Together with 30 others from my former rowing club in Amsterdam we went on a 10 day vacation to Egypt to celebrate the 5 year existence of the sub-entity that the year of ’06 – my year – had created within the rowing club (long story..) The trip was organized with a surprise destination by 6 people from the group, so it was only very short before we left that I found out that we were going to Egypt. As you can imagine a trip like this with 31 guys can be crazy but a lot of fun!

A few highlights from the trip:

• In Cairo I met up with Tamer, whom I know from Stanford! We went clubbing and he also showed me around the city It was really nice to see him again.
• Egyptian food gets to your stomach: at least 6 of us (including myself) got quite sick in Luxor. Luckily it didn’t last long.
• In Hurghada and Sharm el Sheikh we stayed in all-inclusive resorts: something I have never done and will probably never do again! Sure it was fairly comfortable but you can hardly say you visited a country if you stay in such a resort.
• Diving and snorkeling in the Red Sea is AMAZING! I was lucky enough to snorkel with wild dolphins (see the video below) and also saw a big eagle ray! And even just the reefs are very beautiful.

I uploaded my pictures and some videos to Flickr, so check them out for an impression of my above and underwater experiences in Egypt!

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“I speculated with a kind of wonder on the strength of the individuality of journeys and stopped on the postulate that people don’t take trips – trips take people. That discussion, however, did not go into the life span of journeys. This seems to be variable and unpredictable. Who has not known a journey to be over and dead before the traveler returns? The reverse is also true: many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.” – John Steinbeck

My journey was over when I left the Cave Lodge for Bangkok. My few days in Bangkok have felt like waiting for my plane and my camera is a witness of this as I have taken very few pictures over the last days. At the same time I think my journey will not be over when I have returned to Amsterdam as I am sure that memories of the trip will keep bubbling up for the next weeks.

And then this was it! 7 weeks have gone by and with it my first encounter with Asia. I am glad I have so many friends (and family!) who have traveled so much, which has made me decide to go on this trip! Looking back at my posts and pictures I find it hard to realize that all these beautiful places and wonderful people happened to me in just one trip. My arrival in Kuta seems ages ago and I really feel that it was better than what I had expected of it. A little less naive, a little more open-minded and more outgoing, I hope I can keep some of the traveling mindset when time comes to go back to ‘regular life’.

P.S. I arrived back yesterday and will be in the Netherlands for the next 10 days, then I’ll head out again for a 10 day vacation (as if I didn’t get enough already ) and around the 27th I will be heading to Zurich. I’m glad the weather is so good here: 24 Celsius makes it much easier to readjust!

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“Mae Hong Son province – Accessible only by incredibly windy roads, this is Thailand’s most remote province. Although it’s undergone a tourist miniboom over the past decade few vistors seem to make it much further than Pai.”
- Lonely Planet Thailand

You can really feel the remoteness here. After leaving Pai by pickup-truck-converted-to-minivan for Soppong we passed through long stretches of forest divided only by some desolate villages. This definitely seems one of the poorer parts of Thailand, which could well be true as I heard it houses many Burmese refugees. Furthermore it is populated by various hill-tribes who are quite disadvantaged in Thailand as many of them lack Thai citizenship. Still, it is an extremely beautiful place with beautiful people.

The Cave Lodge lies 20 minutes (by motorbike) north of Soppong, in a village called Tam Lot. After the first night I was the only guest here. Normally the caves in the area are visited by Thais as well as ‘farang’ (foreigners) but the rainy season has just started which means it is too wet for most people and not wet enough yet for those interested in wild water kayaking. The lodge was built in the 80s by a man called John Spies, who’s life is as exciting as his name gives to believe. I read parts of his book which tells of his travels through Asia and trekking adventures in Northern Thailand riddled with drugs, disease and death. Talking with him I also found out that he contributed to the “Caves” episode of the incredible BBC documentary Planet Earth.

John discovered around 200 caves in the Pang Mapha district of which I had the priviledge to visit three. Although I had done some adventure caving in the past this experience really outdid everything! Let me leave you with a short story of our trip into “Waterfal cave”. This particular cave is formed by a small river ending in a deep waterfall. It is a long but very small cave – really more like a tunnel – which is what made it such an exciting experience. It’s width was never more than 2 meters and the height was most of the time such that you had to lie on your belly or side to squeeze underneath the stalactites while making sure you don’t get any river water in your mouth. To add to the excitement our creator had decided that this cave would make a good home for river shrimp, bats and some big spiders. And then there was the snake. On our way back Wat, my guide, picked up a stick and started mumbling in himself. At a bend in the river he signaled me to wait while he slowly rounded the corner. When he called me to join him again, he pointed up to an elevation in the cave wall. Curled up in a corner was a big, long snake, which had been in the water in front of us! Apparently Wat had already seen it on the way in, but hadn’t told me as he thought I may have been to frightened to go further into the cave. He may have been right

Below the link to this post’s pictures of the Tham Lot area and my caving experiences.

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Chang Mai is very different from Kho Phi Phi, as I had hoped. And with it came the need to learn a few Thai words as less people speak English here. The only reference I have are 3 pages about the Thai language in the Lonely planet, including some simple phrases. Thai turns out to be much more complicated than Indonesian: it has its own script and also relies on intonation to convey different meanings. The same word pronounced differently can mean entirely different things. For example, the word ‘glai’ means “near” pronounced in a flat voice whereas it means “far” when pronounced with a falling intonation; very convenient

The town of Chang Mai is not too big and has a historic part – surrounded by a moat and a wall of which only parts are left – and a modern part. Both parts are nice to walk through as they gave me a good impression of everyday life in Thailand. On the streets you notice many students who study at Chang Mai University: one of the bigger universities in the country. The markets were great to walk through and an intense experience for all the senses. Later on I met a German girl with whom I had dinner and also visited the night market which sold a mix of souvenirs and proper art by local artists.

The second day was filled with not much more than a good massage, some strolling around the outskirts of town and a game of pool to end the evening. Next stop Soppong from where I hope to do some caving.

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We did get a bit of rain but nothing too crazy, and we still got enough sun to get a tan. In the three days we spent here we went sea-kayaking, snorkeling, and enjoyed (or actually observed) Phi Phi’s night life which includes a lot of drunk Brits and Irish, Thai kickboxing and beachparties. Though I have never been there I imagine this place is similar to places like Ibiza or Lloret de Mar, which are popular among Dutch teenagers for spending a week as drunk as possible at night and doing as little as possible in the day. This comparison is probably not completely fair to Phi Phi as it is actually quite a nice place, with not too much noise at night and very nice things to do in the day.

I do get the impression that most of the Thai islands will be similar to this in that they are western strongholds that happen to be embedded in Thailand. I suppose they are all a bit different, Ko Pha-Ngan has the full moon party, Ko Tao cheap diving, Ko Samui it’s beaches but probably they all have the same bars, clubs, western food and the fact that 80% of the people you meet are western. This is not necessarily a bad thing if this is what you are looking for, but since I also want a taste of real Thai culture I have decided not to visit those islands but instead fly north to Chang Mai. From there I will head west into Mae Hong Son province which is supposed to have many nice caves and – I hope – relatively more Thai culture.

In the pictures you’ll find some nice scenes from our snorkeling trip, a Doctor fish feet cleaning and crazy Thai boxing tourists (they get a free cocktail bucket if hey compete).

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Luckily for me as well as the readers pressed with time, I can be short when it comes to the Perhentians. Perhentian Kecil is a small island off the east coast of Malaysia and is popular among backpackers and divers. As we (Anatole and I) are both, it was a pretty good place to be The weather was generally good, but as I spent a lot of time diving the occassional rain wasn’t that bad. Altogether I did 6 dives during which we saw 2 shipwrecks and some places with very nice (hard and soft) corals and some great underwater landscapes. The rest of our time we spent lying on the beach, eating, drinking and watching the worldcup (yay for NL vs Denmark .

After several days we decided to move on. In our hostel we had met Daniela from Argentina who’s next stop was also Thailand so the three of us left together. Now as you probably know Thailand has not been one of the safest places recently and its southern provinces have been restless even before the recent protests. These provinces regularly (3000 casualties in the last 6 years) gets attacks on public places and transportation.

Having this in mind we decided to first cross through Malaysia before crossing over to Thailand. After some hours into our trip and some asking around we quickly realized that this would take really long an would make it impossile to reach anywhere near Kho Phi Phi island in Thailand that day. Being in a hurry is of course not a reason to take risks but I guess we felt that it couldnt be as bad as our ministries of foreign affairs wanted us to believe. Having arrived in Thailand we got on a train through the southern provinces to Hat Yai. As you know we did make it through alive; nevertheless having heavily armed soldiers on our train, gaurds with shotguns at the stations and armored vehicles along the railway did make for quite an exciting three-and-a-half hour journey!

After several modes of transportation and a trip total of 16 hours we finally reached Krabbi in the middle of the night. The next morning a ferry ride took us to Kho Phi Phi.

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After my (too) short stay in KL I left with a bus to Taman Negara. I generally don’t like arranged packages but since I had already ‘lost’ a day travelling via KL and it was public holiday I bought a package which included transportation, two nights and breakfast, to avoid any further delays.  The trip was quit amazing: bit by bit the surroudings got more densely vegetated as we were slowly approaching the jungle. After a trip of 5 hours we exchanged the bus for a very narrow, long river boat. From there it was 2 more hours following the river upstream seeing nothing but trees and the odd ‘Orang Asli’ settlement. For four nights I stayed in Kuala Tahan, from where I started my hikes.

In the hostel that I was staying I met a group of Scandinavians that were planning to make an overnight hike into the jungle. I was glad to join them as these hikes can only be done with a (quite expensive) guide. The first day we did a day hike to a walkway through the jungle canopy, which reached heights of 30m! After that some of us went on for another 3 hours to hike to ‘the Bat cave’. What a great experience! The cave was quite long but narrow and you had to crawl through water and small holes to reach the end of it. See the pictures for the many bats and the snakes that we spotted

The next day we left for the deep jungle with our guide, who was one of the original people of Taman Negara. Our group consisted of 3 Icelanders, 2 Swedes, a Canadian, a German, a Welsh guy and myself. From the start it was clear why we needed the guide: the paths were hard to see, and where they were there were enough unmarked junctions to get me lost in 10 minutes. Two hours into our hike it started raining, which really made the rainforest come to life, what a sound! The big tropical raindrops falling on the leaves and on the ground not only made an incredible noise, but also brought out the leeches. The type of leeches you find here are brownish, thin and about an inch long (2.5 cm). You sometimes see them standing on the ground supporting themselves on their rear end while moving their front around like a periscope to attach themselves to any passer-by. I found that they are pretty good at climbing up and into your shoe, biting straight through your socks to get to your blood. Luckily it doesn’t hurt or itch when they bite, but since they sometimes do carry diseases we tried to take them off as soon as we saw them.

With everything but our covered backpacks soaked we arrived at the cave where we would spend the night. The Elephant Cave as it was called is at times used by elephants to shelter from the rain, though there weren’t any now. Dali -our guide- quickly had a fire going so we could make our food and dry our clothes. After a good meal and some cave exploration we had a good night sleep.

Before we left on our trip we were warned that it was flower season which meant butterflies, wasps and bees. This became very clear to us on our lunch break on the second day. We had found a nice place along a stream where we could eat and take a swim. Within no time the butterflies had discovered our shoes, and the bees settled on our drying shirts. On my shirt alone there were 30+ bees. Although the swimming was nice and bee free, we shortened our break because of the bees. We had planned to stay an extra night in a hide where we could watch wildlife at night but as we were told that this place was also teeming with bees, we decided to shorten our trip by a day. A short boat trip brought us back to downstream to Kuala Tahan, where we spent our last night in the jungle.

Since this was my first time in the jungle, I really enjoyed my stay here. We may no have spotted any tigers or elephants, but the leeches and the dense forest with hard to find paths made it a great success! 

For pictures of bats, snakes, caves and leeches see below.

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In Singapore I met up with Eefke who I had met earlier on my way to the busstation in Bali. I stayed in a very nice hostel, where we also met Mel, who is from Hong Kong but just moved to Singapore for his job. With the three of us we spent three days exploring the city, as Mel had also not had a chance yet to do sightseeing.

Singapore was quite a change after Indonesia. I’d probably describe it as a very western city with a mainly Chinese population. Everything is extremely clean to the point that you nearly feel uncomfortable. It is then quite paradoxical to notice that it is extremely difficult to find a trash can anywhere. Especially in the metro (MRT) which is cleanest of all. They must have very good (stealth) cleaning crews, or people are just very good at keeping there trash with them. The food is good and varied as you can find Indian, Chinese, Indonesian, Malaysian and western food.

During these three days we visited Sentosa Island (really a family fun park), the Zoo, the Chinese Gardens, Little India,and the Marina. The zoo was definitely the highlight of my stay in Singapore as it was so big, had so many animals and seemed so animal friendly. Most of the animals live on large pieces of land containing their natural habitat. I remember visiting the San Diego zoo with Pieter, which boasted to have the worlds best zoo. Now I don’t really believe in ‘Worlds best’s but I am at least sure that the Singapore zoo is better in all respects! We saw all sorts of monkeys, white tigers and pygmy hippos just to name a few.

After 3 days I felt it was time to move on and decided to go to Taman Negara in Malaysia which is the worlds oldest jungle. I wanted to take the Jungle Train which roughly connects Singapore and Johor Bahru in the north of Malaysia, passing by Taman Negara in the middle. Sadly I found that all tickets for the entire week had been booked already due to Singaporeand Malaysias public holiday. A good reminder of the lesson that traveling means not planning and hoping too much as you never know what happens. So I decided that I would take the bus up to Kuala Lumpur, spend a night there and leave for the jungle the next day.

With business-class like seats in the bus the trip was quite comfortable and I arrived in KL in the afternoon. After arranging my trip to Taman Negara for the day after I walked around in the center for a bit. If 4 hours are enough to judge a city I would say: a lot less clean then Singapore (in a good way), good atmosphere, nice people and definitely a place to return to at some point.

That’s it for now: below you can find the pictures as always and soon more stories will follow about my adventures in the jungle and diving on Pulau Perhentian Kecil.

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Even though Yogjakarta was a great place with great sights it was also the place where I kind of got fed up with Indonesia. Its not the country, the food or the people per se because I really like all of them. It is the attitude people have towards tourists. Someone – most likely the decadent tourists – must have given them the idea that money grows on trees in the west. Now in a sense it is true that money earned in euros or dollars goes a long way in Indonesia, but it does not mean that we are willing to spend all the money we have there. All this culminates in the fact that tourists are overcharged for everything everywhere! I can understand this for certain things such as Borobudur which realistically is expensive to maintain and letting the tourists *and* locals pay for it would mean that locals could not visit anymore. So tourists pay more: fair enough.

What I do not understand is why I should pay three times as much for an ice cream, or a bottle of water, or a local bus. I’m sitting in the same crappy seat, have the same non-AC’ed sweaty ride and yet I have to pay more then everyone else. And they’re not even official tourist prices.. No, its just that the bus conductor decides that he’ll ask me three times as much. Then later seeing him buy some cigarettes from the pile of money that he just collected from everyone does not make me feel better either. Sure I may be haggle things down, but I have not been able to haggle down to local prices. And trust me – being true to my Dutch heritage – I’m not a bad haggler.

Anyway so much for my rant. I guess its a reality in much of the tropics, though I have had similar complaints from other travelers. Apparently Indonesia is one of the worst places when it comes to ripping off tourists; only the Philippines are worse.

Altogether I still had a good time in Yogjakarta and it was a good place to end my stay in Indonesia. The morning of the 4th I took a plane to Singapore for a change of pace.

See below for the pictures:

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Back in Padangbai I decided not to stay in Bali any longer: I definitely would have liked to spend more time but I don’t want to spend all of my 7 weeks just in Bali. The next day I still had the morning to explore Padangbai, after which I took the night bus to Probolingo, which is right next to the Bromo Volcano. Bus-Ferry-Bus and 10 hours later I arrived there at 7 in the morning. Going for the convenient (i.e. faster) option, I decided to pay bit more and got a ride on the back of a scooter all the way up to Cemoro Lawang – a mountain village on the crater rim of the volcano that surrounds Bromo. The landscape going up is extremely beautiful, very green and dotted with cabbage and potato farms. People seemed quite different up in the mountains compared to the Indonesians I had met so far. They seemed a bit of a mix between Peruvians living high in the mountains (what I know from pictures that is) and desert people. Take a look at the pictures below and see for yourself, for me mainly the facial features and clothes gave me this impression.

That day I already climbed Bromo to see the sulfur clouds coming from its crater and the impressive desert like area surrounding it. For me the most amazing part was to realize that Gunung Bromo and Gunung Batok are two volcano’s in a huge surrounding volcano. Just imagine how it must have been like to see that surrounding volcano to erupt! For a good impression of the place you can look at the pictures or the terrain map at the top of the page (you may have to zoom in).

The next morning I woke up at 03:00 to join a caravan of at least 50 jeeps that were going up a neighboring mountain in time to see the sunrise. A very touristic but very rewarding experience – and good for some very nice pictures ! We were lucky that it had rained the night before as it had cleared out the clouds and created a beautiful ground fog at the bottom of the crater. Straight after that we went to Bromo and together with a girl I had met we walked around the rim of Bromo.

The rest of the day was filled with my long and not so exciting trip to Yogjakarta: 2 hours in a sweaty bus to Surabaya and 7 more in a comfortable AC bus to Yogjakarta. I met a couple from England who has been traveling for several months already and I’ll be going for drinks with them tonight to celebrate my birthday

Some other things:

• You will see some Indonesian men with a long, pointy thumbnail. It turns out this is a sign of status as it shows that you do not do any manual labor, which is considered inferior to other types of labor.
• Women have their own equivalent of this: they try to keep/make their skin as white as possible. Again this shows that they do not have to work outside. A great business for companies like Nivea who sell all sort of ‘Whitening Creams’. Perhaps it does seem a bit silly to us, but I guess the reason we try to get a tan is to show off that we have enough time/money to spend some time in the sun. (That would be my guess for Dutch / Northern European people at least).
• My knowledge of Bahasa Indonesia (the Indonesian Language) is improving every day I can generally manage simple things like ordering, inquiring about rooms and directions.

And now for the pictures:

Click to view album “Ubud”

Click to view album “Gili Air”

Click to view album “Bromo”