A bit of history, and a good view...

Spent most of the daytime today in the Imperial War Museum. It's awfully similar to the way I remember it being when I was here last (1998 or so) but it's still an incredible place to simply wander through. The Secret War exhibit, which deals with everything from codebreaking to special forces black ops, was particularly interesting; The twin 15" canons mounted in the park directly in front of the museum were quite a bit more intimidating than I had recalled. Awe-inspiring might be a better word.

Took a walk up to The Canada Store (Yes, that's it's name, though it plays triple-duty as "The Australian Store" and "The South African store") to pick up some Vegemite for my nephew Tristan in Budapest, which is where I'm off to on Friday. (Note: Who knew that you could buy Vegemite in 1kg bulk containers?)

From there I walked down towards the River and met up with a friend of Robyn's named Michelle and hung out with her for a bit (Why do I always meet beautiful, intelligent women when I'm about to LEAVE a city?) before meeting up with Robyn and Jamie and heading up the London Eye. There's a GORGEOUS view (as you'd expect) from the top; the whole thing's a bit pricey, but a damn neat experience, and not like anything else I've ever done.

(Below: View of the Houses of Parliament, and Big Ben, from the top of the London Eye.)

Am off to bed now, but will endeavour to post here more regularly when I can.

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Nic's Current Location:
Robyn Goodman's House, Sevenoaks, Kent, England.
N+51° 16' 42.16", W+0° 10' 44.09"

A late update...

So a number of you, most notably my dad, have been harassing me for a blog update. It's late here, and I'm exhausted, but here you go. Things have been exceedingly busy for the last week. Most of my time in Vancouver was spent doing last-minute odds-and-ends work on packing, lightening my pack (I ditched most of my cold-weather gear, contact lens solution, and DVD's, but cut down almost 20 pounds) and the like. Got on the plane with no problem at all, even though my checked baggage was STILL overweight at 23kg, and my carry-on must have been 20 lbs at least, well over the 5lb maximum... Regardless, I got on OK. Had all my gear serial numbers recorded by Canada Customs so I can get back into the country without being charged tax on my own gear. When I offered to unpack my bag and let the customs officer check the numbers she just told me it "looked like it was all old" and not to worry about it... Go figure. (Above: St. Paul's Cathedral at Sunset, as seen from Shakespeare's Globe, across the river Thames.)

Arrived in London with relatively few complications, was treated to a WONDERFUL dinner by Robyn's new in-laws who are, quite possibly, the nicest people I've ever met. Have spent my first few days in London exploring the Fleet Street area of town, in particular a "small" church called St. Bride's, (There's a half-decent Wikipedia article here as well.) which calls itself "...the spiritual home of printing & the media." It's a wonderful place that was designed by Christopher Wren, in the late 1600's, though parts of the crypt and foundations date back to the first century and earlier. They've actually created a small chapel in the crypt, so that services can be held in the same place they were 2000 years ago. Pretty neat if you ask me.

I'm PRETTY sure this is the place Matt Lambert told me about several months ago, with a spiral stair-case up the spire and a great view of St. Paul's, but they wouldn't let me go up it without having arranged something well before-hand. Perhaps next time I visit...

(Below: St. Bride's is the tall steeple on the left. Fleet street can be seen on the right-hand side.)

Other highlights while I've been here have included climbing the great fire Monument, and getting all the way to the top of St. Paul's Cathedral (600-and-something steps... Yeesh...), having beer in a pub called Seven Stars that's been around since 1602, and seeing The Merchant of Venice at Shakespeare's Globe...

(Below: Seven Stars. Note the "A.D. 1602" at the top of the sign.)

Plan on heading to the War Museum and the London Eye tomorrow, have also booked my tickets to Bletchley Park on Wednesday, my Othello groundling ticket for Thursday, and my train tickets to Budapest (with a half-day in Paris, and a transfer in Munich) as well.

That's all for now, It's 1:30 here and I need to be up in 6 hours. My apologies if I'm slightly less than coherent in this post, it's been a long, long week...

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Nic's Current Location: Robyn Goodman's House; Sevenoaks, Kent. UK.
+51° 16' 42.64", +0° 10' 43.69"

Off the grid and gone...

So, I'm gone... Or at least, I've left Victoria and I'm in Vancouver and I'm only semi-connected to the world... For the first time since I was 17 or so I don't have a cell phone and it's really, REALLY strange...

I said goodbye to my dad this morning (picture above) at the Schwartz Bay ferry terminal hopped on the 11AM boat out of Victoria, hit the mainland right on schedule at 12:35 and then spent four hours busing and walking around Richmond and downtown Vancouver picking my D200 from Nikon (it feels *SO* good to have a "real" camera back in my hands. My backup D80 just wasn't cutting it...) and picking up my British passport from Visa Connection with my Russian and Mongolian visas in it. My backpack weighs in at around 80 pounds or so, by my best guess, with my camera bag adding another 25 to that. (I know that sounds a lot, but that's still well under 1/3 of my body-weight, which, as I understand it, is the recommended max weight for a pack)... Amazingly enough it didn't actually feel very heavy at all once I got it up on my shoulders and had all the straps adjusted... I wouldn't want to walk for 8 hours with it, but that's more because I'm in bad shape and my legs would get tired rather than from any discomfort. The biggest problem I had (and it wasn't REALLY a problem) is that with my camera bag slung across my body UNDER the backpack straps, the camera-bag strap digs in a bit, and is much harder to adjust than when I don't have the backpack on. Hardly critical, but a mild nuisance...

The overall experience was good, as it was handy to see how well I could move around with all my gear. Aside from being firmly reminded of exactly HOW out-of-shape I am, I'm quite pleased with everything. The gear is heavy, but quite manageable, and I'm quite sure I'd be able to run short distances with it if necessary (One of my hard-and-fast rules is that I'll never go traveling/on-assignment with gear that I can't run with, or abandon, should the need arise...)

I'm at my brother Mark's house now, and am relaxing a bit before doing some invoicing and then going for a beer with my friend Kirsti, who I haven't seen in almost a year (She was an ASM at last year's Shakespeare in the Summer festival in Victoria. I was, for a time, the Technical Director of said festival...)

My plans for tomorrow involve a beach, a book, and my D200. (Hopefully some cute girls as well, but I'll have to play that bit by ear...)


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Nic's Current Location:
Mark Hume's House, Vancouver, Canada
+49° 14' 46.69"N, -123° 10' 10.30"W

A brief update on my itinerary...

Yes, it's been AGES since I posted.

Yes, that makes me a bad person.

Yes, I'm cross-posting a facebook post because I'm rushed for time. Sorry. There will be more soon. (In more recent news, I just got word, as I was typing this, that my Mongolian visa has been OK'd... Hooray!)

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I've been getting piles and PILES of people asking where I'm going, how long I'm gone for, etc. etc. etc. over the last few weeks... I hardly mind explaining my travel plans to people, but after the 30th or 40th time, it gets a bit old... SO... Here's what I'm doing, where I'm going, and all that... You can keep track of my on my blog and webpage if you're so inclined...

As most of you know, I was laid off from the Times Colonist at the end of February, 2007. Not having much of a freelance editorial market in Victoria, I figured now would be a GREAT time to take off and visit some places and do some work that I've always wanted to. Chernobyl seemed like a good idea, and I've always been quite curious about the area and it's stories) ... After getting myself vaguely set-up to visit the worlds only urban nuclear disaster area, I figured a brief jaunt up to Russia would be in order... From there I got hooked on the idea of taking the Trans-Siberian (Technically Trans-Manchurian in my case) Railroad across the continent, and ending up in Mongolia for a month, before progressing on to China... After that, and seeing as I'd be in "that corner of the world" I figured a stint down to Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand would be in order too. Laos is supposed to be nice that time of year as well...

After South Asia, I've got two options:
a) If I'm utterly travel-weary and exhausted, I'll head home.
b) If I'm having a blast and not burned out, I'll keep heading south.

If I take option A, I plan on hitching a ride on a freighter over to Vancouver... if I choose option B then I expect I'll head down through the Indies, into Australia, then New Zealand, then catch a freighter from THERE over to Punta Arenas or somewhere near the south end of South America, and work my way back north from there... If I can find a way to go anywhere NEAR Antarctica at the same time, I'd love to do that too. We'll see...

I've got a very rough travel itinerary that gets me as far as Thailand so far. The dates are as follows:

June 1: Fly Vancouver --> London England. Get put up by exceedingly generous friends, try and network a bit, and visit some old friends.

June 8-ish: Train to Budapest via Paris. Spend some time in Budapest visiting my nephew (who is also generously putting me up)

June 16: Kiev. Spend 3 1/2 weeks in Kiev and Chernobyl doing documentary work around the old reactor and the surrounding area.

July 7: Leave for St. Petersburg. Most "tourist" stuff here, though I hope to find some interesting stuff to shoot as well.

July 14: Moscow. A few tidbits of remaining doc. work on Chernobyl. There are some cemeteries and memorials I want to visit, and one survivor in particular I want to try and track down.

July 21-ish: Trans-siberian express to Irkutsk. Possible stop in Yeketarinburg. End up in Irkutsk.

August 4: Enter Mongolia. 1 month based in / around Ulan Bataar. Hope to get out into the Gobi for a bit just to check it out. May try for a train-trip to Uliastay. We'll see.

September 1: China. Have a dual-entry visa. Expect to only stay a month, and want to hit Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and (somehow) see the Three Gorges dam as well.

September 29-ish: Vietnam: No plans beyond staying a month. Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City are both (obviously) on the list.

Late October: Cambodia. Ditto to Thailand re: no specific plans. Will see what haapens.

November: Thailand or Laos.

Things get awfully fuzzy from here on in. I'm not about to try and plan things beyond 6 months out. I'm QUITE confident in my own ability to find trouble / end up in the middle of a civil war / get arrested / whatever.

So. There you have it. That's where I'll be. If anyone feels like joining up with me along the way, feel free to drop me a line (nic@nichume.com, or facebook, are the best ways to reach me these days. Obviously my cell phone and land-lines are NOT the best ways to reach me.)

New toys, plans, and all that jazz...

I have, again, been up to my eyeballs this last week with work, planning, organizing, phoning, emailing, and all that other ... stuff... that goes along with leaving a place for 6 months or more...

I had my first dental exam in far FAR too long done today, $200 down the drain, but it was worth it to know that I likely won't need any work done by Siberian dentists... not that I have anything AGAINST Siberian dentists, if there are any reading this, but I'd feel more comfortable having my own dentist work on me. As it turns out, my OLD dentist has retired since the last time I went to visit and his practice has been bought out by a new guy, Dr. Krieger. Seemed like a very nice chap all in all, though a couple of his dental assistants were a bit shy on the experience side (Having the person polishing your teeth talking to another person and commenting on how exciting it is to polish teeth because she "almost never gets to to do this" doesn't do a lot to instill confidence in me, but I survived, and everyone was quite nice and competent, so ...

My dad returned home on Friday from a few weeks in the UK doing family research and the like. We've jumped straight back into a routine of doing Hume & Hume's as fast as we can to get a nice buffer built up before I leave the country... There's a few fun / interesting characters coming up, so it'll be a nice change from politicians too (not that I mind politicians, but it's nice to get some variety :) )

As far as travel stuff goes, I've had a few minor-to-major developments as well. Notably, I now have a new backpack that actually fits me properly... it's an 85L Osprey Aether (The Osprey website is kinda broken, but you can at least see the thing) and I swear I don't even know I'm wearing it, even with 60 lbs or weight in the thing... I'm also well on the way to having some customized GPS software that's more suited to the type of application that I want. A friend of mine, Evan Willms, is coding it for me in exchange for my Lego Mindstorms NXT set, that I never had the chance to play with anyway. Basically the program is a fairly simple/small/light app. that spurts out GPS coordinates in a Google Maps URL so they can be easily incorporated as a link into my blog posts. Check out the bottom of this post for an example. It's pretty spiffy really. He's also got the thing rigged up to record trip-data while I'm offline, and output KML files that can be dumped into GoogleEarth later on if I want...

I've also finally made solid contact with Don Weber's fixer, Vladimir, in Ukraine. He seems like quite a nice guy, and has asked me to try and bring some Kraft Dinner cheese packets and Pepsi along with me when I go. Apparently neither of these things are readily available in Ukraine... It seems a BIT odd to me to be, in effect, including KD Cheese as part of a payment to get me Exclusion Zone access, but I think it's a good sign that this guy is on the same wavelength as me. I like him already :)

On a final note, I've finally set a good-bye party date... May 25th, at the Union Pacific (see map below...) ... Jimmy, the owner, has agreed to go so far as to post a world map and track my progress with pins while I'm gone... I think it's his way of keeping track of how long his primary source of revenue will be out-of-country, but it's kinda cool too...

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Nic's Current Location:
Union Pacific Coffee, Victoria, B.C.
+48° 25' 48.40", -123° 22' 6.59"

Life is too busy...

I've been lax about posting here lately, largely because I've been running my head off all over the place for the last week or two. I was in Vancouver over the weekend attending the WCNPA conference there, then up in Kelowna visiting an old friend for an evening, then back in Victoria and straight into a couple of days of work at the Metro... Throw in trip planning, an insane 23-hour day at the beginning of last week, a smattering of shoots for corporate clients, and trying to cram in errands / visits with friends while I was in Van. and you've got a pretty busy week all in all.

In the Good News category, I now have my Chinese visa in my Canadian passport, and my Russian visa in my British passport. Still waiting on the Mongolian one; it will get sent in to the embassy on May 15th, and I should hear back from them by the 23rd or so. If I *DON'T* get a visa I've decided to just drop it and head straight to China from Russia... I'm keeping my fingers crossed though...

There's been so much other ... well... stuff... going on these last few weeks that I'm not even going to try and cram it all in. None of it is particularly significant but it's totally drained me. One addition to my arsenal of gadgets that *IS* worth noting is my brand spankin' new GlobalSat USB GPS receiver. Each blog post I make from now on will include my position, down to around 50ft accuracy or so, so those of you who *ARE* interested can keep track of where I am. I'm looking for a software solution that will let me provide a link to a satellite view / map of where I am. I haven't found a simple / clean solution for that yet, so for now, you're stuck with just the numbers :)

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Nic's Current Location:
Union Pacific Coffee Company, Victoria, B.C.
48º25.81'N 123º22.08'W

The trials and tribulations of facebook...

So, I finally broke down and created a facebook account about 4 or 5 days ago. It's been quite a trip down memory lane, touching base with old friends long-forgotten, and people I went to pre-school with...

It's also been a very, very sobering experience.

In the last 24 hours I've connected and reconnected with the two people I least expected, one, an old Camosun friend who shall go unnamed, has had a rough time of it since I saw him last. Health problems abound, and he's still fighting the ghosts of a failed steroid-treatment for an autoimmune neuromuscular disorder, and withdrawal from the medical morphine that was given to help him with the pain. Either of those things on their own, I suspect, would be more taxing than most of us will ever know; I feel glad that the worst I ever have to deal with is a particularly bad cold.

On the other side of things, I received a message out of the blue from a niece (by marriage), Yolanda, that I didn't know I had, and saw pictures of my two great-nephews for the first time ever... I didn't even know their names until today (Indeo and Ryven). Oddly enough, this latter connection happened through entirely non-family channels. It seems Yolanda is friends with the Cheimak family, the younger members of whom I went to SMUS with. We're going to try and set up a meeting of some kind before I leave on my trip, so I can meet Indeo and Ryven, and their dad Jubal, who I've only heard passing mention of until now.

Facebook is a strange, strange place. I've gone from getting horrible news about good friends, to being connected with "new" family in the space of one evening. I don't think I've had this much of an emotional up-and-down day in a long time.

Some days the world seems huge and daunting; others it seems so small I feel like I can just reach across it. Today's been a bit of both...