Traditional Buddhist prayer wheels or Mani wheels are different-size cylinders placed on a spindle, usually engraved with religious texts (mantras). According to those texts, prayer wheels are used to accumulate wisdom and merit (good karma) and to purify negativity (bad karma). The believer usually spins the wheel clockwise, repetitively saying prayers, either aloud or only [...]

A slow boat ride on the meandering waters of the river Mekong is just what we needed after the rush of a motorbike ride from Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) to Vinh Long in southern Vietnam. We’d heard great things about the experience of staying in a home stay on one of the tiny river [...]

The monumental building in the photo below is the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple, one of the modern icons of Singapore’s Chinatown. Though at first glance it may seem like an old structure, it’s actually very new. After a 2 year-long and S$62 million-worth construction, it was opened as recently as 2007. The temple is considered [...]

Despite the early morning hours, our little bamboo hut in the pristine island of Malapascua in the Philippines was hot. I was tossing and turning in the bed, half-asleep and not really sure what woke me up in the first place. A few minutes passed when it occurred to me that it wasn’t the heat [...]

We’ve recently crossed the 6 month mark on the trip and needless to say the time’s gone by in a flash! The countries visited so far, though hardly high in number, have each influenced and impacted us and our journey in ways hard to verbalize in a single blog post.   But this post isn’t [...]