In 2017, I had thought of myself as a pretty adventurous person. After all, earlier that year I had quit my high-paying job in New York to travel the world. By the time my wife and I landed in Bangkok, Thailand we had already been to 19 European countries and lived out of our car for three months traveling around the US to visit our national parks. I was seasoned, or so I thought.
Nothing prepared me for the culture shock I received when I landed in Thailand. The heat, the sights, the smells. I got homesick almost immediately. It became pretty apparent to me that traveling in the western world is easy for an American because most things are very familiar. However, Southeast Asia is wildly different.
Luckily, after about 24 hours of near panic my wife and I made a decision: we just had to go all in and embrace our new surroundings. We hit the town of Bangkok, eating street food, meeting locals and riding around in tuk-tuks. Before we knew it, we were loving life and learning things each day. The new cultures, the new cuisine and the new people. It was incredible.
Over the course of two months we would ride in broken down buses, cross borders on foot, take some very sketchy flights, do a home stay in the rice paddies of Vietnam, eat some wild food, stay in some magnificent cities, ride in more tuk-tuks than we can remember, and totally fall in love with a part of the world that had once been insanely foreign to us. To me, this is what travel and adventure is all about: just going all-in. The fear is natural, but I can assure you the fear of missing out is far worse.
Nothing prepared me for the culture shock I received when I landed in Thailand. The heat, the sights, the smells. I got homesick almost immediately. It became pretty apparent to me that traveling in the western world is easy for an American because most things are very familiar. However, Southeast Asia is wildly different.
Luckily, after about 24 hours of near panic my wife and I made a decision: we just had to go all in and embrace our new surroundings. We hit the town of Bangkok, eating street food, meeting locals and riding around in tuk-tuks. Before we knew it, we were loving life and learning things each day. The new cultures, the new cuisine and the new people. It was incredible.
Over the course of two months we would ride in broken down buses, cross borders on foot, take some very sketchy flights, do a home stay in the rice paddies of Vietnam, eat some wild food, stay in some magnificent cities, ride in more tuk-tuks than we can remember, and totally fall in love with a part of the world that had once been insanely foreign to us. To me, this is what travel and adventure is all about: just going all-in. The fear is natural, but I can assure you the fear of missing out is far worse.
Here are some of my favorite images from our time in Southeast Asia. Countries visited were: Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, Singapore and Indonesia. Enjoy!
