Back in NYC

We are back at our hostel in NYC awaiting the arrival of ranjenes
sister who is joining us for the weekend.
I've just updated our position in the map and will try to post some
pictures soon

Atlantic City and Philadelphia

Yesterday we got up and headed for Philadelphia and checked out some of the cities historial buildings (see flickr pics here) and saw where the rocky run took place.
After Philadelphia we headed to Atlantic city to check out the casinos and beach. I haven't seen Vagas but I imagine Atlantic city to be a bit like an east coast version of vegas. All kinds of crazy bling. We spent some time lounging around on the beach which was nice and somewhat unexpected on this trip.

Video of Water display in Atlantic City

Heres a short video I took of the fountains going as they do on the hour in Caesar's casino in Atlantic city.

Heellooo Neeeww Yoorrkk

Well, Ranjene and I flew into Newark Airport yesterday at around 4pm after which began our adventure into Manhatten Island. We caught a bus into times square, jumped on the subway and took the red line up to Harlem where our Hostel is. It took us a while to figure out which train to take and which direction. Once we had that sorted the stuffy subway was no problem.

All we had the energy to do yesterday after arriving at our hostel was to check into our room and find somewhere to eat in Harlem. After that we crashed and got up nice and early.

After breakfast today we took the train down to Penn station, wandered around, checked out Madison Square Garden, the empire state building, the New York Apple store and walked along the edge of central park. I had a debacle buying a replacement cell phone charger which is now all dealt with.

We met Audhild and Hilde (family friends from way back) for lunch in a small cafe near Madison Ave and 60th st. We then picked up our stuff from the Hostel and came with Audhild to her house near Philadelphia which is were we are now and for the next day or two. (Had a lobster dinner mm hmmm)

Videos From the Trip

Heres a couple videos from the trip. All 450 images from the trip are now uploaded. See them at flickr or just watch the slideshow on the right hand side of this page.

1. We Discover Wood Bison On the side of the road.. A whole herd!


2.We visited West Edmonton Mall. Second largest mall in North America with themeparks, a hockey rink and a hotel in it.


3. We arrived home in Calgary and were a little tired.

Back In Calgary

Ok so I'm a little tired but I'm back in Calgary. Staying with Bryson tonight. Had a couple meetings at NUTV this evening about new web initiatives for NUTV and also regarding live broadcasting. I'll try and get a few photos from the Alaska trip posted before bed and get all up to date with the blog.

Trip Coming to a Close

Well we survived our last night of camping in a provincial park about
1.5 hours north of edmonton. We had a sweet spot on top of a hill with
a fire on which we toasted marshmallows.

We are now on our way to edmonton after getting a bite to eat in
whitespot. Might check out west edmonton mall which is so big as to
have a hotel and water park in it.

Our last leg of the journey will be 3 hours from edmonton to calgary.
I have a couple meetings tonight so need to be back in calgary by
around 5.

Nearly back in calgary

Well we survived our last night of camping in a provincial park about
1.5 hours north of edmonton. We had a sweet spot on top of a hill with
a fire on which we toasted marshmallows.

We are now on our way to edmonton after getting a bite to eat in
whitespot. Might check out west edmonton mall which is so big as to
have a hotel and water park in it.

Our last leg of the journey will be 3 hours from edmonton to calgary.
I have a couple meetings tonight so need to be back in calgary by
around 5.

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Whitehorse again

We are back in Whitehorse again after a long 13 hours on the road.

Bryson is off looking around the shops while I get some blog updating
done.

We stayed in a campground that had showers last night so it was great
to get clean again this morning.

I'm going to go drink some green tea before we make another big push
to fort at john today.

Seward

Today we are in Seward exploring the museum, glaciers and aquatic
centre. Scenery is very nice. Oh and we saw 2 moose in some wetlands
off the side of the road. Moose are cool!

Anchorage

We finally made it to anchorage this morning and are now sitting at
a pub eating lunch and playing with the internets.

We visited the info centre to find out what we should see while we
are here. So next couple of days should be pretty exciting.

Stuff we are thinking about doing:

Seward - aquarium
Glaciers hiking to and driving near
See whales
Animal rehab centre with bears and moose and such

Weather here isn't too cold because we are at sea level. Bout 10
degrees overnight up to 20 degrees on a sunny day (which is not today)

Oh we saw a moose on the side of the road drinking from a puddle
yesterday while driving here.

Kick ass Alaska rules!!

Poofter

Had some real gay sex with a large bear of a man today.  I think I'm finally coming to accept that I am gay.  Enough of this experimenting with women crap.  Gay sex just feels right.  Who cares what mom and dad think.  Not sure what to tell Bryson though.  He's so awesome cool.

Update: In case you couldnt tell, Bryson got hold of my computer.. if you cant laugh at yourself though, who can you laugh at? I guess the post stays... ;)

Panorama

Palmer

Well we almost made it to anchorage. We got to palmer, about 30mins
short. We are staying in a motel as bryson is shattered from driving
13 hours straight for 2 days running.

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Haines junction

We stayed at a place called haines junction last night in a govt
campground. Had a fire and some pasta before bed. This morning we had
showers at the laundromat. They happenned to have wifi so we are
sitting in the car with all my technology checking our email. Time to
fire up the gps and hit the road.

Whitehorse

We are in Whitehorse, in Yukon Province. Going to keep pressing on tonight for a couple more hours I think.

The GPS maps updating my position stuff is still down for now so ill just try and say where Im at whenever I can.

Todays highlights.
1. Cassier, abandoned aspestos mining town where there is a truely mammouth pile of aspestos.
2. A brown bear wandering over to our car window while we stopped in the middle of the road. Cool

Dease Lake

If you care to look it up we are in Dease Lake in Northern BC.

Was a fairly cold night last night, we are at about 1000m elevation here.

Internet is really sparse and no cell phone coverage and i dont expect any for a while.

I shall try to update when I get the chance.

Leaving jasper

In jasper town at the moment. Going to find a coffee shop before we
head to prince george

Day 2. Jasper

We are in jasper alberta at a camp ground. Just ate dinner. Soon to bed. Keep an eye on the right hand col of the blog in the my current location section. I aim to update that via gps at least once a day

Invermere

Night 1 finds us in Invermere. We are staying the night in a loft
where brysons girlfriend lives during the week.

I have rigged brysons car with various cabling so that we have power
for my laptop, my iPod, an fm transmitter and my cell phone which
doubles up as a gps unit. The way I have it set up the cell/gps is
mounted to the dash and shows a map of where we are and tracks our
current position as we drive. The iPod and the fm transmitter are for
playing music onto the car stereo. Sweeeet.

Oh yea back to the trip stuff. So if you are interested look down the
right column of this page for the "my current location" section. I am
using gps to periodically update my location, probably just at the end
of each day.

So time for bed and tomorrow.. To Jasper.

Gmail 502 error

Users (including me) of gmail are having to deal with not being able to access their account properly.
Gmail just says 502 error, we are working on it sit tight. No doubt it will be back up soon. In the mean time this dude has a gmail outage survival guide here: http://skfox.com/2008/06/09/surviving-gmail-502-outages/
and you can check what googles saying and doing about it at google groups
http://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Help-Announcements-and-Alerts-en/browse_thread/thread/9a69798cd0db14a5

To Alaska!

So I leave for Alaska today with my old room mate Bryson. I'm pretty much packed and good to go.
This is to be a road trip of around 7000 km return. We are driving all the way from Calgary to Anchorage in Bryson's Honda Civic.

Heres a route map:


View Larger Map

The Stache

So I simply couldnt help myself. I got back to Calgary and was giving the beard a trim when I realized that I was this close to an amazing stache... I went for it! Oh and I also uploaded a tonne more pictures (see box to the right or go to flickr.com/digitalsadhu) from Hawaii, a cool Korean temple we visited and more beach shots.

Vancouver airport

And so ends my 2 weeks in Hawaii. I have just arrived in Vancouver.
Connecting flight to Calgary in a couple hours.

Last day in Hawaii

It's 8:30am and my final day in Hawaii has just begun. I leave tonight
at ~ 10pm and head back to Calgary via Vancouver arriving mid morning
tomorrow.

So what to do today..
I think a swim is in order, possibly a surf depending on the waves.
Hawaii has some uhh interesting foods to sample such as a block of
rice with a hunk of spam dropped on top and a ribbon of seaweed to tie
it on with... Might give that a miss. Maybe ill go for another premium
hawaiian dish instead.. The plate lunch.

trying to get some work done

I'm in at Ambasador Pender's office trying to get some work done. My phone however has run into problems so I am trying to fix it before moving on to more important things such as work.

Went for a swim at Ala Moana this morning. Its such a nice swimming beach. Calm and clear water.

I leave here in a couple days and most of the excitement has been had so its mostly just winding down till Wednesday.

diving

Went for 2 dives today off the north shore. One to 67 ft. and one only as low as 38 ft. Was good to dive again as I hadn't been since I got certified in Thailand in 2003. Didn't take too long to get the hang of it again. Swam with a pretty large turtle which was cool. The reefs are fairly dead compared with what I saw in thailand however.

Had sushi for lunch and picked up a hitch hiker who turned out to be a surfer (in hawaii? really?) and he said he was paddling out near diamond head when a tiger shark came by and he bolted it for shore. Tiger sharks are pretty much the only really dangerous shark out here though there are a few other ones which are smaller and more timid such as grey sharks, galapagus sharks and white tip sharks.

Turtles are cool.

New Layout, More Surfing

I spent a little time tinkering with the layout of the blog today and what you see in front of you is the result, a nice stripy heading and such. Went surfing at Diamond head around 3pm this afternoon and the ways were quite large compared with the last couple days. I got thrown around a lot and there was tonnes of paddling involved. Consequently my arms are feeling nicely worked and actually I have quite sore nipples on account of not wearing a rash guard. Its quite common I'm told.

Waimea Bay re-edit

I just finished reworking this timelapse with some music and such. I've started using a site called vimeo to host my high end videos as they offer 720p hd options which look very nice. If you click through to the vimeo site the picture is much larger and nicer.


Waimea Bay from Richard Walker on Vimeo.

Lava

Below is another video from our experiences with the lava...

"the big island"

Hawaii is made up of a bunch of Islands with Oahu being the major
island upon which Honolulu resides. On Sunday morning ambassador Pender and
myself jumped on a plane from Oahu to Hawaii, the big island and were
there for 3 nights.
A quick overview of what was achieved.

See active lava flow from less than 2m away at night. check
Snorkel with turtles and other fishies. check
See a sunset at 4200m on the top of Hawaii's tallest mountain. check
(altitute sickness can start to affect some people as low as 3000m)
Hike into an aggressive black "sand" beach. check. I say beach cos its
fine volcanic rock.
Hike over fairly fresh but hardened lava fields. check
Camp outside under the stars (and get blown around by the wind). check.
Observe the stars at the information centre half way up Hawaii's
tallest mountain. check

Somewhere in there we fitted in all kinds of eating, especially Thai
food. There was also tonnes of swimming, driving, a trip to an ocean
discovery centre, exploring towns, hanging out at a drum circle with a
bunch of hippies at a nudist beach and a huge family performing
dance/music troup.

Hell of a 3 day trip. Back on the mainland now. Its all about surfing
and working for the next week. Maybe some diving (fingers crossed)