nerd’s eye view

Vancouver’s Chinese Garden

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For Photo Friday, Vancouver Canada’s Dr. Sun Yat Sen garden. I like this photo because it’s got the reflection of a very modern building in the very traditional lily ponds of the beautifully manicured garden. Go first thing in the morning, you’ll have the place to yourself.

Posted in Passport Travels | 3 Comments »

The Great Big Carnival of Cities

Welcome to another edition of the Carnival of Cities! I do enjoy hosting this carnival - I get to (virtually) see all kinds of places I’d never come across otherwise. Thanks for the submissions!

Wow, there are loads of links this week, let’s see if I can make sense out of them. To set the tone, let’s have a little accordion music. It’s all below the break…

(more…)

Posted in Passport Travels | 12 Comments »

Travelblogger’s Forum Update

First,  a side note: Google ads has seen fit to put McCain for Prez ads in the sidebar. For the record, I’m absolutely not endorsing John McCain. If you’re wondering, I’ll either vote Green or Obama.

We’re at 46 members, friends! I deleted two spam accounts (take that) and am on the fence about this post that seems to be more an ad than a post. Ideas?

In more excellent news, Debbie from Delicious Baby has posted her site up for peer review. Since she’s brave enough to ask for feedback, take a minute, check out her site, and post some feedback for her. Darren of Travel Rants has offered to try to answer your SEO questions - take advantage of his generosity here. And there are lots of new introductions - go check them out! If you’re new, please take a minute to fill out your profile with your blog address, if nothing else.

Thanks again to all of you for your lively conversation!

Posted in Passport Travels | 2 Comments »

At the Quinalt Ranger Station

“Were you in Vietnam recently?” he asked me, pointing at my cap with the Vietnam flag just above the brim.  He was a broad faced guy, Nordic looking and very tan, maybe in his 50’s, extremely healthy - the picture of fitness you’d expect from a park ranger. He was sitting behind the desk at the visitor’s center. I nodded and said, yeah, we’d been there earlier this year and had a great time.

“I was there in 2001 on a bike trip - actually it was part of a bike around the world trip,” he told me, as though it was no big deal to ride your bike around the world. We talked about the shocking traffic in the cities and he admitted that they didn’t ride in Hanoi or Saigon, they mostly used the trains. But he also said he’d been there twice before on two tours of duty with the US Army during the Vietnam War.

“I was against the war from the beginning, you know, but I got shipped over twice. We were in Hue, you know, the Citadel there?” I nodded. “You know that big flag they have over the citadel? It was our job to take it down. We fought really hard to do that. Twice. My unit lost 600 - no, 800 guys fighting there to take down that big flag. So when I was there as a traveler, it was really hard for me to see that. That big red Vietnamese flag still flying…”

I told him about My Son, the temple ruins we’d visited outside of Hoi An. I have no memories of the war, really, not personal ones, but My Son broke my heart a little. The VC holed up there and the US bombed the daylights out of it, ruining the Angkor period temple complex. The US lost the war, communism stuck, and the temple was destroyed for nothing. It’s not the same, I get it. I can not compare my experience with the veteran ranger’s. But it was the first time during our travels in Vietnam that the war felt very real to me.

“The army…you know all those rules from the north, they try to keep those people in the south down and in Saigon, it’s still crazy - guys whizzing by will try to steal your watch right off your arm. The government couldn’t stop the craziness,” the ranger said.  I told him about how we’d been there in the lead up to Tet and we watched the young and thriving Vietnamese people buy huge flat screen TVs and all kinds of consumer electronics, strap them on the back of their scooters, and ride off home.

I asked the ranger if he’d told people that he’d fought in the war. He shook his head and looked past me, quiet for a minute. “No, no, I didn’t. And everyone we met, they weren’t alive during the war anyway, they’re all too young to remember.” I told the ranger about the kid I’d met in the cafe who told me he was studying IT. They’re all going to eat our jobs, I said, though maybe they’ll eat my tech job and not the park ranger’s. “IT, really?” he asked, and shook his head again.

I’d go back tomorrow, I told the ranger, if I could, and he brightened up. We talked a little bit about his corner of the park where there was once a homestead, a scrappy Austrian family carved a farm out of land that the forest wanted to reclaim every single minute. It’s a beautiful place, green and covered in moss, but it must have been a very lonely life and such hard work with dark winters and a constant battle to be dry.  In the photos the cows look huge, but probably, the people were not very tall.

What’s your name? I asked the ranger, and he reached his big brown hand across the counter to shake mine. “You should head up here, to the edge of the lake - there’s one section of paved road and if you look up the slope you can often see bears up there,” he said, pointing at the map. We had to move along - our weekend goal was to visit with friends, not to see the park. I felt okay about shorting our time in the park because I knew I’d be back, but not about shorting our time with our friends. We didn’t make it to spot for bears.

But I am very glad we made the side trip.

Photos: My Son Temple near Hoi An (upper) and Maple Glade Trail in Quinalt (lower) There are pictures from our trip to the coast here.

Posted in Passport Travels, Playing Outside | 6 Comments »

Almost Famous at Alki

This morning our house is chock-a-block with jetlagged Austrians, they’re stacked like cord wood down in the basement. (If you’ve been to Austria, you know they are very skilled at stacking. They are a stacking people, a nation of stackers. ) Last night, we took them for pho (Vietnamese noodle soup) which I swear is good for jetlag and just about anything else, After pho we headed down to Alki Beach where we came across the sight of a blazing beach house. Perhaps more upsetting than the site of a house on fire was the fact that people would not get the hell out of the way, already. People, people. Make way. The car in front of us came to a full stop to gawk, the street was full of people, meanwhile, SOMEONE’S HOUSE IS ON FIRE. A-hem. A public service note: If there is a a fire or other emergency get the hell out of the way.

We were wrapping up our promenade as the sky was blacking with smoke, but it was a truly lovely evening at the beach before that - the weather was warm enough for shorts and a t-shirt, the volleyball sand courts were in full use by gorgeous boys and girls (something for everyone!) and a group of people had set down a dance floor made out of big cardboard boxes and were involved in some serious stepping to Latin beats.

Last week we were at Alki with Janelle from Intelligent Travel - same place, different diversions. I wrote about our encounter with the paddlers from the Intertribal Canoe Journey here, but Janelle has give West Seattle and Nerd’s Eye View a lovely write up on National Geographic’s blog. Her post comes complete with my 16 second screen test. I’m sure that the Travel Channel now thinking that Samantha Brown needs more than a working vacation and should be replaced in the interim by someone shorter and more Jewish.

Posted in Seattle, Travel Reads | 3 Comments »

A Travelblogging Community

You’d have to be blogging from underneath a rock (or be blissfully disconnected from blognews) to not know that BlogHer was last weekend. If you’re a regular reader of Nerd’s Eye View, you know that I didn’t go. The first reason I didn’t go was because I felt like the offerings were insufficiently enticing for this travel crazy blogger. I later received a shockingly generous offer of sponsorship from Uptake, but by then, it was too late, the conference was sold out.

I hear that Suzanne Reisman did a terrific job of running the far too short travelbloggers meetup. And Debbie gathered names and has (wow, thanks!) now published a list of women travel bloggers - it’s here and you can add yourself in the comments.

I am so sorry I was not in that room. It’s not just that I didn’t get to meet you, it’s that I missed out on the conversation about What Travelbloggers Want. Luckily, the folks that were there have not been shy about sharing their feedback with me. If you haven’t guessed, I think blogging about travel is, well, the sh*t, and probably one of my favorite things on the planet. I’m as disappointed as you are that there was no travel session, but I do think that BlogHer has the potential to deliver the goods to my fellow wanderers.

In the meantime, there are two messages that came through loud and clear in the feedback. First, people are looking for you, travelblogger, and they can not find you. And secondly, there’s no focused travelbloggers community. I really want to help. Really.

Enter the Internet. Good lord, it is easy to make stuff happen. Dear Internet, I love you.

I’ve added a forum to Nerd’s Eye View that I hope will serve as a starting point for that community you’re missing. If nothing else, I hope you’ll introduce yourself, share a link to your blog, and maybe ask a question or two. It’s a start.

A few caveats:

• I’ve not run a forum before, it’s brand new to me. Please be patient while I work out the technical details.
• There’s no reason for me to expect otherwise, but please stay on topic - travel blogging related posts only! While I have included a place for discussing travel - because it’s what we love! - there are lots of boards - at BootsnAll, Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree, Matador, Rick Bless His Big Brown Shoes Steves, oh so many others, that do a great job of talking about destinations, but not so many places that focus on travelblogging.
• Finally, profanity, abuse, spam, won’t be tolerated (duh). Okay, I’ll probably be lax on the profanity if it’s used in a travel related manner. As in: “Angkor Wat was effing awesome!”

Registration is easy and the boards are open. Let’s get connected.

Posted in Passport Travels | 11 Comments »