Santiago was great; I didn't make it too far out into non-urban Chile, but the city is rather nice. The view of the Andes behind downtown is absolutely breathtaking since they completely dominate the skyline. Brushed up on my Spanish a bit again, but the Chilean dialect is extremely odd with tons of slang and such. Apparently native Spanish speakers even have a good bit of trouble in Chile. I climbed up Cerro San Cristóbal, a 860 meter hill that dominates the local area with great views all around, and then took the gondola down! Toured the Unduragga vineyard as well, which was quite interesting since they took us all around the wine-making facilities. They had working equipment from 100 - 200 years ago preserved which was quite cool to look at compared to the modern facilities they use now. Definitely worth doing a vineyard tour if you've never done one. I thought about going to Easter Island, which is actually part of Chile, but 5 days wasn't enough to do that. I will go back at some point though, both to do some climbing in the Andes and to go to Easter Island! After paying my $100 "reciprocity fee" (we charge Chileans the same for a visa, so it's only fair they do likewise; they even happily took my Amex and charged it in US dollars), I can now return to Chile for the life of my passport without paying that again.

Back to the US after that, where I've been since. Made it out to Toledo to see Jason and Heather (er, I mean, to go to Cedar Point of course; it must've been coincidence that they were there!) on the last day of the season; it was fairly chilly, which was good since it made it even less crowded! (I'm still not quite as cold-resistant since I was in India all of last winter. I need to start back up on my regular 4.2mi runs in shorts and a t-shirt in 30°F snowy weather and I'll be immune to cold again!)

After that it was off to Kokomo, IN for Nikki's birthday party. Kokomo is basically an hour from Indianapolis and pretty much the middle of nowhere. (And apparently one of the worst meth areas in the country; they caught a high school kid with most of a portable meth lab in his backpack recently!) I always like visiting out-of-the-way suburban areas since I spend most of my time in more urban surroundings. And Nikki's kids are absolutely adorable.

I headed out of town again for Thanksgiving; we had it at Chip's place in Seattle this year. Amber, Jason, and Heather flew out as well so we had most of the usual suspects. The last couple days I was there, it was actually snowing! (Very rare in Seattle.) There was like 1-2" of snow total, but the city was practically shut down because they don't really have snow removal equipment. I had a 1AM flight back and took a cab; good thing I called well in advance since they told me that some people had been waiting up to 2 hours for one to show up!

Other than that, I've been whiling my time away at home and unwinding from having been gone so long. Right now I'm down in Plano, TX (in the Dallas area) visiting my parents for Christmas, the fun commercial holiday that it is! (I actually rather like Christmas.) Sadly, there's a new Walmart going up a mile or two away; as if they didn't have enough of the horrid things all over the place already! The park system in Plano is decent at least, and I can borrow my dad's bike and ride around. (They actually have a couple "bike routes" connecting through different parks and such.) Anyways, I'll be back on the 28th and generally in Boston for the foreseeable future. I've barely seen my friends since I got back between domestic travel and being lazy, so sticking around Boston will be good.

Anyways, this technically concludes my year-long international trip! Not that I'll stop traveling anytime soon...

Anyways...let's see, what have I done in the past month? Well, to be brief, I went to Munich for Oktoberfest (which, of course, is mostly in September) which was a lot of fun. Met up with my friend Phil (who speaks some German, which helps since I don't) who was visiting Germany when I went over there. The beer tents are tons of fun too, since you end up sitting at huge tables with other random groups of friendly people...all with giant 1L mugs of beer! The temporary grounds they erect complete with the massive tents, a rollercoaster, and other stuff are insane for something that goes up and comes down every year. Definitely will have to go back at some point.

Headed up to Stockholm after that to visit a few friends up there and see the city. Stockholm is quite cool because it's basically a giant archipelago with bridges between the islands, which I didn't realize. One of my friends took me on a tour around a bunch of the islands one day. In the middle of winter the days are all of 6 hours long since Stockholm is so far north!

After that, it was off to Amsterdam. I think Amsterdam may be my favorite city to wander around on foot in Europe. Part of that is the lack of traffic—there are quite a few more bikes than cars in the city. Plenty of trams and other public transit as well. It's quite nice walking around with all the canals running through the city as well. Not to mention the typical laid-back Dutch attitude.

Spent some more time back in London as well visiting various friends and relatives, since I'd been going back and forth from London to elsewhere in Europe. Anyways, that's the past month in a nutshell; I'll write something more interesting later. But now, it's off to Chile! I think I'll be back to Boston for some time around Nov 7 or 8 or so; after Toledo I'm going down to Indianapolis for a friend's birthday, but then it's finally back home to stay (for now.)

So, after butchering some Spanish... I've been in Spain since Friday, specifically in León, which is 300km north-northwest of Madrid. The friends I'm staying with speak a bit of English, which when combined with the bit of Spanish I speak works out just fine! I took 5 years of Spanish from 8th grade through high school, but I haven't really spoken it since then, which is about 9 years. It's interesting how my Spanish is these days; I have trouble conjugating "simple" (e.g. basic but totally irregular, though no language matches up with English for irregular conjugations) verbs like to be, which a first year Spanish student would probably know, yet I remember how to say pointless things like hovercraft en Español. My Spanish is rapidly improving, though I'm leaving in two days so it's not like I'm going to be fluent anytime soon. It's interesting that my brain works in such a way that any words that I remember or re-learn I have no trouble spelling (with accents and such) at all. Yet I can't remember most of the useful vocabulary that I learned in the past; it's a slow process to re-learn it.

So León is quite a cool city to visit. It's about 1km above sea level, surrounded by mountains and some rivers. I went out to the mountains with my friends today which was quite nice and picturesque. There's an interesting tradition here of free tapas (e.g., "small plates" for anyone who hasn't had Spanish-style tapas before; basically little appetizers) with your drinks. And that can mean anything including a coke, sparkling water, or, more likely, una caña de cerveza; that's literally a small glass of beer, anything from 125 - 200ml or so, for 1 - 1.5 euros. With tapas included! A lot of them are just tasty bread, olive oil, cheese, and ham (good soft cheese and serrano ham usually), but many places give you quite a few, more interesting, tapas. I've never been anywhere before where you can just go out and have a few mini-drinks and get more than enough dinner at the same time with them! And as for real dinner itself, they have quite amazing and tasty buey (ox) here that one can get barely cooked.

Anyways, before that, since I haven't blogged in a while, I spent 5 days or so in Dublin. Went to the World Cultures Festival over the weekend with my friends there which was kind of cool; lots of interesting foreign music. Spent a day just wandering around the city, which was nice since it's one of those compact cities that one can just walk around without any transportation. I think the highlight was wandering upon a public Shakespeare performance in one of the parks when I was looking for the James Joyce memorial. They were reenacting the Twelfth Night, 80s style! It was pretty funny since they had Cordelias instead of Cordelios. I think the funniest part was when the fake-Cordelia was fighting with one of the courtswomen(?) in slow motion... with Kung Fu Fighting playing in the background... Great stuff.

Let's see, other than that and various wanderings around London, I had a good time up in Glasgow. Succinctly, we didn't see Nessie, but we saw all of the city and such which was pretty cool. Saw a really cool modern rock concert as well...with pipers! (It WAS the International Piping Festival that upcoming weekend.) I think I need to go back up to Scotland some time and actually make it to Inverness.

Anyways, I'm back to London in a couple days, though I may just stay in Spain for another week; I'm not sure yet. Perhaps going to Serbia in a week or so. After that it's off to Norway and Sweden, and Germany afterwards. Too many countries to see and too little time! I might need to spend more time in Europe than planned.

Headed up to London after that, where I've been since. Ethan, John Arresty, and Kate came over for the Great British Beer Festival, which ran from Tuesday - Saturday, so we went to various sessions of that. Went around to random London sites in the meanwhile; I've been a bit lazy since my friends have been going to a few places that I'd been to just last year. Had fun exploring the British Museum today, though (at least a very small part of it; I plan to go back to see the rest.) Last night we managed to see a hilarious standup comedy show. Good cuisine has been quite the highlight here! Between good pub good, tasty restaurants, gastropubs, and the like, I certainly haven't gone hungry.

Tonight was perhaps the most eclectic dining experience of my life. Well, there wasn't any foam, but the oddness certainly kept it up there! Went out to Archipelago with Ethan and John as it came highly recommended. For starters we had peacock, crocodile, and tom yum soup with 24 karat gold-plated quail eggs. After a palate cleanser of some very strange, interesting ices, we moved on the main courses: wildebeest (gnu! these didn't seem very open source though), wok-fried frog legs, and kangaroo. Had a nice side salad with crickets and locusts to go with it. Dessert was some strange sorbets, cheese, and my personal favorite—chocolate-covered scorpion! Mmm. Topping it off was a visit from The Doctor; of his many remedies I chose the absinthe in a bottle bottomed off with a baby boa constrictor. And one of those fun pills that turned into an elephant after dunking into a bowl of hot water!

Anyways, off to Glasgow tomorrow with Ethan, John, and Kate. We shall indeed find Nessie.

I did wander around Bangkok a bit, but didn't see much other than the seas of concrete and glass that you find in any major city. Did manage to wander into a cool little slum-ish area right in between huge shopping malls and giant towers of commerce. I had a nice view of the river from my hotel room; looked great at night, but not so great in the morning after I could see the nice dark brown color of the water. :)

So I spent almost a week in Phuket! I'd originally planned on 4 days there, but the diving turned out to be great. I only got in 7 dives (had some work to do in the evenings or I'd have gone on a liveaboard), but it was still a ton of fun. The highlights were a dive at the King Cruiser wreck and Ko Doc Mai. I'd never done a wreck dive before, so that one was quite fun. Had a couple cool swimthroughs down around 25m through parts of the boat! Ko Doc Mai was a wall dive; basically there was a vertical reef wall that we swam along. What made it especially cool was the cave there that we went into for a bit, though. I have to take up more cave diving in the future! I dove a few other sites, all of which were quite nice. Racha Yai was particularly nice, as I did just 2 dives there, but managed 60 minutes just fine on both dives (finally getting decent at not sucking up all the air too quickly.) And the 29°C water was quite nice, after starting in the 17°C waters of Sydney then moving to the warm 23°C waters of Cairns around the Great Barrier Reef! I'd definitely like to make another diving trip to Phuket sometime in the future.

Thailand's been a great place to visit. Everyone's so very friendly here; of course I'm headed off to India now where the same can be said (at least in the south where I'll be), but I don't expect quite so much out of many parts of Europe. And that's where I'm still headed for almost two months after 6 days in India. Still haven't quite made a plan for Europe, so I'll just figure out it when I get there. If I get bored I think I'll head down to Belize and go diving in the fabled Blue Hole there and get my own flight up to Aruba since I'm out of stopovers.

Oh yeah, I did spend a couple days in Kuala Lumpur before my Thailand trip, which was pretty fun. Met up with my friend Suresh and his wife, and they showed me around the city. Unfortunately I didn't really have time to see the "real" Malaysia either, though Suresh took me to a fairly interesting temple. Lots of cool artwork on the walls with a strange multi-colored motif suggesting the artist was on something. Went down to Singapore for a day as well (I spent 12 hours just wandering around taking pictures); it's an interesting place. Everything's polished as can be, and I was afraid to even jaywalk lest I get caned! Of course I stopped in the Long Bar at the famous Raffles Hotel and had a Singapore Sling, as every tourist must do. (And, yes, I threw my peanut shells on the floor. It would be sacrilege not to!)

Phuket though...definitely one of the highlights of my trip so far. Wonderful people there (other than the tuk-tuk drivers who try to severely rip off tourists!), met a lot of great folks, and had plenty of fun. So yeah, it's off to India shortly for a few days, then wandering my way around Europe for some time. Still working on all those pictures; I suck, I know. I shall reappear from Europe in a few days time! The Great British Beer Festival kicks off the day after I arrive; Ethan, John Arresty, and John's girlfriend are heading over to London for that, so it should be fun.

And I just had the most intriguing experience checking in since I'm finishing this up from the Air France business lounge in Bangkok... Got sent over to the supervisor at KLM check-in, who proceeded to closely examine my passport, take a picture of it, then go over it with a magnifying glass! Apparently this was triggered since I'm flying BKK-AMS-CDG-MAA (Bangkok-Amsterdam-Paris-Chennai); about 11000 miles to go what's around 1400 miles direct, so normally one wouldn't fly such an indirect route. But that's the way of life flying on an award ticket with no better routing... They cleared me with no problem but it was kinda funny watching the guy with the magnifying glass. :) Then I got to Thai immigration and ran into more problems there! Since I'd taken the train up from Kuala Lumpur to Phuket before flying into Bangkok, I'd just had the most brief of immigration formalities at Surat Thani on the Thai border. Brief meaning they didn't even process me into the computer system (I got a stamp on my departure card at least), so I got sent over to yet another supervisor. Took a few minutes and several questions but then I was finally on my way... and off to Chennai I go (in about 2 hours now), long and circuitous via Europe!

After that it's up to Bangkok for a couple days (couldn't get a return flight out of Phuket and only inconvenient dates if I went back down to Kuala Lumpur, so I figured I'd see Bangkok while I was in the area.) Travel between Singapore/Malaysia/Thailand via rail is VERY cheap (my roundtrip to Singapore on overnight sleepers both ways is all of USD20; only standard accomodations though, the deluxe ones are around 4x as much and get you a private room with bathroom but they were all sold out unfortunately) and the new trains they have look quite nice. Then it's off to India for a week and to Europe as planned...

Japan was fun, though I didn't nearly get everything I wanted to do done; guess I'll have to make a return visit! I didn't really get out of Tokyo. I spent most of my time just wandering around the city (plus I had downtime finishing up some work I'd been putting off for weeks. Gotta get the business going if I don't want to become a wage slave again!) Let's see... the most interesting places I did see were Asakusa, which has a great old temple in the area; Ginza, which is like Times Square NYC, but bigger, brighter, and more upscale; and Akihabara, which is a crazy maze of shops selling all varieties of new and used electronics. You can basically buy anything that uses power there, or the parts to make it if you prefer. Tokyo is one of those cities that's ultra-modern yet has plenty of of cultural and historical stuff intact, which is always nice to see.

I'd been planning to AT LEAST see Mt. Fuji, but the weather was completely cloudy the days I was able to go, so I didn't bother since the view would've sucked. I caught a glimpse of it in the distance from the plane shortly after takeoff, at least. Saw a couple friends down there: Nathan, who I've known for years but never met before, and his wife Chita-Sai (I probably horribly misspelled that); and Jay, who I had no idea was in Tokyo until another friend noticed my .jp host and asked if I'd gotten in touch with him! (Last time I met up with Jay, he was in the SF Bay Area.) So yeah, Japan definitely needs a return visit and more than just a few days next time. And yes, the sushi in Japan is amazing. I had some wonderful o-toro. Nice, buttery, melt-in-your-mouth o-toro (at 3000 yen for 2 pieces though, ouch.) And Pocari Sweat (the ionized energy drink!) tastes far better than it sounds.

Oh, and I finally tried the bibimbap on my flight to Japan. It consists of vegetables and minced meat in a bowl, white rice, chili paste, and sesame oil. All these came separately, and you get to mix them up in the bowl (they gave me a little instruction sheet even!) They serve some random side dishes with it; one of them were these little transparent pickled tadpole-like fish, around 1-2cm long and 2-3mm wide. I asked and found out that they were anchovies! (Tasted far better than your average American-style anchovy.)

I'd been meaning to try the bibimbap since I saw it on my first flight, but there've always been multiple other more appealing meal choices; since the ICN-NRT flight is 90 minutes the meal service is limited and the only other entree was cooked fish (who in their right mind would apply fire to fish?) So bibimbap-trying time had come, and it was really good! Actually everything I've had on Korean Air so far has been excellent (they even managed to do my steak acceptably rare from SYD-ICN on the way to Japan.) This is actually my last Korean Air flight on this trip sadly; the remainder of my flights are on Aeroflot, Austrian, Delta, Air France, KLM, and Avianca. (Looking forward to that Ilyushin IL-96 flight from Bangkok to Moscow on Aeroflot though!)

My last week and a half in Australia was fun... I headed up to Cairns last Tuesday, a couple days after my Blue Mountain expedition. Did a 3 day/2 night liveaboard dive cruise on a boat which was great. Got my Advanced Open Water certification while I was out there (means I'm certified to go down to 30m now.) It was amusing when we did the 30m dive and tested each other for signs of nitrogen narcosis; one of our group had numbers disappearing off the slate we were supposed to be hitting them in order on--she was definitely narced! Then this red bass came along and stole a tomato right out of our instructor's hand! (He'd brought it down so we could see how purple it looked at 30m; colors disappear in spectral order the deeper you go.) But yeah, doing a few days on a liveaboard is totally the way to go. You get in a ton more diving since they haul you up at 6am, and I made some new friends along the way since we had ~30 people stuck together on a boat.

Oh yeah, if you're not familiar, Cairns is right near the Great Barrier Reef...so I got to spend 3 days diving on the reef. :) Saw tons of cool reef life and such; all kinds of amazing fish and coral up there. Diving in the 24-25C water was a welcome change from Sydney too! I'm now up to 25 dives and exactly 15:00 total underwater time. (Got in a couple fun night dives too, my first ones.) Stayed in Cairns for a couple more days after that and did some sightseeing and such. After I got back from Cairns, I remembered I wanted to climb the Sydney Harbo(u)r Bridge and had forgotten about it...oops. Fortunately, I managed to sneak it in yesterday on my last free day in Sydney! That was a lot of fun too (other than it being kind of a ripoff at AUD169.) Takes about 2 hours for the actual climb (more like leisurely stroll) up and down the bridge, with plenty of time for sightseeing along the way. I went on the first night climb, so the sun had just dipped under the horizon as our group set out up the bridge; so we got in some sunlight before it got dark on the way up.

That about sums up the end of my wonderful trip to Australia; spent a bit over 1.5 months there, and I can't wait to go back sometime! Left Sydney at 8am this morning (as one might guess I just stayed up, so I'm gonna be pretty dead when I get to Tokyo... napped a bit on this flight but I've mostly just been wasting time online and watching movies so that I don't end up staying up all night again. Doesn't help that Narita (Tokyo's International airport) is about an hour on the express train from Tokyo proper, assuming I make it in time to catch the last express train!) So 5 days in Tokyo, a week to split between Malaysia and Singapore, a week and a half in India (that'll be mostly business; I need to get back to more of that), then it's off to Europe for two months! Yay. I'm well on my way around the globe. Back with more boring monologue after I experience Japanese culture the other way around!

Anyways, I FINALLY got to my destination, Mt. Solitary (quite aptly named for a solo camping trip!), around 7:15AM. 10+ hours of hiking. Took me a good bit to find an appropriately flat, non-overgrown campsite, and finally fell asleep around 8:30... Started back down at 2:45PM Sunday! Going back down was quite a bit quicker starting in the light (also my pack went from 11kg to 8kg from having consumed all of my food and most of my liquids), but sadly it got dark before I saw some of the stuff I wanted to see. I got to the bottom of the climbing-heavy section just as it was getting dark, so that made the trip much quicker since that was the hardest part in the dark; the steep, rocky trails after that were easy enough with flashlight in hand. Still got a lot of amazing views though! And the lack of light pollution was awesome; I saw tons of stars and unfamiliar constellations (I can identify the Southern Cross now, but that's it down here!) The Milky Way was nice and clear across the middle of the sky, a sure sign that you're properly removed from civilization.

So yeah, I'm a bit crazy, but I got one more thing done that I would've been sad leaving without doing! I'm still working out the distances (GPS reception was really spotty in the lower areas, so my track data is intermittent and the odometer not useful; but I have all the segment times and resting times written down so I can go back and figure it all out.) I think I did approx 24km on Saturday and 15km on Sunday. There was TONS of crazy up and down, and a huge section of sheer rock after sheer rock to climb. I think there was around 800m total elevation change in each direction. I camped out at 950m (after starting at 930m at the trailhead, descending to 750m via stairs, bottoming out at 650m or so, and peaking at 990m.) It was freezing up there too; around -3 or -4°C up top, but I was actually TOO warm (I didn't even have enough space to stick the layers I needed to remove while hiking!) Woke up sweating wearing just jeans and a short sleeve shirt in my sleeping bag; guess I know now that I can go way colder than I did if I'm fully layered! I had to abort the full return route Sunday as I wasn't going to make the 8:25PM train otherwise; I ended up taking an alternate route up and getting a cab back to the Katoomba train station to make it in time (next train was at 10:55, and getting from Sydney to where I'm staying in Seaforth at 1AM on a Sunday night would have been a huge pain via public transit or very expensive via cab.) Oh yeah, silly sign, the Golden Stairs only take 25 minutes to climb, not 60! (I'm not sure how I did that at the end of my long trip with my aching shoulders and decently heavy pack. I was about to fall over and die as I reached the top of the ridiculously tall and steep "stairs"; fortunately the cab company knew exactly where the Golden Stairs were, and they got there right after I got to the top! Made it to the train station with 10 minutes to spare.) Got back to Seaforth just before midnight; 30 hours for quite a memorable little trip, not bad at all.

And half my toes hurt like hell. Ow. Apparently I need new insoles for my hiking boots. I'm surprised I'm actually not more sore; I feel like going for a run or something right now! No knee pain either, yay. Now, time to get back to more diving! (And I found a scuba-diving travel bug in the one geocache I bothered to find on my hike, amusingly enough.)

Anyways, I've been having a TON of fun diving down here if you couldn't tell. :) I picked up a mask+snorkel and a pair of fins so far (Tusa X-Pert Zoom split fins; I'd been renting that type for a while and decided to buy them since I might not always be able to rent split fins on my travels, and I do a lot better with them than plain old flat fins.) It's been around 16 - 17°C in the water here, but I've been quite warm in a wetsuit! (Even having lost a few more pounds that I really didn't need to lose from all the exercise I've gotten in here; I managed to bottom out at 50kg but I've been gaining it back eating more than well to make up for all the activity.) Unfortunately scuba gear is unreasonably expensive here, or I'd have already picked up my own wetsuit or semi-dry, diving computer, and perhaps some other gear. (And I grabbed an underwater slate. It's useful to be able to write when you can't talk!)

So I'm off for an overnight hike in the Blue Mountains by myself tomorrow night, I think... should get down to around 0°C. Then back to Sydney on Sunday, and then up to Cairns! I'm going to do my Advanced Open Water course up there on a liveaboard boat over a couple days. I can't wait to do some diving in the WARM water around the Great Barrier Reef. All the folks down here say that since I've been having such a great time diving down here, I'll absolutely love it up there. I'm probably off to Melbourne the weekend after that to do some sightseeing and visit a friend. Then it's off to Japan on Jul 5. (Oh yeah, did I mention I changed my ticket so I could get more diving in down here? :) I was originally scheduled to leave for Japan on Jun 20!) Maureen's been amazingly kind in letting me stay here all this while.

Anyways... I've been mostly keeping busy, having tons of fun underwater, and plotting my evil plots. I'll probably check in from Japan once I make it there, assuming I don't just stay in Australia even longer! This country is absolutely wonderful, in many ways. And I again expect everyone back home to be a certified diver so we can go diving when I get back! Or else!

Took the written exam and finished the third and fourth open water dives today, so I'm now signed off as certified! We saw a big cuttlefish on the last dive which was quite cool (I poked at a slimy tentacle!) As it happened, I was the only person signed up for the course this week, so I basically got private lessons for the price of regular lessons which was nice. I opted to do the extended version, which means I get two more dives tomorrow, so that should be quite fun since we'll be mostly just swimming around seeing interesting stuff rather than practicing and testing skills. I'm going to take my camera and underwater case too. I'm still having a bit of trouble with buoyancy control so an extra day of diving with my instructor will fix that up. (I'm fine until I try to do something like navigate with my compass or play with the dive computer, then I sometimes forget to breathe properly and accidentally end up drifting upwards. Oops.) I got signed off on all my skills, requirements, and course completion, but my instructor wanted to hold off until tomorrow to submit all that so that I'm fully comfortable with buoyancy, so I'm TECHNICALLY not quite a card-carrying certified diver just yet, but close enough! Anyways, anyone who likes the water, or hates the water, should definitely try out scuba! It's amazingly fun. So now I'll be able to dive most anywhere in the world with other certified folks, so I have yet another exciting thing I can do along my trip! (Friday Update: Yup, I'm now officially fully certified as an Open Water Diver. Got my certificate and card, dated yesterday even! Yay.)

Oh yeah, and my visit out to Tooraweenah last weekend was a lot of fun. Started off visiting the Western Plains Zoo in Dubbo which was a disappointment; spent AUD30 to get in for the 3 hours I had there, and decided to take the walking trails which seemed well placed on the map. Except there were tons of OTHER random trails and none of the trails were marked at all so I ended up getting lost more than once. Missed a couple feeding times I wanted to see and spent more time wandering around trying to find trails than I should have had to. It's a nice zoo at least; tons of space so all the big animals are in open areas with natural barriers rather than caged up. Headed up to Tooraweenah after that, stopping to go over to James' "shed night" with him, which was a informal gathering of about 20 guys from his religious group, but other than a couple people telling their personal stories there wasn't any of that stuff involved, and everyone there was really nice. It's interesting talking to farmers who live out in the middle of nowhere with a completely different lifestyle and background from mine. Tons of tasty food too. And they had an old blacksmithing setup that a few people were playing around with! (Complete with bellows and coals and huge showers of sparks and all.) Seeing red-hot iron emerging from a shower of sparks and being hammered into random shapes isn't something you get to see every day. Got a bunch of pictures of that in action with sparks flying and fire burning (no brimstone though), and a nice tour of the wool shed where they shear the sheep.

On to Tooraweenah itself for the weekend, where I stayed with James and Petria. It turned out Saturday was the inauguration of the new public grill in the park, so we went down to have some tasty sausage sandwiches and meet some townsfolk. The outside of the bathroom had this big mural painted around it depicting the infestation of Australia by rabbits, and one of the artists who'd done a bunch of the work on that was there so she took me around the mural and explained it all. (I had no idea the rabbit problem had been so bad!) It's really great how friendly these rural folks are (and Australians in general) compared to much of the world.

We went up to the observatory in the national park there as well and saw the inside of one of their big telescopes. It's great being in an area with about zero light pollution. Of course I had to introduce James and Petria to geocaching, and there happened to be one right at a scenic lookout that they were taking me to anyways, so yet more geek sporting! Saw a bunch of wild kangaroos there too; I got out of the car at one point and walked RIGHT up to some of them for some photo ops (I managed to be non-threatening enough to get within 1m of one kangaroo while it posed for me!) Oh yeah, I rented a car out of Dubbo to go the 120km up to Tooraweenah, which was my first time driving on the left! At least it was country driving and not trying to navigate around a city so it was pretty easy. I was a little nervous since I was warned about errant kangaroos and wallabies randomly hopping into the road, but I didn't run into any. Though when we were driving around the Tooraweenah area in the dark James had to brake suddenly a few times to avoid the hopping obstacles in the road.

Took the train back from Dubbo on Sunday (I'd flown over there, but decided to do the 6 hour train ride back for the experience; it was somewhat scenic but I think I'll fly both ways if I go out there again!) Had "Australia's Award-Winning Best Meat Pie" in the bakery across from the train station, which was pretty good, though I'm not quite sure meat pies can quite be considered a delicacy. As far as the next couple weeks... I might head up north where the water's warm and do some diving up there now that I can do that! Still planning to hit Melbourne over a weekend, though probably not this weekend since I'm pretty exhausted from too little sleep and tons of activity. I'm booked to leave for Tokyo on Jun 20, but I might push that back by a week or so so that I can see and do everything I want to in Australia.

Oh yeah, I've decided I'm going to go off by myself on an overnight camping expedition in the Blue Mountains sometime in the next week (gets to around 0C/32F there at night.) Great hilly terrain to hike, caves to explore, and wonderful views. I got a bunch of info from a local friend who's familiar with the area and picked up a nice detailed topo map of the area, so it's just a matter of packing my tent, sleeping bag, warm clothes, food/water, requisite gadgets (but I bought an actual non-electronic compass as backup!), and making it out there! Only a couple hours west, and the Sydney trains go all the way out there at certain hours. I'm looking forward to my first solo overnight adventure in a strange country with unfamiliar terrain, animals, and weather.

Well, that's my past week in a nutshell. If you're somehow not bored and still reading, go sign up for scuba diving lessons right now or else! I expect everyone back home to be certified when I return so we can go diving!

The past couple weeks have been quite fun. I've done a bunch more hiking and walking around the area, to the point where I seem to have slightly injured my left knee, so I've been giving it a rest the past couple days. Went wine tasting with Shana as planned when I was up in Newcastle as planned which was a lot of fun. We hit half a dozen wineries and a brewery, and I tasted more wine than I'd have thought possible in a single afternoon. Bought a dozen bottles of wine total, and her parents are in the shipping business so I left it up there and they'll arrange shipping it home for me for much less than it'd otherwise cost!

Let's see... I met up with Sam (of Sam and Noam) on Monday, and she took me all around the Eastern Suburbs which was a lot of fun. The coastline has tons of beaches as well as rocky cliffs, so it's rather nice. I saw the famous Bondi Beach of course! Tuesday, a nice geocaching friend in Sydney took me on a geocaching tour of the city; found 7 caches while getting a very nice walking tour of all the interesting places in the city. The funniest thing happened after finding one cache in the middle of the city: we started crossing the road and this random guy pops up from behind us and is like "so how'd you like the park?" So I started wondering why this strange guy was talking to us... And it turned out he was the owner of the cache we'd just found! What a random chance encounter. He'd seen me taking pictures of the cache site and figured we were hunting it.

So this weekend should be fun... I'll have limited net and cell access (apparently if I find a tall hill I MIGHT get a cell signal), so it'll be nice to be removed from civilization temporarily! I'm going to some sort of Christian men's club-type activity with James tonight; he assured me they're completely non-confrontational about religion so it should be fun to meet these folks who live in the middle of nowhere. I'm sure they'll all be wonderful people.

Oh yeah. I've decided I'm going to get certified in scuba diving next week! I'm going to take a 3 or 4 day course, which will give me my basic certification. Then I'm going to try to head up to Cairns the week after and go diving around the Great Barrier Reef. Should be tons of fun; I've been meaning to get my certification forever. Gotta make it up to Melbourne some weekend too to visit a friend there.

Well, I have a flight to catch so that's that for now. Oh yeah, obligatory geek commentary: I finally got my nice 1U Opteron in service, since it's been sitting there for months (while my 6 year old Celeron 433 steadfastly held its own.) Moved over all the websites from the Celeron, and now I have a box with tons of disk space and enough CPU power to run Gallery at more than a crawl, which is a step in getting my pictures in place. Off to DBO!

Spent two days in Auckland, the first being travel-weary and lazy, but the next and last full day I had there I spent 7 hours wandering around in the rain being wet and touristy (found a couple geocaches and took a bunch of pictures while I was at it.) Then it was on to Sydney; I've been staying with Maureen there, so that's been great since I haven't seen her for something like a year and a half. Her son Kane's living there as well; he's one of the most hilarious people I've ever met. Being a bit north of the city I've been a bit lazy, though Maureen took me around the area there and I've done some exploring myself (I went off hiking on Thursday and got back 7 hours later, as seems to be a common theme, worn to death because there was TONS of up and down and up and down and up and down, especially since I tend to veer off trails and go straight through trees, up and down sheer rocks, or through whatever else is in the way that isn't too deep or death-inducing.)

We had a nice surprise visit for a few days from Chloé, Maureen's daughter and crazy fluent speaker of over half a dozen languages, which was fun since we'd never met before. Chloé took me into Sydney via the ferry one afternoon (TONS of people use ferries here as mass transit) for a bit of wandering around; I did get to see the Opera House and the Sydney Harbo(u)r Bridge, as any tourist must do or face execution. I still have tons of the city to see though, but I have plenty of time to do that. And I am definitely going to climb over the bridge while I'm here; sadly they don't let you bring ANYTHING along, so no photo-taking of my own while I'm up there. How many large arch bridges in the world are you allowed to walk over at all though!?

Wonderfully coincidentally, Shana happens to be visiting her family in Australia while I'm here, so now I'm up in Newcastle visiting her. Took the train up here on Saturday (all of AUD17 for the nearly 3 hour trip, quite the deal.) We wandered around Newcastle for a good while yesterday (they don't have napkins here, they have serviettes! NOT NAPKINS!) Today we went to a cool little wildlife reserve where I got to meet some koalas, kangaroos, wallabies, emus, wombats, and some other fuzzy animals. Tomorrow Shana's taking me on a tour of the wine country around here, which is supposed to be rather nice. Somehow I've never managed to go to a vineyard in my life, so that should be a lot of fun. I'll have to roll my way around so I'm sideways rather than upside-down.

Anyways, back down to Sydney in two or three days. Weekend after next I'm visiting a friend in Tooraweenah (population 76), way out in the middle-of-nowhere, New South Wales. The Blue Mountains are along the way, so I may wander around and camp out there on the way out or back; I'll definitely be in the mountains being eaten by the local wildlife for at least a night at SOME point in my travels here.

That about sums up the past couple weeks... Australia's been a lot of fun so far, and I have a ton of stuff yet to do and more people to visit! Oh yeah, I have limited Internet access in Newcastle (I'm connected via roaming GPRS on my US cell right now) so not much online time until I'm back in Sydney. If anyone wants to harass me you can always SMS or call my US cell or my Australian cell (+61 0420217220.) I'm UTC+10 (EDT+14) here as a reminder; though that 6AM call that woke me up this morning barely starts to make up for the people I've accidentally woken up at strange hours. :)

Anyways, off to sleep so I can be up reasonably early to see some vineyards! (AND I'M STILL MAKING PROGRESS ON SORTING THE (now up to) 13000 DAMN PICTURES! But everyone can feel free to keep harassing me.) Look for some pics and more unexciting blog updates in the next couple weeks. No promises, but it'll happen!

So let's see... I got back from India about a month and a half ago, spent about 3 weeks in NYC, and I've been in Boston for a couple weeks now. And I'm going back to NYC tomorrow for a couple days to visit.

Excitingly (to me!), I finally ticketed my initial round-the-world itinerary. 220,000 miles to do it in Business Class on Delta + $200 - $300 in taxes to be levied (for what'd be a ~$15k ticket otherwise!) Up to 6 stopovers (and a surface sector, say, landing in London, taking the train on my own, and leaving from Paris, only counts as 1 stop; so I could travel all around Europe on cheap flights/trains on that single stop), so that's a great deal! Consider that just flying US-Australia in Business is 150k miles, so 70k more for the extra 5 stops is rather cheap. 51703 flight miles total! Too bad I don't earn any miles since this is an award ticket, but thankfully all of that is in Business or First.

So I now have a pending BOS-LAX-ICN-AKL/SYD-ICN-NRT-ICN-KUL-ICN-SVO-CDG-BLR-CDG-FRA/LHR-AMS-AUA-BOG-JFK-BOS ticket! The ticket is apparently so long (common with RTWs) that I have to go to the airport to get it ticketed and they have to write it out BY HAND since it's too long for the computer to print or for them to e-ticket it.

Oh yeah, all the confusing airport codes; so I'll tentatively be in:
Los Angeles: May 8 - May 9 (due to an overnight layover)
Auckland, NZ: May 11 - May 13
Australia (in and out via Sydney): May 13 - Jun 17
Seoul, South Korea: Jun 17 - Jun 18 (due to an overnight layover)
Japan (in and out via Tokyo): Jun 18 - Jun 22
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: Jun 22 - Jun 28
Moscow: Jun 28 - Jun 29 (due to an overnight layover)
India (in and out via Bangalore): Jun 29 - Jul 24
Europe (into Frankfurt, out of London): Jul 24 - Sep 26
Aruba: Sep 26 - Sep 30
— and then back to Boston.

...everything past getting to Australia is tentative though. I'll definitely be adding/changing cities and dates at least a couple times before I'm through.

If you want to see how funny that looks on the world map, see the Great Circle Mapper. I transit through Seoul (ICN) 4 times! And to get from Kuala Lumpur to Bangalore, I fly via Seoul and Paris, a trip of 13297 miles, even though Kuala Lumpur and Bangalore are only 1788 miles apart!

But yeah, my travel plans for the next months are solidifying, and I AM making progress on my huge backlog of 12000 pictures. And maybe I'll be less lazy and try to blog more often.