No Regrets!

Home. Got in yesterday afternoon at about 1pm. Took a marvelous shower, unpacked, and started doing laundry.

As far as the jet lag goes, I am completely wrecked. I was OK going out there, but now I feel horrible. Last night at 7pm, I had a burger and almost threw up, maybe because my body thought it was 7am and it can’t handle a Front Page burger for breakfast. And I am exhausted.

Do I have any regrets about the trip? Well, we were always on the move, and there were times when our stops felt a bit rushed. It would have been nice to have an additional one or two days at each stop to have some relaxation time. It would have been nice to see Vietnam. It would have been nice to spend more time on the beaches of Thailand, maybe going to Phuket. And it would have been nice if one of the legs of our journey were an overland route, just to mix it up a bit. But I keep coming back to the fact that we only had three weeks. You have to make trade-offs, and I think we did OK.

On one hand, I wonder if we should have relaxed a bit more and seen less, but on the other, I feel like we’ve only grazed the surface of Southeast Asia. Even though we’ve seen and done more than most backpackers we met, I feel like we just grazed the surface. There is so much to see and do in Southeast Asia that I wonder if a thorough tour is even doable in six months.

I wish there was away around the flight cancellation fees and the numerous trips to the airport we had to make to sort out our itinerary. It’s too bad Kayak and other international travel web sites doesn’t keep an accurate database of Asian airline flight schedules. It would have made all of my booking a lot easier and probably cheaper than going through travel agents. The only other thing we could have done is not book anything and wing the entire trip once we got out there, but I was scared about doing that around New Year’s, thinking some of the flights would book up quickly.

I guess the only thing I really regret is not having one of the magic mushroom shakes served on the beach during the New Year’s Party on Koh Phangan. I only heard about them the next day, so I can’t say it’s really a regret, but I think that would have pushed the already surreal experience off the charts.

Doug was a really great travel companion. Low-maintenance, flexible, and active, he was always very organized with paperwork and receipts, his clothes were always neatly rolled, and he could find anything in his bag in about three seconds. When first planning the trip, Doug was a bit hands off, but in the end, he came through by arranging our travel visas and took responsibility for navigating each city we visited.

Doug and I made things fun by playing little games along the way, like coming up with odds that the fat girl climbing up to the waterfall was American or that he would be served his noodles before I was served my rice or that my bag would come down the conveyor belt first. There were over/unders for people’s ages and for meal checks and for the cost for boom-boom in Cambodia (US$40).

In the next few days/weeks/months, I’ll be sorting through all of my photos. I’ll go back and add them to my old posts.

So weird to think that 24 hours ago, I was on the other side of the planet.

No Regrets!

I’ve been home from Southeast Asia four months now, and it seems like I never went. Seems like a dream. It’s weird how travel memories are like that. When you’re back home, sitting at the same desk, sitting in front of the same computer, it all just seems so intangible. You know you went because you have the stories and the pictures, but it’s just so hard to believe that you were really there.

I remember the moments when I was away, sitting on a plan or in a taxi or on a boat, looking off into the distance and wondering what it would be like to be back at home, sitting at my desk in front of my computer. And here I am. Such a strange feeling making a connection with yourself through time like that.

I’ve spent the last couple of months living my regular life and working on my photos from the trip, a daunting task considering I took about 8,000 of them. If you take out the time I spent sleeping or sitting on a plane, that’s an average of one photo every 2-3 minutes for three weeks. Granted, taking multiple exposures for HDR exaggerates things a little bit, but still…

I’ve been posting my photos to Flickr, and I’ve begun adding them to my blog posts from the trip. If you click back a bit, you can see them. The photos really make the posts come alive, I think. But it’s all very time-consuming, and it will take another few months to get through them all.

I have booked my next adventure, a trip to Ireland with Stefanie! A while back, she said she’d have some time off from work and that she wanted to go on a trip. I was up for it. It was just a matter of picking where we wanted to go.

Ireland’s a place she’s always wanted to go, and I’ve heard some pretty good things about it. And after finding that round-trip airfare to Ireland was ridiculously cheap ($400), we jumped on the tickets. Fittingly, we bought our tickets on St. Patrick’s Day.

We’ll be there only five days, but we think we can see a decent chunk of the country in that time. Once again, finding up-to-date and reliable information about transportation and other services overseas is proving difficult, but we have successfully planned out our first couple of days. We’ll start off in Dublin and, after a couple of days soaking in the city, we’ll make our way across the Irish countryside to catch our return flight home from Shannon.

I must take a moment to share my appreciation for the company I work for. Most people know how difficult it can be to get a decent chunk of vacation time working in the US, but my company has been very flexible, allowing me to take just about any trip I like provided I wrap up any loose ends and give them enough notice. So if anyone from work happens to be reading this, a big thanks!

We’ve put quite a bit of planning into this trip, coming up with the most detailed, structured itinerary I’ve ever made for a vacation, mostly because it’s one of the shortest. Weird how the less time you spend somewhere, the more carefully you need to plan it. With only five days in Ireland, we really want to be efficient. There is so much to see and do, and we want to make sure we hit all of the highlights.

Our provisional itinerary is as follows:

4/29: Dublin
4/30: County Wicklow, Glendalough, Kilkenny
5/1: Kilkenny, Rock of Cashel, Blarney Castle, Cork, Killarney
5/2: Killarney, Ring of Kerry, Doolin
5/3: Aran Islands, Cliffs of Moher, Galway
5/4: Galway
5/5: Shannon

Once again, trying to use international web sites to book accommodation and transport was extremely difficult. Many of the crappy sites feature drop-downs that only go up to 2007, forms that won’t submit, pages that don’t display in certain browsers, and web page font selections from 1996. I don’t think these businesses realize how much money they are missing out on by not having good web sites. They are certainly losing out on my business.

TripAdvisor’s objective traveler reviews and rankings might be the best resource for international accommodation, and we used it to find and book our first night’s accommodation in Dublin. We are still trying to make sense of all of the train timetables and bus routes around Ireland. In the end, might have to rent a car to give us the flexibility we need. The trains just don’t run the routes we need, and the buses don’t run as frequently or as late as we need. By all accounts, driving in Ireland is an adventure, so it should be an interesting few days.

The weather forecast for the next week looks cool and rainy, which I suppose is no surprise for Ireland.

So here I am, finally on my way to Ireland with Stef…

The taxi ride on the way to the airport was a bit of an adventure. Our driver enjoyed the brake pedal but did not enjoy main roads, using every conceivable back road to get us to the airport. And we were in a bit of a rush, since Continental Airlines had called us earlier to tell us that our flight was canceled and that we had been put on an earlier one. In the end, our new flight was delayed so that it was leaving at about the same time that our old flight was scheduled to leave, so it all worked out. We caught our connecting flight, and we are finally on our way, over the Atlantic at the moment and on our way to Dublin at this very moment.

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The fluffy, gray clouds began to disperse, revealing the rough, green coastline near Dublin. As the plane touched down, Stef vibrated with excitement. Nice to be here.

We made our way to get our bags and then to the main terminal to find our bus to our B&B. Dublin Airport’s a bit smaller than I expected, but it looks like they’re building a huge expansion on it.

Our double-decker bus, #41, took us right to our B&B on Upper Drumcondra Rd. in about 20 minutes. We were greeted at the door by Joseph, a guy with a think Romanian accent and the proprietor of the house. He sat us down in the living room, asked us about our plans in Dublin, brought us some tea, and did everything he could to make us feel at home.

It was chilly and drizzling outside, and we were pretty tired, but we knew that we had to make the most of our first day and see as much of Dublin as we could if we were to stick to our schedule. We reviewed our plan with Joseph, he recommended some buses to take, and we headed into the city center.

We could already tell that the Irish were friendly and outgoing, but in an uncommon display of Irish rudeness, the bus driver would routinely slam the door shut after an arbitrary number of people got on and then take off when people were about to step on. What’s with that?

We got off the bus at Trinity College, finding that it was a good spot to hit all of the things on our list.

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We woke up to a traditional Irish breakfast: a fried egg, two sausages, a runny pile of baked beans, and a thinly sliced, fried piece ham (the Irish version of bacon), served with orange juice from concentrate and your choice of tea or coffee. Fills you up nicely, but it’s a bit heavy. I found that Weetabix, which looks like it’s made of compressed bran flakes about the size and shape of a bar of soap, cuts through the grease nicely.

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Up early once again. We had a big day ahead of us, and we couldn’t let the pouring rain slow us down.

We started with an early morning drive around Kilkenny, stopping first at St. Canice’s Church, which wasn’t even open yet. I snapped a few photos outside of it before we went to Kilkenny Castle. Pretty cool from the outside but pretty bland on the inside. I almost didn’t mind that they didn’t allow photography in there.

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We woke up and met with Rose at breakfast, asking her to turn on the Internet for us like she had promised, but she went into this story about how her computer’s hard drive made some funny noises a few days ago and that she lost everything. Then she told us that she was instructed by her “computer guy” not to turn her computer on while they are cooking. Perhaps her computer sits on the stove? In any case, it was breakfast, and we couldn’t afford to wait. We headed into Killarney’s city center to find some more information about the rally on the Ring of Kerry and assess our options.

At a tourist information center, a helpful woman named Michelle told us that only a small section of road on the Ring was closed for the Rally of the Lakes and that we’d be just fine since we were getting a late start. The bonus was that all of the tour buses and most of the other tourists had left Killarney several hours before, meaning that there should be very little traffic on the Ring. We cursed Rose, got our morning scone, and hit the road.

Setting off to the Ring of Kerry, we knew that we were about to begin the more scenic part of our trip. Except for one wrong turn that took us the wrong way for a few miles, our GPS and maps met our navigation needs perfectly. That GPS has been a godsend.

Like County Wicklow, the scenery of the Ring of Kerry was varied and beautiful. One minute, you’re gazing at the openness of Dingle Bay, then you’re driving along the edge of a thickly gorsed cliff, then you’re passing through a town that smells like rusty bacon, and then you find yourself in the middle of a rocky, scrub-filled mountain range.

The roads themselves were like many of the roads we’ve been driving for a few days: narrow and bendy. Not a problem, though, since there were hardly any cars around. We don’t understand it. All the books we consulted say that traffic on the Ring is a bit of a pain, especially from the tour buses clogging the roads. But we had entire stretches of road to ourselves several times, and we saw only two tour buses the whole day.

But the posted speed limits on these roads were ridiculous. We’re supposed to drive 100 km/h around a turn along the edge of a cliff? With no guardrails? It was a challenge driving even half the speed limit in most places.

The drive took us through the small town of Cahersiveen. Having done some research on my last name, I know that “veen” is old Dutch for “bog,” and the town of Cahersiveen seems to be surrounded by bogs. I guessed that the town might have been originally settled and named by the Dutch. Turns out that “Cahersiveen” comes from the Irish “Cathair Saidhbhín,” meaning “town of Little Sadhbh.” Oh well.

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Pretty cruisy morning. Decided to be crazy and had scrambled eggs and smoked salmon instead of the traditional Irish fare for breakfast, then made our way down the road to the pier near Doolin. The air is crisp and fresh, but the smell of rusty bacon is replaced with salty spray and the smell of decomposing seaweed.

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