It was a fairly long travel day leaving Novi Sad. First, a mile and a half walk to the bus station followed by an hour or so bus ride back to Belgrade. Then a half mile walk to a bus stop where I rolled the dice and took a free ride across town (shhh!). And then I did something I always swore I wouldn’t do, I rented a car. Most of the places I want to go visit these next…
2020 pretty much sucked for everybody on Earth and my year certainly wasn’t without some hardship and heartbreak either. After spending the spring and early summer basically doing nothing due to being unable to find work anywhere, I finally got a gig in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. I was keen to start exploring again and having never been to that part of the country before, I was pretty happy about it. Wilkes-Barre is not a super exciting town, but turned out to…
Ok, so this post is way overdue, but here goes. My nomadic, traveling job recently took me to Santa Fe, New Mexico. For those who have never been, New Mexico is a very underrated state. While the neighbors, Colorado, Arizona, and Utah are getting all the attention, the so called “Land of Enchantment” remains relatively quiet and largely ignored. Much of my time there was spent avoiding the snow and winter temperatures, but I was able to spend the warmer…
Most places in Lebanon can be seen as easy day trips from Beirut, but not all. So I took a break from Beirut and headed up to the mountains to stunning Bcharre, a city on the edge of a cliff overlooking the very deep Qadisha Valley for a little hiking. It was quite refreshing being up here, cooler temps, quieter nights, and the smell of pine trees all around. The main reason for coming here though, was to see the…
Up with the sun, I left Wadi Musa in a car with a nice Czech couple to Wadi Rum about an hour and a half away. When people talk about the Arabian desert, this is usually the place they’re talking about. It’s arid, sandy, and hot, the Bedouin people have been living and thriving here for thousands of years, this was the home and stomping grounds of TE Lawrence of Arabia during the Arab revolts in the early 20th century,…
After an easy ride from Feynan, provided by my hotel, I landed in the town of Wadi Musa, a town that apparently was largely built up only due to it’s proximity to Petra. Lots of hotels, restaurants, souvenir shops, tour buses, selfie sticks, you get the idea. My head was still pounding from my hikes in Dana and Feynan so I pretty much went straight to bed and slept all day and through the night after taking some “Jordanian herbs”…
Getting out of Karak turned out to be a bit of an odyssey. Luckily it worked out, but it took most of the day, a lot longer than expected. I was supposed to take a bus from Karak to Tafilah and transfer to a bus to Dana. For some reason there were no buses to Tafilah from Karak that day, so instead, a couple of locals told me the best way to get there and the odyssey began. First a…
I left Jeonju on a morning train bound for the capitol city of Seoul, where I started this adventure several weeks ago. I really underestimated how much there was to see and do here so I decided to spend a few days seeing the things I’d missed the first time before heading home. Also, many of the places I visited this time were way out on the outskirts of the city which allowed for a much more relaxed pace. To…
My departure from Jeju Island is yet another example of the awesomeness that is Korean public transport. An early bus from Seogwipo to the airport in Jeju City, a plane from there to Gwangju, a taxi across town from the airport to the Gwangju bus station, then a bus to Gochang, then another bus to Seonunsan Provincial Park. Once again it sounds very confusing, but once again, it was super easy. Before I talk about Seonunsan, though, here’s a picture…
I woke up early, said goodbye to Mokpo, and boarded the 9:00am ferry for my four hour sail to a giant volcano. Awesome! 1.8 million years ago lava began spewing from under the East China Sea creating Mt Hallasan and it’s surrounding 368 oreum, or parallel volcanoes, known today as Jeju Island. It’s always been a part of Korea, but the culture here did develope a bit uniquely. Historically, everything from houses to graves to tools and statues of the…