I know I said that Alaska was the next stop on this crazy ride.... but in my attempt to make my last post at least minimally cohesive I left out a very important set of happenings... and a shift that happened within me. As I said previously, up until my move to China I had only traveled in foreign places with a guided tour group (with the exception of a week in Mexico with Chris where we stumbled along with minimal Spanish - but
Mexico somehow seems less scary, perhaps because of its' proximity???) Even on my arrival in Tibet, there was someone there to meet me and always someone to fall back on for help to figure things out and to travel with around China. I do admit though, in the beginning, there were many times when I felt very alone - one person surrounded by hundreds of thousands who spoke only Chinese.... But as my language skills improved I started traveling more in the countryside on my own.
I fumbled my way along for awhile but I found that without any English speakers or guides around to help your language skills improve dramatically by necessity. I found that I LOVED traveling solo because there was never any question of compromise. Whatever I wanted to do is exactly what i did and I never had to worry about another person not being interested in the things I wanted to do or worrying that they were bored and therefore sacrificing my own interests in order to make my traveling partners 
comfortable. I enjoy traveling WITH people as well, because it is really nice to share experiences with someone and to have another mind there to bounce ideas off of and to help you process the events which are constantly and inevitably changing you. Both ways of travel are excellent and valuable. But the idea of traveling completely alone had previously been out of my frame of reference. I did quite a bit of travel within China while I lived there, but the most important trip was one that was born of a random conversation..... My friend and colleague, Suzanne, a Singaporean girl who was teaching at the same school as me, was at my apartment one day and in boredom we were flipping through a mini travel atlas and got stuck on SE ASIA. She mentioned she had to go to Singapore for a wedding. I mentioned I always wanted to see Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Angkor 
Wat is between here and there. Why don't we go overland? Thus was born our two month meander through Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Hong Kong. For me it was another first. I had a travel partner but there was no guide and we didn't speak the languages in any of these countries except Hong Kong. We had a vague plan but no set dates except our flight out of Hong Kong in the end. We took trains and buses to the southern border of China and walked across into Vietnam. From there we spent several weeks traveling south to the Mekong 
Delta then took a boat up the Mekong into Cambodia. After our pilgrimages to Angkor Wat and Tuol Sleng we headed north and took another boat into Laos. We spent several more weeks there and then hopped a train south to Bangkok. I am summarizing greatly as the purpose of this blog is not to tell every detail of my past but to explain how it has changed me. At some point I may post a blog for that trip. Those who have known me since then got to see my emails and 
photos during that trip....and you can look on my flickr site where eventually all my good photos will be posted. I experienced many amazing things - night 
spotting for nocturnal critters while walking through the jungle in the middle of the night in pitch black - listening to the jungle wake up at night into a symphony of sound....especially the hollow staccato sound of the centipedes - a sky of endless fireflies in a mesmerizing dance - swimming into caves in Halong Bay - eating cuttlefish - learning to play a mouth harp - seeing a play performed with water puppetry - playing with phosphorescence in the South China Sea - eating pineapple pancakes - getting the worst sunburn of my life - riding in every kind of boat imaginable 
and then some you haven't got the imagination to think up - visiting a Cao Dai temple - riding motorbike taxis whenever possible - dancing with a serpent - the endless faces on the wall at Tuol Sleng Torture Museum and the monument filled with skulls at the Killing Fields in Phnom Penh - relearning American history from the viewpoint of the people of SE Asia - chasing river dolphins - geckos echoing in the night - the epic grandeur of Angkor Wat and the incredible stone gardens that the jungle tries ever to take back - monkeys playing with my things - riding an elephant through the jungle - an adventure hiking up a waterfall with a multitude of dragonflies, getting caught in a downpour and having to bushwhack our way through the jungle to find our way back - tubing down a river full of zip lines and swings - swimming in a bottomless lagoon - relaxing at our sunning spot in the middle of the river on Don Det - the tree of life - LAO food - kitties everywhere - hiking to the hill tribes - mango sticky rice - riding 3 to a moped 
with our favorite ladyboy after a burlesque show - the endless treasures to be found on Khao San Road - getting my hair dreaded and beaded - and friends, friends, and more friends who we meet and leave and meet again. I wasn't going to describe it but the memories pour in despite me. My point was this: there was no schedule, no framework, no plan. We woke up in the morning and decided if we wanted to stay or go to a new place. Then we decided where. We did ALL the things we wanted to do. We skimped on housing and food but splurged on jungle adventures and entrance fees. Even so - we ate PLENTY of amazing food. We tried anything new that someone put in front of us. Local food is cheap. We balanced tourist sites that interested us with time in nature and physical expeditions and time spent with local people in their homes. After such a trip, a week long guided tour to some exotic place could never again suffice for me. I was addicted. I was changed. Most of the people I met 
were traveling for 6 months, a year, or more - all over the world. The person that came back to America and fled immediately to Alaska had all of this very recently pent up inside her as well as all the heartbreak mentioned in the previous post. No wonder I needed to go hide for a while. So I will stop here again, because now it is really time for the episode in Alaska.
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