http://www.travelblog.org/Bloggers/Out-of-Scope/ Travel adventures in journals and photos from Out of Scope en-us Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:10:24 +0000 Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:10:24 +0000 Dear Loyal ReadersI apologize most abjectly for my failure to post anything on this blog about the last three months of my trip last year. It's not that it hasn't been in my thoughts. I think my reticence stems at least in part from the profound difficulty of summoning memories of places so different from New York that they seem little more than a fantasy. However of all the places I marveled http://www.travelblog.org/Asia/Nepal/Jiri/blog-262830.html The town you come to when you enter Laos from Chiang Kong Thailand is Huay Xai. Huay Xai is nothing more than a half mile of crude wood and concrete buildings slouched on the east shore of the Mekong river at the bottom of a hill. Most of these buildings are budget hotels or general stores selling shampoo potato chips and cola with two or three tourist shops sprinkled around at the center. I http://www.travelblog.org/Asia/Laos/West/Bokeo-Nature-Reserve/blog-151705.html Which of these things does not belong Mae Sot is a strange place. It seems like an ordinary runofthemill forgotten town with a couple of dozen streets woven together haphazardly just a few km east of the Burma border. There are a couple of Buddhist temples a main street lined with mundane shops and a busy market heaped with vegetables fruit flybuzzed meat and fishy fish. One item http://www.travelblog.org/Asia/Thailand/North-West-Thailand/Tak/blog-128195.html When I last wrote I had just completed three days on a scuba liveaboard in the Similan Islands. When I got back to solid land I took a bus from Khokkloi a town in Southern Thailand where I asked my Scuba operators to drop me off to Bangkok. The trip took 14 hours but I slept through most of it and I was able to write off most of the 12 fare to the cost of nightly accommodations. I arrive http://www.travelblog.org/Asia/Thailand/Central-Thailand/Bangkok/blog-127545.html Long long ago in a hemisphere far far away sea creatures with carboniferous skeletons swam about in the ocean living playing and eating each other. The dead ones built up on the ocean floor where they were compacted into a sedimentary rock called limestone. Some millions of years later when the underlying tectonic plates decided to move the rock was thrust up above the ocean surface and s http://www.travelblog.org/Asia/Thailand/South-West-Thailand/Railay/blog-118753.html My plane touched down in Bangkok on November 18th at 930 in the morning. The blast of steamy air that oozed through the cracks in the corridor leading from the airplane to the terminal reminded all the passengers that they were just a short skip from the equator. Escaping the airport in Thailand exercises muscles you didn't know you had as place names in Thai are often quite difficult to trans http://www.travelblog.org/Asia/Thailand/Central-Thailand/Bangkok/blog-112661.html The latter part of my stay in Istanbul brought me chronologically from the Byzantine era into modernity. I wrote about all of the major sites I visited last time. I pick up on Saturday morning when I had to rub my eyes when I looked out the window. Was I really seeing what I was seeing I had to open the window and stick my hand out to make sure it wasn't some strange illusion. Yes in fact http://www.travelblog.org/Middle-East/Turkey/Marmara/Istanbul/blog-109829.html Hi AllSorry for the long interval since my last update. If the internet is a superhighway I'm on a potholed dirt road right now and so this entry will be pictureless and brief. After leaving Istanbul and touring around Turkey for two weeks I decided that it was the wrong season to see turkey and so packed my bags and set a course for... ThailandI arrived about 6 days ago. I'm now in Ko http://www.travelblog.org/Asia/Thailand/South-West-Thailand/Surat-Thani/blog-105566.html Do you want the good news or the bad news first Good My rain gear works extremely well. The bad You can guess. It has rained on three and a half of the five days I've been here. I should warn you that the photos won't be as stunning as they could be as they are all shrouded by a layer of mist between subject and lens. Cities are hard to appreciate alone. By nature a city is a place wh http://www.travelblog.org/Middle-East/Turkey/Marmara/Istanbul/blog-100092.html Well after a summer in New York I am finally starting on the second leg of my big trip. I touched down in Istanbul yesterday morning and I plan to do a tour of the countries of the Middle East deemed safe enough to visit.I awoke this morning my first here in Istanbul to the swirling undulating chants blaring from loudspeakers in the Blue Mosque near my hotel the sound vying with the clamor http://www.travelblog.org/Middle-East/Turkey/Marmara/Istanbul/blog-99202.html Hi AllSorry again for the long delay. But this one is a biggie.After spending a week laid up in Manali hobbled by stomach pains I was dying to get moving. My gut had made a fairly miraculous recovery after a bold selfdiagnosis and subsequent selfmedication. I had about two weeks left before I had to fly home to New York and what had once seemed like an infinite span of time for my travels http://www.travelblog.org/Asia/India/West-Bengal/Darjeeling/blog-79118.html At the end of my last entry I was pulling in to Amritsar home to the holiest temple of the Sikhs. This was a bit of an unexpected detour I had thought I was going to go straight for the mountains but I figured that the Golden Temple had to be on the cover of the Eyewitness Guide to India for a reason. After some inquiries I learned that it could be arranged to make it a stop on the route http://www.travelblog.org/Asia/India/Punjab/Amritsar/blog-69646.html Hello AllI'm disappointed with myself because I'm still more than a month behind on my blog. This means that I can't relate my travel experience with as much freshness as I'd like. Funny. It's only a month ago that I was there and it feels like years ago. Time really stretches out when your moving from one place to another so quickly and between such different places. When you're on the r http://www.travelblog.org/Asia/India/Rajasthan/Jodhpur/blog-60058.html My next three destinations all occupy the southern section of the very large state of Rajastan. After leaving Bundi my next destination was a whistle stop tour of Chittorgarh a town boasting what is billed as the finest fort in Rajastan as well as some oneofa kind architecture that you just have to visit to appreciate. The town isn't supposed to be that great to stay in so I went to Udaipu http://www.travelblog.org/Asia/India/Rajasthan/Udaipur/blog-56314.html When last I wrote I was about to bid farewell to the eternal Taj Majal to begin the heavily touristed Rajastan circuit. Well I'd like to clarify that statement. It is heavily touristed in the right season. It is unlikely that the present time would qualify as that. I deliberated for quite a while about whether I was prepared to endure the 100 110 degree weather that I could expect. that http://www.travelblog.org/Asia/India/Rajasthan/Jaipur/blog-53475.html I've started this entry and aborted it several times because it's hard to know where to begin with a country as enormous and complicated as India. I'll just have to jump in and start writing or else I will be forever stuck in Nepal. I touched down in Delhi on March 20 about two weeks ago. On the taxi ride from the airport I felt a sense of the energy and vibrance of the city. Delhi actually http://www.travelblog.org/Asia/India/National-Capital-Territory/New-Delhi/blog-50602.html I slept badly that night partly due to the pounding rain and partly due to the hope that it would stop and of course the everpresent crappy mattress situation. I woke up at midnight and again around 130 among other times and remarked with dismay that it was still raining. When 445 arrived and it was time for us to begin our walk to Poon hill to collect our prize a spectacular view http://www.travelblog.org/Asia/Nepal/Gorepani/blog-49071.html When we last left our intrepid travelers their ragged band was breaking up on the jagged the rocks that crown the mountains above the Annapurna trail... When you are on the trail and have little to do at night but read and write plus it gets freezing cold and the only warm place is your sleeping bag you go to bed early and get up early. So I got up not long after Eddie and Michelle woke up a http://www.travelblog.org/Asia/blog-47457.html The menus in the Annapurna trail restaurants all seem to have been copied from Protocols of the Elder Trekkers of Annapurna guide as they are all pretty much identical save for the prices which seem to vary in proportion to altitude and remoteness. They have standard Nepali fare like Dal Baht lentils with rice Tibetan specialties like Tibetan bread breakfast food like pancakes omlettes p http://www.travelblog.org/Asia/Nepal/Annapurna/blog-46236.html Hi there Friends Sorry for the long delay. The access road of the information superhighway hasn't managed to penetrate the rugged mountain passes of the Himalayas just yet so this posting has languished in my primitive offline word processor called a note book or some such. Apparently these were once used extensively for composing. Anyway I'm going to break this up into two or three ins http://www.travelblog.org/Asia/Nepal/Pokhara/blog-46207.html