Remnants of the South Gate, Kowloon Walled City Park, Hong Kong

While we were there, I spent a little time sitting on a bench enjoying the scenery while Stephen was photographing. While I sat there, a local man came up to me and said, “Jackie is coming!” He was so excited, but it appeared that he exhausted his knowledge of English on that sentence, so I didn’t find out anything more. He pointed to the other side of the park, so I got up, grabbed Stephen and headed that way. Along the way, several more people were thrilled to tell us that, “Jackie is coming!”

Of course, the most famous Jackie in Hong Kong is Jackie Chan. But because the park was still pretty quiet and sparsely populated despite the undercurrent of excitement, I thought a visit from Jackie Chan was highly unlikely. So we waited with the small crowd of people while a P.A. was set up and a small group of musicians began to play, just to see what happened.

Kowloon Walled City Park, Hong Kong

As the event got going, we suddenly realized that the woman we had been chatting with earlier was the Jackie everyone was waiting for. We didn’t stay much longer, because it was getting late in the afternoon and we didn’t want to get lost on our way back to the train station.

Of course, I had to look up the guest of honor when we returned to the hotel. Her name was Jackie Pullinger. She went to Hong Kong in 1966, hoping to do missionary work. She got a job as a primary teacher in the walled city, and started a youth club to help drug addicts and the homeless. She eventually started the St. Stephen’s Society, which provides homes and intervention for drug addicts. She has led a fascinating life, it seems, and honestly, I thought our encounter with her was probably way more interesting than if they had been waiting for Jackie Chan. Her book is on my long list of things I want to read.

In a couple weeks, we’ll be heading to Oregon for a road trip, so keep your eyes open for a new travelogue. Originally, we planned to go to Oregon and Washington, and maybe up into Vancouver. But when we started looking into what there is to see in Oregon, we realized that we could easily spend two full weeks there. We will probably head further north on a future trip.

Stephen put together a big spreadsheet with places he’d like to photograph, with the “must see” spots highlighted. Since we are starting in Northern California, our first stops will be Lassen Volcanic National Park and Lava Beds National Monument. After maybe a couple more stops in California (Redwood National Forest?), we’ll head on in to Oregon.

Our “must see” list for Oregon includes Crater Lake National Monument, John Day Fossil Beds, Painted Hills, Wallowa Valley, Cannon Beach, Ecola State Park, Hecata Head Lighthouse and Bandon. There are more than 30 additional places on our list of possible stops. Is there anything else we should add to our list of musts?

Like our American Southwest driving trip a few years ago (no travelogue yet, sorry), we will be booking hotels as we go. Last time, we accomplished this with an iPhone, but I am really looking forward to using the larger iPad on this trip. Looking up hotels on the smaller iPhone screen could be hard on the eyes. AAA now has several apps that I am anxious to try out.

The other thing that will make the trip interesting is updating my blog on the iPad. It is definitely easier to do the typing on my old MacBook (which I sold), but with the iPad, I can pull it out anywhere and post an update. I don’t have to wait for Wi-Fi back at our hotel room. Because I spend a lot of time waiting while Stephen sets up shots, this will be great. I am also going to try to take more iPhone pictures and post those with the travelogues as I go. Of course, I will replace them with Stephen’s much nicer pictures after he has had a chance to process and copyright them. I’m looking forward to trying out the iPad blogging on the go experience.

One thing I haven’t been able to do is get my blog up and running in the WordPress app on the iPad. I have my blogs set up to be IP restricted for posting, so I need to take a moment and figure out what IP to use for the iPad and get that set up. On our trip to Bhutan last fall, I would just turn off the IP restriction, post my travelogue, then turn it back on. So it will be a lot easier if I just configure everything to work on my iPad all the time.

UPDATE: I finally got the WordPress app set up on my iPad for both my blogs. It turns out that the problem wasn’t the IP restriction, but that I just had to log on to WordPress first and enable it. Then I just added the 3G IP address for my iPad to the few IPs I can post from, and I was up and running. We leave for Oregon on Thursday. Chiqui was so excited when the dogsitter came to pick up the key on Saturday. She adores the dog sitter, so Chiqui is always happy to have her come and stay.

Light Trails on the Harbor Freeway in Los Angeles

As part of my quest to win the Blog Your Way Around the World contest, I am having a drawing to give away one 8×12 inch fine art photographic print of your choice from Bay Images.

Once you have voted for me, please come back to this page and leave a comment on this post in order to enter the print drawing. You can earn a second entry by either tweeting about this drawing or sharing it with your Facebook friends. If you do that, post that you have done so in a separate comment than your original entry.

To see the more than 5,000 image choices available for the winner, go to Bay Images.

Arenal Volcano, Costa Rica

You may receive travel-related emails from some of the contest sponsors, but they all make it very easy to unsubscribe by clicking on a link at the bottom of their emails.

DEADLINE: The deadline to enter this drawing is Sunday, July 11, 2010, at 6:00 pm Pacific. You have until December 31, 2010 to vote for me, but if you do it now, you have a chance to win a print.

I love Dorling Kindersley’s Eyewitness Travel Guides. The full color pictures are wonderful for deciding where we want to go (not so great on the details once we get there). Any time we travel, we check to see if there is a DK guide for our destination. I wanted to take a look at the most recent Eyewitness Travel books available so I did a search for DK and came across this other DK site, DK Travel. The site allows you to compile a bunch of information about your destination, then organize it into your own personalized travel guide as a printable pdf. You can even add attractions to the site if something you want to include isn’t there, and you can peruse other folks’ guides as well.

I wanted to try it out, but wasn’t ready to actually create one for a trip, so I selected a place I have already visited – Hong Kong. To create a guide, you just browse all the different attraction, lodging, dining and other information, then click “Add details to your guide” any time you find something you like. Once you have added everything you want, you can edit the information by changing the order and organizing it into chapters. Then you add a title and your own image to the cover, and click the button to create your guide. The site will provide a pdf, which you can then print out. You can also publish your guide to the website for other travelers to peruse.

My Hong Kong guide was very hastily thrown together. I didn’t really bother to organize much or put things in the right chapters, but I was still extremely impressed. For instance, if I selected Stanley as one of my attractions, the guide automatically included the top 10 things to see on Stanley, as well as practical information about getting there. With a little organization, my guide would have been pretty awesome. I can see either organizing your guide by areas or by day, including your hotels and dining plans. Each area or day would have its own chapter.

For me, this wouldn’t replace published travel guides (whether they are actual books or digital guides), but I love the idea of having an outline for a trip, arranged the way I want it arranged. The guide will also be very lightweight and you could print a couple so you have a backup copy. The main drawback at the moment is that there are a limited number of destinations on the site. I am sure they will add more as time goes on, but I won’t be able to create a guide for our next destination – the pacific northwest. But if you travel a lot, I highly recommend checking to see if your next destination is available.

I have never entered one of these contests where you have to get the largest number of votes, but I’ve found one that I actually want to win. A group of sponsors is giving away eight amazing trips (all to one person), and I want to win them! The point of the contest is to have the winner blog about their trips and we KNOW I can do that. So this one time, I am asking for your vote. In order to vote you have to register. Once you do that, you have a single vote (you can change your vote, but if you vote for me, I hope you won’t). Oh, and one of the eight trips is to Galapagos. That is my dream trip, so I am doubly excited about this contest!

Here is the link to my entry:

Kara’s Blog Your Way Around the World Entry

Winning this contest could send me back to Costa Rica and seven other amazing destinations!

One note about registering to vote: You may receive emails from some of the sponsors. The sponsors are all big companies, so I am not worried about major spam from them, but you might get a few emails related to their travel services. I know that Backroads sent one out, but I was already on their mailing list anyway. There does not seem to be any way to opt out of these emails when you register. So I recommend one of two things. You can use a yahoo, gmail, hotmail or other similar mail account that is reserved solely for activities that might generate some spam. The other option is to scroll down to the bottom of any emails you receive from the sponsors and use the link they provide to unsubscribe.

Thank you so much for your help.

I’ve been dying to download Lonely Planet‘s 1000 Ultimate Experiences app for the iPad, but at $10, I wasn’t sure it was worth it. But yesterday, I was surfing around in the iTunes store, and happened to see that it was on sale for $2.99 in honor of the international launch of the iPad. I clicked on buy immediately, still smarting from having missed Lonely Planet’s European guide apps when they were briefly free downloads. I don’t know how long it will be on sale, so if you are interested, grab it quick.

The sale was extremely timely, because our plan for this weekend is to figure out where we will go on our next vacation. The app is arranged as a deck of cards, each with a different travel idea. Sets of 10 cards are sorted into various categories, such as “Friendliest Countries”, “Greatest Historical Journeys” and “Most Surreal Landscapes”. The pictures are beautiful and the app is really full of great ideas. Apparently, there are some videos here and there in the app, but I haven’t run across any yet. One feature I really like is the share button, which allows you to email the card you are viewing as an image. I think would be great on the train if I run across an idea I like – I can just email it directly to Stephen (and cc myself if I want). After you hit send, you are immediately returned to the card you were viewing in the app.

Is the app worth $3? Definitely! Is it worth the $10 I was unwilling to pay? Well, $10 is cheaper than the corresponding book, which is currently $15.63 on Amazon. But I seem to be less willing to spend money on iPad apps. That is probably a little silly, because I can’t take too many books with me on a trip, but the amount of information I can have on my iPad is practically limitless. I have some similar Lonely Planet books, like The Travel Book, Blue List 2008, and A Year of Watching Wildlife, as well as DK’s Where to Go When. We do utilize these when deciding on a vacation destination, especially the DK book, but having them on the iPad would definitely be more convenient, especially because a couple of them are huge and heavy. I will definitely keep my eyes open for similar titles on the iPad, now that I have tried 1000 Ultimate Experiences. I haven’t tried any of the location-specific Lonely Planet iPad apps, but I will when we finally decide where to go this year. If you have any favorite travel apps for the iPhone or iPad, please comment.

Tim Cahill

Thank goodness I decided to go. I had heard of Tim Cahill, but I’ve never read any of his work. I just knew he was a travel writer, which turns out to be a bit of an inadequate description. His adventures are at once relatable and exotic. One of the pieces he read tonight was about the “bug scream“, a sound I have undoubtedly emitted far more often than the not so squeamish Mr. Cahill. The story had me cringing and laughing my head off at the same time. Another piece about yoga, from Hold the Enlightenment, was equally captivating. I loved his jolly cynicism and vivid descriptions. This is the kind of travel writing I aspire to, but I suspect I am slightly too lazy to even come close.

Of course all this made me want to run right out and buy every single one of his books, an impossibility given that Stephen has banned me from bringing any more books into the house. I did check BookMooch, but he is a popular fellow and not one book was available to mooch. Looks like I’ll be heading to the library, although I might try to download one on my iPad when it arrives Friday. His books may be a little too dangerous to read on the train though, because I have no doubt I will be guffawing like an idiot.

As excited as I am to read more of Cahill’s work, I would say that hearing him read in person is the real treat. The story of the entranced duck is even better when you get to hear his duck imitation. If you get the chance to attend one of his readings, don’t miss the opportunity.

Stephen is giving away three 10×15 fine art prints on his blog in conjunction with being featured on iwearyourshirt.com on April 18. He has tons of beautiful travel images on his site, so head over to his blog and check out the giveaway. Deadline to enter is Monday, April 19, 2010, at 12:00 noon pacific time.

Stephen just posted his pictures from our recent trip to Bhutan. They are absolutely beautiful, please take a look if you have a chance. You can also read my Bhutan travelogue. I will be adding photos into my travelogue over the next few days.

We did our best to refrain from interacting with this orphaned baby ocelot in the Amazon, but the little guy was determined to steal Stephen's hat while we ate breakfast.

Little Pied Cormorants in Australia

A wallaby in the wild.

*Apologies for the alliteration. I just couldn’t help myself.