The travel bug is nibbling again. Plan # 1 has been wanting to hike Machu Piccu and exploring Peru. However I’m kinda sick of traveling alone and in particular would like to do the 4 day hike with at least one friend. Friends that have expressed interest have gradually flaked when it comes time to actually go, “ok, let’s book this thing.” So, that sucks.
ANYONE want to hike Machu Picchu with me???
Plan #2 has been Argentina and maybe more of South America, to among other things, stalk Gaby Kerpel, and continue to work on my spanish.
My favorite show on tv is No Reservations with Anthony Bourdain. Of course watching this show is absolute torture when he’s somewhere cool. They’ve always got locals set up, or friends that he’s met before, to show him all the ‘insider’ and ‘real life’ stuff… which leads me to plan #3.
Plan #3 is throwing out both plan #1 and 2. It involves a slight change in my previous travel philosophy, which was always continuing to see new places. But I realized I made all these contacts through my travels, and actually become better friends with them over flickr, facebook, email, etc.
So… wouldn’t it be interesting to go back and explore a country with an insider, the way I got to see the Lisbon area with Joao and Teresa. So far options include Greece with my friend Maria (i only saw Athens for about 5-6 days), Costa Rica with my new amigas/amigo (went there in 2005), Korea to visit my friend Sarah, or back to Thailand and a neighboring country (Burma is probably on the agenda ) with my travel expert Sanyawadee.
I’ve racked up some serious vacation days to do any of these, because Honduras I did over the holidays. decisions decisions.
Ok, so it’s clear from a lot of friends responses, that many people don’t know diddly about the islands of Trinidad and Tobago, where I am heading next.
What did I want to do on this trip? Diving, Food, Culture, Beach. Most of the Caribbean islands are expensive and have been wrecked (in my opinion) by tourism and beachfront condos. That kind of strips out most of what culture and food is there, and just leaves the beach.
These two islands lie just a few miles from South America, at the end of the chain of the West Indies in the Caribbean. It has its own self sustaining economy not reliant on tourism, which is partially why it stays low key. Tobago is the smaller island, very sparsely populated, surrounded by coral reefs in the water and full of lush forest reserve in its belly. Over 420 species of birds!
Culture… Music… Food? The steel drum was invented here, it’s serious business not tourist background noise in Trinidad! The Carival and some other festivals are world famous. The mix of races is crazy, almost like Brazil. And I have to admit one of the “decision” moments was watching one of my few regular TV shows – Bizarre Foods. He went to have this unique Trini specialty: the bake’n’shark sandwich. I had to have it.
I do have some jitters at the moment, which I find strange considering what I’ve done in the last year, and especially since this is the first mostly English speaking country I’ve visited since, uhhhh, 2004?
But no need to worry bout me on this trip…. I’m just hangin with my homies Hammerhead and Manta Ray.
Hello again. Yes I’ve been blog-slacking in my non-travel downtime. I guess that would be called… normal life? What can I say? I don’t want to dump the mundane details of dating, food experiments, and (gasp) work for public consumption. Ok, maybe sometimes, but not lately.
So I’ve been itching to use my PADI certification I got a year ago, and I’ve heard northern Cali diving pretty much sucks. Plus the winter doldrums just have me wanting to go somewhere soon, get in the sun, and beat the summer vacation rush. I again decided to put off a big trip (south america) until later. Like maybe when I have a travel companion who speaks better Spanish than I do
I decided to make my first trip to the Caribbean. After weeks of research and plane ticket scouring, I passed on Belize, St. Maarten, Bonaire, and a few other ideas and settled on Trinidad and Tobago. Mostly Tobago. Two very different islands, Trinidad with fantastic culture, music (where steel drums were born) and food, Tobago with gorgeous nature, coral reefs, plenty of dive spots, few resorts, and deserted beaches.
Yeah, that should be nice. (pic stolen from Lonely Planet)
I just bought a ticket to Guatemala for Christmas week because we have it off!
Totally semi-spontaneous choice based on the cheapest ticket i could find. KAYAK.COM! OMG what i godsend of a website! A no-frills site that searches all the airlines and broker sites to find the lowest fare and includes flexibility options. wow.
i’ve been meaning to dust off the ol’ blog anyway. i “has” some things to say
For the record – I did not want the trip to end. I was done with Spain, I was ready to leave there. Although I had some difficult moments, I did not want to go home. This signals to me, 3 months was easy and too short. 6 months would be awesome. I met two guys along the way who were on month 7 and going strong.
I am back in San Francisco, although not exactly “home” yet. Long story… another stupid on-the-fly traveling decision.
It’s amazing how for most of my trip I had zero air travel problems. Well the travel gods were saving it up for me for the end. It was a long nightmare trip that included my $25 chunk of black pork getting confiscated by customs, my camera and computer “viewed”, can I just volunteer for the cavity search too? It’s a damn good thing I didn’t also try to smuggle in some Absinthe. All of that caused my large backpack not making my last flight.
F the United States Customs and Immigration. Worst country I visited. This is such a ridiculous place in which we live. i’ll stop now.
So I have a lot more to post about the trip, including the end of Spain, country wrap-ups for every country, and some more random pictures from all over the place I just need to get off my cell phone and sort through.
But first I’m trying to sort through 3 months of mail, various pieces of personal business to catch up on, I have a gig next week I have rehearsals for, etc, etc. Oh yeah, and that little detail of looking for a new job. So stay tuned and thanks for reading.
No I won’t be discussing the details of my budget. I will say however, that Spain has sent me waaaay over what I pictured my budget to be. The euro has brought me great pain. Or should I say the Dollar has brought me great pain (Thanks George W.) To give you an idea, when I take 200 euros out of the ATM, it turns out to be $266 u.s. dollars. And I’ve taken a lot of those withdrawals out this month. $266 lasted me so long in SE Asia.
So as I cried into my coffee this morning, gazing into my computer screen at my Bank of America account balances, I realized I need to tighten up for the rest of the week. The real challenge is just trying not to stress about it and enjoy my trip, which is hard for me.
So a historic night in my life – I have made it almost 3 months into my trip – and tonight – I stay in my first youth hostel… ever. pretty funny huh?
So far so good, out of 10 beds in this room only 3 of us here. But I will have to bite the bullet and stay in hostels when i get back to Barcelona too. Ah… youth. What I probably should have done was alternate nights between youth hostels, and normal pensions/hostals (what they call budget hotels in europe that I’ve been staying in) and I probably would have been happier with the results.
I have practiced a great deal of restraint in not posting profanity laced tirades earlier in my trip about my Bank, which I used to enjoy in years past. However, their $5 out-of-country ATM fee is one of the highest around. But not just $5, NO, also a 1% additional charge for currency conversion.
An amazing video of him dancing like a goof on all of his stops. He did it at first on his own and became “internet famous.” Then a gum company sponsored another trip for him to shoot it again for a commercial. awesome.
How about a little round of applause for my iron stomach! Eating street food all across the world, at times literally inches off the street (see Vietnam pictures.) I did want to make it out of India before I started bragging.
Ok, my doctor also gave me Atropine (which is for milder stomach problems) which I took a few a couple times. The one close call I had was in Denpasar, Bali, at the bus station. I got there way too early and had to kill time and get some lunch, and the options were limited. It was a muslim place where all the food is made and sitting in the window… it was good, I was nervous, but no major problems.
I still have to face Morocco however…
Another food story – I finally had something so disgusting I couldn’t finish it. Dateline: Madrid. I had read that Tapas places usually specialize in one or two dishes and that’s what you see people eating. So I pointed at something that looked like a plate of saucy meat that many other people were eating. The guy said something like “orejas con something or other,” and I said “si.” The texture was so gnarly I couldn’t get them down. It was like 3 layers on each piece of meat, a big layer of fat, a tiny layer of decent tasting meat, and a hard disgusting layer. I was baffled. Finally I saw the English menu on another table… pigs ears. The first and last time.
A lot of people asked about whether language would be a problem on this trip.
When I saw Indonesian people talking to French people…
Thais talking to Danes…
Germans talking to Israelis…
Vietnamese talking to Portuguese…
North Indians talking to South Indians…
Guess what language they all spoke?
ENGLISH!
What language do you speak? English! This gives you a decided advantage on traveling to faraway lands. A lot of southeast Asian people also told me I am easier to understand than a lot of people they talk to. Let me tell you, language is no excuse not to go somewhere in this day and age. I don’t speak any of the languages of the countries I went to and got all of my needs met. (I made the not-so-brilliant choice of studying Latin in high school. /cry) Just try to learn a few of their words, speak slowly, don’t use contractions, and smile a lot.
And… always carry a pen. I’ve actually formed a rather close bond with my pen, we’ve been through so much together. Or it may be a sign of losing my mind due to traveling this long alone.
(From what I’ve read, Russia and China are two big countries where you may run into zero English, if you are planning such a trip.)
Almost everyone I encountered in Asia would actually try very hard, and even apologize for bad English, to which I always would apologize in return that I don’t speak their language and tell them they speak great English. Many even were trying to learn, or would want to talk because they wanted to improve.
An interesting note I picked up is that people from countries where American films and TV are dubbed in native language, as opposed to hearing English with subtitles, makes a huge difference in their learning English. Notably French, Spanish, Chinese, and German, countries where the population is big enough to spend the money to dub foreign films. Vietnam for instance, the only place I went to see a movie, they get subtitles, so they hear English more.
Last night I watched E.R. in Spanish, it was difficult and kind of disturbing.
Speaking of Spanish, this is the one language I actually know a lot more words, phrases, and the basics going in. But I am far from conversational, sadly, and definitely can’t keep up with the rapid pace.
Spain however, is so far the worst country I have found at finding English speakers. It’s kind of what I pictured France to be like. They don’t speak it, and some are a bit snobby about it. But it’s going ok and I’m going to know a lot more when I leave. I bought la diccionario.
One major note, the official countrywide language of Indonesia is called bahasa Indonesia. There were literally hundreds of tribal languages in the Indonesian archigapeligo before they put this common language together. It uses english (cough * Latin) alphabet and no tones like other southeast asia languages.
hello = halo, name = nama, doctor = dokter, beer = bir, polisi = police, etc…
If I had known how easy it was to speak, read, and learn, I would have started that one before I went. It also explains why they can easily learn English. So if you are planning a trip there, I highly recommend learning it if you want to interact with the people, I certainly will.
) with my travel expert Sanyawadee.
and yes i’m taking pictures.
