Travels

Ah, September 11th. a day to remember, its hard to imagine. its been eight years since that day in NYC and we are STILL having a war over it. WWII didn't even last that long. Non the less i am not in the US and i dont have to think about it.

i arrived in hong kong from hainan via china airways. and China is a lot more modernized than i previously thought. Probably because of the 10 trillion dollars we owe them. The US is in so much debt that we may never recover.

After i got off the plane i immediately wanted to go site seeing. just to see another culture, at least its big cities. This is probably the biggest city i have visited thus far. And i have one thing to say. There are a lot of people here, in some of the more populated cities i felt suffocated to how many people there are.

I didnt feel like doing anything too active this weekend, just un wind for a while. so i went shopping for random souvenirs for the family. i found a lot of interesting things here. One of them was British cigarettes that aren't available in the US that i found in china. and they were 22$ a carton, thats like 2.20 a pack. in the US they are going for about 50$ a carton. so i bought me a few cartons for the road.

Hainan is the smallest province of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Although the province comprises some two hundred islands scattered among three archipelagos off the southern coast, all but three percent of its land mass is on Hainan Island (Hainan Dao), from which the province takes its name. To say "Hainan" in China usually refers to Hainan Island itself. It has a population density of about 8,000,000 people.

While in Hainan i spent all of my time in Sanya at the southern end of the island. i came here to see the ends of the earth. a rocky area at the southernmost part of the island. It was here that the Chinese used to believe was the literally the ends of the earth the sky and the heavens. The local Chinese call it Tianya Haijiao, literally meaning Edges of the heaven, corners of the sea. This is a popular resort for newly weds because of a famous poem carved into one of the rocks "I will follow you to Tian-Ya-Hai-Jiao" which means they will follow each other to the ends of the earth and never be separated.

There were a lot of american tourists, probably for the same reasons i am here.

The Kingdom of Cambodia is a country in South East Asia with a population of over 14 million people.[4] The kingdom's capital and largest city is Phnom Penh. Cambodia is the successor state of the once powerful Hindu and Buddhist Khmer Empire, which ruled most of the Indochinese Peninsula between the 11th and 14th centuries.

I have lost track of all the places i have visited so far. i am beginning to grow tired of this trip and am questioning whether or not this trip was worth the money. though i have invested the money to this trip ahead of time so the money is spent and there is nothing i can do about it now. Though i do look forward to get back to the states, back with my friends and family.

I got the idea to go to cambodia from the men in black movie, stating that "you can get a lobster dinner there for like.. a dollar" and i thought screw red lobster lets go to cambodia. I didn't find much lobster there that was worth buying but i did find plenty of snake rolls and fried scorpion. Didn't try any of it, it didnt seem to appetizing to me at all. the language barrier here was ridiculous. almost next to no one spoke a word of english here. i had to pay a translator to come with me for three days during my travels. i probably wouldn't have been able to board my plane without this guy.

though overall my trip was enjoyable. i tasted SOME of the local cuisine and i saw some of the ancient shrines that have been there for hundreds of years. Aside from the language barrier the people were nice from what i could tell. i saw some of the beaches and they were absolutely amazing.

Ah, the great Kingdom of Thailand in the heart of southeast Asia. The local weather is very sunny and hot with little cloud cover to cope with that. non the less it is great weather for going to the beaches.

when i was in Borneo i heard from a family member that an old college friend of mine is living in Bangkok. We used to be best friends but he left the country to get out of a bad divorce (i mean really bad, she took everything) i was able to get a hold of him using a local phone book at the airport and we met up in the heart of Bangkok and got dinner at one of his favorite restaurants. It was a place Ive been to before (strange right) no it was no McDonalds. it was a hard rock cafe. i picked myself up a shirt as a souvenir. it was nice to have a nice bacon cheeseburger for once considering the places i have been have very little (if any at all) American food restaurants.

I also visited the beaches of Phuket and Koh Samui. i couldn't believe how beautiful these places were. when i get married this is where i want to go on my honeymoon. In Samui the beaches were just amazing. i went on a scuba diving tour and saw a live shark. it wasn't a very big one but a shark non the less. they seemed to be used to human activity here and showed no aggression towards any of us tourists.

When i arrived at Phuket i went to the address of the hotel where my friend told me to go. It was Bangtao resort. this was the nicest place i had ever stayed and would rate it as a five star in everything. the service was great and the food was amazing. though it wasn't my typical choice in cuisine but still delicious. My room was right next to the beach and i had a perfect view of the sunset.

Things to do here do NOT run thin at all. as stop number five on my trip i would have to put this at the top. Each place i visit seems to get better and more enjoyable as i go along.

Borneo is the third largest island in the world and is located at the center of Maritime Southeast Asia. Administratively, this island is divided among Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei. And has a population of 18,000,000. this was stop number four on my trip, and so far the most enjoyable. i absolutely enjoyed my entire time here. When i arrived at the hotel my guide was telling me that i had an hour to get ready, i asked for what. He said to wait and see. and i am very glad that i did he took me on a tour to go see the bat exodus. it was one of the most amazing things i had ever seen, words can't even describe, it will be something you will have to see for yourself.

The next day i went on a tour through the Deer Cave system. and it was equally spectacular to the preceding bat exodus. the cave entrance was so huge and Boeing 747 could fly through it. i was just amazed at some of the cave formations i saw inside. though because of my camera having lack of a flash i wasn't able to take pictures. but i feel this experience will be in my memories forever. I will definitely be coming back to borneo and would highly recommend it for anyone traveling through Malaysia.