Kurt Johnson

Our updated itinerary for the next few months:

March: Japan

• 3/3-3/11 with a group from Wharton, mostly in Kyoto and Tokyo.  Done

Late April & May: Southeast Asia 

• Thailand (April 25-May 4)
• Laos (May 4-10)
• Cambodia (May 10-13)
• Southern Vietnam (May 14-30); Nha Trang, Dalat, Saigon, etc. Right now we're not planning to go anywhere north of Hoi An.

Early June: China

• Beijing and surroundings (May 30-June 4)
• Tibet (June 6-14) 

Late June & Early July: Germany to Africa

• Germany (June 15-20)
• Tanzania (June 21-30)
• South Africa (June 30-July ?13?)
• Tunisia (6 days)

Hopefully we're going to have friends or contacts in some of these places so we're not just following in the ruts of other tourists.  Although we would like to visit India (esp. Sikkim) I think the summer trip is getting pretty long already so we'll try to do a separate trip to India before too long.

The AirTrain at JFK airport cost $1.9 billion to build.  The new Chinese railway to Lhasa cost $3.8 billion to build.  Both took 5 years.

The Airtrain comprises 10 stations and 13km of track.  The Lhasa railway comprises 44 stations and 1,142km of track including 160km of bridges (675 bridges, mostly for areas with permafrost).  Additionally the Lhasa railway was built in extreme conditions include the highest altitude of any railway on earth (>5,000m) and sustained an 8.1 magnitude earthquake in 2001.

On a per-kilometer basis the NYC railroad is about 45x as expensive ($146m per km vs $3.2m per km). Without claiming that the cost figures are directly comparable or even accurate, it is mind-boggling to me how expensive it is to get a public project done in NYC; spend a couple of minutes trying to rationalize spending 146 million dollars per 1,000 meters of track in Queens.  It is equally impressive to think about how the Chinese mobilized 20,000+ workers and pushed out the frontier of civil engineering in such a massive way in only a few years.

Sourced from Wikipedia: Qingzang Railway, AirTrain JFK 

 Note that I've commented many of the photos so you can tell what's going on.

• Cusco
• Sacred Valley
• Inca Trail and Machu Picchu
• Puno and Lake Titicaca

Inspired by this 1.5 gigapixel image I tried to play around with some stitched panoramas on my trip to Peru.  You can click on the image to download the large (11 megabyte, 45 megapixel) file.

 Taken near the Temple of the Condor.

Further evidence that I am a pathological collector of gadgets; the chart below shows the altitude recorded by the GPS unit I got for Christmas.  The unit, a Garmin Foretrex 101, is cheap (~$70), easy to pocket, and logs 10,000 data points that can be downloaded via serial cable; my only beef is that there is no native USB support.  After downloading the datapoints with G7ToWin I use RoboGeo to sync the GPS tracklog with my photos and stamp GPS coordinates into each photo's EXIF headers. 

It's official: I've accepted a full time offer at the same firm I spent last summer with.  We are planning to be back in Dallas starting in late July / early August 2007.

I'm back in one piece despite the airline's best attempts to delay me (32 hour trip home).  I will try to put up some comments on the trip and more photos as time permits. 

Woman posing for a photo in front of the incredible Inca masonry at Sacsaywaman (aka Sacsayhuaman).  Rocks weighing 120+ tons were quarried 2km away and worked into irregular shapes with only a few millimeters of tolerance at each joint.  The resulting stonework requires no mortar and fits snugly together to survive even powerful earthquakes.

See EXIF and GPS data plus an aerial view