The Travel Tales of Julia Sheldon

My goal was to get to 30 countries by my 30th birthday. I had a plan for 2018 of how to make this happen:  I would go to an island near Australia with my friend from Philippines in July when we both had some time, and then go to a different island for my 30th in October. But then I had to return to Canada from Australia in April and leave Aus for good in September, and my dear friend had lots of work travel on the go so we simply could not make our travel plans work. Luckily, my friends decided to go to Fiji in February and invited me along, so that was Country 29. And then in July, once I knew I'd be back in Canada as of mid-September, I set out recruiting people to join me on a 30th birthday trip in the Caribbean somewhere. I did a whole bunch of research on good deals at all-inclusives vs. rented apartments vs. hostels, and cool things to do in a week, and weather patterns (read: hurricane season), and eventually settled on Aruba. Originally, there were 6 people who sai...

August 1: Jakarta Since we arrived at the hostel at 2am, we slept until about 11. We grabbed brunch at Cheesecake Factory, which did not look anything like in The Big Bang Theory, and then walked to the closest mall so I could get my haircut. Niken showed up! She was the Indonesian leader from last summer's Step Up in Ottawa, where I was staff. She took us to the Jakarta Cathedral, beside the largest mosque in Southeast Asia, and it just happened to be the Asian Youth Conference so it was full of Christian teens from all over Asia. Neat! This is especially interesting because Indonesia is a Muslim country. We went to Jakartakota, the old Dutch downtown, for dinner and wandered through a market along the bus transitway for a bit. The Dutch left Indonesia in the 1950s, so there is a LOT of influence here. August 2: Jakarta I had an awful migraine so spent the entire day in bed. Pod beds are great for avoiding a lot of noise and having relative darkness even...

May 16: Phong Nha at Gecko Hostel. We arrived at 4am, slept for 2.5 hours, and woke up to have some breakfast and get picked up for an INCREDIBLE tour to Paradise Cave and Dark Cave. Huge thanks to Phong Nha Discovery Tour and our guide, Sunny. She really was smiley all day long despite the rain, and so funny! We first walked through forests and rain to a waterfall in the Botanical Gardens. Paradise Cave was discovered by a farmer in 2005, found largely by accident. Seems he saw a hole, tried to get in and made it about 10m down before realizing that it was huge and he couldn't see anything. The British Cave Research Association and Hanoi University began mapping out the cave system and made it tourist-accessible for only 1km of the 31km as of 2010. It's called Paradise because the temperature, somehow, doesn't change; it's 20-22 degrees all year round. I actually found it quite chilly, since we walked up the mountain in the pouring rain. We were given an hour ...