As we entered China, I expected, as I believe nearly everyone does, to see communism in its most stereo-typical form... dark and cloudy days with big dull concrete block structures, police constantly peaking over your shoulder, and people that are shy and quiet because they are afraid of who is watching or listening. Now, it was a dark, cloudy and rainy day when we entered China, and I instantly felt that it was going to be hard to travel around because after lea...

With Southeast Asia behind us, we moved on to the "western" gateways to the rising "superpower" of the Far East, Hong Kong and Macau, China. Hong Kong seemed freakishly modern, and the drive in from the airport to the massive skyscrapers ahead made me wonder whether we had just escaped the third world and by-passed the first world to some other future place that our society would eventually become. The city of Hong Kong is split between Hong ...

With all the fun of Laos behind us, we moved on to Vietnam. Vietnam has mixed history with our nation and several other Western nations, and I came here wondering whether my expectations of a nation scarred with wars and the limiting constraints of communism would be upheld. Fortunately for me, a young American male, most of those ideas of people hating me for where I was born were not true, and in the month that I spent traveling Vietnam I felt nothing but hospi...

Putting our special forces skills behind us, we moved on down the mighty Mekong River on a two day boat cruise with the locals passing small mountains covered in dense jungle where hill tribe people still live in bamboo huts and subsist on the river before arriving at the old French colonial capitol of Laos, Luang Prabang. Luang Prabang still retains much of its architecture and French character from the 1800's, but the hill tribe cultures along with the Buddh...

After my bus and boat adventure through Laos, I was ready for the jungle, zip-lines (strapping yourself to a wire a sliding along the wire from one point to another), and gibbons (a type of monkey) that the "Gibbon Experience" in northern Laos seemed to promise. The first day was a mix of an extremely long hike down a dirt road to a trail, where the rain began to come down hard and we found ourselves slopping around in the mud and becoming more and more...