BACK TO BANGKOK

Three months and 23 days after departing Bangkok en route to Lisbon, I am back in Bangkok after a 44hr journey that involved a 6hr bus from Prague to Berlin, a 2.5 hr walk thru Berlin to the airport in the dead of the night, 4 hr wait at the Berlin airport, flight to Amsterdam, 4 hr layover, 11 hr flight to Bangkok, and 1.5hr bus ride to Khao San Rd. So here I am, chilling for a day before heading down to Ko Samet, 3hrs to the south. There I will as much of nothing as possible for 4 days before heading back to Bangkok to meet up with Niall and fly north to Chaing Mai on 14 Oct or so.

Prague is a great city, probably the most photogenic city I've been too. The old areas the wrap the Vlatva River are in excellent condition, and the history of it all is overwhelming. Obviously though, it is immensely overtouristed, the majority of the people on the streets in the city are tourists, but what would you expect.

So the European travels are now complete. Without doubt, Turkey was the best place for traveling. It combined a wide range of sights and diverse natural beauty with the experience of feeling of being in a different place, with a different culture that Europe cannot match. My travel plan was to go to Eastern Europe, as in different than Europe, but for the most part, it is better catergorized as Central Europe, or the eastern side of Europe, as it not much different than the western bit, just a few years back in the developmental process. Even Romania, much further behind the rest, is just a poorer version of Europe. Not until Turkey did things change in a drastic way, and there, most the change was in the Eastern half. Traveling through a culturally distinct land is much more interesting than plodding through Europe to see all the sights. Just walking through a Turkish city can be interesting enough. So thanks to Chris for injecting the Turkish into the travels. Of course, I wish I could have hit Croatia and the Balkans, more of Czech and Hungary, and Poland, but there is never enough time and money for everything.

The general plan for the next 10 weeks is to head to Chaing Mai and northern Thailand for two weeks, then east in Laos for about two weeks, traveling south and east into Vietnam, journey through the southern half of Vietnam, then cut into Cambodia up through the killing fields and Ankar Wat before returning to Thailand.