“Where the hell are you from?” said an old Caymanian guy in red horns and a sequin cape. The Cayman Islands is a sophisticated place, but we couldn’t resist a visit to its kitschiest attraction on Hell’s Highway. Inside the Devil’s Hangout, the owner Ivan Farrington chatted us up before his display of flame T-shirts,…
Anytime you check into a fantastic luxury hotel, you think “I could live like this” but at Kinondo Kwetu, we literally wanted to move in. Sitting on the edge of a sacred forest of Diani Beach, Kenya, this former house became a hotel when the rave reviews and support of friends pushed them to open…
The sound of trumpets, trombones, and snare drums is getting louder and louder…we roll over in bed. Then a crescendo hits like it’s pounding at our hotel door. There is no sleeping through this–Cuenca is calling. We threw a jacket over our pajamas and chased after the music. We followed a brass band of dapper…
When we were planning the HoneyTrek route, Myanmar (formerly Burma) was still under a military dictatorship, saddled with sanctions and virtually shut to the world. The regime officially ended in 2011, but after 49 years of oppression it hardly seemed like a place you’d want to visit…but everyone we met who’d been said exactly the…
Hanoi is an Asia metropolis at its most romantic. With strong Chinese and French colonial influences and plenty of Vietnamese pride, this 1000-year old city is a glorious blend of east and west, old and new. Hanoi would have probably wooed us on any given day with its pagodas, palaces, lakes, and markets but the…
Our love-hate relationship with Vietnam began the moment we crossed into the Mekong Delta. It’s gorgeous, it’s exotic, it’s a veritable sensory overload…but Vietnam has more shysters than any of the other 33 countries we visited on the entire HoneyTrek–combined! We got scammed/lied to/accosted five separate times in our first three days in the country….
After getting our feet wet on Okinawa’s largest island, we navigated to the tiny isles in the far reaches of the Ryukyu archipelago. Most people don’t make it this far but the Okinawa tourism bureau and Hoshino Resorts are trying to change that. To help spread the word on the unique beauty and culture of…
We’ve always known that we would WWOOF Japan (World-Wide Opportunities On Organic Farms…a.k.a. Travelers willing to work four-to-six hours per day in exchange for room and board), for a variety of reasons. Aside from the free room and board in an expensive country, WWOOFing is a wonderful way to gain access into a culture that…
Japan!!! A place near and dear to our hearts for so many reasons. My parents lived here in the 1970s and loved it so much that they brought my sister and me here to look at schools and houses during our elementary-school years. For Mike, having so many Hawaiian friends in college prompted him to…
We heard such mixed reviews on Shanghai that we almost didn’t come here. “It’s just another big city” some people scoffed while others raved, “It’s one of the most exciting cities of the 21st-century,” …so with that we had to see for ourselves. With more than 4,000 skyscrapers and plans for over 1,000 more in…