Today was not the best of travel days. I woke after my large dinner needing to pack, shower, and reach Gare de l’Est before 10am. Luckily, my bags were light and easy to pack, with few things that did not have a regular place. M gave me a ride to the Metro after my obligatory coffee and croissant, and I rode Line 7 to catch the TGV.

I decided it was time to take a vacation. There was a problem, however: I was under a lot of pressure to finish school-related work. Is it possible to take a vacation without taking a vacation? I came up with the idea of flying to Perth over the Easter long weekend and then catching the Indian Pacific back to Sydney. On April 22, I caught an early-evening Qantas flight to Perth and took a taxi to my guesthouse. Although tired from the flight, or perhaps from the two beers I had with dinner, I decided to explore the CBD. The lights were blazing and, despite it being the start of Easter weekend, plenty of people were out. Perth appeared more diverse than I had anticipated, with a strong Asian influence. Many …

I’ve been looking for a simple, no-hassles GPS display program for Linux, and I believe I finally found one: TangoGPS. My requirements were quite simple; I needed something that would talk to gpsd, and display a dot on OpenStreetMaps. I’ve been able to do this in other programs (even in 3d in WorldWind), but I wanted something to download the maps for me, and GTK+ would be a plus. TangoGPS was easy to install (apt-get install tangogps), and on my test ‘drive’ home tonight on the train, worked a treat. See related screenshots.

I arrived in Chengdu tired but in high spirits: my adventure was progressing quickly, and I was in Sichuan, the land of spicy food, which holds a special place in my heart. I had two missions in Chengdu: 1) find a place to shower and 2) catch a bus south to Kunming. The quest for a shower took me down a dirty side street lined with hotels, where I stopped at several to ask about prices. I had to be careful, however, as I don’t think asking “how much for three hours?” would have been particularly successful. I finally found a room for about $20 a night, which I thought was fairly expensive at the time.

Our friends from Hong Kong, who had departed earlier, were sightseeing in Xining. After leaving the train, we ate at a small Muslim-owned restaurant, attracted plenty of attention, and called my parents. Because we knew little about Xining and did not have much time, we wandered through a local shopping centre and eventually found a huge bookstore. After several hours there, I bought a volume of English classics at a bargain price, and we left to walk through a market.

Unfortunately, I’d be seeing this milk again, in a deeply unpleasant way. Although my travel schedule had been delayed by the difficult bus ride, I refused to let that diminish my enjoyment. After my usual spicy pancake breakfast, I started preparing to visit Sera Monastery, one of the three great Gelugpa university monasteries of Tibet. While waiting for my friends I met a woman from Corsica, and when I mentioned my dream of owning a vineyard, she told me that people from Corsica are chaotic. I tried to joke about what was clearly a serious statement, but she went on to describe the pseudo-xenophobia, threats, bombs, and fires associated with the island. The warning did make an impression and opened my …

Early in the morning, at 6:00am, we arrived in Guangzhou. Can you guess what we did? We ate rice balls, of course. Perhaps I should explain: although Taiwan prepares rice balls differently, those in Guangzhou usually come in a dark sesame paste or soup and are filled with peanut butter. Yum.