We spent 100 days abroad: beaches, cities, temples, jungles, rainforest, scuba diving, zip lines, food, culture, poverty, affluence, and many wonderful new friends.

Best day: our first day at Ton Sai/Railay beach, rock climbing for nine hours on magnificent karsts jutting from the Andaman Sea.

Best meal: tied between two sausages, both from street vendors, one in Chiang Mai, one in Luang Prabang. I’d never had such a combination of textures, flavors, and a wonderful spiciness before. Street food was generally best, cheap restaurants not great.

Best food: Singapore.

Best lodgings: Bali Sesak on Gili Trawagnan. A cozy bungalow with AC for the hot midday, a comfortable bed, a private outdoor bathroom with shower, a shaded lounging area under the bungalow, wonderful hosts, all for $18/day.

Most surprising moment: seeing a woman dressed in head-to-toe black, wearing a niqab, laughing and clearly grinning as she held hands with her boyfriend/husband.

Most dangerous moment: riding in the back of pickup trucks on winding mountain roads . Seeing the carnage of a just-happened accident in Laos made the danger very apparent.

Scariest moment: diving in strong current in Gili Trawagnan, needing to climb hand over hand across the floor 30 meters down with 70 bars of air left.

Place that most deserved more time: sort of a cop out due to its size, but Indonesia. We only saw Bali, the Gilis, and Yogyakarta on Java. Sumatra, Borneo, Komodo, Sulawese – all places I wish we had time to see.

Top recommendation: the Gibbon Experience in Laos. Ziplining hundreds of feet above the jungle floor with local guides who were once poachers but now put their siblings through school for English.

Most emotionally moving: Cambodia and its cultural specter of the Khmer Rouge and constant, dangerous reminder through the tremendous danger of the countryside due to land mines and other unexploded ordinance. A tremendously rich history and cultural tradition, almost obliterated in 4 years by madmen.

Hardest thing: in Southeast Asia, the general cultural dislike of public affection. Not being able to hold hands with The Private Eye or put my arm around her in public wore thin pretty quickly.

Things I would do differently:

Bring different (nicer) clothes: I brought mostly very casual clothes and beach wear. But most of the places we were (except the beach vacation spots) dressed more formally and nicely than I expected. Of course if I’d read up on this I would have known, but I didn’t. Once there, finding clothes that fit me well, were nice looking, and easy to clean was nearly impossible. I’d have brought, in addition to my Psylo pants, two pairs of light, easy to clean pants, as well as light shirts with collars (perhaps short sleeved). The most important thing is that they dry quickly. I would bring three sets of mosquito resistant clothing and have arranged somehow that I wouldn’t carry them around SE Asia, just pack them when leaving for Peru.

Bring more first aid supplies: everything seemed to heal more slowly in the tropics. We used up our band aids pretty quickly. Of course it was easy to buy more when they were really needed (my scrape on Gili Trawagnan), but often scratches and such aren’t a big enough motivator to find a store. Specifically, alcohol wipes, band aids, and medical tape.

Carry a sum ($500?) of American dollars in a safe place: there were a few situations where ATMs were either unavailable or we needed to pay a lot of money. Having a stash of US dollars would have saved me a bunch of worry in a few tough spots.

— The Professor