January 19 to January 29 Udaipur; peace, quiet and Bond. A wonderful place to relax and kick a Bombay cough. With wedding season in full swing, the town is also filled with wind carrying Hindi pop and Christmas lights topping dozens of roofs spotlighting celebrating families. You get the full range here, P-Diddy and the Clintons in town to celebrate a New York Hotellier's big fat Indian wedding at the Lake Palace or a couple of lights, horns, dancers and a horse - simple but still colorful in ways only India can provide. Weddings are hard to get away from and [View Full Entry]

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January 6 to January 18 I just munched a delicious egg omelet in the middle of a dirty, loud, crowded and smelly intersection. The egg stand is the size of a small closet stacked head to toe with eggs, 1000 cracked a day. After the chai but before the eggs I was witness to a horseback wedding procession complete with a 15 member drum and horn band and a push cart generator powering giant house lamps camped on top of small children's heads. The groom was very Lawrence of Arabia, complete with curly mustache. I nearly fell off my cracked plastic [View Full Entry]

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December 26 to Jan 5 So my New Years resolution for next will be: 'Avoid getting thrown up on next New Years Eve.' What a way to ring in the new year huh? Into Singapore to get my visa for India, after hightailing it to the Indian embassy I received the high inquisition, I must look way too shady. "What do you want to do in India for three months," "Why are you going there, its too long," "You can only have a one month visa, these passport photos wont work, get new ones" I ask what wrong with them, "No, [View Full Entry]

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December 15 to December 26 Well you don't need a ticket out of Australia to enter the country, my cancellation fee lesson. Not that I was going to repeat the mess of leaving Bali for NZ. Melbourne really is the upscale cosmopolitan center of Aus. The men had better haircuts than any US city I've been in. Square shoes are the norm and the food is wonderful, still cant find good Mexican though. The better part of the city is the stuff tourists have a hard time finding, the out of the way pub scene. Tom, a Manchester ex-teacher, and I [View Full Entry]

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Champagne Backpacking - best way to describe it. At the end of any hard days tramping in the NZ wilderness you can dock the boots at a clean comfortable hut. Bliss. NZ is gorgeous, not a new statement, but its incredibly accesible to the good stuff. Amazing trails all organized with superb trail markers. Its a shame that most people think of bungee, skydiving, sledging and jet boating when the infrastructure for hiking is so great Within the NZ national park system there are several classifications of Huts and Hikes, some preimum and well maintained and advertised and as such well [View Full Entry]

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November 25 to December 14 Most of our time in the south was spent hiking on several trails. In the first month of my travels I spent some time climbing in Railey, Thailand, where I met Marcus. He invited us for a weekend in Kaikoura, north of ChCh for some fishing, BBQ and drinking with his mates. It might of been a typical night for them but it took me a few days to recover. So in a 24 hour period I managed a few firsts. We started off at 9am in poor weather and swarmy seas looking for our tasty [View Full Entry]

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Jon and I can cook, were pretty good and we enjoy it. I however lack wine knowledge that he doesn't. I can't even pretend to know what questions to ask. 'Shallow depth of topsoil makes grapes work harder producing a more robust fruit.' Nope, that would get by me every single time. In that aspect I'm Jack's absent minded taste bud, no NZ wine tastes that bad or deserves a wrinkled up nose and stiff elbow-head severely titled pose as if one more smell would ruin the rest of the day. So with a large portion of our time set aside [View Full Entry]

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November 16 to November 24 - I had a travel crap day leaving Bali, stupidly I maxed out my card limit to buy a new camera and I had to rely on my unused credit cards to make it out of Indonesia with their airport depart tax. I didn't know it but I haven't used 2 of 3 credit cards in almost 2 years, they were recently canceled due to non use. I couldn't remember my pin to the one that still works so no money. I had to walk 4ks to the airport. It was lucky I showed up early [View Full Entry]

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October 17 to November 15 - Kuta and the south bit of Bali is very developed and was very empty, just two weeks outside of the latest round of bombings so I wouldn't call it a festive place anyway. Back on a motorcycle for 11 days, Bali requires an international drivers license, which I don't have, but I do have photoshop. Alright, it may not be smart but it should at least reduce the amount of the bribe I'll need to pay should I get pulled over. Some dive sites around Bali feature bleached out coral due to El Nino several [View Full Entry]

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All the photos are in the dead of night, I'm glad it ended up that way but Macau was a quick trip. Nick, a young Kiwi toymaker, and I headed for Hong Kong central and had a great time, sleeping half the day away when I should have been on a boat to Macau. When I had finally made it it was already dark and with a flight at noon the next day I chose the obvious. Ditch the bag at the ferry station and walk with the camera, all night, no hotel. I headed for Taipa, one of two small [View Full Entry]

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