Honeymoon Round-Up

Thursday, Aug 23rd, 2007
Categories: adventures, my photos, travels

In late July 2006, I proposed to my then girlfriend of two years, Marcia Yunuen Vara, and thankfully she happily accepted. We had expected to get married in the spring of the following year, but in the fall, as we started the wedding planning process, we quickly realized that late fall / early winter was our best option to have a relatively inexpensive, small wedding (unfortunately, living in a highly desirable ‘destination wedding’ location can have it’s problems). In the middle of October, we picked our wedding date to be December 1st, 2006. 6 weeks away. We were both fine with this date. We knew we wanted to go on an extended traveling honeymoon and we had a few places we knew we wanted to go. Marcia decided to plan the wedding and I set about to plan the honeymoon. While Marcia ran around all day pulling her hair out, looking after the wedding, I stayed up all day and night researching travel guides and websites. I finally settled on Bali, Indonesia, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and India (we didn’t quite make it to Laos). I booked plane tickets for: Vallarta → Los Angeles → Bali → Bangkok → Delhi → Los Angeles → Vallarta. The planning for travel inside the Thailand / Cambodia / Vietnam area and the traveling inside India was left open to allow for spontaneous decision making and so I roughed out itineraries for these parts of the trip to have some idea of how long to spend in each place. I booked hotels for the first night or two in each location and researched places to stay in every possible town or city we would have any chance of visiting. I had Lonely Planets or Rough Guides for each country and by the time we got going, my guides looked like they had been attacked by post-it notes and a yellow highlighter.

The entire trip would be 10 weeks (2 1/2 months).

On December 1st, Marcia and I were married in a small but lovely civil ceremony on the beach in the town we live in, Bucerias, in the state of Nayarit, Mexico. Our close family, local friends and a few of my good friends from Los Angeles were in attendance. Two days later we left for L.A. and 5 days later, we were on our way to Bali.

Along our trip, I had planned on updating this blog in real-time, but kept on having errors logging into WordPress (the system that controls this site), I found out later, after the trip, that a plug-in I was running (bad behavior) had basically banned any ip address that came from Southeast Asia. And so, I wrote emails home to our families and when I could log in to the system, I’d post the emails. Truth be told, there just wasn’t enough time to fully experience everything and have the time to synthesize it enough to write cohesive blog posts. It’s a good thing I didn’t post in real time, we would have spent the whole trip in dodgy internet cafes.

I brought my Canon 5D with me and one 24-70mm lens. Over the course of our trip, I took over 8,000 photos. Downloading them to a small hard drive, along the way, only editing with the in-camera monitor. Upon our return, I let the photos sit unedited, for a month or two and then slowly worked through each country, editing, processing and posting sets of photos, at the rate of one country per month. The photos reside on Flickr, as do 99% of the photos found on this website. After uploading a new country’s photoset, I would create a post on this blog, summarizing our experience in said country and linking to the photoset on Flickr. I would then go through and create blog posts that highlight certain photos or a combination of text and photos that relate different aspects of our trip: interesting things we’d seen or done, travel tips for other sojourners, dealing with travel fatigue, the idea of sleeping in a new place every 3 days, new people we met along the way, etc…

So without further ado, here are the gazillion entries I’ve made, documenting our 2 1/2 month backpacker honeymoon though Bali, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and India. Enjoy!:

Posts made on on the trip

Dec 09: Hong Kong
Dec 18: Ubud Bali
Dec 21: Greetings from Dreamland
Dec 21: Kuta, last stop
Dec 31: Chiang Mai, part 1
Dec 31: Chiang Mai, part 2
Jan 07: Saludos from Siem Reap, Cambodia
Jan 09: Phnom Penh
Jan 17: Viet Nam
Jan 22: Mother Ganga
Feb 11: Greetings from Rajasthan

Bali

Thailand

Cambodia

Vietnam

India: Varanasi

Quality Peoples