Instagram, Foursquare, and Twitter may have killed my blog game, but I think I’m going to do this again.
Currently I’m sitting in the Oneworld Lounge at Hong Kong International Airport, enjoying some free curry chicken dumplings (empanadas?) and shrimp cakes, recharging my perpetually dead iPhone off of my Macbook, and trying to roughly plan out what I’ll be doing with myself for the next 20 days.
Just over a week before Hurricane Sandy hit, I had left New York by car barely six hours after returning to it by plane after a long weekend in Chicago. 3000 miles later I had spent time in Chicago, Denver, and Vegas before stopping in Long Beach for a long weekend with friends. A few days before arriving in LA I had abruptly redeemed a slew of American Airlines Advantage miles in a long winded phone conversation from the patio of a Colfax Ave Starbucks. This resulted in my departure from LAX for Bangkok via Hong Kong yesterday. I am scheduled to return to Chicago from Saigon via Hong Kong the day before Thanksgiving (see you at Crack Friday).
Monday night I dressed as the Phantom of the Opera as Gucci Mane, dined on a bucket of homemade ceviche with a bottle of champagne, and fell asleep without an alarm set. Tuesday morning I woke up with just enough time to get to the airport and fly to Asia.
I spent last night and all day today exploring Hong Kong. This morning I accidentally ate a goose for breakfast. And I finally got to ride the mid-levels covered elevators! Hong Kong is cool and I will get to that eventually- perhaps after I catch up on 16 months of highly blogable but unblogged adventures.
My rough plan as of yesterday was to spend a few days in Bangkok before heading east to a beach or two and then to Cambodia by land. I would spend a few days exploring the ruins at Angkor Wat/Siem Reap before traveling to Phnom Penh and eventually on to Saigon by boat. I figured this would be cheap, weird, and a sufficiently challenging way to spend 3 weeks.
Today I realized that my plan might be a bad one. I could theoretically secure a visa for land entry to Vietnam in Bangkok, but it’d be way easier to simply get the visa on arrival at the airport in Saigon. I would like to see Angkor Wat, but I would not like to become berserk on malaria pills and I would definitely not like to get malaria. I want to see Phnom Penh, but only because it sounds weird and I know I have no logical reason to ever be there. Also, my plan completely skipped over the beaches of Southern Thailand.
Currently I am thinking that I will use these three weeks to take advantage of the low cost airlines that have apparently taken over southeast Asia. In some order, I plan to go to Phuket, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and maybe Bali. I will swim in the Indian Ocean and* the Marina Bay Sands infinity pool! For this plan to work, however, I must end in Saigon and have a visa waiting for me on arrival- otherwise I miss out on my flight back to the US and miss out on Thanksgiving and get disowned by my family. Also these “low cost” airlines must prove to be low cost. And safe. At least safer than a Cambodian riverboat.
Plan A:
Plan B:
This has not been proofread, so please excuse anything and everything that does not quite make sense. Flying to Thailand now.
This entry was written by , posted on November 1, 2012 at 3:52 am, filed under Travel. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.