So once again I’m just trying to keep things interesting by posting pictures dating back to Peru. We told you guys about Machu Picchu 5 months ago but thought it would be more fun if we saved the pictures until now. But first I will start off with a few to accompany Amanda’s newest blog post below. So here are a few from the beautiful Perhentian Islands, where the clear blue water and fire twirlers never ceased to amaze us…

Nights on the beach drinking monkey juice (cheap Malaysian whiskey) and sitting around a fire… who wouldn’t love this place?

On a very different note, we spent a day visiting the Killing Fields and S21 prison near Phnom Pehn, Cambodia. Amanda described the emotions in our last blog post but I tried to capture the overwhelming sense of loneliness and fear that emanated from the prison walls.

While it feels like I keep changing the mood too quickly I think the contrast is an appropriate representation of the trip so far. So, the incredible Salkantay Trek to Machu Picchu…

We will have more up from Laos, Cambodia and Malaysia soon! And perhaps a few stragglers from Argentina and Peru as well.  Read about our most recent adventures below.

Do you remember when everyone got really mad at Britney Spears because she was photographed driving with her small son on her lap?  Well, if you think that’s bad, you should brace yourself should you ever come to Southeast Asia.  The primary mode of transportation in Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos seems to be motorbike.  And I pictured my mother gasping in horror when I saw a woman with two young kids all riding a motorbike together.  Then I saw a woman driving a motorbike holding a baby.  And then I saw a man driving one, with a woman behind him, and a small baby tied in a bundle to the woman’s back.  Lillie spotted a bike with no less than four kids perched on it behind and in front of their mother.  And best of all, in Chiang Mai, we saw a man driving a motorbike towards us with a dog in front, his two back paws on the foot rest and his two front paws on the handlebars…then as he went by we saw that there was another dog perched on the back, sitting on his haunches behind the driver just as cool as if he never bothered with walking anymore.
Traveling really puts things in perspective, as we’ve said a thousand times already.  The first time I saw tiny kids or even babies riding on motorbikes with their parents, I thought about how you would probably never ever see that in Raleigh or Chapel Hill.  We are so cautious with children in the U.S.  When my sister and I were little my dad made us watch a horrifying video called Stranger Danger, in which children are abducted in any number of creative and terrifying ways.  In some of the places we’ve been, children roam around freely, they splashed around in the ocean in Cambodia, swimming without supervision (gasp!).  When Lillie went on her motorbike ride up to the Bolaven Plateau in Laos, she came across a Dutch man who had moved to Laos to harvest coffee, and he had met a Lao woman and started a family and a business there.  As Lillie sat in his café drinking coffee, his adorable son sat outside playing contentedly with a machete.  When his father saw this, he exclaimed with exasperation to his wife, “How many times do I have to tell you, I don’t want him playing with machetes!”  His mother looked at Lillie with a smile and a shrug, as if to say, “Husbands, they never relax, do they?”

Here are some other observations from the past few weeks, in no particular order, and perhaps not even relating to anything else:
In one day, I washed my hair, my body, my face, and a piece of clothing with shampoo, and then later my hands with laundry detergent.
I saw a mouse in Starbucks.
A woman in Kuala Lumpur asked me if we had KFC in America.
A local in Cambodia told us he had sex with a shark in Thailand because the Thais said they would kill him if he didn’t.  (We’re hoping he didn’t translate that story correctly into English).
We saw a man leaving a clinic in Siem Reap, Cambodia, on the back of a motorbike, holding up his I.V. bag with his good arm.
We saw a stray dog eating a piglet in Laos.
Our taxi driver, upon reaching the port to Perhentian, insisted on taking us to breakfast then force feeding us fish drenched in brown gravy for breakfast.  Lillie looked like she was going to puke and I actually liked it.

Malaysia seems a bit different than the previous countries we‘ve been in.  Kuala Lumpur is a big, modern city, with some of the most posh and expensive shopping malls I have ever seen.  Lillie and I spent nearly a week there after we returned from the Perhentian Islands.  Pulau Perhentian Kecil, or Small Perhentian Island, was one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen.  Snorkeling there was amazing, and our friend Laura, from England, mentioned that despite having snorkeled and dived in Indonesia, Thailand, and Fiji, Perhentian was the best she had seen yet.  Our guide took us to the Blue Lagoon, a tiny deserted beach where the water, somehow, managed to be even bluer than our beach.  It was like a scene from a movie.
We’ve made two new best friends, Laura and Katie from northern England.  Their English accents have yet to cease being entertaining, especially because a quarter of the time I have no idea what they’re saying.  We met them on Perhentian, and we’ve been traveling together since.  Laura and Katie have a penchant for nicknaming, and our circle of friends and acquaintances during our nine days on the island grew to include such colorful characters as Sarong Man, a tall, hairy Italian who spent every night dancing at the beach bar wearing just a flowery sarong; Jungle Boy, a local who liked to impress the foreign girls with his rugged jungle charms and his shark bite scar; Pajama Man, Sarong Man’s sidekick, who basically just danced next to him wearing what looked like pajamas all week; Hat Man, another local who wore a hat jauntily angled to one side at all times, but who’s idea of polite conversation was to invite Laura, then Katie, then Lillie on a private boat trip to Redang, where he said he had a “surprise.”  And my favorite by far, Opera Man.  He was a big, burly, shirtless Norwegian guy who materialized one night on the beach with his friend and sat down with us to have a beer.  After he revealed that he was an opera singer, we of course cajoled him into singing us a song, and I think they probably heard him on the mainland, maybe even as far as India.  Once he started singing, he belted out every word with such gusto it was impossible not to laugh.  Best of all,  he didn’t take offense to the fact that we were in hysterics by the time he finished.  And he really was very talented.
We’ve finally made it out of Kuala Lumpur and are in Penang, an island on the west renowned for it’s food.  We only have six more days in Malaysia before we take a bus north to Koh Pha Ngan in Thailand for the Full Moon Party!  It happens to fall on October 23rd, Laura’s birthday, and we are now thinking Halloween costumes, glow in the dark paint, buckets of Sang Som…

Cambodia has been such a different experience than anywhere else so far.  After crossing the border from Laos, we spent one night in Stung Treng, unremarkable except for the impressive amount of vomiting I did after eating lunch at the guesthouse.  At 6am the next morning we caught a bus to Siem Reap, home to Cambodia’s (and perhaps all of Southeast Asia’s) most impressive temple ruins, Angkor Wat.  We hired a tuk-tuk driver to take us on a three day tour of the temple ruins inside of the massive archaeological park.  On the first day we got up early enough to be at Angkor Wat, the name of the most famous temple, by sunrise.  Unfortunately it was cloudy so the sunrise was not too exciting, but the temple itself is incredible.  It is something like 800 years old, massive, and still really well-preserved.  Every inch is covered in carvings of dancing women and intricate designs.  I tried not to, but couldn’t resist touching the stone walls from time to time, amazed to be walking around inside something so old and sacred.
The park contains a ridiculous number of temples, in varying conditions; some looked to me like a heap of rocks, while others were like Angkor Wat.  To be honest, after seeing a handful, I started to lose interest.  One of the best, Lillie’s favorite, is called Bayon and it features giant carved faces on huge stone pillars all around the temple.  That one was worth getting out of the tuk-tuk for. Another of the most famous is Ta Proum, a temple with a massive tree growing right out of the middle.  The tree looks almost like an extension of the temple itself; it’s trunk and roots curve over, around, and inside the temple’s rooms.
Inside Siem Reap the city, Lillie and I had a lot of difficulties.  Because there are so many tourists there, the people in the city seem to rely very heavily on foreigners for income.  The tuk tuk drivers stopped us every five yards, yelling, “Tuk tuk, lady? Maybe later?  Where you go?  You need ride?”  Children approached us while we were eating at sidewalk cafes, entreating us to buy bracelets or books or newspapers.  Men on crutches or in wheelchairs, missing limbs, asked us for money while we were walking or eating.  I can’t describe how frustrating it was, because we didn’t want to say no but we didn’t really have a choice.  We did buy bracelets or books sometimes, but to do it every time, every day, is impossible, even if your budget is larger than ours.  The same thing happened to us when we went to the beach town of Sihanoukville for a few days.  There are people everywhere you go selling or begging.  Sihanoukville was beautiful, with bright blue water so clear you can see everything in it.  It had a bit of a seedy feel to it.  Hooker Beach, you might say.  And even more disgusting and egregious was the city’s reputation as a spot for child prostitution.  I cannot even describe to you our feelings when we sat out having a beer one night after dark, having already heard this fact about the city, and saw a little girl no older than ten walk by with her face covered in makeup.
Phnom Penh, the capital, is beautiful, much more so that I expected it to be.  The city has a more open feel than Siem Reap; there are landscaped plazas and parks spreading out everywhere, and a beautiful riverside avenue next to the Tonle Sap River.  It is lined with cafes and restaurants, tourism agencies, and other businesses.
But we never seem to learn our lesson.  Twice since arriving we’ve eaten out at one of these riverside restaurants, at one of the sidewalk tables, and the people asking for money or selling things are relentless.  They approach every few minutes.  It is such an uncomfortable situation; I don’t want to say no, but I also don’t appreciate the interruption.  Then I feel guilty when I get angry.  We really feel like we can’t win, because we try very hard to treat these people as humans, to give them at least a little respect even if we can’t give them a dollar, but sometimes I think the effort is wasted.  Plus I lose my patience sometimes.  I understand why they are doing it, and I can’t blame them for being poor, but I‘d like a quiet meal, hold the guilt, please.  I realize this is not about us, that there is a bigger situation that is far more tragic than the momentary discomfort we feel facing their poverty.  But trust me when I say it’s overwhelming.
We went to the Killing Fields 15 kilometers outside of  the city, a legacy of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime that ruled from 1975 to 1979.  I have never seen anything like it.  The museum on site explained some of the history and politics behind the Khmer Rouge, and the reasons behind erecting the stupa, or memorial building, the way they did.  Even after learning a little about the context, the site itself was unreal.
A giant pagoda-like structure sat by itself in what would have been a pleasant green pasture if not for its dark history.  Inside, on 17 separate shelves, lay piles of bones and tattered clothes.  The first few shelves, as far as the eye could see, were piled with skulls.  The site was grotesque and disconcerting, to say the least.  The idea had been to exhume the remains of the people brutally murdered and discarded in open pits in the surrounding fields and allow them a more dignified burial.  The site was a shrine to their memory, a way of showing their remains some respect, and a reminder that the brutality carried out by the Khmer Rouge dictatorship would not be forgotten.  But it was hard to keep that in mind when staring at so many cracked human skulls.  Put simply, it was horrifying to look at.  I pictured each skull as a human face, gaping in horror, piled on top of one another, and I felt both a sick fascination and a horrible disgust.
Equally disturbing were the mass graves spreading out so casually around the memorial.  Right out there in the open, overgrown with grass and even flowers, large pits in the ground put a very real image to the accounts of brutal mass slayings.   Because bone fragments and pieces of tattered clothing are still being inadvertently uncovered by heavy rains, pieces of checkered shirts or ragged clothes peeked up along the path, still mostly buried.  My stomach turned over when I realized what we were walking on: that even on the paths around the pits human bones and clothing were visible in the dirt.  This was no normal museum experience; we didn’t file past some informational signs and look at graphic pictures of some distant tragic episode.  We stood next to pits where Cambodians clubbed to death their fellow farmers, teachers, neighbors, young and old, and left their bodies to rot.  We walked past the tree that executioners used to bash in the skulls of babies before tossing their tiny bodies in with the others.  The experience was surreal, powerful and upsetting.
Our next stop on the tour of horrifying historical tourist attractions was S21, the infamous Khmer Rouge prison and clandestine torture facility located right in the city.  Formerly a high school and currently another museum, the grounds looked relatively unchanged since 1979 when they ceased to house death and despair.  There were four buildings, each with three floors of large classrooms.  Some had been shoddily partitioned with bricks or wood into tiny cells, others contained nothing but a rusted bed frame in the center of an empty room.  The last building housed row after row of mug shot type photos of the prisoners.  Some looked plainly terrified.  Others silently screamed out in despair.  Some seemed empty and prematurely devoid of life.  Other photos showed mangled, emaciated bodies laying on the floor of the cells, or bloodied naked corpses. Displayed near the photos were the instruments of torture: rusty old hoes, hatchets, ropes, shackles, and tubs for drowning prisoners within an inch of their lives.  Not surprisingly, barbed wire covered the open balconies of each of the buildings to prevent prisoners from even the last luxury of attempting escape by suicide.  In the three plus years that S21 operated, 20,000 “subversives” were slaughtered, and seven survived.
Lillie and I spent the afternoon talking about that experience, and even though it was horrifying I’m glad we saw those sites.  I think that is one of the most important parts of the trip, to learn.  There is only so much you can get from a book or a classroom; I doubt I will ever forget staring at those piles of bones or the cells in which the Khmer Rouge tortured prisoners.  Cambodia in general has really opened our eyes.  I would love to come back one day.
We are in Malaysia!  We flew out of Phnom Penh on Air Asia into Kuala Lumpur on Sunday morning.  Air Asia is a budget airline, and if you’ve ever flown on a budget airline, you know all about the bite-you-in-the-ass last minute fees.  We arrived, checked in, set our bags on the scale, and the agent calmly said, “Ok, that’ll be 80 US dollars.”  We were ten kilos overweight between the two of us.  That is a crime, and we were not going to stand for it.  So, in the middle of the airport, we opened up our giant backpacks and began a mad dumping session, tossing things out left and right.  Shampoo, toothpaste, lotion, mosquito net, tennis shoes, books, clothes…we left so much stuff.  We managed to get our bags under the weight limit though, so take that, Air Asia.
We spent two whirlwind days in Kuala Lumpur, which is an awesome city.  Remember those two towers with the bridge in between them that used to be the tallest building in the world?  That’s there!  And there’s an awesome mall inside!  We walked all over and spent hours staring at the beautiful city lights at night, where everything is lit up.  Right now, we’re on the smaller of the Perhentian Islands, off of the northeastern coast, and I think I died and went to heaven.  White sand, crystal clear turquoise water, beautiful jungle, monkey juice…it’s going to be a great week.

September already!  We left Chiang Mai about two weeks ago for Chiang Khong, a border town in the northeast.   We crossed over the Mekong River to visit our eighth country, Laos.  Upon arriving in Huay Xai, we bought tickets for the slow boat down the Mekong to Luang Prabang, a small river town and a UNESCO World Heritage site.

There were about 70 or 80 of us on the boat; it was very narrow and about 50 meters long.  There were wooden benches on either side of the long aisle down the middle, and the sides were all completely open, which afforded us a great view the whole way.   The scenery included lush jungle and sloping green mountains, lower and rounder than some of the more imposing peaks we saw in South America, but beautiful in the way they rose up behind the forests, shrouded in mist.  There were about ten different shades of green.

Each day we spent about seven hours on the boat, with a night in the middle spent in Pak Beng, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it village halfway to Luang Prabang.  We were interested to find that the boat stopped several times each day on different spots down the river, to bring various odds and ends to remote riverside villages.  During most of these stops, small children would scramble down the riverbanks to gawk at us, to wave and splash around in the river as we came and went.  We could see other peopled gathered in groups, watching us from farther away.  Their expressions seemed so inscrutable sometimes. As Lillie pointed out to me, it seems like the younger the person you meet, the friendlier they are, and the older generations seem openly suspicious sometimes.

In Luang Prabang, we found a really nice guesthouse right on the Mekong River.   Luang Prabang is very tourist friendly and has a great night market and delicious buffet style street food area (buffet!  There’s nothing Americans love more, is there?).  During the day, you can wander down to this area and find numerous stands selling baguette sandwiches with whatever you want on them for 10,000 kip, about $1.25.  This is perhaps the finest legacy the French left in Laos.

The most fun we had in Luang Prabang was the day we rented bicycles and decided to take them the 15 kilometers outside of town to the Tad Sae waterfall.  The ride was scenic and peaceful; it rained lightly the whole time, and we were surrounded by mountains, jungle, and fields.  Several times we rode through the tiniest of villages, just a few houses and stores lined up next to the road.  The children in the villages must have thought we were hilarious, because they loved running in front of us, laughing, screaming sabaai–dii (hello), and giving us high fives as we rode by.   I’m sure we did look funny because both of us were filthy after two hours of cycling in the rain on muddy roads.

The waterfall was stunning.  I don’t think either of us expected it to be so beautiful.  The water was a clear, lovely green color, and it rushed down over a vast area in small tiers, with a naturally formed swimming pool on one level.  We jumped right in even though it was freezing, and spent two hours climbing up the levels and then jumping back down into the pool, sometimes on the rope swing someone had put up.  It was a little scary at first because in some parts the water rushes down really forcefully, but with the right maneuvering you can climb from rock to rock, up one layer at time.  We loved it there.

We left Luang Prabang and went three hours east to Nong Kiaow, a sleepy little town on the Nam Ou River, where we rented a riverside bungalow and spent a few days doing little more than relax in the hammock on the porch and watch the river float by.  It was really beautiful there.

Now we are in Vang Vieng, south of Luang Prabang.  We arrived via a 24 hour bus ride, and I know we’ve spent a lot of time describing bus rides, but I have to tell you about this one.  Picture a school bus.  We boarded and left at 7:30 am.  The bus was only a quarter full, so we were pretty comfortable.  The bus driver’s method for preventing a head on collision around blind curves on a very narrow road is to honk his horn several times.  The first few hours aren’t so bad, but the bus doesn’t stop for a long break until 1 pm, where we rush into the bathroom.  Lillie and I did not know how many times he would stop, nor did we know how to ask any questions in Lao, and since nobody on the bus spoke English, we thought it would be safest not to eat or drink anything.  That way we could avoid the toilet situation altogether.

Every few minutes we stop in tiny villages along the way to pick up more passengers and cargo.  At almost every stop, the young guys helping the driver loaded giant sacks of rice or other goods on to the bus; they were just placed in the aisles.  I wanted to point out that blocking the aisle would make escape difficult in the event of an emergency, but I don’t know how to say that in Lao.  By mid afternoon, the bus was packed full of people and rice, almost to the roof.  When there are no seats left, people still board the bus, and just sit on the rice sacks.  As you can imagine, the bus must have weighed about a million pounds, and we cruised at about 10 miles per hour up the steeper hills.

Despite not eating or drinking anything, by 7 pm Lillie and I both have to go again.  Using a combination of sign language and desperate facial expressions, we get them to wait while we race to the toilet.  A little while later a woman boards the bus and sits across from us.   She is carrying a wicker basket full of live frogs, one of which later escaped.  Her giant sack is right by my feet, and the string holding it closed loosens a little.  Two beetles the size of mice crawl out.  I resist the urge to scream like a five year old and Lillie’s eyes go wide.  The guy behind her picks them up and throws them out the window.  When the woman herself catches a third escapee beetle, she rips its legs off and puts it back in the bag.  Later we notice a different woman eating something with her sticky rice; it looked exactly like the escaped beetles.  Luckily this helped reduce our hunger.  We arrived stiff and exhausted in Vang Vieng at 6 am Friday.

Lillie and I have been talking a lot about our impressions of Southeast Asia so far.  It has been so strange to be confronted with situations that are in some ways so similar but in others so vastly different.  I mostly mean the different contexts of poverty.  All of the countries we’ve been to have some form of severe poverty.  Laos is maybe the poorest of them so far.  From a 2009 report, it ranks 133^rd out of 182 countries on the UN’s Human Development Index, which measures a state’s well-being based on literacy, life expectancy, education, and standard of living.  Laos is right above India.  The U.S. ranks 13^th on this list; Chile is 44^th, Argentina 49^th, and South Africa is 129^th.

But Lillie and I were talking about how sometimes poverty here seems so different from poverty elsewhere.  We couldn’t come to any conclusions, but we debated back and forth about how one would classify those families we saw living in the tiny riverside villages we passed on the boat, or the ones we saw on our bikes or on the bus.  They live in rural, isolated villages in one of the poorest countries in the world, but they don’t look unhappy (at least the children certainly don’t).  Their poverty doesn’t remind us of the kind we saw in big cities like La Paz, where people looked desperate to scratch out a living.

But how do you measure it?  Are they poor in material wealth?  Absolutely.  Lacking the most basic necessities, cold and hungry? Probably not.  Do they have access to adequate medical care? Probably not.  Isolated?  Yes.  But their villages look like communities.  Their houses look sturdy and fit for the elements.  They farm and fish, and probably have for generations.   When basic needs are met, where do issues like boredom or privacy fit in, and most importantly, how do they view their own situation?

Picture any photograph you might have seen in a magazine or newspaper of a child from an impoverished country, dirty and barefoot, wearing tattered clothes.  Those photos are meant to provoke pity.  But we’ve seen tons of children that fit that description exactly, and they are almost always laughing (sometimes at us), running, and playing just like any kid I know at home.  The wealthiest nations of the world certainly are not full of the happiest people: look at suicide rates in the most developed countries.

Trying to define “poor” or “happy” feels to me like trying to build a car engine from a box of spare parts without any directions: I am not sure where to start, nothing seems to fit, and I don’t know what it’s supposed to look like when I’m done.  It’s a tired old adage that money does not buy happiness, but the question of where happiness really does come from has been surfacing consistently over the last eight months without an answer in sight.

Well today might be going down as one of the best days of the trip.  We went elephant riding, and it was all that we could have hoped for and more!  For ten dollars a piece, we went out into the hills of Pai, the small town we are currently visiting in the north of Thailand, and rode an elephant for an hour.  We chose an elephant camp that only works the elephants four hours a day, and they seemed to care for them very well.  Upon arriving, without much ado, we climbed up a wooden staircase to hop on.  The elephant, a 36 year old female, backed up like a dump truck so we could awkwardly climb on, Lillie riding on her neck and me right behind.  The mahout, or elephant trainer, accompanying us was a hilarious Thai man.  He walked next to us, guiding the elephant with verbal commands, and she would barely go anywhere if she didn’t have him in her sights.  We asked him her name, but despite hearing him say it twice we were at a complete loss.  I decided to call her Flappy, which of course in any Asian language is pronounced Frappy.

We went for a pleasant enough, slightly bone jostling walk down a dirt path, and arrived at the river.  This part was the very best!  Frappy walked slowly into the river with us on her back, and then spent the next half hour trying (successfully) to throw us off.  It was like an Asian elephant river rodeo, and we were both screaming and laughing and trying not to drown or be crushed.  The elephant was definitely having a great time, because it was clear she enjoyed very much being in the water.  She would sink down until only her massive head and back were visible above the water, she’d roll over , fill her trunk with water and spray it over her back (onto us), and generally cavort like an animal enjoying a cool reprieve from the heat.  We had so much fun.  Our guide gave us instructions in confusingly broken English for how to stay on top, and we each even managed to stand up while Frappy rolled around under water, but neither of us could stay on the whole time without being thrown.  For such giant creatures, elephants can be surprisingly quick and slippery.

It was definitely one of the most fun and exotic experiences thus far.  Less successful was our ill-fated trek into the jungle last week..  Our group consisted of a guide, and eight other young people from Canada, England, Ireland, and South Africa.  A mixed group, as always.  We were signed up to do three days and two nights.  The first day included a trip to a butterfly and orchid farm (thoroughly boring) followed by a three hour trek through the jungle to the Long Neck Village.  Trekking through the jungle made me feel like I was in a movie: the scene was set perfectly with swampy forests, beautiful mountains in the background, mud, bugs, and lots of sweat.   I made Lillie go first in case there were poisonous snakes on the path; luckily for her there were none that we could see.

The Long Neck Village was painful, in more ways than one.  We reached it around 4 pm, and it was the location where we would spend the first night.  The Long Neck people are from a tribe in the jungle in Thailand where the women, from a very early age, place rings around their necks progressively over time to elongate them.  The women we saw varied in age from very young to middle aged, and the older the woman the more gold rings she wore and the longer her neck.  The ordeal appears awkward and maybe painful.  We heard that the women cannot remove the rings ever, because their neck muscles have been permanently altered and would not support their heads.

Lillie and I both felt extremely uncomfortable here, as everyone in our group conspicuously gawked at the women like we were in some sort of sideshow or zoo, and they stood at the other end of the village regarding us suspiciously.  The people there were not particularly friendly, but who could blame them?  At dusk the villagers assembled in front of the campfire so that the long neck women could perform a shuffling, half-hearted dance for us while our group took photos.  Lillie, ever the morally conscious photographer, preferred to take candid shots of the adorable children playing hopscotch, a decision I supported completely.

After chatting for a few hours, we decided to turn in for the night.  All ten of us were to sleep in the same bamboo hut on stilts.  There were ten mats laid out for us on the floor with mosquito nets provided above to prevent an all-night insect feeding frenzy.  I was having trouble sleeping from a combination of the toxic DEET fumes rising off of my body, the heat, and the hard floor.  Lillie was having trouble sleeping from the horrific stomach flu she mysteriously acquired at some point in the night.  She had to throw up all night and all day the next day.  Needless to say, the next day was rough, and we cut our trek short and returned to Chiang Mai so that Lillie could try to recuperate.  I’m happy to report she is feeling much better.

Surprise is such an interesting emotion.  It comes attached to another feeling, like a Siamese twin.  Events that could not be more different can all evoke surprise and its companion feeling.  Shock can come from disgust.  A tiny gesture can inspire wonder.  Unexpected sights can take one‘s breath away.  One reason that this trip can be overwhelming at times stems from experiencing all of these different emotions together, within the space of a few hours.
The other night we went to a bar/restaurant called Paradise, which was anything but.  It was on the street not far from ours, one that seemed pleasant during the day but turned seedy at night.  Colorful lights hung from above the bar and around the patio outside of it, and pretty young Thai women sat on stools looking bored or in the booths waiting for customers.
We watched five men walk in and sit down at the booth next to ours.  They were in their 30s and 40s, farang who rolled in gleefully from some other part of the world.  The Thai women flocked over and sat down close to them, talking and laughing coyly as each guy appraised them with cold indifference and shifty eyes.  Lillie and I shared a look of disgust, because we recognized the scene unfolding.  I had read about sex tourism in Thailand and never considered myself naïve, but to actually watch young hookers at work was stomach-turning.  Men troll these bars in groups or often alone, flashing money, soaking up the false flattery and desperate coquetry.  Maybe the most heartbreaking and shocking part of watching it happening was how dreadfully commonplace it all seemed, as if those men and those women were only small players in a sick game taking place in every bar in this city, every night, year after year.
But the night was not full of sadness.  I was mid sentence when Lillie’s eyes got wide and she said hurriedly, “Turn around!”  On the sidewalk not ten feet from us an elephant walked by with a young Thai riding on his back.  Elephants are amazing.  He flapped his ears and chewed on his trunk.  His face was wrinkled and incredibly expressive, and I thought to myself laughingly, if he could speak I bet he’d say something very wise.  Cars continued driving by behind his giant mass and the snapshot I have in mind still makes me shake my head in wonder.  Neither Lillie nor I knew what to say.
Surprises can be big, like an elephant on the sidewalk, or they can be small.  A little boy, no more than five or six years old, walked up selling roses while Lillie and I were taking notes for the blog.  He was one in a line of many who approach foreigners trying to make a living selling trinkets or beads or flowers.  He was too cute to resist, so Lillie bought a rose.  He sold Lillie the flower but lingered, looking curiously at what I was writing.  I asked him his name, and he told me, then I handed him the pen and the notebook.  He took the pen and began writing his name slowly, concentrating on each character with that quiet intensity that only children have.  He finished but instead of handing back the pen, he began drawing a picture.  He drew a girl with a ponytail holding a flower in her hand and a little figure next to her holding a bundle of flowers.  He looked at the picture, satisfied, and handed back the pen to wander off to the next group.  The words make it sound so banal, but Lillie and I both felt touched.  It reminded us that communication is so much more than conversation, than language.  He was just the picture of innocence, so tiny and quiet and foreign, but he still managed to send us a little message of goodwill.  The smallest interchanges, no matter how brief, can feel extraordinary.
Too often I have such a hard time letting go of this nagging feeling of guilt when I walk around in places like Thailand.  I sometimes feel waves of resentment, whether real or imagined I can never be sure, emanating from the local people.  They ask where we’ve been, where we’re going next, and inevitably, what we do back home.  “I was a waitress” sounds so awful and non sequitur.  I tell them what we are doing on this trip and I nearly burn with shame, because most people we meet work so hard and make only a tiny fraction of the money we saved in a year.  I chatted with a young girl in Buenos Aires who was staying in our hostel with her family as they vacationed from another part of Argentina.  As I answered those questions I mentioned above, her mother sat scowling at me harder and harder.  “But it’s much faster for you in the U.S.,” she interrupted.  “You make a much better wage than we do here.”  Her husband was a doctor in a rural area.  I didn’t even need to point out that my dad bought the car that took me to work every day, or that my parents paid for the education that allowed me to move ahead.  I didn’t need to mention it because it was apparent she assumed it from the first glance.
They will probably never do what we are doing.  And I would never blame them for feeling cheated.  Why do I get to be so lucky and they scrape their savings together each month?  I have no idea.  The only conclusion I have come to is that I can’t apologize for who I am or where I come from.  I see the glaring inequality of my situation and theirs, and I recognize that it sucks.  My only goal is to learn as much as I can, because one thing we notice over and over again is that happiness is universal and can be found in drastically simpler ways than I used to think.    Lillie and I try to find the things we all have in common, to draw out the friendliness, or the humor, or the sense of camaraderie that people can share no matter where they come from.  And when that does happen, I can’t even describe the feeling of triumph and warmth.  It is always my favorite surprise.

I talked to my mom a couple days after arriving in Bangkok and told her that I immediately remembered why I loved this country so much. She asked me why. Seems like a simple enough question I guess, but when I started to put it into words I was at a complete loss. “I don’t know mom, I just love it.” Well, clearly that wasn’t working for her so I’m going to try and verbalize this intense fascination I have for Thailand. This one is for you mom.

Bangkok is a big, dirty, overwhelming and completely fantastic city. As we were riding the bus into Bangkok we must have looked like wide-eyed little girls. We passed monks in their bright orange robes, street vendors selling foods of every kind, beautiful gold and jeweled temples, pictures of the King everywhere and signs reading “We love the King,” upscale commercial districts bustling with young professionals, neighborhoods that looked as old as Thailand with wooden shacks and tin roofs and everything in between.  In a movie theater in one of the most sophisticated, upscale shopping districts, we were asked to stand before the movie started and “Please pay homage to the king” as his picture flashed across the screen for a few minutes.  Bangkok is such an interesting mix of old and new, tradition and modernization.

We spent a few days just walking through the streets and soaking up the sights around us. We stayed on Khaosan road, a very busy tourist section of town with all the cheap hotels and hostels. There are street vendors selling extremely cheap and delicious food, clothes, sunglasses, adapters, knick-knacks and really anything else you could imagine. We stayed in a hostel in the upstairs of this little Indian restaurant. It wasn’t exactly the nicest, or cleanest hostel we have ever stayed in, to say the least, but the waiters were extremely friendly and the atmosphere was great.

On our first day of really getting out to try and see some of the other neighborhoods we were stopped by a professor who urged us to take advantage of the Buddhist holiday and have a tuk-tuk driver take us around the city for a total of ten baht (about 30 cents). We were a little bit confused because the professor wrote out a list of spots and practically pushed us into the tuk-tuk but we figured for ten baht what the hell.

We soon realized that the deal was for the tuk-tuk driver to take us to certain temples, government agencies and shops where he could get gas coupons for bringing tourists who may buy something. I have to explain something about Bangkok. Somehow the government has convinced everyone there, not just government workers, to push tourists towards the same agencies, tours, temples, etc. We have been stopped by countless numbers of people and the conversation always ends with this same, sometimes uncomfortably persistent, pushing. While it is extremely frustrating we have been trying to remind ourselves that it’s a cultural difference. I think the people here are genuine. I think they do want to help and they are truly friendly. But there is some nationalistic feeling that we can’t begin to imagine that comes into play here. They see westerners and the first thought is “how can we strengthen our country through the tourism industry.” Fair enough. Nevertheless, it gets a little hard to deal with at times.

A lot of what we saw was great. He took us to a beautiful temple and several other sites around Bangkok. The embarrassing and painful part of the tour however, was the “tailor-made” stores. Amanda and I had to go into these stores and sit down with the salesmen and pretend to look through wedding dresses, suits, ties and all sorts of clothing. The most embarrassing/saddest part was that we had no plan so Amanda might be looking through a book on men’s suits and I might be looking at wedding dresses and when he asks us what exactly we are looking to have made we stare at each other and then mumble “ummmmm we are just browsing.” I’m not sure whether it’s because we were dressed like complete bums or the fact that we couldn’t get our story straight but we were less than believable. We had to do this twice so that our driver could get his coupons. He told us if we bought something he would get three instead of one. Sorry buddy, but have you seen us? As much as we wanted to help out, our budget doesn’t exactly include a suit, or a wedding dress, I’m afraid.

Despite our tour around tourist agencies and stores completely out of our budget we had a great time and riding around in the tuk-tuk was a fun way to see the city.

So I’ll get back to my mom’s question. One night when we were sitting out drinking a few beers and watching the craziness that is Bangkok pass by, I asked Amanda about this problem I had. I explained that I couldn’t put into words why I loved this place so much. Surprisingly enough, Amanda, who is always able to beautifully describe any situation, completely agreed with me. She had a hard time verbalizing what it was about Thailand, the little bit we have seen so far that made it so infectiously wonderful. With this question, one of these discussions started that Amanda and I have once every few months. Usually it’s when something big happens, like an earthquake for example, or when we go through an extreme change, like arriving on a new continent. Whatever the reason, these conversations are always a highlight for me because we both bring a different, yet sometimes scarily similar perspective to the trip.

While I wont bog you down with all the details of our self-explorative, analytical rants, I can tell you that it’s places like this that provoke these questions. It’s places that are so completely foreign, so completely different from anything we’ve ever imagined that make us ask where we fit into all of this. Or, better yet, what the hell we are doing here. We began discussing the ways in which we’ve influenced each other during the trip, the ways people we’ve met have impacted our experiences and the sheer excitement of all the different places we’ve seen. We have had so many crazy adventures it’s hard to imagine that a new set has just begun.

We spent one of the days in Bangkok on a tour through the floating market, the bridge over the river Kwai, a terrifying snake show and a tiger temple. As we were riding the long-tailed boat through the jungle, after the floating market, I felt so truly happy and awestruck and I came back to my mom’s question. Certainly I could think of an answer. I found myself smiling like an idiot at all the people we passed sitting on their porches or selling goods from their boats. Every single person I passed smiled back at me. Not the polite, “look there’s a stupid tourist” smile either. They genuinely smiled. For me, as silly as it sounds, a smile like that speaks to me through all the language and culture barriers. It means more than anything someone could say to me. Although we are on a different planet, somehow we can still communicate.

Sometimes I am just overwhelmed by it all.

We are now in Chiang Mai and as much as we loved Bangkok, Chiang Mai is a nice change. The slow-paced, laid-back style and friendliness of the people makes a great impression from the start.

Last night we saw a sign for a satay house and I love satay. I’ve been raving about it to Amanda for months so she told me right away that we could go for dinner. I was excited. We wandered down a driveway to the satay house (which was just someone’s home) and found a group of friends sitting around drinking whiskey and beer wondering what we were doing at their house. We asked hesitantly if they were open for dinner and one of the women jumped up, invited us in and set a table for us. With no menu to choose from we put our trust in her and she brought us a fantastic meal of pork and bread for Amanda (the new vegetarian) and the best satay sauce I have ever had. We ate and drank and ended up joining the group of friends for a Thai lesson and a sing-along of American oldies and guitar playing for a couple hours. I told Amanda as we left that it’s these experiences that we could never possibly plan for that turn out to be the best. The people were wonderful and although several of them spoke no English, once again, we found ways to communicate. This is why I love this place.

So, this has been quite a long-winded response to my mother’s question, and I’m not really sure I answered it but I hope I cleared it up a little. When I left Thailand two years ago I remember thinking it was the greatest country I had ever been to. The people are extremely friendly and welcoming, the landscapes are beautiful, we pet tigers and saw a mongoose fight a cobra, we floated through the jungle and shopped from vendors in fishing boats and we’ve seen some of the most beautiful and most sacred places on the planet. This is Thailand.

Peru and Iguazu Falls pictures will be up soon!

I am in the throes of a passionate and messy love affair with Thai street food.  I know I haven’t mentioned anything yet about what Bangkok is like or what we’re doing, but most of this post will be about food, because it is amazing here.
First of all, on Khao San Road where we are staying, there are street vendors lined up, day and night, selling all kinds of delicious foods.  The exchange rate is 31 Thai baht to the dollar.  They make pad Thai everywhere, with wide, flat sticky noodles stir fried with vegetables, egg, chicken, or pork, then topped with chopped peanuts and sweet chili sauce.  This will cost you between 20 and 35 baht.  They sell crispy spring rolls for 10 baht a piece.  They grill chicken or pork kebabs glazed with sweet and sour sauce for around 15 baht.  Lillie spotted a roasted duck hanging from one of the stands, and that is her next target.  There are other tasty things we haven’t tried yet, like dumplings, noodle soup with pork, curry dishes…and things we’re afraid of, like strange and scary-looking fried sea creatures, fishy stuff, and crispy crickets, worms, and other bugs.  In addition, if you feel like splurging and spending between three and ten dollars, you can have the most amazing Indian food in one of the dozens of restaurants in our area.  The bottom floor of our guesthouse is an Indian restaurant, and I ate here last night…fantastic.
And the fruit!  Some of it is so exotic looking I can only guess what it’s called or where it comes from.  Every little restaurant makes delicious fruit smoothies for about a dollar.  On the street you can buy fresh sliced pineapple or mango for a snack.  And Lillie introduced me to one of the favorite Thai sweets: sliced mango on top of sticky rice coated in coconut milk.  I was skeptical at first, but now enthralled; it is delicious.  Last night we stumbled across something even better.  They make crepes, stuffed with bananas and fried egg, smothered in chocolate or nutella, for 25 baht.
I recently decided to become a vegetarian, and I don’t think there is any place on earth better for vegetarians than Thailand.  All of the fruits and vegetables are delicious, and many of the dishes are catered to vegetarians.  The most difficult place on earth to be a vegetarian is definitely Rensche’s house in Johannesburg, where I was berated within the first ten minutes of arriving for not eating meat.  Rensche said, “Well what about chicken?  It doesn’t even count.  Eating chicken when you’re a vegetarian is like saying, ‘I’m not really drinking today, I’ll just have a white wine.’”  Sadly I fell off the wagon there, or better said, she violently threw me off the wagon, but I’m back on track here and loving it.
So the bottom line is that you can troll the streets and eat yourself sick for less than three dollars, easily.  If it were acceptable, or at least not devastating to my self-esteem, I would just stand on the street corner all day, eating.
Aside from the food, Lillie and I both love Bangkok.  It’s busy, loud, dirty, and full of completely different sights, sounds, and smells than we’ve experienced yet on the trip.  It’s really hot, which Lillie loves and I’m trying to get used to.  (The Haydens don’t do heat well.  When the air conditioning breaks down, my parents go to a hotel.  If you think I’m kidding, you can go by my house today, which is empty since the air conditioning is broken.)  We will be in Bangkok at least a few more days, so we will be sure to update the blog with more information once we see more of the city.

Well if things felt like they were moving quickly before, they are absolutely whizzing by now.  Right now Lillie and I are in the airport in Singapore waiting a few hours for our connecting flight to Bangkok, Thailand.  We are like saggy-eyed zombies staring at our computers but we haven’t had internet for a while so I, at least, can’t tear myself away.  I am really excited to be in Asia for the first time and Lillie is excited about returning since her last trip to Thailand in the summer of 2008.  We flew in to Singapore this morning from Johannesburg, South Africa.
We arrived there on July 15th.  Rensche, who I met through my brother, Evan, very graciously hosted me and Lillie for our entire stay.  She welcomed us right away, and really warmed her way right into our hearts by suggesting a trip to the liquor store within about 15 minutes of our arrival.
The next day, as we were waking up out of our jet lag stupor, Rensche came by to pick us up and take us to a business lunch with her work friends at a very nice restaurant not far from her house.  I wasn’t sure what to expect, but she assured us that we were more than welcome and that the lunch would be casual.  We found ourselves seated with such a mixed group: there were two men from Zimbabwe, a woman from Greece, a few Afrikaners, and some men of Indian descent.  We had such a great time talking with everyone about South Africa, how the World Cup had gone, and the range of travelers’ opinions of their country.  We both had to assure everyone that we did not expect to see elephants walking next to the highway or find lions in Rensche’s backyard.  Apparently this was an actual problem with tourist misconceptions during the summer, which saddens me greatly and has me hoping it was the Canadians and Australians.
We went to a “braai,” or barbeque, at Rensche’s friends’ Elton and Natalie’s house.  The food and the company was fantastic.  We spent Sunday in Soweto, the large township home to more than four million people, near Johannesburg, where we saw Nelson Mandela’s house on the famous Vilakazi Street.  We also visited the Apartheid Museum, and despite our previously-mentioned aversion to museums, Lillie and I both walked out in agreement that it was one of the best we had ever visited.  The footage and displays of apartheid-era paraphernalia were at times so overwhelming it was hard to be there.  But they did a great job of educating visitors about the struggle and the triumph, even visitors with as little knowledge as we had going in.
We also had an awesome time in Newtown, an area of downtown Johannesburg that buzzed with a more vibrant, city vibe than the suburbs.  We listened to an awesome DJ and met some South Africans with a bit of a different perspective than the people we had met so far.  That might have been my favorite part of being in Johannesburg: with such a checkered past, South Africa really seems to be at a crossroads between past and present, challenges and progress, and everyone has an opinion.  I loved talking to people about their country because you could tell immediately that they loved talking about it.
But, wait, there’s more!  If you need to use the bathroom, or refill your coffee, check your email…now’s the time.  There’s a lot more to this post because we have more stories to tell from Peru.  But really, take your time.  Luckily the posts are a lot more stationary than we are.
The Salkantay Trek was incredible. We started at 5 am on a Wednesday morning with a bus ride to Mollepata, where we met our group and our guide. There were 11 of us: three other Americans, two French Canadians, two English, and two Spaniards. Our guide, Nilton, was from Cusco and was fantastic. The price we paid included our tents, sleeping bags, almost all of our food, the guide, the entrance to Machu Picchu, and the transportation back to Cusco.
The first day was not terribly difficult, and we reached the campsite around 5 or 6 pm. It sat right in the bottom of a beautiful valley, surrounded by snowy mountains. They warned us that it would be the coldest night of the trek, and that was an understatement. It was FREEZING. Sleeping was difficult, even though both us bundled up in everything we had. I wore two pairs of leggings, a long sleeved shirt, a sweater, a sweatshirt, and my heavy coat to bed, and still shivered through the night. I would have chosen waterboarding over getting out of my sleeping bag to go to the bathroom at 5 am, but they did not offer that.
The next day was killer. We woke up at 5:30, had breakfast, and started hiking at 7. We had four hours of hiking uphill before we started descending, and it was extremely difficult. We had to get up to 4,600 meters that day, and the air was so thin that the hike seemed impossible. We were struggling up a rocky dirt path between two huge mountains, trying to keep up, and my heart was beating so hard that I thought it was going to thump right out of my chest, hit the ground, and start flopping around like a dying fish. Reaching the top was a personal triumph for us both, and we had a stunning view of Mount Salkantay.
The next two days we hiked up and down through the hills and valleys, and eventually reached the point where the mountains around us were no longer topped with snow but instead covered with jungle. It was beautiful.
The cooks made us three meals a day, right at the campsites or lunch spots, and the food was really great. We ate lots of soup, rice and vegetables, quinoa and sautéed beef, and drank coca tea to help with the altitude. The cooks and the horseman were amazing: not only did they have to stay behind to pack up our tents and clean all of the cooking gear, but they then had to reach the next campsite before us, even though they were on foot as well, leading the mules, and carrying a few of our backpacks themselves, since (as a group) we had brought too much for the mules to carry. If that wouldn’t make you hate tourists, I don’t know what would.
Saturday evening we finally reached Aguas Calientes, the town that sits below Machu Picchu. We had to get up at 3:30 am the next morning. It was brutal, but not nearly as bad as what happened next. We walked out of town, to the base of the mountain, and started hiking. Neither Lillie nor I really grasped the consequences of deciding to hike to the top rather than take the bus, but what it boiled down to was climbing roughly hewn rock stairs, in the pitch black pre-dawn cold night air, for over an hour. Maybe this doesn’t sound difficult, but it was. After 45 minutes, my legs started to feel like they were made of lead. But the sense of accomplishment at the top was great, especially when we sneered obnoxiously at the chumps who took the bus and arrived after us.
I am not sure how to describe Machu Picchu. We were blown away. It is one of the most incredible things I have ever seen. The houses and walls are so well-built that they’ve survived centuries. Architecturally the construction is really a marvel, since the blocks of stone are fit together so perfectly that not even a needle can get in between them. We explored the area for hours, then climbed up one of the terraced hillsides and sat down in the sun just taking it all in from above. It was awesome. It really felt like the perfect ending to a long journey.
We spent two more nights in Cusco after the trek. Both of us really loved Cusco, especially when our guide took us to a dance club in a more local section of town, where there were virtually no tourists. Just walking in was quite an experience, considering that nearly every head turned in our direction. It was quite obvious that we didn’t belong there, but the vibe was not unwelcoming, just perhaps bemused. The music was fantastic, and the dancing even better. Everyone danced, the entire time, without a break. Lillie pointed out the best dancer in the mix, an older Peruvian man wearing a fanny pack, holding a liter of beer, and dancing his heart out. I’m pretty sure nearly two-thirds of that beer ended up on the floor, but he clearly didn’t care (and probably didn’t notice). His faithful wife or girlfriend braved his flailing arms and sidled up to him to wipe his sweaty forehead without either of them breaking stride. It was hilarious.
Leaving South America was definitely bittersweet for both me and Lillie.  But it’s hard to be too upset now.  We’re going to be in Bangkok in a few hours!

I have been absent for a while and for that I apologize. Amanda has been great with wrapping up all of our adventures of the last few months in just a couple posts and now I will try to do that with my photos. Because I am so behind I cut out a ton but it has been months and months and thousands of photos so bear with me! I will start with Torres del Paine. We already described most of these events but I will give you a brief re-cap of each.

Mom came to visit in March and we flew down to Patagonia and hiked in one of the world’s most beautiful national parks for a few days. It proved to be extremely challenging but equally rewarding. It is one of my favorite places so far and the beautiful landscapes will be hard to beat…

After Torres, Amanda and I, with our English friend Becky, went to the Glacier National Park, just outside of El Calafate. All I can say is that it was one big chunk of ice…

We also biked around the beautiful town of Bariloche, also in Patagonia…

A few pictures from our home in Buenos Aires. The decorations are from my birthday. I woke up to a wonderful surprise…

Michael and Rebecca came to visit in May for three wonderful weeks. We spent about a week in Buenos Aires and then traveled in Mendoza, Cordoba and Uruguay. We rented a car and took a trip through the beautiful mountains of Cordoba. We wanted the full experience so we stopped at a restaurant with a smokehouse out back and tried the parillada, mixed grill. Rebecca proved to be a true Southern girl as she ate the tongue and kidneys and whatever else was on that plate without batting an eye. Michael tried, with little success, and I stayed far away from all the questionable meats. We ended our road trip in a little ghost town called Mina Clavero. We were told the town grows tremendously in the summer months but it was still a beautiful place to stay for the night. We found one open bar and although we were the only customers, the owner/chef cooked us a fantastic meal while we listened to horrible renditions of crappy America music. After dinner he insisted we stay a while and so we drank tequila and ate pizza with his family. It was hard to see Mic and Reba go but we had a fantastic time…

The day Michael and Rebecca left was the final day of celebrations for the Argentine Bicentennial, Bicentenario Argentino. Amanda and I were witness to the most fabulous, complicated, in-depth parade of our lives. We watched and I took pictures as Argentina’s entire history passed by in floats shaped like ships, a flame enthralled depiction of the constitution, soldiers marching, mothers weeping, tango dancers, clowns and communist protesters. It was quite a spectacle…

Not long after Mic and Reba left, my parents and Amanda’s sister and her mom came to visit. While Phyllis and Lindsay were here we went to Uruguay again and rented scooters for the day in the small town of Colonia…

While in Buenos Aires, tango capital of the world, we wanted to take our families to a show so we went to Café Tortoni for their famous and unforgettable tango show…

We had a fantastic time with our families. After we spent about a week in BA with everyone, Lindsay and Phyllis had to leave and Mom, Dad, Amanda and I took another car trip up to Iguazu Falls, Argentina. Amanda has already described them but the falls were breathtaking. I will post pictures of them very soon. Amanda headed off from there to visit friends in Chile and Mom and Dad and I stayed another day at the falls and then made our way back down to Buenos Aires. However, it wouldn’t have been a road trip with my dad if nothing disastrous/slightly dangerous had happened. As we headed from Apostales, the yerba capital of the world (yerba is the famous tea they drink all over Argentina), to Ibera, another small town, we decided to take the road that looked “more legitimate.” Well, I will spare all the details but about 50km in we were completely stuck in unrelenting, never-ending mud. Dad kept getting out to push and after a couple hours of stop and go driving we ran into a group of Malaysian tourists (in 4-wheel jeeps) who told us that the other way was even worse. They ended up attaching a rope to our car and Mom handled the steering as Dad and I rode on the side rail of one of the jeeps, taking in mud like we were bathing in it. Thankfully we made it out after a total of 5 hours on the 70km stretch of road. We have the Malaysian tour group to thank for that. Hopefully they will be sending me pictures of that and I will post those as well.

The last set I will post is just a sample from the job I have had here in Buenos Aires. These pictures were for the same company, Once In Motion, to promote their new helicopter tours over Buenos Aires. Although we never got to ride in the helicopters it was exciting having a group of models and assistants to help with the shoot…

We leave for South Africa on Wednesday. I think I can speak for us both when I say we have very mixed emotions. While I am terribly excited to start this next half of our trip I will be sad to say goodbye to South America. The places we have visited and the people we have met make it hard to leave. However, I have a sneaky suspicion that this wont be the last time we are here…