BootsnAll Travel Network



Penang: Amaza-craza-Malaysia

December 1st, 2006

Penang is amaza-crazy. Georgetown, the main town on the island here, is an old colonial town, a place where huge naval ships used to dock and drunken sailors would wander the streets, causing a merry ruckus. You can sense the history and atmosphere that used to be here.

But it’s different now. Rents were raised a couple years ago, so now more than half the stores you see are closed. All the streets in the districts — Little India, Chinatown, Pakistan Avenue — are crowded; not with people, but with cars. What used to be neighborhoods of dusty alleyways alive with bustling commerce, now is filled with the sound of passing motorbikes and car horns. A few pedestrians wander by, passing in front of steel-gated shop shadows. The cars zoom past, on their way to the big Western shopping malls.

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Koh Lanta: Scuba and Sunflower

November 26th, 2006

Happy Thanksgiving! Okay, I’m a bit late for that. But still. On turkey day, I was scuba-diving off the coast of Thailand at a place called Koh Haa — and now, I’m officially certified as an open water diver. Wootie woo!

Yeah, it was a really cool experience… Even if at the start, it was pretty nerve-racking and slightly uncomfortable. There’s a lot to deal with, with all the remembering to breathe properly and equalize pressure the right way, and then to do all the safety exercises correctly. Just a lot going on, which makes you breathe more, which depletes your tank faster… But on the fourth (and final) dive of the course, we did one final exercise — and then it was a fun dive. And that’s when it hit me how awesome the experience of being 18 metres (60 feet!) underwater really can be. We just cruised around and checked stuff out — bazillions of all kinds of fish, including a porcupinefish and a scorpionfish (dangerous!), some beautiful anemones and starfish, a sea snake, a moray eel, a nudie branch (yeah, Oscar and Jme, I saw one!), and an underwater cave that was cool to look at, but really dark and thus a bit freaky. Does a giant octopus live in there?

We didn’t find out.

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Krabi: Photos from Vietnam

November 11th, 2006

As promised. These aren’t in any particular order; these are just the ones I liked the best. I’d encourage you to have a look at the whole Vietnam set, though, as well. For my per-minute-internet-dollar, I’d say there’re more’n a few photos in there that are worth a look, if I do say so meself — Vietnam is a lovely country, in general, but it is also very photogenic. Anyhoo, off we go…


Rowboat, Tam Coc
The slow, serene rowboat ride through Tam Coc (known as the “Halong in the rice paddies”) was really awesome. Went into some cool caves, too.

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Khao Sok: Three months on the road

November 9th, 2006

I’ve been travelling for three months now. Does that seem like a long time? I don’t know — hard to say. It kind of does, in that I’ve seen and done a lot of schtuff. And it kind of doesn’t, because what’s three months, really? But it’s been awesomeness, dude. Doodarooskis.

To bring you up to speed… I left Vietnam and flew to Bangkok, where I went immediately from their brand new fancypants airport to an overnight bus down to Koh Phangan — location of the infamous full moon party. My first night I got far too drunk (damn Thai-whiskey-filled buckets!), and ended up sick in bed the entire next day. The entire day, and night. The day after that, I recovered slightly, was able to keep some food down, and went to bed early. The next day was the full moon.

As you can probably glean, I wasn’t all that gigged up about it.

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Hanoi: How it was where we were that one time

November 1st, 2006

no worries
no doubt
when you’re drunk swimming naked
in Halong at midnight

the stars glitter
like phosphorent splashes
cannonballs off the boatside
on the count of three

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Nha Trang: I got a weird eye infection

October 14th, 2006

And it sucks. No joke. Basically, both my eyes are bloodshot, and hurt a lot.

But you meet people on the travellin’ circuit all over here who have this form of pink eye — this infection that causes pain and irritation of the eye for a few days. Well, I got it. I’ve met enough people who’ve had it to not to be too concerned about it. And it makes sense that this little bitch gets passed around, as everyone is often in close quarters — on buses, or sharing the same pillows in guesthouses, night after night.

But I repeat: it sucks. I also made it worse. How? By being a drunken idiot, of course.

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Saigon: Shit.

October 9th, 2006

Hahaha! A little of the old Apocalypse Now humor there for you guys.

“Were you in the shit? Yeah, I was in the shit.”

That one’s from Rushmore.

Hey, did you know that Vietnam is the world’s 13th most populous country? I sure didn’t! But it’s true: Vietnam has more than 81,000,000 inhabitants. Now try to think of the twelve other countries with more people. (Hint: None of them are in Europe. The answers are here.)

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Sihanoukville: By popular demand…

October 2nd, 2006

Photos! From North Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. You can see them all over at my disorganized photo dump of a Flickr page, but for a taster/teaser/Sizzler/sampler, have a look here first. Generally speaking, we’ll work backward in time, starting with Angkor Wat….


A Wonder of the World.

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Siem Reap: The cutest couple in Cambodia

September 26th, 2006

You’re a waiter, a Cambodian waiter, working on the tourist strip in Siem Reap. Pub Street. You work on Pub Street, and every day you see this girl, the hostess at another restaurant just down the block, on the other side of the street. Most days you pass her restaurant on your way to work, and she’s already there by then because her shift starts an hour before yours does. She smiles, always smiles — and you smile back. You see each other in other places, too, and always the same shy smile. Sometimes you look up from the table you are serving out in front of your restaurant, and you make eye contact with her across the distance. You smile and she smiles back, and then you continue distributing beers to tourists.

And always you say nothing to each other.

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Siem Reap: Doh maaa

September 23rd, 2006

My blog server crashed sometime during the past couple days, and I’ve lost a bunch of my posts from the last month. Yep. Bummers McBummersly. I’ve found and followed some google-cache guidelines for restoring most of them, but as it happens, through the restoration/re-posting process, these cached versions were then overwritten. The upshot is that the post from Chiang Mai about the “fetal” Irish pool players and the Irish guy going off with the possible ladyboy… well, that post is gone. The funniest one, dagnabit! Also lost are a bunch of your comments, but I have been able to repost those that I could find. Schiesser, as the Germans and Austrians would say. I don’t know what they’d say in Lao, Thai or Khmer, or else I’d write that. I know that “doh maaa” means “motherfucker” in Vietnamese, though. (Thanks, Duke of Nam!) So let’s go with that: Doh maaa!!!

But I guess dem’s da breaks.

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