Blogging on the road

27 03 2010

I have received a few questions on bringing a computer with me on a backpacking trip like ours and I’ll try to answer as many of them in this post as I can.

Why a Netbook?

I really wanted to blog throughout our journey, both to let people know where we are and what we were doing but also to keep a journal for our selves that we can look at in a few years to remind us of how great the trip was.  We also needed some sort of a device to store our photos, we have so far taken over 1,300 photos and videos in ten weeks but our camera only stores about 600 photos if I remember it correctly.  Being able to watch movies and listen to music would be an added bonus.  With that in mind I did some research back in December to see what we could do.

I have a 13 inch MacBook at home that I love dearly and even though it is quite small I didn’t like the idea of taking an expensive device like that with me so if I wanted to take something with me I would have to acquire it.  I looked into several smart devices like the iPhone and netbooks and laptops as well.  At first I really liked the idea of a 9 inch netbook but they were hard to get and in the end I settled on a 10 inch Asus netbook from Amazon. 

The netbook was “only” about $340 and had everything that I wanted: Windows 7 (I didn’t have the time to install MacOS), fantastic battery life (10.5 hours), adequate hard disk space (250 GB) and memory (1 GB) and a bright screen with a good resolution (1024×600) and most importantly light (just over a kilo) and compact.

What about Internet Access in the Orient?

Before coming over here I thought that we would have internet access once a week or so at best but we have been pleasantly surprised that you can get on the internet almost anywhere.  I would say that about 70% of the guesthouses that we have stayed in have had their own computers that they rent out (often at inflated prices) and free wifi access in the lobby area for those that have their own computers and about 15% even have access in the rooms.  This has been the same for all four countries we’ve been in so far.

Internet cafes are quite frequent but they are not really cozy places to hang around in – just rows of computers – so when we have not had internet at the guesthouse we have dropped into one of many restaurants offering free wifi to entice customers.  There have been plenty of restaurants with free wifi, at least where the guesthouses seem not to have wifi on their menu.

The internet connections have been quite fast over here, maybe not as fast as back in Europe but fast enough to upload these blog posts, movies to YouTube and photos to flickr.

How to keep safe?

I haven’t been too concerned with digital security – someone sniffing the network and trying to steal my passwords – I think that is more of a concern if you are using a shared computer.  Physical security however has been more of a concern.

When we have been one the road i have always had the computer in my small bag so it is with me at all times, I would never have it in the big pack as it gets thrown around and, as we have seen on one occasion, been searched through for some valuables.

After we have picked a guesthouse I sometimes leave it there during the day but if I get suspicious I take it with me.  Sometimes the lock on the door isn’t too trustworthy or that strangers could go to the rooms unseen, then I just take it out with me – it is just one kilo so it isn’t a big deal, just like taking an extra water bottle.  If I leave it in the room I always lock it in my big bag and sometimes I lock the bag to the bed.  I know that is false security as a thieve could easily open the bag with a knife but it makes me feel better.

Some guesthouses offer security boxes in the lobby area but we haven’t used that service at all.

Quite many tourists over here carry expensive cameras that are 4-10 times more expensive than my computer so I’m not overly concerned about theft but just in case we always back up our photos to a memory stick ca. every three weeks.

How to make time to blog?

Most of my posts are written off-line with Windows Live Writer, a blog editor from Microsoft that works nicely with WordPress – my blog service.  In Writer I can format the posts and insert the photos so that when I come online I can publish the posts by pressing one button.  Same goes for photos where I use Flickr Uploader to upload the photos to Flickr with a push of a button.

Since I’m able to do everything offline I can just use whatever dead time that is available.  My favorite times for blogging are at night just before going to sleep or while taking one of the many bus rides that we’ve been on – it passes time pretty quickly :)

How has it all turned out?

Apart from the blogging and photo storing it has been nice to be able to watch movies at night or go through our photos together, edit and refine them, when we have the time.  It has also been fantastic to be able to update the iPods once in a while, refreshing the music library or adding new audio books instead of the ones we finish.

All in all it has been a fantastic decision to take the netbook with us and definitely worth the little hassle it has cost us.  I won’t think twice about taking a computer with me on our next trip!


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Categories : South East Asia

Mae Sai Visa run and then back to Bangkok

26 03 2010

Before entering Thailand from Laos we had heard that we might only get a fifteen day visa exception into Thailand, which would be too short for us, but the Lonely Planet book told us thirty days so we didn’t worry.  When we were at the border we discovered that the 30 day visa is only granted when you fly into Thailand so we only got fifteen days.

That meant that our visa would expire before we fly to Hong Kong and the fine for overstaying your visa is 500 baht per day ($16).  To escape the fine we needed to make a visa run.  A visa run is to go to a neighboring country, only for a few minutes, and then back to Thailand to get extra fifteen days.  The cheapest option is to go to Burma (Myanmar) (Laos $30 and Cambodia $20) where you can get a day permit for $10 or 500 baht, which is very strange since $10 is actually 330 baht ?!?!

For our visa run we drove up to Mae Sai, a small border town by the Golden Triangle where Thailand, Burma and Laos meet.  The Golden Triangle used to be the world’s biggest opium producer but that has all been cleaned up – at least on the Thai side.  The four hour drive up to Mae Sai was painless and once in Mae Sai we just walked through the Thai immigration office to get stamped out and into the Burma immigration office where we paid the fee got our Burma passport stamp and walked back into Thailand with a new fifteen day visa.  The whole process took about ten minutes and was as simple as could be.

After getting our stamp we drove back to Chang Mai to take the ten hour sleeper bus to Bangkok.  We are only staying the day in Bangkok before talking another sleeper bus down to Chumpon and from Chumpon we take the boat back to Ko Phangan where we intend to load the batteries before taking on China – The Middle Kingdom.  I have a few topics I want to address while on the beach so stay tuned :)


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Thai cooking and Pandas

24 03 2010

A few days ago we went to a cooking class with …well I can’t remember the name right now …in Chang Mai.  It was a full day course, thought by the Thai version of Rachel Ray.  She was just like the pirate movies that the street vendors are selling – almost a complete replica.

The course was set up in a way that first we went with our Rachel to the market to buy the stuff we needed and after the market it was time to cook the courses we had chosen – we were able to choose 6 different dishes plus making our own curry paste from scratch.    I picked banana spring rolls for an appetizer, spicy papaya salad, Tom Yum (hot and sour) soup with shrimps, chicken and cashew nut stir-fry, red curry with chicken and mango and sticky rice for dessert.  Elínborg however picked fresh spring rolls, seafood salad, the same Tom Yum soup, Phat Thai stir-fry, green curry with chicken and banana cooked in coconut milk for dessert.

The whole course was a lot of fun and we learned a lot about the Thai ingredients.  We were also told what we could use at home instead of the Thai stuff that we can’t find in our stores.  We seemed to be naturals in Thai cooking, at least everything that we cooked tasted fantastic and the best part of the whole course was to eat all that great food ;)

Now that we know how to cook Thai food, you guys will just have to buy the ingredients and invite us over for dinner and we’ll come and cook for you !!! :)

We also went to the Chang Mai Zoo.  The zoo was just OK, not more, but had a few very interesting animals.  The main problem with the zoo is it is widely spread over a very hilly area so it is hard to walk around. 

We were very impressed with the selection of cats where they had both big and small cats.  In the big section they had white tigers, lions, Asian tigers and both a black and yellow panthers.  The panthers were a lot of fun, the black lady was in heat and the yellow male would make rough love to her every two minutes or so – lasting about 5-10 seconds each time.  The small cats section has some interested cats as well, cats that we hadn’t seen before – desert cat, panther cat, fishing cat and others.

The main attraction of the Chang Mai Zoo are two Pandas, a few months old baby Panda and an adult panda – we weren’t sure which sex.  The baby Panda was awfully cute and full of life.  He sleeps most of the day but is woken up twice a day to play and eat and we managed to be there for that.  He was like a two year old human kid, running all over and playing with his keepers, doesn’t want to do anything he is told to do – just play.

The older one was not as playful at all, just sat and ate and only moved to get more bamboo to eat.  You could really see though that Pandas are not just cuddly cute teddy bears, he or she had huge fangs and seemed powerful enough to snap a human in half in a few seconds.


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Wake Up – A Life of the Buddha by Jack Kerouac

24 03 2010

kerouac_wakeup As with so many books recently, I listened to Wake Up – A Life of the Buddha as an audio book.  It comes from Penguin Audio as 5 cds read by Danny Campbell, who in my opinion didn’t do the book justice with his monotone voice that hardly gave the story the life it needed.  Still the story is very interesting and a fundamental story in the lives so many people around the world so I tried to looked past this fault in the production.

This book tells the story of the Buddha or to be correct it tells the story of XXXXX that later in life becomes the Buddha or the Enlighten One.  The story begins when XXX is still a little prince growing up in Hindu India. XXX becomes disillusioned with the life of riches that he lives and leaves the palace to search for answers on life it self – on deaths and rebirths or reincarnation, one of the cornerstones of the Hindu religion.  To my understanding the prince discovered the secrets of life and becomes the Buddha and the book follows the Buddha to the end of his human life or until he enters Nirvana.  The book also goes through some of Buddha’s teachings as he is preaching to his disciples.  To create a coherent story the author both cites old scriptures from different Buddhist traditions and uses his own words to bind the scriptures together.

Before I read the book I had heard some stories of how the prince became the Buddha but is was very interesting to read it again as a coherent story from beginning to end.  Reading the book at this point in time, while traveling through South East Asia, gives it a good and solid context and makes the reading (listening) even more enjoyable. 

About three fifths of the book follow the life story of the Buddha and about two fifths are from the Buddha teaching or preaching to his disciples.  The former I liked immensely The latter part I didn’t get so well and I have to admit is went a bit over my head.  The Buddha talks about the self, the true self, the mind, the essence of mind, the conscious mind, the brain mind, the essential mind and so forth and it was a bit too complex for me to make any sense of it. 

To summarize, I really likes the story of how the prince became the Buddha and how he spent his life after becoming the Enlightened One.  I didn’t like the teachings since I didn’t fully understand them – maybe I’ll have to give that part another try later. 

I would recommend this book to anyone that wants to learn about the Buddha and Buddhism but at the same time, I would recommend going quickly through the teachings unless you are very enthusiastic about the subject.


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…and now the Jungle Flight

21 03 2010

Yesterday I persuaded Elínborg to join me on a trip with a company called Jungle Flight.  The guys at Jungle Fight have set up a zip wire course in the canopy of the jungle in the mountains beyond Chang Mai, similar to the original Flight of the Gibbon.  The course consists of 33 platforms with 26 zip wires, 2 sky-bridges, 4 abseils and one spiral stair case.  The longest wire is 300 meters long and the highest is 120 meters above the ground.

In the beginning (and the whole day before) Elínborg was terrified of the thought of hanging high up in these wires and the anxiety didn’t lessen when we came on site.  The staff was made up of of guys that, already at just after seven in the morning, acted like a heard of calves in the spring – cracking jokes, all laughing and making noise and didn’t  seem responsible at all.

After brief instructions we went for the first zip wire and when in business the guys were very careful and responsible – although continually making jokes.  Right from the beginning both of us were loving the experience and all fright was out the window.  It was so much fun being up in the canopy and sliding over those wires, enjoying the view.

Gradually we learned more tricks and got more frisky and went head first – Superman style, we went together on twin wires, went backwards and without hands.  The distances, height and speed varied greatly so sliding on the wire never got old.  In between they also had the abseils where a rope is fastened to your back and a guy lowers you down in a Mission Impossible kind of style, down 20 to 40 meters at full speed – a fantastic adrenalin injection.

We had opted for a cheaper option, 22 platforms, but midway through we were offered to upgrade, which we gladly accepted.  I don’t think anyone could pass up on that opportunity being midway through the course.  We were in a group with two Taiwanese girls that were doing the big circuit and that made the decision even easier.

So we had a great day in the forest and all in all it was a great experience and a lot of fun that I hope can shines through in the photos – we would highly recommend this to anyone that has the chance!


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Tiger Kingdom and Jungle Flight

20 03 2010

We have just been loving life here in Chang Mai.  First of all it is great to return to some sort of organization after Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos.  This time around we really notice how much better off the Thais are – both in terms of organization and money.  Another great thing that we were really missing is the Thai food.  Being back to fantastic red or green curry, tom yum soup and other fantastic dishes is just great!

The first day in Chang Mai we just wandered around the city, trying to get our bearings.  On the second day we decided to take a tuktuk to the Tiger Kingdom, a park with about 30 or so tigers.  We had very mixed feelings going in, you never know how the animals are treated and how things work.

The deal is that you can come and have a peak into one of the cages and then you can buy 15 minutes with one (or many) of four different age groups – newborns, “teenagers” and adults – with the newborns a bit pricier than the others ($15 vs. $10).  We thought long and hard if we wanted to do this, we had seen that if you go in with the adults you are not really petting them, more approaching them from behind and tap on them and it felt very strange to us and not worth the experience – except maybe just getting the thrill of standing next to an adult tiger.

So we opted for seeing the baby tigers since we were there and just to sum up – the experience was amazing!  Once we came into the enclosure where they were kept – by the way they were three 6 weeks old kittens – one of them just ran to Elínborg and right into her lap and he stayed around us the whole time.  The kittens are a bit tricky because they just go where they want and we were not allowed to hold them, fetch them or anything – just be there and if they wanted to play then we could play with them.  Those ten to fifteen minutes with Kankoon (Jack Fruit) were just wonderful and so much fun!

Elínborg with little Jack Fruit

After seeing the baby tigers we were allowed to walk around the part and see the other tigers (through the fence) and what amazing animals they are – so graceful and elegant.

The teenagers

After the whole visit we felt really good and had no second thoughts.  All the animals were born in captivity, they seemed very healthy and well taken care of and seemed happy to us (without a degree in tiger psychology though).

Well this has been long enough, I’ll just post about the Jungle Flight experience tomorrow.


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