*disclaimer – A couple of the photos in this post were shot by Pao, of Wetlense.com, who has an unfortunate habit of leaving my camera on all day and draining the battery. He also doesn’t know how to spell “Lens.” I’ve already had some words with him about it; he chooses to ignore my linguistic advice.

I’m not posting my Sulawesi photos in order, because I don’t feel like it… And by that, I mostly just mean I’m lazy and there’s a lot more of the Tana Toraja ones than there were of these from Bunaken. I figured that it would take me less time to finish this set than the other one, so I could feel like I’ve been productive sooner :)

Bunaken’s alright. Nothing special, but then again, my beach standards are too high for anyone’s good. The water’s clear, and I hear the diving’s great, but there’s SO much garbage in the water. Everywhere. I got painfully sunburnt on the first morning we were there, chasing a pod of pilot whales, so I basically sat around and relaxed at the homestay place we were in.

South Sulawasi post will be coming up soon!

My immune system is in a loosing battle to some nasty food poisoning that just doesn’t want to let up, so I’m in no mood to write, but on a completely unrelated note, I’m off to Sulawesi this weekend to look for something interesting to shoot…. and mud.

I’m still in second place by about 50 votes, so in order to bribe you take the 3 seconds it takes to go to this link scroll through the five finalist photos, select my name in the voting box on the bottom and press the big “Vote” button, I’ll randomly select two people who voted to win a 10×12 print of your choice. I recommend dead fish. Reposting the contest link and asking your friends to vote on your flickr/facebook/twitter/whatever social network you fancy, will get you three entries.

Once you vote make sure to let me know. Anyway of contacting me works just fine: email, commenting on this post, facebook, flickr so I can add your name to the list.

Voting ends 15 September, so I’ll announce the winners and whether I won the contest shortly after that.

I’ve always wanted to go to visit the Kokanee brewery, because I had been deceived by the commercials to believe it was up in the glaciers in the middle of sasquatch land. Like I said… I’d been deceived. Creston, BC is clearly not a glacier, it’s a valley with fields and farms and stuff.

On the bright side, when we happened to be in Creston for an afternoon, and stopped at the Columbia Brewery to check it out, it happened to be the first day they were open for “the season.” I’m not sure what season it was – apparently the beer tour season – but we didn’t ask too many questions and just signed up. It only cost $2 which goes to charity and we got free usage of some excellent Ranger glasses and all ended with some beer sampling and reminiscing through all the classic sasquatch commercials.

…wait…why doesn’t my spell check understand the word sasquatch?!

Normally I stay in pretty cheap places, and only partially because it extends the travel budget and is a one of the main reasons I can justify traveling as much as I do. The other reason is because when I hate the room I’m staying in it ensures I’ll actually get out of it the minute I wake up. This time I decided to splurge on a few nights in one of the lovely little boutique hotels in town. I got a great deal at the Ramayana Boutique Hotel & Spa on agoda.com before I left on the trip, and my “splurging” still only cost about $50/night. Of course it meant that I spent a lot more time in the super pretty room being lazy, but it rained a lot of the time and I was sort of sick while I was there, so between lazying around in the hotel and several Laos massages, it worked out to be a perfect relaxing end to the otherwise seriously dirty trip.

Each of these towns is completely different: Houay Xai is insanely overpriced, to take advantage of all the tourists just arriving in the country from Thailand. Muang Sing is a charming little town, but has a curious lack of transportation, unless you do the smart thing and rent a motorcycle in Luang Namtha and drive there yourself. Luang Namtha has about as much charm as a Chinese industrial town, although I had a lovely massage and herbal sauna in a bamboo hut in the middle of a freezing cold rain storm. …And Nong Khiew is a dream. Definitely what I had in mind when I decided to roam around northern Laos. Stunning little town on two banks of the slow-moving Nam Ou River, connected with a great big bridge, and surrounded by mountains and jungle. Most of the guest houses are huts overlooking the river with amazing views. Mine was sort of full of bugs, but smelled really good for some reason. Then I jumped in the river and got an ear infection and couldn’t take the boat ride to Luang Prabang because there wasn’t enough people for the boat so I got stuck on another bus. The End. Here’s the pictures.

We pretty much covered as much of peninsular Malaysia as was humanly possible in 3 days (we came home a day early to avoid the jams at the border). We did 1500km and hit 6 states. If we had 2 more days I’m pretty sure we could have made it to the rest of the states, including Sabah and Sarawak. We’re that awesome. I’d hate to think about how much tea I drank on this trip.

Anyways… the itinerary went something like this: Escaped Singapore about 1am on Thursday, stopped for coffee around 3am and decided where we should aim for. Decided to try Pulau Pangkor. Arrived at the jetty some time in the morning, realized it was insanely busy, so made a detour to the beach paradise of Teluk Batik, with an incredibly classy octopus taking over a building. cool. Decided to try Taman Negara, and easily found a place with rooms available there. Drove past Ipoh, through Cameron Highlands, ended up almost out of petrol somewhere in Kelantan, and realized there was no way we were going to make it to Taman Negara, so we settled for the raging metropolis of Kuala Lipis. (At least they had good food there, which can’t be said about Taman Negara). Next day we made it to Kuala Tahan (Taman Negara) and visited the Orang Asli the next morning. The way back we almost went through Kuantan, but got bored, so turned around and took a super extra long way through KL. Most of the photos are from the car…. for obvious reasons.

Kiamat Selalu Dekat.

So I think we’re officially foodies. We flew up to Penang for one night, just to eat our way through town. Of course none of the four of us (Jo, Alita, Ruby and myself) ever leave the house without cameras, so we did manage to snap a few photos along the food trail. I still can’t believe it took me 26 years of my life to make it up to Penang. Loved the town and could happily spend a whole lot more time wandering around all the old buildings, dreaming of buying a shop house and renovating it into a studio or lounge or my dream home or whatever….

Unfortunately I was struck down with a nasty flu the morning we arrived, and only made it out of the hotel a few times. Even though my sense of taste was pretty messed up because of the flu, Penang food is definitely everything it’s cracked up to be. YUMMMM! Unfortunately my fave café where I normally go for asam laksa just doesn’t cut it anymore.