“There are certain things that cannot be adequately explained to a virgin by either words or pictures. Nor can any description that I might offer here even approximate what it feels like to”1 . . . lose yourself in a place that is completely foreign.
Try as we might, no one can really tell you about travel. Some things you just have to experience for yourself. That’s true even under the best of circumstances but especially so when talking about areas that are rapidly changing, like South East Asia.
Rarely have we experienced such disconnects between the things we read and our experiences on the ground as we did in this part of the world. So much is changing so fast that the travel article written even a couple of years ago is now badly out of date. The same is true of the stories you hear on the road. Time and again we met people who told us things about places that turned out not to be true.
Here are just some of the things that surprised us on our eighteen-week tour of the region.
Everywhere Once 