Wanderlust

Photo

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 16:11:13 +0100

Manila

Alona Beach.

view from the taal volcano.

Hanoi, Vietnam.

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 16:08:57 +0100

Kabelsalat.

random train tracks in da city.

Hanoi, Vietnam.

Philippines.

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 16:06:21 +0100

our boat to cross taal lake.

Philippines.

Photo

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 11:00:18 +0100

Halfway through our Dim Sum Dinner :-)

outside PS Café Ann Siang Hill

Petronas Towers, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 10:58:46 +0100

Petronas Towers, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Photo

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 10:57:22 +0100

On top of the world.

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 08:21:45 +0100

On top of the world.

Happy Chinese New Year everyone! Hope y’all ate as much...

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 03:25:56 +0100

Michelle's mum, me, mich, jeremy

Happy Chinese New Year everyone! Hope y’all ate as much good food as I did.

Christmas

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 11:13:59 +0100

On the 24th we decided to do something special - it was Christmas after all. So we booked a tour to go visit an elephant camp somewhere in the mountains of the Chiang Mai province. Feeding bananas to the elephants when we were getting to know them, an old childhood memory suddenly popped up in my head: Feeding elephants spaghettis in the zoo in Hamburg. So I went and asked one of the workers of the farm whether spaghettis are appropriate food for elephants, which seemed a little odd now that I had seen them eating bananas, sugar cane and lots of big leaves (an elephant eats 250kg a day, just for those who like random facts). ‘No’, he said, ‘they should not eat pasta. But we sometimes give them rice, for the pre-natal vitamins’. After some curious inquiry I found out that, well, the pasta probably didn’t hurt the elephants in Hagenbecks and, that they feed pregnant elephants (they carry their babies for two freaking years!) with rice because it is easier to infuse with vitamins and other medication.

On Christmas Day itself we went hiking in the Inthanon National Park, seeing loads of banana, mango, coffee and papaya plants, soy bean and rice fields, huge spiders and ants and beautiful but loud waterfalls. Our guide was a rather interesting character who told us with a bit of melancholy in his voice that a lot of opium used to be planted in those secluded mountains. Other than opium, he liked to talk about bamboo, pointing out ‘Young bamboo’ ‘Strong bamboo’, ‘Old bamboo’, ‘can built hut from bamboo’, ‘can cook sticky rice (rice, sugar, coconut milk) in bamboo over fire’, ‘can make shoes from bamboo’. From time to time he would alternate his talk about bamboo with the one line of ‘jingle bells’ he knows. For lunch he provided us with rice, tofu and vegetables that he had carried, wrapped in banana leaves, up to the waterfall where we ate and took a little nap.

So yeah, Christmas wasn’t really Christmas this year. Whereas I don’t regret it for one second to have spent this vacation traveling rather than having gone home, I am already looking forward to next December, which will be the first time in three years me and all my brothers will be at home for Christmas (i hope!).

Chiang Mai - Day I

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 10:55:30 +0100

Before I start talking about just how much I loved Chiang Mai, both the city and the province itself, I think I should share about my trip there. I had flown in BKK because it was significantly cheaper from the Philippines and I had heard that the bus to Chiang Mai is fairly cheap. I took one of the government buses and I was the only person on the bus who was not Thai and at the same time the only person who spoke English (which was more of a problem). The bus had a stewardess, a middle-aged Thai woman dressed in turquoise and wearing a turquoise cowboy-hat who spoke less English than someone working for the Deutsche Bahn. Long story short, my backpack and I made it to Chiang Mai after spending 10 hours on a bus not quite sure whether it was really going the right direction. After a lovely Chicken Penaeng Curry (Yellow Curry with a very peanut-y taste) for dinner, I went to an internet café to find out where Martina, Gergana and Nora were staying. Turns out they were staying nowhere, but still on the 17-hr bus from Laos to Chiang Mai. Luckily, I had already met a French girl who currently volunteering in the Philippines on my flight to Thailand, so the next day, Eve, ‘her English’ (as she lovingly called her occasional inability to communicate herself), me and a map set out to wander through the old of Chiang Mai. After a delicious breakfast in a little artsy café we saw many monks, temples, tourists, massage parlors, restaurants and gardens. At night, Martina, Gery and Nora arrived and we decided on giving Chiang Mai’s night life a shot. Unfortunately, the mix of drunken tourists and ladyboys was not so much to our liking.

Patterns.

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 10:43:59 +0100

ceiling

stairs

Patterns.

Grand Palace and Wat Pho.

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 10:40:50 +0100

not really

more like it.

Grand Palace and Wat Pho.

BKK and floating markets.

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 10:38:40 +0100

BKK and floating markets.

Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 10:25:56 +0100

I had no more bananas for him :-(

Monk's clothing

Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Jungle trekking.

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 10:21:05 +0100

Jungle trekking.

Plans and typhoons.

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 10:17:00 +0100

Cebu Pacific Airlines is blacklisted by the EU. Cebu Pacific has multiple hate-groups on facebook. It is known for scheduling more flights than it has planes. Still, if you want to get from Manila to Cebu, Cebu Pacific is the only ‘convenient’ way of doing so. Our flight was only 3 hours delayed so in a way we were really lucky. As we arrived very late on Cebu Island, we planned on spending the night in Cebu City and taking the ferry to Bohol the next morning. So much the plan - but there was no ferry going because of the typhoon warning. Luckily, we met someone in the hotel lobby who is in the process of building a resort three hours away, in Alcoy and who offered us a very fair price to stay in one of the apartments for a night (you can see the view from the terrace and the massive pool on one of the pictures). We were just enjoying the view when it started raining super-heavily all the sudden. We went inside to have dinner, but a few moments later the lights went off - power outage on the whole coast. Cebu island was not as badly affected as other places in the Phillipines, like Mindanao, the predominantly Muslim Island, where more than a 1000 people lost their lives.

Two days later we took the first ferry that was leaving Cebu Island, going to Bohol. From there we took a bus to another island - Panglao - and found ourselves a cheap residence right on Alona beach. The weather more than made up for the two-day wait we had on Cebu and we spent three days enjoying the sun, drinking calamanzi juice or San Miguel with a calamanzi in it, depending on the time of day ;-). One of those days we rented a boat to go to Balicasag island, which is famous for its snorkeling. Fish in all colors, sizes and shapes, oddly shaped corals, majestic turtles and quickly moving eels made for a fascinating experience and were possibly the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Our next stop was ‘virgin island’ which is an untouched, small island - definitely go there should you ever be around Cebu/Bohol!

"Traveling is learning. In Manila I learnt to sleep to the sound of karoke (a skill that came in more..."

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 10:00:10 +0100

“Traveling is learning. In Manila I learnt to sleep to the sound of karoke (a skill that came in more than handy in Bangkok).”

Manila.

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 09:59:26 +0100

After I had spent an absolutely lovely week with my Mama in Singapore, filled with sightseeing, good food and shopping, I got myself to Changi Budget Terminal and on a plane to Manila. Already in the cab from the airport to our hostel, Manila’s poverty hit me in the face. Shoe-less, skinny kids were running from car to car, cab to cab stuck in one of the many traffic jams, begging for money. The moment the car slowed down, the cabdriver locked all doors from the inside. Security is taken seriously in Manila - but only for and by the wealthy and the tourists. Due to semi-recent terrorist attacks you have to go through a security check every time you enter a train station, every time you enter a mall. I have to say though that the many security men with their huge guns made me feel less, rather than more, safe.

Till and I got quite lucky - not only was our hostel clean and spacious, but it had also opened just two months earlier and on our first night they had a big welcome buffet. Wanting to safe Intramuros (‘within the walls’, Manila’s old city) for when Simon and Jan arrived, Till set out to explore other parts of Manila. On our way to the University of Santo Tomas, Asia’s oldest university founded in 1611 by some archbishop, we encountered a rooster fight in the middle of the street. Around twenty men were cheering for either one of the roosters. If a rooster fight in the middle of the street of a big city seems crazy to you I probably forgot to mention that Manila is chaotic, smelly, dirty, poor and ugly. The scene was admittedly a bit absurd, but it seemed to fit into the overall picture I got of Manila that day. The university campus on the other hand was lovely - at first the security guy at the main gate wouldn’t let us in, but after two pretty Filipino girls talked to him for a while, he just nodded and let us through. I guess there is not much to say about a uni campus but two things did strike me as interesting. The first being university students wearing a school uniform and the second, the amount of dancing that was taking place all over campus. Multiple groups of students, both boys and girls, were doing MTV-style-video-clip-streetdancing everywhere.

But my favourite moment that day was when Till jumped into the ‘Women only’ coach of the train going back to the hostel. Everyone stared. I couldn’t stop laughing. You already get a lot of attention as a foreigner in Manila (Walking through the streets I could hear ‘Hello Ma’am’ ‘Hello. Country?’ or, my favorite ‘What’s up Ma’am’ from all directions) , but those were definitely Till’s 5 minutes of fame.

The day Simon and Till arrived from Vietnam was also the day I started developing a strong antipathy against German men. We were sitting in the Cebu Pacific office attempting to change our flights when Simon started telling us about an elderly German man who had told him about the ‘3000 women he has bought in the past year’ (10 a day? Yeah sure.). We were clearly talking quite negatively about this guy when someone sitting in front of us turns around and says: ‘Well, I haven’t had 3000, I have had 500. I got here in 2006. But you know, you have to try so many to find a good one. The first one I had got pregnant. She (!!!) didn’t use contraception. Then she died giving birth, my bad luck, eh? Then I had to go search for a new one. They all just want your money.’ Disgusting, sad, appaling, pathetic, horrible, … .

The next day, not being very enthusiastic about Manila, we decided to take a bus to Bagatay and from there a tricycle to the Taal lake. In the middle of lake is a volcanic island and within the volcano, there is another lake. I can definitely recommend going there if you are in Manila.

Philippines.

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 09:11:01 +0100

St. Tomas University, Manila

day before the typhoon hit.

A coke for 7 pesos (=12 eurocent)

Philippines.

Photo

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 10:53:09 +0100