View My Travels in a larger map

This is a map of all the places I have been in the world.  The map lists cities, but just as a general overview, I have been to 5 out of the 7 continents, totaling 24 countries to date.  Below I will just talk about my backpacking travels, though I travel more on top of that for conferences or general visits.  Click on the cities marked above and you can see small small comments that I make about that place.  Make sure to check out some pictures of my travels!

Japan 2003:

This is the first time I ever backpacked anywhere.  Since grade 9, my friends Bryan Chou, Andrew Chen, and I really wanted to go to Japan.  Not sure why… but we really wanted to go.  We even started taking Japanese lessons from a tutor in preparation!

After we made our money from doing IYA, we were finally able to go in 2003.  We flew from Vancouver to Tokyo and arrived sometime in the afternoon.  We only stayed one night in Tokyo (and it rained that night) before heading to Mt. Fuji.  We wanted to see the sunrise on Mt. Fuji, so we climbed at night… without sleeping before because we were so excited.  Needless to say, we crawled our way to the top after 7 hours (one hour of which we paid $10 to sleep in a bunk bed).

Next, we headed west to the countryside province of Tottori, where we saw temples on hard-to-access mountains and experienced amazing hospitality.  We then headed down south to Shikoku, where we learned to make noodles and how to survive without travel guide materials (we forgot info for this portion of the trip back at home…).  By the way, all this time we had a JR (Japan Rail) pass, so we could take the bullet trains and whatever we desired as often as we wanted to.

The last leg of the trip involved Shodoshima – the Hawaii of Japan, Kyoto – where old meets new, and Osaka – where we ate and shopped and enjoyed our last moments in Japan.  After, we flew from Osaka to Taipei, Taiwan, and we went to go volunteer in the mountainous regions of Taiwan for a local hospital.

This trip was definitely very memorable.  Not only for us three, but people started to know us as the three kids that made their own money and traveled for 18 days through Japan and Taiwan.  It spurned something within us that continues to this day.