Weblog » Around The World

Are you still reading my weblog? Have you been waiting for me to make my pictures more accessible? Do you want a Travelogue that both has content, and can be viewed (somewhat) properly in Internet Explorer?

Well, I’m getting there. I’ve just started my job at IBM in Poughkeepsie, NY and now that most of the moving is finished and I can settle down into a routine, I’ve been working on getting this site “optimized”.

Firstly, the images are now all shrunk to a decent “Internet-friendly” size. The important and relevant ones will soon have names that make sense (no more IMGP0951.jpg). I’m still working on getting galleries up so that people can see a slideshow and thumbnails, but most of the systems designed for that purpose seem fairly unpleasant.

Secondly, You may have noticed a few site-wide design changes. I’m working on making this site appear a little better to users of IE, and I’m adding more pages to the Travelogue section so you can all “hear the story straight from my mouth”.

I’ve also upgraded the weblog software so that I can clear out some of that online-poker spam that has been creeping into the comments. The Archives are pretty much up and running now too, so you can look back at my previous posts. The main page will only display the last 10 posts, so if you haven’t been keeping up, you better check out the archives. The archives themselves display 10 posts at a time, and you can click the little “previous posts” link at the bottom to see more. And, as always, they all run in reverse chronological order, so the most recent update is right at the top for you to view.

Give me a little more time, and I’ll have this place running great. If you have any ideas or comments, feel free to leave them below.

I am writing this post from my computer at home in Douglassville, PA USA. It is currently 78 days since I started this trip, and as of this moment, I am finished.

The PA DMV apologized for not being more helpful, and offered to fax me a copy of my driving record if I needed it. I told them to mail it to my house where I plan to add it to my scrapbook of other papers from the trip.

I could not justify waiting so long to start the trip across country, and so I boarded a flight to Philadelphia and, for the last time, put on my backpack and set out.

Amtrak was an option early on, but unfortunately my finances are not what they were when I started the trip; only for an outrageous price with several connections and only coach seating for days would I have been able to get an Amtrak ticket.

Leaving Tuesday from San Francisco with my driveaway car would have been possible but would have cost more than the plane ticket and extended my trip far past the 80 day mark, leaving me unprepared for my move to Poughkeepsie.

Besides, I missed my MINI.

It’s been a great trip. I will tell you all about it as I add my pictures (full size versions up now, edited versions soon) and finish my travelogue. I’ve come to realize (while trying to write it on my laptop during the journey) that it is far too much information to stick onto a few pages. Compressing it down just makes it sound like a boring journal without any of the delightful “mikeyoung-isms” you all know and love. So, expect to see that whole section expanded and filled… especially with witty photo capitions.

For now, give me a shout/comment telling me that you’re still alive. Let me know where you are living now (for those of you who have moved) and what you are up to. I’m going to try to catch up with the world I’ve missed over the next few weeks and your assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Yesterday, I hit snag #1 on my trip around the world. It took until I was almost finished with the trip to encounter a serious problem, and of course that serious problem had to occur in America — not Russia or Morocco, or even Venezuela with its mudslides.

It looks like the drive across the country will not be happening, and we can all thank the Pennsylvania Department of Motor Vehicles for throwing up roadblocks.

In Russia, plenty of paperwork was filled out, stamped, and filed; in America, no one seems to know how to fill out the paperwork required — and when they do, they decide that it will take 2 weeks to do it.

I tried to get my Drive-Away car the other day. The idea behind this system is that people who move across the country don’t want to drive their cars; so, they pay a company to find a driver to do it for them. Its a great idea, and allows many foreign visitors to see America very cheaply, as they get a car essentially for free as long as they get it from point A to point B.

I informed the drive-away company of my desire to drive across the country, and everything looked perfect: There was a car going from San Francisco to Windsor, CT; it was a small car and would be cheap in terms of gas; I had given them my information and was set to pick up my car on Friday afternoon.

Then, the hassles started.

If I had been a foreign visitor with an international driver’s license, everything would have gone smoothly. Unfortunately, I was a Pennsylvania resident and Pennsylvania is one of 3 states which require up to 2 weeks to perform a simple driver’s background check. The guys at the drive-away company hadn’t realized this when they told me to head up to San Francisco, and when I arrived it was a disaster.

Without a driver history, the drive-away company can’t insure me, and I can’t drive across the country. There is no way I can wait 2 weeks to get my history, and so it looks like my trip will end here.

I tried to go online to see if I could expidite the process, and PA does offer an online driver history system. Delightfully, after paying $5 to get it, the PA system failed to work — instead giving me a blank page with a big “Log Out” button.

In Russia, state-sponsored atheism had one benefit: people worked on Sundays. Here in America, no one does, and so I am stuck. I can either wait till monday morning and call the PA DMV and hope to be able to work things out, or I can say, “screw it all” and board a $250 plane back home. I need to buy the ticket with at least one day’s notice to get the cheapest fare, so that’s another difficulty.

It’s a sad state of affairs… I knew this part of the trip would be the trickiest to organize, but to come so close just to have it all dashed is still upsetting. Part of me wants to wait and see if I can get it sorted out; the other part says, “you’ve lost 15 pounds in Siberia; you’ve sailed across the Mediterranean; you’ve stayed in both a 5-star hotel and a sleazy guesthouse in Hong Kong. It’s time to go home.”

If you have an opinion, voice it now.

I’m home.

Well, at least in terms of my home country. I left Fiji 3 hours from now, and travelled back in time to Los Angeles.

I’m staying the night in a hostel here with a bunch of other people from Fiji, and then tomorrow I’m taking the train (and bus it seems) to San Francisco to pick up a car fromt he Auto Driveaway people. Then I’m planning on meeting Dave Maino from PSU who is doing an internship there.

After that, it’s off across the country on a random, unplanned trek across the country.

I’m not yet sure what I should make an effort to see, so if anyone has any suggestions, give me a list! Bear in mind, however, that I have no money and am running down the reserves on the way back home.

So, Fiji is going well. I’ve just gotten back from the Robinson Crusoe island and a few days of relaxing on the beach and some fun partying with all the other backpackers at night (til the power goes out at midnight)

I’m off now to another island with some snorkeling and peaceful white sand beaches to lay out and relax before I fly back home.

Its been great to not have to worry about things and just take a “real” vacation finally. I’m looking forward to coming home, but I’m also glad that the trip isn’t quite over and I’ve still got all of the US to drive through.

Ok, so for the record, I am now in Fiji.

I am terribly behind on my weblog. I’ve missed writing about leaving Hong Kong and New Zealand. I will try to rectify that now.

After my dad left Hong Kong, I stayed one night in a delightfully tiny cupboard. The room had a bed which literally occupied 90% of the space. It was wall, bed, wall in one direction and wall, bed, 2 foot space, door in the other. It cost 200 Hong Kong Dollars and was the cheapest in the area.

I then left for a 10 hour flight to New Zealand. It was uneventful, and would have been much better had I been able to sleep. SInce I couldn’t, I slept most of the next day in Auckland, New Zealand.

New Zealand is a very beautiful place, and although it is crawling with backpackers it wasn’t quite like Barcelona. Barcelona was full of kids with lots of money and not so much time; they partied hard. New Zealand is full of kids with lots of time and little money; they partied hard — economically.

I jumped off a building in Auckland. Everyone else was doing it…

It was a “fall-by-wire” jump where they allow you to free-fall and then slow you down just before you go splat. It was something like 500 feet, from the tallest building in the southern Hemisphere (they say). I survived and got a certificate.

While I was falling from the sky, Clark from PSU called me. I obviously didn’t answer during the decent, and I didn’t notice the ring so it wasn’t distracting from the ground flying up to meet me. When I called back, I realized that no one knew where I was… so I went online first thing in Fiji.

So far, Fiji is great. It is definitely a tourist place, but you can tell that there are certain “segregated” areas for real tourists and us backpackers. The backpacker side is much more real and seems more enjoyable.
The guy staying in my room just arrived as well, and he is on the same flight as me back to the USA. We are both winding up round-the-world trips and jsut want to lay out on the beach, so it looks like we’ll be hitching around together to visit the different beaches and outlying islands.

I’ve only been here a few hours, but I can already tell its going to be nice and relaxing… as long as I can get insect repellant.

I’ll try to write again, but it might be tough as the islands we are planning on going to don’t even have electricity, much less internet access. If worse comes to worse, you’ll hear from me again once I arrive in Los Angeles on the 12th.

So after I arrived in my luxourious hotel room and had a good sleep, I ventured out into Hong Kong to make good use of the three days I had before my dad arrived in China.

I did indeed take the funicular railway up to the “Peak” which, I might add, wasn’t really the peak at all. Then I climbed the actual peak via the trails until I reached the radio towers.

I also rode the Hong Kong trams around the town just for the sake of doing it. These trams run along what used to be the coastline of the island. Due to reclamation, the lines are now a few blocks back but still feature the thin double-decker trams of death that have been around for quite a while.

I also took the ferry between Kowloon (the peninsula) and Central (the island) and visited some of the parks.

The people of Hong Kong have some quirky things in their city, and I love them all.
The first was a foot massage path that had a bunch of little stones designed to poke into your feet as you walked over it. The path was excrutiatingly painful, which did make your feet feel much better afterwards (if only because they were numb from the assault).
The second was a pedestrian escalator. Yes, I am serious. The people of the city had to travel to work at the bottom of the mountain, and return home at the side of the mountain every day. So, to ease their labors, they built an escalator right up the side of the mountain. It is preposterous. Its actually a series of quite a few escalators and you can get off at every block, but I still rode it from start to finish just because it was there.

When my dad finally arrived, I took the subway and train over to the border and to his hotel in Shenzhen. From that point, we spent a few days visiting Shenzhen and then Guangzhou (Canton) and then made our way back to Hong Kong.

Shenzhen has this amazing little theme park called “Window of the World” which consists of every major landmark — miniturized. There were the pyramids, the Taj Mahal, The Statue of Liberty, the Hermatige, Mount Rushmore, and even Venezuelan mudslides. It was just so delightfully tacky that I had to go and take pictures. Most of the minitures were quite well done, and now I feel like I made it to all of those places that I never got a chance to travel to… albeit as a giant.

Also, since I had internet access in my dad’s hotels, I was able to put up my photos. I haven’t organized them other than putting them in categories as to where they were from, and I haven’t manipulated them other than making them small enough to upload. (They currently fill up several GB on my computer) But for all of you who have been complaining, they are there now.

As my brother tells me, I haven’t taken any pictures of myself or other people. This is true. You should remember that I am travelling alone, and can’t exactly take many pictures of myself standing next to things. Similarly, in many of the places I have been, if you hand someone your camera, they will either steal it or ask for money to take the picture. So, what you see is what I saw…

Here’s the link, and it will also be accessible in the links list to the right. It looks as if I will only be able to finish my travelogue and completely organize my photos after I finish the trip, but I will try to get as much stuff up for people to see.

http://www.elyoung.com/resources/images/trip/raw/

I left Russia on the 19th of April and traveled via Seoul, Korea (pronounced Sey-oul, not soul like I had thought) to Hong Kong.

Arriving in Korea was quite interesting because the people at the desk in Vladivostok couldn’t access my ticket for Cathay Pacific’s flight from Seoul to Hong Kong. So I was told to check in at a transfer desk in Korea. Well, Cathay pacific doesn’t have a transfer desk in Seoul, so when I arrived I was stuck in the airport in some sort of limbo.

While I waited for people to sort out my predicament in Korean, I read about the brand new airport I was in and how it had more than 12 seperate security zones and was designed to efficiently move people, baggage, and equipment in a beautiful and healthy building. I must add that my actual experience of moving throughout the airport was the best I’ve encountered so far, and the security checkpoints were very good because hey managed to keep me stuck for quite a while.

In Brussels, on my way to St. Petersburg, I had a similar problem. Although the people in England were able to validate my tickets all the way through, they couldn’t send my luggage. Therefore when I entered Brussels I needed to exit the airport with my luggage and reenter and recheck my luggage before going onto Russia. When the immigration official saw this, he said “You have entered and left Belgium in the same day,” and I answered, “It is a beautiful country.”

In Korea, however, that type of solution wouldn’t work. It seems that my luggage had been checked through to Hong Kong, and I had to accompany my luggage. I couldn’t (without paperwork) simply go through customs and immigration and then reenter the airport. Also, by this point, the security officials had sat me down to discuss the situation amongst themselves… no one wanted my suggestions.

In the end, they let me through to the gate and told me to wait for a Cathay Pacific representative. This I did, and when one arrived the first thing they said to me was, “You don’t have a boarding pass do you?” They printed one up for me and were extremely helpful, and the rest of the trip was quite enjoyable. I’d highly recommend Cathay Pacific as the best airline I’ve traveled so far, and the Seoul airport as the nicest airport structure I’ve been in. (They could use a few more airline transfer desks though.)

Arriving in Hong Kong was quite an amazing experience. My dad had mentioned at dinner that his son was travelling around the world and would be arriving in Hong Kong before he would get there. I would be arriving at night, and he was worried that I wouldn’t be able to get in and find a hostel. One of the other guests at dinner told him not to worry and that his company would take care of it (he wanted to meet this world traveller).

Well, my dad relayed on to me that someone might meet me at the airport and take me to a hotel. I was happy that I wouldn’t have to figure my way around the town late at night, but I wasn’t expecting what I received.

At the gate, just upon disembarking from the plane, there were two airport representatives holding a sign with my name on it. They picked me up and whisked me away through the airport in a beeping golf cart. As I passed all of the first class people from my flight staring at me, I wondered what exactly I was getting myself into.

beepbeepbeepbeepbeep went the cart as it swosshed me through vip lanes for health quarantine and arrived at immigration. I went through the lane and my two airport friends were waiting on the other side with my luggage in a cart. Then through customs I went and there they were on the other side as well. As we walked into the arrival hall, there was another person with my name on a card who I discovered was my driver. The airport escorts said their goodbyes and I was off in a Mercedes S500 with reclining back seats for the drive into Hong Kong.

Let me tell you, after 3 weeks in Russia on a train and with sagging cots and no hot water, this kind of treatment was just preposterous. I rode the entire way on that golf cart with a crazy smile and did crack up laughing twice while playing with the various controls in the back of the car. I’m not sure I’ll be able to readjust to the hostel lifestyle after this part of my trip is over.

Now that you are all laughing about my experience on the train, I figured I’d let you all know about Andy and my experiences in Vladivostok, and our final days in Russia.

I think its safe to say that both of us had had our fill of the Russian Experience. There are plenty of places and things we didn’t get to see, and plenty of experiences we never had (like the sauna before jumping into a frozen Lake Baikal) but I think 3 weeks of walking around with a tiny budget and no amenities and 9 days of train rides made us ready for a vacation.

The people of Russia should be commended and respected for the lives they lead. I can only imagine what hardships they must have gone through during Soviet times.

Vladivostok is a perfect example of what Russia must’ve been like during the formative years after the fall of the Soviet Union. The city was only opened to visitors relatively recently, and its lack of proximity to the other major cities of Russia left it to develop at a slower rate. Missing here are the abundance of French pastry cafes and Western food chains so prevalent in Moscow. Also missing are cheap hostels and hotels, and hot water.

In many cities of Russia, hot water is centrally supplied — like cold water. This usually means that hot water takes about 5-10 minutes to get hot unlike in other countries where it might take a minute or two to get from your basement water heater to your shower. The problem this causes in a city like Vladivostok is hot water shortages. Since vladivostok was designed as a military and naval port, there was never a need for vast quantities of hot water (or many of the other modern civic conveniences).

So the cheapest hotel we could find cost US$80 a day, had hot water only during certain periods, had cots which sagged like hammocks for beds, but did actually have electrical outlets (a step up from the hostels). We also could barely find any restaurants — much less economical ones. What we managed to eat was Italian food from a restaurant member of the “American Beef Club” with dishes that were terribly overpriced but gave us something in our bellies.

Other than those issues, Vladivostok was very much like the other Russian cities we visitied. There was clearly a more Japanese and Chinese influence on the town due to its proximity, as represented by the billboards in Chinese characters and the right-hand drive cars on the road. The city also had an interesting view of the ships in the harbor, and there were plenty of sailor-aged couples taking advantage of the romantic views during what we imagined was their shore leave.

Andy managed to get himself a flight out of Russia one day before his visa expired, and decided to take a fairly roundabout way involving ferries and trains to Tokyo but did manage to arrive on time. We both had no trouble leaving the country (unlike what many guidebooks had told us) and on our final day managed to make it to the airport (involving a train and a bus ride for about an hour) without much problem.

On my final day, I said goodbye to Russia. It was a bit sad to be leaving, but part of me felt like I needed to move on. There were no postcards in Vladivostok, so those of you waiting for postcards will have to wait till Hong Kong. Andy went to the post office and bought some holiday/birthday cards to send as postcards, but I felt that was just too bizarre, so I bought some stamps in case I found anything at the last moment. I didn’t, so I might just deliver the stamps seperately.

Hopefully, I can recap much of the Russian Experience in my Travelogue (including pictures eventually) so that you can all see more what travelling through Siberia and the individual cities was like. I am realizing now that writing in detail about each of my destinations takes alot longer than I had anticipated. It is very probable that it wont be completed in full till after I return. Hopefully I’ll get as much up as possible, and at least the text and pictures uneditied. Stay Tuned.

I promised I’d write about the fantastic adventures I had on the train, so here it goes. Sorry about how far behind I am with the log. I’ve had so much to write about and so little time to put it on the Internet.

We managed to buy our tickets and board the train to Vladivostok quite well. I think at this point we had become pros… just as long as we didn’t do anything complicated. We settled into our cabin, both of us on the top bunks, and met our cabinmates, parents with their baby boy sharing the bottom two bunks.

The baby was impressively well behaved, crying only a few times and then for only a sort while. What was more of a problem was that this was to be our longest train journey yet and we didn’t have any food. Since the train left at 7am and we had arrived in Irkutsk late at night, we never had a chance to visit a supermarket like we did in Yekaterinburg and Moscow. When we finally bought some food from the stalls on the station platform, we realized that we had lost our pack of spoons and had to eat everything with our hands… not an easy thing to do when what you bought was soup and meat in sauce.

For those of you wondering, I was finally able to weigh myself when I arrived in Hong Kong. I had lost about 12 pounds since the beginning of the trip and I have no doubt that most of those pounds were lost in Russia.

On our first of three nights on the train, we decided to eat in the restaurant car. Fortunately they had an English menu (unlike the other train where the waitress took out her 10 year old english phrasebook and tried to translate for us). Unfortunately, they only had a few of the items on the menu and the waitress couldn’t speak English enough to tell us what. So we ordered two completely different things and ended up with two of the exact same dish.

While we were waiting for the food, we met a group of Russians sitting at the next table. One of them could speak some broken English and proceeded to ask us all sorts of things about where we were from, etc. etc. The whole car got involved in he conversation, and along with the party came a good deal of Russian vodka.

Back in Moscow, I had told Andy that I couldn’t come to Russia without trying some caviar and vodka. Up till then, we had stayed away from both because Andy hates vodka, having had a bad experience with Smirnoff (I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to find anyone who has had a good experience with Smirnoff) and neither of us had an overwhelming desire for caviar.

Well, now we were getting our taste of Russian vodka — Flagman to be exact — and we were getting it in full. Andy still couldn’t get past the taste of it and went quickly back to the beer, but I persisted, not wanting to give Americans a bad name in front of the Russians. (I later learned that our English speaking friend Alex was himself a bit afraid of the vodka and was staying with beer.)

I must have given quite a good showing, because I don’t remember what happened next. At some point everyone in the traincar had an arm wrestling contest and I technically owe my watch to someone as a bet. Our food came and was satisfactory, but it didn’t matter because we couldn’t taste it anyway. A drunk Russian army officer harassed us for our passports which we had left in our cabin. I was carried down the hallway and thrown into bed amidst lots of screaming by some official looking people. And thats about all I can remember.

If only I could say that everything was fine and dandy and I woke up the next day a little hungover but all the better for the experience. Hah. When I woke up, Andy informed me that I owed everyone in the train from my car down to the restaurant car an apology, especially the poor family below me. I would have gladly done this, except I had no idea how to say “I’m sorry” — the only thing coming close being “excuse me”. This I proceeded to say to everyone I saw the next day. I remained fairly sequestered in my cabin for the rest of the trip… not a problem I might add, because I never fully felt well again until we got off the train and I got a real meal in my stomach.

Alex and friends were quite delighted in their new foreign friends and stopped by our cabin to get us for some more drinking and partying in thier carriage. I drank a bunch of coffee while the rest toasted and talked about their jobs. It was here that I found out that we were drinking with former police officers, army officers, and corporate bigwigs, and that these people had managed to get me out of trouble when the police wanted to kick Andy and I off of the train. It was here also that I found out exactly what a disaster I had been the night before, and the reason why all of the carriage attendants glared at me (with one in particular not letting me into her carriage).

Fortunatly for me, we made it all the way to the end of the line without any further trouble. We didn’t see Alex and friends much after that because the providnistas (carriage attendants) ganged up to keep them out of our carriage and us out of theirs. I think I might have learned a life lesson on that train… if you are going to get drunk in a foreign country, get drunk with important people.

Never before had I gotten so drunk, so quickly. For all of you wondering about Russian vodka, let me tell you that the entire “experience” goes far beyond the actual drinking of the liquid itself. It is indeed far better than anything we have in the states (and I might even go so far as to say Grey Goose if only for the quantity). A shot of vodka is more than twice the size of a shot here, and the process of drinking it involves a long series of toasts and small appetizers. There are no chaser drinks here… vodka is all you have. It is for this reason that before you even realise that you are slightly tipsy, you are passed out on the floor.

With all of that said, if you get the chance and are a vodka connisseur, buy some “Russian Standard” or some “Flagman” vodka. Neither of them are actually spelled that way, if your browser supports it, here are the cyrillic words:

Russian Standard – Русский Стандарт
Flagman – Φлагман