The next morning we got some breakfast, then spent an hour at the bike repair place waiting for our new tire. Naturally the whole family hung around and waited with us, offering us beer at eight in the morning before a long day of riding motorbikes. I guess years of watching backpackers pass through had given them the impression that all westerners drink beer all day, every … [Read more...]
Poipet Rhymes with Toilet for a Reason
Don't feel bad if you've never heard of Poipet before—you're one of the lucky ones. A Cambodian town on the border with Thailand, Poipet has become a miniature exhibition of sorts, displaying everything that's wrong with Southeast Asia in one convenient location. Many visitors to Cambodia avoid 'the toilet' altogether by flying into the country. The rest of us take a bus … [Read more...]
Monkeying Around on the Motorbike Loop
After the statue cave, we saw another cave. I can't remember a single thing about it, so it must have been spectacular. Moving on…. Our next stop was a lake located a few kilometers off the main highway down a dirt road. It was our first experience with dirt roads on our week-long motorbike trip around the central 'loop', but far from our last. We handled this road … [Read more...]
Solving the Mystery of the Disappearing Gas
At the rental place, we tried to get the owner to pay for the tube that had to be replaced, but shockingly, he refused. He claimed that we had agreed we would pay for any damage to the tires, which was technically true, but we understood that to mean we would pay to have any punctures sealed that happened while riding over the often rough roads along the central Laos motorbike … [Read more...]
Japanese Built Road Through Building
What do you do when you're constructing a highway and there's an office tower in the way? In Japan, you run the road through the building. This is the Gate Tower Building in Osaka as seen from the rooftop observation deck of the nearby Umeda Sky building, which is hard to miss as it looks like this: … [Read more...]