It was one of those waking moments when I thought I was still trapped in la-la land because the text message that woke me up read something like, “we are being invited to guest on a TV show. Get your ass online.” So I staggered in the middle of the night and checked our email. Lo and behold, it was true. But then as I scanned the message, the taping dates fell on the dates Ron and I will celebrate his birthday in God-knows-where. I contacted the researcher and our chance of making ourselves …

I arrived in Shanghai at noon with a sunshine attenuated by the freezing air and overpowered by the bustling crowd of platform 11. I was carrying my 60 L backpack and my day pack, plus big boxes of Aunt Xi Ling–whom by the way, I met in the preceding 14 hour train ride. Together with Max and Lene, we dumped the duct tape cocooned packages in the trunk of the cab for our motherly train seat mate. Aunt Xi Ling gave me a hug and uttered something in mandarin before …

When I was in college, all I could think of when hearing the name Sri Lanka was the place where Ravana took Sita after abducting her away from Rama and Lakshman. In my professor’s version of Ramayana, Ravana took a big leap from India to get to Lanka. In other versions, Ravana shoved Sita inside his Pushpaka vimana, man-handled a giant peacock, and used it to fly back to his kingdom. What is regarded as a discovery of something which was not sought but was nevertheless found is perhaps what makes …

The best way to get a transportation around Kandy is to rent a tuktuk from your hotel. Most often than not, random drivers will overcharge and try to rip you off every singe way they can. Like, duh! You get this modus operandi in any tourist place on earth so don’t act like you are surprised. car hire will usually costs around 10,000 and we got a tuktuk at 4,000 (for a half day run) through a recommendation of our butler–YOU READ IT RIGHT! We got a butler during our …

Do we look like we take drugs?
No, you do not answer that…
So it was the day after Ron and I left the comforts of Theva when we found ourselves walking uphill on a winding road to spend a few more nights in the heart of Sri Lanka’s cultural capital, Kandy. Too much relaxation is apparently not so good for our looks. We were the perfect victims as our common sense dangled from our ears.

We popped in a local store to pick us some cigarettes. As it turns out, Marlboro products are not available …

 
There would be times that we fall silent… Numb that our mouths, in this case our fingers, stretch frozen on the bed of keyboard letters.
On the road blogging is something we are avoiding, because of several reasons:
One, we couldn’t focus. We actually suspected that we suffered an unfulfilled stage in our childhood that gave us an adult case of attention deficit disorder. Our head would root to a direction where a strong scent of fun is originating at any given time. Our eyes would gravitate and fixate unconditionally to anything …

It took more than 30 minutes of open highway motorbike ride to head off to our final stop of the day. But the old school asphalt road and the feel of isolation in the driest place in Asia made the joy ride seem shorter than a house party quickie stint. (Disclaimer: I do not know anything about quickies! I’m telling the truth).
I learned a new skill of taking pictures on a running motorbike, but the speeding open vehicle, the smashing wind, fine dust and some random flying small objects hurts …

Previously, on Fliptravels:
We were both drifting fast to La-la land when I asked Monette…
Ron: We booked a round trip ticket right?
Monette: Yeah…
Ron: Is it (the return ticket) with you?
Monette: No…
Both: HOH CRAP!!!
And so we endured half of the five-hour trip to Mui Ne with shooting BPs as we don’t know how we can get hold of our return tickets. At the pit stop, I quickly took my caffeine fix; and with closed eyes, called our hotel that booked us the tour (Ron also had to call them to make sure …

9:13 AM
I stepped out of Tan Son Nhat International Airport arrival exit. I spotted Monette in the middle of the crowd of friends and families of arriving passengers. That particular moment felt like a halftone vignette in 30 degree-sephia, captured in slow motion. Slow-mo mainly because of our heavy backpacks but also because we missed each other so much after months of separation. We ran to hug each other right in the middle of a Vietnamese audience–Like a cheesy Bea and John Lloyd scene minus the romance.
I was overwhelmed with the fact …

I stepped out of Bandaranaike International Airport with all the soot and grime of Manila, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and of course, Sri Lanka. Four airports, three plane rides, damning heat of the summer sun, one 1-hour bus ride, and one 4-hour bus ride in 24 hours should be enough to drive me to pick an axe and decapitate Ron, or anybody who crosses my way. But since that was our first out-of-South East Asia trip together, I restrained myself lest be banned from going out of the country.

The bittersweet journey started …