Craig Dodge - Blog

If you've been following me on Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn, you have probably already figured out that I am about to embark on a new adventure.

I have recently joined the team at Asia Adventures and will soon relocate to Cambodia to work with them full-time,  helping to promote their unique cycling, trekking, cruise and motorbike tours throughout Southeast Asia.

Over the past 2 years, I've had the pleasure of visiting Cambodia 4 times; 3 times to Siem Reap and once to Phnom Penh. I was touched deeply by the sites, history, culture and most of all, the friendly people. I started to casually look around for what kind of job opportunities there were in the area, and was fortunate to have met the owner of Asia Adventures.

Asia Adventures is a perfect match for me for several reasons. First, although I enjoy teaching English in Taiwan, most of my employment experience is in the travel industry. It will be great to get back into it. Second,  the company specializes in cycling, trekking, cruise and motorbike tours, all of which interest me personally. Finally, I especially admire and respect their dedication to "Responsible Tourism"; supporting the community, charities & local vendors as well as protecting the environment.

Please stay tuned to this blog, or any of my social networking pages listed above, for regular updates!

A very interesting discovery.

In the past couple years, I've been so fortunate to visit Siem Reap, Cambodia 3 times. The first time was on a company trip, which was an escorted group tour, and the second and third times were independent trips with my good friend Tom Lambrecht, allowing me to get closer to the local people and real Cambodian life. People who know me won't be surprised to hear that the people and place have touched my heart. It wasn't just the Angkor temples that made these trips so wonderful, but I also feel like I've made some life-long friends.

People who know me will also tell you that I love bike riding. It's a recent passion that I discovered about 3 years ago by joining former colleagues and students from ChuLin School on rides through the mountains surrounding Taipei, Taiwan. I am not a professional cyclist by any stretch of one's imagination, but I think I can qualify as a cycling enthusiast.

So it was an interesting discovery to come across Asia Adventures, a company that has a wide variety of tours in the area. Besides the usual tours of the sites and temples, they also have more unique tours like Cambodia Cruises on the Mekong River and Tonle Sap Lake   and even better, Cambodia Cycle Tours. 

Perhaps there is an Angkor Temple biking tour in my near future......

I wrote previously that I was putting the blog on hold, but I had such an excellent trip to Cambodia recently,  I have to write something here.

Cambodia hadn't really been on my "list of places to visit" before.  Not that I had anything against going there, but maybe I'd just lost my drive to visit new places. Then I was invited to join a company trip with Serenity Entertainment Group in September 2010. It was an amazing experience visiting the Angkor temples, but as it was a group tour, I didn't get to experience much of Cambodia's contemporary local culture. It was a good introduction, but I needed an opportunity to return.

When my friend Tom suggested we go somewhere for Lunar New Year this year, I immediately thought of Cambodia. We went independently, staying at the Golden Banana Boutique Hotel & Resort. This was one of the two places we stayed at during the first trip and seemed like the quiet, friendly, intimate place for the perfect, relaxing vacation with a local feel. We weren't disappointed.

The highlight of this trip were the good friends we made at the Golden Banana. They are the most genuinely warm, kind, friendly, helpful staff at any hotel I've ever visited. It starts with their own personality and character, but is enhanced by a good relationship with each other and hotel management. The hotel provides the staff with customer service training as well as subsidizes their higher education. All of these factors contribute to excellent customer service and a unique guest experience.

For sightseeing, we got away from the Old Market and the Angkor Temples and went more "off the beaten path". We visited one of the floating villages, swam in some waterfalls popular with locals, and went to the home of our friend/driver/guide Tay in a rural village about an hour from Siem Reap. I played volleyball with Tay and some of the other staff of the hotel, and spent some quality time chatting with them around the pool.

I invite you to see the pictures from both trips in my Photo Gallery or on Google+ . If you have any questions about the trip, please post a comment here, or please e-mail me.

I have decided to put the blog part of my web site on "pause" while I re-evaluate it's role in my overall Internet presence.

Having recently joined LinkedIn (business networking) and Google+ (social networking), I haven't had enough time to update this blog with the more detailed posts that it would need to be useful. I will focus my blogging to those other two sites for now, and I invite you to visit me there.

If things settle down, and if I can find time to write on language learning or other topics of interest, I will resume blogging here. But in the mean time, I hope to see you either on LinkedIn or Google+.

Sorry I haven't updated the blog in a while. In addition to things getting busier with my job, I've also been enjoying spending time with my friend Helen, who is visiting from England. She's only here for 2 weeks and there are so many places in the Taipei area to show her!

I've posted some updates on Google+, some are public and some are limited to people in my Google+ Circles. If you'd like to join Google+ or be added to my Circles, send me an e-mail or leave a comment here.

By the way, the above photo was not actually in Taipei, but in Pinglin.

Next week, we should be back to our regularly scheduled program. Stay tuned.