Vietnam, 28 Jan 2007 --

 As of 3:30 am four days ago, I’m flying solo in Asia.  Cara took off for the airport, got most of her frequent flyer upgrades to business class, and is now back home in Milwaukee working on her graduate degree.  Traveling solo will definitely be a lot different, and I imagine without anyone to talk to out of sheer boredom/lonelyness I’ll be spending a lot more time photographing.

On the photography note, thanks to crazy cheap fares on Tiger Airways (apparently the 2006 Low Cost Airline of the Year, woohoo!) I’m able to swing through Singapore for a few days ‘on the way’ to China for only $65 US more than it would have cost me to get there via northern Vietnam.  The purpose of this brief visit is so I can attend a two day photojournalism workshop with the Objectifs Center for Photography that I found out about last time we passed through Singapore.  I’m hoping the workshop will give me some new ideas…I’ve been feeling a little stale lately.

I wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of having an extra 6 days to kill in Saigon before my flight left for Singapore, and my plan was originally to head for the Mekong Delta or Dalat soon as possible.  Then, I found out about a photography contest Perceptive Travel is hosting in connection with Lonely Planet’s new series of Citiescape Guides.  The 10 cities featured are Mumbai, Delhi, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon, Tokyo, Sydney, Kathmandu, Singapore, or Bejing. 

Seeing Saigon on that list with such impressive neighbors made me think I must be missing something here, so I decided to dig deeper.  I sat down with my map of greater Saigon, and circled a bunch of areas that looked interesting, obscure, or out of the way.  So far my targets have included:  little unlabled temple symbols, markets not mentioned in the travel guide, and streets that just don’t seem to line up with the rest.  Over the last few days, I’ve been making use of Saigon’s excellent bus network (man, these fancy green buses go everywhere!) to visit some of these spots with good results. 

Incidentally bus maps areavailable free at the Benh Tanh bus station, but it’s gotta be the best kept secret in town.  I’d been looking for one for a few days when I stopped to look at the map mounted under the glass on this guy’s desk at the bus station.  He wordlessly unlocked his desk drawer, pulled out a map, handed it to me, and went back to eating his lunch.

 So far on my bus-borne adventures, I’ve found some great back alley markets, a lake surrounded by tree-shaded coffee shops, and, as far as I could tell, a wedding theme park.  That last one was a big, nicely landscaped park area with several large buildings.  Each building was pre-decorated for a large wedding reception in a different color scheme complete with plastic flowers, centerpieces, and fancy chair covers.  I think they just leave the decorations up full time, and clean between weddings.  Strange.

I don’t have any of the photographs uploaded from my exploration of Saigon yet, but I do have almost a month’s worth of stuff from Lao and Northern Vietham:

Pictures from Vang Vieng, Luang Prabang, Ponsavanh, Sam Nuea, Vieng Xai…basically all of Lao that we saw that wasn’t Don Det.:

Hanoi, Vietnam:

Hue, Vietnam:

Mui Ne, Vietnam:

Saigon, Vietnam:

Malaysia, 1 Nov 2006 --

I usually try to make my writing concise, so when I look at the rambling of my previous post I cringe a bit.  It’s impossible to summarize all the great things we experienced on the week or so we spent in the Kelabit highlands of Borneo, so I’ll try a summary list of why the Kelabit Highlands are great:

• Transportation is exciting:  The one and only way into and out of Bario is by 6 seater twin otter aircraft.  It takes 3 weeks to walk to the closest major city.  The pilots keep the cockpit door open, and if they’re in a good mood and you ask nicely they’ll fly you by some of the local mountains on the way in.  I also enjoyed watching the pilot steer with one hand and gesture animatedly with the other while talking to the copilot.  Ba’Kellan is a bit more connected, and you can take a 5 hour rollercoaster 4×4 truck ride instead of the airplane to get in and out.  Oh, and I have some pictures of dogs sleeping on the runway in Ba’Kellan…which is great.
• The Food:  I haven’t eaten as well as I did in Bario and Ba’Kellan in a long time.  I think it’s a longstanding Kelabit tradition to stuff visitors as full as possible with fresh rice, jungle vegitables, fried chicken, and tasty tapioca cakes as possible.  Our guide, Walter, told us that when Kelabit people visisted relatives in another village it used to be the tradition that they would eat every meal with every relative.  Apparently you’d finish your first breakfast only to find your next relative waiting for you at the door to take you to his house.  In the jungle, our guide picked and cooked us a dinner of fresh jungle spinich and jungle fern with some rice from his hometown of Pa Lungan.  We were lucky enough to arrive in Ba’Kellan for a wedding (a British guy met a girl from Ba’Kellan while they were both doing missionary work in Kosovo…and the rest is history) and we were welcome at all the pre-wedding festivities.  They even slaughtered a pig.
• Walter, our guide:  This guy was awesome, he took us to his hometown of Pa Lungan, fed us, and had us stay with his brother.  He made a great jungle cook, and was always chopping down random jungle plants with his parang (machette) and showing us we could eat them.  Apparently, when he’s not guiding tourists he prefers to travel the jungle without a trail because it’s faster.  Also, he helped me find a left handed parang (they’re only sharpened on one side) of my own to buy.  He told me a used one would be the best bet, since I was looking for one I could use…not just one to look pretty on the wall.  Oh, and Walter can cut perfectly straight planks from jungle trees with a chainsaw…which I think is pretty amazing.  Walter’s had some bad luck lately, and he really liked my jungle shirt from REI, so I got online today and ordered one to be sent to him.  I hope REI can figure out how to ship something to Bario.
• Walter’s Brother, Mado: This guy was really smart.  We stayed overnight at his house and he told us stories about the WWII Japanese occupation of Malaysia and the 1965 ‘confrontation’ with Indonesia over the border.  On both occasions the Brits and the Aussies parachuted soliders in to Borneo to help prevent the invaders from attacking the Kelabit, and for that reason the white man is held in high regard with the Kelabit.  Nice to see westerners doing something right for a change.  Also, Mado filters his own water and uses solar panels he installed himself instead of the standard generator.  I think he has the smallest eco-footprint of anyone I know.
• The Kelabit People:  The traditional greeting for travelers passing through a town translates something like “Hello, where have you come from, where are you going,” and everywhere I went I heard people greeting me.  We passed briefly into Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) on the trek to Bario, and we came to a village where they were building a new church.  A string of something like 40 men walked past us on the trail, each carrying a giant fresh cut plank from the jungle on his back…amazingly each man paused to shake Walter’s hand, my hand, and Cara’s hand before continuing on to the church site.

So, I’m sure this doesn’t do it justice….but I’ve been at this webcafe for far too long now, so that will have to do.  I posted many more pictures today, as well including…

A few last pictures from Singapore:

Pictures from Kuching and Mukah in Malaysian Borneo:

Some from Bario, Ba’Kellan and the Jungle in between:

And finally, we also have a point and shoot camera with us that can go some places my D70 can’t.  Though they’re a little out of sync with the rest of the pictures, here are a few from the b-reel:

Malaysia, 9 Oct 2006 --

We spent the last 4 days or so exploring Singapore, and we have come to the conclusion that Singapore is, in fact, the city of the future.  The city is ultra-modern, multi-cultural, multi-theological, Disney-land spotless, and packed to the gills with artsy events. 

During our visit, we were fortunate that the Singapore Biennale 2006 was taking place.  For those of us who were unaware, a biennale is a bi-annual contemporary art exhibition hosted by a city.  Singapore’s government has obviously thrown a great deal of money and support behind the event, and cultural, governmental, and commercial venues throughout the city were transformed into exhibit spaces for modern art installations.  The main venue (containing 200+ works) was a former military camp (others included mosques, temples, and the court chambers at city hall).  It turned out to be something like an art scavenger hunt, and was a fantastic way to discover parts of the city we might not otherwise have seen. 

While in Singapore, we were also fortunate enough to stumble across the ‘Mr. International, 2006′ contest, sponsored by urban male.  The pictures (mostly from the ‘cultural costume’ portion of the evening) have to be seen to be believed.  We sat in the back row, (mostly) successfully stifling giggles as these guys came out in one ridiculous costume after another.  Would you believe they had a Mr. Latvia?! 

Singapore pictures are here:

 I also posted a few more pictures from Kuala Lumpur (check out the very unhappy monkey):

…and some pictures from our jungle trip to Taman Negara:

Sorry this isn’t the most descriptive post ever….I’ve gotten this picture processing and uploading down to less than 2 hours, but by the time I’m done with that I don’t have time for anything else!

We’re in Kuching on Malaysian Borneo at the moment…off in search of proboscus monkeys in the jungle tomorrow.

Malaysia, 28 Sep 2006 --

Just because internet is cheap here…here are some pics from Kuala Lumpur (KL to the locals) before we head inland to the jungles of Tamara Negara.

Malaysia, 27 Sep 2006 --

I’m working out some of the hard parts of editing and uploading pictures without a computer (portable software like Portable Firefox, FastStone Image Viewer, and Filezilla are godsends).  So here at last are two more Galleries:

 Pictures from Penang Island, Georgetown

Pictures from the Cameron Highlands, Malaysia:

usa, 13 Aug 2006 --

In preparation for The Big Trip, I’ve put a lot of thought into how I’m going to make shooting with a bulky DSLR camera work for me on this hostel-to-hostel, minimum budget trip work for me.  From what I understand, one of the main purposes of this “Internet” everyone is talking about is to share information with the general public (that and looking at porn, I guess), so I thought I’d give a little back and post my list of photography gear, and my logic for what I’m taking.  Worthy of note: this is only the second bit of useful information I’ve contributed to the internet, with the first being my kunaffe recipe that exactly one complete stranger was able to find thanks to google.

My camera is the Nikon D70s.  It’s the camera I’ve been shooting with for a little over a year and a half now, and I love it.  The only other camera I considered was the D200, but that was impossible to find when I ordered my D70 a few months ago, and was probably more than I wanted to spend anyway.  The only feature that stands out as something I may miss is that I hear the construction is more rugged.

My only lens is the Nikon 17-55mm f/2.8 AF-S.  This set me back quite a bit of cash (if you want to know exactly how much, you can look it up on Amazon and send me an email telling me just how crazy you think I am for dropping that on a lens).  At least Nikon was nice enough to give me a $100 rebate on it.  I love to shoot low light situations with available light, and I’ve found that all my favorite pictures from recent trips have been from fairly close in, so hopefully this will prove to be the ideal lens for me.  It does seem a little heavy, but it’s supposed to be very rugged…which is good.

In the past, I’ve felt trapped inside mosques, temples and such by lenses that didn’t go wide enough like the Nikon 24-120mm VR.  Also, since I want to get better at “breaking the wall” and talking to people when shooting candids I figure the shorter 55mm will keep me from chickening out and shooting from a distance.  I was going to take a Nikon 50mm f/1.8 prime, but that got the axe in the interest of lightweight packing.  I had placed an order in April for the Nikon 18-200mm VR that everyone is talking about, but Amazon twice pushed the delivery date back and eventually said they wouldn’t arrive until September…so yeah, not so much an option.

As far as storage goes, I’m not taking a laptop so this took some thought.  I’m only carrying four 1GB Lexar Professional 80x CF cards.  I’ve had enough strange problems with larger sizes in the past to be skeptical, and I don’t want to be stuck waiting for a giant card to fill up so I can back up the images and send them home.

For long term storage, I eventually settled on the Apacer Disk Steno CP-300.  This is a device that burns straight from CF cards to DVDs.  A lot of people seem to be using hard drive solutions lately, and in particular many people recommend using an iPod.  I just don’t trust hard drive devices to hold up to the way I’ll probably end up abusing my gear on this trip, and my iPod craps out frequently.

In playing with the CP-300 so far, I’m pretty happy with everything but the fact that it seems to be a little picky about the DVD media you use.  I’ve had the best luck with DVD-Rs, and the general opinion seems to be that -Rs are better than +Rs for archiving anyway.  The funny thing is that not all -Rs seem to work.  My current brand of choice is Sony, which is good because I’d think they’d be fairly easy to find in Asia.

So with all those pieces, the workflow will go something like this:  I have the camera set to shoot RAW+JPEG Basic.  I want to have the flexibility of coming back with RAW adjustments later, but I need the ability to upload JPEGs from web cafes while we’re on the trip.  After I fill a card, I’ll burn it to two DVDs, verify the images and wipe the card.  Once I’ve burned four CF cards to a DVD (totalling 4 GB), I’ll mail one copy of the DVD home and keep the other.  Once my mom (who was kind enough to offer to help me out) confirms that she’s received a given DVD, I’ll be able to throw away the backup copy that I have with me so I’m not stuck dragging around too many.

Sounds simple enough, right?  Guess we’ll see starting in a few days….if you don’t see pictures starting to show up in the gallery I guess that means I forgot something obvious.