worldtrip

Well, I made it up Kilimanjaro, but it took just about every ounce of eneergy I had.  I actually got mountain sickness on the way up (the summit is around 19,000 ft), and basically had to crawl to the top.  We went up on the fifth day of the trip, at midnight, andclimbed all night.  There was a huge procession of hikers with headlamps on, moving at a ridiculously slow speed – it took about 6.5 hrs to reach the summit, and I had to lay down on the rocks many times – I felt like I was hallucinating, and was very dizzy.  MS effects everyone differently.  It took me about 30 minutes to cover thje last 300 meters to the top.  I then had to descend rapidly, so my guide (Paul) and I shoe-skiied down a 1000 m skree slope, after which I was violently ill – then a 4 hour hike down to lower elevation. I guess I won’t be climbing Mt Everest anytime soon. Kili is the largest free standing mountain in the world and the highest in Africa – it is truly impressiv.  I’m leaving this AM for a 5 day safari to Serengeti, Ngorongo, and other spots – should be very impressive (elephants, lions, leopards etc)  – hope there is still space on this site to post pix   

Well, I’ve made it to Africa – I’m in Tanzania now and getting ready to do a 6 day trek up Mt Kilimanjaro tomorrow.  Haven’t seen any large animals yet, but I’m sure they’re lurking out there somewhere. I left the Asian continent yesterday at 1 PM, and I have to say India was a truly unusual mixture of pleasure and pain.  I took 2 consecutive overnight bus rides which just about wiped me out, but I was able to visit some pretty cool sites.  I mentioned the Ajanta caves last time, and have included some more pictures of them.  They are quite stunning, enormous temples carved out of sheer rock – I don’t think the pix really do them justice.  The next day I travelled to Ellora caves, which are reported to have the world’s oldest religious paintings- around 400 BC.  They used vegwetable fibres, natural pigments , and other substances to paint them, and the color is still very vivid.  India at the moment is incredibly hot and dry – I’ve included some pix of the people carrying jars of water from communal wells.  They would throw buckets attached to ropes down about 20 feet to a puddle of mud, and then carry them miles back to their villages – an unbelievably harsh life.  They say that the monsoon is late this year, and they are all waiting for the rains to begin planting they’re crops.  I didn’t spend long in India (5 days), but it was enough to get a glimpse of how a lot of the world lives.

Well, this has to be the wierdest post yet.  I’ve been in India for 2 days w  sorry I don’t have some pictures to sedn noe (left my cable inMumbaI). I’m in Aurangabad, India and I’m almost certainly the only foreigner in this city.  I took a 12 hour overnight bus trip from Mumbai to here and checked into a hotel  about 6 am  this morning.  Tried to get some sleep before heading out, but woke up when a cockroach crawled across my chest.  Went to some rock caves in Ellora after that, and they were quite spectacular! When I send the pix you’ll see what I mean.  The caves were built for monks about 1,000 – 1,400 yrs ago.  They were carved into the mountain, and I’ve certainly never seen anything like them.  It’s kind of like they carved St. Patrick’s Cathedral from a huge piece of rock, complete with all the altars, statues, etc.  There are a great number of caves, representing the Buddist, Hindu, and, Jist periods.  I better stop now, this will make more sense when I send the pictures

 Well, it’s been a long time since my last post.  Internet access is pretty difficult in some places and I guess I’ve been a little lazy as well.  I’m in Cambodia now, and will be leaving for India tomorrow night.  I have to say I’m a little apprehensive about India – I’m only there for 5 days, and I have no clue what to do there, except I’m pretty sure it’s going to strain my patience.  SE Asia has been everything I hoped for.  Since my last post I’ve traveled through Northern Thailand, Laos, and the last few days have been visiting the famous Khmer temples and Killing Fields of Cambodia.  I had an awesome birthday in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where I met a great girl from Burma and we visited some hot springs together.  The next day I took a bus north to Chiang Saen to visit a Thai friend I met on the bus.  We toured the ancient temples there on his motorbike, I had my 2nd birthday party at a restaurant on the Mekong River, and visited the Golden Triangle.  The next day I took a harrowing 6 hour speedboat ride down the Mekong to Luang Prabang, a beautiful French town in Laos.  The scenery there was awesome – spectacular limestone karst formations and a lot of provincial charm.  I continued by bus south to Vang Vieng, which was even more unbelievable.  The main attraction there is tubing down the river, and stopping at the numerous riverside bars for BeerLao and whiskey shots, with incredible rope swings, slides. and zipline rides all along the way – kind of decadent, but very relaxing and fun.  Took an overnight bus to Vientiene, the capitol of Laos, then flew to Siem Reap, the site of the 8th wonder of the world, Angkor Wat.  The temples here date from the height of the Khmer empire, around 1,00 years ago.  AW is the largest seperate building in the world, with a height greater than Notre Dame.  There were many temples and sights, including the pink temple (Banteay Srei), and the tree-strangled temples of Ta Prohm.  Today was a more somber day – I visited the War Museum, which contains relics of the Cambodian War (approx. 1970 – 1990) during which the Khmer Rouge killed about 3 million people for the sins of not supporting the communist regime of Pol Pot.  My guide had lost an eye, leg, had multiple land mine shrapnel injuries, seen the murder of his entire family by the Khmer Rouge, and lost his wife in 2000 to a land mine.  I’ve heard many opinions about the American complicity in this sad affair, but he did not seem to blame the US (although I have my doubts).  Anyway, I then visited the Killing Fields here (there are much larger ones in Phnom Pehn), where some of the bones of people killed by the Khmer Rouge during the genocide were kept at a temple.  I find it amazing that people who have suffered so much can be so happy, but I think I would have to live here a long time to understand it.  Anyway it’s been a great trip here in SE Asia, and I will definitely be returning, but for now I have to keep moving along.  Will try to send more posts, but this site is difficult to manage from the computers I access, and appears to be running out of space.  Check back in  a week – will be in Africa then- hopefully preparing to go up Kilimanjaro.  Also look at my Facebook site, which I update more frequently (my Iphone is really easy to use compared to these old PC’s)

Well, it’s been awhile since my last post, partly due to lack of internet faciliities, and also to some technical problems. I’m in N. Thailand now, in Chiang Mai.  South Thailand  was great and I did some nice snorkelling and diving there. The photos show various fish and inverts (there is one leopard shark photo). 

During my entire trip down there I was immersed in a giant migration of “20-something” backpackers, who had attended the full moon party on Kho Pha Ngan, and were then moving throughout the islands.  I heard estimates of up to 5,000 people at the party, and I wouldn’t doubt it based on the volume of people on ferrys, buses etc., but I think I’ve finally left them behind.  Chiang Mai is much more chilled out – really a great place.  Another traveller told me about a guesthouse here, and I really love it.  I went bicycling around town yesterday, looking at various temples.  My guesthouse is right in the middle of some beautiful ones,  and one of them had a large celebration yesterday – I wasn’t really sure what was  going on, so I took a lot of pictures hoping to figure it out later.  Sorry there are no captions to these photos – believe me it’s hard enough just downloading them to this site.  My facebook site is 10 times easier, but I think I’ve solved the image size problem.  I’m planning on going on a 3 day hill tribe trek in a couple of days, including some rafting, elephant riding (not sure about that one) and other activities.  Well, think I’ll go get a massage now – my body is really starting to feel my age these days (oh, to be 20-something again!).

I didn’t think it would happen, but somehow it did.  I went out this morning on a boat packed  full of student divers.  There were about 5 dive boats on the site when we arrived, and someone in the water yelled “whale shark”.  Of course I wanted to jump in immediately before it was frightened away, but we had to let the students in first.  I was sure it must have swam away, but about 10 min into the dive I turned to my left and 10 feet away there was a 6 m shark! It was incredibly easy to approach – didn’t seem phased at all by all the gawking divers.  I took many photos, and have included some other reef and land shots.  Tomorrow I plan on renting a scooter and going snorkelling.  There is also a huge party here tonight, so this island is definitely getting interesting by the day.

Well, it’s all good here in the land of smiles.  I spent 3 days on Koh Pha-ngan.  Did a few days of snorkelling and took a trip by boat around the island.  It was pretty quiet there, because they had just finished the famous full moon party the day before I arrived.  I met an Ausie guy named Ian and it happened to be his 40th birthday, so there were some fireworks on the beach, and a lot of beer to drink.  He bought some kind of a balloon that you light on fire, and it drifts into the sky – fortunately he is a fire fighter in Australia, so there were no buildings incinerated.  My last day I rented a kayak and paddled to a small island.  I went to do some snorkelling, and when I came up from a dive it was pouring rain, and a rainbow was in the sky – (sorry, no picture of that).  A lot of the local people were busy all day chipping oysters off the rocks below my room.

Today I took the ferry to Koh Tao.  Pulling into the harbor you could see that the water is crystal clear, and there are tons of people in town, mostly for diving.  Made a reseervation for tomorrow – they told me that they saw a whale shark today, and had the pictures to prove it, so I’m hoping I’ll get lucky – will be taking my UW camera.  Inernet access is better here, so I’ll try to post pix if they materialize.  It’s a little complicated, because I have 3 cameras, and this site requires all pix to be resized – quite a pain, but it’s nice to keep a record of things.  

I haven’t written for awhile – the computer access has been kind of limited, so I’ll summarize a bit.  My last night In Beijing I went tothe Chinese acrobat show.  Thew pictures don’t really do it justice, but it was pretty impressive – seven girls rising one bicycle!  I then  spent a couple of days in Hong Kong.  It was pretty wild – I stayed in a room that was just a little bigger than my bed, and went into the city from my hostel in Kowloon, both nights.  There is a place there called Lan Kwan Fong that was really happening – lit up like day all night.  Kowloon was a lot like Times square and getting out of the subway late at night was one of the more confusing things I’ve done lately.  In the day  walked around the city and visited an island called Lantau.  Lantau is a beautiful place – you take the ferry to get there, and it’s main attraction is a giant bronze Buddah, 300 feet tall.  I visited it on Buddah’s birthday so the crowds were pretty huge.   I took an aerial tram back to the subway station – it was quite spectacular!

I then flew to Bangkok, and then down to South Thailand, and over to an island called Ko Pha-gna.  I arrived much later than I anticipated, so I spent the night in a hotel by the ferry. In the morning I treated myself to a Thai massage and haircut (approx $7 – well worth it!).  Then a ride to the other side of the island.  The hotel here is pretty sweet – I’ve included a few pictures.  Went for a snorkel right below my room about an hour ago, and it was really nice.  The water is a little murky because there is a small stream flowing onto the beach, but the fish and coral were beautiful.  Will definitely spend a few days here before going to the next island, probably Ko Tao.  Loading the pix on the computer here is a little difficult, but I’m getting better – every computer I use seems a little different.  Sometimes the Facebook works a lot better.  Better send this now before I press the wrong button and screw something up.

Today was a pretty full day.  It started out with a bike ride around the neighborhood alleyways (hutongs), including a stop at an exercise park on a large lake.  Most  of the people there were older, but seemed to be in great shape.  There were various exercise machines, as well as some gymnastic equipment, and a 60 year old man showed me how he could do some pretty impressive stuff on the horizontal and parallel bars.  We also tried some Tai Chi, and played some type of game involving something that looked like a haky sack with feathers.  My fellow bikers were Jon from the hostel, and Tu, a Chinese-American girl from Boston.  After the ride,Tu and I went to look at the Temple of Heaven.  Compared to the Forbidden City, this was much more sedate, and really beautiful.  The temple was built around the early 1500’s as a place for the Emperor to worship, and consists of several round buildings with umbrella-shaped roofs.  A lot of the buildings, steps, etc. were arranged in groups of 9, which is the most sacred number to the Chinese.

Tu can speak Chinese, and this was a great help in navigating around the city.  I also used my GPS on the IPhone quite a bit, which worked really well.  After the temple, we took the subway up to the Beijing Zoo,which was actually a bit more complicated than I had thought.  The subways here are really clean and well organized.  There is an electric display in all the cars showing your present location – there are even flat screen TV’s to watch if you get bored.  The zoo’s main attraction was of course the pandas.  This zoo was the first to artificially inseminate and rear pandas and has a huge exhibit to display them.  Apparently they need to eat 15 hours a day, since their diet consists entirely of bamboo, and they were busy doing this when we saw them.  Since they are only found in China, the zoo also donates pandas to other zoos around the world as a good will gesture.  When we returned to the hostel, I said goodbye to Tu, who was taking a train down to Xian.  One more day in Beijing – I hope to see the Summer Palace and the acrobatics show tomorrow.