temps
Chris Templin Joined: March 25th 2009
Logged in: July 13th 2011
Logged in: July 13th 2011
My career plans are limited and will hopefully be more developed by the time i'm in need of a large bank loan. For the time being though I am quite happy enjoying whatever freedom I can achieve.
As stated, I live in Melbourne, Australia and love it. I'm a university graduate with a degree that is a lot less interesting now than when I selected it 4 years ago. Damn. Still love with my folks and two younger siblings, one ageing dog, one semi-productive chicken and two bikes.
Travel Blog Posts
Instructions
W.C., privy, commode, latrine, throne, dunny, the john, chamber pot, convenience room, the head, can, loo, outhouse... Yep, its toilet time. My relatively short 'career' as a passport user has given me access to a varied range of cultures, languages, traditions and histories. I've count myself lucky to have been brought up from a young age with stories of adventures in foreign lands mixing fluently with those of Murgatroid and Where The Wild Things Are; instilling an urge to see these fantastic places from day dot. During the 1970's, my father treated himself to a brief holiday of seven years without a re-entry stamp to Australia, a period which saw him gain enough storytelling material to last him the following thirty five-odd years. Seven months of backpacking is long enough to give most people a basic ... read more
Rio De Janeiro
Hands up who loves February? It's a strange old month, February. Shorter than the rest, with a leap year further confusing friends and relatives of anyone unfortunate (or fortunate) enough to be born on the 29th of the 2nd. Christians will recognise February as the period of Lent, the period of the liturgical year lasting 40 days before Palm Sunday. Other people know it as party time. Carnaval, Rio De Janeiro, February 13th-16th. Steamy city streets pulsating to the sounds of samba and rhythm-heavy drums. Barely dressed Latinos & Latinas gyrating seductively atop psychedelic floats to the cheers of thousands of onlookers. Mardi Gras, Sydney, February 19th-March 7th. City streets filled to capacity with performers and cheering onlookers. Sexually ambiguous and proud, Sydney celebrates one of the world's best known Gay Pride events. Mardi Gras, New ... read more
= 1:1 AUD$ in Europe
Traveling this part of the world is bloody expensive. This is learned the hard way by nearly all young backpackers from the Antipodes undertaking their first major overseas excursion. All of those overtime wages earned in shitty bars are immediately transformed into Monopoly money, their value free falling to the point of non-relevance. The tricks are many; similar numbered price tags lead many to overlook the devil's symbols - € and £, resulting in blown budgets and frantic calls to generous parents at 2am Australian time. Filial love goes only so far in explaning these life-saving 0% interest loans; perhaps the generous parents remember too well their times spent Living The Dream, camped on the floor of a leaking share house in wintery London, surviving on white bread and tomato sauce. My first excursion here in ... read more
Food for thought...
It was the homeostatic equivalent of placing a loaded pistol to my temple and pulling the trigger. Consuming 1 bottle of cheap whisky, watching 3 football world cup qualifiers, joining a protracted and intense debate about various global woes and sleeping 3 hours must rank among the worst possible preparation routines for a long-haul, transcontinental flight. What would you do? You have a nasty flight and an even more gruesome connection beginning the next day when your roommates invite you to join them in an evening of restrained revelry. The cute Angel on my right shoulder firmly reminded me that AirasiaX’s seats on the KL-London route weren’t going to be conducive to a good sleep, and London’s Stanstead airport certainly wasn’t going to provide comfortable locations to pass the 15-odd hours between my midnight arrival and ... read more
Jeepney
I was unfortunate enough to visit a Filipino jail house. My iPod had mysteriously vanished on a bus ride through the island of Cebu. It had dropped onto the floor and mysteriously found it's way into a fellow passenger's bag. Gone. So I had the dubious pleasure of sitting in the San Vicente Pulis Station for 2 hours while the casually dressed cop laboriously filled out a report. He was wearing the standard cop attire - shorts, thongs and a Philippine Idol tshirt. A big fuck-off pistol strapped very conspicuously on his hip served as the only hint that he was there in an official status. Well, that doesn't really explain much as many Filipino blokes seem to be carrying a pistol in the back of their shorts. For once it reassured me, as behind him ... read more
Cataingan - Cebu room mates
Philippines, you're doing it wrong. Your food is feral and your toilets do nothing to alleviate the pain that the food causes. For many first time and uninitiated Asian travelers it is the image of the infamous Asian squat toilets that bring on a case of the heebie-jeebies. Let me assure you, it can get a lot worse than the squat pan. The Philippines has had a long social, political and military association with the United States. Good Ol' Uncle Sam imparted a love of basketball, corrupt politicians and most tellingly (in the opinion of both myself and my rear), western-style toilets. Western toilets are a bad thing? In theory, a country in Asia which uses western cisterns is a wondrous thing. A touch of home in a foreign land, right? Wrong!. The toilets here are ... read more
Pilgrims of 2009
I love the pursuit of strange food. So far my list of 'accomplishments' includes the following: * cockroaches (Thailand and Cambodia) * grasshoppers (Thailand and Cambodia) * vegemite (Australia) * chicken feet and intestine satay (Indonesia and Aus) * fish eyes (Malaysia) * frogs (Laos) * snake (Aus) * dog (Vietnam and Indonesia) * cat (probably at some stage on Victoria St...) * squid ink-based pasta (Italy) * a "special" chicken biriyani topped with the heart and liver (Burma) It goes on, but right now my iPod's new playlist (cool names for songs - 'Backseat Love', 'Antichrist Television Blues', 'Gay Bar', 'I Am The Walrus', 'NiggyTardust' etc) is distracting me from the task at hand. I digress. Weird food is clearly a completely subjective thing. It only took sharing a bus seat with a Cambodian who ... read more
My first dive
Once again I find myself plotting ways through which I can organise to live in Bali full-time. I love it here! A marriage of convenience to a local lesbian is currently high on the list of possibilities… Fam and I returned a couple of days ago after a planned expedition to the wilder islands East of Bali turned into a battle with gastro and an extended sunbathing session on a perfect island. Gili Trawangan is heaven if you’ve been slogging around in the filthier parts of Indo for a few months; a cinema, white beaches, waters teeming with sea life, some cool bars and plenty of good food provide the distractions. I guess it’s like Kuta, minus the bogan Australian element, schnick-schnack sellers and penis bottle-openers. And it’s popular with Scandinavian “backpackers”, most of whom actively ... read more
P1030156
Much has been said about the prevalence of poorly translated Asian tattoos on Western males' bodies, and I know we've all shared a laugh or two over some classic 'Chinglish' translations in restaurants and on signs in this part of the world, but I have finally reached the pinnacle of cross-cultural misinterpretation. What I witnessed HAD to be an honest and unintentional mistake, but even so it was so amazingly bad it just had to be photographed and documented. I'll set the scene... We had been on shoddy trains for 5 hours escaping the dreary town of Solo and heading to the metropolis of Surabaya. Our plan was to change trains there and head to the city of Probolinggo which serves as the main starting point for trips up to a tiny town on the edge ... read more
Political Rally
It’s hot and I’m having one of those blessed lazy days. My previous PB in terms of days away from Aus has been surpassed today and to celebrate I’m going to do sweet f*** all! Fam and I sacrificed ourselves to the constant grind of Indonesian usury and scams yesterday. Having white skin in this part of the world brings about what is known as “white-man = walking-wallet-so-let’s-rip-the-stupid bastard-off-for-as-much-dosh-as-possible-and-still-smile-as-though-we’re-doing-him-a-favour.” Understandably, this is not my favourite practice in the world. We had decided to get up early and venture out to the huge Buddhist monument at Borobudur, some 42km away from Yogya. Where we’re staying is the budget traveler’s enclave (read: tightarse central) and appropriately it is populated by more Indonesians hoping to make a buck out of the rare tourists than the tourists them... read more
