Pause and Wander

Dates: March 14-15, 2026

Places: Chiang Rai & Chiang Mai, Thailand to Taipei, Taiwan

We woke up in Chiang Rai, Thailand on our last morning in Southeast Asia.

One hundred and twelve days. Four countries. Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and a brief hop into Singapore. Longer than we’ve lived anywhere together on this trip, longer than we initially planned to stay, and every additional week earned by one simple decision back in December: we wanted to do the Gibbon Experience with the girls, and March was the earliest we could book it.

So we stayed.

And now, with the Gibbon Experience behind us and Taiwan ahead, it was time to go.

We had just one day to split between Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai before our red eye flight to Taipei that night, so we woke at dawn and hit the ground running. Wat Rong Khun—the White Temple—is here, and we had skipped it not once but twice on previous visits to this town, and Shaina was insistent we make it there this time. 

Wat Rong Khun is the life’s work of Chalermchai Kositpipat, a Chiang Rai-born national artist who has been designing, building, and funding the entire project out of his own pocket since 1997. The all-white exterior represents the purity of Buddha, while the mirrored glass embedded throughout symbolizes self-reflection. The bridge to the entrance crosses over a sea of arms reaching upward from the depths of hell, and the interior murals depict swirling flames, demon faces, and pop cultural figures—Michael Jackson, Neo from The Matrix, Freddy Krueger, Pokémon, a T-800 Terminator—alongside images of nuclear warfare and environmental destruction.

Read without context, that list sounds like a fever dream.

Standing inside it, the intention becomes clearer: the pop culture figures aren’t being revered, they’re being used as a warning. The things that distract us from what actually matters—patience, education, family, community—rendered in the visual language most likely to get our attention.

It’s an unconventional way to deliver Buddhist teaching and it works precisely because of that unconventionality. The artist is trying to reach people who might otherwise tune out. Walking through it we found ourselves thinking about it more seriously than we’ve thought about most temples that made no such demands on us.

The girls were fascinated and a little unsettled, which felt like the correct response.

From there we took a Grab back to the hostel to pack while the girls worked through homework, then lunch at a no-frills curbside burger spot advertising itself as the “fourth best burger” in Chiang Rai. Was that a statement of pride or a warning? Either way the avocado cheeseburger, the fries, and the onion rings were surprisingly excellent, especially when considering it was served on a sidewalk.

Then a bus to Chiang Mai—comfortable and very cold, the air conditioning set to a temperature that suggested the driver was transporting organs. Reading lasted about forty minutes before the winding road made it inadvisable, at which point Max and Finlee switched to music and audiobooks and let the hills scroll past the window.

Hannah and Family, Take Three

We arrived in Chiang Mai and went straight to Hannah’s Airbnb—the boat family from Luang Prabang and Houayxay, now unexpectedly overlapping with us again in another city in another country, neither group having planned around the other.

Hannah and her mom Candace were out when we arrived, taking a Thai cooking class at Sammy’s Organic Farm—a place Shaina and Max had visited years ago and recommended enthusiastically. They reported having an amazing time, arriving home well-fed and happy.

Jade and Luz were at the house, which was all Arya and Finlee needed to know. The four of them immediately dissolved into a two-hour game of hide and seek that spread across the garden and through the narrow streets and alleys of the neighborhood.

This is the beautiful low-maintenance thing about kids at that age—they don’t need warmup time, they just play.

When Hannah and Candace got back, we all headed to the epic Chiang Mai Saturday night market together. It skews more heavily toward food than souvenirs—closer in spirit to a hawker market than a craft market—and the crowd was thick in the pleasant way. We worked our way through chicken satay, pomelo, corn on the cob, sausage, dumplings, ice cream, and several other things we’ve already forgotten. The four girls took off enthusiastically, exploring as a herd and only occasionally reappearing when they needed money to buy food. We practiced our new-found parental patience: often not knowing where your children are in a slow-moving sea of hundreds of people.  

Markets like this are one of the great pleasures of Southeast Asia—the ability to eat a dozen small perfect things instead of committing to one large meal.

We said our goodbyes to Hannah, Candace, and the kids just after nine, which was genuinely sad in the way that goodbyes to good travel people always are. Three cities, three unexpected meetings, and now a final parting.

We are on our individual adventures, living on the road, and we keep running into them. That’s been one of the quiet pleasures of this leg of the trip.

The Long Goodbye

Then to the airport.

We had lounge access through a credit card perk and used every minute of it. The staff were exceptional—one woman in particular who spent the entire evening clearing plates before we noticed they needed clearing, refilling tea unprompted, and producing small candies for the girls at intervals. As midnight approached and the lounge neared closing time, she offered a warm send-off rather than the gentle prod we might have expected.

Small things, but they accumulate.

We boarded our flight to Taipei soon after.

One hundred and twelve days in Southeast Asia.

The math of it only lands when you stop and look at it directly. This region of the world has been part of our life longer than any single place we’ve ever visited together.

And it holds something specific for us that predates the girls entirely. We first came here in 2007 and have been coming back in one form or another ever since, and each return deepens something rather than diminishing it.

The food. The people. The particular quality of the light in the late afternoon. The way a good meal at a plastic table on a sidewalk can feel like one of the best nights of your life.

It is a place where adventure scales to whatever you need it to be.

And we have needed it to be quite a lot of things over these 112 days.  

We’ll be back. That’s not a plan yet, but it’s a certainty.

Goodbye, Southeast Asia.  Thanks for everything.

Hello, Taiwan

The flight departed at 12:30 in the morning, which is technically a departure time and functionally a punishment. We attempted sleep. The attempt was not successful in any meaningful way, and we landed in Taipei thirty minutes early at 4:30am with the hollow, slightly unreal feeling of people who have been awake for too long in a pressurized tube.

Immigration was mercifully quick. We found a taxi, loaded in, and somewhere on the drive to the Airbnb Shaina and the girls simply switched off—heads back, eyes closed, gone. Max watched Taipei scroll past the window in the dark, catching impressions more than details: clean streets, low-lit neighborhoods, the occasional flicker of a convenience store.

A city presenting its overnight face to a new arrival.

Our Airbnb was on the ground floor, tucked deep into a large apartment complex well away from the road. We met the host, brushed our teeth, set alarms for ten, and collapsed.

When we resurfaced, Taipei looked entirely different from what we’d been expecting.

It is cleaner than we anticipated and simultaneously more lived-in—not the gleaming all-glass-and-steel newness of Singapore, but something with more texture to it. The best analogy we can offer is a good pair of corduroys: a little dated in places, maybe slightly worn at the knees, but they fit just right so you keep them.

The neighborhoods we passed through on the metro later in the day had that quality—architecture that has been standing for a while and shows it, in a way that feels inhabited rather than neglected. Taipei 101 makes its impression on the skyline from miles away and reminds you that the city is entirely capable of spectacle when it wants to be.

But the neighborhoods are doing something quieter and we think we like it.

Brunch first: MB Café, chicken katsu with brown gravy curry that was excellent, French toast that was unanimously declared a success by the whole table.

At this point Shaina peeled off to go back to the airport to collect Missi, which left Arya, Finlee, and Max to navigate the metro home alone. Shaina is our navigator—an evolved role rather than a designated one—and when navigation falls to Max we tend to make at least one U-turn before finding our bearings.

Today was no exception. A small wrong turn, a short backtrack, and then we were fine.

The girls and Max stopped at a 7-Eleven—Taiwan’s convenience stores being a category of experience unto themselves, reliably stocked and somehow always exactly what you need—and then returned to the Airbnb so the girls could knock out the remaining homework for the week.

Missi Arrives

The airport pickup went smoothly, which deserves a mention because the last time Shaina tried to meet Missi at an airport it devolved into a full comedy of errors involving early arrivals, late metros, and dead phone service on both ends.

Today Shaina found her mom without incident, which conclusively proves that doing a nice thing for someone is simply better than trying to surprise them with that same nice thing.

The girls and Max went to the metro stop near the Airbnb to meet them coming in.

Hugs all around.

It is genuinely good to have Missi here.

One month together in Taiwan. A whole new chapter of this trip beginning right now, with family, in a place none of us have ever been.

We dropped her bags at the Airbnb and headed straight to a night market—one of Taipei’s many, this one tilted heavily toward food. Fried chicken, fried bread, a giant gua bao stuffed with braised pork.

Delicious, filling, and not exactly a model of nutritional balance.

Taiwan’s food is rich and savory and deeply satisfying but it has a heaviness to it that is different from the brightness of Thai food. Thailand spoils you with its balance of sweet, sour, salty, spicy—every dish a conversation between flavors. Taiwan is doing something else, something deeper and more grounded, not just an extension of standard Chinese fare but something more complex, and we’re still figuring it out. 

But we have a month ahead of us to do just that.

Back at the Airbnb, we put on the Netflix special of Alex Honnold climbing Taipei 101, which seemed appropriate as the building was visible from our neighborhood. We made it twenty-five minutes in before the accumulated weight of the day landed on all of us at once.

We paused it and went to bed.

What Comes Next

Southeast Asia is behind us now. Our time here gave us gibbon songs and Mekong sunsets and rice paddies and night markets and a Khmu village that made us think harder about what our daughters need to see.

Taiwan is ahead of us. Missi is here. We have a month to explore this island with family before we take a U-turn and head to Central Asia and she crosses the Pacific heading home.

Between worlds. That’s where we are right now.

And honestly, it’s exactly where we want to be.