Good night and good bye
9:15am
I sleep in until about 7:45am and work out, pack my bags, and get ready while bæ is out and about looking for an ATM. Despite finding one online that accepts Visa, he learns that the map is incorrect and he needs to ask several sources for directions to the nearest ATM. Three ATMs later and it’s a no-go.
Our plan is to spend the minimum amount at Au Lac (300k) and use the Grab app to book a car to the airport. …
🤬 Broke, tired, and stressed out in the city
9:10am
Even closer to us than the four-story restaurant and grocery store is a much smaller vegan place, tucked away in an alley right behind our hotel. Despite its size and location, Phuc Quang Chay is highly rated on Happy Cow. I also assumed that the food here would be on the bland side of things, in part due to its adjacency to a Buddhist temple. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
I order their Bún bò Huế, a traditionally beef noodle soup. Growing up, given its murky broth and strong aroma and use of pig blood, I was not a…
Plant based options galore
9am
We return to our dearly beloved Au Lac Healthy World, eagerly and quite quickly. Planning our stay near a vegan establishment, especially one with so many types of food, is paying dividends.
I am pretty boring so I opt for the “beef” pho and iced Vietnamese coffee. As we are waiting for our food, we check out the adjoining grocery store which has every type of mock meat possible. In the midst of ordering our meal, they somehow forget my pho (we experienced the same issue yesterday with another employee — and I am low key chalking it up as…
…and off to my father’s land
8:20am
Rise and shine! Today we are departing Siem Reap, Cambodia (my mom’s home country) for Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (my dad’s). We take a short walk across the Siem Reap River to go to Vibe Café. I read somewhere that it was the first all-vegan restaurant in Cambodia, and there’s another one in Phnom Penh. As it seems with most plant-based establishments we’ve been to, the interior is chic! bæ (aka yesterday’s guest writer) orders the most fragrant delicious pancakes, which my mom takes several bites of. Meanwhile my mom gets the quinoa porridge and I, the avocado toast…
Gerard aka bæ takes the wheel
1am
I feel something touch my right ear. I am half-awoken by it, so I swat away in the general direction of the disturbance. About a dozen seconds later, I feel something small crash into my lips, waking me up ever-so-slightly more as I blow air out through my mouth while spazzing out with my hands. Not even one minute passes by as I hear the sound of a mosquito buzzing in my left ear, at which point I immediately jump out of bed, grab my phone, and turn on the flashlight. I am wide awake.
I see the mosquito over…
zZzZz boring zZzZz
9:23am
The morning was nice and slow, the kind that I feel like I just don’t have enough of in my day-to-day. We leisurely stroll to BUZZ Organic Food & Drink, where we both order the vegan toast. It is perhaps best described as a salad on a slice of bread. While good, it proved quite difficult to eat and it was perhaps the messiest meal to date. The toast included quinoa, cucumber, tomatoes, onions, chickpeas drizzled with hummus. ฿214 (includes tip)
Around 2pm
Waiting at the gate for our plane, I nibble on the sugared tamarind we bought yesterday. The siblings and…
Island hopping along the Andaman Sea
8am
Similar to my last day in Croatia, on our last full day of Thailand, we decide to go island-hopping. When there’s a morning activity planned, I’m less inclined to have a big breakfast. My last Nature’s Bakery fig bar saves me.
Morning
What a chill day thus far. Despite the lull during our wait at Nang An Pier, we board a long-tail boat to four different sites: Pranang Cave Beach, Tup Islets, Chicken Island, and then Poda Island. The clear water and limestone cliffs rising high in the water are magnificent, and it’s refreshing being in the ocean. At Pranang, the…
Swinging along the jungle canopy
7:15am
Our day starts fairly early, as we are endeavoring on an outdoor obstacle course in the jungle. After a quick workout, I eat the pre-cut mango (I know, so fancy) that I purchased from last night’s night market. Parts of it is bearable, but some of it is not. ฿50
12:30pm
Wow, what a morning! Our outdoor adventure has been a whirlwind of DIY zip lining, climbing, going through such fun and wild activities like riding a broom and walking along a suspension bridge high above the trees. There were four courses and after the first one, we had a scrumptious…
A story of hope and relapse
A few months ago, upon returning from England, I started to feel sick. This led me to take a day off at work, and so I laid in bed, watching the latest season of “The Good Place.” Incidentally, I also stopped drinking caffeine and started to experience the worst headache imaginable. Unlike the sharp pangs of a migraine, I felt as if I was beat over the head with a cast-iron skillet—the pain was diffuse yet pronounced. And so it went for a few days, until my body adjusted to the increased blood flow into my brain and I no…
Bonding with my given and chosen family
9:15am
The closest vegan restaurant offering breakfast is Nourish, right across from the Three King’s Monument, an expansive open plaza in an otherwise tightly-packed city. The restaurant is serene, but in hindsight, I am realizing that maybe it’s just not that popular. I order the pancakes with banana and strawberry, drizzled with chocolate and sesame. The pancake is rather dense and tasteless and unlike the light fluffy pancakes I expected. To be more adventurous, I get the iced latte made with soy milk and konjac bubbles. The latte tastes a bit off, and the konjac tastes like …nothing. ฿204
9:45am onward
As if…
