It was a different sort of travel day from Lopburi to my next stop. It was time to turn in this, my third, rental car. So I drove due south past Ayutthaya straight to the Bangkok Airport where I turned in the car then I decided to have a little fun by riding the train back north to Ayutthaya. It was about a 45 minute trip and it cost me a whopping 11 baht (about 33 cents). The Ayutthaya kingdom…
After exploring Chiang Saen basically as a couple of day trips from Chiang Rai, Now it’s time to explore Chiang Rai itself. I was the most worried about dealing with floods in Chiang Saen, but it turns out that Chiang Rai got flooded much worse. The water has receded and the city is mostly cleaned up, but the streets are very dusty and dirty with now dried mud and there are piles of mud on the sides of some streets…
Greetings and welcome to Thailand! After having my visa rejected over a typo about six months ago, I finally got everything straightened out and NOW, I can enjoy another Holy Crap Adventure in this beautiful part of the world. Thankfully, my journey here went super smooth. But I also arrived super late, so I just stumbled into my hotel and crashed for the night. After a good night’s sleep I’m ready to start exploring my first stop, Chiang Mai, in…
My flight from San Salvador to Managua, the capitol of Nicaragua, was quick and easy. And the driver of the shuttle I booked was waiting for me to whisk me away to my next official stop in Granada. The first thing I notice about Granada is how insanely hot and humid it is. This has to be in the top three hottest and most humid places I’ve ever been on earth. I don’t know if I can do this. I…
I left El Salvadors Ruta de las Flores via a chicken bus to the bustling town of Sonsonate where I grabbed a quick snack and then hopped on another bus to the nations capitol, San Salvador. I’m only spending one full day here, so this will be a quick post, but I thought the capitol was worth exploring a bit. I started at the National Museum of Anthropology, right around the corner from my hotel. They had a pretty impressive…
I left Copán early on a shuttle all the way back to Antigua, the only place the shuttles seem to go, and this is now my third time there. Not that I mind so much because Antigua is a pretty nice place to get “stuck” for a night. The next morning I was on another short shuttle ride to the capitol, Guatemala City. I dropped my trusty backpack off at the hotel and commenced with an epic museum day. The…
From Maun I said goodbye to Botswana and made my way to the next country on my list, Namibia. I was supposed to have an hour and a half connection in Johannesburg, but my flight from Maun left thirty minutes late, and my flight from Johannesburg got changed to thirty minutes earlier, so an hour and a half turned into a thirty minute frantic sprint through the Johannesburg airport. I sprinted, cut in line at immigration, sprinted, cut in line…
I intentionally tried to end this trip to Italy with one of it’s bigger and more significant cities and Florence turned out to be perfect for just that. Along with the size and significance came an awful lot of people. This last several days has been a chaotic mix of pedestrian traffic jams, waiting in lines to see sights that a month ago I could just walk right into, and having to buy advance tickets for things wondering if I…
My route from Modena to Bologna may be the shortest stretch of travel I’ve had on this entire trip. Just a quick thirty minute train ride. And since I’ve already passed through the train station here three times in the past week, I may as well explore the whole city. Bologna is a really busy university town, in fact, the university is the oldest university in the world, established in 1088. Bologna, despite all the idealistic young hipster students walking…
Strap in everyone, this is gonna be a long one. I left Spoleto in the wee dark hours of the morning and made my way down the narrow streets to the train station. Once the train started I promptly fell asleep and didn’t wake up until everyone had almost disembarked at Rome’s main terminal. I guess I was tired. I quickly got up and figured out where my connecting train was and about two hours later, I arrived in Naples…