New Year's Report and Kicking it in Boston

Happy Belated New Year! And Happy 1/11/11 day. (Is that even a Holiday? If it isn't it should be!) We were in Vermont for New Year's Eve and Day, staying with Neil and Betsy. We had a wonderful time and we went to a New Year's Eve party at their friend's house, a party this particular host holds every year. We'd actually been to his New Year's party three years ago so it was fun to see the beginnings of a tradition of sorts. The party also doubled as a 60th Birthday so there were poetry readings, toasts and tearful speeches by the woman's son. Plus the food was catered and it was outstanding, including an amazing chocolate mousse cake!

New Year's Day we took a snowshoe up at Grafton Ponds where my Aunt Betsy does cross-country skiing and snow shoe instruction. She was leading a wine and cheese snowshoe tour where you snow shoe up the little mountain to a cabin where there is wine, cheese and a little camp fire waiting for you. It was amazing! A great way to spend the first day of the year!

Back in Boston, after that large Christmas snow storm, we've only gotten a few more dustings of snow, but apart from a warm spell on New Year's weekend, it has stayed cold, causing snowy/icy conditions on the roads. I've decided to try and commute by bike all winter so I picked up some studded tires for my bike. They're small studs that are placed on the outside edge of the tire to primarily help with lateral sliding. You also run the tire pressure a little low so that you get more surface area under the tire. For the most part, Boston treats the roads (including the bike paths!) exceedingly well so I wasn't needing the studded tires too much, although yesterday morning I took my normal route through the Arboretum and came across packed ice and snow:

See what I mean about treating the roads. This is inside the Arboretum, where no cars are allowed, so they plowed this for pedestrians and bicyclists. I was a little hesitant at first but then I realized the tires were gripping just fine so I made my way through. Here's another shot of the tires, all packed with snow:

As I've said before the commute is actually the best part of my day; despite the cold I love riding every day, and I hope to keep it up the rest of the winter. Plus, the studded tires are harder to pedal so I will be very strong when Spring rolls around. When I switch back to my "slicks" it will feel so fast.

This past weekend, we received a last minute couchsurfing request from an Australian guy doing a two month bus trip around the US. He had only one reference from a fellow traveler and not a host, but we took a chance on him and it worked out great. He's a super nice guy, very knowledgeable about the US, including sports. We went down to the local pizza place to watch one of the NFL football games (since we don't have TV at our apartment), and I was surprised how much he knew about football. But apparently basketball is his favorite sport and he went on ebay and bought two tickets to last night's Celtics game. He wouldn't let me pay but he took me along, and it was super fun, even though as it turns out, the Celtics lost. As luck would have it, we watched the first Celtics home loss since mid-November. But, I'd never been to a Celtics game before so I enjoyed it. I'd never seen so much green before; next time I go I should definitely get a team jersey:

He's moving on today to Montreal, then Ottawa, Buffalo, Detroit, Nashville, Memphis, New Orleans, Austin, and who knows where else, eventually making his way to Los Angeles where he flies back to Melbourne, Australia.

We might have more couchsurfers this coming weekend. A couple, he's from Philadelphia, she's from Taiwan and they're trying to couchsurf in all 48 of the lower 48 states (while writing a book about it). Meeting all these travelers makes us miss our travels a lot, and it feels odd to now be in the position of living vicariously through other people's travels. Part of me wants to just jump on a bus like our Australian friend, but then again, Buffalo and Detroit in January? Detroit at all? I think he needs some help planning his itinerary.

A Most New England Thanksgiving

We spent the weekend as if we were on a mission to fulfill every cliche of a New England Thanksgiving. We began at Jaimee's dad and step-mom's house on Thursday where we helped prepare a traditional turkey dinner while watching the New England Patriots beat the Detroit Lions 45-25. Then we welcomed a houseful of guests, a mixture of both friends and family, including five visiting Australians. There was a little pressure presenting a "typical" American Thanksgiving for the visitors, but as usual, Jaimee's dad and step-mom were wonderful hosts and could definitely qualify as model hospitable Americans. The Leroux house was like a revolving door all afternoon and evening as people came and went. There were probably a total of about 40 people that stopped by at one point or another.

Jaimee and I headed back to Boston on Friday where we met up with a couple of her friends from Cape Cod. We toured them around Roslindale and drank hot chocolate in our little apartment. Then on Saturday, we drove to Plymouth to meet some friends of Jaimee's from Chicago who were in the area visiting family. We met up for breakfast at a cafe right next to Plymouth Rock! How could we not snap a couple of photos next to the iconic 1620 rock?

From Thanksgiving 2010

From Thanksgiving 2010

After a brief pop-in at Jaimee's Aunt and Uncle's house in Plymouth following breakfast, we went back to Boston for a late lunch of turkey dinner leftovers with my sister and her wife's family. Isn't Thanksgiving about going from one meal to the next, all the while visiting family? After the brief lunch we came back to Roslindale and wandered into the village for the Christmas Tree lighting. We even got to see Santa Claus arrive on a fire truck! We didn't stay long but we appreciated living in such a cute neighborhood with lots of families and fun activities for them.

We then went home and waited for our couchsurfing guests to arrive. Those who'd been following our travels know that we used couchsurfing quite a bit during our travels. We begun using the website back when we lived in Seattle and hosted several people before we left. We then "surfed" many times while traveling and we vowed that when we settled down again we'd return to being hosts. Well, Dominic and Audrey from Saguenay, Quebec became our first guests in Boston. Saguenay is way up in Quebec; it took them almost 10 hours to drive to our house! They are incredibly nice. As is typical when couchsurfers meet, we enjoyed talking about our travels. We also helped them plan their time in Boston.

They were kind enough to bring us a little house-warming gift of a bottle of Sortilege: Canadian Whisky mixed with maple syrup! We cracked it open and shared some on a little ice. It was so delicious! The gift reminded us of when we hosted other Canadians last year in Seattle. Canadians are always so nice!

Today, while Dominic and Audrey went off to explore Boston, Jaimee and I met my cousin Bevan up in New Hampshire for a hike up Mt. Monadnoc. It was a typical New England winter day with crisp cold air and cloudless blue skies. We took the supposedly less-traveled Dublin Trail up the mountain, although there were quite a few people out climbing today. The trail was somewhat treacherous, especially at the top where there was lots of ice; Jaimee even got to use her Yaktrax to keep her from falling on the ice. It was a beautiful but cold at the top.

From Thanksgiving 2010

From Thanksgiving 2010

The hike was a wonderful finish to a wonderful weekend. What a great Thanksgiving, and as we mentioned briefly on Thursday we really do have lots to be thankful for. It might not seem like it with all our running around this weekend, but we did reflect on how lucky we are to have so many loving friends and family.

Iceland: a beautiful cherry on the top of our trip

Iceland is amazing! I can't imagine a better place for the last stop of our trip. Although we only have four days here, and are just barely scratching the surface of what Iceland has to offer, the scratch that we've done has been pretty nice.

Our visit started out on a slightly stressful note though. We took a 10:30 PM flight from Frankfurt, which was scheduled to arrive around midnight local time (it's about a 3 1/2 hour flight and Iceland is two hours behind Western Europe), but the flight was delayed by about an hour and we didn't arrive until after 1 AM, and after taking the bus into Reykjavik it was almost 2 AM. We had scheduled to stay with a Polish couple through couchsurfing and we had their address and phone number, but it turns out we were dialing the wrong country code. We were using the SIM in our phone that we got in Greece so we didn't know that we had the wrong code, only that the phone number didn't work. After walking around for a while (even at 2 in the morning it wasn't even close to dark) we eventually found the apartment, but after ringing the bell and knocking on the door, nobody would answer! We didn't know what to do, but in the end decided to just "camp" in their yard. We unfurled our beach mat and sleeping bags and slept for a few hours in the back yard.  Around 8 AM we tried ringing the doorbell again and this time they answered. They're not sure why they didn't hear us the night before, but they welcomed us in the morning before heading off to work.

We spent the day exploring Reykjavik, which is a very cosmopolitan town, full of little cafes, restaurants, book stores and other little shops. We were lucky to have a beautiful blue sky day, with temperatures in the high 50s, low 60s. Here's the famous concrete church, called Hallgrimskirkja. We didn't get to climb it because it was busy with funerals, but it's quite a sight and because it's on a hill, it can be seen from all over town:

From Iceland

We also visited one of the many outdoor geothermal public pools. For a 360 kroner ($1.75 US) fee we soaked in a gigantic outdoor hot tub. These pools are everywhere and are centers of social life. Instead of going to a coffee shop (although they do that too) groups congregate and hang out soaking in hot water. It was quite fun.

Iceland has a reputation for being extremely expensive, but Iceland was hit especially hard by the recent financial crisis and their currency took a huge hit (thanks Financial Crisis!), so in dollar terms prices are half or less what they were two or three years ago. So, while Iceland is still not cheap (restaurants in particular are still quite costly), it is not at all prohibitively expensive. For example, we ended up renting a car for two days to do some touring and it cost 19,000 kroner (about $90 $145 US) for two days. This includes taxes and insurance! Update: I realized later I must have miscalculated the exchange, and it's actually $145 for the two days, which is on the high side, but still better than we could find on-line when doing research.

We also scored a free tent for out little excursion by just asking. We went into an outdoor store and inquired about renting a tent to do some camping and although they didn't rent tents they told us to check the hostel across the street. We went in there and asked and they said we could just have a tent! Some German tourists had bought it and didn't want to bring it home so left it at the hostel. We were surprised, but they just let us have it. It's not the best tent in the world, but it was more than sufficient. (See a picture of it in action.)

For our road-trip we toured around what's called the Golden Circle area, a loop of about 200 miles or so that visits some waterfalls, National Parks, hot springs and geysers. Here's a short video of a geyser called Strokkur. It erupts every five minutes or so. You can watch the water recede into it and then bubble up and explode. There were gangs of kids (heard screaming in the background) who would stand downwind from the geyser and get soaked by the water.

From Iceland

We tried to get some pictures of Eyjafjallajokull (no, I didn't fall on my keyboard, that's really how you spell it), the volcano that caused all the flight cancellations last month, but it was covered in clouds so we couldn't see any steam. We also saw plenty of huge waterfalls, including Gullfoss, which had a beautiful rainbow across it:

From Iceland

We've had a blast (no pun intended) touring around in our rental car. The scenery is just amazing. Iceland is very beautiful, and there is a lot to explore. It's a great time of year to visit Iceland since the sun doesn't set until almost 11 PM and then rises again at 3 AM which means it's never completely dark.

We now have about 24 hours left in Iceland (and on our trip). Tonight we hope to camp in a hot spring area and take a dip in some open-air geothermal swimming pools near Hveragerdi. Then tomorrow before our flight to Boston we're stopping at the Blue Lagoon, a famous spa/outdoor hot pool to do some last minute relaxation before getting back to the US.

We can't wait to see friends and family again, but it's sad that our trip is almost over. It's been 297 days since we left Seattle last August 15th. Iceland has been a great last stop, and I'd highly recommend it as a place to visit, especially now while the dollar is strong against the kroner. (And note to our Seattle friends, Iceland Air flies direct to Reykjavik from Seattle.)

Athens and a strike!

We're visiting Greece during an interesting time. They've been hit especially hard as a result of the global financial crisis. The government is essentially bankrupt and almost defaulted on its debt a couple of weeks ago. It got rescued by a loan from the international community (i.e., Germany) and as a condition of the loan the government had to impose a series of "austerity" measures to limit its expenditures. This has resulted in protests by people whose wages or services were cut.

Not that it's the Great Depression or anything even close, but we couchsurfed with a local named Panos in Athens so we got to hear first-hand about some of the cuts. He works for a local university and his salary was recently cut 7% and his father's government pension was also cut (including withholding a lump-sum payment he was owed). Panos is not out rioting in the streets (and his dad was actually on holiday when we visited), but Panos did have some interesting things to say about Greece and the crisis. I won't bore our readers with the details (feel free to ask me about it sometime) but the essence is he thinks the government wastes a lot of money and wishes they'd cut military spending (per capita they spend more than eight times what Germany spends on military spending, he pointed out). In that respect, it was a lot like a conversation I might have in the USA.

Panos was a great tour guide. He took us all around the city, including a nice night out with some of his friends. The Greeks are notorious for their late nights, and on Saturday night with Panos we stayed out until 4AM drinking Ouzo at a tiny street-side cafe. Earlier in the evening, we sat outside an outdoor concert by the band Thievery Corporation, then a Jazz Festival for more outdoor music, all the while surrounded by throngs of happy, partying Greeks. Let's just say if you measured the crisis in terms of coffees consumed or street-side cafe visits, Greece wouldn't be registering a crisis at all.

Although Panos claims it has nothing to do with the crisis (and says it was always this way), we continue to notice massive amounts of graffiti. It's everywhere, and it's definitely the worst we've seen on our trip. I guess every county has its one issue. Australia had flies, India had garbage, Egypt had street touts and Greece has graffiti.

From Athens

We had a whirlwind tour with Panos in Athens, including Sunday spent at a beach in Sounia, south of Athens. We met many of Panos friends, all cosmopolitan young people speaking very good English, including one guy, I kid not, named Adonis. Like I said, if this is a country in crisis, bring it on!

We left Athens this morning for Patra, northwest of Athens in order to catch a ferry to Venice, Italy, our next destination. We were supposed to catch a ferry at midnight, but there was a ferry workers strike so our boat is delayed six hours and won't leave until 6AM. Since we were already planning on hanging around until midnight we figured instead of getting a hotel room we'd just hang out in the train station or something, although now we're starting to maybe regret that decision. Patra is a little run-down and we're not sure what we're going to do for the next four hours before we can check into our boat. We're currently writing this blog post at a little cafe basically waiting until they kick us out.

If all goes well with the ferry, we'll arrive in Venice on Wednesday morning (it's a 31 hour ferry - yes I said 31 hours) where we'll probably spend one or two nights before heading off to Zurich, Switzerland to visit our friend Aaron. Crazy that we'll be back in the USA in a little over a week!

A Cretan Adventure

When we decided to visit Greece, we didn't really know where we'd end up going. With 227 inhabited islands (thank you Wikipedia), plus numerous places to visit on the mainland it was a bit daunting to decide where to go. We chose Rhodes to start because it was close to Turkey, but from there we had many choices. We're definitely glad we added Crete to our itinerary.

Crete is the largest of the Greek islands by both population and area. Most of the people live along the northern coast, and we landed off the ferry in Iraklio, around the center of the north coast. Although a definite stop on the tourist trail, Iraklio had a sort of rundown feel to it. There was graffiti everywhere, and there were many beggars and street kids trying to sell us stuff as we walked around.

From Crete

Now is the part of the blog where we describe things that we didn't go to see; The Archaeological Museum is apparently quite nice, and the Palace of Knossos is the main tourist attraction of Iraklio. Unfortunately we didn't go to either. We did try to go the Battle of Crete Museum, but it was closed. (I read a little about the Battle of Crete, which took place from May 20 to June 1, 1941 when Germany invaded and "conquered" Crete during World War II, and I was hoping for pictures of the famed glider troopers that Germany used in the battle.) There's also the Cretaquarium (a great name for an aquarium, by the way), "the largest aquarium in the Eastern Mediterranean." Which begs the question, does this mean it's large or small? I assume they mean to imply it's large, but really, how many aquariums can there be in the Eastern Mediterranean?

Anyway, after enjoying a few of the numerous street-side cafes in Iraklio (and honing our backgammon skills) we moved on to our couchsurfing hosts of Irene and Arjan in the small village of Koutouloufari, about 15 miles east of Iraklio. Hoping to couchsurf on Crete we had sent a message to the general Crete couchsurfing group. This was a new method for us to find a host. Normally, the way couchsurfing works is that a surfer (one who wants to stay with someone else) does a search in a given area for hosts and then messages them each individually requesting to stay. However, all the people we requested to stay with were unable to host us for one reason or another. So we sent a message to the Crete Couchsurfing Group saying we were on Crete, didn't know where we wanted to go and wondered if anyone wanted to host us.

Luckily, Irene messaged us and said she'd love to host us. It couldn't have turned out better. Irene is from the Netherlands, having moved to Crete only five or six weeks ago. She moved in with her Dutch boyfriend who's summered here for the past 15 summers. They are relatively new to couchsurfing (we were only their second guests) but they were outstanding hosts. We had our own little apartment, on the second floor of an impossibly cute little Greek house. Additionally, Irene is a chef and she cooked us a delicious vegetarian meal the first night we were there. Here's Jaimee relaxing in our little room:

From Crete

Irene's boyfriend Arjan runs a tour business, called Routaki Routes where he provides customized driving routes all over Crete. There's an audio portion where you listen to information at each "stop" of the route. He drives the routes periodically to make sure they're up-to-date and he took us one of the off-road trips in his jeep and it was a blast. We went all over the mountains of Crete, saw many vineyards, orange groves, churches, a huge agave plant, and a giant cave! He wrote the trip up on his blog (even written in English for those of us who don't read Dutch). Here we are in front of one of the churches on the route:

From Crete

We ended up having dinner at this farm/hotel which we never would have found otherwise, and had a wonderful gourmet meze meal (Greek style tapas) of over 10 different dishes.

It was hard to leave Irene and Arjan, but we took a bus across the island to Chania in western Crete. It was there another couchsurfer (Juan, from Spain) agreed to host us. We had contacted him individually from an earlier couchsearch and his "maybe" turned in an "accepted" while we were staying with Irene and Arjan. We wanted to visit western Crete primarily to hike Samaria Gorge, and this turned out to be a highlight, not just of Crete, but of our entire trip. It's listed as being of varying lengths (from 13km to 18km [8 to 11 miles]), depending on where you measure the start and end but it is invariably listed as the "longest gorge walk in Europe". (Similar to the Cretaquarium discussion above, I wondered, how many gorge walks are there in Europe?) Regardless, it was both long and beautiful.

The standard route is to take a bus to the start at the northern end which begins at 1,250 meters (4,100 feet) and walk down through the gorge to the sea. Then catch a ferry to another town where you catch a different bus back to Chania. In all, it was a 13 hour day, but totally worth it. We took some photos during our hike, which you can see at the end of our Crete album but there are some good ones on the Samaria Gorge information page as well.

Now we're off to Athens. We weren't sure if we were going to go to Athens or not, but the only ferries from Chania go to Athens. We are couchsurfing in Athens as well, and we're supposed to meet up with our host for breakfast tomorrow morning. The ferry leaves at 11PM and gets into Athens (Piraeus) around 6AM. We bought "deck" class tickets (no inside cabin) but it's a full moon and we hope (well, I do at least) to pull out our sleeping bags and sleep outside on the deck.

Good-bye Turkey, Hello Greece

We're sounding like a broken record, but we had a wonderful time in Turkey. It's highly recommended as a place to visit, and we only saw a small portion of the country. In a future visit (or visits) we'd love to visit central and eastern Turkey and explore more of the Mediterranean coast.

One of the downsides (or you could call it an upside too) of couchsurfing is you often don't do the "touristy" things while staying in a given place. This was the case in Izmir. We loved hanging out with George, but we didn't really do much in Izmir except visit a few brunch places, take a side trip to Cesme, and hang out with a bunch of his friends. It was great, but we were happy on our last day in Izmir that George took us up to see the beautiful views from the top of Kadifekale (kale means fortress). It's the ruins of the ancient city of Smyrna, one of the "Seven Churches" of the book of Revelation. According to Revelation, Smyrna was the only "church" that didn't get rebuked by John, the author of Revelation. "This makes the Izmir people special," George told us. Regardless of rebukes, the views were pretty special, and in typical Turkish fashion, after snapping a few pictures we sat and had some tea. Did we mention how much we love Turkey?

From Izmir and the Turkish Coast

We knew we were heading to Greece after Turkey and we'd decided to head to the island of Rhodes first. Partly we decided on Rhodes because it was close to Turkey and also because we found a couchsurfing host there. Rhodes has a population of about 50,000 people but there were about seven couchsurfers when we did a search, one of whom, named Savvas, agreed to host us. Coincidentally, when we were at George's couchsurfing party in Izmir we met a Brazilian woman who knew Savvas! She met him when he went to Brazil last winter. Small world.

Before going to Rhodes we spent a couple nights in Selcuk, near Efes (Ephesus), another one of the Seven Churches. Selcuk was a very cute town, and the ruins of Efes were amazing. Although it was mobbed with tour bus traffic, it was really cool seeing the old buildings. I hadn't really thought of it before, but a lot of Bible history is in Turkey.

From Izmir and the Turkish Coast

Our last stop in Turkey was the Mediterranean town of Marmaris. We were only stopping here to catch the ferry, and we're glad we didn't spend more time here, as it was our least favorite Turkish town. Our guest house owner bragged about how Bill Gates visited recently (not at our $30 a night guest house, but in a private yacht off the coast) which tells you something about the town's character. It's full of European tourists, mostly rich ones and the stores and restaurants cater to that crowd. We did find one cheap restaurant (which we went to twice) and we enjoyed walking around people watching.

We took a fast ferry to Rhodes, it only took about an hour and a half. We met up with Savvas and we all went out to dinner and drinks at a local pub. Savvas is very well educated (he's half Greek, half Swedish) and his dad (the Greek half) was a High School exchange student in Cape Elizabeth, Maine 40 years ago! Anyway, Rhodes seems to have quite a few sights to see, including castles, beaches and mountains (it's an old volcano so the middle of the island is quite mountainous). We'll post more of our adventures later. In the meantime, be sure and look at all our pictures of the Turkish coast. We updated the album since the last blog post.

Ancient Ruins and More Couchsurfing Adventures

Western Turkey has a definite "tourist track," a series of stops that almost all tourists to Turkey visit. Istanbul, of course is one stop (usually the first) and then most tourists head south along the coast, stopping in Canakkale to visit the World War I battle field of Gallipoli and the ruins of Troy. We decided to take an organized tour of Gallipoli as the sights are quite spread out and there isn't really public transportation. The tour was pretty interesting, and we learned a lot about the battles that took place there in 1915.

Gallipoli is a famous place for Australians and New Zealanders to visit because it was the first major battle of Australian and New Zealand forces (ANZAC). There are numerous memorials to dead Australian and Kiwi soldiers. It was a beautiful day when we toured the area and it's hard to imagine fighting in such a beautiful place. Over 500,000 soldiers died in about eight months of fighting.

From Gallipoli, Troy and Pergamum

From Gallipoli, Troy and Pergamum

Next up was Troy. We decided to visit Troy on our own since a tour would cost $40 US each and there was a public bus out to the sight of the ruins. However, because we were catching a bus to the town of Bergama at 12:30 PM the day we visited, it only gave us about an hour to see the ruins. It turned out to actually be enough time, as there isn't a whole lot to see. We walked the circuit of the ruins and took some pictures at the somewhat ridiculous Trojan Horse recreation.

From Gallipoli, Troy and Pergamum

Troy was okay, but we enjoyed the Gallipoli tour much more. From Canakkale we took a bus to Bergama, which is right next to the ancient ruins of Pergamum, "site of the preeminent medical center of ancient Rome" (Lonely Planet). We stayed at the cutest little guest house, called Gobi Guest House where the owner, Gobi was probably the cutest Turkish man ever. He made sure we were comfortable at all times, giving us complimentary tea whenever we were coming and going as well as all sorts of information about visiting the sights of the area.

From a budget perspective, Bergama also gave us two good budget-conscious stories. First, we'd read in the guide book that there was a shuttle bus that transfered people from the bus station to the center of town about 7 km (4 miles) away. The guide said it costs 2 TL ($1.25 US) each. However, when we got off the bus, a taxi driver and another ticket seller told us that there wasn't a shuttle bus anymore, but that he'd drive us for the "very good price" of 15 TL ($10). We said no, we wanted to take a bus, and Jaimee even showed the guys the part in the guide book that said there was a shuttle (as if this proved there should be a shuttle). They insisted there was no shuttle. Thinking there was no bus, we relented and headed to the taxi. The taxi driver popped the trunk and we were putting the bags in when I spotted a bus on the other side of the parking lot. "Where does that go?" I asked. "Oh, another village," the driver said. Not trusting him, I ran over to the bus and it was a shuttle into town, for FREE. We jumped on the bus and told the driver and other passengers the story and they were all very mad, saying that that was not how Turkish people should operate and the driver even wanted to get the taxi driver's identification number in order to report him to the tourism board. It was a welcome reaction, quite different from Egypt where the attitude seemed to be that that kind of behavior was to be expected.

Our second budget story occurred when visiting the actual ruins of Pergamum. After paying 60 TL ($40) each for the tour of Gallipoli and 15 TL ($10) each to visit Troy, I was a little burned out on paying entry fees, so when we walked up the Pergamum entrance and saw it was also 15 TL each, we agreed that Jaimee would pay and go in and then come and get me to pay if the ruins were really great. Otherwise, I was happy to wait outside and see what I could from the entrance. So, Jaimee paid and walked through and I settled in to wait outside. When the ticket taker saw what I was doing she just let me go in for free. Now, it might seem stupid to balk about paying $10 for an entry fee when we'd paid so much to get to the actual sight in the first place, but after paying at sight after sight in Egypt we were kind of tired of paying. In any event, it probably won't work again, but it's worth a try if you ever want to get a two-for-one admission...

As it turned out, Pergamum was totally worth $10 (even $20 maybe). The ruins are in great shape, there's a huge amphitheater and several other building, including treatment rooms for psychiatric patients. The only downside was that we were touring the sight with a gaggle of school kids from several different schools and the place was swarming with kids running all over the place. They also were saying many things to us in Turkish that I can only imagine was not very nice because they kept laughing after yelling different phrases.

From Gallipoli, Troy and Pergamum

From Bergama we took a bus to Izmir, a city of about three million people on the coast. According to our Istanbul couchsurfer Ali, Izmir is the "Barcelona of Turkey". We'd arranged to couchsurf with this 60-ish year old guy, George, who was retired from working in the travel industry. As it turned out, George is an American from Barre, Massachusetts who's lived in Turkey for 45 years. He was an absolute hoot. He is gung-ho into couchsurfing, even hosting a couchsurfing party while we were there. About 20 people showed up, including a Brazilian, a Portuguese, and an American from Steilacoom, Washington. The American annoyed everyone by showing off his "new toy" (his words) to everyone. (Side note: I wasn't overly impressed, and do not plan on running out and buying one when we get back to the states.)

George took us all around Izmir, mostly out to breakfast (Turks put brunch-loving Americans to shame - they can surely lounge for hours with cup after cup of tea and a yummy medley of foods), but also to the seaside town of Cesme where we met up with some friends of his who own a big sailboat.

From Izmir and the Turkish Coast

Even though we've only know George for a few days we feel like we've known him for a lot longer. He's a great guy and we hope to catch up with him in the states this Fall when he heads to Boston for a family reunion.

Tomorrow we get back on the tourist trail and head south to Selcuk where we can visit more ruins and see the ancient city of Ephesus. Feel free to look at all our pictures of Gallipoli and Troy, as well as the few that we took in Izmir. George took more pictures at the couchsurfing party but we couldn't transfer them off his camera but if he ever posts them on-line we'll add them to the album.

One of the Great Cities

Istanbul was a real delight. We'd heard entirely good things about the city from other travelers and our visit lived up to the expectations. It is an amazingly beautiful city with wonderful architecture, natural beauty in all the various bodies of water and green spaces and has a very cosmopolitan and European feel. It's a huge city both in population (16 million or so) and area - the second largest city we've visited (after Cairo) - but it was not intimidating at all. There is ample public transportation and once within a neighborhood, walking around is very pleasant.

We were lucky to couchsurf with Ali, a wonderful guy who lives on the Asian side of the city. Since we were there on the weekend he spent Sunday with us taking us all around the city, pointing out the various sights. We also took a little scenic cruise up the Bosphorus strait that connects into the Black Sea.

From Istanbul

Then, Jaimee and I spent another day touring all the other sights we didn't see on Sunday with Ali. Yet still we don't feel we saw everything there is to see in Istanbul. We did see the major landmarks, including the famed Blue Mosque. This picture doesn't begin to do the building justice. Built in 1609, it is an impressive building both inside and out. See this google search for even better pictures.

From Istanbul

The one drawback to Istanbul that we'd heard from others was that sometimes the shopkeepers could be aggressive in attracting customers, but after Cairo and Luxor in Egypt, the market bazaar experience in Istanbul was a dream. Only one person was even remotely rude or combative, but we didn't let it bother us in the least.

We enjoyed having tea and coffee at a few of the street side cafes that dot the city. We have also enjoyed trying a few new foods. We had read that the food in Turkey is the best, and we have to admit that it is very tasty! Also, Turkey is definitely more expensive than anywhere we've been in the last few months, but it's still quite manageable.

Although we could have stayed longer in Istanbul and really enjoyed ourselves we headed out on a bus yesterday down the Aegean Coast to the town of Canakkale, which is near the sight of the Battle of Gallipoli of World War I and also the location of Troy of Iliad fame. Today we're taking a tour of the Gallipoli battle fields and tomorrow we plan on touring around Troy on our own.

So happy to be in Turkey

We said good-bye to Egypt by means of one horrible overnight train ride. Maybe we did it to ourselves, but our stubbornness refused to let Egypt beat us, but I think in the end Egypt did win after all.

After not really enjoying Aswan (feel free to ask us about it sometime), we took the train back to Luxor and hung out our last day in Luxor doing a falafel/tea tour of the city. As we've said multiple times, Egyptian food is outstanding, and the tea and sheesha culture is quite cool. Tea and backgammon for two hours in the middle of the day? What's not to like? So, overall, we had a great final day in Luxor. (We only got ripped off once - what a day!) We planned on taking the overnight train to Cairo, but did not want to take the "tourist" sleeper for $60 US each ticket. We also didn't want to take 1st Class for 156 LE ($27 US). Instead we wanted to buy a 2nd Class air-conditioned seat for 52 LE ($9). After being in Southeast Asia and India for three months we'd grown used to traveling in second class; we actually prefer it - we find it more "interesting" and it saves money to boot.

However, every time we went to the train station to buy a ticket they wouldn't sell us one. We tried multiple times but each time the ticket booth told us to just buy it on the train. It was a little risky, but we thought okay, why not? We got on the train at 9:30PM in Luxor and it was mostly empty, so we took two seats. The ticket seller sold us two tickets for 52 LE - so far so good - although he suggested we upgrade to 1st Class. His English wasn't that good; we didn't really understand what he was saying or how much the upgrade would cost so we declined. He also mentioned that we should keep our eyes on our bags which were in the luggage rack above our heads. So we shimmed our bags underneath our seats, reclined our seats and prepared to sleep for the ride to Cairo.

However, around 1AM someone woke on us saying we were in their seats. They had a ticket for our exact two seats. Somehow they were able to buy advanced tickets. We were confused, and in the confusion the guy sitting in the aisle next to us offered to start helping us. In India, we welcomed local help from people, but in Egypt we grew very wary of accepting "help" from strangers. In any event, we had to vacate our seats, but at this point the train was completely packed, I mean solidly packed, as in not a single seat anywhere. Additionally, there were people sleeping on the floor in between the cars, sleeping behind the last row of seats on the floor or sitting double to a seat. It was absolute chaos. I left Jaimee with our bags in between two cars and walked the train looking for seats. Nothing. When I got back to Jaimee our friend somehow convinced a few other guys to take turns standing so that Jaimee and I could rotate into a seat. In between we had to stand right next to the bathroom car where the door wouldn't stay shut, wafting very unpleasant smells into the cramped quarters where I was standing with three other smoking Egyptians. The mix of latrine smell and cigarette smoke was almost enough to give me dry heaves on several occasions.

When the train started to empty out, Jaimee got her own seat and slept, while I sat in a different seat with our bags piled on top of me. We actually got a couple hours of sleep. We got off at the Giza stop in Cairo, took the Metro to the central bus station, got some koshary (who knew pasta, rice, lentils, chick peas, dried onions and tomato sauce could taste so good?) and took the bus to the airport. Total cost from Luxor to Cairo International Airport: 52 + 1 + 4 LE (train, subway, bus) x 2 = $20 USD. Was it worth saving the $100 by not taking the tourist sleeper train? Or saving $32 by not going in 1st Class? Probably not. But as we don't plan on going back to Egypt anytime soon we'll never find out.

We flew into Istanbul, and it was like a breath of fresh air. Literally. Not only was the weather wonderfully cool, but when we took the bus from the airport to the Sea Bus ferry terminal (we're couchsurfing on the Asian side) they even put our bags down below in the luggage area of the bus. Now that's civilized! Granted the 20 minute ride cost 5 Turkish Lira (TL), about $3 apiece, but you know what, everyone was paying that price and it was clear from the very beginning what the price was. That in itself was refreshing.

Then we bought ferry tickets from an automated machine at the ferry terminal. Since I have to put one picture in the post, here's Jaimee waiting in line to get our tickets.

Our couchsurfing host is super nice. Even though we'd been traveling for about 24 hours straight, we stayed up well past midnight drinking Tuborg, chatting about culture, travel and Europe versus America. And we made plans to go out for brunch in the morning (i.e., soon). We are so happy to be in Turkey! More to come as we explore Istanbul and the areas of Southwest of Turkey.

Cairo and the Pyramids

As it turns out, Cairo, Egypt will be the largest city we visit on our trip. With a population of almost 20 million it's a sprawling and active city. But despite the insane traffic, it's quite walkable, although crossing the street can be scary at times. Overall, we found it to be a perfect place to visit for a few days.

We were lucky to couchsurf with Lee, an American working for USAid in Cairo. He lives right near downtown, a block from the Nile river. It was great having him to help us navigate around, and since he speaks Arabic, he was able to get us better deals when we went our for tea or dinner. As many non-touristy restaurants don't have menus or prices in English, unless Lee was with us we were routinely overcharged. For example, we had dinner with Lee one night for 13 LE (Egyptian pounds, about $2.50) while breakfast the next morning for me and Jaimee cost 35 LE (about $7). Tea and a sheesha (more about that in a second) with Lee cost 8 LE (about $1.50) one night while tea for me and Jaimee was 20 LE (about $4) in the Islamic Quarter. Although all those prices are quite reasonable (who knew Egypt would be so cheap?) it's annoying to be over-charged just because we're tourists.

Although Egyptians are very friendly, we found scams around every corner. We like to give people the benefit of the doubt when they offer to help us, but we found many people had ulterior motives. This happened on our way to the pyramids yesterday. Surprisingly (at least to us), there are several pyramids right outside the city limits of Cairo reachable by public transport. Lee directed us in the general direction of the buses that head down there, and while we were looking for a connector bus a man offered to help us as he said he was going to the pyramid area himself. Maybe that should have been our first clue that it might be a scam, but the second was that his phone kept ringing and he said it was his wife calling him multiple times. But, he seemed like a nice guy (he even paid our bus fare for us) and we kept following him until he finally brought us to a tour operator way away from the main gates to the pyramids. The guy inside gave us a hard sell on an entire pyramid tour including camel rides. Wouldn't you want to trust this guy?

From Cairo

We had a rough idea of the entry fees to the pyramids and this guy was charging us double what it should cost to do it yourself. Plus, we didn't want to ride camels. Eventually we declined his offer by insisting we didn't want to ride any camels. Which led him to yell probably the funniest thing anyone has every yelled at me as we walked away, "If I see you on a camel later, you'll be in trouble." So I guess it was worth all the hassle just for the quote.

We found the main gates to the pyramids and after paying the entry fee walked around on our own. The pyramids are quite impressive, especially given that they are so close to Cairo. We went inside one of the pyramids which was quite interesting. It was a long, narrow, steep tunnel into a large cavern.

From Cairo

Coming from India where it was so humid, the weather in Cairo has been such a relief. It's hot, but since it's a dry heat it's very comfortable. And the food has been a very pleasant and yummy surprise. Egyptians eat pita bread at every meal, and similar to the thali meals of India where you get to taste many different dishes in one meal, they do similar things here; a meals consists of small dishes of foul (pronounced fuul - bean dip with tahini or oil mixed in), potatoes, baba ghanooj (eggplant spread) and numerous types of salads, mostly with cucumbers or tomatoes. Lee also took us to a Yemen restaurant where we had very yummy vegetable soups and more types of dips with fresh pita.

And given that we're in Egypt, we tried a sheesha (called a hookah in the USA) at one of the numerous Sheesha cafes that are everywhere in Cairo.

From Cairo

You can see the rest of our Cairo pictures including our wanderings around the city, including a few hours spent walking in the Islamic Quarter (where our pictures don't have captions as most of the time we didn't know where we were). We only stayed two nights with Lee in Cairo and yesterday took a nine hour bus ride to Dahab, on the Sinai peninsula of Egypt. It's very touristy here and a popular place to scuba dive in the Red Sea. The only hassle so far has been the overpriced taxi into town from the bus station. But so far it seems like a nice place. We're going to attempt to climb Mt. Sinai, hopefully even tonight (it's best to hike it in the dark because of the heat) since today is a full moon. We'll post more about it in a few days.

Mumbai and Good-bye to India

Mumbai has been a surprise (in a good way). When we were in Goa we met two Brits who flew into Mumbai and immediately bought 1,700 rupee (about $40) 1st Class train tickets to Goa. They said Mumbai was crazy and insufferable (you got to love Brit-speak) so they got out of there right away. The $40 train ticket should have tipped us off that we shouldn't necessarily trust their description, as we paid 800 rupees (about $18) for two tickets in non-AC Second class from Goa to Mumbai.

Everywhere we've been in India people have told Mumbai would be crazy, with beggars everywhere, slums all over the place, unbelievably bad traffic, etc. And then they would go on about the local trains, how crowded they were and how we should avoid them at all costs. Well, to that I would say, yes, yes, yes, yes and yes. It is all those things, but it also some how works. Mumbai has a wonderful vibe, a feeling of being alive that we didn't feel as much in the other big cities of Chennai and Bangalore. Surprisingly, Mumbai reminded us mostly of Bangkok, with a large working class and lots of "regular" looking people milling around, busy doing whatever it is that Indian working class people do. Our impression of course comes from staying in a middle class neighborhood in North Mumbai with Gaurav, our couchsurfing host.

From Mumbai

Our train ride from Goa was quite pleasant, no real issues, apart from being over 12 hours long. There was ample food available from vendors walking the isles of the train; we sampled biryani, pakoras, somosas, bananas and frozen fruit bars (kept cold with dry ice!) all washed down with about 10 cups of chai throughout the trip. Indians certainly stay well fed on the trains.

We spent two full days exploring and walking around Mumbai. Each day we started with coffee in Gaurav's apartment, then took a rickshaw to the train station and then a local train to whichever part of the city we were exploring that day. The local trains are something like I've never seen. Apparently there can be up to 7,000 people in an 1,800-person-capacity train during rush "hour". The train pulls up and it's an instant shoving match to get on the train. On one train we tried pushing to get into the car but it was solid people, so we rebounded out and tried the next car. Compounding the problem was that about 1/3 of the train cars are "Lady Only" cars with slightly more room in them, but since Jaimee and I did not want to be separated, Jaimee often ended up being the only woman packed like sardines in the train cars. I really wanted to get some good pictures of the chaos on the trains, but when you're surrounded by so many people, it's a little hard to snap a good photo.

From Mumbai

Mumbai has been unbelievably hot. They're having a heat wave right now; it's been about 100 degrees with 70 or 80% humidity and even the locals are complaining about the heat. Needless to say this makes for pretty poor sight-seeing weather. We tried our best and saw some neat sights. The architecture is pretty, and the city has a very cosmopolitan feel to it. We didn't take a ton of photos while we were here, but you can take a look at the whole set here. A quick note about the "slums" of Mumbai, which you won't see in any of our pictures. They are definitely apparent and quite sprawling, especially along the train tracks. We didn't get any good pictures mostly because we didn't want to gawk and stare and also because once you stop moving you become a target for beggars or people selling stuff. The slums and the way that so many people live in them are very fascinating though.

Tomorrow we fly to Cairo, Egypt. We arranged to stay with a couchsurfer, an American working for a non-profit organization there. He can host us for two nights and then we'll take a side-trip either down the Nile or over to the Sinai Peninsula.

Indian Family Homestay

Thanks to couchsurfing, we stayed for three days and nights with a wonderful family in the outskirts of Bangalore. Vijay and Niya are a couple expecting their first child at the end of June, and staying with them for the summer is Vijay's 15 year old nephew Gollu. They are a super nice couple who own and run a furniture design and manufacturing business, and Vijay designs bicycles in his spare time. He even created a custom bamboo bicycle and was profiled in an Indian environmental sustainability magazine. (The bicycle was on loan to a friend so we couldn't get any pictures but you can read the profile (sadly, no pictures though) of Vijay here.)

We were treated just like family and had a lazy, laid back weekend with them. They live in a four story apartment building and are very friendly with all their neighbors. All the kids called me and Jaimee "Uncle" and "Auntie" which was pretty cute and they enjoyed playing Scrabble and UNO with us. One afternoon I borrowed a bike and went riding around the neighborhood with Gollu and the other kids from the building (think the movie The Sandlot but with the kids' uncle along for the ride :-). And another afternoon we all went to Lalbagh Botanical Gardens, a huge 100 acre park in the center of Bangalore. Here we all are in front of a big tree in the park:

From Bangalore

India continues to amaze us. The divide between the rich and the poor is mind boggling. The neighborhood we stayed in is a fairly new development and in between the new apartment buildings live hundreds of people in make-shift tents. While Vijay and Niya have a housekeeper who visits daily to clean (and even does the previous night's dinner dishes!) and they drive a small Fiat sedan, the people in the "slums" outside cook on open-air fires and live under plastic tarps. While looking off their rooftop balcony you can see naked kids running around amidst garbage below.

Bangalore is an odd mix of old and new India. Walking around the city has a very cosmopolitan feel; there are lots of well-dressed young people, lots of malls, but also cows roam the streets and the ubiquitous Indian garbage is everywhere. It also felt strange when Sunday afternoon, driving home from the park we stopped on the side of the road for fresh sugar cane juice. A man took a whole sugar cane stalk and pressed it through a machine, selling us yummy glasses of juice for 7 rupees (15 cents) each! What can you get for 15 cents in the US? Yet just down the street is a mall with all the luxury brands like Tiffany, Rolex, etc., selling for standard US prices.

From Bangalore

The city also has frequent power outages, often lasting only a few minutes, but sometimes hours at a time. This added to the contrast as one day we were cruising through one of the downtown malls when the power cut out - the mall was an eerie quiet without the sound of the background music or hum of the air conditioning and all the escalators were still.

We ate wonderful food with Vijay and Niya, both of whom are great cooks. They tried teaching us a few different recipes, but as even the "simple" recipes require a cupboard of spices we probably won't be doing too much traditional Indian cooking back home. In addition to home cooking they also took us out to a night market where we had delicious street food, including masala soda (tastes kind of like Moxie).

It's been fun seeing how middle-class (upper class?) Indians live and seeing a non-touristy side to India. Tonight we take an overnight bus to the town of Hampi, a site of old temples and ruins from when it was a major city in the 1300s. We're not sure how much longer we have in India. Niya invited us to her family home in Gujarat, a little north of Mumbai; she's going back there in two weeks to stay with her family until she gives birth. Although it would be awesome to stay with her and her family, we don't know if we'll still be here two weeks from now. After Hampi we plan to visit Goa and then Mumbai, but for how long in each we don't know.

We didn't take a ton of pictures in Bangalore, but the ones we did take are here.

Welcome to India

As it turns out, Vietnam was perfect preparation for our visit to India. As readers of our blog know, we didn't find things to be very easy in Vietnam. Buying bus or train tickets was difficult, it was impossible to not get ripped off by taxi drivers, even finding decent, non-touristy food, and getting what we ordered (or wanted) was not always possible. So, the bar of expectations was pretty low when we boarded our flight from Ho Chi Minh City to Chennai, India.

Our flight went through Singapore and we had a wonderful seven hour layover at the Singapore Airport. Wonderful because the airport was clean, we could drink the water from the water fountains, there was cheap food and free wifi. We also visited the post office in the terminal and mailed back 13 pounds of stuff we didn't need to carry around anymore.

We landed in Chennai and passed through customs without a problem (we lucked out being non-Indian as our flight was 90% Indian and "foreigners" had their own customs line at the airport). We had arranged to couchsurf in the southern part of Chennai and after a harrowing ride in an unregistered taxi (at one point I tried rolling the window down and found the door handle instead, but was able to hold on and not fall out) we arrived after midnight.

As usual with couchsurfing, our host is wonderful. She's an American from Connecticut, recently living in Vermont and Colorado before moving to Chennai with her three year old son last year to teach middle school at the American International School. We had fun playing with her son Elijah. Well, at least he had fun. I was mostly a prop (okay, I had fun too):

From Chennai

The reason we started our India tour in Chennai is because when I was working at Keynote Systems in Seattle, I worked closely with a development and support team in Chennai. I'd met two of the people from the Chennai team when they came to Seattle for a visit, but unfortunately one of them was in California for training and the other works in the Bangalore office now. However, I did meet the rest of the team, all of whom I had never met in person.

From Chennai

The office is located in an office park in southern Chennai and illustrates the incredible contrasts that have come to represent modern India. Inside the office park you'd think you were in any other corporate office park in America (complete with security that seems to exist more for show than for real security). Outside, however, is another story. The streets are lined with small shops and run-down buildings and are clogged with rickshaws, motorcycles, cars and buses. Even the train station right next to the office looked abandoned and as if it had been bombed.

About 40% of the people in India live on $1 a day, and wandering around Chennai there is evidence of poverty everywhere. Yesterday we took a walk down to the beach (supposedly the second longest beach in the world) and were amazed at the living conditions of people along the water:

From Chennai

During our three days here (be sure and look at all our pictures to see what we did while here), there have been moments when Chennai seems like a modern, cosmopolitan city, but then we'll pass piles of garbage in the streets or catch the strong whiff of urine to remind us that India is still quite a poor country. It will be interesting to see more of the country and visit some less urbanized areas (although even "small" towns here can have close to one million people). Our planned itinerary is to basically head south along the east coast until we get to the bottom of India, then head north along the west coast through Kerala and Goa until we reach Mumbai. We might also take a detour to Bangalore depending on our time and interest. From Mumbai we'll determine how much further north in India we want to go. Here is a map of southern India which we'll update with the places we stay as we go along:

View World Trip in a larger map

Tomorrow, we're catching a bus to the town of Pondicherry (Puducherry), a seaside town with a strong French influence. The bus station we leave from has its own wikipedia page (found while trying to figure out how to take the bus) which says that at 37 acres it's the largest bus terminal in Asia. In many areas it seems, India is all about extremes.

Six Months

Today marks six months of traveling since we left Seattle on August 15th of last year. Our first adventure in the Enchantments of central Washington seems far away in both distance and time from our current adventure in Bangkok Thailand.

From Langkawki, Malaysia we took a ferry to Satun, Thailand, where after a fairly painless border crossing (didn't speak a word to the customs agent), we bused it to the town of Hat Yai where were caught an overnight train to Bangkok. Pulling into the dock at Satun, this is our first view of Thailand:

From Bangkok

Public transport in Thailand is interesting to say the least. If it has a motor, people use it as public transportation - motorcycle taxis, "tuk tuks" - small vans or converted three wheel motorcycles, boats of all kinds, vans, taxis, etc. For example, they packed 12 adults into the back of a two-wheel drive Toyota pickup (not an extended bed truck either) to get to the bus station in Satun. (Why they don't just put the bus station near the ferry, I don't know...) We took this picture, pitying the poor people who had to ride in it before we realized we were taking one as well:

From Bangkok

The train ride was not very comfortable, but what 17 hour train ride is? We bought a 2nd class "sleeper" car, but that's a misnomer; someone comes through around 9PM and converts all the seats into "beds", essentially five foot, 10 inch sofas (I'm six feet tall). Plus, the only seats available were upper bunks, right next to the air-conditioning vents. It was like sleeping outside in the winter it was so cold. I actually pulled out my 25 degree sleeping bag, which had been pretty useless since we got to SE Asia and crawled inside it to try and sleep, although with the florescent light on right above my head, there wasn't much sleeping.

Once in Bangkok, we worked our way over to the area of town where our couchsurfing host lived. We took the subway (yes, Bangkok has a subway), the sky train (ditto) and finally a taxi. We later realized taking a taxi the whole way would have been both cheaper and faster, but what did we know?

Our host, Nuch, met our taxi (the taxi driver had to call her on the cell since he couldn't understand our instructions or read the English script version of the address), gave us the keys to the apartment and said she was "busy" and had to go. We let ourselves in to discover one room with a double bed, a small empty wardrobe, and a bathroom. We didn't understand what was going on. Did she live here? Were all three of us going to sleep here? Only when she came back three hours later did she tell us this is an extra "apartment" that she has for family and friends. So, we had the place to ourselves.

The neighborhood reminded me of the Puerto Rican/Dominican neighborhoods of New York City (do these even still exist?) because of all the mid-rise apartment buildings, lots of little convenience stores and tons people on the street. Nuch says she likes having couchsurfers stay here because they get to see how real Thais live, as opposed to the touristy (or sex business) areas. There certainly were no tourists in this area, and we've enjoyed the relaxing atmosphere of having our own apartment. Our first evening we caught a beautiful sunset off the roof of her building (we're staying on the 12th floor):

From Bangkok

I was still feeling kind of sick our first full day in Bangkok so we took it easy just wandering around and not doing too much. I started feeling better toward the evening and we went to the Khao San district and had an amazing organic vegetarian Thai buffet at May Kaidee. I think after a few days of not feeling well and not eating very much, I was ready for scrumptious healthy food. I shoveled in loads of curries, spring rolls with peanut sauce, tempura vegetables, noodles, rice and salads. It was super tasty, amazingly fresh, and lucky for us since they only do the buffet once a week on Saturday. And the best part? It was only $3 a piece, including fruit shakes!

Yesterday, we took the canal boat by the apartment out to a floating market, a meeting place along the river where every weekend hundreds of boats meet up along a dock and form an impromptu market to sell various products and food. We had a scrumptious lunch of rice, noodles and spring rolls (we could live off these things!) before taking a three hour canal tour. Our boat was a low slung affair packed full of holidaying Thais. It was Chinese New Year, after all. We got squeezed into a bench built for much shorter people, right next to a young man who was "on the spectrum." Jaimee believes she is a magnet for people like this. You know the ones; personal space issues (either you are in their space or they are in yours), always facing the wrong way, and that nice mumbling and singing. While sitting beside this fellow he spread way out in the seat causing us to have less than half the row for the two of us. Then when we piled back into the boat after a stop he was RIGHT behind Jaimee, exhibiting his personal space issues again... The best part was when there was a big splash (the canal was full of fish) and his family wiped the water off his face for him. Jaimee felt nervous because a family that jumps to at a time like that only does it for one reason - to avoid a meltdown.

From Bangkok

The tour was pretty lame - there was a guy who would talk about all the sights (including at least 10 temples), but he only spoke Thai (maybe that's why we were the only white people on the boat?) and one of the stops included a visit to a zoo where there was a snake show.

Before ever complaining about conditions in American zoos again, I'll realize the animals could have it much, much worse. This zoo was depressing, and although it was kind of amazing how close the snake handlers got to the snakes, we also felt kind of bad for the snakes. Here's one performer with three cobras:

From Bangkok

We're staying one more night in Bangkok before heading North to Chiang Mai tomorrow night. We plan on heading up there to see the forests and mountains of Thailand, as well as take some cooking classes at a farm we read about on the Internet. To be able to make anything close to the amazing green curry we've been devouring here would be awesome.

Singapore - The Mall City

We kicked off the Asia part of our trip by spending a few days in Singapore. We flew direct from Christchurch to Singapore on Singapore Airlines. It was a fairly uneventful 10 hour flight and customs was a breeze; the customs officer didn't ask any questions before stamping our passports. Of course it was probably so easy because you'd have to be crazy to try anything illegal here. The customs card clearly states that drug trafficking merits the death penalty and I vaguely remembered the American who was caned for defacing public property a few years ago. According to our guide book, it is illegal to chew gum and there are fines for not flushing public toilets. And as we saw on the subway from the airport, it's also illegal to transport durians on the train:

From Singapore

We had no problem abiding by this rule, as durian is an acquired taste (and smell) that we have not acquired yet.

We arranged to stay with a Japanese couchsurfer named Kuni. He works for a travel agency and is a prolific traveler (as well as very busy couchsurfer). He lives in the Little India portion of Singapore which is very central and his condo/studio apartment was very nice with great views of the city:

From Singapore

Even though he has only the one room, he hosted us for three nights and two other American for one of the nights we were there. Additionally, the first night we arrived, he took us over to his friend's apartment where we met some other locals who were also hosting their own couchsurfers. Singapore is a very multi-cultural city; at this party there were people from Singapore, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Panama and the USA and those were just the people that currently live in Singapore. The couchsurfers were one woman from Switzerland and three of us from the USA. We had a great time at the party. We drank several different kinds of sake and we did a "stair climb" up 29 flights of stairs in celebration of one of the couchsurfer's 29th birthday. Here we are lined up before our climb:

From Singapore

Singapore has been a great start to Asia. We found a medical clinic where we received all our inoculations that are recommended for the region and we got our first taste of good, cheap Asian food. The food here is outstanding. There would be no reason to ever cook for yourself here as around every corner is a food court/food mall where you can find any style of food you want for around $3 or $4 US per person. Of course, Singapore also caters to wealthy people so there are fancy places as well, but you can find very good food for little money. Here is a typical looking food court:

From Singapore

Speaking of eating in restaurants, we'd like to give a public thank you to Jaimee's friends Becca and Evan who surprised us with an e-mailed gift certificate to the restaurant Blue Ginger. Apparently Becca found the restaurant on-line and got us a gift certificate to the restaurant. We went there for lunch today and it was excellent. It was such a nice surprise and a very nice restaurant. (Hint: you can find our upcoming locations on our calendar page, but we'll be in Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok in the coming weeks :-)

Originally we'd planned on staying here until Saturday, which is when we have a connecting flight on to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. However, we've actually toured around enough that we're moving on tomorrow. We're going to take the bus tomorrow to the town of Melaka on the west coast of Malaysia. We've also booked a room at a guest house there based on the recommendation of one of the American couchsurfers we met. It's going to cost us $7 per night for both of us to stay there. We are definitely glad to be in Asia.

We called Singapore the Mall City because it really is block-to-block full of shopping malls. There are high-end malls selling Prada and Gucci to huge street malls in Chinatown or Little India. We did our fair share of browsing but as we're trying to travel light did not buy anything. But, the energy of Singapore is infectious. Most of the malls are open until really late which is a contrast to New Zealand where even in the touristy sections everything shuts down around 6PM.

Here are the pictures from our short stay in Singapore.

Singapore

Good-bye New Zealand

Today we leave New Zealand and fly to Singapore. We've spent 65 nights in New Zealand and enjoyed it immensely so it is with a twinge of sadness that we're leaving. However, we're excited to be heading to Singapore and starting our Southeast Asia swing of the trip.

As we mentioned before when we came back to Christchurch from Stewart Island we stayed with couchsurfing superstar Sue. We can't say enough good things about her. She's super generous and hospitable and we were lucky enough to stay with her while she hosted several other people so as a bonus we met some other cool travelers. We already mentioned the couple from Alaska who are biking all around New Zealand, but last night Sue hosted a couple from England who are also on an around-the-world trip. They went from England through Russia, Mongolia, China and now New Zealand and are heading to Australia next. We felt like seasoned travelers because we were able to give them some advice on where to visit in Australia.

Speaking of travel tips, if you ever come to Christchurch, visit during the World Buskers Festival. We spent two days viewing all the performances. And despite the crappy weather we saw all sorts of performers from all over the world. We also caught a late-night comedy show and a night-time fire show.

Here's Mario, Queen of the Circus on top of the World's Strongest Woman:

From Christchurch

David from Duo Hoops balancing a bike from the audience on his chin:

From Christchurch

And it wouldn't be street theater unless there was a guy on a giant unicycle juggling fire:

From Christchurch

The Buskers Festival was a great end to our New Zealand trip and we left Sue with her saying she would come visit us in the US. A note to Aunt Betsy and Uncle Neil: we promised Sue and her daughter Loren cross-country ski lessons so you are forewarned!

Now we're going to catch the bus to the airport where we have a 10 hour flight awaiting us. We'll attempt to check-in with our Spot, but since we know Singapore has weird rules about stuff we might not want to draw attention to ourselves with a big orange GPS.