eccentric lgbt travel, far off the beaten path
It’s funny, the very day I posted my first “Perfect Travel Day” post about Mostar, Herzegovina, was the exact day I am about to describe to you. Perhaps there’s some kind of mojo attached to it? Anyway, I won’t get too meta here – I’ll instead tell you about our most magical day in Kampot and Kep, Southern Cambodia.
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Sound familiar? This is the second installment in our Bear Sanctuary travels – the first being back from our first trip in the Balkans last October. I’d say I’d think it’s the last, but there’s a magnetic power of attraction between David and me and orphan bear sanctuaries. And no, I’m not complaining.
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For as long as I can remember, I’ve been captivated by Central Asia. My father runs an antique rug store in the Seattle area, and since I was a wee child I’ve been surrounded by Central Asian textiles, from Uzbek suzanis to Kyrgyz shyrdaks. For one reason or another, I’ve yet to make it to the region from whence these textiles came, but that is about to change. David and I are heading on our second trip of the year – to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. And I couldn’t be more excited about it.
Prior to starting our 2016 Southeast Asia trip, I had thought to myself, “Surely we won’t be bringing a lot of kitsch home from this trip – what will there be to entice us?” I had spent time Southeast Asia in the past (though, fairly, primarily in Thailand), and thought I wouldn’t be bringing home Beer Chang tank tops and flowy backpacker pants…so what else was there? Dried Durian certainly didn’t make the list.
But as travel often does, it takes your assumptions and proceeds to whip you in the ass with them. Not only did we fill a bag with gifts before even entering Vietnam, the third nation of our trip, but we ended up having to buy another bag to porter our things from the mere 48 hours we spent in the nation’s capital of Hanoi. #consumerism Read more
We ended up in Kampot after I had a hipster traveler existential crisis. Feeling like we weren’t going anywhere truly “off the beaten path,” I opted to cut our time short in Koh Rong Samloem by a day to spend a night in the relative backwater (at least, compared to Siem Reap and Bangkok) of Kampot, in southern Cambodia.
We wanted to have a laid back 24 hours in a laid back town before heading to less-laid back Siem Reap, and Kampot turned out to do just the trick. 
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As a full time employee of Corporate America, I spend a lot more time daydreaming about travel than actually traveling. I toyed around with the idea last year of posting about the places that take me down wikipedia and travel blog rabbit holes, but with little follow through. And as I’m kind of spent talking about Southeast Asia for the moment, I couldn’t think of a better time to revisit my various wanderlustings. So without further ado, find below the five spots keeping me up at night, planning adventures well into the 2020s.
Mozambique
I have never been to Africa. And while there are a million places I would love to visit there, Mozambique is at the top of the list. I know a few people who have had the privilege of traveling there and I have only heard amazing things. From the unspoiled Indian Ocean beaches (the country stretches from South Africa in the south all the way to Tanzania in the north – that’s an impressive coastline), to a fascinating and tragic history of Portuguese colonialism, to the diversity of people found there (like many places on the Indian ocean, trade routes catalyzed cross fertilization of cultures belonging to the nations surrounding the body of water), everything about Mozambique is attractive to me. There’s even a healthy dose of modernist architecture to be found in the larger cities of Maputo and Beira.
Well, maybe everything but the million hours and several thousand dollars it takes to get there from Seattle.
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I have to be honest with this one. I did no work to plan what we’d see and not see while in Herzegovina. The Bosnian portion of our Serbia/Bosnia trip in this past December was a fairly standard itinerary: into Sarajevo, then Mostar, and back to Sarajevo again. In Mostar we hung around the Old Bridge, and did our best to fend off rather forceful drinking invitations from the sole two patrons of our hotel bar. Peer pressure doesn’t always work (except when it does).
It was New Years Eve, and we’d had an absolutely magical day in Mostar – we went to bed before midnight (as we had done in Tbilisi, Georgia a year prior), as we were to wake up early (in Bosnian standards, anyway) to see some key sights around Herzegovina the next day. Read more
David and I are big tattoo fans, and we each have quite a few that adorn our bods. Mine are all related to travel and experiences I’ve had in different places around the world, and after spending a week in Cambodia, I knew I wanted a piece of local ink to express my feelings about the complex nation. 
As it turns out, David was on board, too, and we set off developing our different designs. As or more important as the design, however, was finding the right artist to do the work. We have an artist we use here in Seattle, and we wanted to find the right artist in Cambodia, with whom we could develop a similar, easy-going rapport. Read more
I didn’t know a term existed for the quasi-futuristic, kitschy American architecture of the 50s, 60s, and 70s until a few days ago. But as I drove home from my parents’ house (the same house I grew up in) on the less-than-scenic Lake City Way last week, I drove by the in-progress restoration of Ying’s Chinese Foods Drive-In – as I have done multiple times before. I decided I needed to photograph it, and in my googlings I came across the term “Googie Architecture.” Things started to click, and I made plans to take the husband on a Golden Hour Thursday night date to document this both captivating and extremely kitschy building.
Growing up, as my father was working to start his own business, I remember going to Ying’s on special occasions for American Chinese staples like General Tso’s or almond chicken. I was particularly attracted to the fried rice cakes the kitchen staff had colorfully and artificially colored vibrant pinks and greens and yellows. The building has always had a special place in my memory, and yet I didn’t know the history of the plot of land itself. Read more
Coming into our trip to Southeast Asia, architecture peeping wasn’t in my plans. Despite evidence to the contrary from our tour of New Khmer architecture in Phnom Penh, I didn’t actually plan any of our adventures in modernist architecture – they just happened to occur. Sure, I may have screamed and waved my hands for tuk tuk drivers to pull over at random places on the streetside for me to take pictures, but that was about the extent of my planning.
