There is More to This Country. . . Where I come from it takes a good hour and a half driving in excess of the speed limit before you even come to the next piddling little village down the road, and to get to the next “big” place takes another hour or so. Australia is the kind of place where you can drive for several hours on end and only find two places that are signposted enough to be considered worth stopping at. This is the world that I grew up in; this is what I’m used to. Imagine my surprise [View Full Entry]

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Welcome Home My Dear Convict Son It felt as though I’d just spent nine hours in time machine when I emerged from the plane. I was pretty sure that I arrived in London significantly before leaving New York, and as I was still operating on Tacoma time my internal clock was telling me that the sun really ought not to be up at midnight. I hadn’t slept on the plane of course; who can fall asleep when your body is telling you that it’s 10am? I was obviously quite grumpy, but I was holding myself together just long enough to get [View Full Entry]

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Welcome to New York They say that you can’t visit the USA without seeing New York and despite the fact that you very well could do such a thing, it not being physically impossible or anything like that, and also forgetting that a lot of US citizens never leave their home town anyway let alone visit New York (I guess they never exactly “visit” the country though so they can be excused), I figured that I ought to at least prove this rule one way or another. So, bravely going where only a handful of million others had gone that week, [View Full Entry]

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In the Words of Prince Humperdink: Skip to the End I apologise in advance for this journal is nothing of the sort. Consider it more along the lines of me trying to get some thoughts out of my head and onto paper (albeit the electronic kind). For those of you who are actually interested in what I did while in the USA I have included a short description towards the end along with some decent photos. Feel free to skip to the end and please do not feel required to read any of my ramblings. Also, I’ve had to write it [View Full Entry]

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Once Upon A Time In the year 1607 a fourteen year old girl named Arjumand Banu Begum became betrothed to Prince Khurrum, third son of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir. This alone would be a truly unremarkable story but thankfully there is a little more to tell. This is the story of how one man ruined it for the rest of us by setting the bar far too high. The princess became the third and most beloved wife of Khurrum (polygamy being in fashion and all) and the couple were reportedly so head over heels in love with each other that they [View Full Entry]

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Where’s The Bloody Zoo? While I was on the train heading across the Indian continent, Piscine Molitor Patel was telling me a thousand wonderful facts about the Pondicherry Zoo. Stories of exotic animals living happily in their synthetic enclosures while the young Indian boy ran amok around the area trying to collect as many religions as he possibly could were rolling around my mind as Paul and I arrived in the old French colony of Pondicherry. Imagine my disappointment when I found out that there never had been a zoo in Pondicherry! After many angry outbursts, curses towards heavens (as many [View Full Entry]

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The Long Drive to Israel Right after the four-thousandth bikini clad goddess obliviously walked past us that day Paul and I decided that the time had come to leave the sunny shores of Goa. Somehow an entire week had disappeared on Palolem beach (I dare not guess the reason) in which we had seen very little, done very few things, been almost no places, and had learnt absolutely nothing. Sure, we’d both been having a great time and Punjabi had most assuredly been entertaining us each night with his antics but the time had come for us to move onwards and [View Full Entry]

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Christmas Day in Aurangabad Some people may have been wondering on Christmas Day whether there was a more perfect place to be celebrating Big J’s B-Day than where they were. Perhaps there was somewhere out there more fitting, more appropriate, and more enjoyable than their particular gathering. You see, some of us are not lucky enough to be able to enjoy the comforts of home and family at Christmas; some of us are living far from where we grew up, some of us are traveling, some have no family to go to, some of us are traveling, and some of us [View Full Entry]

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You’re Either a China Person or an India Person. . . Supposedly India. . . that far off place that for one reason or another is stuck in the western mind as “exotic”, “overwhelming”, “magical”, or even “scary”. When talking to travelers, young or old, the word India is always countered with two types of story. The first ones are horror stories of crowded bazaars filled with pickpockets, touts, mayhem and madness. Places where you have to have a tough skin in order to survive. The other stories tell of a wondrous place filled with colours, sights, sounds and smells which [View Full Entry]

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A Tip For Seasonal Travel: I Wish Someone Had Told Me This Before You wouldn’t do an Alaskan cruise during winter and you wouldn’t visit the Sahara in summer. These are two well established pieces of assumed knowledge which every one of us has installed somewhere between our earlobes. From this, it should not take a long stretch of hard thought to come to the simple conclusion that you should visit cold places when they are at their warmest; which typically occurs during summer. Through a lack of grey matter, or perhaps through the debilitating Australian disease of southern-hemisphere-itis (we find [View Full Entry]

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