Road Trip Map

We created a tripline.net map for our road trip, in addition to the international leg.  Both can be found on our maps page.

Animated map

A family friend invited us to talk about our trip at the Friendship Force of Northern Colorado.  It was great to talk to a group of excited travelers, and it was also a fun, if challenging exercise to condense a year of travel into 40 minutes.  While preparing our presentation, we discovered tripline.net, which is a great way to visualize a trip with an animated map.  The map animation slows down eventually when you have as many way-points as we did, so we created a less detailed overview (just one point in each country) for our presentation, but here is the full, nitty gritty version:

Postcard: Ambalavao

The hat rock, in Ambalavao, Madagascar.

Bangkok to Antananarivo

We had heard there was a direct flight from Bangkok to Antananarivo in Madagascar, but we couldn't get there that way.  We could fly there via Paris, Johannesburg, or Nairobi.  Nairobi seemed the closest connection, so we chose a nine hour Kenya Airways flight to Nairobi, with a layover and then another two and a half hour flight to Antanananrivo.  Our flight left Bangkok at 12:30 am, on the timetable of international flight that doesn't deal on local time.

We had to check out of our hotel at noon, and so we killed time in the plentiful shopping malls, trying to avoid being outside. It's hot and muggy outside, and that's a reason, but our main goal is to avoid getting caught up in the Thai New Year, called Songkran.  On Songkran a few drops of water and talcum powder are pressed to the forehead of the elders as a sign of respect. But really, after that is done in the early morning hours of the day, it becomes a water gun and talcum powder fight in the streets.  We don't want to lead into 11 hours of flight soaking wet and powdered in talc. We have read about where the water fights are prohibited, and so we stick to our hotel lobby, the elevated railway, and the shopping malls. There are guards with large garbage cans by each entrance to the train, and teenagers empty their supersoaker water guns in them. They are soaked to the skin. As the day progresses they are covered in smears of talcum powder as well.  The trains are crowded and it's increasingly hard not to get damp and talc-smeared as more bodies press into the train cars.

Thailand: meh

Thailand was the only country we visited that disappointed us.  There were a number of factors contributing to that.  Numerous people had raved about how inexpensive Thailand is, but after visiting Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, it seemed outrageously expensive—it was no Australia, but we certainly wouldn’t call it cheap!  It was also very Westernized, which was a strong contrast to the countries we’d just come from.  It felt a bit like the Thailand exhibit at the "International Pavillion" of an American theme park.  And it was relentlessly hot, muggy and buggy.  We’d been in other places as hot (though not as buggy) and enjoyed them, but Thailand just didn’t seem to offer much to offset being completely sweat drenched 10 minutes after stepping outdoors. 

For perspective, we still want to return to Bolivia, even after our escape from there, but we have no interest in returning to Thailand.  Unfortunately, we’d already committed to spending three weeks there, thinking it would be an inexpensive place to relax and slow down before diving into 6 weeks of fast-paced travel in Madagascar, Egypt and Jordan.