Himalayas!

A new shrekking adventure is in the works -- Hiking to the Everest Base Camp ! Stay tuned for pictures & details

Luxor

We visited the temple of Karnak today. The structure is massive, and is covered with egyptian hieroglyphs. Just a glimpse...

A sailboat on the Nile. We go up the river in one of the bigger boats (like the one in the back) tomorrow evening.
Oh..and I got to ride a camel today :) Pictures coming later (I only have a hard copy)

Cairo

In one word Cairo is hectic. Everything around the pyramids is organized quite well, and the number of touts is manageable. The egyptian museum though is another story - full of tours trying to speak over each other (heh I was part of one), the building is old, the labels date from many years back (most are typewritten on yellowing paper, some are handwritten). Nonetheless, the amount of stuff in it is astonishing.




The last photo is of a KFC delivery motorbike. (Incidentally taken while standing under a Pizza hut sign. The Amman airport also had its fare share of american fast food places. It was the last place I expected to find a Popeyes fried chicken shop.

pictures

Made it to egypt

After some flight delays, and unexpected detours, i've made it to egypt & had a glimpse of the pyramids. Some petra images attached.

ps. my bags have now been to Beirut.

Jordan

I happily made it to Amman..unfortunately my luggage didn't.

Regardless, Petra is absolutely amazing, and is worth the 24 hours (almost to the minute) that it took me to get here. Pictures will come up later, need to sort through the 100+ already taken. More petra tonight & some tomorrow, then to Cairo by tomorrow evening.

Egypt & Jordan

Off to a new adventure.

April 1: NY -> Amman ->Petra -> Amman -> Cairo -> Luxor -> Aswan -> Abu Simbel -> Cairo -> Amman -> Dead Sea -> Amman -> NY: April 14.

back home

Like all good things, this adventure has come to an end. Some fun statistics:

Modes of transportation: car, plane, bus (scheduled & chartered on the street), train, tram, subway, escalator (it's a mode of transport in Hong Kong!), boat (speedboat, long tail boat, crazy chinese ferry boat), tuk-tuk, elephant. [missing from the list: helicopter]

Miles flown: around 29,000 (which averages out to a crazy 800 miles per day)

Countries visited: 5 + 2 Special Administrative Regions
Passport pages filled up with stamps & visas: about 5

Things lost: sunglasses, a watch (on the last day), and a little under10 pounds.

pictures taken: around 900

timezones to readjust to: 10 (or 14 depending which way you count)

Climbing climbing climbing

And of course Railay bay has spectacular climbing... the pictures below don't do it justice, it's simply amazing.

This was a nice 25m climb...waaay high.
The palm tree does not make for a good hold, it's a bit wobbly.
This one definitely took a bit of mental effort to lead, but I got it in the end (the ratings here are definitely overrated - this climb was a 6b+ on the french system / 5.11a on the american system, and I would never be able to lead something that hard).
The famous cave on Tonsai beach. The rusty ladder leads to another terrace of climbing above. The stalactites make for some good holds.


Taking a break inside the cave, only about 20 feet up.

Done with the inner cave climb. Too bad it looks like I climbed the ladder.. I really didn't - the stalactite on the right was pretty handy though.

The paradise that is Railay bay

I promised some pictures, so here we are. Our hotel:

The beach in the morning - the long tail boats will take you to nearby islands or other beaches.
looking the other way on the beach.
Another view:


The water is almost hot, the sand is silky smooth, what more could you ask for?

ps

i moved computers in an effort to upload some pictures, but this one just shocks me whenever i touch it (which includes plugging in a USB cable). I can't say I didn't try though..

Railay Beach

Railay beach is absolutely gorgeous. The water is almost hot, you can easily stay in for an hour w/o feeling a tiny bit cold, the sand is silky smooth, and the cliffs surrounding the beach make it all the more picturesque. I wish the computer in this overpriced internet cafe was a bit faster so I could upload some pictures, but with 256megs of ram it can barely handle the internet.. the plan for tomorrow: find a better computer :)

Went climbing for a full day today, unfortunatley no deep water soloing for me: this is low season, and the guy who does it needs at least 8 people to do it. We were able to assemble a group of 3, but that was far too little.. :( next time, i guess. But we still climbed right on the beach today, which made for some good views.

Tomorrow Lila & I are going on an all day snorkeling / island hopping adventure. Should be a blast.

Chiang Mai

Ah...thailand..the land of cooking courses, waterfalls & elephants (at least those are the parts that I've seen this far). We are even staying at a guesthouse with a beautiful courtyard that has its own small waterfall :)


Our first day here we decided to go for a cooking course. It was run on an organic farm outside of town and was incredibly well organized. We ate all of the food that we made & got a recipe book to take with us (so there's a slight chance i'll be making some thai food again).

Today we had a day long adventure that included hiking through some local villages, swimming at a waterfall (we dove in seconds after this shot):

and riding elephants through the jungle! We bought some sugar cane and bananas before the ride & fed our elephant throughout the hour long trip.


The trip ended with some rafting on long bamboo rafts down a small river. Even small rapids (grade I, maybe II) were super exciting. The only downside to the day was that it rained non-stop, but after we went swimming in the waterfall we were super wet anyway :) The rain did however wipe out my thoughts of going climbing tomorrow.

We are off to Railey beach on Monday morning & will stay there until thurday afternoon, before heading back to bangkok to catch our flights home. Hopefully we'll get some good weather for climbing and some deep water soloing.

Although I didn't do it in Hong Kong, I am getting a suit tailored here in Chiang Mai...it's been quite an experience :)

Needless to say the food here has been amazing...to top it off, I just had the best pad thai ever from a street vendor for 30 baht (~$1USD).

Cambodia

We got into Cambodia at 7am local time, after getting a visa & getting picked up by a tuk-tuk (a motorcycle towing a two person carriage) we were in our hotel by 8, and back on the road by 9, making the most of our time in Cambodia.

Our first glimpse of the temples:



Closeup of the majestic Angkor Wat ( I have about 80 more pictures of it)


Here's one :)

And here's another...the "reflective pool" is a bit on the dirty side, but serves its purpose well.

We then moved on to the temple of smiling faces, there're 216 in total, each facing either north, south, east or west.

And then we pretended to be in the Tombraider movie (this is actually where it was filmed)
Can you believe this tree?

Today we went to see the floating villages... these houses are moored near the river banks. You can walk on the banks, but most people are in boats... There are little grocery canoes that float around with vegetables, etc. A bit reminiscent of Venice, but only a bit.

Notice the blue sky in the middle of the rainy season :) We were lucky yesterday as it started raining just as we got into our tuk tuk at the end of the day, today was just sunny and hot (not surprisingly both of us got a little burnt).

We are off to Chiang Mai, Thailand tomorrow for a few days. Hopefully I'll get a little bit of climbing in there, before attempting to do some deep water soloing at Raleigh / Tonsai beaches.

Siem Reap

After meeting up with Lila at the Singapore airport at 5am, we made it to Siem Reap and had a full day tour around Ankgor Wat. The place is amazing, I can't believe it didn't make the new 7 wonders of the world. We are off for the day, but chances are I'll get some pictures up in 12 hours or so.

Hong Kong

Hong Kong... After stuffing outselves silly with dim sum the girls went shopping, and I went up to the peak to get a good look at the city. The city is on a hill, and our hotel was quite a ways up, luckily Hong Kong has the world's longest series of escalators. In the morning the escalator goes down, but at 10am it switches and goes back up. The ride from the sea to where we were staying near the top took about 10 minutes..



My second day there I caught a ferry to Lantau island, which in addition to having the new HK airport (which is absolutely wonderful!) also has the world's largest sitting bronze buddha statue (I believe all of the qualifiers are necessary :) There is a monastery on the grounds which serves yummy vegetarian chinese food. The stairs were painful in the blistering heat.

At the top:

Returning from Macau I couldn't resist the picture of the night skyline.

Leaving TLG

The ferry to take us across the river. If you look closely you can spot the cave where the ferry operator was sleeping slight above the leftmost boat. Needless to say the village is on top of the very steep hill...


4 very happy people on our private bus to Lijiang. About an hour and a half into the two and a half hour trip the driver would abruptly stop & tell us to get out. A few seconds later a small minivan pulled up and took us the rest of the way. The driver went back to the village to pick up 11 more people for the same route...

Our celebratory snack of fresh lychees. The lonely planet claimed that lychee wine is popular in Lijiang, but no one we asked had ever heard of it. So we picked up some fresh ones on the street. We ate most of them in the next 14 hours.

Tiger Leaping Gorge

Lijiang

Women in traditional Naxi costumes dancing in the street.

Me, Carri & Dian in Lijiang.
More traditional architecture.
Lijiang at night.
Carri and Dian in Lijiang at night, with lots of touristy souvenir shops in the backgroud


We later learned that this building was built primarily for the tourists in 1997. It's still gorgeous though.