Archive for the ‘travels’ Category
Sunday, May 4th, 2008
I never really got to say much about sightseeing in Taiwan after the conference since everything got so busy. After our wonderful post-conference dinner in Danshui, we crashed back the hostel and woke up to a disappointingly drizzly morning. It was a silly idea considering the cloudy skies, but we headed straight to the Taipei 101 - the tallest tower in the world at 101 floors. It is impressively huge. So huge that the tower poked through the clouds and we wouldn’t have been able to have seen anything from the top so we decided to come back later after visiting the Sun-Yat Sen (who forced the Empress out of power) memorial around the corner.
The Taipei 101 is also really cool because it has the fastest elevator in the world, going from top to bottom in an incredible 36 seconds! That’s 1000m per minute! Charlie and his glass elevator really need to upgrade. We also managed to find some Taiwanese fried chicken with mixed vegies for lunch in some back alley behind the world trade center (which we casually strolled through, thongs, singlets and cameras in hand) before discovering a totally awesome suburb of Taipei which only sold computer and camera gear. Seriously, it was streets and streets worth, probably bigger than my university campus (and that’s big, folks!).
The Confucius temple was lots of fun and very colourful, with red and gold decorations and pagoda rooftops adorned with intricate dragons. Seeing as our hostel was close to one of the most famous landmarks, the Chiang Kai Shek memorial, we visited this enormous plaza at the end of the day so that we had a quick getaway back to the hostel for feet resting time. I could not believe the magnitude of this place. It is probably possible to fit over 100 football fields in the space. My camera couldn’t capture the entire space, so here’s a panorama. If you want to get a feel for JUST HOW FREAKING HUGE it is, click on the photo.
Another grand attraction of Taipei is the Shilin night market where you can experience things such as:
- Stinky tofu (it smells worse than gtk+)
- Asian Elvis impersonators with awesome gold pants
- Never-ending arcades stacked full of Dance-Dance-Revolution machines
- Random old Taiwanese men giving random hints on life
- Buying “pets” as close to being Bonsai as you can get without shoving them into a jar
- Awesome fruits, like durian, dragon fruit and rose apple
And then there is the Grand Palace Museum, which true to it’s name is both very grand, palatial and is host to the finest collection of Chinese art in the world.
That’s a lot of links in one post. Here’s another one for good measure:linkety clinkety (completely factual)
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Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
Didn’t get a chance to blog about day 2 of the OTST2008 meeting yesterday since everything has been so hectic. Day 2 was similar in order to Saturday, hearing lots of excellent talks about open hardware and software. I found the talks on Freifunk.net and Open Street Map particularly exciting and look forward to seeing how the future plays out.
Later in the afternoon Pradeepto spoke about the kde-edu project, and Ian and I spoke about Amarok 2. It was a little unfortunate that the number of attendees waned towards the end of the day but I still think the event was more than fantastic. Ellis and the folk from Asus treated us all to a wonderful Taiwanese dinner by the seafront in the waterfront town of Danshui. It was great fun :). Here’s most of the team in a group photo:
Summing up, I had a great time. The summit was definitely a great endeavour and hopefully has brought on the right change and the first step to have free software and hardware promoted throughout Taiwan and the Asian world.
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Sunday, April 27th, 2008
Reporting from the luxuries of free Internet at our hostel in Taipei, Ian and I have been going over the talk that we’ll be giving on Amarok tomorrow at the Open Tech Summit here in Taiwan. The entire day today has been spent at the (very nice) Asus corporate headquarters - about 20 minutes on the metro ride outside of Taipei. The metro itself is a nice analogy to the Taiwanese people. Exceptionally efficient, very friendly and hospitable, immaculately clean and well thought out. Kudos to you, Taiwanese government. So friendly have the Taiwanese people been that I’ve been escorted up 10 flights of stairs, around train stations and through chaotic traffic - just to lend a hand. The Asus headquarters are totally awesome, if simply for this rendition of the Mona Lisa created entirely out of motherboard parts.
The aim of OTST is to promote open software and hardware to the Taiwanese, who are quite backward in their thinking of FOSS culture. We’re here on a religious missionary crusade to try and convince them to pick up free software! There were a number of interesting talks today, such as an introductions to OHI and OpenPattern, ultra cool speech recognition software for the EeePC and a general EeePC hacking howto. There were a few talks in Chinese, but I still found it easy to understand how cool it was to see compositing support on the EeePC.
In the early evening we had a light dinner party (which was quite heavy as we’d been fed all day), with two performances by local creative-commons artists. It’s heart-warming to see that Asus is putting a lot of effort into hosting this event and really trying to push the FOSS movement in Taiwan.
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Thursday, March 6th, 2008
I’ve been getting up to a whole lot of everything and nothing at the same time, if that is even possible. Bali’s full on scene of Kuta was a little too much for me to handle (expensive prices, filthy beach and infuriating touts shouting ‘transport?’), so onto Lombok it was. Even the more relaxed locations of Bali, like the incredible temple perched on a cliff in Ulu Watu, the cultural centre in Ubud and the quiet resort beaches of the East coast couldn’t compare to the beauty and chilled out atmosphere in Lombok.
We cruised up through the West coast of Lombok, through the cheap resort town of Sengigi (a great town with a beautiful reef surf break and excellent food), until we arrived in the Gili Islands. Spent nearly a week diving, surfing and relaxing on the beach. Life couldn’t have gotten much better. Lots of fun people and plenty of things to do (I spent my days surfing between dives, and Jared spent them lying on the beach reading books). We enjoyed our stay so much that we even conveniently missed our boat back to the mainland and stayed another day. When my time in the Gilis was up, I headed down south to Kuta Lombok to check out the awesome surf breaks. Kuta Lombok was my favourite part of the island. Being totally remote, there are no ATMs and the internet connections aren’t even worth touching. The only way to get around is on a motorcycle and an attached surf rack. There weren’t many travellers and everyone was there to do one thing - surf! The beaches are some of the most beautiful, transparent blue and white sands with headlands of massive proportions and cliffs punctuating the horizon.
I’m also back in Bali for the Balinese New Year, Nyepi. Strange thing about this festival, is that there is no mention of it in any guidebook. I would also rate it as one of the most important, since the entire island is sent into a state of house arrest for 24 hours. There’s a big party the evening prior to purge all of the evil spirits from houses and souls, and then everyone stays inside because they are lurking around through the streets. So here’s a tip: if you ever get stuck in Bali on Nyepi, find a nice hotel with a pool and food for the entire day.
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Wednesday, February 20th, 2008
I shouldn’t have been surprised when we arrived at Medan Airport in Sumatra to be told that our AirAsia flight had been cancelled. At 6am, nonetheless. By Murphy’s Law, it shouldn’t have been unexpected that it also meant we’d miss our connecting flight from Jakarta to Solo. So when it all came crashing down, it was all frustrating because we lost a day of travel and had to spend more time in the terrible city that is Medan. Really, it’s terrible - for the third largest city in Indonesia, they don’t even have grid electricity until about 6pm (they use generators other times). Then, AirAsia were real bastards and made us sleep at the domestic terminal of Jakarta airport until 4am on the hard wooden roach infested benches outside the check-in counter. This led to that and eventually we got on a plane and arrived in Solo to get straight on a bus to Jogjakarta.
We broke the trip in two by stopping at the Hindu Prambanan temples, which are impressive, but nothing compared to the Buddhist monuments of Borobudur (which we visited the next morning). Enormous stone temples dedicated to the path to nirvana and illustrated with carvings of the stories of the buddhist ways of life. Back in Jogjakarta, life is brimming with busy streets typical of a city deemed the cultural capital of Indonesia - tacky shirts and terrible handicrafts (except for the impressive works of the Batik artists). Hostels are smacked in the middle of lanes which are impossible to navigate around, especially in the middle of torrential downpours. The Kraton, or the Sultan’s palace (Jogja has a sultan), is a huge mini city with over 25,000 inhabitants. They get free tea, coffee, accommodation and work within the premises so they have a pretty good life. I expected the palace to be a little bit more over the top, but it was quite sparse. The villages inside were also very nice, and we found a little shop making Wayang puppets for the Sultan’s performances. The Wayang puppets are two dimensional items made out of buffalo leather, stenciled and elaborately painted to make representations of important Hindu people such as Krishna.
We left Jogja on a two day tour to Gunung Bromo and then onto Bali, which seemed to be cheaper than actually going it alone. Gunung Bromo is a large national park around the volcano of Bromo, where we woke up at 3am for a trip to a viewpoint to see sunrise. Being wet season, we saw absolutely nothing but fog, and I froze because I had not many clothes. Our hostel had this magnificent view of the volcano which we hadn’t even realised until about 10 in the morning, by which time we were leaving for Denpasar. Indonesians in Java can be filthy liars. I don’t know why, maybe it’s a bad habit, but they seem to make stuff up or lie even when it has no direct impact on their lives. For example, we were told that our bus would arrive in Bali at 7:30pm, only to be frustrated, impatient and annoyed when we pulled into the bus station past 11pm.
Spent the last few days in Bali with Dani, Nikki and Jared, relaxing at the beach, lots of surfing and eating disproportionately large quantities of excellent food!
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