Archives For Travel

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!

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…

Liked the teaser? Read more…

Once in a while you meet someone who is out and about busy “finding him or herself”. I have never fully grasped the concept of this idea. What is it exactly that people try to find? Is it their real self, how they would be without the influences of todays society, or is it how they really want to be?

While this undertaking seems somewhat realistic back in their own country, I find the idea ridiculous when travelling. What makes people think they can find themselves in the alien surroundings of a foreign country when they couldn’t even manage it back in the familiarity of their homes?

The expression in itself implies that somehow somewhere along the road they got lost, otherwise there would be no point in going looking for yourself. And they obviously seem to have a problem with being lost. They might not be happy with themselves and want to change things. But it’s funny how naive some people are. Travelling is not an express ticket to a new personality. It is true that travel changes people. Without my trips I wouldn’t be the person I am today. But even when travelling, with all its amazing experiences and impressions, this is a gradual process and does not happen overnight or during a two week trip.

Moreover I think all this takes away parts of the travel experience. How much can you actually take in looking for yourself in every corner, when you should be looking for new cultures, new experiences, new friends…

The same is true for the problems you carry around with you. How many couples do (or should I say ‘did’?) you know that decide to take a break from their routine and go travelling or on a holiday, just to break up after a couple weeks on the road? Travelling does not solve your problems for you, at best it just puts them safely away somewhere for easy retrieval on your return. And more than likely your problems will try to surface at times. If you drink too much alcohol, then you won’t suddenly become a AA advocate, just because your favorite pub is halfway around the world.

What travelling does, though, is giving you a chance to start making those changes you always thought about on New Years Eve and forgot about after the third drink. Your usual temptations are gone, you are out of your normal routine and you are basically free to do whatever you want. All you need is patience and time. And who knows, you might even stumble upon your lost self somewhere on the way.

This week the big day finally came… We were allowed to hold the match to all the wood we had pushed together in the last few weeks! What a sight! Luckily for me, I was the designated part-time videographer. What’s left of the trees is still smouldering…

The place I work gets really cold now during the night, so we decided to start the fireplace up. In our little farmhouse we have one woodsaw, four chainsaws and two axes. The Kiwis decided that that’s not good enough…

Part 6 of the series of images from my office! I hope you enjoyed the images. This one is the last.

Happy Birthday, Bro!!