I took off from Bangkok to Pettaya for a day trip. I left at eight AM and it was only two hours away by bus. For the past few days I'd been itching to do something crazy and scoured my brain for what that could be. And then it hit me. I have to go skydiving. I looked up for some places and found one called Thai Sky Adventures, in fact it was the only continually operational drop zone in all of south east Asia, and only established since November. And it seemed like their pricing was better than back home too. When I arrived at the bus station I was picked up by Pete, the sales manager of the place and had to pretty much sign away my life and fill out the disclaimer forms. ... read more

I reached Ko Tao in the early hours of the morning after being crammed below deck of a fishing boat overnight, and as soon as my feet touched the ground it began to pour. I went into a restaurant for some breakfast as I waited for the rain to calm. The entire reason I traveled to this island was to go diving, as this was one of the best places in the world to do it. Or at least it once was, as unfortunately word of mouth had made it more popular which meant the coral reefs were suffering from overuse. I walked around for a while and made my way to Sairee Beach, the main beach of the island, and began shopping around for a diving place. After talking to a few people I heard ... read more

On New Years day I picked up my stuff and headed towards the bus station by my lonesome. Billy would be catching a flight to Bangkok and then Vietnam, so I was effectively a solo traveler. I still have a lot to learn in this regard. I bought a ticket to Malaysia's largest city, Kuala Lumpur, then just sat back as the bus drove on for a few hours. I must have fallen asleep on the way cuz when I woke up I could see the Petronas Towers in the distance and realized we had arrived. The bus dumped us all off and I tried to get my bearings and find the hostel address I had written down before leaving. Malaysians speak Bahasa Malaysian whereas in Indonesia they had been speaking Bahasa Indonesian which is more ... read more

After spending a few days chilling out in Kuta, we decided it was time to move on. We got on a bus and drove to the north east point of Bali and then crossed over with a ferry. We then embarked onto a sixteen hour journey to get to the city of Yogyakarta, in central Java. Culture shock was in overdrive here. The main issue was that English was poorly understood, the vast majority of people we tried communicating with knew maybe a couple of words MAX. In fact many people didn't even use the words correctly which messed us up at times. Our bus ride was interesting to say the least. We sat right up at the front and had a huge view of everything ahead of us, which was both good and bad. There ... read more

Ubud We flew into Indonesia via Jakarta, the capital city, and then almost immediately continued onward to Bali. We were greeted with the cheery sign "Welcome to Indonesia! Death penalty for drug traffickers!". After arriving at the main Bali airport, we oriented ourselves, and moved on to Ubud, a cultural town in the center of the island. Unlike the rest of Indonesia, which is primarily Muslim, Bali is mostly Hindu, and in fact is the largest Hindu enclave outside of India. As a result there were tons of Hindu temples of all sorts of shapes and sizes throughout the island. We stayed at Jati Homestay, Jati being some sort of famous painter from Bali. I perused through his gallery and noticed he loves painting artwork of topless women. When we arrived in the town we realized ... read more