Archives For Travel

This pic was taken quite some time ago while on a pleasure dive somewhere deep around Simon’s Reef close to Gili Trawangan. It was after the tsunami and we hadn’t had any customers for some time, so we just took the boat out for fun.

There should be 8 monkeys. Can you spot them all?

This list, which only existed in my head until now, started out with number 3 around 20 years ago and I’ve added destinations and trips to it as I found out about them. In time places moved up and down or disappeared completely as I visited them. There’s obviously many more places I want to see and things I want to do, but there’s got to be something special to make it onto my top 10…

1. Travel up the Congo River
   The Congo, in the heart of Africa, represents for me the magic I associate with that continent. Lush rainforest, genuine experiences and extremely hard travelling!
2. Drive from Capetown to Marrakesh
   When I was little my Dad always brought travel magazines like Tours back home. A lot of them dealt with off road tours through Africa, how to outfit cars, which routes to take and so on. It obviously left an impression on me.
3. Hitchhike from Munich to Beijing
   I was around 9 years old when I first thought it’d be awesome to drive all the way from my hometown to China. In time this has morphed into hitchhiking, as a cheaper, more flexible, but probably more dangerous alternative.
4. Dive and travel Antarctica
   Huge icebergs, penguins, sea lions and many more amazing animals. Just imagine what the underwater world looks like there…
5. Navigate the Mekong River
   I have crossed the Mekong many times in many countries and the idea to help navigate a boat from China all the way to Vietnam has been growing ever since.
6. Explore the Bamiyan valley in Afghanistan
   Ever since I heard about the huge Buddhas I wanted to see them for myself. Even though they have been destroyed by the Taliban regime I still want to go and explore the little caves left behind by Buddhist monks.
7. Experience the Hajj
   I am not a Muslim or very religious, but there’s something about the pilgrimage to Mecca that I find fascinating. Maybe it’s a couple of millions of people in the same place actually believing in a God. That’s got to make for a special atmosphere.
8. Live among the Orang Laut for some time
   The Orang Laut are scattered all across Southeast Asia. The name literally means ’sea people’. Their way of life, so closely connected with the ocean they live on, has always fascinated me and in a way I can identify with that.
9. Travel to the (original) Burning Man
   Nowadays there’s a few BM branches around, but I’d like to see the original in Black Rock Desert in Nevada.
10. Cross the Sahara on the back of a camel
    Just another one of my weird dreams. Call me a romantic with no sense of realism, but I think this would be a fantastic experience.

Will I ever make it to all of those places, do all of those trips? To be honest, I doubt it. There are too many variables. Some of those countries aren’t really that safe (yet), I am perpetually in a state of near bankruptcy and a couple of those trips shouldn’t really be done. That’s not the point of this list though. My wish list ,or dreams if you like, are an indication for the kind of experiences and adventures I want and seek and usually they push my limits a little bit further out. It’s my minds way of telling me that I’m ready for the next step away from my comfort zone.

It’s important to have dreams as well. Without them I might as well work on my tan on Ballerman 6. What are your travel dreams?

This image was taken on a little road trip to Glenorchy, a little sleepy town about an hours drive from Queenstown. The road ends here and you can feel it. The air smells fresh and you’re surrounded by mountains and sheer vastness…

Children are awesome. Especially when travelling in Asia. It is very rare that I pass up an opportunity to take a few snapshots of kids. Usually they follow me around and yell ‘Photo, photo, Mister!’. And all they want in return is to have a look at the little screen on the back. Then they go on telling me the news of their day, blissfully unaware that I don’t understand a word. It always makes me chuckle.

These four girls from the little village of Lamalera wanted their picture taken, but always got scared and ran off. Eventually they managed to stand still for a few seconds.

In Asia you see a lot of girls, kids themselves, looking after their younger siblings. They expertly carry them around on the hip, pick them up after they fell over and feed them rice and some fish.

These two cheeky boys in Dili wouldn’t stop talking. All I could understand was ‘photo’ once in a while. They seemed like tough little cookies. I suppose they would have to be living in one of the many refugee tent cities.

Crossing a border can be a daunting and nerve wrecking thing and that might not necessarily have something to do with those 2 kg of cocaine hidden in between your smelly socks.

I always think that customs officials are being trained to put on mean faces, to make you as uncomfortable as humanly possible. You might be getting the look, when you’re in trouble with your girlfriend, but that has nothing on your average customs guy. It’s almost like they have x-ray vision, but they use their superpower for evil and not for good.

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Can’t believe it’s already been a year for this trip. Ok, it’s been more like one year and three weeks, but no need to be petty, is there? I haven’t been up to that much over the last four to five months except working here in New Zealand, but even that has been a rich (and necessary) experience. First I thought about writing another post like my 6-month article, but then I thought, why not cut together all my little video clips and then throw a few pictures into the mix. Have fun!

A high dynamic range image of the Christchurch Arts Centre

One of many car wrecks dotted around Dili, East Timor.

It seems that something bad and shocking is always going on in some place of the world. Be it terrorist attacks, diseases or natural disasters, like cyclone Nargis in Myanmar or the recent earthquake in China. Most of the time this results in western countries issuing travel and security warnings either for the whole country or just for affected areas. This obviously is a good thing or rather it could be a good thing. After all travellers and holiday makers need some kind of safety indicator and their own government should be the natural choice for that. The problem here is that the general population with little travel experience takes those travel warnings at face value and doesn’t usually bother reading them themselves. All they hear in the news is that there has been a catastrophe somewhere and that travel warnings have been issued.

By that point the damage is usually done. Holidays get canceled, travel plans get changed and while everybody feels sorry for the victims everybody is glad not to be caught in the aftermath of it all, even though their specific holiday destination might be completely safe. Obviously you can’t blame people for doing that. It’s a natural reaction, but does it really have to be that way? And then there is the moral question of it all. Should you be enjoying your holiday when there are people suffering and dying just a couple hours flight away? This is a very difficult question and one everybody has to answer for themselves.

On Christmas 2004, when the tsunami struck Aceh Province, I had been living on Gili Trawangan, Indonesia, for about 10 months, teaching diving. Visitor numbers started to drop within a few days of the disaster and kept on dropping over the next weeks, even though our little island was more than 2500 km away from Banda Aceh. In an industry, where your income depends mostly on commission, this is tantamount to suddenly losing your job. Still, I and other dive instructors were in a relatively good position compared to some of the local people. We had savings, had earned a lot more and didn’t need to support a whole extended family.

When disaster strikes it never only affects the people in the disaster areas, but large parts of the overall population, at least in countries that are dependent on tourism and visitor numbers. The financial consequences of the Boxing Day Tsunami were felt all over Indonesia. It was a disaster after the disaster. Millions of dollars were donated, but I dare say that not much of that money made it to the indonesian people not directly affected by the tsunami. Travellers and tourists further worsened their situation by switching to alternative travel destinations.

Only a little bit of research could show that your initial travel destination is completely safe and if it isn’t then there is always the option of travelling to a different spot in the same country. It will help the local population there immensely. Of course that still leaves the matter of morality, but if you had asked an Indonesian after the tsunami what he preferred, then I’m sure the answer would have been that he’d rather earned enough to put food on the table…

I have just received this photo from a friend on Facebook and apparently what you can see are chinese soldiers holding what looks like tibetan monk robes. It doesn’t take much to imagine what they were planning to do with those robes, does it?

Yesterday I woke up and set myself a mission. I was gonna find out as much as I can about Queenstown, New Zealand, from all the different kinds of information that are available to us travellers. First of all there are the normal print media like guidebooks and their newly born siblings, downloadable pdf chapters of guidebooks, but then there is the whole internet. Forums, travel networks, travel wikis and personal travel blogs. I was wondering if I could get the information I wanted from all those sources and how they compared to each other…

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