SAS

Oh and for anyone who is interested here is the Semester at Sea website - its got some cool info about the program and past voyages:


And more to come about Ecuador!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Town of Norseman, Australia

Image
In the end I worked in town of Norseman, Western Australia for five months.  Luckily I had enough hours on the job to keep me occupied because there wasn't much else to do in town. My first thought upon learning about Norseman was, why the name?  There are a ton of odd town names in Australia - Toowoomba, Wagga Wagga, Woolloomooloo, Maroochydore - but most of them have Aboriginal origins.  Norseman, as I soon learned, was the name of Lawrence Sinclair's horse.  In 1894 Sinclair stumbled upon gold in the area.  As legend has it, his horse kicked up a gold nugget with its hoof.  A gold rush was already on around Kalgoorlie, and prospectors soon flooded into the area seeking riches (the wiki page has a short blurb about the town). on the edge of nowhere: Norseman, WA Norseman, the eponymous horse whose owner founded the town. Norseman Gold, a mine next to the town, is the longest continuously running gold mining operation in Australi...
Read more

Finishing Osaka, on to Tokyo

Image
I've covered some of the great food Andrew and I had in Japan, so now let me move on to whatever else it was that we were doing between meals.  Two posts ago I touched on Osaka, the second largest city in Japan and our fist stop in the country. Osaka is in the Kansai region of Japan, which also includes Kobe and Kyoto Osaka city proper has about 2.7 million people, but that is only a fraction of the true number.  Citing population based on city limits can be quite misleading.  Take my hometown of Columbus, and Cleveland, another city in Ohio, as examples.  The population of the city of Columbus is over 800,000, while Cleveland's is less than half that.  Take a look at the metro area, or the urban core plus surrounding suburbs and commuter towns, and the comparison is flipped: Cleveland is substantially larger than Columbus. Back to Osaka - while the city itself only has a couple million inhabitants, add in the urban sprawl and surrounding ...
Read more

The Beautiful Scenery and Distinctive Culture of Samosir

Image
After spending two nights and only one full day in Berastagi I was set to move on to Lake Toba.  More specifically I was headed to Samosir, the island within Lake Toba.  Samosir, the largest island within an island in the world (within the island of Sumatra), is nearly the size of Singapore!  The island is a popular destination for both international and Indonesian tourists looking to get away from the hustle and bustle of Indonesian cities.  The views are hard to beat too! From Medan to Berastagi to Lake Toba View of Lake Toba from Samosir Island Actually Samosir used to be more of a tourist attraction, as did the rest of Sumatra.  Backpackers even set up a Koh Phagnan style Full Moon party on Samosir.  Nowadays it receives a fraction of the international tourists.  Many people I met on the Banana Pancake Trail, a name for the typical backpacker stops in SE Asia, were only stopping in Bali and the surrounding islands when going to...
Read more