I got FIVE shots today. Yellow Fever Tetanus Typhoid Fever Hepatitis A & B Meningococcal Meningitis I passed on rabies and polio, so there is a chance I will spend the rest of my life in an iron lung or foam at the mouth. Oh well. Everyone at the travel clinic was sort of aghast …
If you have been reading the news the last few days, you have probably come across the “scandal” about the Lonely Planet writer who wrote parts of the Colombia guide book without ever traveling to Colombia. Actually, it is a non-story. He was never supposed to go to Colombia. He was just supposed to write …
Before I get too far away from it, I should add that I did not hate my brief time in Tahiti. While it was expensive and it did seem to overwhelm much of the experience, there were a few things I did enjoy. Poisson Cru. Before I left the island, I made sure I was …
I know you are all probably following along at home, but in case you didn’t know, the 2007 Pacific Games have started in Apia, Samoa. This has actually been a big deal everywhere I’ve been this summer. In Samoa, all the streets in Apia had banners for the games and every day in the paper …
In the United States, there are three parks which are considered to be the crown jewels in the National Parks system: Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon. If you had to make a similar list for Australia, I don’t know what two of the parks would be, one one of them would have to be …
There are lots of places in the world you can go SCUBA diving, but Cairns just might have the biggest concentration of dive shops and and the largest diving industry in the world. The size of the industry is big enough that it has dedicated businesses devoted to underwater photography. I figured this would be …
Today is ANZAC* Day in Australia, New Zealand and several countries in the Pacific (Samoa, Tonga, and Fiji I think). It is the day which Australians and Kiwis remember their war dead. In the US it would be the equivalent of Memorial Day, or Remembrance Day in the UK. ANZAC Day, from what I’ve gathered, …
I’m having a hard time finding a reasonable tour to Komodo National Park. Everything out of Bali requires at least two people and if you go alone you have to pay an arm and a leg. I’m seriously considering just flying to Flores and doing some sort of tour from there. It should be much …
I don’t just like to write about what I see in certain places and then drop the country as I move on to the next. There are some subjects that deserve revisiting, and one that sort of jumps out at you in Hong Kong is the Philippines. Why the Philippines? You’ll notice it if you …