Archives For Travel

Recently Timen has asked me to give him some recommendations where to go to in Southeast Asia to learn to dive. This inspired me to come up with a list of my 10 most favorite spots (so far!) in that beautiful corner of the world.

1. Koh Lipe, Thailand
   For the tranquility, the most beautiful beaches and great company.
2. Seraya, Indonesia
   For the absolute beauty and peace I experienced there.
3. Koh Lanta, Thailand
   For the awesome diving and the best dive shop crew ever.
4. Hoi An, Vietnam
   For the great japanese architecture and all my drinking buddies.
5. Gili Trawangan, Indonesia
   For the sharks, the turtles and one of the best social lifes you can imagine.
6. Angkor Wat, Cambodia
   For the fantastic scenery and the mystic atmosphere.
7. Mount Kinabalu, Malaysia
   For the view after total and utter exhaustion and the hot springs.
8. Pulau Perhentian Kecil, Malaysia
   For Captain Blackbeard, his booze runs and the best mango shakes on this planet.
9. Luang Prabang, Laos
   For the funny monks and the beautiful temples.
10. Yangon, Myanmar
    For Shwedagon Paya and the friendly people.

The first stop on my upcoming trip will be Australia. My travel buddies and I have come up with a great idea, though! We leave our car somewhere in Darwin and fly for a little one-to-two-month detour to Indonesia and then onwards to Malaysia and Thailand. I’m really looking foward to this as well, as it will give me a chance to catch up with some friends. Not sure yet, if I’ll be going back to any of these places above, though. I think I’ll be checking out some new fascinating places, but maybe my list gave you a bit of inspiration on where to head for next…

Stacy from Rambling Traveler just tagged me a few days ago to tell her 5 reasons why i travel. I just recently wrote a little post about this topic, but didn’t really elaborate on my reasons, so here we go:

1. I love the excitement, that’s always in the air when travelling. I mean, most likely the “big” adventure won’t happen, but it just seems possible that someone hands me a map to a secret beach…
2. Life is so simple on the road. I find this strangely comforting. Everything I own and need, I carry with me in my backpack. No need for a car, an apartment or a tv and no desire to own all that either.
3. Cultures other than my own have always fascinated me; it’s almost like a charm. There’s so many things to see and experience and so many different people to meet out there, I don’t see how I could spend my whole life back home.
4. The only way to experience more freedom than when travelling is to go skinny dipping. When you’re out and about you can do whatever you want. If I’m fed up with a place, I can just leave. Back home this would be a tad more problematic.
5. Virtually anything, good or bad, funny or sad, could happen to me, when I travel. I like this uncertainty a lot. There is a grain of truth in ‘No Risk, No Fun’!

So, there’s my reasons. If you read this, Ethan, then I’d like to hear your reasons. I’d like to see as well, how you would incorporate this into your story!

I had been living on Koh Samui in Thailand for almost half a year and it had been exciting and fun. I was sharing a house with Laurent, a french frogman, opposite Big Buddha Pier in Ban Bang Rak and we had a ball there. Diving by day, watching the sunset by dusk and going dancing, meeting friends for dinner or having a party or a barbeque by night. Life was easy, chilled out and great fun. Nevertheless, I felt ready to leave, go some place else, move on. Six months in one place was a long time for me then. Most of us left Samui around the same time.

About a year later said frogman asked me to work for him at his new dive school over on Koh Lanta. I took the chance to visit some friends on Koh Tao and Samui before getting stuck into work. But while being on Koh Tao was fine, I couldn’t stand Samui. Everything seemed sad, miserable and sleazy. Where before the island had been a fun place to be, now that my friends from before were missing, ‘my Samui’ had lost it’s soul. At least for me. I only stayed a couple days and haven’t been back since.

Meanwhile I hardly return to my favorite places. I like to keep the picture I have of them, as they were then, in my head. Thinking back on my travels, going back hardly ever worked out for me. The more recent bad experience then also seemed to overshadow a little the great time I have had the first time round and I don’t want this to happen. What about you? Do you like to return to your favorite places?

So, here’s my entry for Ian’s Most Hilarious Travel Photo Contest over at Brave New Traveler.

This photo is from a time when there wasn’t a Hofbräuhaus at every corner of the world. When I walked past this establishment, I just had to get my picture taken with this funny thai maître d’ in his traditional bavarian costume.

My friend Bibiana took this picture on what was probably the most boring dive of my life. Well, it was until Bibiana started an underwater fight, ripping my mask off, trying to turn off my air, pulling on my fins. This fight eventually led to a complete underwater equipment exchange (except our wetsuits and dive computers). This is my victory dance photo…

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When I was little my family always went travelling. Most of my school friends went for two weeks to Italy, France or Greece during the summer holidays. My family rather chose to spend all of our school holidays away in Poland, Hungary or the Baltics, which was a lot cheaper as well.

I was twelve when we went on holiday to the baltic states. My dad spontaneously promised my uncle that he could visit the house he was born in a few years before World War II. The only problem was that the house was now officially on russian territory and we could not get a visa. So my dad bribed a border guard to let my uncle, me and himself on our bicycles across for the day. We spent a couple hours driving around the border town, but in the end my uncle found the right street and shortly after that the house. It made his day. By then we were quite lost though. So after pedalling around for a bit and not really getting anywhere, my dad stopped at a police station and asked for the way back to the border.

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I had never thought that, Lombok being a muslim island, you’d be able to get a pork steak there, let alone a whole spit-roast pig. But obviously I was wrong. When friends and I were invited to dinner by a really nice balinese friend of my boss at Dive Indonesia, we jumped at the opportunity and I can tell you, it was absolutely delicious.

One of the most important traits one can have as a traveller is endurance. After all we spend a considerable amount of our travelling life waiting. We wait for a bus, that was supposed to have picked us up three hours ago; we wait at airports to catch our flight out; we wait in a queue at some embassy to apply for a visa and then again to pick it up; we wait at restaurants for our food to arrive; we wait for our next trip to start; we wait at border crossings for a border guard to stamp our passport; we wait and pray for daylight to arrive, cause we, once again, chose the cheapest guesthouse, which is full of bugs and mosquitos and lacks a basic mosquito net; we wait at customs while our backpack is being inspected; we wait…The list goes on and on.

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Finally managed to get my bro to scan some photos from earlier trips. Cheers, mate. This is one of the beautiful stone faces from around Angkor Wat. It’s a mythical place with a fascinating aura and this photo captures that atmosphere quite well, I think.

This was my trusted bike on Trawangan. It wouldn’t drive straight, but, probably because of that, it always brought me home safely after a hard party night…

I love to watch people. I do it at home, sitting in a cafe for example, and I do it while travelling. I found Khao San Road in Bangkok, Thailand, to be one of the best places to indulge in my hobby. You just sit down in a restaurant with a chilled beer and watch the world pass by. There’s Israelis with dreadlocks and wearing bandanas, English burnt by too much time in the sun and too little sunscreen, Swedes, tanned a dark brown in their boardshorts and cultivating that surfers look, German tourists trying to blend in to the whole traveller scene and in between them all left over hippies on a short visit from the last full moon party in Goa. Nowadays, you can actually interchange all those nationalities. The country-clichés are slowly disolving I think, but there are still different types of travellers:

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A few days ago I met an old aquaintance of mine. We hadn’t seen each other in years, so naturally we chatted about what happened to us during those years. Eventually we got to me teaching diving in Southeast Asia. This always seems to fascinate people and one of the first questions is usually if I’ve seen any sharks. After more than a thousand dives the answer is obviously a yes, with a huge grin on my face. I love sharks, I think they are great animals and it shows. My old friend didn’t understand me. After all, sharks don’t have the cuddly appearance of dolphins and judging from their reputation with the public, they are more like the mass murderers of the ocean.

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Just found this photo somewhere in the depths on my laptop. And I just had to laugh out loud. I think it’s great, especially the ‘good luck’-part…