Matthew's end of year missive 2003

This is my end of year letter. I put it here in case you missed the email!
Hi. I hope you are having a great end to 2002

First, let me apologize if I've disappeared off your radar screens, if you were sitting there thinking, "where is that Matthew Holt fellow", I have indeed disappeared more or less off the map. I'm writing my end of year message from Laos, a

I have now got the photos from Sapa up as well as more in the Hanoi album. I have also put up the photos from Southern Laos after much fussing from the Germans' with the sense of humour, Uli and Maikka, but you have to go to the relevant secion of the blog (dated 1/4/03) to see them. Plus the shots of Ventiene are up too.

Stories to follow...am a bit tired after a too-happy christmas dinner

So to bring you up to date....this missive covers my time in Tam Coc, Hanoi (twice) Halong Bay, Sapa and getting to Vientiene in Laos, where I'm writing this. After leaving Dong Hoi I was awakended on the sleeper train by it stopping. I asked the guard where we were as Vietnamese stations don't bother with niceties like signs. "Nimh Binh" he said. That's me, I thought, and rushed off to get my

So I'm leaving Vietnam tommorow. I've spent the last few days in Sapa which is in the Tonkin Alps in far northwest, and have been completely fog bound. I'll have photos up from here soon enough. However for those of you waiting (hi Dad!) I have now got all my sets up. These include the Tam Coc river, Halong Bay, Hanoi, and a certain "Big Wednesday" night out in Hanoi (you know who you are and

Dalat via Nha Trang via Hoi An via Hue to Dong Hoi -- I've spent most of this month thinking of the Eddie Murphy skit at the start of Trading Places, when he's pretending to be a blind, crippled Vietnam Vet, and two cops ask him where he was stationed. He says (something like!) "Dan Ang, Nha Trang, Hoi An, Du Nang, Ru Tang, yeah man I was at all of them places...", then the cops kick of his

Saigon--Ho Chi Minh City. Full of history of the war, in which first the French then the Americans managed to lose the peace after winning most of the battles. But now, 27 years after the tanks crashed through the gates of the southern Presidential palace and 57 years after Ho Chi Minh invited ONLY the USA to his independence celebration (and here's a poster telling the Viet Minh to be nice to

Catching up on past history. So I left the Hello guesthouse ($4 a night) and after a nice early journey on top of a fast boat past lots of floating houses on the huge Tone Slap lake, I arrived in Phnom Phen to be greated by more hotel touts than I've ever seen in my life! There after some screwing around I arived at the seedy and smelly series of guesthouses by the nice but small lake. I should

Ok. Sorry but there is no way that you can see the albums I've put up so far without registering with Ofoto. They changed their policy and wont budge. It REALLY only takes 20 seconds (ony 4 fields to fill in) and you can give a false name and email address. I will move all future albums to a different service but it would take forever to move the ones up there now....

You can still see the

I've just been informed by ego surfing Canadian Vicky that she couldnt see her photos. Yup, Ofoto has changed their policy. You can still click on individual photos, but to be able to see whole albums the way I currently have it set up, you now you have to register with Ofoto. I will be changing the way I present the whole albums in the next day or so. So to see the whole albums either

So when I last left you I was getting off the back of a pick-up truck after a hellish 9 hour journey on what passes for a road in Cambodia. I promised my self many times the next few days that I will now pay up for the plane tickets if the road is that bad! After getting jarred half to death we got to Siem Reap. At one point in the journey the "road" is totally flooded. Stuck truckers

So I'm supposed to get to this as often as I can but yet again it's been weeks. And then I'm delayed. So for instance I wrote the Bangkok section in Phnom Phen, but hadn't yet got to the Cambodia section, and yet now I've been in Vietnam for a week or so.

What I can tell you is that I have millions of photos of Ankor Wat and other temples up.
I also have some here of Phnom Phen, not for the

oops

Bangkok – Quite a place Bangkok. I was due to meet two friends from California in BK. One was Joel Tornatore, who I'd seen recently before leaving. The other was longhaired Irish git Dave Russell who had flown in from Nepal specially to see us. Or at least he thought he would, then Maoist rebels in Nepal trapped him, then all of a sudden I was at the airport in Bangkok looking hopelessly for

So it's been a while--Sorry to those of you waiting urgently by the computer for the next gripping installment. Mostly I've been lying on the beach and drinking at night. So not as gripping a story as some of what's been going on in the past. A few nice day trips here and there, a few days with JB, Rebecca and Clova from Singapore in Phuket (bottom left of this map) and a few wild nights out

Just a quickie--Still on Ko PhaNgan, Had a great dive today courtesy of Fredi, Daniel and Heike at Haad Yao Divers at the SailRock mid way between Ko Pha Ngan and Ko Tao. Tonight is the Full Moon party, so we'll see how I survive! The other news is that the full set from Malaysia is up, and you can re-read it (in the unlikely event that you read it already!) with active links in the previous

So I'm now in Thailand, the blur of Malaysia having passed me by. I started in the town of Melaka, where as I mentioned, cadging a lift home off two Russian gymnastics coaches (rhythmic, not artistic, please) turned into an all night drinking session. As the beers flowed Vera (the rope specialist) kept on explaining to me in more and more slurred broken English that she was upset that everyone

OK so all the photos from India are finally up and in the text. So you can all go back and re-read the blogs to now and click on the multitudionous links to see what I saw (or more or less). If you are too lazy to do that, you can instead click on anyone of these
Getting there and Delhi
Jaipur
Jaisalmer
Camel Safari in Thar desert
Jodphur
Tiger hunting in Sariska
Agra, Taj Mahal, Agra Fort,

Civilization regained and soon to be lost.

So apart from sitting in the luxury of Eliot Fisk's amazing apartment --this is the view and watching a few DVDs, I did bugger all in Honkers. I did take a tram all the way to the pool, but it was closed. It was a similar story in Singapore, where apart from an intellectual lunch with Mun-Kew Leung's colleagues at the Lab for information science--one of

Sept 29--All India is pretty rough but Agra really tries your patience. There are endless attempts to sell you chess sets, necklaces, anything made of marble, and anything else that moves. By now I had lost patience with rip-off rickshaw drivers, and aggressive hawkers, and I managed to really lose my temper a few times. It didn't help, but I felt better!

The big things to see are the Taj Mahal

So we awoke after a remarkably good nights sleep in Jodphur, which is halfway back towards Jaipur. Jodphur has a HUGE fort in the center and alot of blue-washed houses around it. After minimal, in fact (remarkably for India) no, haggling, we got a guide to show us around the fort, which is itself a stiff 15 minute uphill walk from the town. He was happy to tell us that he owned 7 racing camels

This is a continuation of my second week in India....It covers Sept 20th to about the 25th
(no pics yet, but they will appear soon)

Jaisalmer is a magical city of only 10,000 on the hills of a big fort in the middle of the Thar desert. It's about 100 miles from Pakistan. It used to be on the main spice and opium routes and was once very rich. What's unusual about this fort is that you can live

I'm next to the Taj Mahal, having been sidelined away from my planned route by a general strike to protest the terrorist action in Gujarat. I just wanted to post my overriding impression of India which is men shouting at me, usually "Hello friend", but quite often "Unda-tek-er!" This is roof that satellite TV is the greatest force on the planet. I'd never heard of him but this guy apparently

Jodphur--So the tavels and travails of being a blogger in India continue. I wrote a long piece this morning, and as I was going to save it, the town had a power cut. The store had an uninteruptable supply, but not attached to the computer I was working on! So all lost--great art needing to be recreated. (My god I'm writing Indian English!)

India, or more accurately Rajasthan:
I feel like

This is more of an observational than a news piece, hopefully some of these will crop up in my blog from time to time

London, 13 years on

I left London 13 years ago and apart from a couple of weeks in 1990, I haven't been here for more than a day or two between trips since, until this year. I've now spent four days in London twice this summer and I've been fairly astonished by some of the

So I left San Francisco following an emotional goodbye to my physical therapists Nicki, and Devin (Laura wasn't there for her picture), and a fairly wild night out at the Thirsty Bear (pictures right-click here). After a smooth trip in business class--getting my reward for all those changes at O'Hare in the 1990's--including a brief time sitting next to a model (sadly the overnight part when we

I'm now doing tutorials for James and Shawn. Shawn (that's a she) just came back from 5 years in China (so she says!) and she really cares about my backpack and my lack of a collapsable duffle bag--I spent 2 hours at REI today and still no resolution! James just wants to find out what a computer can do for him. James has a website for his company Western states teleport. They both owe me big

So it's really happening, I'm really going away for a long time (well until 2003). So none of you have to put up with me till then other than reading this thing. No chance of it actually being updated before I get to the UK.

So to say goodbye THIS MONDAY SEPT 2 I'm buying tapas and a beer or two at the Thirsty Bear, 661 Howard Street San Francisco, B/W 2nd and 3rdstreet. I'll be there from 6

Suddenly I'm leaving in 10 days and there appears to be no time to do everything I need to get done, done. Of course that means, finish off insurance negotiations for the knee (ongoing,-- will write that essay sometime), for car (form got sent to the wrong place by the claims guy), deal with getting stuff into storage, out of storage, getting my phone switched off, trying to figure out why the

Quickie update. I had an article published on my eHealth dotcom experience on California Healthcare Foundation's iHealthBeat site. It went up sometime late on Friday and I only found out because I had 5 emails about it this morning.

I'm also readying plans to be in England, which mostly means watching the Chelsea v Newcastle game on September 14. Chelsea won their first game this season at

Alrighty then. Last night I booked the ticket on American. I've used all of my frequent flyer miles. The route is fixed-ish but the dates are flexible. I go to the UK on Sept 4-5, off to Delhi (India) on Sept 16, then to Singapore on Sept 29. After that I get lost in SE Asia, hoping to do Malaysia, bit of Thailand, Burma, more Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, or some variant of that. Then

I'm trying a new approach. I'm moving the News and Gossip part of the personal site to Blogger. So this should make it easier for me to post regular updates and also to save me some time. So you might want to set your bookmark to to http://matthewholt.blogspot.com/ Thanks!

August 3, 2002: I survived my birthday. It was quite a serious affair and very arty. Or more accurately, I managed