Hawaii
After not visiting Hawaii for over thirty years, I will be traveling to Hawaii twice this year. My sister and I will soon be accompanying my parents on a short visit Hawaii. Over four nights and five days, we'll relax at the Hapuna Prince Hotel and take a few day trips around the island. If time and energy is available, we might include a day trip to Kauai for a trip to see family friends.
Africa
After I return, my wife and I will be preparing for our safari trip to Africa. At this point, we have all the additional gear for this winter-time African safari. According to the guidebooks and our travel consolidator, the temperatures will be very cold (30F) in the evenings and early mornings and rise to the mid-70Fs during the mid-day. To deal with this temperature range, we're packing several base-layer items along with mid-layer outerwear and gloves. As we're using small charter planes to move around Africa, our travel items for three weeks must be squeezed into a 12x12x24 inch duffel bag.
We'll travel over 24 hours from California to Johannesburg, South Africa, via Heathrow. As we're using frequent flier miles for one set of tickets, we accepted the available flight itinerary. Thus, the flight from the US includes a nine-hour layover at Heathrow. From Johannesburg, we catch a small charter flight to Malamala Game Reserve. A few days later, we'll jump on another small charter flight to Mashatu Game Reserve, a sister property to Malamala. From Mashatu, we'll use additional air travel for a short stay at Victoria Falls. Our final safari stop will be at the Chobi River area before returning to Johannesburg for another long flight back to the US.
I'm trying to keep my electronics down to a minimum on the Africa trip. The laptop computer will stay home and I'll bring my Nexus 7 tablet for journal entries and email. I wanted to backup all of our digital photos but this has raised a small challenge. Each digital camera has over 64GB of storage on the SDHC/Compact Flash cards. 128GB is too much to backup on either of our tablets. So, I'm building a memory card back-up device, using a Hyper++Space Colorspace UDMA2 device for backup purposes. The unit that I ordered doesn't ship with any storage. Accordingly, I've added a 500GB notebook hard drive to the back-up device that should provide more space than we'll ever need for images and videos. The Colorspace also should speed up transfers to our iMac when we return. If this device proves hardy enough, it could also be useful for our later trip to Antarctica.
After not visiting Hawaii for over thirty years, I will be traveling to Hawaii twice this year. My sister and I will soon be accompanying my parents on a short visit Hawaii. Over four nights and five days, we'll relax at the Hapuna Prince Hotel and take a few day trips around the island. If time and energy is available, we might include a day trip to Kauai for a trip to see family friends.
Africa
After I return, my wife and I will be preparing for our safari trip to Africa. At this point, we have all the additional gear for this winter-time African safari. According to the guidebooks and our travel consolidator, the temperatures will be very cold (30F) in the evenings and early mornings and rise to the mid-70Fs during the mid-day. To deal with this temperature range, we're packing several base-layer items along with mid-layer outerwear and gloves. As we're using small charter planes to move around Africa, our travel items for three weeks must be squeezed into a 12x12x24 inch duffel bag.
We'll travel over 24 hours from California to Johannesburg, South Africa, via Heathrow. As we're using frequent flier miles for one set of tickets, we accepted the available flight itinerary. Thus, the flight from the US includes a nine-hour layover at Heathrow. From Johannesburg, we catch a small charter flight to Malamala Game Reserve. A few days later, we'll jump on another small charter flight to Mashatu Game Reserve, a sister property to Malamala. From Mashatu, we'll use additional air travel for a short stay at Victoria Falls. Our final safari stop will be at the Chobi River area before returning to Johannesburg for another long flight back to the US.
I'm trying to keep my electronics down to a minimum on the Africa trip. The laptop computer will stay home and I'll bring my Nexus 7 tablet for journal entries and email. I wanted to backup all of our digital photos but this has raised a small challenge. Each digital camera has over 64GB of storage on the SDHC/Compact Flash cards. 128GB is too much to backup on either of our tablets. So, I'm building a memory card back-up device, using a Hyper++Space Colorspace UDMA2 device for backup purposes. The unit that I ordered doesn't ship with any storage. Accordingly, I've added a 500GB notebook hard drive to the back-up device that should provide more space than we'll ever need for images and videos. The Colorspace also should speed up transfers to our iMac when we return. If this device proves hardy enough, it could also be useful for our later trip to Antarctica.
Myanmar
For some time, we've been interested in visiting Myanmar. Friends that have taken recent trips there have shared how much they enjoyed the sights and Myanmar people. Besides integrating a visit to Yangon, Mandalay and Bagan into our trip, we were interested in seeing life along the Irrawaddy River. The river was and, in many aspects, still is very important for transport, food, business and everyday living. We booked a Myanmar land and river trip in 2016. Yes, we know that's almost two years away from now. Nonetheless, it will give us some time to plan for this trip - which could include a return visit to Siem Reap, Cambodia, for a few days.
For those interested in travel to Myanmar, I recommend reading:
For some time, we've been interested in visiting Myanmar. Friends that have taken recent trips there have shared how much they enjoyed the sights and Myanmar people. Besides integrating a visit to Yangon, Mandalay and Bagan into our trip, we were interested in seeing life along the Irrawaddy River. The river was and, in many aspects, still is very important for transport, food, business and everyday living. We booked a Myanmar land and river trip in 2016. Yes, we know that's almost two years away from now. Nonetheless, it will give us some time to plan for this trip - which could include a return visit to Siem Reap, Cambodia, for a few days.
For those interested in travel to Myanmar, I recommend reading:
- The River of Lost Footsteps: Histories of Burma, written by Thant Myint-U,
- The Glass Palace: A Novel, written by Amitav Ghosh
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