flyinghaggis

So the Hundred Islands is this range of islands in the Philippines, and it is pretty much as awesome as it sounds.Beautiful white sand beaches, mushroom islands, delicious fish, yadda, yadda, yadda…. To get there, we took a multitude of forms of transportation. From San Juan we took a trike to downtown San Fernando, a local bus to Agoo, a Victory Liner bus to Dagupan, and finally another Victory Liner towards Santa Cruz but we alighted at Alaminos, the terminal bus stop for us. We took a trike from there out to Lucap, the town on the mainland next to the Hundred Islands National Park. We had heard from so many people about how the Victory Liner buses were so much better than the other companies, but they didn’t seem so much better to me. In ... read more

So, I finally got my feet into some trekking. This trek was pretty good, we started in Darjeeling and ended up back in Darjeeling, but with quite a bit of hiking in between. I decided to break the trek up into three blogs since I have so many photos :) On day one we met up at the Trekking place in Darjeeling at 8:30 and met our guide Pemba who spoke quite minimal English, which ultimately turned out to be a problem later on. We began our trek in Maney Bhanjyang, an entry into the Singalila National Park. We got a taxi ride to Maney Bhanjang with a jeep which took about an hour, and had a breakfast of 2 small chapattis, a small omelette, and milk tea. After our (not very filling) breakfast we stopped ... read more

On day two we were awoken at an ungodly hour to see the sunrise over the Himalayas. It was really quite worth it, and then we went back inside for a lovely breakfast. We had loads of porridge, doughnuty bread with jam, and milk tea. It was a great start to the day. After we got walking we descended about 400 m to the low point of the ridge hike. After reaching the minimum, we began to climb, and the rest of the day was entirely spent going uphill. All in all, we did 18 km in length, 400 m down and then 900 m up if I remember correctly. The ascent was exhausting. There were a couple of points on the hike up to Sandakphu where I was thinking about just giving up, but I ... read more

So I spent a few days in Kolkata with a cool couchsurfer, and did basically no sight-seeing at all. We basically had too much fun eating out and exploring the Kolkata scene. I arrived in Kolkata from Dubai via Doha at 3:10am, and we in fact arrived a bit early. The flight turned out pretty awesome since I got an upgrade to first class which was nice since it was a 5 hour flight. I didn't really get a whole huge amount of sleep, but damn it was comfortable. A nice dinner, a glass of wine, and even my own DVD player. When I arrived in Kolkata I took a taxi to my couchsurfers apartment. I got ripped off and paid 800 Rupee ($16.7) since I couldn't use the prepaid taxi booth since I had absolutely ... read more

Ok, so these haven't exactly been the most exciting last two days. In fact they have been pretty boring, and if I had known, I would have changed my plans quite significantly. Probably spent more time down South and tried to hook up with two Berliner girls in Kabak. Oh well that's just how the cookie crumbles. I spent a day in Selcuk, the town that neighbors Ephesus, the best-preserved Roman town in Anatolia, but my GOD the place is swarming with tourists. The city of Ephesus itself is in really quite good condition and is impressive to see, but it would be nice to be able to move more than 1 foot without bumping into another person. As a result I spent something like an hour at the site since I was not enjoying it ... read more