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 are stuffed toys. This is a story of three such souls this Christmas: two travelers and one fun loving Santa. After finding Mumbai to be a tad on the dull side, or more politely speaking, ... read more

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 it hard to understand how December could be anything other than warm and sunny), Ben and I forgot this basic piece of advice and we were to be found in exactly the wrong place at ... read more

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. The team gathered in Kathmandu in preparation for the series and then bravely stepped on to the Annapurna Circuit in search of the ultimate game of cricket at 5416m above sea level. My Dad, my brother, Ben (a work ... read more

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 wrong there as well; something was completely opposite to what I was expecting from the ancient capital of the Tibetan world. For centuries, at least ten of them, Lhasa had been the grand capital of ... read more

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 and had found the city itself to be rather plain, however, it was a logical first stop inside Chinese territory. Somewhat surprisingly though, we had a fantastic time in the city as we actually took ... read more