Welcome to The Wedding Travelers!

I was looking through the archives for some shots for our new blog (coming soon!) and saw some photos I wanted to post here. I was thinking of going back through the whole trip and posting shots from each place. Who would be interested in that? Leave a comment if you want that!

For now here are those awesome photos:

 A traveler on the streets of Jaisalmer.

And another local from the streets. 

 From the Qutab Minar in Delhi.

 The Lotus Temple in Delhi.

 Hanging jootis in Calcutta

 Buddha sculpture from the temple at Krabhi, Thailand.

An awesome rhino from Kaziranga. 

Our boatman from Varanasi. 

Hope you enjoyed that little hodge-podge, but I'll keep things a bit more organized as I keep posting!

Also, I have gotten a couple emails regarding the Hindu Wedding article, and how it's not finished. Oops! I'll definitely try to get that finished up soon for you all!

Cheers,

Lauren :) 

Category: Adventures

Tags: architecture, bahai, buddha, calcutta, carving, delhi, fort, india, indian one horned rhino, jaisalmer, kaziranga, krabi, landscape, lotus temple, photography, qutb minar, safari, temple, thailand, travel, varanasi

First off a long overdue post about our friend Jon. We mentioned him briefly before but he really needs more attention given to him and his greatness. I intended to make this a seperate post, but since fast internet here is tough to come by, and requires us "soft hacking" our way into using the connection, we regretably don't have time to post every day and give him his due in that manner.

So we're starting this post with Jon, and then there will be lots of fun pictures.

But first: the man, the myth, the ninja master legend, Jon.

We met this guy and his amazing fiancee Sarah when they dropped by to talk to us about their upcoming wedding. We had shot a couples session with Jon's older brother Dave, and they liked our work so thought they would stop by and chat with us. In our discussion it came up that Jon was a web developer, and specifically worked with blogs. We had had the Wedding Travelers on our mind for a while at this point, and knew we needed to figure out a way to make a wicked cool blog. It was a match made in heaven.

The work started, we gave Jon a template that we wanted to use, and somehow from that simple Photoshop file he put together the complex and easy to use blog you see before you. It still is in it's beginning stages, and he has a ton more tricks up his sleeve, if you can believe it. I'm sure you all haven't even used half of the cool feautres he has created, and we'll be sure to let you know all the great ways to use the site as they are finished.

In our business we have worked with many many companies, from people who make our websites, to the people who print our business cards, to the people who ship all of our gear to us. I'll tell you right now that dealing with all those people is easily the most frustrating, time-consuming, and difficult part of our job. But this has never ever been the case with Jon, and for that we value him so very very much. Not to mention his incredible talent. I'll tell you right now that when it comes to small businesses working with small businesses, honesty, promptness, and general friendliness is the most valuable thing, and worth much more than saving a few dollars along the way.

So if you have any web related ideas, need someone to consult with, need a website or blog designed, or anything along those lines, Jon is without a doubt the guy you need to talk to. His company is called Streamline, his website is www.streamline-web.com, and he is the man. No questions about it.

If you miss this post later on as you are looking for his link, it's at the bottom of our website, and also on our Photography Resources page, for your convenience :)

Now enough beautiful thoughts about Jon and his mastery of Javascript. Let's get into the post. And to preface this, we will probably be posting bi-weekly now that we've arrived in India and found Internet cafes and WIFI to be less readily available than in Vietnam (go figure). But we'll do our best to update as often as possible, and start you off with a slew of great pictures from our first day here.

But before that, let's finish up with Thailand.

Oh, and by the way, this is Rob writing. I usually prepare pictures for the blog and Lauren writes up the post, but today I bring you both! We’ll start off where we left off, in Krabi, Thailand. Here’s a little video of a temple we climbed close to Krabi:



The thing about this temple was that there were 1237 huge steps (sometimes a single step was greater than 2 feet!) to get to the top. I guess it wasn’t actually a temple on top (the temple was at the bottom) but there was a giant sitting Buddha and what looked like a giant bell and various other smaller ornaments. It was a tough climb but definitely worth it. I’ll let the pictures do the talking!

First picture is unrelated to the above, but right outside our guesthouse was a banana tree. I’ve never seen a banana tree before and it was somehow different from what I expected (it looks like some kind of carnivorous plant!)

On with the temple!

My grandma had asked to see more pictures of what people’s homes looked like (which I thought was a great suggestion!). This is one of the nicer looking places that we came across on our scooter ride to the temple. In the rural areas along the road a lot of people just live in metal corrugated shacks, as well as rickety looking wooden houses. In cities and towns most of the buildings are reinforced cement or cement layered brick.

Cool rock formations (I can’t remember if they are mountainous or karst limestone formations). Anyways they are all around Krabi.

A view from the road of the temple we climbed. You can just barely see the enormous Buddha and Bell on the top of the second peak from the left.

That’s it from Thailand, we’ve moved onto India now. Our time so far in Calcutta is actually the reason why I wanted to write today. There is so much about this place that cannot be told in pictures. One reason is that this city stimulates the senses in much more than just a visual way. Even now in the dark recesses of our windowless hotel room I can hear horns honking somewhere. On the street it is a never-ending cacophony of diesel engines, horns and sirens of every frequency, jack hammering, construction of every kind really, and people. People yelling, people laughing, people crying, people whistling, people spitting, belching, and even peeing. Maybe you can’t really hear people peeing but it sure seems like that when you pass open urinals on the side of the street, which brings us to the smells. Walking around is like this: Your baseline is diesel fumes, if you’re outside and on street level then you smell them all the time. If you pass a dark looking alley it usually smells like urine, if you pass an open urinal it definitely smells like urine. You’ll pass a chai stall and the sweet smell permeates the air and you can smell nothing else. We’ll pass sweets stands and spice vendors and their respective smells will sweep over you. You’ll pass garbage dumps and the same will happen. And when you’re not passing near by something that smells (which is rare) you will return to the baseline of diesel fumes. We actually clean our noses out at night and it blackens the Kleenex. I’m really not exaggerating. As far as tastes go we’ve been pretty cautious about what we eat (no fruit or anything unpackaged) but I can tell you right now we’ve had the best Indian food of our lives. Actually it’s pretty much all we’ve had for breakfast, lunch and dinner since we arrived here. It’s all so familiar but at the same time on a different level than the stuff we get at home. And the chai here is fantastic. A typical meal at a restaurant with chai, a couple sodas, a couple pieces of Naan and two or three small dishes usually costs around $5. It’s by far the best value we’ve seen.

Another reason this place cannot be told well in pictures is because of the poverty here. I shouldn’t say that it cannot be photographed, it’s just a really difficult thing to photograph. I’m having a difficult time right now even talking about it. I can’t speak for all of India because we’ve only been to one small part of one city, but when I think about how many people live in India (1.03 billion, 16% of the worlds population) it makes sense to me that the quality of life here can’t be the same as anywhere else. And its not the amount of beggars or homeless people that account for the poverty I’m talking about—though there are many. It’s the standard of living that is so shocking. I wish I could describe this all in more detail but I really feel at a loss for words. We’re going to try really hard to show more in our pictures. I don’t mean we’ll focus on the poverty here, but it really is an intricate part of where we are.

Anyways here are a few pictures from our little walk yesterday:

Like the title of this post suggests, we do attact considerable attention (particularly with our big cameras) and the people here certainly do not mind staring at us!

Old style Ambassador taxies

Crazy motor rickshaw

Street side barber


A cup of chai from a street vendor and the little clay pot they serve it in. We drank our chai by the vendor expecting we needed to return the cup, but it turns out they just throw them out afterwards. Weird.

Where chai comes from...

Good to the last drop

The Indian flag

A busy street scene

Curious schoolchildren

Power lines and birds 

I’ve done some different processing here on a few photos from today’s post, and I'd really love if you guys would let me know what you think! Leave a comment!

Cheers,
Rob
 

Category: Adventures

Tags: buddha, calcutta, chai, food, india, krabi, landscape, photography, street life, sunset, thailand, tiger cave temple, Traffic, travel

Hey everyone!

Well, we haven’t gotten a good blog post up in a long time, so I bet you’re craving some pictures and some videos! Especially all of our friends and family back home in Edmonton who are enduring temperatures of -50 degrees Celsuis right now. I can’t imagine you guys are going outside, so here are some photos and videos, dedicated to you! I hope they help you try and think of warmer places!

I’m going to keep the chatter to a minimum here since there are really a ton of photos and videos to get through!

We’ll start with our last day in Vietnam, which was spent in Hoi An. First we have a rooster that we came across. I absolutely love how he is the one splash of colour in this shot.



And before we left we had to go back and visit our good friend Chompsky. Here we are having a good last snuggle.



We made our way to the Central Market in Old Town, which provided some fantastic photo ops



And some nice light as we were walking home



We got up incredibly early (4AM) to go to the My Son (pronounced Mee Son) ruins just outside of Hoi An. They were built by the ancient Cham people, and were Hindu temples, which was surprising and also very cool. In the end we were very glad that we got there so early, since we didn’t have to try and work around hundreds of visitors to get some great shots.





And then we were out of Vietnam. We had originally planned to visit the North, but in the end chose to cut it out of our itinerary. We ended up spending 10 hours in the  Hanoi airport, and saw that the weather looked absolutely dreadful. We actually wore a couple of the winter coats we had made for us, as well as scarves, because it was so cold! So we were happy with our choice for sure!

When we got to Bangkok we headed straight for the Khao San Road. I would say that it could be considered the center of the backpacker universe. In the morning after a good nights sleep we were up and exploring. We had some absolutely amazing Phad Thai from a street vendor



Breakfast of Champions: Street food, Red Bull, and Coke…mmmmm



There were some really cute kittens at our hotel



And here’s the Khao San Road at night. It’s really a crazy assault on the senses!



They have these things here in Thailand that they call “buckets”. It is essentially a small plastic bucket that they fill with alcohol. The “traditional” mixture is cheap Thai whiskey, Red Bull, and Coke. It’s potent, to say the least!



And while on the Khao San pretty much anything can happen. As we were sitting there this women came up and just plunked this weird hat on my head. Clearly I was a bit surprised!



And then we made our way to Ko Phi Phi, nothing less than an island paradise.



Our first night there we wandered around and came across a wicked fire dancer show



They make just amazing patterns



Here are a couple of videos that will hopefully give you a better idea of the madness of these dudes than pictures can. In this first one if you just saw the end, you would definitely think it was on fast forward. But no, he’s really just that fast.



And then the finale consisted of about 6 of these guys just going at it. It was way too cool.





Then the next morning we went snorkeling. Now in Vietnam the snorkeling we did blew our minds, and we were hoping that Thailand would measure up. I’ll tell you right now that it completely blew all of our expectations right out of the water!



This was the sight we saw when we first jumped in to the nearly bathwater warm water



The visibility was incredible, you could see way deep down beneath you!



The variety of sea life we saw this time around was mind blowing. Check our this enormous eel we came across



This is a giant clam, and you could see it opening and closing if you watched for long enough



A sea cucumber



A rather scary looking sea urchin (I think the thing in the center is it’s eye…..creepy!)



And perhaps one of the coolest things was seeing these clown fish (think of Finding Nemo!).



They were hiding in the sea anemone and if you wiggled your finger they would dart in and hide, then pop back out, ready to play some more!



Other strange creatures? No, just us! I’ll tell you, it’s rather hard to smile while wearing a snorkel!



Our snorkel tour even took us to Maya Bay, which was where the movie “The Beach” was filmed. Back when Rob was here 4 years ago he had the whole place to himself. Unfortunately we had to share with 100 other people. But we still really enjoyed the white, soft sand and the clear blue waters. Here’s a shot of one of the long boats inside of the bay.



Then on the way home we saw an incredible sunset. Here’s a shot of Ko Phi Phi Ley in the gorgeous evening light (which is the island that is home to Maya Bay, we stayed on Ko Phi Phi Don, a short boat trip away).



And one of that sunset (straight out of camera, no Photoshop to this one. The colours were really spectacular)



And to finish up our time on this island we headed off to a local bar to watch a bit of Thai Boxing. It was definitely intense!







Ouch!



So you might wonder why we only spent a couple days on such a gorgeous island? Well, I shall tell you. First off, Ko Phi Phi is actually really expensive now! We were paying roughly $100 dollars a night for our room, and it was not as nice as I was expecting! It was really quite standard. And we were lucky to even find it, everything on the island was practically fully booked! So with our traveler’s budgets there was no way we could afford to stay there very long.

Secondly, Ko Phi Phi has become something of a Cancun of South East Asia. The number of young, tanned beach beauties around was astounding and they were all there to just party and lie on the sand. As we were wading in Maya Bay, easily one of the most beautiful beaches in the world, I overhead a girl say “This is fantastic. But if only it had a bar!” Can you believe that?? The chilled out travelers vibe is totally gone, and the place is just packed. Not exactly what you want for a place to relax, since it’s tough to even walk down the street without having to push through crowds! Not exactly our scene.

That being said, we honestly thoroughly enjoyed our time on the island. We had some incredible food (easily the best sushi we’ve ever had) and indulged in a Thai massage. We don’t have any pictures of that, since we were too busy getting massaged, but it’s so very different from a typical Swedish massage! It involved a lot of pushing and pulling on your limbs, and has been described as “passive Yoga”. It sounds very strange, but I assure you it was fantastic!

So that’s the scoop with us. Right now we’re in Krabi and are very happy to have found a simple room for $10 a night. We’ll be spending a bit of time here catching up on our work, and then preparing to arrive in India. So get ready for that, and we’ll talk to you all soon!

Think warm thoughts ☺

Lauren

Category: Adventures

Tags: bangkok, clown fish, coral, eel, food, hoi an, khao san road, ko phi phi, landscape, longtail boat, my son, ocean, photography, snorkeling, street life, sunset, thailand, the beach, travel, tropical fish, vietnam, wildlife

Hello everyone!

Our apologies for not having posted sooner, and for the lack of pictures. We hope you guys haven't been orrying about us! We're currently safe and sound in Ko Phi Phi, Thailand (the place where the movie The Beach was filmed, although a different island a few kilometres away). So you can just imagine the scenery. And if you haven't seen the movie you should watch it right away and then just picture us there!

We have a ton of new stuff to post up to show you the beauty of this place, we just need some time (and some WIFI) and then you'll be able to take a peek!

Anyway, so far our time in Thailand has been rather trying. We arrived in Bangkok around 11PM after having been on the move since 5AM. All the guidebooks said that this wouldn't be a problem, to just make our way to the Khao San Road (the main backpacker district, also in the movie The Beach) and we'd find something. Well after getting a taxi ride there (which ripped us off) we began walking around looking for a place. About 45 minutes of searching turned up nothing at all, so we took our bags and started to walk to another road that was just a few minutes away. We trudged down this road for probably another 45 minutes searching, and finally found something. It was expensive (30 dollars a night) and not very nice, but it had a bed and air con so we were happy. But we weren't too happy with Thailand!

The Khao San Road is crazy and busy and just teeming with people from all walks of life. I'm pretty sure this is the best place in the world for people watching! But it's a pretty large assault on the senses, and one that we can't take for long. So we planned to make our way to the islands in the south. We found a travel agent, booked our tickets, and thought all was well.

Well we got onto a bus after waiting for about an hour and half after they told us it would leave. At least it was a nice bus! We left Bangkok at 7PM. Around 7AM (yes, it's a really long bus ride) the bus stops at this little out of the way place that consists of nothing more than a thatched roof structure selling cold drinks, and a building that seems to think it is a travel agency. All the people in the bus were told to get off, and take all of our stuff. Then we were sent into the "travel agency" one at a time. Rob and I sat there wondering what on earth was going on in there, since people would be in there for quite a while. When we finally got in there we found out, and were none too pleased with it.

They tried to tell us that we needed to buy another ticket so that we could take a mini-bus to Krabi (the place where we catch a boat to Ko Phi Phi) right then. Otherwise we would be waiting for 3 hours until the next one came, and we would miss the first ferry. One thing they should have known is that you do not mess with Rob & Lauren early in the morning. After we've had a good nights sleep and some food, we're totally chilled. But when we've only had a few hours of sleep, we're a force to be reckoned with. We really gave them hell for trying to rip us off like that, demanding that they phone the travel agent in Bangkok.

Eventually after refusing to pay for the fake tickets, and raising our voices a bit (the rest of the bus was still waiting outside, and I'm pretty sure they could hear we were upset) they put us on the mini-bus, but not without a slew of Thai that I'm pretty sure wasn't "Thank you for your business".

After all that we were hoping that we'd just get there without any more hassle. But no, not in Thailand! We had one more stop at a random travel agency, a wait there, some more Thai yelled at us, and finally we made it to the port, just in time to miss the ferry by half an hour. 4 hours of waiting, and we got onto the boat and made our way to Ko Phi Phi. Total travel time from Bangkok: 24 long, hot, hassle-laden hours.

But was it worth it? Well the scenery here is probably the most beautiful we have ever seen, the water is clear, turqouise and sparkling, and the food so far has been great. We're off to go snorkeling in a few hours, and I pretty much know that is going to be mind blowing. So even though Thailand hasn't been so kind to us so far, we're still optimistic that we'll see some beautiful scenery and have a great time.

And we don't mean to give Thailand such a negative review so far, and hopefully things will pick up. But Rob was here 4 years ago and he feels like things have really really changed here. It's easy to see that the massive increase in tourism (we see far more travelers than Thai people) has spawned a slew of unscrupulous travel vendors, and we have unfortunately have had far too much experience with them so far. It's funny because the Vietnam we saw seems a lot like Thailand was 4 years ago. Perhaps that makes it a better bet to travel to, though hopefully they cope with the increase in tourists in a more honest manner.

Category: Travel Tips

Tags: bangkok, bus trip, khao san road, ko phi phi, thailand, the beach, travel