Wandering Jon

Jon Brown's take on travel, photography, technology and WordPress.

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My Favorite Place on Earth

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One question I get asked all the time when talking about my travels is “What’s your favorite place?”

There honestly a lot of favorites, but there is one place I hold above all others. I found it on my very first trip to Asia thanks to my circus/fire friends I met along the way of that first trip. In fact for me, that favorite place is a place within a place, it’s a very specific few square feet at a restaurant on the rocks perched between three idyllic bays.

I’ve returned to that very spot many times over the last 10 years and it’s slowly changed.

No Roads (2007)

On my first visit there in January of 2007 there were two ways to make it to these beaches. One, the one everyone takes, is a 15 minute ride in a long tail boat. When the ocean was calm, this was no problem, but regularly the ocean is not-calm and occasionally it was far too rough for the boats from Haad Rin to even try. The alternative route was a 2 hour hike in the jungle on a un-maintained trail. Very few took the later, unless left no other option and there was no road.

The mythical road (2013)

Years later a “4×4 only” road started getting cut through the jungle. Motorcycles at first could make it and then very adventurous Jeeps. It wasn’t used regularly though and certainly wasn’t open to the public. Only those that owned the bungalow operations along the beach used it, and even then it was regularly too muddy for any vehicle to make it though. The boats were still how everyone got in and out, and how nearly everything THING from food to building materials got in and out. At this point the road was still half myth and many people hoped it would never become commonly usable.

The Road (2014)

Today the steepest and worst parts of the road have been paved, although it’s still only passable by high clearance 4×4 vehicles and not open to the public. There is a 4×4 pickup truck taxi service that operates making daily trips in and out. Perhaps the only good thing is there is at least now competition with the boats which had more than tripled in price over the years.  Now it’s 200-300THB for either the boat or the truck, which is a bit lower than the last days of the boats being the only option. The bad is more people, more all-night parties, more trash…

The times they are a-changin…

The location iss on Haad Yuan, Haad Tian and Haad Why-Nam beaches on Ko Pha-Ngan, Thailand. I said there was a specific place there though, and it’s a table (two really) at Bamboo Hut restaurant. It’s a place where I can sit while eat the most delicious pumpkin curry, drinking mocha or mango shakes, work or gaze out onto the beautiful sra for hours. 10 years ago this spot even had “wi-fi”. Wi-fi is in quotes because back then it was a connection grabbed by a 64 Kbps connection grabbed by a dish antenna (find it in the photo). That connection was shared by everyone that could get on, imagine 10 people sharing a single 1980’s dial-up connection that frequently just stopped working for hours at a time. Fun! Now, you can get a decent 3G cellphone signal and tether to your own connection. Some providers I think now even hit the spot with 4G/LTE although that’s spotty. Still my favorite place… but I’m looking for a new place, one like this one was 10 years ago 😀

My favorite part about people asking me this question of my favorite place though is finding out about where their favorite place is and why… So!

Where is your favorite place? Why is it special to you?

Travel Pro Tip: Ask to get moved forward when flight delayed

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Frequent flyer pro tip: If your flight is delayed and you have a tight connection don’t be shy about walking up to the counter and asking for seat closer to the front of the plane.

Today I’m flying to Los Angeles (LAX) from WordCamp US in Philadelphia (PHL), via Chicago (ORD). If I could have avoided flying through Chicago in the winter without spending a fortune to do it, I would have… but today I couldn’t avoid it.

I did two things smart in booking this flight.

First, I made sure there was a later flight between ORD>LAX, just in case there was a weather delay in either PHL or ORD. However, it’s worth noting I already know that flight is full so of little use, still better to know it exists this time of year.

Second, when the inbound flight (coming to PHL from ORD) announced a delay I promptly went up to the gate counter and based on the fact that I was sitting in row 32 and that my 1 hour 30 minute layover in ORD was now was going to be closer to 30 minutes with a terminal change if they’d kindly move me to a row closer to “the front of the plane”. Nobody wants anyone to miss a flight and United graciously moved me forward to 7B, which while a middle seat, is an economy plus bulkhead head seat. I hate middle seats, but this is still loads better than standard economy.  In rare instances this will even result getting a free upgrade to 1st class.  Here however all I really want to to still make my connection in ORD.

Keep your fingers crossed for me, boarding flight UA 451 now.

 

TripAdvisor has destroyed the world with hyperbole

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While this opinion has long been stewing about everything from WordPress plugin reviews to Amazon and Ebay seller reviews where anything less than a 5 stars is seen as failure, this is what really triggered it.

The Best Mexican Food in Seminyak

Once upon a time we would leaf through Lonely Planet where we travelers would read fairly unbiased and neutral reviews of places on tourist trail. Granted, that missed a lot of things both due to the time to print, as well as the practical limits of page count, but at least back then what you read had some credibility.

Then the internet happened

People discovered online that they could publish their own reviews of all the places they’ve been and share their experience with other people, how wonderful! Only, after a very short time the peoples of the internet also learned that everywhere from the comments section on yahoo news post to review sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor and more that there were a lot of other people expressing their opinions of things as well. Somehow they all decided that the best way to get heard over the noise was to be as extreme as possible in their speaking.

So if I were to review TripAdvisor like one of its reviewers would, I’d say “TripAdvisor is the absolute worst website on the internet for travelers. Everyone that writes review on it either has no idea what they’re talking about or is just incapable of providing an honest useful review. Avoid it like the plague really you could die from just reading it!”

A fair and thorough review of the “Best Mexican [food] in Seminyak”

For two people who love mexican food the food at Chara, the subject of the above review, is good. However, I can not conceive of universe in which this restaurant and it’s food could be considered 5 stars “excellent” in anyone’s book. Frankly, 4 stars “Very Good” would be a stretch for both the restaurant as well as the food it serves, but at least then I could sit with “well they enjoyed it more than me” instead of “what can they possible be thinking?”

Maybe, in a bubble of space that ignores the world outside Seminyak and outside Bali, but reviews on site like this should not ignore the outside world.  The star/circle/point ratings aren’t “relative to what’s available next door”, they’re based on your sum total of experience or shouldn’t they be?

Signs Eat Well, Travel Often
A very cute set of signs at Chara that certainly resonates with us

Having visited every Mexican food restaurant in and around Seminyak, including Chara multiple times. I’d say that Lacalaca is actually “the best Mexican [food] in Seminyak”. That’s doesn’t really say much considering the size of and location of Seminyak, but none the less I’m really fine with either earning the title of “Best Mexican in Seminyak”. Neither Chara nor Lacalaca however warrants 5 stars “Excellent, OMG one of the best meals I’ve had”. That’s not an insult, that’s reality for anyone that’s ever had a delicious meal at least once in their lives.

Lacalaca has some delicious fish tacos with flavors that suggest some care went into balancing them. In my book I could and did stretch things give Lacalaca 4 stars, even though there were at least a couple of meals we had there that were only average.  Chara however was never better than 100’s of other mexican restaurants I’ve happily eaten at and forgotten.

Crowdsourcing data needs to be smarter

Crowdsourcing reviews doesn’t serve the readership when the highest rating is essentially the default from which to lose stars/points only for gross deficiencies. Systems need to exist to moderate reviewers all or nothing mentality unless your only giving them an all or nothing choice.

TripAdvisor, and the most popular of review sites like it I think are beyond hope. Nothing short of resetting everything and changing their scoring systems would really help.

The one exception I’ve found in this sea of useless untrustworthy reviews is Foursquare. On Foursquare you simple say Good, Neutral, Bad. Then, as I understand it, 4sq actually does some artificial intelligence processing of your comments pulling out key words including positive or negative speech to formulate its 0-10 rating as well as it’s tags and filtering. This, I think, is why I find there ratings and filtering so much better than TripAdvisor’s. Plus it’s a smaller pool of reviewers that seem more savvy and to care more.

How about you?