I arrived in Chile shortly after 18:00, although the sun was still beaming as if it were noon. At the airport, I withdrew some money and immediately caught the Centropuerto bus near the front of the terminal, just as Triposo advised. I bought a return ticket and was soon dropped off at Pajaritos Station on Line 1. I managed to get a Bip! card and caught the metro to Manuel Montt, the station closest to my hotel.

In February I gave a presentation to about 80 people at the Sydney Python group hosted by Atlassian. Firstly, Atlassian’s office was beautiful, feeling a little like Google’s Sydney office, but with beer on tap instead of cereal dispensers. Secondly, the talk before me on Cython by Aaron Defazio was exceptionally interesting, garnering lots of questions from the audience. My presentation, more of a show and tell on piping location data to Google’s Latitude through App Engine, was also meant to subtly share my views on the need for innovation in the public sector (all sectors, really).

My first trip to Kathmandu is now over, so there are some lessons learned I should scribe. Some of these are obvious rules I usually abide by whenever travelling, and some I simply forgot in my (very) impromptu trip to Nepal. When agreeing on a price, make 100% sure the other person states the price back to you. I thought a price had been agreed to when the other person responded “ok ok, you are a lucky man”, but this does not count. As they say, reconfirm, reconfirm, reconfirm. When arriving at the airport, make sure you have small bills, too. I had 3x 100RS, 1x 10RS, and then a few 500RS. The price I negotiated was 440RS, and it would have been nice to have paid the exact amount. During my visit, …

For the last ten years I have run this website from various systems. First it was on Wordpress, then Mambo, then Joomla, and since early 2006 it has been running on custom code written using Django. I used this site as a learning tool for Django, re-wrote it after gaining more knowledge of Django, and then re-wrote it again when Google released App Engine. However, I recently realised that for the last few years I have spent more time writing little features than actually writing. I have entire trips that I never wrote because I was too busy writing code.

Stopped hosting websites for people. I cancelled almost all the domains I was hosting for other people and removed their websites from my server. Hosting websites generally does not take much time, but I still needed to manage backups, monitor them, and make sure everything worked. This was fun when I was younger: “Neat, I can host websites virtually for free!” Over time, however, the appeal faded. I now help with only two websites.

Sure enough, I did not arrive back at Kathmandu until almost 17:00, maybe later, which translated into a very long day. I debated whether I should have flown, even though that would have been more expensive, but I do not know if it would have been any safer. I walked away from the bus stop and navigated directly to the Laughing Buddha, where I put down my bags, bought some water, and went out looking for food. After visiting a supermarket, I had dinner and a beer at MoMo Star, dodged a few more scooters, and finally settled back into bed.

I awoke just before 6:00 a.m. and started walking. The streets were quieter than normal, but still active. It was dark enough that I used my flashlight, although the locals managed to navigate without any assistance. After walking down Thamel Road, past the Garden of Dreams, and across the street, I found a long row of “tourist buses.” There are three ways to get to Pokhara, my next destination: a local bus, a tourist bus, and a minibus. The local bus is inexpensive but apparently takes a long time because it stops in every town. The tourist bus takes much less time but is more expensive; it is basically like a Greyhound bus. Then there is the minibus, which takes about as long as the tourist bus …

My image of Kathmandu was something like a Swiss winter wonderland, but in Asia. The second the plane dropped below the clouds, I realised how wrong I was: the entire city was dotted with four- and five-storey buildings and surrounded by a dark haze of pollution. The airport was simple. I had already prepared my visa application, the required $25, and two photos, so I moved quickly through the line. Outside the airport, taxis were everywhere. The prepaid counter quoted 650 RS, which gave me a baseline. Of course, that may have been the point.

The maximum speed of the KLIA Ekspres appeared to be 160 km/h, and it was touted as the fastest train in Southeast Asia. The train had free Wi-Fi over a 4G network, so we were able to send photos home and chat on Gtalk. We also tested a Gtalk video call with each other while sitting on the same train, and it worked. I wished more people back home had Android devices so I could talk with them.

Every time I travel, I discover something I could have done better. I now follow many of those lessons, such as bringing only electronics that charge via USB, but still forget others, such as packing a stuff sack for dirty clothing. This trip to Bali began with a lesson I will not forget: before leaving the airport, confirm that the taxi driver understands the destination. My delayed flight arrived after midnight, but the taxi desk was still open. I organised a prepaid taxi for 135,000 rupiah, or about US$13. Prepaying reduced the need to haggle and removed any concern about a longer route increasing the fare. My previous taxi ride in Bali had been straightforward, but this time the driver and I had no language …