The Mist, the Cloud, the Tea, and the Sunset: The Trails of Shizhuo
The hardest part of any itinerary is usually not where to visit or when, but for how long. There are always disagreements online over how much time each place deserves, with some people claiming to have fully explored everything in one day, while others take a week. And when it’s […]
Spilling the Tea about Alishan
Victor loves coffee, and this blog is a clear testament to that. There are so many posts about coffee tours, coffee shops, coffee destinations, conversations about coffee over coffee, and even hiking through coffee plantations. Yet if you were to go through our kitchen, you’d find at most two bags […]
In the Sea of Clouds
When we travel, we usually try to avoid pre-planning everything. By rigidly scripting every activity down to the minute, you can easily deprive yourself of genuine travel experiences, instead just following the “script”. But that doesn’t work with sunrises and sunsets, especially if you want to catch them from a […]
Hugging Trees in Alishan
Alishan was giving me a headache. Trying to fit this mountainous forest into our itinerary was a challenging task. No direct trains from Taipei. No direct buses. Renting a car and driving up there? Maybe. But that wasn’t ideal. The most reasonable option was to get to the city of […]
Getting My Ears Picked in Taiwan
One of the pleasures of going to Asia, at least for me, is the massages. Everywhere from Thailand to Vietnam to Cambodia, the massages are excellent, cheap, and widely available. From restorative foot massages after a long day of hiking, to full body deep tissue rubdown that leaves me in […]
Normandy, France or How We Spent Nearly $4,000 in Four Days
In the summer of 2009, after I finished another year of law school, we traveled to France. I flew to Paris two days before Julia to get my “art museum” fix and managed to visit four museums in that time. But once in Paris, I immediately discovered that food prices […]
The Highway to Our Own Personal Hell (Wyoming)
Our road trip in 2004 had many memorable moments in California, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado, but the one anecdote we always associate with this trip actually happened in the “drive-through” state of Wyoming, on a long stretch of a highway, deep at night. We were eight days deep into our […]
The Trip That Started It All
This is probably going to be the oldest story published on this blog, back from March 2004, before we had our backpacks and cats. Victor has been in the US for less than a year and was itching to discover more of America than just the Chicagoland area. He was […]
A Traveler’s Dilemma: The Human Zoo
In December 2013, while traveling through northern Thailand, we had the option of visiting a hill tribe village. In Chiang Mai, nearly every tourist agency advertised these tours with photos of smiling indigenous women with unnaturally long necks wrapped in brass rings. Initially, the trip looked tempting, and we even […]
Egypt: Camping in the Desert Mustafa-Style
Our Egypt desert adventures start here. As the sun was setting over the White Desert, our Jeep headed towards the overnight camping spot. With no large dunes or stones to block our view of sunset or sunrise, our guide and driver found a spot in a large flat valley, white […]
Egypt: Black Desert, White Desert, Best Desert
We’ve never had a bad trip. We’ve had a lot of mishaps and quite frankly several shitshows, but we never have been to a country we didn’t like. And now, looking back at dozens of excellent trips we’ve taken around the world, I can tell you with complete honesty and […]