Friday, December 09, 2005

Vacation planning

When planning a trip across the Trans-Siberian Railway (goes from Beijing to Moscow) that one is considering taking in the winter, one suddenly realizes that while Siberia is supposed to be a beautiful sight in the winter, it may be worth going on such a trip in a season when the permafrost is under only a few inches of soil (summer) rather than when there is another 6 feet of snow on top of it. Realizations such as these are why one stops planning said trip and asks one's self where would be a nice climate to visit in the dead of winter... perhaps a climate that would be too hot in the summer time.

When one finds out that you can take a train from Singapore, to Kuala Lumpur, and then through some of the most beautiful rainforest in the world to Bangkok, one starts to look at plane tickets to Singapore. Looking into it further, one decides that he does not want to be shot by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, one decides one will go around by air or boat to Ho Chi Min City (formerly Saigon) and take the train up the Vietnamese coast, through Danang, to Hanoi where one can catch a plane back to good ol' Yantai. On top of this, when one compares the price of tickets on the Oriental Express to those on the Trans-Siberian Railway, one realizes that a trip through SE Asia is infinitely more economical.

If one where considering such a vacation, of course.