TravelStream™ news feed for member walshy_88 on TravelPod's free travel blogs service http://www.travelpod.com/syndication/rss/walshy_88 en-us Copyright ©2012 TravelPod.com Sun, 27 Nov 2011 06:56:20 -0500 http://www.travelpod.com http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/walshy_88/3/1320989092/tpod.html http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/walshy_88/3/1320989092/tpod.html#comment Travel Blogs http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/walshy_88/3/1320989092/tpod.html Sun, 27 Nov 2011 11:56:20 +0000 MTV

Vegas in the Vatican via Vietnam - Macau, China

Macau, China

Everywhere I move, I'm choking on the fetid fumes lingering in the air, from stale 'air' conditioned hotel rooms to the casino floors where smug smokers nonchalantly emit their noxious breath into the shrinking pockets of these vast halls of sin yet to be poisoned.

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Impressively mounted conglomerations of excess jut into the smoggy sky. And yet the city feels incomplete, spreading across several islands, none quite sure of where they see themselves in five years.

Deeper into the old town, curving cobbled alleyways lit by lines of lamps reach a stunning hilltop facade of a ruined cathedral; a surprising oasis of European history in a Vegasian desert.
]]> http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/walshy_88/3/1320988795/tpod.html http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/walshy_88/3/1320988795/tpod.html#comment Travel Blogs http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/walshy_88/3/1320988795/tpod.html Sun, 27 Nov 2011 11:36:01 +0000 MTV

Hanoi Shuffle - Hanoi, Vietnam

Hanoi, Vietnam

A muted, stifled glow begins to clarify the silhouettes of scattered bare concreted facades, as the dark of the night is rather reluctantly retired for another day.

Chugging along through the outskirts of Hanoi, a delightfully enskivvied elderly gent stands in the street swinging his arms above his head, wearing an enormous grin, wholly inappropriate for this early an hour.

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Entrenched in Hanoi's old quarter, the narrow streets necessitate deft footwork to maneouver around an endless supply of parping motorbikes swerving onto footpaths, and impromptu gatherings of food consumption, apparently best undertaken as low to the ground as possible, like a succession of children's birthday parties.
]]> http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/walshy_88/3/1321015328/tpod.html http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/walshy_88/3/1321015328/tpod.html#comment Travel Blogs http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/walshy_88/3/1321015328/tpod.html Fri, 11 Nov 2011 04:51:16 +0000 MTV

The Corner - Hoi An, Vietnam

Hoi An, Vietnam

An eerie silence descends over the narrow streets of Hoi An in the afternoon's final hour;  wearied european tourists intermittently stumble past on their way back to their hotels overlooking the rice paddies.    Outside a breezy corner cafe, occasional  bursts of youthful vigour erupt around the corner, squeals of delight piercing the balmy evening air Aimlessly ambling away across the bridge, the elegantly lit riverfront zooms out to a sublimely serene snapshot.
]]> http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/walshy_88/3/1319571718/tpod.html http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/walshy_88/3/1319571718/tpod.html#comment Travel Blogs http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/walshy_88/3/1319571718/tpod.html Tue, 25 Oct 2011 13:02:29 +0000 MTV

Mui Ne: Sights & Sounds of Sand & Sea - Mui Ne, Vietnam

Mui Ne, Vietnam

Fishing boats, mysteriously moored in the offing, scend with the sea's sudden surges;  but the waves tire as they reach the narrow stretch of sand separating the South China Sea from an assortment of hastily constructed 'resort' villas:  a littoral disappointment. The waves irregularly stagger into shore, thwopping onto the solid slab of sand like a jazz drum solo. ....................................... ... As the sun fares thee well, the emptiness of the night efficently consumes the starless sky, and the skin starts to cool; creeping up in the shadows of dusk, a warm salty breeze, having stored the heat of the day, caresses the skin in an act of forbidden Aeolian foreplay.
]]> http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/walshy_88/3/1319372791/tpod.html http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/walshy_88/3/1319372791/tpod.html#comment Travel Blogs http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/walshy_88/3/1319372791/tpod.html Sun, 23 Oct 2011 13:05:16 +0000 MTV

Senses of Saigon - Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Emerging suddenly from a tunnel of over-built alleyways, I'm striding along an endless boulevard of uneven paving. The warbling bass of scooter engines and the melodic parping of horns are punctuated intermittently by the rhythmic staccato of a pick attacking a block of ice, rising and falling as I saunter from earshot: Saigon's symphonic sensory melange.  Captain Willard's alcohol infused opening narration to Coppola's masterpiece inexplicably enters my mind:  "Saigon.  ****, I'm still only in Saigon." ....................................... ........ Terribly relaxed locals, limbs laid casually across their scooters, are temporarily bemused by the foreign presence invading their peripheral vision; the more enterprising ones optimistically offer their apparently indispensable services, but sensing the futility of these offerings, quickly return their attention to the familiar bustle that reconsumes the streetscape. ....................................... ........ Later, as the sun swoops under the sprawling concrete construction sites that edge towards the horizon, the clouds register their discomfort with a more omnipotent warble, a rather weak attempt to cast their influence over this most uncontrollable of metropolises.
]]> http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/walshy_88/2/1250936079/tpod.html http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/walshy_88/2/1250936079/tpod.html#comment Travel Blogs http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/walshy_88/2/1250936079/tpod.html Tue, 25 Aug 2009 09:50:38 +0000 SE Asia Explained/Explored/Exfoliated

Markets, Muay Thai & My taxes at work - Chiang Mai, Thailand

Chiang Mai, Thailand

After a few hasty and hassle heavy days in Bangkok, I climbed aboard a comfortable (if a little slow) Friday overnight train to Chiang Mai.

From the moment I stepped through the platform threshold, I felt the strange yet comforting sensation as if I had been transported back 60 years into a Hitchcock film or Agatha Christie novel. Navigating my way through the buzzing throngs, stepping up into the rickety carriage, taking my seat along the narrow passageway...

Only the Thai words from the curt conductors could shatter this bizarrely nostalgic illusion. That and the disappointing lack of upper-class English types, murder, intrigue, and 90 minute running time.

Interesting toilets consisted of a hole in the floor of the train, with a handy window whence one could smile to passersby (or more probably animals in the increasingly dense forest festooning its way alongside the tracks).

Once aboard, I met a Dutch girl and Scottish girl, with whom I spent the next few days exploring Chiang Mai.

As I dropped my bags in my room at the guesthouse in a thankfully quite serene neighbourhood, I fortuitously happened across the single most important piece of Australian Government spending: the Australia Network Cable TV channel. Leaving aside the daily screenings of Home & Away and a few other questionable programs, the live coverage of the AFL (Hawthorn vs St Kilda) burst from the TV like a spring in a beautiful luscious oasis in the sparse unforgiving desert of 24 hour 'news'.

However, I thought I should see some of the city for which I had travelled to this continent, so I eventually left the room and ventured out into the streets (after the final siren of course!).

In some ways, Chiang Mai is a smaller version of Bangkok although it has its own idiosyncrasies such as the red taxi utes with benches along the back and naturally the complex pricing structure which seems to have higher volatility than the New York Stock Exchange.

Being in town over the weekend, there were two different local street markets on Saturday and Sunday and this meant we could largely avoid the huge Night Bazaar, which has its interesting stalls of handicrafts but is ultimately a bit too focused on tourists and thus has much less of the charm still present at the others.

Much like Bangkok, many of the charms are to be found outside the city or with a little more time to explore beneath the surface, but with limited time, I once again had to move on north towards the Golden Triangle...

In the next installment: borders, jungles, and Muay Thai (which didn't make the deadline for this entry)...
]]> http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/walshy_88/2/1250745879/tpod.html http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/walshy_88/2/1250745879/tpod.html#comment Travel Blogs http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/walshy_88/2/1250745879/tpod.html Thu, 20 Aug 2009 06:21:45 +0000 SE Asia Explained/Explored/Exfoliated

Tuk-Tuks & Ping Pong - Bangkok, Thailand

Bangkok, Thailand

When my flight to Bangkok was surreptitiously delayed by Air Asia for a couple of hours, the idle time was spent organising the remainder of my largely unorganised holiday.
But before long, I was striding along the vast walkways of Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi airport and out once more into the hot sticky abyss of the modern Asian city.

Warnings of excessive touting at International Arrivals were greatly exaggerated as the Airport Express bus (when it eventually arrived) proved efficient and not overly expensive.
However the warnings were perhaps more appropriate for the Khao San Road area, where I made the uncertain decision to base myself for the few days I had there.

Driving across the city, large office buildings and high rises were spread throughout a huge area, such that distinguishing any one region of this sprawling, expansive metropolis proved difficult. Endless rows of air-conditioners lined the outside of apartment buildings, a signal of how far we are from slowing climate change.

The true experience was yet to come as we disembarked at the edge of the Khao San Rd (somehow I had remained blissfully ignorant of its delightful charms to this point).

Instantly, a swarm of tuk-tuk drivers descended on the hapless tourists navigating the footpath around street stalls, overflowing into the gutters, seemingly very interested in our destinations and their apparently superior ability to take us there, wherever that may have been.

I successfully negotiated this initial test and escaped into a narrow 'soi' down which my pre-booked (I was unnecessarily well organised..) guesthouse was presumably located. After re-acquainting myself with the world of hygiene and cleanliness, I re-emerged into Khao San Rd in the early evening, hundreds of stalls being set up along the footpaths and onto the road, hawking anything a tourist might want (and indeed anything they think a tourist might want, however bizarre it might be); This mini economy operating entirely on tourism.

Interspersed between these stalls were brief moments of free space where cafe/bars, set back behind the street stalls, were filled with Westerners surveying the crowd, sipping their cheap beer.

If I walked by myself along here, touts would subtly inch towards me, chanting under their breath: "Massage, you want massage?", having flipped open a fold-out business card with helpful pictures in case it was unclear from their sledgehammer-subtle innuendo what was being offered.

One quite respectable looking older gentleman sat comfortably, legs apart, on his chair in the centre of the road, a huge grin on his face, lingering like Lewis Carroll's famous feline.
He was a man of few words, just three in fact, which he would excitably blurt out to startled passersby: "Ping Pong ball?!"


I still managed to indulge my travelling T-shirt fetish and hone my haggling skills, which is of course great fun..


Even outside Khao San Rd, Bangkok is a hectic, noisy city. The relative calm of the temples and palaces around the city never far away from the surrounding hustle and/or bustle.

A short detour along the river in a longboat packed like a Tokyo Subway train was intercepted by the heavy rain moving in, surprisingly absent to this point.

The rain lured me into what became a long procession of upmarket shopping malls, which seem ubiquitous in major Asian cities, although not as ubiquitous as the 7/11 stores on every block.

Although not without its charms, it seemed that much of interest was outside the city and would have to be sampled another time, as I had a date in the Northern Lao jungle in just three days...




]]> http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/walshy_88/2/1249882880/tpod.html http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/walshy_88/2/1249882880/tpod.html#comment Travel Blogs http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/walshy_88/2/1249882880/tpod.html Mon, 10 Aug 2009 06:11:37 +0000 SE Asia Explained/Explored/Exfoliated

Monkey Business (KL continued) - Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

After a cheap fishy buffet, the afternoon saw us embarking a local bus out of the city to Batu; As we approached along the bustling main road, a wide bushy monolith appeared, shooting up from the flat surrounds.

Herein were the Batu caves; The spectacularly ornate entrance gate forming a threshold to the 200+ steps up to the cave entrance: A minor struggle in the stifling heat.

The main cave was a large expansive pit, a small stream of smoggy sunlight struggling through a narrow leafy opening high above the cave floor. a disorganised troupe of monkeys climbing up the sharp, steep walls towards it.

With buddhist temples and altars built into the caves, the peaceful sound of irrythmic drums and local wind instruments joined with the screams of monkeys and seemingly lost and confused roosters into a dissonant symphony.

The caves themselves were not particularly exciting but the location and religious serenity provided a relaxing respite from the inevitably noisy city centre,

The early evening was spent ambling through the Chowkit markets, a delicious peanut and corn pancake providing the necessary sustenance to see me through to the next morning and the departure to Bangkok...
]]> http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/walshy_88/2/1249629145/tpod.html http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/walshy_88/2/1249629145/tpod.html#comment Travel Blogs http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/walshy_88/2/1249629145/tpod.html Fri, 07 Aug 2009 09:29:59 +0000 SE Asia Explained/Explored/Exfoliated

Rice, Ringit, and Catherine Zeta-Jones* - Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

The surprisingly comfortable Air Asia flight to KL was all the more so in the knowledge that the return flight to KL was half the cost of the MCC membership I had just renewed in preparation for my timely return on the day before the first final.

Upon a smooth landing on Asian soil, I strode out onto the tarmac, immediately struck by the pleasantly warm and dense Malaysian air, a little self conscious about my inappropriate clothing for these hotter climes.

The tropical plants lining the road into the city reminded me of the developing world of Latin America, but any such comparisons were betrayed by the well paved highways, and English signage and speakers, no doubt an inheritance of British colonialism.

The outskirts of the city were occasionally interrupted by high rise hotels, randomly jutting out of the sparse, flat landscape into the low lying smog.

The multi-pronged transport system is enviably efficient, although I think the other key descriptor here is 'new'. I'm not sure that many pieces of large public transport infrastructure in Australia's major cities could be similarly described.

Even newer was my hostel (just five weeks old), and one of the best I've ever stayed in, located in the heart (or more probably the left hamstring) of Little India, a locale that really explains itself.My first evening was spent with a Northern Irish fellow traveller, ambling through the Chinatown markets, packed with vendors flogging their quality branded goods. I somehow resisted the temptation to follow an honest looking fellow into an alleyway to pick up a pristine copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Half-blood Prince's Goblet...

Escaping through to the more sparsely populated streets of a late evening, we broke into a purposeful stroll, ironically with little idea of where we were, where we were going, or indeed where we wanted to go. It became apparent after a while that we were not in Chinatown anymore, as more and more upmarket hotels began to surround us, towering above the moonlight, obscuring the bright lights from the high rise towers, intermittent glimpses of the shining Petronas Twin Towers guiding us like the star of Bethlehem to the miraculous upmarket shopping mall at the base.

After two hours of purposeful striding, the appearance of an Irish pub was considered more miraculous, and a relaxing pint was a nice conclusion to proceedings. Even nicer was the live cricket coverage from Edgbaston, where the Australians were successfully averting disaster.


Day 2

An early rise to queue for the free tickets to the Petronas Towers Skybridge was thwarted by hundreds of other tourists who rose even earlier and had been queuing since 6.30am.

Although we had the last laugh when we were offered some tickets by a guy who had booked a big group but had some spots left.

Nevertheless, the view, while quite nice, was not worth such an early rise, although the novelty was traversing the skybridge (just half way up the 88 floor towers). The 3D(!) infomercial for Petronas (a large oil and gas company) that we were subjected to was less inspiring although its similarity to Simpsons spoofs of such infomercials was quite amusing.
*See the film 'Entrapment' with Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones for good views of said towers (for those confused by the title of this entry).


The towers and the elaborate shopping malls below and in the surrounding areas of the Golden Triangle and Bukit Bintang seem to be a symbol of national pride, although I'm not sure how interesting endless Louis Vuitton and Ralph Lauren stores can be...

More wandering about the city saw us eating at a few street stalls, sampling from a buffet of largely seafood related dishes, where the locals were eating their meat and rice dishes by hand (right hand of course..)
 Very tasty and naturally very cheap ($2 including a drink)


Stay tuned for the next installment: More in KL and two days in Bangkok...
I can hear everyone abating their breath while they wait...


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Starter - Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Just arrived in KL. More to come when I've actually done something...
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