adventure to asia @adventuretoasia - Tumblr Blog

Dear Kelsey! Your PakseCafe post on SE Asia visas was SO helpful, THANK YOU! I've a few questions: 1. I'm from Trinidad and Tobago and don't know if I'll have the option to acquire visas on arrival to Laos, Cambodia and Thailand. Can I? 2. Do you have any recommendations for the third party companies you mentioned in your section about Vietnam? 3. Let's say I would like to go from Indonesia-Vietnam-Cambodia-Laos how easy would it be to acquire visas in each country prior to heading to the next?

Hi there! I haven’t been on this blog in a really long time - so I don’t know when this post was sent! Let me know if you still need help with this - glad it could be of use to you!

observando

It’s funny. When you leave your home and wander really far, you always think, ‘I want to go home.’ But then you come home, and of course it’s not the same. You can’t live with it, you can’t live away from it. And it seems like from then on there’s always this yearning for some place that doesn’t exist. I felt that. Still do. I’m never completely at home anywhere.

Danzy Senna (via observando)

#finland #whereishome

(via karithenelizabeth)

“how was your trip?”

It’s not that I don’t want people to ask me about my trip.

It’s more that I fear my complete inability to sum up, in succinctly packaged phrases, just “how” my trip was. In part because it was a lot of things: awe-inspiring, depressing, blissful, liberating, painful… And in part because most people here <America> lack any useful reference point: my musings about another world fall short if you’ve never witnessed it yourself (and yes, this is painfully obvious as I try to explain and instead watch eyes glaze over and social nicety nods take place).

In my attempt to give life to my memories, I am robbing them of just that; in trying to share them with others, I find their sharpness sanded, their beauty dulled, their magnitude diminished. The words are just words and the pictures are just pictures and I haven’t quite figured out how to transmit emotion through either of them. I know that I cannot do justice to what it was, what it meant, or how it changed me.

I guess in part because I still don’t exactly know.

I find myself lingering in some highly specialized purgatory: the ‘in-between’; while the vivacity of Asia is no longer my reality, the memories have not yet settled long enough to be cogently processed. The in-between of not wanting to return, but of not wanting to be here; the ceaselessness of not knowing my left from my right. I guess sometimes it just takes a long time for us to understand ‘The Point.’

My memories feel so fucking lonely. When I tell you “how my trip was,” I don’t know how to give you the feeling of cathartic freedom that I find myself currently grasping for, I don’t know how to make you feel the struggle of learning to forge your own life, and then returning to one that seems to be created for you. There is a distinct sort of fear in watching the humans I love operate within the allusion of freedom that is intrinsic to American life, and there is a unique fear in musing on when I will become one of them again. No matter what I say, I hear my voice as echoes inside a cave that I’ve not learned to pull anyone out of.