blogs about CC-Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5

Beer, Bacon and Bargirls: SAPTCO bus to King Fahd International Airport, Dammam

jani — Mon, 05 May 2008 09:14:01 -0700

Public transport in Saudi Arabia is about as developed as you'd expect in a country where oil costs $0.10 a litre, so it was with no small astonishment that I spied the sign for an airport shuttle service at Dammam's little SAPTCO bus terminal. We were at the terminal already and the next hourly departure was in 20 minutes, so why not give it a shot? After all, it was Friday afternoon and the noon prayers were droning on outside, meaning that absolutely nothing was open.

Beer, Bacon and Bargirls: Manama, Bahrain

jani — Mon, 05 May 2008 09:06:55 -0700

Manama reminds me of Abu Dhabi: they're both smallish and filthy rich cities on the Gulf, relatively liberal by Gulf standards, have city centers dating to the 1970s but with huge amounts of construction now adding modern skyscrapers into the mix, and have virtually nothing in the way of attractions. Bahrain's unofficial symbol is the Pearl Roundabout, which is, you guessed it, a roundabout which has a large statue of pointy things (supposedly dhow sails) holding a pearl aloft. Yay?

Beer, Bacon and Bargirls: Saudi-Bahraini Transport Company, Khobar to Manama

jani — Mon, 05 May 2008 08:56:35 -0700

Up at 10 AM the next morning, we demolished the complimentary fruit basket in lieu of breakfast and had the hotel drop us off at the SABTCO station. We were in luck: there are only six buses a day, but the very next one had free seats at SR50 a pop (~US$12) and was leaving in half an hour. Although it wasn't exactly a bus: the Khobar-Bahrain service uses little minibuses seating perhaps 20 and pulling along a dinky little trailer for luggage.

Beer, Bacon and Bargirls: Train 9, First Class, Riyadh-Dammam

jani — Mon, 05 May 2008 08:48:38 -0700

As a bit of a train buff, I tried my best to google up some info -- any info -- about the services of the Saudi Railways Organization before our trip, but virtually none was forthcoming, and eventually it was Trsqr who did the (considerable) legwork of reserving tickets. He rustled up the number of Dammam's train station from somewhere and got an Arabic speaker to proxy, and it turned out that even the SRO website's schedules are inaccurate.

Beer, Bacon and Bargirls: A Multimodal Escape to Bahrain

jani — Mon, 05 May 2008 08:29:51 -0700

One sunny day I found myself in Riyadh with a weekend to spare, and as luck would have it, fellow Wikitraveller and Flyertalker Trsqr was in exactly the same predicament. It was school holiday season in Saudi, so flights were packed tighter than the Jamarat Bridge on the 10th day of Dhu al-Hijjah, so fuelled by a champagne-and-cigar binge in a disco ball suspended 240 meters above Riyadh, we eventually settled on visiting that den of relative iniquity known as the Kingdom of Bahrain, taking the train out and the plane back in.

Wahhabalinese Adventures: Abu Dhabi

jani — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 05:35:11 -0800

Abu Dhabi is not one of the world's great airports by any measure, but its quirky terminal seemed downright snazzy after the swirling chaos of DEL. Midnight is rush hour at AUH, but I had no problems snagging a seat from where I could contemplate the utterly bizarre mushroom-shaped spout of lime green and blue tiling that dominates the terminal, although any notions of Zen serenity were blasted out of the water by the endless loop of really, really loud trilingual announcements about vol eh-ygrec trois-trois-cinq a Casablanca or whereever.

Wahhabalinese Adventures: Delhi

jani — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 10:53:09 -0800

It's been a good nine months since I was last in Dilli, and I was quite amazed by the speed at which (some) things have progressed. The Metro extensions to Noida and Gurgaon, a few tentative rebar poking out from the ground in fall 2007, had sprouted into an almost unbroken row of lofty concrete pillars with viaduct cranes connecting the tops and station boxes starting to take shape -- they just might make the 2010 deadline.

Wahhabalinese Adventures: Bali

jani — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 05:23:15 -0800

Ah, Bali. I've spent a lot of time working and traveling around in Indonesia, and the Island of the Gods is the one place I always seem to end up returning to. In fact, for this trip Plan A was go to Phuket, but there was no availability or remotely reasonable pricing at the JW Marriott. Plan B was the Marriott Hua Hin, but while the hotel was OK, getting there from Singapore is kinda painful.

Bookmarklet for Flickr

Tatata — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 00:45:29 -0800

I made a bookmarklet to search images on Flickr.

The search condition is included to find images within the limits of CC-BY or CC-BY-SA.

[ja]フリッカー検索用ブックマークレット

Tatata — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 01:33:19 -0700

ウィキトラベルで利用できる画像をフリッカー (Flickr) で検索するためのブックマークレットを作成しました。検索条件として、「クリエイティブ・コモンズ表示 (CC-BY)」又は「クリエイティブ・コモンズ表示-継承 (CC-BY-SA)」により使用許諾された画像であることが組み込まれています。ご利用下さい。