@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } Sawadeecap or Sawadeecah (for the females)!
With less than a week remaining before we depart for our semester in Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia, we feel an overwhelming excitement to meet you and begin our adventure together! As we sit at the Carpe Diem Headquarters in Portland trying… Read More
After enjoying a semi-permanent home in Chiang Mai, the shorter ‘chapters’ of our journey over the last few weeks have made for a whirlwind of new sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and feels… one of which is the tightness of our backs from shifting loaded backpacks from songthaws to trains to taxis to boats to pickup trucks to get us from north to south Thailand.Out of Chaing Mai we first traveled… Read More
Hey everyone sorry for the lag time.
We have spent around a month in the interesting city of Chiang Mai, Thailand. The five of us spend our time in different ways.
-Brian has taken a Thai Massage course with Kuan Amanda. He has also taken some time to reflect on his different goals in life, such as his future coffee shop.
-Amanda has done a variety of activities, the Thai… Read More
A group shot with “grandpa” and Mong at the boat races. After a good luck ceremony performed by villagers during the last night of our trek.Resting after a long day of hiking. On the trail Sunrise at Angkor Wat… Read More
Right outside Chiang mai on an Eco-farm we met Matt. Matt was a retired wall street stock brocker whom found buddhism, moved to Thailand, and was here to teach us about meditation and yoga. We had a rigorous meditation schedule starting at 7am with meditation a break/morning yoga and breakfest, meditation and buddhism lectures, then a lunch break, back to meditation until dinner and then a night yoga session. After… Read More
We made our way to Huay Xai, a border town on the Thailand/Laos border, so that we could enjoy the Gibbon Experience. Getting to Huay Xai was quite the adventure as it required taking a 14 hour bus ride. We all boarded the bus at 7pm and prepared ourselves for our travel into the night. The bus wasn’t very crowded which was quite nice as it allowed us to spread… Read More
We descended from the hills of Lao into our home base of Luang Prabang, a UNESCO World Heritage City, looking ahead to three days of relax and exploration before traveling onwards towards the Thai border. We had a good meal and rest in preparation for the next morning when we made our way to a set of brilliant clear blue waterfalls. Tessa and Amanda chose to pump their way to… Read More
The trek….Let us give you a break down each day of the 5 day trek and 2 day water rafting in Laung Prabang…..
Day one,we got into several different moving vehicles and meet our guides Mong and Mr.Jim. What wonderful men they were and they treated us so well along the trip. One hour later finally making it to where we begin. Hiking through many river, rice fields, mud, climbing… Read More
Hey There everyone.SOO much has happened its difficult to recap it. Some highlights are as follows: Our group did a Tuk-Tuk ride for peace on International day of peace in Battam Bamg(No idea if that’s the correct spelling, seen many version for the name of this city). Lots of fun, we got some advice there from a Buddhist Monk. He guided us through mediation telling us the the importance of… Read More
Hey everyone,I would tell you where exactly we are but my role in the group does not involve pronouncing or spelling names correctly. What I will tell you is we are painting! Painting classrooms to be exact. We finished our two base coats of white paint in the three classrooms we’re working on and graduate to sky blue paint tomorrow. We’re painting classrooms for the street families compound where we… Read More
Hello everyone!
The five of us are all well rested from 35 hours of airplane travel and ready to explore Siem Reap. Walking around the city is crazy with mopeds, bicycles and cars to watch out for. The people are so sweet and kind. The place we are staying at is Nilla Villa Guesthouse, and when walking and meeting the place all of us fell in love. We are all… Read More
I’ve just gotten off the phone with the leaders and it appears that our small group is all together and hanging out! They actually share the first leg of their flights with team India, so it should make for some good conversation during their long transit across the Pacific. For now, everyone seems to have arrived early and we are all set to go! Please stay tuned for blogs from… Read More
From a buzzing Carpe Diem HQ, we leaders Brian & Amanda excitedly and humbly post this first blog to launch our South East Asian adventure. In a week, we will fly off from San Francisco en route to Siem Reap, Cambodia where we will begin our team orientation. From there the adventure will unfold as it will, each day gauranteed to gift us with opportunities for growth and understanding both… Read More
Hey all,As our trip comes to a close, it’s time for the final blog. We find ourselves possibly stranded on Koh Tao, and as being stuck somewhere goes, it definitely could be worse. (More beautiful beaches and scuba?! No! Anything but that!) As most of you probably know, the situation in Bangkok prevents any possibility of leaving on our scheduled Bangkok- Hong Kong flight. As of now we don’t really… Read More
Hello one and all-Completed our student ran free travel which we spent exploring the vast complexities of Bangkok. It was a little hard getting used to the city life, which was far more hectic than Chiang Mia. Regardless the city was great. Spent one of the days doing a cooking course which varied with 10 courses and a trip to the market to know what we were using. And with… Read More
Welcome back faithful readers, hope all who read this are doing as well as Team Seasia. After our adventures in Chiang Mia, the troop set off for IWP, a women’s justice center located in Mae Rim. There we learned much about Buddhism, eachother, and our inner being; deep stuff. There was a tight schedule of meditation of various sorts throughout the day; from sitting mediation, to walking meditation, to yoga.… Read More
Greetings,apologies on the lateness of this message as well. A week and a half or so ago, seasia traveled to Pun Pun organic farm to learn about organic farming (obviously). There we learned from nightly slideshows the importance of seed saving and the ease of earthen building.We did a variety of different tasks every day. One day we made compost, a mixture of manure, old straw, banana leaves, and EM… Read More
Hello avid and probably confused readers!
I would like to apologize for this late entry on our Gibbon Experience as it was almost assuradly not quite as recent as the timing of this blog would indicate! try about 2 weeks or so back in time.
In any case we all enjoyed the Gibbon Experience immensely. Trekking through hilly and steamy jungle terrain was not nearly as high in quantity as… Read More
Greetings faithful blog minions!
For the past week, and a day on either side of the week for rest, our motley crew have been occupied with our group trekking choice of THE NAM HA CHALLENGE. This trek, picked from a website given to us by our trip leaders early in our trip, was a 7 day excursion into the jungles of luang namtha and around the Namtha national park. The… Read More
After saying our last goodbyes in battambang we backed up and headed to Siem Reap. Seven hours of travel by boat and we arrived at our new home, Nita Villa, for a couple days. Our first day was spent touring a silk farm and learning the meticulous process of silk weaving, all the way from silk worm to silk shirt. Later that day we also got to see some stone… Read More
