We're Goin' Down to Austin

...gonna have ourselves a time.

Clicky the picture: for a full view

Well, in case you haven't heard, Justine and I are moving to Austin, TX in a few weeks. And we're planning a good old-fashioned American Road Trip! The trip will take us about 10 or 11 days, with stops in Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, Grand Canyon National Park, a petrified forest, Albuquerque, White Sands National Monument, and Big Bend National Park.

Stay tuned for updates!

A True Road Warrior

American Airlines' in-flight magazine, American Way, is holding their yearly Road Warrior contest. The winner wins two million Hilton points and one million AA flier points. Pretty good, huh? Anyway, besides a bunch of questions about my "demographic" and some questions about articles written in the mag (answers are easily discovered via Google and Wikipedia), they want you to present three photos with captions that prove you're a road warrior and to write a haiku about being on the road. Here's my application, and when Justine submits hers, I'll post it here, too.

Picture 1: One is often faced with adversity, but only true Road Warriors can overcome even the most nefarious hazards and live to tell about it [China].

Picture 2: Sometimes planes, trains, and automobiles are delayed, but true Road Warriors find a way -- even navigating the dangerous streets alone [Laos].

Picture 3: Cold weather, rain delays, early morning commutes... a true Road Warrior pushes on and is rewarded for his or her struggles [Nepal].

The haiku I wrote is as follows:

In Asia, beware!
Potable water is scarce
Prepare for the runs

-Mike.

Mozzies at Night

Bring your malarone (r) to India!

 

Funny Story

Sorry... it's been a million years since I last posted. Things have been busy and I'd like to get back to posting more about our 8-months abroad, but even more so, I'd like to start posting about trips and things we've done since we returned. In the mean time, here's a little story from our days in Thailand, late January 2007.

Thailand has a 30-day visa that you get when you arrive. It's free. And you can renew that visa three times, meaning that you can stay in Thailand for up to 3 months straight and pay nothing. The catch, though, is that to renew the visa, you have to leave the country and then return. Several tourist outfits have this figured out and they make "visa runs" to various borders (Malaysia and Burma/Myanmar, for example) for a few bucks. It's all very much a part of the backpacker's M.O.

Needless to say, Justine and I needed to make such a visa run when we were in Southern Thailand near Krabi. We booked a visa run through our guest house (about 25 bucks for both of us, if I remember correctly), which would take us to Malaysia and back. We paid in advance, and carried our receipt. Off we went, at 6am, to take a 6-hr. ride in a minivan full of other backpackers to the Malaysian border.

We arrived just after noon (we had brought sandwiches for lunch, as well as chips, fruit and drinks and the trusty iPod for entertainment), behind a few other vans and buses filled with tourists. We all walked out of Thailand, getting our passports stamped, and into Malaysia, getting stamped here, as well. We then walked around the building to the other side in order to get stamps for leaving Malaysia. Ten minutes after arriving in the minivan, we were getting our passports stamped for arrival in Thailand, ready to go! Here's the best part... I already mentioned that the visa is free. Malaysia, who havn't realized that this operation could be a cash cow for them, doesn't charge anything, either. As we were getting back into the van, the driver goes "you have to pay them 20 dollars each for the stamp! Don't forget to pay for the stamp!" Justine and I looked at each other and laughed in disgust. "We already have the stamps." Some of the other tourists started to look confused and began reaching for their wallets. "NO!" We shouted. "It's a scam. This driver is running a scam... the guy in the window will give him half the cash if you pay. Don't listen to him." The driver insisted that you simply MUST pay. Nuts to that. We got back in the car and demanded that he drive us back to the guest house in Ao Neng. He finally relented, but what the hell did he expect to happen? Everybody already had their passports stamped, so even if you didn't know it was free, why would you hand over any money?

Getting scammed is just another regular day when you're traveling, though. Good thing we're not idiots or we'd have had to come home much earlier!

-Mike

Map of Beijing

Here's a google map of Beijing, with our pictures attached. What you can do is click on the tabs on the map (or on the side bar) to view some place that we visited in Beijing. A little pop-up will appear on the map, containing information about the place in question and with a picture that we took of the location in question. For example, you can click on the pin located at the entrance of the Forbidden City and a picture that we took will appear. Enjoy!

Map

The One Each Album

Here's a photo album that contains a single photo from each of the places we went to on our long and winding 8-month trip.

The show isn't a perfect summary (I'm sure we missed a few places and there's two from New Delhi, but we were there on three separate occasions even though we didn't include 4 pictures from Tokyo or 3 from Kathmandu, etc.), but it is as close to a brief summary of our trip as we're likely to get. If you don't like it, too bad. Otherwise, enjoy these 60 photos!

Mike.

Spiders

I meant to post this a long long time ago, but haven't gotten around to it until now. Check this:

 

Those shapes are the tangeled mess of dozens of huge daddy long legs, which by itself doesn't seem all that gross, except you might wonder, "why the heck are they all so close together?" If I could show you, however, you'd see that those dozen are attached to literally thousands of others, possibly a million, in a huge black, throbbing web of spiders that runs a several-yard-long stretch of a river path in the town of Pai in Northern Thailand. I have a video (AVI format, 20 MB) of it, too. Pretty gross, huh?

And for those of you who really like bugs (Gaby and Court, I'm looking in your directions), I present to you a
small and incomplete web gallery of animals, mostly bugs, that we photographed from around the world. Enjoy!

-Mike

More Pics

As Justine mentioned in the previous post (see below), we're finally getting around to organizing the 10000 photos we took (literally) while we lived in the other "real world" overseas. You can see them
here. There's only a few and they're all from the S. Island of NZ, but enjoy anyway. More to come....

Scenes from the Kepler Track

Brought to you by Picasa. Google is cool.

We have a lot of free time, being unemployed and all. Above is an example of the creative and fruitful use of our free time. We've been home a month now and we're still looking at our photos and fantasizing about "next time". A special thanks to our family for sitting through a two-part slide show this weekend.

Mike claims he needs to use the computer for something actually productive, so here ends my brief post.

Justine

Laos: a country with massive poverty (31% live below the poverty line), only a small fraction of their roads are paved, people are starving, they have not railroads and very little infrastructure to support their own people. But there are NUMEROUS places... just.... like... this:




Tourists with iPods come into town wanting cheap and easy western entertainment. And since iTunes is illegal in these here parts (and they hardly honor American copyright), you can just go in there buy mp3s, tv shows, movies, etc. The interweb, it appears, is ubiquitous, even in small South East Asian countries (hence our ability to keep this blog all along). We a service like this once in our travels, when we were in Phenom Penh, Cambodia. And although the Boom Boom Room has literally thousands of rock and hip-hop albums available, as well as the Simpsons, Family Guy and MI:3, we purchased a pair of Cambodian rock albums for about 2 bucks. Well worth it, but I just can't believe how desperate people are to get the new 50 Cent when they're out travelling the world! Which brings me to another rant: how come every time we walk into a place, they take of the local music and put on Hotel California?! I cna't count the number of times we would ask restraunts or shops to turn off the western music and put on music in Lao, Thai, Cambodia, Indian, Chinese, etc. That's how we found out about those bands whose albums we bought in Phenom Penh! Arrgghhh.... I could rant for hours about how certain parts of our travels were ruined by westernization, but I'll let the picture above tell the story, instead.

It was taken in Vang Vieng, Laos, a small town near these gorgeous limestone mountains (see previous post). We went for some hiking, caving, and river tubing, but most people go there to watch TV (literally... the place is known in the guide books as the place to watch Friends and every restaurant is blasting at least two different episodes of some kind of American TV) and get high (opium, shrooms, and weed are openly on the menus there). It was a gorgeous setting befouled by the worst kind of tourism and travellers. We met only a few other people there we liked, and every one of them (including us) couldn't wait to leave. So that's Vang Vieng. Otherwise, I though Laos was an amazing country with loads to offer all kinds of tourists. You should definitely go there, but skip VV.

-mike.