So my little journey across SE Asia is drawing to a close. All to soon really. I had worried in the beginning that it might be a disaster (in so many possible ways),  but it turned out OK. I am realizing that I don't know all that much about travelling as a tourist. Most of my travel has been for work, and far, far from tourist zones most of the time. So I'm finding that I'm not super comfortable trapped inside the tourist bubble. Where a lot of things are fake, or at the very least contrived. Even  in  one of the tourist  markets  tonight,  when I was   looking  at backpacks, the vendor confessed to me that the backpack  I  was  looking at was a knock off (Not in so many words, she said,  "This bag 100%, and this one--the one I  was looking at--99%"). 

I'm also learning that it is good to figure out what I'm hoping for out of travel. Granted part of travel is the encounter with the unexpected, but there are so many suggestions out there of things to do or see. Websites, guidebooks, hotel desk staff, taxi drivers, other travelers, everyone has a list of things that might be interesting. As a result I think it's easy to end up doing something that maybe you don't want to do all that much in the first place. What I do know is that I want to get out of the tourist bubble if at all possible. Or at least get out to the fringes of it--escaping entirely may be out of the question.

Below is my requisite photo with the country flag of a new country in my count. I suppose I took a bit of risk setting my camera down at a traffic circle, but there was no one really close by, and I figured I could beat anyone to the camera if they tried to run for it.