Voyage Of The Odd Essay

I’m on the second leg of my Sweden trip now, arriving in Stockholm by train from Gothenburg yesterday following spending time there exploring the city and the Way Out West music festival.

As things stand currently, I have a bit of a back log in entries I may or may not post in the end, and will leave photos until I get home because the little EeePC is really struggling with the size of them. (I’m only using the very smallest, first gen 700 series)

Gothenburg was an awesome city and I really got the hang of the trams as a means to getting between locations in the center, the hostel and the festival main stages which allowed me to see an act, and get back in town for a museum visit or some such.
The hostel I stayed in - Interpoint YMCA - wasn’t that great though, it did the job but the atmosphere was a little strange, though I can’t put my finger on why, initially I thought it was me, but having settled in to the Hostel here in Stockholm everything is much more how I had hoped, and last night after starting early evening watching the Olympics with some other travellers, we ended up making a swift visit to the supermarket for some beers and progressed to playing cards, flip cup and then trying to head out into a club in town, which turned out to be a bit of a let down as the clubs close early on a Sunday here. Still, we hooked up with a couple of locals who took us to a pub that was open, and after a round of drinks we all headed home via mcdonalds, as again the plan of going to a kebab shop failed when everywhere we looked for them was closed.

More updates will follow as I get into a pattern a bit better, my paper based journal is almost upto date now, finally, so I should get my focus onto my online output soon. Or I’ll end up drinking with who ever arrives in the hostel today could go either way.

Wired News is carrying an interesting article about Tracking Air Fares and systems to predict ticket prices. It’s a fairly interesting read and highlights the key things to do in order to get cheap flights, but it doesn’t offer much more then the common knowledge that is already circulated around many travel resources and blogs.

Personally, I’ve been using Kayak to search for tickets as they have some very handy features that make repeated searching easy, and in the search results offer a chart of pricing history which you can use to help pin point when the cheapest times to travel are.

The two most important things to keep in mind when looking for cheap flights are simply be flexible about when you travel, and when you see a cheap flight, book it right away as it won’t stick around for long.

Even using Kayak’s email alert system to get emails about cheap flights I find a lot of the tickets I get told about have raised to a higher price by the time I get to them, so if you are planning on traveling, just looking for tickets isn’t enough, you need to be ready to grab the bargain when you find it.

Brave New Traveler

I can’t recommend reading Brave New Traveler enough, while many of the blogs I have in my reader I just read the articles as they come, I will specifically look for new items from here daily.

Sample Article: Travel Is About Who You Meet, Not Where You Go

BackPackers.com

I haven’t been reading BackPackers.com for that long but came across it following a recommendation on Ask Meta Filter, there are some interesting articles from time to time, and if you’re interested in festivals around the globe they do mention a healthy number of them.

Sample Article: Doer, Watcher, or Wanderer: What’s You Backpacking Style

Vagabondish

One of the first travel blogs I started to read at the same time as Brave New Traveler, regular postings and some really good information keep me coming back time and again to read the articles in this blog.

Sample Article: A Practical Guide to Vagabonding and Long Term Travel (Part 1)

The Travelers Notebook

There is more of a commercial slant to some of this blogs posts, dealing with aspects of photography, bloging, podcasting and such, but that doesn’t mean it’s not got some interesting and useful entries for anyone interested in travelling.

Sample Article: Five Rules for Recognizing and Avoiding Travel Scams

Other Blogs

Gridskipper: The Worldwide Travel Blog

I actually came across this one while sorting out the links for this post, but it looks interesting so I’ll be following it from now on.

The Life Less Traveled

While not just travel related, this new blog focuses on people doing extraordinary things, and shows a lot of promise which I am following with interest.

Our last few days on Koh Chang were in many ways the most interesting and struck a nice balance of getting out and experiencing new things, hanging out with friends old and new, and going out partying in epic style.

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Looking ahead to the rest of the year (I’ll finish my Thailand updates later in the week) I have a pretty healthy set of destinations in the line up for the rest of 2008 and beyond:

July: Suffolk, England - For Latitude Festival
August: Amsterdam, Holland - For A Friend’s Stag Do
October/November: Helsinki, Finland - To Visit My Sister While She’s Studying There
December onwards: Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam etc. - Traveling South East Asia for Six Months

I’d really like to go to a music festival in Europe too, so there are too options on the cards currently:

July: Open’er Festial in Poland. (Friends are going)
August: Way Out West Festival in Gothenburg, Sweden. (Sigur Rós are playing)

Given that Sigur Rós are my all time favorite group it’s likely to come out on top, they are playing at Latitude as well, but I’d leap at the chance to see them twice.

For the last couple of weeks I’ve ventured out of the UK for the first time, with my first passport obtained just a week or so before departing on the 12th and headed off to the Far East to join a group of friends who were traveling in and around Thailand.

I can’t really it call it traveling or backpacking as we only ended up going two places: Bangkok, and Ko Chang (Koh Chang) we did originally have plans to head further north into Kanchanaburi for the second week of our stay but by that time we had met so many people we were getting along with and a few different trips and parties were coming up that it made sense just to stick to where we were comfortable, particularly since everyone of my group had decided we were going to come back for several months at the end of the year and travel seriously, so there wasn’t any feeling of missing out on anything.

12th March - Manchester To Doha To Bangkok
We flew out with Qatar airways from Manchester which at the time was hit by sever gale force storms, so there was a question as to weather the flight might be delayed, or if we would even make it to the airport as they were closing motorways all over the place as high sided vehicles were blown over in a number of locations. Then with a quick change over in Doha we flew into Bangkok we arrived about 7am on the 13th (local time)

13th March - Khaosan Road, Bangkok
Thankfully it was fairly overcast and smoggy when we arrived so the heat wasn’t too intense, but all the same we were thankful to get onto the air conditioned bus that took us to Khaosan Road where after a bit of milling around we met up with our friend Kate who got us sorted out with rooms for the night at My House (On Soi Camasongkrum) so after settling in, having my first encounter with cold showers and a bit of a nap we set out into the day, had some food, mooched about and did a bit of shopping for the day before finally calling it a night late on ready to catch the early morning VIP bus to Ko Chang.

14th March - Khaosan Road, Bangkok to Lonely Beach, Ko Chang
This was our first real taste of travel in Thailand, which consists of starting at one location with a slip of paper of some sort, which as you go from vehicle to vehicle gets changed for other slips of paper as you travel along. The bus journey took perhaps six hours to get down to the pier near Trat, and then with a short wait we were transfered to the ferry, and then hopped onto a Taxi on Ko Chang which took us along to Lonely Beach, where a short (But hard) climb up the hill got us to the Oasis resort, one of the highest sets of guest huts in the area lead us to meet up with the rest of our friends, and the group of travelers they had hooked up with. After catching up and sorting out rooms and what was to become the usual pattern of lingering getting ready, eating, and then out to party we hit our first taste of the islands full flavor when we went to the Half Moon party at Siam Huts on Lonely Beach. Which was amazing night and really set the pace for our two weeks on the island.

I haven’t really had much new to write on this recently, while travel has never been far from my thoughts in some ways, I’ve also been trying not to think to much about it while I was trying (With difficulty) to get my passport application sorted out. However, yesterday when I got home it was finally sitting on the floor waiting for me when I stepped in the door.

So now I’m looking forward to my first ever step out of Great Britain, all the way around the world to Thailand in just 12 days time. I can not describe how stressful the days until my passport actually arrived were.  - Yes, I know booking flights to Thailand without a passport is not even remotely sensible, but it’s all resolved now and I don’t need to repeat such stupid paths.

It’s all a bit unreal at the moment, there is a group of us flying out to Thailand (Via Doha in Qatar), to meet a trio of friends who have been there for over two months, so we have very little in the way of planning, other then to meet up with them and follow their lead. All the while constantly hearing from them how amazing it is out there.

Given I normally plan everything with exacting detail, this is a very new way of traveling for me regardless of the additional distances, so I’m very much pushing my comfort zone.

With having friends out there already packing isn’t really a concern though, we have been given a whole lot of advice on what to bring, and what to leave behind, this weekend’s big job is to do a bit of shopping for essentials.

I have been pondering clothing, but I think I’ve settled mostly on the idea of buying stuff when I’m out there so I have some interesting things to wear when back home during the summer.

Lots of people make comments along the lines of “I’ll come with you!” when you talk about world trips, with varying degrees of sincerity of course, but either way there isn’t anything stopping people hooking up with me for parts of the journey. I’m not planning on having a full time travel partner since I want to be free to randomly go where ever I want without compromising.

On the other hand, the more people come out to join me for shorter periods of time - say a couple of weeks to a month - the better. It’s easy enough to plan to be at a particular airport to pick them up, and drop them back either there, or another location down the road.
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When anyone dreams of traveling by road I’m certain the only thing people think  driving is a VW Camper Van, they are after all iconic and capture that carefree spirit you tend to want from your dreams.

However, when it comes to seriously planning a round the world trip and making it a reality, a Volkswagen from the 70’s isn’t quiet as attractive when you actually have to deal with unmaintained roads, mountain passes and extreme weather conditions.
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Yesterday, I might have made light of the fact half of the Middle East and Africa is torn up by war, and when you’re just looking at a map and crossing of places you can’t travel it’s quiet easy to gloss over that fact, but actually it’s pretty depressing in a way and the countries that are off limits have some amazing sights that would be amazing to see.

Still, I can’t do anything about war zones, but the other problem - not been able to drive though Russia at more then 43 miles per hour, I have a solution for.
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