Erik'sTravel

 In mid-October I took a long weekend to Penang, Malaysia. Penang is an island off the Malay Peninsula at the very north part of the country, almost as far north as the Thai part of the Malay Peninsula.  Just a few photos to give you a sense of this magnificent island, with lots of great natural beauty and the city of George Town, an urbanscape built in the late 1800s. George Town has been restored and is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  Loved my visit and would definitely return. One of the coolest places I visited was the Entopia Butterfly Dome.  It's a gigantic tropical garden of colorful flowers covered by a dome, filled with zillions of butterflies.  There are so many inside they land all over you, especially if you dress in yellow and the butterflies think you're a gigantic flower, as this woman learned.  At the Tropical Spice Garden.  This garden of several hectares, contains hundreds of tropical plants, including a multitude of spices and edi...

I just completed a 30-day trip around the world to attend University of Central Asia's graduation and to visit family in the U.S.  I traveled from Jakarta to Kyrgyzstan (via Istanbul) to the U.S. and back to Jakarta again. It was a super trip, but I calculated that the ten flights I took this past month (a distance of over 30,000 kilometers) released a lot of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.  Just my individual contribution alone amounted to about 11,000 kg of greenhouse gases.  That's not good for the environment at all, especially when we are facing the dire effects of climate change. What's the best solution to this problem?  Not traveling by air, of course.  However, unfortunately, I live far away from my family and economic necessity requires me to hold my current job, until I find a position closer to loved ones, so air travel is an environmental evil I really cannot avoid.  So, what to do? In my case, I have chosen to do something more than wrin...

  Earlier in my U.S. trip, I visited my son in North Platte, Nebraska.  It's the reddest, Trumpiest part of a very red state.  And during my visit I stopped at Fort Cody, a fake U.S. Army fort built in the 1960s to lure tourists off the newly-built superhighways as they traveled to vacation destinations out in the Western U.S. like the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone Park. That's why you display the two headed calf that was born on a farm in Nebraska in the 1940s, then stuffed after it died having lived only three days. This kind of oddity would be advertised as something to draw curious tourists off the highway to buy the souvenirs in your tourist attraction.  As I visited Fort Cody, the fake Army fort, I realized that this "tourist trap" was exclusively designed for Red-State, MAGA Trumpists and totally reflects their values and mental picture of what America is and should be.  Luckily, you don't have to visit Fort Cody, but I can interpret it for you and show yo...

Flying to North Platte is a bit of a problem as there are only two flights a day.  I was fortunate enough to find one of the few seats remaining for my trip, but sadly, I could not reserve a rental car before I departed, because I would be arriving after the rental car counter in the North Platte airport closes, and it doesn't rent cars out past closing time.  And the people I was visiting were unable to pick me up either. Well, I figured, I could get a taxi--airports always have some sort of ground transportation--so I wasn't particularly worried. When I landed I discovered that there was no ground transportation at all and my Indonesian phone wasn't working either.  I talked to a few people, but no one seemed able to help me.  Finally found a local willing to call the one taxi in N. Platte.  He told me that the taxi would be there in a half-hour. Two hours later, still no taxi. Luckily, there is a diner connected to the airport and I decided to stop a trustwor...

Again, I am posting these pictures long after I have visited the Thai island of Phuket. I mainly started this blog for my parents, as they are not on social media and they said they wanted to see pictures of my travels.  But, after a couple of months they told me there was something wrong with my blog because they could no longer access it.  Well, I checked and had someone else check too and there's nothing wrong with my blog.  And I have found it is impossible to assist an octogenarian and a nonagenarian with technology issues from 14 time zones and 15,000 kilometers away, so the people for whom this blog was created aren't able to see it for some completely unknown reason.  Given the statistics I occasionally review, the number of people who visit my blog postings can generally be counted on two fingers, so I am not entirely sure why I post anything.   Actually, I guess I post for myself.  I recently opened the blog I kept for a few years in Kyrgyzstan an...