The core of my summer vacation was a trip to Hawaii to meet my family. There were lots of stops before and after but there’s nothing like family. And nowhere like Hawaii.
The beach was awesome and I spent a lot of time just sitting.
Check out this incredible tree we found on the famous Road to Hana. It looks fake, but in reality the colors were even brighter and more absurd. They’re a special kind of eucalyptus tree, but I don’t know what makes them streak technicolor. The Road to Hana was an awesome drive, switchbacking 46 miles around the rugged east coast of Maui.
Here’s my favorite of the dozens of waterfalls we saw during the Hana day. It looks like it’s falling from the sky, right?
And just hanging around the condo. It was great having a three bedroom place opposed to separate hotel rooms because it was like hanging out at home, even if that home happened to belong to someone else. My mom described it as a week of Christmas Eve’s because the whole family was together, safe, and giddy with excitement for the next day.
(The guy on the right is Andy, my sister’s boyfriend)
I hated to leave Maui both then and now, but I want to share a picture and a memory from some other places I visited this summer. After Maui, Ann and I went to Honolulu for three days before crossing the Pacific again. We went for a nice long hike one day, went stand up paddle boarding for a morning, crashed happy hours at expensive hotels, saw a rare Hawaiian monk seal in the middle of Waikiki beach, and took in some gorgeous sunsets.
From Honolulu we went to Guam for a night, and then tried to layover in Tokyo to meet some friends there, but that didn’t work so we ended up home in Korea at Incheon airport. Our next flight to Singapore wasn’t scheduled for 3 days, since we had been hoping on staying in Tokyo, but since we got to Incheon early, we decided to standby and got to Bangkok early, before catching up with our original Singapore flight that laid over in Bangkok. So we got like 2 and a half days in Bangkok, which was great. We stayed in a wonderful hotel booked from the Incheon customs line, and had a great time. Thailand is one of the few places in Asia that hasn’t been conquered, so it mostly retains all of its original cultural artifacts and buildings. 
Since we stayed close to the river, our main method of travel in Bangkok was boat, which pleased me because I love boat travel, especially when 30 minute trips cost the equivalent of 40 cents!
We also saw some amazing temples. Our tour guide taught us the various poses of the Buddha, but I was constantly forgetting them, and failing the impromptu tests he gave.
From Bangkok, it was on to Singapore. We did some neat things in Singapore, but I didn’t really care for the place. We had a terrible hotel that wasn’t even inexpensive, and the city itself is sort of sterile and antiseptic. You can be fined, caned (like actually beaten with a stick in public) or imprisoned for doing things like spitting, smoking cigarrettes in undesignated areas, or carrying the wrong kind of fruit (durian) onto the subway. The city is immaculately clean, but it’s also wildly expensive. Beers were (no joke) 15-20 dollars in many places.
We visited an extremely strange park built by the guy who invented Tiger Balm. The highlight was the Chinese Levels of Hell. “Abusing books” resulted in a disembowling, which was vividly illustrated with miniature figures, like every other crime you can think of.
Following the cave of hell, we had a surreal experience at the park pond. We were just walking around the pond when we noticed that there were several turtles following us, swimming alongside our path. We stopped for a moment and noticed that there were actually dozens of turtles following us. We stood for another moment and soon there were over a hundred turtles swimming towards us, slowly, but purposefully. A little bit freaked out, we walked across a bridge, but it didn’t matter because the turtles just followed us there too. Here’s a picture of them piled up underneath the bridge. My theory is that the hundreds of turtles have been trained over the years to follow people because maybe they feed the turtles like that, but it could just be we have some sort of strange turtle power after swimming with giant turtles in Hawaii.
From Singapore we left for Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and met up with a couple friends. 
The highlight of this trip was feeding the wild monkeys at some sacred bat caves/ Buddhist temple. They peel and eat little bananas just like humans!
And here we are in front of the world famous Petronas Towers. From Kuala Lumpur… back to Thailand! Phuket island, this time. We wanted a nice relaxing beach vacation at the end of our summer travels. It was nice and relaxing but also rained the whole time. We mainly just lounged around our hotel, ate good food, and wandered around. I rented a motorbike one day and that was fun.
There’s hundreds more pictures and dozens more stories, but that’s it for now….
[...] gone and over but here is Kyle’s take on his summer – short and sweet! Click here: Summer 2011. Like this:LikeBe the first to like this [...]