Articles from this Category
4 June 2012
This is the real China I woke at 0530 (to the sound of someone chopping firewood) due to jetlag which I fully intend to use this in my favour with early buses and trains ahead. I had slept very well despite the bed being so hard. It felt like a plywood board padded with blankets. […]
3 June 2012
Prices in the new China I set off with my daypack today for a 3 night trip to the Wuyuan area which is about 6h (less 20min rest break) bus journey away. The bus journey was uneventful as the roads were either motorway or very good. This is the new China. Sadly the new China […]
2 June 2012
After a good night sleep I felt like new again. I thought it would be a good idea to but the tickets for the bus tomorrow to Wuyuan. I did this at Shanghai South Long Distance Bus & Railway Station. It was all very painless except travelling by metro and foot takes forever as distances […]
1 June 2012
Sleepless flight We had the weirdest and shallowest take off out of Auckland. We seemed to hover over the lights of South Auckland and it took quite a while before we were away from suburbia. This must have been the Boeing 777 that thought it was an propeller aircraft (or an Airbus A340). I had […]
30 October 2011
Above: The green countryside before arriving into Bandung. Rather than fly out of Jakarta, we thought it would be different to fly out of Bandung to KL/Kuching. We’d save a little on lower departure taxes out of a regional airport … and the distance from Jakarta to Bandung is only 3h by train. The train […]
27 October 2011
We made our way to Labjuanbajo Airport early for our Wings Air 0830 flight to Denpasar-Bali for our connection to Jakarta. We never expected a traffic jam in a little town like Labuanbajo. But today was the day that locals were departing for their Haj in Mecca. The main road was chocka as was the […]
26 October 2011
Dragon-spotting on Komodo Island As we’ve kept ourselves on New Zealand time in order to make early flights and dives, we woke up naturally at 5am … assisted by the sunrise. Breakfast was cheerfully served at 5:30am and we were at Loh Liang, the National Park base for Komodo Island at 6:00am. We had to […]
25 October 2011
Crew, stowaway, freeloader or extra passenger? We pushed off from Labuanbajo harbour around 7:30am on our lovely comfy boat with what I thought were 4 crew members. As it turned out, one of them was an Indonesian passenger … I think the crew had smuggled him on even though we had paid for the entire […]
24 October 2011
We walked around Labuanbajo, in the land of Komodo dragons, and enquired about dive trips. Day trips are common and overnight trips require the right numbers in the travelling party. Every shop had the same offerings at the same price … except Labuan Bajo Dive Club which was IDR50,000 cheaper. That little difference in price […]
24 October 2011
Above: Sunset as viewed from our accommodation. Today we did a full day’s outing from 0800 to 1700 with two dives. Like many people, we skipped the optional third dive but couldn’t return until everyone was done. First up was Manta Point (Karang Makassar) where we saw four manta rays and an eagle ray. It […]