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 wit [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 sou [View Full Entry]

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Killing Time Between Treks After hiking the Annapurna circuit, Team HAC spent some well needed time relaxing in the small (and indcredibly laidback) city of Pokhara. Compared to Kathmandu it was a wonderful place to relax and enjoy the better things in life: mainly food. We also got around to doing a couple of small activities. Ben tried out paragliding, and four of us went on a three day rafting adventure down the Kala Gandaki river. For brevity's sake I'll skip a written description and will instead let the photos tell the tale. Team HAC Goes Separate Ways We [View Full Entry]

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High Altitude Cricket: The Next Frontier The world of cricket has been stagnant too long. No major advancements have been made in the game in recent years, excepting of course any advancements that have been made, and something needed to be done about it. Enter Team High Altitude Cricket, or HAC for short. The mission was simple: to play cricket at any altitude higher than Australia. It turns out that this is not a particularly difficult task thanks to Australia's highest mountain, Mt. Kosciuszko, being only 2228m tall and because Nepal is, on average, really stupidly high. T [View Full Entry]

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606km The Long Way Round: Eight Flights, 21000km, Nine Days, and One Wedding Later Hi Matthew, you are cordially not invited to the wedding of your mum and dad. Saturday 27th October. Well, I certainly wasn't expecting that email from my dad, and it certainly made things complicated given that I received the news on the 18th. That gave me exactly nine days to. . . well, what can you do in nine days? After five minutes Marjie noticed that I was blankly staring at my computer screen with an expression of dumbfounded stupidity gracing my face and she promptly [View Full Entry]

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Note: I haven't been able to put up some of the photos from Jokhang Temple as of today. I'll try and put them up next week. New Lhasa Lhasa looked a little strange as our taxi drove us from the train station into the center of the town. It could have been the effects of the extreme high altitude messing with our heads, it could have been the surreal, near moonscape views of the barren Tibetan mountains around us, or it could have been the unexpectedly warm and comfortable weather that made me feel ill at ease but something else was [View Full Entry]

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The Problem We returned to Chengdu to prepare for the next section of our trip: Tibet. This was going to be a slightly more risqué and thus exciting trip thanks to all the efforts of the Chinese government to keep people (excepting rich package tourists of course) away. At the outset things seemed to be stacked against us, but we decided to give it a go. Initially we had planned to travel to Lhasa by bus, but thanks to a series of crackdowns in the towns of Litang and Chamdo it appeared that doing so would be a lot harder than [View Full Entry]

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Getting Back on Track My unexpected, month long trip to Mongolia put my travel plans a little askew and I found myself in an awful hurry to get to Nepal. This is not to say that I was keen to get out of China, for that should be implied after six months of lethargic bumming around in that wonderful country full of grotesque inequalities and startling contrasts, as I was instead rushing towards a pre-arranged meeting in Nepal. After crossing into China, Marjie and I headed directly for Hohhot, the capital city of Inner Mongolia. I had already been through Hohhot [View Full Entry]

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Foreword The last month of my life was spent in one of the most untouched and amazing countries in the world (in my limited and biased opinion that is): Mongolia. For seventeen days I was let loose in the wilderness and countryside, for days on end I sat in a Russian van as we drove over the pulverised remains of what may at one stage have been called a road, and in that time I saw an abundance of amazing places and met many wonderful people. I could not possibly tell you every detail of my journey, and in some cases [View Full Entry]

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Ulaan Baatar No, I did not make up the name Ulaan Baatar, nor did I misspell it. Surprisingly, UB’s name is less difficult to say than most things in Mongolia even after you get over the issues involved in reading Cyrillic (note to all, PECTOPAH actually sounds like “restoran” which makes a whole lot more sense, I wish I had known this fact a few months ago). Somehow, having all signs and notices written in Russian script makes UB feel awfully depressing. Everywhere I go I am reminded of old movies and documentaries which showed communist Russia. Even in the museu [View Full Entry]

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