Carmen Grau

Sunrise in Southeast Asia Carmen Grau

Departing Barcelona, Spain on January 2, 2000, Carmen Grau spent the first seven months of the new millennium on a challenging personal, spiritual, and intellectual journey of cultural exploration. Using Bangkok as her jumping off place, Carmen visited all the countries of the Indochinese peninsula-Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Burma-and then moved on to Malaysia, as well as Sumatra and Java in Indonesia. She also made brief visits to Hong Kong, Macau, and Singapore. While visiting many cities and famous destinations Carmen also made the point of traveling slowly, often trying to leave the beaten path, and have close, personal encounters with the people, languages, and cultures of these lands that remain, as she describes in vivid detail, mysterious, exotic, baffling, and enchanting. Her rich, extensive, and engaging travelogue describes her time in more than sixty different locations, cycling the streets of Vientiane, walking through the quiet Burmese countryside, learning to scuba dive in Malaysia and make traditional wood carvings in Sumatra, and often venturing to unfrequented, out of the way places. Sunrise in Southeast Asia is Carmen's bestselling account of this adventurous journey through Indochina and beyond. "Carmen's frank, open-minded, good-humored narrative of her ups and downs along the road will surely inspire readers to challenge themselves to find the courage to depart from familiar, comfortable places and assumptions to discover the heart of humanity in the world at large." Brendan Riley