Vagabonding in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, without plan or destination.

Took a ferry to Manly, a suburb that is part of Sydney’s Northern Beaches. Corso, the main street, is short and connects the bay ferry terminal on one side of town with the ocean on the other side. They have a former army reserve with a quarantine station at the North Head, which is opposite…

Checked out The Rock. It used to be a dangerous part of town a hundred years ago but its old brick warehouses got remodeled into expensive restaurants, cafes, and galleries. Some of its alleys are more modern redevelopments that pay less attention to the old style, but it’s still a very nice neighborhood in a…

Yesterday was mountains, today is beaches. Sydney has countless beaches. Started at Bronte Beach, one of Sydney’s Eastern Beaches facing the ocean, and walked to Bondi Beach, Sydney’s most famous beach. There is path that connects them all, and in November there is an event called Sculpture By The Sea where perhaps a hundred sculptures…

Blue Mountain National Park begins 60km west of Sydney. It’s very accessible: a six-lane highway, double train tracks, and lots of buses connect Sydney to the park. It can get quite busy. All the viewpoints and trails in the park are tamed – perfect roads lead there, there is parking, fences, guardrails, and stone steps.…

Ok, promise, Sydney will be the last distraction in this blog before the action returns to Asia. I arrived in the early afternoon and had time for a walk around Sydney Harbor. Sydney Opera’s roof is every bit as extravagant as it looks on the postcards. It’s different from every angle. The waterfront between the…

Took a tour to Mt. Field because there is no other good way of getting there. The driver proudly pointed out attractions on the way there: a zinc smelter, a paper mill, and most importantly, a Cadbury chocolate factory. The first stop in the Mt. Field National Park was Russell Falls, a large waterfall at…

Did Hobart’s museum circuit during the short time window when things open here. The Maritime Museum has all sorts of models and items used during Australia’s colonization; the Penitentiary Chapel is a church on the upper floor and solitary confinement cells – some only a little larger than coffins – for British convicts, and the…

The plane from Melbourne to Hobart on the island of Tasmania takes a little over an hour. I am staying at Battery Point Manor in a huge room with a view of the ocean. It’s in a quiet neighborhood where people frame their driveways with flower beds, right above Salamanca Square at Princes Wharf, a…

After a final look at the Twelve Apostels in the morning, we went to Otway, Australia's westernmost rain forest. They have a nature trail through the forest, dense with underbrush, huge ferns, tall trees covered in moss, and fire hoses. It’s so dense that it would be impossible to move away from the path. Birds…

The Great Ocean Road is Victoria’s main attraction. The coastline is very rugged and consists of steep limestone cliffs, washed out by the ocean so that a number of tiny islands and pillars have remained standing out in the ocean. The deep blue ocean and sky, the yellow limestone cliffs, the white surf, and the…

The Grampian Mountains are west of Melbourne, just past the Pyrenees. Australia is almost completely flat so they have to economize – anything you can’t throw a tennis ball over is a mountain, and the Grampians peak at 1167 meters. The road there is green farmland, site of Australia’s Gold Rush in the 1850s. The…

Ventured beyond downtown: Brunswick St in Fitzroy has lots of little offbeat shops, restaurants, galleries, and bookstores, and is not at all glossy like the central business district. It’s fun to walk and browse here. If they could only lose a couple of lanes of the busy Brunswick St, and maybe add a few head…

At the travel agency they told me that the spire at the Fed Square looks just like the Eiffel Tower. Boys and girls, if you think that this thing looks anything like the Eiffel Tower, you need to get out more! Fed Square is a somewhat sterile cluster of museums, boring boxy buildings with funky…

Editorial intermission: If you want to be really pedantic about geography, you might wonder what Melbourne is doing in a blog about Asia. Melbourne is not, in fact, in Asia but on a former penal colony off the coast of Papua New Guinea. At least, when you look my way from Europe, you’ll have to…

Never had so much opportunity to chat with customs officials as today, arriving in Melbourne. They wanted to know what I do, what’s in my backpack, and how I can afford to visit so many places. They browsed through my pictures to verify my statements. Apparently Bali is a major source of illegal drugs. That,…

The Ulu Watu temple is at the southern end of Bali. It’s small but very scenically perched at the edge of a huge cliff that falls down vertically to a foaming ocean. Admission includes a rental sarong. As before, the temple can’t be visited but the real attraction are the views of the ocean anyway.…

Tanah Lot is a pair of Hindu temples built on large rocks in the sea. The larger one is reached by wading out through shallow water on the lee side of the rock, while the surf crashes on the rock at the other sides. They have a holy spring in a cave at the bottom,…

After hurrying about hectic Bali for a few days, I decided to conclude my visit to Indonesia on the quiet little Gili Air island just off the coast of Lombok, the next major island past Bali. Perama runs a boat there from Perambai in Bali. There are no piers in Perambai, Lombok, or any of…

Quiet day. I have spent so much time in buses, hurrying from one place to the next, that I thought a rest day was in order. I went to the beach, and walked for several hours through rice fields and little villages. They have lots of roadside shrines, mostly consisting of a little empty throne…

Ubud is a town north of Denpasar, close to the center of the island. It’s known as an artist’s village. I went there by shuttle, motorcycle, and finally a bemo (a minivan with benches in the back) all to myself. Ubud is a quiet village with none of the hustle of Kuta. It’s very green…

I have been warned about Kuta. It’s a tourist trap gone wild, with big ugly malls and resort hotels, souvenir shops, brand clothes stores, fast food, billboards, and taxi drivers yelling “transport”. It’s also quite modern and clean. But this is also Bali, and a smile and some friendly words quickly make easy friends. And…

It’s three km climbing a steep dirt path up the forested slopes from the minibus parking lot in Ijem to the top of the crater rim of the Ijen volcano. A stream of workers carrying a pole with a basket full of big sulphur bricks at each end over their shoulders. I talked to Suleiman,…

A jeep picked me up at 3:45 to take me to the top of Mt. Penanjakan. The view of the sunrise is fantastic there. Much of the large crater with the Bromo volcano in the middle and its white plume are spread out before us. The bottom of the crater is with a sea of…

I woke up in my bungalow the next morning with a view of the Gunung Bromo. This is a small volcano in the middle of a vast crater ten kilometers across, and my bungalow is just meters from the edge of the caldera. There is a road from the hotel to the bottom of the…

The bus from Solo to Gunung Bromo National Park takes ten hours, plus a change of buses in Probolinggo. It’s basically ten solid hours of risky passing maneuvers. The road is in excellent condition but has only two lanes, and there are many trucks that crawl along at 30 km/h. So long lines form, and…

Prambanan is a Hindu temple complex of enormous 7th-century stupas on a large terrace, dedicated to Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu. It’s a Unesco World Heritage site and under extensive restauration; one stupa is all scaffolded and sevaral are closed to visitors. The stonemasons are clinking away on the stupas and on the ground to prepare…

Went on the back of a motorcycle to Borobudur, a large Buddhist temple in a forest before a backdrop of green hills. It’s a square of 120 meters at the base, with four square terraces topped by three round ones. The four square ones are walkways with very intricately carved panels on both sides, topped…

Yogyakarta’s main street is Jalan Malioboro, a busy road with separate rickshaw lanes. It’s one long shopping mall with clothes stalls in narrow dark arcades. It ends at the sultan’s palace. The sultan lives there but a cluster of very large reception pavilions and smaller attached buildings that house exhibits can be visited. The central…

Spent 15 hours in buses. People here work with numbers loosely – eight hours become twelve, and 5,000 Rp is the same as 50,000 except when paying. And we spent over two hours just leaving Bandung’s downtown gridlock. And the bus from Bogor to Bandung decided to flit by Jakarta. Arrived in Yogyakarta – or…

Puncak pass is at 1450 meters, 25km east of Bogor. The scenery is beautiful – lots of very green hills with tea plantations to both sides of the winding road. Unfortunately much of the scenery in hidden behind something like the world’s biggest shantytown strip mall. Only the last few kilometers allow some views. The…