It must have been about the time that the sky finally took a break from urinating on us, that I actually woke up from my abbreviated cat nap. 3am. I had about another hour or so to toss around on the camp pad who was doing his best to impersonate a piece of cardboard, and try to convince myself that I was actually getting some rest. Ever since the three of us climbed into our tent yesterday evening, after an entire day of hiking in the pissing down rain, I was dreading the thought of having to leave the “comfort” of [View Full Entry]

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Its kind of like apples without oranges, Santa without his scary little elves, the Lone Ranger without Tonto, or in some obscure way, God without El Diablo. The story of our time spent on the Indonesian island of Flores would not be complete without first mentioning the time we did on her neighbor, Sumbawa. Having spent just under twenty-four hours on the Island That Shade/Rain Forgot, I am hardly the expert, but when 21.5 hours starts to feel more like a month, you know that it is time to move on. On an island with a landmass larger than Bali and [View Full Entry]

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Bali. From my experiences, Bali is kind of like that really popular girl that you know back in high school. She always seemed to have everybody convinced that she was just a little prettier than she really was, but for some reason, everybody still wanted to be with her. Fortunately for us, Bali is not exactly like that girl in high school we all knew and it has some redeeming qualities. For me, I like to call those qualities, scuba diving. Knowing that we were going to avoid the heavily touristed areas of Kuta beach and Nusa Dua, we took the [View Full Entry]

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A thought crossed my mind while sitting in the Indonesian Embassy in Kuala Lumpur. Ive found that foreign embassies are the perfect places to just sit and think, especially when you spend the entire day waiting for your ridiculously high number to be called in order to then, find out your fate concerning entry into their country. “If all goes according to the new “plan”, we sure are going to be spending a lot of time in a country that we originally had no plans to visit.” Awaking early and sprucing ourselves up in our Sunday finest, we were going to [View Full Entry]

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*Note* After a severe and prolonged case of writers block, I have decided that it will do no good to try and force myself to write a new entry. What follows is a collection of postcards that I wrote to an imaginary friend of mine, while traveling through Sulawesi. I hope that you can follow along and make sense of the babble. Ill get my act together one of these days. Hey Suess, long time no communicado, huh? Yea, thought that Id write you a little card to update you on ‘ol Beergut and my erratic wanderings. It’s the beginning of [View Full Entry]

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“Farang Song!” The words proudly rolled off the tongue belonging to our most recently acquired Thai friend, with the excitement of a child learning his first dirty word in another language. It took only a second for my attorney to realize that our 5’6” middle-aged companion had stretched his inadequately short arm over both of our laps and into the glove box. Retrieving from the glove box a tape labeled Biggest Hits of 2000; he popped it into the stereo. “Tom Jones?” “Yes. Tom Jones!” our driver proudly proclaimed, but he was already off in h [View Full Entry]

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Chapter 8: In which the author and his redneck trucker buddy, Beergut, find themselves in yet another strange land full of all new foreign markings, customs, hard to pronounce words, sights, and gastrointestinal treats. The latter of which, possessing the capability to not only scald you on the way in, but in the other direction as well. Being faced with all these new challenges, the author finds himself strangely reminiscing about the smallest country (aside from Singapore, which is r [View Full Entry]

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Not much more than a few weeks have passed since the General and I found ourselves happily sucking down sub-standard Singaporian swill and stuffing our faces with Roti Cani, in the capital city of Malaysia. “How did I get here? This land of ancient temples, endless rice paddies, and unexploded ordinence.” It turns out that three days, two bus rides, a twenty-six hour train journey, multiple subway and skytrain fiascos, our first of many tuk-tuk rides, and the longest taxi ride ever can get you too, from the center of peninsular Malaysia, to north western Cambodia. Or I s [View Full Entry]

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Its almost like it could be the plot of a really ill-planned b movie. You know, like the type that goes straight to video and never quite seems to hit theatres. Maybe like a Kurt Douglas flick that you think you have heard of, but when you rent and watch it, it becomes frighteningly apparent why you have never heard of it. This particular piece of cinematic wizardry might be called something like “Escape from Singapore: and any other big Malaysian city that looks similar to Singapore, but is a little dirtier and harder to get around”. I know, the title [View Full Entry]

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There is something, shall we say, unnerving about being completely defenseless in a city more known for its violence, than its colorful mixture of native cultures. I guess that if you think about it, if you open the blender that is the city of Port Moresby, and you throw in a few thousand immigrants from some 800 distinctly different cultures, add a heaping portion of poverty, a good amount of disillusionment about jobs that dont exist, and top it all off with a tiny sprinkle of available land, its really no wonder that this city seems like a breeding ground for [View Full Entry]

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