I’ve written before about the travel phenomenon that Chad and I have dubbed “the Japan effect.” Basically, this occurs when you go from someplace that fits your preferences perfectly (Japan, Buenos Aires) to someplace with some challenges. After spending only a week in Japan prior to our arrival in Vietnam, our first days in Saigon…
Category: Asia
Nagano Snow Monkeys
I am about five weeks behind on blogging, but I’m choosing to view this as a good thing. It means I’ve been really, really busy with both work and travel. Travel is the goal and work makes it possible, so those are the best priorities. Still, our two nights in Nagano feel like a very…
Tokyo Twice
We were more than halfway through an immensely hard 2024 before we even started planning this leg of our travels. In light of how challenging the year was, we decided a more dramatic trip was in order and so we decided to return to Asia for the first time since 2019. Our one and only…
FAQ – What Did We Learn in Leg 3
From the very beginning of our planning, we expected our Asia leg to be the most exotic and therefore most memorable of our initial three long trips. What we didn’t expect was how many once-in-a-lifetime experiences we’d be able to pack in and how many of them we could only describe as “magical.” While so…
FAQ – How Did Our Numbers Look for Leg 3?
Numbers are great for wrapping our heads around all the experiences we’ve had. So, here is our 3rd leg represented in numbers: Countries visited: 5, all new for us – Singapore, Cambodia, Thailand, Japan, IndonesiaCities visited (overnight): 9Number of hotels: 8Number of hotel nights: 17Number of apartments: 4Number of apartment nights: 68Total beds slept in:…
Bali – A Beautiful Mixed Bag
We had very high expectations for our two weeks in Bali. The town of Canggu has been #1 on Nomadlist, a website we use to help us estimate costs for places and get ideas on where to go, since before we left on our trip over a year ago. Over and over we’ve heard wonderful…
Extraordinary Osaka
Our life in Osaka was a funny mix of normal and amazing. We established an easy routine and were very comfortable in our small Airbnb apartment. We had perfect late spring weather throughout our stay and made a lot of time for activities – so much so that we left Osaka a little tired and…
Hiroshima by Shinkansen
We really wanted to visit Hiroshima for a number of reasons, but the main one was that we felt it important to confront the troubled history of what the U.S. did to this city in World War II with the atomic bond. Also, it is the setting for one of my favorite films and an…
Hello, Tokyo
Tokyo may be the most wonderfully strange, utterly magical city in the world. From hyper-efficient public transit to fun modes of serving food to throngs of people wearing suits to beautiful parks and temples to the shining city lights at night, we LOVED it. It doesn’t hurt that Tokyo is the capital of the most…
What We Did in Chiang Mai
When I wrote my first Chiang Mai post, we’d seen very little of the city beyond our neighborhood and done very little to experience Thailand beyond participating in Songkran. We found much more time for fun exploration in our last three weeks in Chiang Mai. We definitely didn’t do everything (we skipped the elephant sanctuaries…