DVM en route

Another summer, another continent. What would a summer be without me leaving the country in search of a little adventure!? I have decided to revive the long-lost "travel blog" in hopes of documenting my first and possibly final four months in clinical veterinary practice. For those of you who haven't heard, I have taken a locum position (short-term) in Australia - and not just anywhere, but Chinchilla, Queensland, Australia at the Chinchilla Veterinary Services. If you take a look on a map, just go about 500km west of Brisbane in to the abyss of the outback. If you mosey on over to googlemaps.com and look up Chinchilla, you'll probably have to (i) zoom in to appreciate any relevance to this town and (ii) splash yourself with water to wake-up from the feeling of boredom that you ... read more

Note: this was written over many several disjointed days so I apologize for any disjointed thoughts and events… Since I haven’t written in a few days, I have forgotten most things I did last week. Looking at my last post though, that is probably best as it removes the majority of rambling that no one really wants to read anyway. Tina arrived at SaiBei Farm on Friday afternoon thankfully as Levi left me alone to fend for myself (I thought I had rid myself of his existence - unfortunately, as I would later find out, that would not be the case). I am not really sure where he went or for how long he was going to be gone. This appears to be the way most Chinese conduct themselves. Coming & going as they please seems ... read more

Well…what the hell am I doing back here again? For some masochistic reason I decided to send myself back to China this summer but rather than traveling I’ll be working for China AgriCorp - a company that principally distributes semen (from bulls FYI) for ALTA genetics in the US, as well as other dairy farm services. I didn’t realize it until today, but they are quite a major player in the dairy industry here in China, so the breadth of experience should be quite good. This is the first time they have had a student work for them since I approached them about the opportunity of creating a “veterinary student internship” - which, by the way, is a CV friendly way of saying “volunteer” but makes you sound less tree hugging and community oriented. I have ... read more

Due to the excessive amounts of rain in Lijiang (and the rest of Yunnan province), we decided to forgo our trip to Tiger Leaping Gorge in favour of heading back east to a town called Dali on Monday. After a rather uncomfortable 3.5hr bus ride through gorges, mountains, clouds, goat and ox herds (and the feeling of imminent death due to the lack of road guards beside the cliffs....) we finally made it. We were dropped off on the side of the highway amongst a bunch of rocks. There were lots of taxi guys waiting around to take everyone who wanted a ride into town, but we decided that we could hike it to our place. Since it wasn't raining for once, it was actually a nice change. It was about 4km to our hostel and ... read more

After a moderately 11hr bus ride in a rain storm on a "sleeper" bus from Kunming, Thursday night, we arrived in Lijiang around 7am Friday morning. After getting off the bus and getting ourselves organized, we went off to our hostel. Lijiang is split into two seperate cities of sorts - an "old" and a "new". We are staying in the "old" city which is one of China's last chinese looking cities with curved roof houses with clay tile shingles etc. It is really beautiful. The area is in a valley of sorts at the beginning of the himilayan mountain chain. Unfortunately, due to the rain, it has been quite cloudy so any view of mountains has really been out of the question. We got to our hostel and got a really great buffet breakfast (which ... read more