So, Cusco and the surrounding area is absolutely fantastic. This area reminds me a lot of Spain, which makes a lot of sense since the Spanish conquered the Inca Empire in the 16th century. Most of the buildings are clay-mud bricks with a stucco exterior along with red clay tile roofs. It's a very attractive design especially the larger buildings with the large interior courtyards (the hostel I'm staying in has such a courtyard, 2 actually). The Loki Hostel I'm staying has a pretty remarkable history actually, if you're interested there's a quick bio here: http://www.lokihostel.com/cusco/the_house/history Within the downtown core of Cusco there are scores of cathedrals with very ornate sculptures, paintings and murals. The main square is sided by cathedrals on 2 sides and 2 others very close. In the surrounding area there are scores ... read more

I'll use this as a first entry since I want to try this out before my trip to South America. This entry will be pretty short, but I'll upload a pile of pictures. In September 2007 Ann and I and the kids (Jacqueline, Jasmine & Mikaela) and our friend Wendy enjoyed a fun-filled trip out east. We camped in some super-cool spots (Hole In the Wall, NB being the best), saw some fantastic sites (Hopewell Rocks, Cabot Trail) and managed to attend the wedding of our friends Eric & Heather in Dalvay, PEI (which was actually the initial incentive for the trip). It was 3 weeks of sheer chaos travelling with 3 little kids, but thanks to our friend Wendy at least we had a 1-1 ratio of adults to kids. We survived and actually had ... read more

Namaste everyone. Well, here I am in Delhi, India. Let me tell you the road here from Kathmandu was none too smooth. I’m sending this once again through my ever-trustworthy friend Bob (who I’m sure has lots of time on his hands to do me these favours now that he’s a new daddy). I managed to check my e-mail messages this morning on the most ancient computer I think I’ve ever used (my old Commodore 64 excluded). I used a DOS-based web-browser to check my hotmail account which actually worked out surprisingly well although a bit time-consuming. Last I wrote I was in Pokhara, Nepal recovering from a trek in the Himalayan mountains. My recovery diet consisted of lots of beer and rum and several games of pool and darts. Although it proved difficult I managed ... read more

Hey everyone, So Kathmandu is nothing like I expected. I thought it was cold and there was nothing to do but trek, but it's amazing! In Kathmandu it goes up to about 25 C (that's about high 70s for you non-metric people) in the day. There's white water rafting (we're going on a 6 day trip soon), elephant safaris, cool villages and markets. Also trekking. I could spend months here. We seem to be giving the impression that all we do is drink. Some of you may be wondering why we just didn't stay home and do a round-the-world tour at Milwaukee's (that's a bar in Toronto that has about 150 beers from around the world). So in this message we won't mention beer anymore. Later today we're going to a slide presentation from one of ... read more

Hey everyone, How's it going? We are now in Beijing, having crossed by train into China about 4 days ago. It was pretty neat, we took local trains (as opposed to one international train that most travellers take) and so got to stop in a couple towns that probably have never seen tourists before. Got to learn to count to ten (in Chinese, we know how to count to ten in English, we're math majors) in some restaurant with the whole family helping out. Gave them a Canadian flag pin for that... So today we just got back from the Great Wall. We camped there over night, at Simitai (about 3 hours from Beijing). It was way cool, first we had to climb up the wall, it's in a non-touristy condition, so quite dangerous in parts ... read more