For our second day in Taipei, what I planned was to go to Yehliu Geopark, Jiufen, and Shifen. I mean what's a trip to Taiwan without these 3 right? Whenever I see people posting about their Taipei trips, these 3 destinations are always in their itinerary.

I'm excited to share with you the final stretch of my Southeast Asia bucket list!!! If you're reading my blog way back 2016, you would know that I am trying to visit all Southeast Asian countries and guess what?! I've finally visited it all!! (Except Brunei and East Timor) Visiting it all (okay maybe not all but I'd like to think it was all, lol) wasn't really my plan when I got hooked up on traveling. I just wanted to experience the culture and explore new cities until I realized that if I wanted to connect the history piece by piece of these countries, I really need to visit it all. My goal was to finish it all before I turn 30 but I was able to visit it all a week before my 25th birthday (Bali, Indonesia is the last location and Myanmar being 2nd to the last).

Believe it or not but this is actually my first time in La Union. Been wanting to go for months now but I have no one to go with me. So when my best friend is coming home from her vacation, we immediately planned a weekend getaway. My high school friends are mostly into staycations so it's really something when we finally push a getaway like this. Baby steps. Haha! And also, this almost didn't realize because Atheena had a traumatic experience with beaches so we were looking for other places we could visit while she's on vacation. But fortunately, we got her blessing. Lol. The only condition is that she'll not go to the falls. 

I never really appreciated long weekends that much until I need it to have a vacation. I would say I am in my longest streak of not filing a VL and SL and so far I am doing okay. I mean, it's a struggle but with my situation right now, I really don't have a choice. So when holy week approached, I feel like I'm a student in a sembreak because, for the longest time since the Christmas holidays, I can get a decent vacation from work.

I've been to Bangkok a lot of times but this is my first time visiting Damnoen Saduak Floating Market. And by far, this is one of the nicest floating markets I've been to. It is literally, a "FLOATING MARKET" where people can buy goods from the sellers in the boats. When I first went to Ho Chi Minh, we are told that we will be seeing a floating market in the Mekong River but what we imagined was different from the actual floating market they have there.

It was our third day backpacking and this I swear is one of my most hassle days in 2018. I am not exaggerating that. We had a very stressful problem with our Airbnb host and Agoda booking. But first, let me start the post by narrating how we did border crossing by land!

I am always a fan of border crossing because living in the Philippines means we don't have a neighboring country that we could travel to by land so it was really fun crossing borders and observing how just by one single border changes how the way people live. This is most evident when we crossed the Laos-Thailand border. The way the drivers navigate is different from both countries. In Laos, they follow right-hand drive while in Thailand, they follow left-hand drive. So you could literally see differences by just how we changed lanes when we arrive in the border of Thailand. Little things like that fascinate me.

I have always been a fan of chilly weather because let's face it, the weather here in Manila is not good for the skin. It gets too humid and hot sometimes so when there's a long weekend where I can experience Baguio weather without actually staying in Baguio, I grabbed the opportunity and went there with my father.