Random musings

  • Samui

    All good things must end and so after the full moon party it was unfortunately time for our little group to head our seperate ways. Dan and Yara headed for Singapore, a bunch of the couples headed down to Kolanta for some relaxing (and no doubt romantic) time and I headed to Ko Samui to…

  • The Perfect Zen Day

    I spoke a little before I left about what the perfect Zen day would be. Here is the rough schedule, amended for the experience of actually living it: 10 am wake up 10-12 lie in bed, read in the hammock, take a walk through the totally quiet town 12-1 eat “breakfast” 1-3 Yoga class. Amazing…

  • Yoga

    I find it a little scary just how much I enjoy Yoga. I had tried it once before when I worked at Microsoft but hadn’t enjoyed it at all; (The Pro Club, an almost all-Microsoft gym had a way of making many things somehow less appealing than they should be) Good fortune then, that I…

  • Be Here Now

    Originally I had pretty ambitious plans for travel in SE Asia. There is a whole list of places everybody tells you you must go: Ankor Wat, Phnom Penh, The Delta Region in Vietnam and so on… Whenever you meet fellow travellers the easy conversation (like “what’s your major?” in college or “what do you do?”…

  • Night Diving

    I have realized that I really enjoy acquiring new skills, especially physical ones. While I find diving very enjoyable, I will admit that after a certain number of dives, all the coral and beautiful fish and even fantastic sea turtles start to blend together a little. You start to wonder then if you should continue…

  • Ko Tao

    After a week in Ko Phangan (Where does the time go?!) I have moved on to Ko Tao. This kind of travel really gives you a first hand view of the limitations of the Lonely Planet and it’s peers. While the books describe Ko Tao as very rural, without even fulltime power, arriving at the…

  • Ko Phangan 1 – Hat Rin

    Ko Phangan On my flight into Thailand, I skipped Bangkok entirely and on the advice of a friend headed directly to Ko Samui and onwards to Ko Phangan. It’s like each of those places gets progressively less developed as you go, with Bangkok as mega-metropole, Ko Samui as developed honeymoon destination ala Maui (with an…

  • Catching up

    I have never been very good at keeping a journal. In elementary school, I had an amazing English teacher, Mr. Lowndes and part of the assignment in his class was to keep a running diary of what we were reading, what I thought of it so far, and so on. At the end of the…

  • A few days in Rio

    Rio feels a lot like New York City, or the place New York would be if it were consistently a lot hotter and the divide between rich and poor were even more insane than it is. It definitely takes a few days to get your travel legs. Challenge #1 getting money from an ATM, not…

  • Leaving town…

    It’s amazing how much work it is to sort out and shutdown your life in a city. Packing, shipping, change of address, goodbyes, etc… Especially if you’re planning on being out of the country for a few months, there’s a lot of crazy stuff to do. A few things I discovered in my preparation: Remote…

Got any book recommendations?