William Bezodis

BirderWilliam

William Bezodis

I'm currently using this travel blog page to chronicle my travels in SE Asia and Australia on a 16 week solo backpacking adventure. If you're interested, then you can subscribe to updates and have my semi-coherent ramblings delivered right to your inbox!

All of the blog posts from this current/most recent trip in chronological order can be found here: https://www.travelblog.org/Bloggers/BirderWilliam/Trips/33129
If you've just found or been directed to this blog, then I suggest just clicking that link and going from there.

The general theme of the blogs is birding, wildlife, nature, zoos, some culture here and there, and just travel generally.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact me using the message or comment buttons on the right.

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR EARLIER POSTS:

All of these posts prior to the South East Asia and Australia trip were originally written for, and posted on, another website: zoochat.com where I go under the name 'LaughingDove'. I've put these posts here to give them a proper place to live where they are more easily viewable and accessible. I'm moving things over here starting with the oldest, and consequently most poorly written and generally worst posts with lots of scientific inaccuracies and spelling mistakes and such, so things should get better.

There aren't any pictures here for the time being, although I do take lots of pictures of the wildlife that I see, but I do hope to get some pictures up here eventually. There are loads of pictures on the aforementioned zoochat.com though so if you really want to, you can go and check things out there, and I have uploaded a few of my very best bird pictures to my page on the Internet Bird Collection under the name William Bezodis (http://www.hbw.com/ibc/u/11009).

NB: Because the posts were originally written for another site, there will probably be things that don't make sense here and refer to the other site like post numbers or the usernames of members on that site for example. I hope to go through and fix up loose ends like that, but in the mean time please be aware of that.



Europe » Poland September 24th 2018

I have now finished sorting and uploading pictures for this most recent South East Asia and Australia trip. I've added a total of 1239 pictures across the 95 blog posts from the trip and photos can now be viewed attached to each day's blog. The 1239 pictures uploaded is roughly 4% of the total pictures I took on this trip. If you wish to view these, I recommend either starting from this post and clicking the 'previous entry' button in the top left hand corner to go back through the posts in reverse chronological order or going to the trip page here where all the blogs from this trip are listed in chronological order. The first few pictures are embedded in the text and in cases where there are more pictures from that day than the ... read more

Europe » Poland September 12th 2018

Just for some fun which some readers may find informative, I’ve decided to do a thorough round up of everything of the trip, mainly the wildlife seen and the total overall costs. The total trip was 111 days which is one day short of 16 weeks or a week and a bit short of four months, from the 23rd of May to the 10th of September. During this time I visited five countries and went on 13 flights (meaning 13 individual planes, counting one trip with a connection as two). Mammals: I don’t have as detailed statistics for mammals as I do for birds, because my mammal listing involves only a ZooChat yearlist and a simple spreadsheet lifelist. Unlike with birds where I use the HBW system to keep my records. The total trip list for ... read more

Asia September 10th 2018

The good thing about an early morning flight is that Bangkok's traffic is much reduced at 5AM. The other side is that, well, sleep is good too. Bangkok's main airport, Suvarnabhumi (there is a secondary airport used mainly by Low Cost Carriers for regional flights) is a very large airport as you would expect. But unusually, the whole airport is just a single massive terminal. There is only one passenger terminal, and the efficiency with which immigration, security, and check-in operates with all passengers in the same place is quite impressive. With all this efficiency and lack of traffic, I was through immigration and at the gate with two hours to wait for my return flight to Warsaw with Finnair via Helsinki. Finnair operates an A350 on the BKK-HEL route (twice daily!) which is probably my ... read more

Asia » Thailand » Central Thailand » Chonburi September 9th 2018

Yesterday afternoon, after posting that last post, we went to a nearby weekend market at a temple (Wat Bang Peng Tai). This is worth noting because there were a number of exotic animals kept at the temple including Red-necked Wallabies, Sulcatta tortoises, morbidly obese Black-tailed Prairie Dogs, and quite an extensive collection of exotic waterfowl. Nothing incredibly rare, but not the sort of stuff you'd find commonly in a duck pond and reasonable diversity - three species of whistling ducks and four species of swans for example. Even Greater Flamingos too. The temple is on a Khlong, one of the many canal things that go through Bangkok, and the waterfowl enclosures are mostly entirely on the Khlong with floating wooden areas as the land area (some of them also have a bit of actual land). Actually ... read more
White-shouldered Ibis
Black-necked Stork Pair
Greater Adjutant

Asia » Thailand » Central Thailand » Bangkok September 7th 2018

It's been a few days since I last posted a blog, primarily because I haven't been doing anything particularly blogable. I've mainly been getting a few jobs done where I'm staying at my aunt's house. There are a couple of things I would do in Bangkok, namely the snake farm and insect park, but the issue is that I'm staying quite far from the city and in an area that makes it difficult and time consuming to get in to the city. I've got no immidiate access to public transport and getting a taxi in Bangkok is cheap enough but getting in to the city takes literally hours and sitting in traffic for hours is extremely slow and frustrating. If I was really bothered, what I would have to do is actually go and stay in ... read more

Asia » Thailand » Central Thailand September 5th 2018

There wasn't enough yesterday to do a full blog post, much of the day was spent chilling since I'm staying with my aunt in her house on the outskirts of Bangkok (the Suvarnabhumi Airport side for anyone who knows Bangkok) I've got a nice room and I don't need to worry about spending too much money sitting around doing nothing. Most of the day yesterday felt like it was spent sitting in traffic in Bangkok as we went into the city. Primarily so that I can get a suit tailor made which I am doing because getting a tailor made suit in Thailand is a comparable price to an off the peg suit from a cheap discount clothes shop in Europe. At this point, just imagine that clip from Monty Python's parrot sketch is playing: "this ... read more
Lyle's Flying Foxes
Lyle's Flying Fox
Lyle's Flying Fox

Asia » Vietnam September 3rd 2018

I don't really know the origin of the line in the title, I'm aware it's Vietnam War related, but I'm not exactly clear on the specific origin and it's not obvious from Google. Anyway, I'm mainly using it because that's how the Top Gear Vietnam episode ended. My flight to Bangkok was with Jetstar Pacific, which is the third branch of Jetstar that I've flown on this trip having also done Jetstar Asia (Singapore based)) andtstar Australia. There is a fourth branch, Jetstar Japan. Jetstar Asia is the Vietnam branch or Jetstar and I had chosen Jetstar over AirAsia which was priced similarly because Jetstar flies to Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi Airport (BKK) rather than the main budget one of Don Muang (DMK) and that is much more convenient for getting to my aunt's house in Bangkok - ... read more
View of Saigon from the Plane
Saigon Suburbs from the Plane

Asia » Vietnam September 2nd 2018

Today is Vietnam's independence day and I noticed quite soon because my usual banh mi (personal sized baguette sandwich) shop - which is just around the corner and had been open every day from 6:30 - was closed. This is Vietnam though so I didn't have to go too much further to find an alternative banh mi shop. My dong had become rather soggy after yesterday's rain though. 10k and up is plastic polymer banknotes, but the 1000, 2000, and 5000 are printed on really poor quality cotton notes. Given that they're worth 3.3p, 6.6p and 9.9p respectively that's unsurprising, and they get really mangled and soggy. I believe the government tried to replace those with coins at one point but people wouldn't accept and use coins and Vietnam runs purely on notes. There can't be ... read more

Asia » Vietnam September 1st 2018

I must say I'm starting to really tire of walking up at 5:30 every morning so that I'm up early enough for birding. That's a full hour earlier than I would have had to wake up for school! Anyway, today was my last day here at Dalat as my return bus ride is tomorrow. I decided to see if I could save a bit of money today by calling a GrabBike to go to the lake. I wouldn't be able to call one all the way out for the way back of course, but I was going to ask them to call a taxi anyway. The GrabBike cost 53k which is almost exactly a third of the taxi and it would be my last chance to have a fun potentially fatal motorbike ride in Vietnam. The ... read more
Local Endemic Grey-crowned Crocias
Mrs Gould's Sunbird
Fire

Asia » Vietnam August 31st 2018

Today marks 100 days of this trip. 13 more to go. I had to wake up someone at the accommodation to open the door today again. Apparently they open the door at 6:30 which suggests I was a bit late getting out yesterday because the door had just been opened. Anyway, after breakfast of an 18,000 dong bahn mi op la (eggs and baguette - that's about 59p) I walked up the road and for a taxi. I don't have to feel guilty about getting a taxi this time because there's no bus, and I needed a taxi rather than a motorbike because I needed a metered vehicle because I wasn't sure that the drop of point would be so obvious and with a pre-negotiated fare you can't get them to drive around if you said ... read more
Grey Bushchat
Mountain Bulbul
Water Buffalos




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