After 7 days over Christmas back country motorcycle touring in Vietnam, 4 days on Koh Panang for the full moon party, and 3 days in Bangkok i’m back, i’ve actually been back a week but have been unable to construct the summary blog post. My vacation has left me speechless and a little humbled, the people that i’ve met and the circumstances of their lives had quite an impact on me. Vietnam especially left me in awe of people in the countryside who live extraordinarily difficult lives but were so incredibly hospitable and happy it just blew me and my friends away. Believe it or not once you get outside of the major cities westerners are few and far between, I think we saw 3 westerners in 6 days, so every village we stopped in we were an oddity, people would come out of their houses to look at us, and even some of the most pensive faces would crack a huge smile if you just waved your hand and said hello. Here are a few of my fav pics from Vietnam, feel free to check out the rest of the Vietnam pictures here and the Thailand pictures here. If you are interested in a trip like this you should check out Off Road Vietnam. Vietnam is growing at a tremendous rate at the moment and like China has discovered free market economics, it is suggested that if you want to see rural Vietnam as it is now you will need to do it in the next 10 years.
Oh, and we also really got to eat very well… here’s some video of me eating a fertilized duck egg for breakfast
(i’ll be uploading more videos to karllong.blip.tv and hopefully me and my buddies will put a proper edit together of our adventures as we have a tonne of footage)
From a t-shirt perspective Thailand had an awful lot of them, but the vast majority were nothing new, just mass produced knock-offs of college humor type shirts. I did happen to find one gem on a side street, which was this one guy who hand screened his own shirts on movie related themes, I picked up two of these including the City Of God and The Big Lebowski:
Red Bull is quite a theme in Thailand:
Some of the run of the mill in Bankok
I hope to get back on the blogging schedule again, loads of people emailed me while I was away and i’m sorry I can’t get back to everyone, I really appreciate the suggestions, tips and notes, seriously, thank you!