After the 4 day/4 night boat trip from Lombok to Flores, I took a couple days to relax in Labuanbajo, the town on the western end of Flores and do a couple of dives a few hours from shore. The diving, officially in Komodo National Park, is world class, stunning, colorful, with lots of macro (that's the tiny stuff) and big palegics. Dived with sharks, turtles, massive Napolene Wrasse (maybe 2 meters in length -- and they're just fishies) and enjoyed the most amazing, diverse soft and hard coral I have ever seen. At $30 a pop, the diving was [View Full Entry]

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In a land where ripping off the tourist often seems to be a national pastime for many touts, transport personnel, restaurant and accommodations catering to westerners, it sure was nice to find a refreshing change of pace. I stumbled upon Edwin and his L'Avalon bar/cafe/accomodations one day while simply meandering the streets of Kupang, West Timor, having already been in town three nights. His hip bar/cafe was an open air shack on the water, just off the road; he even piped in good solid tunes from his ipod, blaring out of two speakers facing the main road, and well-heard inside [View Full Entry]

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I took my first "live aboard" a few weeks ago (though not a dive live aboard) and was that ever worth the money! In reality it was pennies, but when traveling on a tight budget, it was more than I would have normally spent in that amount of time (4 days 4 nights), but worth every moment. I had taken half a week to relax and visit with some local friends in Mataram, Lombok when a friend of a guy running the guesthouse where I was staying (a young guy whom I had befriended a day or so earlier) approached [View Full Entry]

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The Pelni ship is an amazing mode of transport. German-made and the biggest ship I have ever been on in my life (I've never been on a cruise, but if some of you have, you can then imagine the size of this monstrosity), these beasts haul thousands of passengers every day of the year from island to island, from Sumatra and Java, Kalimantan and all the way east to Maluku and Papua, and many smaller islands in between. There are often six or seven floors for passengers, plus lots and lots of cargo. Passengers can opt for 1st, 2nd and sometimes [View Full Entry]

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Ok, let's see, I left off while I was exploring Flores, a truly spectacular, volcanic island in Indonesia. So much has happened since then, I don't even know where to begin. Oh, for those of you who are new to my email blast, first off, welcome, second of all, to catch up and keep abreast of my travels (often, quite delayed, however, and I do apologize for that), please read and sign up to receive my blog: http://www.travelblog.org/Bloggers/travlinfool From Moni, where I had had the break-in in my room, I traveled to the east of Flores, stopping in Maumere one night [View Full Entry]

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"Say what??" you must be thinking about now? That subject line may make no sense whatsoever right now, but in actuality, it does; you will just have to read further in order to unravel the meaning. Today, the topic is about ladybugs, Spiderman and the turning of a knob 69 times. More specifically, the rooms in which I have stayed the past few weeks. I started off the Indonesian portion of my latest endeavor in Yogyakarta, a sizable city in Central Java, towards the southern part of the island. Yogya (don't pronounce those "Y"s think of them as "J"s instead; the [View Full Entry]

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Even though I have been traveling on my round-the-world trip now for nearly 29 1/2 months with no real end in sight, it feels as if I have just started up once again. The Hands On deployments tend to do this to me. I settle in one place for 4-5 months, working in the community six days a week and getting to know the locals as well as my fellow international volunteers. It's a nice change from constantly having to locate and flag down buses and trains, dealing with the haggling and harassing of vendors trying to sell their wares, and [View Full Entry]

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Wow. I had forgotten what a time warp I live in when volunteering for Hands On Disaster Response. I left Bangladesh when the project completed last April and continued traveling throughout India and South East Asia, before the "call to duty" came again in mid Sept to help out the people in Gonaives, Haiti. 4 hurricanes and tropical storms within a few weeks in late August to early September ravaged the city of 300,000, raising the nearby river to above its banks. It flooded the city and brought more mud than I have ever seen in my life to the streets, [View Full Entry]

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..Just so we're all on the same page, I left Thailand on the 5th of October and popped in to California for a week on my way to Haiti, in the Western Caribbean. I visited with family and friends, many whom I have not seen since I started off on my venture two years ago, almost to the day. The week flew by with hardly a moment to breathe. All in all, it was a fantastic stopover and now I am here in Haiti ready to get my hands dirty, my legs muddy and clothes trashed, helping Hands On Disaster Response [View Full Entry]

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Rested, relaxed, armed and ready to tackle a new country with only a 6.6 KG laptop bag (minus the laptop - I left it at a friend's house in Thailand), I left the lights of north Bangkok behind, jumped on a local bus and for less than a dollar I headed for the Suvarnabhumi (pronounced like Sue-wan-ah-boom, believe it or not) International Airport, traveling partner in tow. With 7 1/2 hours until the early morning flight to Yangon, Myanmar, we busied ourselves by reading waste-of-time trashy gossip magazines at a bookstall, munching on crisp cookies and exploring the nooks and crannies [View Full Entry]

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