But let’s consider actual sleeping accommodations. In Bali, part of Indonesia. For one night. What do you pay, and what do you get?

$1–$4 gets you a basic room with a shared bath (down the hall) out in the country, not in town. This type of place is called a guesthouse. (ahem) Your Serenity agent will fix you up with something higher class, but if you’re out vagabonding, this is where it’s at. These are not part of any chain as far as I know, and you pretty much have to ask around to find one.

$5–$10 gets you a shower of your own, and in the right areas gets you a big room with a private bath, veranda, surrounded by tropical gardens. The upper end of this range includes a king-size bed, maid service and breakfast.

This look worth $10 a night to you?

$15 in some areas gets you air conditioning and a pool.

$20 or less on Samosir Island gets you a two-room suite

Off season, $50–75 in most of the country gets you a place that would rate four stars.

Let’s head into Jakarta. You can spend $250 at a lavish resort. And they go way up from there in the right areas. If you’re determined to spend a grand per night, you can do it.

Now let’s talk about food. Typical Indonesian food is one of a million variations on noodle or rice soup. Spiciness varies a lot, too. You won’t get bored. Indonesia, by the way, is where chickens came from, and you can see them running around, and you can get them in your soup. They’re leaner than the relaxed, plump ladies I keep in my back yard, but they’re better off than the poor creatures in a chicken factory. But I digress.

$0.40 gets you a cheap meal from a street vendor. Eat where you can see the food being prepared, and from places that look clean. Spend a buck in a restaurant. Some places serve family style. The tab will come to a few bucks. Tourist traps cost you maybe $15 unless you go to some world-famous place. Seafood is the best meat to eat, and don’t drink the water! The coffee is okay, though. Actually, the coffee is outstanding.

This guy found an uncrowded spot to pose for his picture

You get the idea. The cheaper the more adventuresome. The more expensive, the more like home. And why would you go to Indonesia to experience what you can get at home?

A vacation is a change in routine activities.

Most people find it easier to change their schedule if they go someplace, and that’s certainly a good idea. You can, however, change your schedule without going anyplace and that would refresh you just like a “real” vacation, though it’s a little harder to do—too many temptations to retain the old habits.

But I want to warn you about a danger in vacations where you relocate for a while—bringing your schedule with you. Don’t!

Small electronic devices are easy to pack. Don’t. Want to check your Facebook? Don’t! Twitter? Don’t! The human race did just fine for centuries with nothing better than conversation and the occasional letter. When you vacation, disconnect yourself.

Vacation no-no

I’m not just pontificating, either. New research shows that being connected all the time tires your brain out, and having idle time refreshes your brain. So if you’re going to spend all that money on a vacation (even if you get a really good deal through your (ahem) Serenity agent) don’t waste it by hindering the refreshment. It takes a day or two to get used to not being connected all the time, so give yourself at least a three-day weekend.

Email us when you get back.

Bleah. This site doesn’t have too much deep thought, though I do think it’s a fairly interesting read, and I do put some time into it, both from research and my own experiences.

Normally I toss this stuff immediately into the trash folder. I’m not interested in supporting forex traders or their scams.

But my last post, below, garnered one of these from someone who runs their own travel blog, about Bantayan Island in the Philippines, and the site looks pretty interesting, especially if you’re considering a visit to the Philippines. (Ahem, your Serenity agent can fix you up with a vacation there.) So here’s a photo of the beach:

Sugar Beach in Santa Fe. Click to enlarge.

Looks like a pretty nice place, and the blog seems to be pretty active. Go take a look. http://www.bantayan-island.net/

There. I’ve done someone a good deed. Maybe I’ll go plug this site on that site!

The country experienced some horrible genocide back in the mid 90′s, but that’s over now, and the tourist industry is justifiably growing by leaps and bounds. For the adventuresome.

Normal adventurers

This is the place to go to see gorillas, hippos (the largest hippo-oriented national park in the world), volcanoes (see a couple posts back about a trip to a volcano in nearby Congo), jungle, elephants, and more. Not to mention local culture and art.

Typical art, typical smile.

Almost ready to call your Serenity agent, right? Maybe not a bad idea, but there’s this one lake you might want to stay away from. Lake Kivu.

Looks innocent, doesn't it?

This lake is dangerous. Here’s a quote from a limnologist (lake scientist)

Lake Kivu is a meromictic lake with a relatively shallow euphotic layer (~18m) usually smaller than its oxic mixolimnion (20-60 m), and with a weak thermal gradient in the mixolimnion.

There’s more where that came from, but what’s going on is that this lake has a lot of dissolved carbon dioxide and methane in it, and tons and tons of these gasses are trapped down at the bottom of the lake. Something might make all that gas escape, all at once. The valley would fill with unbreathable gas, and everybody would suffocate. Maybe in their sleep. You might have heard of another lake that experienced a limnic eruption, killing a couple thousand people. This lake is 2,000 times larger and the area is more densely populated. ‘Nuff said.

On the optimistic side, scientists are working at extracting the methane peacefully and converting it into electricity. It could supply power to the region for a century. I’d rather have that happen.

Have you ever been to Rwanda? We’d like to hear about it.

So anyway, one strip I read is called Rip Haywire (google it). It’s a lighthearted parody of an adventure comic, like Steve Canyon and Buzz Sawyer back when I was a kid. The art is not nearly as good, but then, Rip is not serious, either. A new story arc started on Aug 16, set “somewhere off the coast of Kaua’i Island.”

Kaua’i happens to be a real place, so let’s take a look at it.

Kaua’i is a little more than 500 miles square; it’s pretty much a big, dormant volcano, the northernmost island in Hawaii.  Still tropical, but everybody speaks English and you don’t need a passport. And they do dumb American things, like pie-eating contests. Coconut cream pie, of course. They call it the garden island, and it’s certainly green. Maybe the island is most famous for being the location of another dumb thing, Gilligan’s island—the pilot, anyway.

The cast

More than 70 other movies were shot there, too. Okay, maybe it’s more famous for Pirates of the Caribbean and the Jurassic Park movies. It really is a gorgeous place. And since we raise chickens, I have to mention that the island has lots of wild chickens.

This is about how many adult chicken we have at our place. Ours are pets that give us eggs; these are wild.

It’s easy to get your Serenity agent to fix you up with a nice vacation there. Maybe you’ll see Rip’s flame-throwing squid.

PS. Wouldn’t you know it—a day or so after I wrote this, National Geographic revealed their photo of the month. It’s a wave on the shore of Kawai’i.

click to enlarge

Wanna know which airport of the top 100 has had the largest fare decline in the past year? Mitchell International. That’s in Milwaukee, not exactly local to Delaware. But fares dropped 17% in the last year, on average. Have your Wisconsin relatives come visit you–they can get your friends and family Serenity discount for their motel. You can take them to that place in Philly that isn’t there. Such a deal, huh?

PS: Be alert for the next post–Aug 11. It’ll mention a long-distance trip (as in millions of miles) you can do from your back yard, and your Milwaukee relatives can take the same trip.

If you don’t want to miss the post, click the orange RSS feed icon over there on the left, and it’ll be delivered to you.

PPS: This doesn’t have anything to do with anything, but today’s date is 8-9-10. And less than a quarter past 11 tonight, it’ll be 8-9-10-11:12:13 Neat, huh?

So here’s the geek part: Chrome supports themes. Themes are visual “trimmings” that change the appearance around the edges of software like browsers and media players. Like putting a skin on your cell phone–doesn’t change how it works, it just looks different. Maybe I should say cooler. Under certain circumstances you can see a background picture in Chrome, and that’s where a travel-related theme is nice.

Here’s the theme for the island of Samosir, northwest of Indonesia.

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/lhplnmlhhojlffceihlgmenbjgbchhhm

It’s free (beats even Serenity’s prices), and here’s what you get:

Samosir theme in Chrome

Pretty neat, huh? Poke around and you might find some more exotic locations. If you find one you like, put a link to it in the comments.

P.S. On another slightly geeky note, be sure to check the post two days from now, Aug 11. It’s about a special (non-commercial) event on the 12th.

That rectangular logo at the bottom indicates that the passport can be read electronically

I recently had opportunity to renew mine on short notice. Here’s how the “adventure” went.

First, I have an expired passport, so all I needed was that and a filled out form DS-82, which I filled out online and printed. (This is the form you mail in for a renewal if you have time. I didn’t.) Oh yes—I needed to bring my drivers license. And proof that I’m about to travel. And two passport photos. And money, $170 to be exact. $60 of that was for my renewal method—show up in person at the office in Philadelphia. This is the fastest way to get a passport (and most expensive), and they let you do it in person only if you have less than two weeks before you travel (Hence the proof of travel. Tickets or an itinerary will do). At least you can make the appointment by phone, and it’s all automated. Worked slick. Here’s the number, if you want it: 877-487-2778.

So I got an appointment and the confirmation number (another thing they say you need, but I didn’t need it). The US Custom House in Philadelphia isn’t hard to get to, but I was glad for my GPS. I don’t do Philly very often.

Here's where you get a passport in Philadelphia

The appointment gets you a place in line. Well, lines. I got into a 15 minute line to tell them I was there, then a 45-minute line (we got to sit in chairs) until they called your number. They have an automated sign that tells you how long the wait is. Look at it when you register. That’s your wait time. You can go to the nice little lunch room upstairs while you wait, but be sure to get back down to the room before they call your number. I had all my papers in order, so processing went smoothly, and the clerk was friendly. In fact, all the staff was friendly and good-natured. (You can smile in the passport photo, by the way. What’s important is that it looks like you. —I wonder if I could have made a face for mine.)

Then I learned that my passport would be ready in about three and a  half hours! So I got to do a nice walking tour of Old Philly.  Go to my personal blog, Mushrooms to Motorcycles, to get the details about that.

So I showed up promptly at the appointed time, but my passport didn’t show up for another hour. Lots of other folks got theirs on schedule, though. I was just unlucky, I think.

So I’m ready to go! Maybe there’ll be some posts about my trip in the near future. It’s a work trip, not a vacation, so I couldn’t use my Serenity agent (the company is making the arrangements) .

Things have changed in some respects with the coming of digital videocams. For one thing, you can see what you shot, delete it, and reshoot at will. Before we left on our cruise (set up by our Serenity agent, excuse the shameless plug) we bought a camera that had the capabilities of a professional movie camera of the 1950′s except you could hold it in your hand (it didn’t weigh several hundred pounds) and you didn’t have to be a pro to operate it. Maybe you should be, but you can operate these things with very little expertise. Our videocam fit in my wife’s hand, smaller than a soda can. It even came with editing software. Our rationale was to learn how to make decent movies on the cruise in preparation for our real purpose. ‘Ysee, my wife is an accomplished china painter, and we have this desire to set up a web page on how to paint china. There happen to be some very good china painters in California, and they are getting old. We plan to use our Serenity incentive airplane tickets this fall to fly out there and shoot some painting lessons to put on our website.

So. Along comes the cruise. We had a great time, and I posted a lot about it way back earlier on this blog. I invite you to go read about it. The first post is here. Well, we used the camera as much to take still photos as to take videos. When we got home, we could watch some snippets, but we couldn’t get the editing software to work. We haven’t deleted anything, because who knows? maybe we’ll figure it out someday. Occasionally we look at the still photos.

My point is that if you plan to shoot video, you can’t do snaphots. You have to plan the video. I can’t pretend to give you good advice myself, but I found an excellent article with some good advice. Go read it before you take that videocam on your vacation.

Have you shot video on a vacation? How did it go?

Tourists don't get this close to the edge

Vanatu has some pretty cosmopolitan areas that offer an airport, fine dining, duty-free shopping, scuba, volcano watching, a really varied topography, and relaxing on the beach. Native vilages are practically in walking distance from the touristy areas. And like any area that depends on tourism, everyone is friendly. Maybe this shot of the place you actually can go looks more romantic:

Technically, you're not supposed to go here, either, but everyone does. Click to enlarge.

You fly there from the US by way of Fiji, another pretty good vacation stop. Talk to your Serenity agent.