Asia

This is basically just venting… So read at your own peril. I left my hotel at 5am in Jaipur to make my flight to Muscat, Oman (layover on my way to Cairo).  My experience trying to leave the country epitomizes my experience in India.  Keep in mind that this was a relatively nice hotel I [...]

Overall, now that I’ve made it out alive, I’m glad that I ventured to India despite many peoples warnings and general questions of “why in the world would you want to go there?”.  With the amount of travelling that I’ve done, its hard to find a place that is completely different than what I’ve already [...]

I arrived in Delhi at the airport and had arranged for a private driver to pick me up. For the convenience of not having to deal with touts, I paid the steep price of about $10 USD for the half hour journey into the city (metro would have cost less than a dollar). I nearly [...]

I left Southeast Asia earlier than I had planned. I hesitated booking a scuba diving trip to the island of Sipadan (supposedly one of the best places to dive on earth) and then the flights to get to and from dramatically increased. And if I want the fancy-pants apartment overlooking Touchdown Jesus next year, sacrifices [...]

Singapore is known as the “fine” city/country because of all of the things you can supposedly be fined for (littering, eating on the subway, etc.).  You may remember an incident involving an 18-year old American citizen that was caned in Singapore in the early 1990’s for vandalism.  Or you may be familiar with the notion [...]

Seoul was about 15 degrees on my last day there, so meandering around in only two fleeces and a raincoat (I elected to not pack a down coat for only a few days of extreme cold), I was freezing.  Hopped on a six hour flight to Kuala Lumpur and was greeted with temperatures in the [...]

After over 30 hours of travel (including layovers in Chicago and Tokyo), I finally made it to my hostel in Seoul, after midnight local time.  You would think I would be ready for much-needed sleep, however because it was 10am eastern time, I was wide awake.  This messed up sleep schedule continued for several days, [...]

We ended up waiting at the Amman airport for about an hour and a half in order to take the public bus, to our executive suite at the Le Meridian – how about that for an oxymoron?  You can imagine how utterly ridiculous we look walking in, where formal wedding receptions are taking place, with our backpacks…  Once again, [...]

We left Istanbul to go to Dubai.  But instead of flying southeast we flew northwest…to London.  Then from London to Dubai.  Apparently oneWorld thinks it is more profitable to send us on a 5 hour flight then a 7 hour flight, instead of one 2 hour flight.  All of which had empty seats, but no L class.  No wonder [...]

Even old New York, was once New Amsterdam.  Traveling from Romania to Turkey was a 20 hour odyssey fromBucharest to Istanbul in a vintage 1950s train car with no air conditioning with the summer sun beating in to the window from noon until dusk.  We stayed not far from the famed Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque. Massive religious wonders.  We paid the entrance fee to Hagia Sophia [...]