend a day or two there, then fly to Thailand. That still might happen, but right now I am holed up in a budget hotel in Sihanoukville. It’s clean, it has AC, and it has a private bathroom with a western toilet. Here I will stay until I feel well enough to manage the 6-hour bus ride to the capital.

Update 11/26: I’m feeling much better after 24 hours of bed rest, and have a bus booked this afternoon to Phnom Penh. Onwards the adventure!

The penultimate day of our REI Adventure was a hike with an overnight stay in the Phnom Kulen hills north of Siem Reap. We woke up early, tossed our gear in the van to meet us in the evening, and began to hike. We passed through rice paddies and taro fields, drawing ever closer to the hills.

Finally we reached the hills, and then it was up, up, up a long set of stairs past a spectacular (modern) Buddhist temple to the summit. There we found a gorgeous waterfall, along with another temple perched atop a huge sandstone boulder.

Then we found our campsite, at a beautiful spot along the river. We spent the afternoon swimming and relaxing, then the staff cooked us up a proper feast and we ate and drank late into the evening. Not quite a proper backpacking experience, but a tremendous amount of fun.

The next day (yesterday) we took a bus to Kompong Khleang, a village built on stilts on the shores of Tanle Sap, Cambodia’s great freshwater lake. They use the stilts because the water level changes dramatically between the rainy and dry seasons. The landscape reminds me of the Louisiana bayou, but the stilts made me think of a ski village with doors on the second floor so you can get out when there’s 12 feet of snow.We took a boat ride out to a little floating village. Apparently these are full of Vietnamese refugees who fled after the fall of Saigon – Cambodian law doesn’t allow them to own land, but says nothing about building a house on the water.

Last night we returned to Siem Reap for our farewell dinner, took one last wander around the night market, and said our goodbyes. Everyone else is flying home today – some even have work on Friday! It’s an interesting feeling to know that our circles intersect for such a brief moment – a little sad, a little lonely, but also very glad for the experience and aware that we may well meet again.And like I said before, it’ll be nice to get back to my own cadence. Tonight I take a sleeper bus (boo!) to Sihanoukville in the south, where I catch a boat to the island of Koh Ta Kiev for a few days on the beach (yay!). It’ll be a nice change from biking through the jungle and hiking over the hills.

Hello from Cambodia! The REI group has been based in the town of Siem Reap in Northwest Cambodia for the past couple days, bicycling our way through the ruined temples of the Khmer civilization.Choy is still with us, and we’ve picked up a Cambodian guide named Bun who is also pretty cool.Some facts I have learned about the Khmer:

• Their civilization lasted roughly 500 years, from the late 800s to the early 1400s.
• The Khmer emperor was considered a god-king, with divine right rooted in the Hindu and later Mahayana Buddhism.
• The Khmer had a deep mastery of water management, and used this mostly to grow lots and lots of rice, regularly achieving 4 harvests a year (without intentional water management you get 1 or maybe 2).
• This incredible agricultural bounty supported the largest city in the world before the industrial era, with a peak population of up to a million people.
• Their civilization went into decline as a result of pointless and costly wars with their neighbors, coupled with extreme climate instability, decade-long droughts followed by years of intense flooding, followed by more decades of drought.

Somehow we missed taking about them in high school history class. The group put on a podcast on one of our long van rides through Laos, so I was able to brush up.The thing that surprised me about the ruins is the pure number of them. Angkor Wat is the biggest and most visited, but there are literally hundreds of other temples scattered throughout the area. The biggest just barely poke above the tree line, but most are hidden amongst the jungle. A mountain bike is absolutely the right tool for exploring.This part of Cambodia is flat as a pancake, which makes for a strange contrast with the endless rolling hills of northern Laos. Its principle geographic feature is a huge freshwater lake, covering hundreds of square kilometers to an average depth of just one meter. It shrinks and grows substantially with the dry and rainy seasons, and managing this was the secret sauce of the Khmer.I keep having to remind myself that this is all real – it’s not the set of a movie or video game, these are real ruins built by real people hundreds of years ago, and I’m really walking through them right now.Wrapping and coordinating the temple visits, bicycle routes, kayak rentals and the rest has been this REI tour. I have been very impressed so far. We have stayed in excellent hotels, had perfect itineraries, worry-free support for all the activities, and oh, the food! Set menus from delicious restaurants, course after course of incredible, delicious, artfully plated food. I have never been so well- (or over-) fed.It took a little while to get used to it, after living in the dorms for so long. Based on my budget from the 5 weeks I spent in Vietnam, the price of this 12 day segment would be almost enough to get me through the entire 3-month trip on my own.Now I’m coming to the conclusion that it was worth it. This segment is the anchor of the trip. It was the first thing I booked and having this as a backstop made it easier to get my courage up about several months in a strange and distant part of the world. And, it’s nice to have a break from slumming it with the dirtbags for a while (no offense, dirtbags). Soft beds and delicious meals, and not having to organize a single piece of it myself, is a very nice way to live.Still, great as Choy and Bun are, I think I’ll be ready to go back to my own rhythm when the time comes.

Hello from Laos! I’ve spent the last few days in the town of Luang Prabang, exploring first on my own and then with this REI Adventure tour.

Sunrise over the town

On the evening of my second day I met up with the tour, putting my vacation on rails for the next 12 days.

This group is interesting – I’ve been struggling a bit with what to write about it. My first instinct is to complain, and I’ve got to let at least a bit of that through. With an average age in the late 50s the group is quite a bit older than I expected, with two big ramifications. First the pace is much slower than I would like, both athletically and of the tour in general. Second I feel like I’m hanging out with a bunch of my parents’ friends – they’re fun people, but we don’t have a whole lot in common.

I think I was hoping I would find “my people”, the next step for those who are footloose and adventurous but old enough that the backpacking game doesn’t appeal, and well off enough that they can afford something a little fancier. People who have got the career thing sorted out but haven’t quite settled down yet. Maybe a nice woman about my age who wants the same things out of life that I do. I don’t know quite what I’ve found instead, but it’s not that.

That said, I’ve been having a pretty darn good time so far. Our guide Choy (Lao for “skinny”, though I think “slim” might be a more flattering translation) is top notch, and he’s done a great job of herding us cats. Most of the activities have an option to extend, like biking both to and from a waterfall instead of taking the van one direction, and I’ve taken them all. My roommate Michael is the one other millennial on the trip (only one decade older than me) and we’ve become quick friends. And honestly, the whole group is pretty darn good.

So what did we do in Laos?

I have been incredibly impressed by Laos so far, and would highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in traveling to Southeast Asia. It’s beautiful, culturally rich, and way off the beaten track. I also don’t think it would be too hard to navigate on your own.

My time in Vietnam has finally come to a close. Yesterday I said my final goodbyes to my sister, hopped on one last insane motortaxi, and caught a quick flight across the border to Laos. This feels like a good moment to pause and reflect.

I spent 33 days traveling through Vietnam – almost 5 weeks – and I feel like I have seen a pretty broad range of people and places. I’ve dodged traffic in bustling metropolises, bought petrol in sleepy backcountry villages, wandered through old towns and been led through national parks. That said, I’m still an outsider, and I haven’t seen anywhere near everything. These thoughts will be broad generalizations, and you should take them with an appropriate amount of salt.

First, I think my favorite thing about Vietnam is the food. Pho, bun, bahn my, bahn xe, spring rolls fresh and fried, fried noodles, fried rice, coconut cookies, dragonfruit, mango smoothies, coffee coffee coffee. Even with the many backcountry rest stops and free hostel breakfasts, I could probably count the number of disappointing meals without taking off my socks. And it’s sooooooo cheap! $0.50 for beer, $1 for a sandwich, $2 for a big bowl of pho.

Even fine dining is cheap. On our last night in Hanoi, Liz and I decided to find the most expensive restaurant we could, partly to blow some of our leftover VND, and partly to celebrate her birthday which I may have forgotten (I blame jet lag). We ended up on a rooftop sky bar, gazing out at the beautiful skyline as we sipped fancy cocktails and munched on delicious bites. The bill for both of us: just over a million dong, or about $50. Trying as hard as we could to spend money, we still couldn’t match what one person might spend for even a merely nice dinner back home.

My second positive takeaway is of the general energy of Vietnam. As I wrote about Saigon, everywhere I visited felt like it was on the rise. There’s construction everywhere, and people seem positive and hopeful about their futures. It feels like if you’re hardworking or talented or have a great idea there’s plenty of space to rise, plenty of economic space to fill. It shows no sign of stopping. That’s not to say that the country is perfect – there’s a long way to go in terms of education, infrastructure, reducing corruption and especially environmental stewardship. But when you look around, the vision for how strong this country can be is clear. I think when I get back I’m going to find a Vietnamese index fund to invest in.

Third, Vietnam is freaking beautiful. I think that’s pretty well covered in previous posts.

As long as I’m reflecting, I may as well do some introspection too. I’m just over half way through my time abroad, and I’ve learned some things about life on the road, and through them about myself.

I have had a constant stream of shallow relationships – you meet someone in the hostel, ask each other the same six questions, condensing your life stories into 5 minute anecdotes, partying or sightseeing or taking politics for a few hours. Then you part ways and never see each other again. I’ve met a few groups that formed on the road, but this seems to be the exception, not the rule. This is beginning to grow tiring, and I find I miss a deeper relationship, an easy and old friendship. Traveling with Liz the past 10 days gave me some of that, but we still met droves of new people at every stop.

I find that I miss, not work per se, but having projects to work on. I’m a planner by nature, I love watching something slowly come to fruition over weeks or months. Using that skill is a lot of what made this trip possible, but now that I’m here there’s very little of that sort of work to be done. The closest I get to a long-term project here is reading a long book, which isn’t exactly strategic. I find that if I’m not careful I start to get antsy and bored.

I have struggled somewhat to take care of myself. It’s hard to count calories when you’re eating out for every meal and beer is an integral part of meeting people, and a hostel is not a great environment for a regular morning workout. My gut is definitely bigger than it was when I left, my wind is shorter, and it bothers me. Exercise and fitness is a big part of who I am, and at least part of that part stayed at home.

None of these are deal-breakers. The persona I’ve presented through this blog, the carefree footloose traveler having the adventure of his life, is petty accurate. But part of the draw of traveling is to get perspective, to live life without many of the things I’m used to, and so to come to a better understanding of what is most important and what I can do without.

Practically speaking, if I do another long term trip it will look very different than this one. Probably it would be a “digital nomad” type trip, where I post up in some city or another for a season or two before moving on to the next while working remotely for an American company. I think that would be a more sustainable life in many ways.

It also won’t be for quite a while. By the time I get home, I expect I’ll have had my fill of traveling for a bit.

Not yet though – there’s too much exploring left to do! My next stop is Luang Prabang in Laos. I’ll just post one picture to whet your appetite.