I’m not exactly sure why I was so woefully under-prepared for my seemingly easy visa run to Malaysia last week, but let’s chalk it up to sheer laziness and a touch of travel arrogance.
Thailand gives visitors from the United States (among other nationalities) an easy 30 days on-arrival visa if you enter the country by air. Coming into Thailand, that was simple enough. And rather than apply for a Thai visa from the US, I figured I’d just do a visa run in Southeast Asia once I was settled into …

Dear my Lonely Planet: Central America on a Shoestring,

Why have you lead me astray? You disappointed me this past week at the Mexican/Belizean border crossing.

I love you, I nurture you, I pull you out of the depths of my bag when I’m in a pinch, and yet you disappoint at the weirdest times. You’ve got ten different hostel accommodations for some random, Podunk towns, but yet a mere paragraph about the actually fairly confusing border crossing between Mexico and Belize via Chetumal.

But also, you know, thank …

The whirring sounds and motion of the overnight train to Bosnia did little to cover the noise of constant intrusions into my train compartment; I was doing a late night border crossing into Bosnia from Croatia and the customs officers have absolutely no mercy. The officer who came through the train on the Croatia side to check my passports and issue an exit stamp was as unsmiling and humorless as so many of the other Croats I’ve met. I hate to make a generalization about the Croats, but while the …

Continued from Round the World Travel Torture
The cab to the ferry to the ferry
The cab makes the 2 kilometer drive to the docks in record time and we tumble out of the vehicle in true clown car style, sling our packs onto our backs and dart into the customs line for a perfunctory passport check where the customs official stamps our passports and rapidly shoos us away to catch the ferry.
It’s still there!
As we jog toward our ferry we pass by a large group of older Eastern European women …

One of the less charming features of the Assisi hostel was the lock-out from 9:30am through 4:00pm – that meant that although we didn’t need to leave for the train station until nearly 11:00am we were forced to sit outside of the Ostello de Pace for a couple of hours warming up in the morning sunlight until it was time to catch the public bus to the train station. This bus was the first of the eight legs of our never ending travel day.
One of the reasons I am …

There is a very distinct rhythm to life in the developing world –things happen day after day often enough that you just forget that life could be lived any other way. For me, carrying toilet paper in every pocket of my clothes was just second nature. My whole days in Nepal were built around the timing of electricity for the day. Another fun part of traveling throughout India and Nepal…hand-washing laundry. Ahh, that is one of those things that just becomes a part of the routine.
In India we were …

The time-line in Nepal was a little disjointed on the blog, but basically, the weekend after our trip to Chitwan Helen and I said our goodbyes to our monasteries, gave Amrit a huge hug, and headed to Pokhara to do the Poon Hill trek through the Annapurna region and subsequently my stint in solitary confinement (ie. the pain-staking mind-purification process known as Vipassana meditation)
I was really sad to leave my monastery… the boys are so extremely welcoming and I felt like I was actually making a difference for them. …

The flight into Kathmandu was short and fairly inexpensive – I was a bit bummed that we couldn’t do the more eco-friendly version by training/busing it from Varanasi, but we unfortunately cut Varanasi out of our trip and just bit the cost (and environmental impact) and caught a really short Air India flight between Delhi and Kathmandu.  Entering Kathmandu is seemingly easy – it’s visa-on-arrival for US citizens.  The one catch though: the airport ATM is never working.  Now, I learned my lesson previously in Laos and always carrying …