Blogs from Asia - page 13037

Dedicated to Jaspreet Laly - RIP!! My arrival at Shamashree Hotel was a pleasant journey from Bangalore airport. The general infrastructure could instantaneously be seen as an improvement upon Chennai. The roads are wider with less traffic attributable to the system. The buildings also have more promise, providing familiarity to a rather western city.. The saturday provided me with sight-seeing opportunities. The traditional tourist approach was actually quite essential because i had no knowledge of Bangalore, and no familiarity with the city as a whole. I arranged a driver through the hotel, with specific instructions to have a speed-guided tour of all the sights around inner Bangalore. Touring with a rickshaw could have provided a more feasible approach but this method has its limits. My driver spoke good english and soon began to extensively outlay the ... read more

Dedicated to Jaspreet Laly - RIP!! After the touring the Bangalore sights, a night out in the vibrant city was overdue. Balaji had arrived in a re-scheduled morning flight from Chennai. His wife had given permission for leave, and now the city life was upon us! This was Balaji's place of study during university, so he knew all the places to explore with regards to having an enoyable evening. We first embarked in a pub to have a few deadly kingfisher beers. Bangalore has a theme of having many pubs, not dissimilar to pubs in the UK. The students, locals and tourists coalesce to impede on the glorious offerrings of alcohol...well, they just have a good time basically. I was pleasantly surprised to see people gulping alcohol in huge volumes whilst being free-spirited in every means. ... read more

So here we are at the incredible Cape Panwa Hotel. The hotel is beautiful, sitting on the south eastern tip of Phuket island between the South China sea and the Andaman sea. The hotel is quiet and secluded with 750m of private beach made up of soft white sand. It is nestled in the side of a hill and even has a tram to take us from our room to the beach. We have a view of the ocean through a forest of exotic palms. The hotel staff is great, they cannot do enough for you. After a confrontation with the front desk over our booking they upgraded our room to a large suite with a livingroom, bedroom and large bath. As you enter the room the first thing you notice is a large well stocked ... read more

I am currently in the Narita Airport in Tokyo, about 1/4 into my journey home. Luckily I had to get up at 3 am this morning to get to the airport for my flight, and after staying out later last night I was dead tired and slept through most of the 6 hour flight to get me here. Next is the really long segment to San Francisco, then an 8 hour stop-over (luckily during the day so I will be able to go out and explore) and then another few hours to get me home to Edmonton. My final day in Thailand was a good one. The tailor came to the hotel in the morning to bring me my clothes, none of which fit so they then had to scramble and alter them twice more during ... read more

We thought Spring was in the air. We shed our outer layers, slipped on our sunglasses and rejoiced outside in the sunshine and warm temperatures. We packed away our down jackets, stowed away our winter boots and plotted to steal away for a moment of stolen sunshine during the working hours. Oh, Beijing weather, how you have mocked us. Over the past couple days, the winds have roared back in from Siberia, stripping the trees of their hesistant blooms, rattling the windows and bowling over small children struggling to pedal their way to school on their pathetic little bicycles. The temperature has dropped 20 degrees, making the impending shut-off of the government-regulated heat next Thursday all the more daunting. We have lost Spring, and fallen back into Winter. I hold but one stubborn ray of happiness ... read more