Dave & Meredith's Travel Blog

A quick note to say greetings from the island of Kauai where we have been since Monday. The flights from Mongolia to here were uneventful and we’ve enjoyed the last 6 days here using the town of Kapa’a as our home base to explore. We’ll describe what we did here in a separate post. Tomorrow (Sunday) afternoon, we fly to the Big Island for 6 more nights.

One post we typically do once we’ve left a destination is a list of unexpected things. We struggled a bit to come up with this list for Mongolia because we knew so little about what to expect that, in a sense, we were ready for almost anything. That said, there were a few surprises:

• 3 locals mentioned the Celtics when we said we were from Boston. Apparently basketball is a popular sport here. They even knew that the Celtics had a great year this year. “World Champions!” said a Mechanical Engineering student going to school in UlaanBaatar.
• I thought for sure that one or both of us would get sick from the food we ate in locals’ gers, especially since most was served in a communal bowl and passed around. But there were no problems.
• The Gobi Desert is more semi-desert than what many think of. Yes, there are giant sand dunes and arid places but most of it (at least what we saw) was covered in a very low scrub that from a distance looked more green than brown.
• We thought we would see more wildlife in general on the trip, but especially in the Gobi. In the end, we saw two ibex in the distance but only as two dots on a hillside. Bummer.

Finally, a quick technical note/aside: I’ve always thought I was encoding Windows (WMV) video incorrectly when I post a video because, when it downloads, it doesn’t stream, i.e. you have to download the whole thing before it starts to play. The QuickTime videos always streamed properly. Then the other night on a whim I tried downloading the WMV video in Internet Explorer and it streamed just fine. A little Googling around and it turns out that the issue is that the Firefox browser doesn’t stream WMV out of the box. Microsoft makes a plug-in for Firefox to correct this that I’ve tested just fine. If you use Firefox on Windows and want to stream WMV’s (not just mine), you may want to install this: http://port25.technet.com/pages/windows-media-player-firefox-plugin-download.aspx (this is a Microsoft site).

– Dave