Posted by Seth on September 8, 2010 under Trip Reports | 
Three of my four days in Guyana were spent in the capital city of Georgetown. There were a couple specific touristy things I wanted to do – see the market and the sea wall mainly – but those were not nearly involved enough to really consume my entire stay. Lacking much of any other guidance or any real semblance of a reasonable tourist infrastructure I found myself doing one of the things I do best: wandering around.
I walked several miles, criss-crossing the northwestern part of the city pretty well and getting to explore some of the less commonly seen parts of the town. Hiding out in a cafe while a storm rolled through or grabbing a healthy dose of curry at one of the scores of local shops, I managed to keep myself busy and mostly out of trouble. I shopped with a couple of the local merchants and generally had a blast.
That said, the city did present itself of multiple personalities throughout my visit. There were the moments where the market seemed like any other I’ve visited around the world – just a bunch of merchants going about their day. And there were times it seemed ready to swallow me up and spit me out, a few pounds (or dollars) lighter. There were definitely times I knew I needed to cross the street but the trouble never really followed.
There were moments that the canals which traverse Georgetown seemed serene and beautiful, nearly akin to those in cities famous for their waterways. But then the stark reality would come creeping back in. The canals in Georgetown are not there for transportation nor are the there for beauty. They are there because the city sits several feet below sea level and receives a ton of rain annually. The canals are a lifeline, allowing the city to collect the huge rainfalls and drain them out to sea at low tide. Unfortunately, however, it isn’t just the rainfall that the canals collect. They become refuse points, gathering waste of both the commercial and human varieties. They are bathing facilities as I witnessed more than once. In many cases the water stagnates, becoming a breeding ground for mosquitoes (hooray, Malarone!) and for scents that I’m quite happy I don’t commonly experience. Indeed, the canals, like everything else in town, can be both beautiful and disgusting all at once.
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Posted by Seth on November 7, 2008 under Uncategorized |
Today was day one of my ridiculous weekend of travel. So far, so good, though there is still time for things to go wrong as I’m only on flight number one. But overall things are good.
I started in NYC this morning and hopped on a bus for the ride down to Philadelphia. It turns out that many flights are much less expensive out of Philly than NYC, so even with a ride to Philly I save money on the flying. Plus, in theory, the chances for upgrades on Continental flights out of Philly are pretty good. But more on that later.
I planned on going to Philly early to meet up with a friend down there and finally have my first real Philly Cheese Steak. I previously wrote about the BoltBus service and this time I took MegaBus, just to compare. They are basically the same and pick up/drop off about the same places at both ends of the trip. On this trip the WiFi did not work, which was annoying, but hardly the end of the world on the quick ride.
So I got to Philly and we headed over to Tony Luke’s for an authentic cheese steak. My order was the same as I’d get anywhere else – provolone with – and, well, it was a good cheese steak. It was not an earth shattering or life changing experience. I actually thought that the meat was a bit dry and bland. But it was pretty good.
After cheese steaks we had a bit of time to kill so we drove down to the end of the Philadelphia runway under the approach path and hung out for an hour or so, snapping shots of the planes coming in to the airport. It was a little too early for the big planes to be coming in from Europe and the grey skies made exposing the shots a bit harder, but I still got a couple decent pictures out of it. Plus, I didn’t get arrested while wandering among the light stanchions that are used to guide the planes in, so that was a bonus.
I thought that I had a decent chance for an upgrade on this flight as my previous flights out of Philly have been easy to upgrade on. Today’s flight, however, could not be farther from that experience. There were about 40 people on the waitlist, and I was in the high teens or low twenties; I stopped checking as it was depressing me. So I’m sitting in my exit row seat and planning my next move.
The layover in Houston gives me about 2.5 hours of time to hit up the Presidents Club with a couple buddies and do what I can to make up for the lack of drinking on thin flight before heading off to my onward connection, where I will also be sitting in coach.
More to come tomorrow as I zigzag my way across the west coast, from The Cowboy (John Wayne Airport) to actual cowboys (Oklahoma City).
Posted by Seth on September 15, 2008 under Trip Reports |
Apparently bus travel is the new hotness in travel in the North East Corridor. There are about 5 new companies operating in the Boston – Washington, DC area. Some of them are just new brands on old names, like BoltBus and MegaBus instead of Greyhound and Champion, and some would seem to be newcomers to the space. And these are decidedly NOT the typical Chinatown bus setups. Yes, they leave from a random street corner somewhere in the cities they serve, but they also have real websites where they sell tickets and publish schedules. Some of them (at least Bolt and Mega) have on-board WiFi and plugs at the seats. I’m on the bus now and plugged in and posting away, as well as getting some work done.
On the down side, it is still a bus. Only about 30% of the seats are full on the mid-day Monday New York-Philly run, but I can imagine it being rather uncomfortable if it got more crowded. And I did just get to listen to J.K. (the woman across the aisle) talk to about 4 different people at top volume about getting her time sheet in and her expenses paid. I suppose that happens all the time on the train, too, but it was still pretty annoying. And there is always the potential for traffic problems, but we’ve managed to avoid them thus far.
And we managed to pace an inbound flight on final approach into Newark as we headed down the NJ Turnpike, affording me this fun shot from basically right outside the window:
Overall, I’m satisfied thus far, especially since it is rather less expensive than the train options and is a non-stop trip, at least to Philly, but I don’t know that it would be a great option on a crowded ride. I’ll potentially find out next week when I make the final leg of my ridiculous 2x to Hawaii in 10 days trip back from the Philly airport and try MegaBus out (I’m on BoltBus today).
Turns out that the WiFi isn’t very good, which is too bad. I just dropped offline (from the bus to the internet, not locally) though it was working OK about 10 minutes ago. And now I’m sortof back, though it is slower than the free WiFi at a Continental Presidents Club, which is saying a lot.
Update (~5pm): After spending about an hour in traffic thanks to a fire somewhere on or near the Ben Franklin Bridge into Philly I’m not as convinced of the value of the bus. If it really was a train fire as was indicated online then I might’ve been just as delayed on the train, but this is getting to be pretty painful, even with the Internet (which has been pretty good during the hour delay).
Posted by Seth on September 12, 2008 under Uncategorized |
The traffic in Istanbul sucks. There is no two ways about it. The city is on the water, with the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus major impediments to travel there, funneling all traffic through a couple of bridges that are woefully undersized to handle the loads. They are apparently planning on adding an additional bridge on the Bosphorus, but that is still a ways out, as it has only just been approved by the government and the final site hasn’t yet been selected yet. A taksi from the airport to downtown is easily a 45 minute endeavor, at a rate of something around YTL30, which isn’t horrible, but also certainly isn’t cheap by any stretch. The roads are just ridiculously crowded. Not quite as bad as Delhi or Saigon, but close.
Fortunately, they have a pretty solid mass transit system in place. And we rode a lot of it. We didn’t take a bus in Istanbul, but there are plenty of them and it seems there is pretty reliable route coverage and frequencies. Similarly, the ferries cover the water crossings way better than a car possibly could; as busy as the waterways are they are still way better than the bridges. There is even an aerial cable car that operates just below the Hilton Hotel near Taksim Square, crossing over a park for those who don’t want to walk or drive around to the other side. Those are the pieces we didn’t get to try, but there are plenty that we did.
There is a Metro system – actually a few light rail systems that connect at transfer points – that cover the city, from the airport in the West to the Sultanhamet to the Beygolu area across the Golden Horn. There’s another tram system that runs on the Asian side as well, with easy ferry connections. With trains running about every 10 minutes and air conditioned, modern cars the light rail was truly phenomenal. From the airport to the Sultanhamet area was about a 45 minute trip, the same as a taksi, and the cost was two tokens – YTL 2.80 – per person. The one thing that is a bit annoying is that transfer between the various lines requires a new token and fare to be paid, but that’s a minor inconvenience considering how convenient the trams are to the vast majority of the areas that most folks want to visit.
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| The engine that drives the funicular. |
There are also a couple funiculars (inclined trains) that run in the Beygolu area. One of them is almost brand new (~10 years old) and the other is actually the third oldest mass transit system in the world (behind London and a now defunct Brooklyn route), over 130 years old. We tried to ride on both one day and managed to find the new one pretty easily, but the older one was elusive. As we departed Istanbul for Cappadocia we actually still hadn’t found it. As we had a 7 hour connection on our return through Istanbul, however, we had a second chance to find the old one and ride a piece of history.
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| The tunnel for the older funicular route. |
The older funicular was more fun, with the tunnel looking its age and the tram car somewhat newer, but not a ton. And we managed to take the Metro in from the airport, ride the funicular up to the Tunel Square area, have a very long and relaxing brunch and repeat the trip in reverse in about 5 hours. Plus the old funicular has a different fare, YTL 0.90, so we had to buy a different token and that meant another fun souvenir for me. I’ve now ridden on at least the three oldest, so I need to find out what the rest of the old ones are and start planning some new trips.
They also seem to have a “tap-and-go” system where you can put money on a card/pass of some sort rather than buying individual tokens. I certainly don’t speak enough Turkish to try to figure out how that works, but it seems like an easier option if you don’t want to mess with tokens during a visit, though I have no idea if there is a charge for the card and/or a discount for using it.
I’m a big fan of mass transit in general, and even more so when it goes to/from the airport. This wasn’t as easy as the Metro in Washington, DC or BART in San Francisco, but it was pretty darn close, and it was way cheaper and mostly easier than a taksi in from the airport. It will definitely be my transit choice next time I’m in Istanbul.
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| The view inside the car of the newer funicular. |
The platform for the newer run. |
Posted by Seth on August 23, 2008 under Uncategorized |
The ad bar atop my Gmail account this morning had a link to an article about the busses in Ecuador. It got me thinking about our trip there two years ago and just how interesting the bus ride we took was, so I thought I’d share both that story and ours.
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| Bus stop in Ecuador |
We took a bus from Otavalo to Quito. It was about a 2.5 hour ride and I believe it cost us $4 for both of us. There is a bus station – really just a parking lot, but what else is a bus station – in Otavalo, and there might actually be a schedule in operation but we never saw it. On arrival at the bus station we started wandering around until we heard someone yelling “Quito! Quito! Quito!” over and over again. We waved at him and he came running towards us to grab our bags and toss them on the bus. Lacking the language skills to effectively communicate we just went along with the situation and climbed on board. The bus was surprisingly comfortable and reasonably clean, pretty similar to a charter tour bus that you’d find in the USA, though it seemed older and just well kept, not new. We settled in for the ride and the bus pulled out of town and headed towards Quito. We stopped a few times on the roadside leading out of town to pick up more passengers, with the same “Quito! Quito! Quito!” shout repeated over and over. There were also stops at various places along the highway where passengers got on and off, and merchants plied their wares. Most were selling food of one sort or another. In retrospect, I should’ve had some of the food, even though I don’t remember any of it looking particularly great. Still, street food is fun and often delicious, and I missed that on this trip.
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| Self-portrait on the bus ride |
The bus ride also included a movie shown on screens mounted to the ceilings. I can’t remember if there was audio or not, but I absolutely remember the movie. It was Jeepers Creepers II, and it was horrible. But there was free entertainment. And, much like every other form of travel, there was always the option of looking out the window, which I did. A lot. The views were pretty amazing, and I even managed to grab a self-portrait shot.
For the price, convenience and entertainment the busses in Ecuador present a great option and are certainly not to be missed. Just make sure you find a seat near someone you know or who looks reasonable to sit next to. Otherwise you might end up in a slightly strange situation.
Posted by Seth on August 10, 2008 under Uncategorized |
If you’re willing to hack your CharlieCard then it would seem that it actually isn’t all that hard to give yourself some additional fare value on the Boston mass transit system. A group of MIT students were prevented from presenting their report on the flaws in the system thanks to a last minute injunction handed down by a judge in Massachusetts. The trio was poised to present the findings at Defcon, an annual security/hacker conference. The MBTA effectively petitioned the courts that they’d lose too much money if the report was presented before they could fix the problems and managed to get a judgement in their favor.
Of course, the slides for the presentation were published before the injunction came down, so plenty of folks have some of the details. Something about the horses already being out of the barn comes to mind. They apparently offered to tell the MBTA about the problem a while ago and were rebuffed. Better to sue later than solve the problem now. When will people learn that you cannot actually silence people who discover security holes. Just fix them and move on.
Oh, and they got an A on their research from their professor.
Posted by Seth on January 21, 2008 under News |
I posted a while ago about finding your way around NYC and how easy it can be, as long as you don’t mind standing around and looking lost until someone helps you out. Now it looks like Google is trying to help out, with the introduction of Google Transit.
Google Transit is based on a spec that Google has published, allowing any public transit operator to make their schedules and routes available in the Google interface, including their maps and all the other fun stuff that they have available. Sadly, it isn’t available for any of the cities I seem to frequent the mass transit systems of (New York, Washington, DC and Boston), but they do have a number of cities, including several international destinations, covered. It’d be nice if I could use place names (like names of the casinos instead of their addresses for the Las Vegas Monorail), but otherwise it is very, very cool. Oh, and an English option for the schedules/routes they have for all of Japan would be great as I’m headed over there soon and could use the help in my planning.
Three of my four days in Guyana were spent in the capital city of Georgetown. There were a couple specific touristy things I wanted to do – see the market and the sea wall mainly – but those were not nearly involved enough to really consume my entire stay. Lacking much of any other guidance or any real semblance of a reasonable tourist infrastructure I found myself doing one of the things I do best: wandering around.
There were moments that the canals which traverse Georgetown seemed serene and beautiful, nearly akin to those in cities famous for their waterways. But then the stark reality would come creeping back in. The canals in Georgetown are not there for transportation nor are the there for beauty. They are there because the city sits several feet below sea level and receives a ton of rain annually. The canals are a lifeline, allowing the city to collect the huge rainfalls and drain them out to sea at low tide. Unfortunately, however, it isn’t just the rainfall that the canals collect. They become refuse points, gathering waste of both the commercial and human varieties. They are bathing facilities as I witnessed more than once. In many cases the water stagnates, becoming a breeding ground for mosquitoes (hooray, Malarone!) and for scents that I’m quite happy I don’t commonly experience. Indeed, the canals, like everything else in town, can be both beautiful and disgusting all at once.
