We've got a bit of catching up to do haven't we?

As the title of this post suggests, I'm finally getting off my ass, proverbially at least, and writing a bit of an update about what I've been up to for the last... err... 16 odd months. It's hardly an excuse, but my time in China behind the Great Firewall all but killed my blogging momentum, and my two months in Nepal afterwards, with internet connections slower than anywhere else in the WORLD (seriously) pretty much killed what remaining enthusiasm I had for the endeavour.

What I'm hoping to do now is to write and publish a series of catchup-posts over the coming weeks to bring everyone who's curious up to speed with what I'm doing and where I am now. For the less patient among you, the short answers to those questions is "Heading South and East" and "In Bali" respectively, though I've had one or two interesting adventures on my way here. Having said all that, I guess it's time to start cluing you guys in to what I've been up to:

Following my late-August 2007 departure from Mongolia I made a proverbial bee-line from Ulan-Bator to Beijing by train and hell-car (aka "sleeper bus") ... I still haven't figured out WHY they're called "sleeper" buses, as I have yet to manage to get a single wink of sleep on one. Anywhere. Ever. A week(-ish) in Beijing and it was off to Dalian, in the north, and then onwards to South Korea via a ferry from Dalian to Incheon, just outside of Seoul, where I spent 5 days enjoying Korean life and catching up with some old friends from BlackBall (The ferry company that runs the MV Coho from Victoria to Port Angeles; Selling Coho tickets was my first "real" job at the end of high-school.). After Seoul I hopped onto a KTX high-speed train for the ride to Pusan in the South-East of Korea, where I spent another few days sight-seeing.

I got bored of Pusan after a couple of days and, longing for something new, hopped a ferry over to Fukuoka, Japan on a whim... Given the amount of time I was actually in the country for, Japan was actually a rather eventful place for me. I met a great girl and spent a couple of weeks wandering around the country with her. I also managed to spend a few days in Nagasaki and Hiroshima to have a look at the A-bomb memorials and sites; my curiosity about the two locales stemming from my time in Chernobyl, Ukraine.

That's all you're going to get out of me for now, though I'll do what I can to write a bit more in a few days.

(Below: A back-street in Beijing very, very early in the morning.)

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Nic's Current Location (at time of writing): Seminyak district, Denpassar, Bali.