My Mac's Christmas present...

Thank you Apple. I have had my Powerbook for 15 months now and I'd like to give you an update on it...

The impish nature of your product fist came to light when the power adaptor stopped working just a few months from new. Oh the fun I had trying to get a new one while in Mongolia as even with Applecare (costing a few hundred quid) you couldn't find a way to send one out to me. Surfing your support forum I felt a warm glow that I had joined a select group of Apple users - actually not that select, there were loads of them, and I was only admitted as a junior (it was my first power-adaptor to go kaput, not my 3rd, 4th, 5th...)

I think next was the DVD burner - what you so amusingly call a 'super'-drive. One day it just point-blank refused to burn DVDs anymore. The entertainment of buying a new type of DVD every time I went to a computer shop and then the suspense of seeing if it would work or not continued for months. My coaster collection is now the envy of my friends and I’ve even had to start giving them away to the local taxi drivers so they can dangle them from the rear-view mirror and blind-themselves with reflections at hilariously critical moments. My DVD drive problem entitled me to join another not-so-select group on the apple support forum who had all had 'super'-drives; I think you should rename that branch the “Coaster Club” in honor or all the people who didn’t know they were beta-testers.

Moving along a couple of months and I was now in Kazakhstan. Yep, the land of Borat and copper-line modem dial-ups. Ho, ho, ho (well it is Christmas), the joyous time I spent trying to connect to a local ISP was increased ten-fold due to the speaker on the laptop's modem not working. Was the line engaged, was my ISP not answering, had I got a crossed line with Borislav as he discussed this year’s water mellon harvest with the Central Committee? I guess I’ll just never know and will miss out on corning the Kazak mellon-futures, at least for this year.

And finally, to seal 2006, you gave me the best present at all. Did you know I had time on my hands and was rapidly running out of books to read? Trying to recover the data from my hard-drive has been a most enjoyable challenge, I must thank you all for giving me a puzzle that was so complicated it took several days to solve. Not including any software in the OS that could deal with the failure was a brilliant step as it took me several extra hours to find, download and run a program that would recover the data.

However, despite all the fun I’ve had with my Mac I think it’s time we took a break from one another for a while (this will probably be enforced by the amount of time I hear Applecare takes to turn around repairs). When the laptop does come back I think it will be time to grow-up and get a serious computer. One that has parts that aren’t cutting-edge but will, hopefully, work for at least a couple of years before they give up the ghost.

Thankfully I still have my trusty work laptop. It’s a Prostar, not very common as you get them put together to spec rather than off the shelf. It weights a ton, the fans wail like a banshee, and it’s made of a very boring grey plastic. It has traveled with me for over 10,000 km off-road in Mongolia and for at least 200 hrs of vibrating around in the back of a Mi8 helicopter. It’s been used at +35 Celcius and stored at -30 C. It’s a year older than my Powerbook but it still works. Every single bit of it (right, back-up now just in case…).

Happy Christmas.

Garmin and Mac, GPS and Google Earth

Well, back on the 10th Jan Garmin announced that it's GPS software products would be compatible with mac computers by the end of 2006. I found a Garmin 'blog' site the other day here and asked them if their developers' Christmas bonus were dependent on that, as with only a few days to go it's doesn't look promising... Obviously the criticism didn't go down well as my post never materialised.

Searching the rest of their site I then found a later press release from 27th Jun 2006 which admitted that only one of GPS software products "Training Centre" would be up and running (pardon the pun) by the end of 2006 and further announcements would then follow regarding the release date of other Garmin GPS software.

Sorry guys, sounds like you paid lip service to mac users earlier in the year without having finalised a realistic project time-line; either that or just slacking off. As your site says, the Arizona office, where mac compatible software is being developed, "is also an ideal place for us to test and use Garmin devices while biking, hiking, and geocaching." Hmm, more time needed in the office maybe?

Anyhow. Garmin software will be overtaken by 3rd-party translation software fairly soon. Why do I say this? Two words, that should shake the fear of god into Garmin, Google Earth, which I'll call GE from now on to save my fingers. GE uses a simple code language to put points on Google's 3D globe of the earth that is already well stocked with satellite images, maps, roads etc and is all available for gratis after downloading a and installing a small program file. (As an aside Google managed to roll-out a mac version of GE within less than a year of the PC version becoming popular...) Google calls uses a language called KML (keyhole mark-up) to put points on the GE globe but this language uses XML convention grammar and files which can be edited in a simple text editor (if you haven't heard of XML then just pretend it is similar to HTML, used to write web-pages, if you haven't heard of HTML then you can give up now...). Googles explanation of KML can fe found here and if you haven't yet discovered GE then get the program from here.

I haven't done a huge search on the topic, but once you have GE on a mac you just need a program that will download points from your GPS and save them in kml format to see them in a glorious full-colour world. Up till now I've been using MacGPS Pro to do this, a program available for around 50 bucks here. So far this program gets data out of your GPS and into KMZ format for GE but has issues up-loading points saved from GE in KMZ format. (Don't worry, kmz files are only kml (and therefore xml) files in a compressed format, see my previous post for how to uncompress and examine them using Excel.)

So, the last step of the puzzle is how to get points out of GE and back into a GPS. I suspect there are copyright issues involved, storage of data in a digital medium etc etc that have slowed Google's development of this, or are they just being leaned on my the GPS manufactures who see their own market for selling digital mapping products vanish in a puff of smoke?

Brrrr…

Complete luxury today – it’s so cold outside I’m sitting here in trousers and a jumper. According to the nearby weather station (Near Asoke/Soi Cowboy) it dropped to 18.3 Celsius early this morning. UB is reading minus 24 and smokey… Choice A or choice B?

Yesterday evening saw a large fire just down the street. I think it was in an area with detached residences and it must have destroyed at least a couple of properties so someone will not be having a very merry Christmas. It shut down the power to the block and fire-crews closed down the roads on either side, including a major N-S link road passing the Queen Sirikit conference center and Benjakiti Park up to Asoke BTS. The fire was close enough that at one point where we were gathering up ‘irreplaceables’ just in case the wind changed. Fortunately we are travelling light so we could fit cameras and some back-up hard-drives in a shoulder bag and disappear to dinner, narrowly avoiding being rundown by some moterbike-mounted fire-crews on the way.

Bah, humbug

Don't the Bangkok Thai's get peed-off at the creeping Christmas time invasion of Christianity into their lives?

As I walked along the skywalk between Siam and Chidlom yesterday I was almost deafened by Christmas songs being blared out of speakers every 25m along the way. Is this purely commercial marketing or a not too subtle attempt by the god-squad to infiltrate a Buddhist country on the sly?

Foodland, a 24-hr grocery chain, should also be sent to the court of the Thai Ministry of Culture (if they have one) - guilty of playing Christmas songs sung by a bunch of 5 year olds. I may have to stop buying groceries for the next few weeks just to avoid Class 3b's rendition of Frosty the Snowman.

And even worse, the rare Christmas puddings that were on the shelves a week ago can now only be bought as part of a Christmas hamper... Any Thai's reading who don't know what to do with that little red plastic tub hiding under the bottle of Jonnie Walker black can get in touch…

More on traveling through Mongolia and hiring jeeps...

A post I recently put on Lonely Planet's thorn tree branch for Mongolia, the discussion was started by taking about vehicle fuel use...

Hi riccardo,

hadn't seen your reply to the other post - very good info and fairly spot on, looks like we are thinking along the same lines, other than that I love those "worthless, arid, dusty flat and huge place" - there aren't too many of them left in the world that you can drive across like in the Gobi...

You were very lucky getting away uninjured if your jeep rolled. Driving if the biggest safety issue in Mongolia as medical assistance in the remote areas is absolutely zero. My medical insurance rates Mongolia with the same current risk as for Iraq and Afghanistan… There are only a limited number of helicopters in the country (4 or 5 available as commercial hire) and these are often out on fishing tours in the summer. Even worse is that they have to get permission from a government/military authority before flying - last year my company wanted to arrange a medical evacuation of a driver who had rolled his vehicle and was in a coma, the authority 'decided' a helicopter evacuation wasn't necessary and wouldn't give the pilots permission to fly. We had to send a local doctor out to the countryside and the casualty was brought to UB a few days later, where he eventually died.

Even if you can get permission for a helicopter evacuation (and your health insurance will pay the cost, currently around 2200 USD per hour's flight time) it takes a helicopter about 2.5 hours to get from UB to near Yolyn Am and another 2.5 hrs to get back to UB (so over 10,000 USD), where medical facilities are still fairly poor and you’ll probably just be stabalised before needing a international medivac to Beijing or further. Basically, if you are in a critical condition in a remote part of Mongolia (say an open fracture of the femur or anything else that causes a huge blood loss and shock) YOU WILL PROBABLY DIE - no questions asked, do not pass go, do not collect 200 quid

I personally know of two other vehicle rolls last year where people died. In one, the foreign passenger was sleeping when the vehicle rolled and woke up next to his dead driver. Another vehicle roll killed 5 local guys from a mining company in a single accident.

I think anyone planning a long jeep or van journey around Mongolia should add on a week at the start of their trip to find a good driver and jeep. Do some day trips out from UB to Terelj or Khustai as a test run to see if you get along with the driver, his driving is safe and his vehicle doesn’t break down all the time. The time you spend doing this will make a huge difference to the enjoyment of a 2-week trip and possibly to your health for years to come.

Moving on… General advice for ‘independent’ travellers in Mongolia…

People who suggest that tourist should not worry about things like over-reporting fuel use or paying for drivers ‘accommodation’ when they sleep in the back of the van anyway are not helping the areas they visit. Mongolian was a closed county 15 years ago and people are still learning how to deal with an open society and an open-market economy. Not all tourist companies have experience or knowledge of the world outside Mongolia (say, how a backpacker hostel should be run) and many are learning what they can ‘get away with’ as they go along. Same with the drivers, where siphoning off a bit of petrol every now and then is a rite handed down from father to son…

How do people think they are helping when they accept being ripped-off because ‘the people are so poor’ anyway? This encourages tour companies and drivers to lie, steal and cheat rather than provide a good service. If you do get good service then make sure it is rewarded somehow – possibly not via cash but with something useful (do you really need to carry that sleeping bag back to Europe/N America? How about giving it to the driver who drove you safely, at a reasonable pace, for the last one or two weeks? And tell him why you are giving it to him.)

Staying at local gers is another delicate issue. If your driver rolls up to a ger and lets you know that you will be spending the night there and it will cost 5USD then he has probably been there before, knows the family, and the family will be used to seeing him with passengers and getting paid for it (probably 2 USD out of the 5 you give the driver). Don’t start feeling sorry for the family and giving out food/money/gifts – they have accepted you as a commercial guest.

If, however, your driver is obviously lost, eventually finds a ger as the sun is setting, goes in, and then comes out saying you can stay for the night, it is probably a family he has never met before and who are not used to ‘paying guests’ – the true hospitable nomad… Be very suspicious if the driver then says ‘5 USD per person’ and wants to collect it from you to give to the family. Make sure you pass the money over yourself. Also consider cooking your own food (and offering to share it with the family). If the ger is in a really remote area then a gift such as a kilo of flower, a bag of salt or sugar will probably be appreciated. Other good gifts are pencils and note-books for children. Please don’t give out batteries as some guide-books suggest – they only end up being thrown out when they are dead.

Whoa, that went on for a little longer than expected…

Long live the King

Today is the 79th birthday oh the King of Thailand. Many happy returns if you happen to be reading…

Only in Mongolia - State Sponsored Terrorism

Unbelievable but true...

A MIAT flight from Dalanzadgad to UB was apparently held up by 2 passengers who pulled out pistols upon landing at UB airport last week. Some people were tied up but it all ended peacefully, the only casualties being a lady who received cuts on her face and lips and one person who was taken to hospital due to high blood pressure.

Unbeknownst to the passengers or flight crew this was a planned test of counter-terrorism measures with the “hijackers” being members of the Mongolian General Intelligence Agency (GIA). According to the UB Post newspaper the GIA acknowledged they had been asked by the Civil Aviation Authority of Mongolia (CAA) to test security without alerting any other party of the exercise.

You can see the original story on the UB Post’s website here

Can you believe these guys? Is the ignorance, arrogance, naivety or a general combination of all three? This just goes to show how little contact with the outside world Mongolian officials still have. Luckily for the GIA and CAA there was only apparently one foreigner on the plane, a Japanese national. Imagine the scene if there had been a group of American, British, or Israeli tourists on the flight who were familiar with stories of hijacking via the global media. They may have thought it worth taking matters into their own hands. The Americans would at least have attempted to sue the shit out of the CAA for setting up such a stupid stunt and causing mental trauma – and for once I’d be inclined to support the mentally traumatised party.

Mongolian jeep trip fuel use - a random post...

Russian jeeps and vans - fuel use.

Just reading some posts on another travel website and it seems people are getting ripped-off with buying petrol on their jeep trips...

Russian vans and jeeps if well maintained should both average around 15 L / 100 km on a long jeep trip when mixing driving on asphalt, flat dirt-tracks and rugged areas. Thats 1 L of fuel for 6.6 km on average - use will be more in rugged areas but balanced by better efficiency in flat areas (or when the driver turns the engine off and coasts downhill...). Surprisingly I've logged almost identical fuel use in Toyota Landcruisers in Mongolia (4.6 L diesel engines).

Drivers can easily fool you with how much fuel they are using as both the vans and jeeps have 2 fuel tanks and the fuel gauges rarely work. If you are paying for the gas ask your driver fill up both tanks to full when you are leaving town. Then, allways fill up both tanks every time you refuel and keep a tally of the number of litres and the kilometres on the odometer (but the latter can be out by up to 10% if the jeep/van has non-factory wheels/tyres).

Random point of interest:
Russian jeeps have 2 fuel tanks of 39 L each
Russian vans have a 56 L main tank and a 30 L sub-tank
A loaded Zyl truck uses 65 L / 100 km...

ATM cards and Big Brother watching you

I used my ATM card once when I got to Thailand a few weeks ago to take out cash. It worked the first time but the next few times I tried it, over several days in various ATM machines it was rejected. I called my bank and they said it had been blocked (not cancelled - don't panic) because they had recorded a single cash withdraw transaction in Thailand, which they regard as a country with high fraud risk.

I've also had credit cards blocked due to first-time use in a new country - it now seems a necessity to notify your bank and creditcard companies about all your travel plans ahead of time. Not content with monitoring you after the event they now want to know about where you are going beforehand. When they say they are monitoring against fraud they try to make you feel like the guilty party - all doubtless in the name of the war on terror? Wonder what would happen if you told them you were going to somewhere dodgy, say Tadjikistan, and were going to make several 5-figure transactions... Would you see people in suites and dark-glasses following you onto the plane? Would you even be allowed onto the plane????

Scary.

web site update

What do you call an old update? Well whatever it is, it has happened to my main website recently with new (?) photos from back in September being added. These were taken in Uzbekistan as part of a study-group trip to see a couple of Central Asia's largest copper and gold mines. Don't worry, the photos aren't of rocks (well, most of them...).

Go look at http://www.geocities.com/thomaspsant/index.htm for the new stuff.

Life in Bangkok continues. Salvation was found yesterday with the discovery of a shop selling Marmite and Arran marmalade. I continue to be amazed at the standard of service here, we had previously used a home delivery service from a shop when buying kitchen stuff but yesterday used the delivery service for groceries. If buying before 2pm delivery is guaranteed between 2.30 and 4 pm, and you can even ask them to deliver your beer and wine cool. All for a minimum purchase of around 15 pounds (about 3 pots of marmite and one marmalade). Can you tell I’ve been living in some pretty ropey places for the last decade?

Back to the blog!

Okay, okay, okay. So I've been totally slack during the last few months and haven't updated much at all. Some of us are just too busy...

After having the break in Thailand in July it was back to Mongolia for a while before heading off to Kazakhstan where I ended up spending a couple of months on and off in a small mining town in the NE of the country. Short transits through Almaty reminded me strongly of Sofia in Bulgaria, though the mountains to the south are a bit more serious than Vitosha. My girlfriend met me on a trip back to the UK in August where we covered around 3000 miles in 10 days catching up with people and then it was back to Kazakhstan for me and Mongolia for her. September found me in Uzbekistan looking at some gold mines on a study-tour and then it was finally back to Mongolia for October.

About a week or two ago Nadia and I moved down to Bangkok where we'll be staying for the next few months until our expected baby makes an entrance and Mongolia warms up a bit after the winter chill (so probably until May then!). That’s assuming that the hospital can extend Nadia’s visa and the change in Thai visa regulation at the start of October don’t effect my multi-entry one.

So, expect some more posts in the near future with more than a hint of red-curry and not a piece of boiled mutton in sight.

10 past 3 in the morning, UB airport, F*****g Air China...

Sitting in UB airport at twenty to three in the morning is not the best start to any trip. The airport was strangely quiet earlier today at a couple of hours before flight time, apart from for Postcard Man – the longest surviving airport ‘employee’. The reason being that the flight had been delayed until eleven that evening, a ten-hour delay. Now call me suspicious but when a airline tells you there is going to be a ten-hour delay on a two-hour flight its generally not a weather or a mechanical issue, especially if exactly the same thing happens a couple of times in a week (people waiting for Air China’s flight to Beijing on the 6th were told the same delay). Nope – this reeks of a scheduled event due to Air China not wanting to change their timetable in the face of reality.

 

So after an afternoon waiting around UB my girlfriend and I duly headed back out to the airport for nine in the evening. Eleven o’clock came and went, which had been the delayed flight time, and shortly afterwards the announced delay had an hour added to it. When the MIAT flight to Seoul, due to leave at half past one in the morning, started to check in before us we could see our time slipping further and further away.

 

And god, was the airport this evening the best ever argument for having a ticket check two kilometres down the road to filter out the extended families coming to say their goodbyes. Groups of teenagers with clothes looking like they fell off the back of an Oxfam Hercules took endless photos of one another on the latest five-hundred dollar mobile phones. One young girl sported a pair of jogging pants with “enter the filly party” written right across her buttocks, that left me pondering for quite a while…Mothers would be fawning over their departing offspring, siblings would be turning away to cry, farther would be stoically standing by, sometimes swaying slightly with the first effects of slightly too much earlier fairwell vodka. Finally, and hour after the Seoul flight had been called, mother (dressed in her best pinstripe with an aging ‘Russian mafia doll’ hairdo and rather too much face-whitener) would realise the little darlins would miss their flight if they didn’t get to the very front of the check-in queue en masse.

 

Anyway (yep, I love starting sentences with that word) After the scrum for the check-in we were spat out through immigration and security to wait for another couple of hours air-side. Finally, at three in the morning they announced the arrival of flight CA901, that would turn around as CA902 and hopefully transport us all down to Beijing. So, a five-thirty arrival in Beijing… should be checking into the hotel at about six to six-thirty in the morning… That was about the time I was planning to wake up from a nice refreshing eight-hour sleep in the luxury of my normal Bangkok Hotel.

 

Thank you Air China. I would be cutting up my frequent-flyer card if it didn’t get me a quick check-in in Beijing. Actually as I never intend to use you again I think the card will face the scissors anyway…

 

T

Now 10 past 3 in UB airport.

Nice weather for ducks

May the 29th, and here in UB we just had a summer blizzard. Rather a
wet one but the hills outside town are covered in snow and the
streets are up to six-inches deep in water. At least one tourist was
seen today jumping over snowy puddles in a pair of shorts, someone
should have warned them the Gobi starts about 300 km to the south...
Down in the Gobi there are dust storms going on with some reported
visibility down to about 10 metres - roll on the summer

Dull tecnical post - Getting Waypoint coordinates out of Google Earth and into a GPS

Sorry for the lack of posts recently. Busy back in Mongolia.

Here is a little something for all you frustrated GoogleEarth + GPS users out there working out how the heck to get GPS waypoints out of the thing…

If you splash the cash of 20USD you can upgrade to Google Earth plus and plug in your GPS, or more usefully open Garmin Mapsource *.mps files into the GE viewer.

“So what” I hear you cry – you still can’t mark up things of interest in GE and get coordinates back out of the darn thing. Maybe the Google Earth Pro at 400USD is the way to go…

I think not!

1 – make your new points in GE. Make sure they are highlighted in the places side-bar. Save them as a GE file *.kmz
2 – rename the kmz file extension to zip. A kmz file is actually only a zip wrapper for the juicy stuff inside
3 – unzip your file, inside will be a file named doc.kml (ok, so I got up till now off the web, but no one seemed to have written-up the following...)
4 – select the doc.kml file and use a right-click to open it using excel
5 – you will get a prompt in excel asking how to open the file, the default is “as a xml list”, go for it
6 – just click ok to the next prompt and bingo, a list of waypoint details.

If you are feeling ready for some pain you can format them into a PCX5 waypoint file format to be read directly by Mapsource or Garmin GPS units, details on the web, somewhere…

The easy way only applies if you have a decent GIS program such as Mapinfo or Arcinfo. Edit the excel file to get the data into Mapinfo as points, export the Mapinfo table as a mif and then use GarFile (shareware download) to get things into your GPS.

Of course the above is all of theoretical interest only - remember folks, the data provided by Google Earth is copyright and storing the actual coordinates of points selected from their data may cause an infringment of the software licence you agreed to for using Google Earth. Mind you, they rely partly on a huge user-community to provide a fair amount of the info anyway, seems unfair not to be able to get waypoints back...