Thailand

Perhaps one of my favorite places in the world - PAI Our bungalow happiness IS a hammock

so many sweet outdoor cafes and coffee shops, Pai was filled with live music, night market shopping, and was just a chill mountainous town

It was about a 3 hour (very curvy, fast, windy, vicious) drive up the mountain to this quaint town

The view from our hotel in Koh Panang

The most beautiful beach ever (next to Abel Tasman, NZ of course) where I walked post food-poisoning once I could leave the room

The Art Cafe, great little half-outdoor cafe with organic munchies and coffee and books

Karissa and Buddha

Karissa practicing meditation at a local temple

i love Engrish

Banana pancakes at our fav restaurant (Juicy 4 U) Chiang Mai - on Christmas Day

Combination lovely AND fantastic

Fresh coconut juice my FAVORITE!

We did a cooking class in Chiang Mai, first they took us to the market to teach us about the ingredients

Then we cooked one dish after another

...and cooked some more (while eating each dish we prepared)

and when we couldn't eat anymore of what we cooked....we got foot massage.

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Thailand was a magical experience, I would definitely go back and spend more time traveling around. What they say is true, the food is amazing (as long as you eat the right stuff), the people are so friendly, it's colorful and beautiful. Being a Buddhist country, there were temples on just about every corner in Chiang Mai, we shared a taxi with a monk a time or two, the night markets are crazy crowded and it's one big stimulus overload, but so fun!

I was just there for 2 weeks and then Karissa stayed to get her Yoga Teacher Training certificate on the island of Koh Panang for 3 months. Wished I could have stayed...

India

My cousin, Karissa!
And...the food. Spoons available, but eating with your hands is the traditional route of food consumption

Cruising the streets of Chennai

The view from our hotel

The beach in Mamallapuram, just don't take your shoes off

The beauty of India...

A great place to chill and a common theme in the cafes

Cows eating trash everywhere, so sad

Hmm, which cup of chai to sip...

Walking through the backpackistan (Mamallapuram - South Coast of India)

The "cooking class" we asked a restaurant owner to give us

The output

In the impromptu cooking class, we just asked the restaurant owner to teach us how to make a few dishes, so he did, and it was really fun (except that the extremely uneven cutting board and sharp flimsy knife were no match for my finger)

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Since I'm going to be in school for the rest of my life, I decided to take one last trip to see my cousin Karissa before my traveling career is put on hold.

I spent only a week in India, just enough time to see a bit of a city, Chennai where I flew into, and some of the coast, Mamallapuram, where we stayed for 5 days. Chennai was really just a place for Indian people and not necessarily tourists, which was great, I got to experience their way of life without having to cater to Westerners. We ate food with our hands, at for breakfast the kind of food we might eat for dinner in an Indian restaurant here, and it was all fabulous. The people really were nice, except when they were trying to scam you, and it didn't seem dangerous at all. Dirty? Yes. Streets lined with people sprawled out over the "sidewalks" and starving cattle digging through the street garbage for something to eat. There really weren't garbage cans, per se, just piles of rubbish all over.

Street driving really is mad. Most people seemed to drive scooters/motor bikes. They fit 2,3,4 people on them, and it seemed as if no one was ever really holding on, despite the crazy driving. Honking starts at 4am and stops around midnight, so if you're looking for peace and quiet, India is not the place.

Our time in Mamallapuram was pretty chill, they call those towns "Backpackistan" which is a good description. In order to get Real Indian food, we just walked a couple blocks out of our town and went to eat with the locals, where meals (for two) were about $2, as opposed to $10 or so in the village area. Lots of begging in the backpackers towns, of course, but not in the city, hardly at all actually. They're not conditioned to it because there aren't foreigners roaming around to beg usually.

We would have loved to visit more temples, as they are all over, but we only made it to two, Swami Vivekenanda built the "ice temple" and was the first to introduce ice to India! The others required too much walking for me. It was a truly relaxing week with quite a lot of cultural education.

I received a traditional Ayurvedic massage (always my goal, to learn massage techniques from every country I visit so I can always take something home to practice). The most interesting part of this was actually when I went to the store front where I had booked the massage, and the man working there said "you go with my son, my wife will massage you at home" and I was thinking "oh shit" and wasn't quite sure what to make of that. So...I walked for about 15 minutes in the dark side streets, and finally down an ALLEY where it was VERY dark, and came to their house. If it hadn't been for the "Ayurvedic Massage" signs I saw on the way there a couple times, i would have been r-u-n-n-i-n-g back to the guest house. Oh, and the guy escorting me didnt' exactly speak English, so it was a long, relatively silent walk. I tried to ask some questions about the credibility of his mom, but didn't get much. The massage: lots of oil, and not the traditional "spilling of the oil on the forehead" you always see in pictures. Not swedish massage, but more like circulatory with lots of (what we call) "duck quacks" with the hands. Not real relaxing but hey, I was going for education! (and it was $10)

Massage Website

For information on my massage business please visit www.emilypassic.com

Sitka, Alaska

Andy took me out on MAPLE and I was lucky enough to experience a day underway on the buoy tender. They were testing some oil spill equipment, as you can see from the photos above. It was fun to see how he does his job (he is the XO, second in command of a crew of 55) and watch how the bridge is run on a day underway.

Yes, this beach is actually in Alaska, we had a coastie take 6 of us on the morale boat over to Kruzoff island with our mountain bikes and our lunch. So we biked across logging roads on an uninhabited island, hiked a couple miles on gaming trails, and found this beach at the end...

Janae came up to visit for the weekend

Janae must have brought some good luck with her, because look what we saw! And 2 cubs with her!

A 5 hour hike up Gavan Hill (I consider that to be more of a mountain, less of a hill)

We noticed, through a hole in the snow, that this was what we were walking on top of

Gavan Hill

Indian river hike, about 8 miles

One of my morning hikes up Verstovia, the trail head is about a 2 minute walk from Andy's doorstep

Driving home from fishing one evening we saw about 17 bald eagles on this beach, one protecting a carcass and the others making sneak attacks

The fog blanketing Sitka

Last day in Sitka, 6am walk along the water....

My first hike with Andy, we did Verstovia, about a 5 hour hike, and crossed some slippery, snowy, steep terrain, but absolute beauty

he even tooking me to a shooting range to try out his rifle

Mucho fishing, I LOVE IT! The king salmon were jumping by the hundreds it seemed, these massive fish "breeching" righ in front of us

this was not one of them, but this is a Doly Vardon, a member of the salmon/trout family...and we did eat this for dinner.

2 weeks in the land of the "Last Frontier"

I loved every bit of Sitka, this was actually my second time going up there, and I plan to go back one more time before Andy leaves. You can do every outdoor activity possible, not be too hot (ha!) and in the summer, have loads of sunlight! Now, I know it's not the same story in the winter, darkness and all, but being a marine climate, they aren't getting snow from October to May like you might expect in Alaska. It sprinked on us about half of the days, but the other half were completely dry and sunny and gorgeous. And the consistent rain makes it just as green and beautiful as our rainforest in the Olympics.

We saw hundreds of bald eagles, they're "out" this time of year in full force. Saw deer roaming the trails, mama bear and her 2 cubs out in a field, went shooting and fishing, hiking almost daily, went out on a boat, mountain biking, and cooked some awesome food!