LAO CHOW

I can't speak to the French colonization of Laos during the early 20th century, but they sure left behind some stellar bakeries. Everywhere we turned in Vientiane and Luang Prabang, boulangerie counters were piled high with crusty baguettes, buttery croissants, and flaky pains au chocolat. Traveling from the bread barrens of South Korea (think red bean doughnuts and sugar-coated garlic rolls), I thought I'd landed in a sort of starchy Shangri-La.

But in addition to each perfect bite of pastry, I encountered a strong case for Laos' own cuisine at an innovative Luang Prabang restaurant called Tamarind. We spent a morning wandering the town's vegetable and meat market with Tamarind staff, examining everything from galangal (the gnarly root, which is a relative of ginger) and kaffir lime to shallots and lemongrass. After purchasing a bounty of produce, we returned to the restaurant's cooking school to prepare traditional dishes like roasted eggplant dip and spicy fish steamed in banana leaves.

Chicken feet, fortunately, were not on the menu...but have you ever seen such shapely-looking legs on poultry?

HOI AN LANTERN FESTIVAL

We had the good fortune of arriving in Hoi An, Vietnam during the full moon, which brings with it the celebration of the town's monthly Lantern Festival. As the sun disappeared, hundreds of colorful silk lanterns lit up the streets, and shopkeepers ignited small bonfires of fake Vietnamese currency in the gutters for good luck. Several string bands struck up their traditional instruments, and elderly men gathered on the sidewalk to play chess by candlelight.

We wandered along the riverbank, where impish girls in silk pajamas implored us to buy paper lanterns. Ultimately we gave in and joined the throngs of tourists, both Vietnamese and foreign, in setting a candle afloat on the river. We watched it get caught up in the stream of soft lights, bobbing gently until it collided with a river weed and went out.

THE MOUSTACHE BROTHERS OF MANDALAY

Three prison terms and six years of hard labor couldn't keep Par Par Lay from cracking jokes about the Burmese government. Up until he was admitted to the hospital for kidney disease in July, the 67-year-old comedian could be found each evening at his makeshift theater in Mandalay, waltzing in a papier-mache bear head and making wisecracks at the military's expense.

On August 2, he died at home surrounded by his family, including brother Lu Maw and cousin Lu Zaw. Together, the trio made up The Moustache Brothers, a comedy act that was one part slapstick, one part traditional Burmese dance performance, and one part ridicule of the military regime.

Until recently the Brothers—along with their wives, sister, and two-year-old granddaughter—performed nightly for foreign tourists in the front room of Maw's home in Mandalay, Myanmar's second-largest city. It was a low-key production, with a floral bed sheet draped over a clothesline serving as the backdrop, and Lu Maw sharing his Burmese cheroots with the guests.

The only Brother who is fluent in English, 62-year-old Maw served as the MC for the performance, addressing the audience with rapid-fire idioms—"Are you with me? You catch my drift?"—and alternately blowing a vuvuzela and puffing on cigars. As he narrated, Par Par Lay and Lu Zaw would act out scenes from their own lives and from popular a-nyeint pwe folktales about characters like U Shwe Yoe, a parasol-twirling bachelor looking for love.

A major event in Burmese culture, a pwe (festival) sometimes lasts all night and can include dancing, puppeteering, comedy, and drama. The Moustache Brothers' act is typical of an upbeat holiday program with a focus on dance and slapstick. Lay liked to tell a joke about going to Thailand to get dental work done: "The dentist asked me, 'Why not get your teeth fixed in your own country?' And I told him: 'Because in Myanmar, I'm not allowed to open my mouth!'"

It was at a 1996 performance in Aung San Suu Kyi's home that the family made their first political crack. They drew straws backstage to determine who would take on the riskiest role. Lay, who drew the short straw, made a comic comparison between government officials and thieves and was thereafter imprisoned three times. Both he and Zaw spent six years breaking rocks at a prison camp near the Chinese border.

After Suu Kyi and Amnesty International successfully negotiated their release, the Brothers were banned from performing in Burmese and in public. In adapting the show for tourists, they managed to both skirt the government restrictions and continue to make a living doing what they love.

"As long as the tourists keep coming, the government doesn't bother us," Maw said. "They wouldn't want to upset the foreigners."

Lay, in particular, was an active supporter of the National League for Democracy (the party of Suu Kyi), canvassing in rural areas and encouraging voters not to be afraid of politics. He was hopeful that the 2015 elections will bring real change to Myanmar, and longed for the day when the comedy troupe would again be allowed to take their act on the road for festivals, weddings, and funerals.

"We'll keep campaigning until Myanmar is a complete democracy," he said.

The remaining Brothers have vowed to continue the show, both to earn a living and to honor Lay's memory. The two-man performance began several days after his funeral, as messages of support from foreign tourists continued to appear on the Brothers' Facebook page.

"A big loss," wrote an American visitor who remembered Lay, "He will be missed by his friends all over the world."

A LITTLE BIT OF LATELY

Just dropping in to share a favorite photo and a favorite article from recently. Early one evening in Hoi An, Vietnam, I spotted this elderly boat operator plying the river. When her vessel ran aground in the shallow water near the bank, she pulled it free with a strength that belied her fragile, bent frame. I love the look of sheer determination on her face.

This month I enjoyed writing about my favorite Korean custom, the public bathhouse, for Global Traveler's October cover story. I also got to share a bit more about our brief visit to North Korea via the Demilitarized Zone. Check it out here: http://www.globaltravelerusa.com/contemporary-seoul-turns-traditional-korean-delights/. Happy travels, wherever you roam this month!

AMONG THE HMONG

I had heard that the Hmong are snappy dressers, but my jaw still dropped at the sight of them when we pulled in to Sapa, a former hill station in northwestern Vietnam. Decked out in colorful embroidery, shiny jewelry, and velvety black legwarmers, they cut a regal form against the backdrop of terraced green rice fields. We hired one of them, a young woman named So, to guide us on a trek to the surrounding villages.

As we wove our way past water buffalos and bubbling mountain streams, we acquired a small following of women—one with deep wrinkles etched across her face, another with a gold tooth and a baby—until there were seven of us slipping along the muddy path. While Joe and I panted to match their pace, the Hmong kept their hands busy splitting and wrapping hemp fibers for the traditional clothes they make.

When we reached our destination five hours later, I collapsed in a heap. No one else seemed to have broken a sweat; the old woman was casually smoking tobacco from an enormous bamboo pipe. Turns out they had walked with us for half the day simply to sell us two dollars worth of hemp bracelets.

STEPPING INTO NORTH KOREA

“If you choose to defect today to North Korea, I won’t be responsible for your actions,” said Private Mitchell, the U.S. Army soldier who met our tour group inside the Demilitarized Zone. He wasn’t kidding—in 1984, a Soviet tourist ran across the demarcation line separating North and South Korea, and the ensuing gun battle killed four people.

We exited the tour bus into the bright summer sunshine at Panmunjeom, the abandoned village that has served as the de facto dividing line between the two countries since 1953. Not more than a hundred yards away, a North Korean soldier stood observing us through binoculars. I raised my telephoto lens for a closer look. He was young and thin, his dark olive uniform cinched tight at the waist.

After a few minutes, we entered one of the bright blue conference buildings that straddle the border. A South Korean soldier, his fists clenched at his sides in a Tae Kwon Do stance, stood blocking the back door. Gingerly we stepped across the invisible line dividing the room in half, unsure what to do with our three minutes standing on North Korean soil.

Despite the palpable tension at Panmunjeom, the DMZ is an almost scenic snatch of land, at least on the southern side. Driving between the various checkpoints, we spotted pheasants taking flight among the ginseng fields. The North Korean side is another story: behind the concrete facades of a ghost town (pictured above), vast swaths of trees have been cut down to expose anyone trying to escape.

TRISTES TROPIQUES

“Hello, my friend, you need sarong? Taxi? Hashish? I give you good price!”

The offers, polite but aggressive, followed us everywhere we wandered around Bali last week, from the motorbike-choked streets of Kuta to the near-deserted sands of Gili Air to the overgrown interior of Lombok. We had come to Bali to escape the incessant noise of South Korea, searching for the much-touted beaches backed by rice terraces and birdsong.

And we found them...but so had hordes of Bintang-guzzling Australian surfers, their biceps the size of tree trunks, drawing the peddlers of Pringles and hash like ants to a picnic. It wasn’t until our last night, when we decided to splurge on a stay at one of the many immaculate resorts, that we realized the key to our peace and quiet was the walls keeping out the hawkers--and Bali along with them.

Perhaps appropriately, I was reading Tristes Tropiques, a book by the anthropologist and self-proclaimed travel hater Claude Levi-Strauss. In 1955 he wrote of his journeys, “Now that the Polynesian islands have been smothered in concrete and turned into aircraft carriers solidly anchored in the southern seas, when the whole of Asia is beginning to look like a dingy suburb, when shanty-towns are spreading across Africa...what else can the so-called escapism of travelling do than confront us with the more unfortunate aspects of our history?”

WHEELS OF FORTUNE

Recently I was reading a Huffington Post article about overrated travel destinations, and the author suggested ditching Costa Rica for Hawaii because “the roads are better, things are a little tidier, most people speak English…the food is actually interesting and they have really great umbrella cocktails.”

No disrespect for Hawaii (I’ve never been), but I don’t agree that it should supplant Costa Rica on anyone’s travel itinerary just because it’s easier to navigate. Our adventures on Costa Rica’s crappy roads—including nearly squashing some pedestrians and being pushed backwards up an incline by a helpful group of Ticos—were some of my favorite memories from our trip around the country. Not because we enjoy complications (although everything running smoothly doesn’t make for nearly as good a story), but because the nature of our escapades was uniquely Costa Rican.

Perhaps that’s the difference between touring and traveling: Tourists try to minimize uncertainty with a regimented schedule and cultural encounters distilled through English-speaking guides, while travelers embrace the unknown—mishaps and all—as part of an authentic experience. All I know is that sitting on the beach with a bottle of Imperial and a bowl of ceviche is significantly more pleasurable after you’ve faced a few bumps in the road.

CAT POOP COFFEE

One day we were drinking coffee at the home of a Korean friend when she informed us that the beverage we were consuming had been made from cat poop. Naturally, we thought she was joking; then we were horrified as she insisted it was true. It wasn’t until I got home and Googled “cat poop coffee” that I fully believed what she was saying.

Apparently, when the Dutch established coffee plantations on the islands of Java and Sumatra in the 1800s, they prohibited the native farmers from picking any of the coffee for their own use. To skirt the rule, the farmers collected feces from a long-tailed cat called a civet (Not what’s pictured above. That’s just a Burmese temple cat.), which ate the coffee fruits but left their seeds undigested. The natives then cleaned, roasted, and ground the “kopi luwak,” and voila: cat poop coffee became a trend.

Eventually the plantation owners themselves began to favor the rare civet coffee, and in a Tom Sawyer-esque turn of events, it became the most expensive coffee in the world. These days it costs around $35 to $80 per cup and is consumed mostly in South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. Although it’s plenty safe to consume (Trust me, I checked!), industry experts mostly concur that it’s a gimmick. I’d have to agree: it pretty much tasted like a stale cup of Folgers.

WORLD'S FRIENDLIEST PEOPLE

Last month the New York Times’ Frugal Traveler wrote an article deconstructing the question “Which country has the world’s friendliest people?”, while the World Economic Forum recently published this interesting map (note that South Korea ranks, along with Russia and Venezuela, among the least welcoming countries). Of course, there are good people in every country, and traveling usually results in some kind of connection with the locals. But when a people are extra hospitable/warm/welcoming, it can make a good trip truly memorable.

Such was the case when we visited Japan in February. Everywhere we went, we were overwhelmed with hospitality—from the ryokan owners who lent us snow boots to the innkeeper in Fukuoka who gave us her cast-iron squid ball pan. On our first trip there, in December, a young man went out of his way to help us buy subway tickets and take us to our train in Tokyo (an experience you can read more about in my article for this month’s Global Traveler).

Perhaps the best part about these interactions was that they were completely unexpected. Strangely, the Japanese have a reputation for coldness and xenophobia, but our exchanges were the complete opposite. In fact, I felt more welcome there than I ever have in Busan, where foreigners are a dime a dozen. Maybe that’s the key: places that aren’t overwhelmed by visitors are in the end more receptive to them.

JAPAN'S SNOW MONKEYS

There’s a lot to love about the Japanese aesthetic, but one of my favorite elements is their cultivation of pleasantly surprising incongruity. In other words, the Japanese have an appreciation for the absurd…and what could be more absurd than a monkey in a hot tub?

The Jigokudani Monkey Park was our first stop on an eight-day visit to Japan this month, and it set the bar pretty high for the rest of the trip. We traipsed through snowy woods near the town of Yudanaka (about 45 minutes by train from Nagano) to find nearly 200 macaque monkeys alternately digging in the snow for seeds and resting their furry bodies in a steaming hot spring.

For the most part, they completely ignore the tourists shoving telephoto lenses in their faces. Someone discovered the monkeys’ high-altitude hangout in the 1960s, and humans have been flocking to see them bathe ever since. It was tough to tear ourselves away from watching their weird faces, but fortunately we had our own hot baths, cold saké, and mountain vegetable tempura to look forward to at the nearby ryokan (traditional inn).

DOI SUTHEP POSTCARD

I'm embarrassed to admit that I still haven't sorted through my photos from our travels in Myanmar and Thailand last summer. This fellow was taking a break from tossing holy water onto pilgrims at Doi Suthep, a hilltop temple near Chiang Mai. Supposedly it was erected on the spot where a mysterious white elephant lay down and died. The nice thing about sifting through my notes and photos slowly is that it lets me recall more colorful locales as the cold, bleak days drag by in Busan. A description of our life-changing trip to Myanmar is a long time coming.

In the meantime, here's an article I wrote about Austin, Texas—a city that’s racing ahead of America’s recession—for the January issue of Global Traveler magazine.