Just up the road from paradise

Apologies for leaving everyone hanging for over 2 years! It would be nice to think I've been marooned in paradise all this time, but that's not quite the case. However, I'm now picking up more or less where I left off (one step back in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia), having just checked into a slightly more reputable hostel than last time.

Cliff's Notes version of past 2 years:

The last few days of my trip in late 2005 were kinda crazy, but it was hard to get motivated to post about it after I got home, especially after jumping right into a new job.

Thailand:

The stormy conditions lasted a few more days on the island, with no ferries running (one had capsized elsewhere in Thailand, so everything was on hold). After taking a little boat out to the ferry, then waiting an hour or so while they forced off enough people to safely set sail, I made it back to the mainland.

Unfortunately, the storm had put southern Thailand was under ~2m of water, including the main city all the buses and trains went through. A couple Germans and I managed to catch a ride in the back of a pickup, with a driver who thought he could safely make it around the city to the airport on the far side. I made it in time to catch an earlier Air Asia flight, and even have a DQ Blizzard.

Bangkok was my last stop, where I had a couple days to relax before heading home. I didn't manage to get into too much trouble and caught some of the more tasteful tourist sights. I even ran into the same group of French folks (and one American) from Nice that I'd hung out with a bit in Manali, India. Small world.

Back home, I start work at a small reseller/consulting company called BlueChipTek. Time passes really, really fast.

Peru/Bolivia - as part of a Christmas present for my dad (and at my mom's suggestion), the two of us go to South America for a couple weeks in 2007. I'll hopefully write more about that someday. We had a good time, though the altitude in Bolivia really wiped us out, and 2 weeks wasn't quite enough time to fully acclimatize.

February, 2008 - after much badgering from several friends and former coworkers, I agreed to accept a job at a startup currently known as Rearden Labs. My original plan had been to take off for 6 months or so before starting another job, but of course they wanted me to start immediately. 2 months seemed like a reasonable compromise.

So after putting a lot of thought in where I'd want to go, I settled on picking up where I left off on the last big trip. Heading down through Malaysia to Indonesia sounded slightly more interesting than seeing the rest of mainland SE Asia (Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, etc.).

After reading about island after island with "the best diving in the world", I decided this time I wanted to see a little more than I can snorkeling. I just barely managed to squeeze in a full 3-week SCUBA course (at Wallins Dive Center in San Carlos - highly recommended) before leaving California, doing my final 5 dives to the bottom of Monterey Bay last weekend in the midst of a storm. But I made it (barely!) and I'm now Open Water certified. I'm not sure how much diving I'll do here (it's not my main reason for coming here), but I hope to get several chances as I go. I'm still clearly a beginner at this, so I'll try to find a couple of easy spots to dive to start with. But I'll definitely dive, since 2/3 of the crap I'm hauling along is diving related. So much for underwear.

That brings me up to the present. So where to next? So far, the only thing that's fairly certain is my return date (April 25th), though even that's subject to change. From experience, I know I need a couple days just to adjust to the climate (upper 90s year round, in both temp and humidity), let alone the jet lag. Once my body quits fighting it, I'll probably catch another Air Asia flight, this time to Kuching, Malaysia. It's on the island of Borneo, which it shares with Brunei and Indonesia.

I have a general idea of what comes after that, but I'll save it for another post, hopefully with a map so you have some idea where I'm talking about.