The Blog Continues...

IT IS EXACTLY ONE YEAR LATER since the much hyped-up DAY 503, and the Blog continues! Since I'd like to keep this here TGT2 Blog self-contained with a beginning, middle, and end, the ALL NEW adventures can be found by clicking HERE. Whether or not this is to be the final location of future TGT dispatches I haven't yet determined (since I don't get design and branding control of it), but for now, read along and get your juices flowing -- The Global Trip Blog is back in action!

Travel Vicariously

(This introductory entry will remain on top for newcomers to this Blog. New dispatches from the road have been announced in "The Blog Continues..."

GREETINGS AND WELCOME to the Blog of The Global Trip 2004: Sixteen Months Around The World, one of PC Magazine's "Top 100 Sites You Didn't Know You Couldn't Live Without," written by freelance travel writer Erik R. Trinidad, and hosted by BootsnAll.com. Sometimes funny, sometimes shocking -- but always an entertaining distraction from office work -- this Blog retells the accounts of my sixteen-month journey around the world (October 2003 to March 2005), which took me over 95,000 miles across thirty-seven countries on five continents. This trip is sadly already over, but don't you worry you desktop travelers out there looking for a virtual escape from your mundane desk jobs; the day-to-day stories of the 503-day affair have been immortalized here on the internet, joining the ranks of the other immortal things on-line, like animated dancing hamsters and porn!

If at any time you feel that your boss is lurking, you can simply CLICK HERE to spawn a screenshot of an important-looking Excel spreadsheet to cover the fact that you are reading this and not doing any work. (It can also help cover any porn you may be surfing on the side.)

IF YOU'RE JUST DISCOVERING THIS BLOG NOW (as many people apparently are), you are the latest hit in a count of over 55,000 unique hits of people who have been following me on my adventures around the world. Since Day One, I've tried to make each day's entry as interesting as possible, although I'll admit I've had some boring days -- not many, but some. For example, there wasn't too much excitement in the first couple of weeks of my trip when I was enrolled in a two-week Spanish course in Quito, Ecuador, but during that time I managed to liven things up with pictures of my diarrhea.

Yes, it's that kind of a Blog, folks.

If you can get over that, you'll probably enjoy the entries from the rest of the trip, which, in this Blogwriter's opinion, only got better and better as time went on -- and without the need of gratuitous poo pictures either. When this Blog began, it was written just as a little journal to keep friends and family updated on my whereabouts, but as it got passed and forwarded along a thousand times over, it eventually evolved into a phenomenon for an international audience. With the bar raised, I started to treat it like a daily travel humor column and on-line reality travel show, which sometimes drove me crazy, but was ultimately rewarding.

So, for the ultimate vicarious journey around the world without having to leave your computer, may I suggest watching the "Would You?" slideshow first, and then simply reading all 503+ entries, starting from the beginning on Day One in October 2003, and reading everything from entry to entry, month to month. If you are the attention deficient kind and want to skip to the good stuff, here are some of the highlights:

• Riding the roof of a train through the Ecuadorian countryside
• Getting stung by a Portuguese man-of-war jellyfish in the Galapagos
• Eating live butterfly larvae in the Peruvian Amazon
• Sandboarding and dune buggying outside Ica, Peru
• Getting a traditional Andean music band to learn and play "Y.M.C.A."
• Trekking down to the oasis in the World's Deepest Canyon for New Year's 2003-04
• Staying with the Uros people on Lake Titicaca
• Mountain biking down "The World's Most Dangerous Road" in Bolivia
• Touring the Bolivian salt flats of Uyuni (picture above)
• Buying nitroglycerin at a store and exploding it near the mines of Potosi, Bolivia
• Catching caimans and pumas in the Brazilian Pantanal
• Being "attacked" by a renegade sign and rushing off to the E.R. in Foz do IguaÁu, Brazil
• Participating with the Beija-Flor samba school in the 2004 Carnival Sambadrome in Rio de Janiero (and winning)
• Taking tango lessons in a politically-charged Buenos Aires
• Visiting the poor, but developing townships outside of Cape Town
• Riding an ostrich at a South African ostrich farm
• Great white shark cage diving off the coast of Gansbaai, South Africa
• Getting mugged at knifepoint in Cape Town
• Catching air on a quadbike in the Namibian sand dunes
• Volunteering at an HIV research project in Zambia
• Visiting a Zambian children's orphanage
• Reaching the top of Mount Kilimanjaro
• Meeting the Maasai people of the modern world
• Being stranded and abandoned in the middle of the Serengeti plains
• Discovering the "secret" whereabouts of former Enron executive Kenneth Lay
• Visiting the Ethiopian castles of Gondar
• Exploring the rock-hewn monasteries and churches of Lalibela, Ethiopia
• Getting scammed at the Great Pyramids of Giza, Egypt
• Traveling in a police convoy near the Sudanese border
• Trekking to the top of Mount Sinai
• Getting bathed in a Moroccan hamman
• Riding camels through the Sahara desert
• Trekking up north Africa's highest mountain
• Jammin' with Marley's Wailers in Essaouira, Morocco
• Getting recognized as a "celebrity Blogwriter"
• Getting trampled at Pamplona's Running Of The Bulls
• Pleading to the Russian consulate in Paris for a visa extension
• Searching for an obscure statue of Albert Einstein in his hometown of Ulm, Germany
• Learning a new Russian word in Yekaterinburg
• Forcibly paying a bribe to corrupt cops on the Trans-Siberian Railway
• Dealing with a communication barrier at a homestay in Irkutsk, Russia
• Horseback riding nomadic-style in the Mongolian highlands
• Drinking beers on The Great Wall of China
• Aggravating the farmer who discovered China's Terracotta Warriors
• Seeing a newborn panda cub in Chengdu's Panda Breeding Center
• Eating roasted dog in a restaurant in Yangshou, China
• Rushing to see the Noonday Gun in Hong Kong
• Dining on poisonous blowfish in Tokyo
• Experimenting with Japan's low crime rate
• Testing out hi-tech Japanese toilets
• Meeting the booth bunnies at the world's biggest video game expo
• Befriending a Zen master in a Kyoto Zen temple
• Touring the nuclear bomb memorials of Hiroshima
• Trekking to Mount Everest Base Camp on my thirtieth birthday
• Surviving a near-fatal case of altitude sickness with the help of fellow trekkers, sherpas, a yak, and a horse and by being airlifted by helicopter the following day
• Getting an operation on my leg at a little clinic in Delhi
• Learning to play along with the scams of Indian taxi drivers
• Interviewing His Highness Maharaja Sawai Bhawani Singh of Jaipur
• Walking barefoot in the Temple of the Rats outside Bikaner, India
• Schmoozing my way to a free lunch at Udaipur's exclusive Lake Palace
• Setting off firecrackers with a seven-year-old for the Hindu holiday of Diwali
• Getting denied admission at a Bangkok nightclub
• Launching paper lanterns into the sky during Chiang Mai's Yi Peng Festival
• Learning to cook as the Thais do
• Flirting on an active minefield near Phonsavanh, Laos
• Braving Hanoi's crazy motorbike traffic
• Hearing the Vietnamese take on The American War in Vietnam
• Visiting my estranged grandmother on a Filipino farm
• Trekking the famous rice terraces of Banaue, Philippines
• Having fun with a Spider-Man mask in Manila on New Year's Eve 2004-05
• Trekking the ashy trails up Mount Pinatubo
• Learning to kiteboard in Boracay, Philippines
• Partying with the locals at the Ati-Atihan Festival 2005
• Exploring the go-go bar scene of Bangkok's Patpong district
• Taking a long and questionably safe road trip from Bangkok to Siem Reap
• Comparing Cambodian temples to video games
• Trying to volunteer in tsunami-effected Krabi, Thailand
• Rock climbing in the Krabi province of Thailand
• Meeting a Blogreader in Kuala Lumpur on Valentine's Day 2005
• Learning to fly in a sky-diving simulator
• Smuggling chewing gum into Singapore
• Visiting all of Indonesia in a day
• Trying to find the Canadian identity
• Streaking near the campus of the University of British Columbia

As overwhelming as this highlight list seems, any regular reader of this Blog will tell you that this is merely the tip of the iceberg. For the full effect, you should really just read everything in order from the beginning, since many times there are references to previous entries that aren't necessarily highlighted here.

ANYWAY, WELCOME AGAIN to the Blog of The Global Trip 2004: Sixteen Months Around The World. While this is in no way, shape, or form a substitute for actual travel, I hope that, at the very least, it can help you get through your boring day at the office when you are supposed to be working on something more "important." Oh wait, is that your boss coming? Quick, CLICK HERE!