May 26th, 2010
After a little bit of a radio silence, an update from me again. The last few days I’ve tried to do as little as possible, which includes avoiding internet cafes. My last post was from Ubud, where I had great time seeing a bit more of the ‘real’ Bali. I have to admit that Ubud is still quite touristy, but thanks to Charlotte and Karin who I visited there I got to see and hear a bit more of how Balinese people live and think. I had a walk through the rice fields, visited the Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary, and enjoyed the good food. We also took a day to go to Waterboom, which is basically a water park (swimmingpools, slides, cocktail bars in the water etc :p). We went together with Arnold (the Indonesian guy I had met before), altogether a really fun day!
Going to Waterboom meant going to Kuta by scooter, which was my first experience driving in the crazy Indonesian traffic. Traffic feels fairly safe even though it seems quite chaotic. The next day I kept the scooter and visited two ancient sites close to Ubud (Gunung Gawi and another with a name along the lines of ‘Holy Water temple’, I forget). After a few great evenings of drinks and a closing night in the only ‘club’ of Ubud with Charlotte and Karin it was time to say goodbye. Next stop: Gili Air, which is where I am right now. I did a – not too spectacular – night dive here, but mostly lay in the sun or sat on the veranda practicing the ukulele. I ran into a Dutch girl here: it is funny to realize that I dont really feel like I need to avoid Dutch people as I haven’t been in the Netherlands myself for a while (Dutch people generally avoid other Dutch people while on vacation..). Anyway we did the diving together and checked out some of the restaurants here.
As I’m getting a bit restless because of all the staying in one place I’ll be heading out again tomorrow. I’ll be going to Java, with a stopover in Kuta. I might do a few more dives in the north west of Bali but then head to Jogjakarta.
I feel I’m writing a lot about what I’m doing and not so much about my impressions of the country and the culture. So in an attempt to write a bit more about that, already a few of my impressions of Indonesia so far:
- People are very religious in Bali: mainly Hindu (but quite different from Hinduism in India). I am especially impressed with how often people spend time going to the temple, holding ceremonies and especially making offerings. Some women spend the majority of their time making offerings.
- Indonesians strongly believe in ghosts, much different from how we look at it in the west. Some people even prefer not to be home alone to avoid coming in contact with ghosts.
- A waiter told me that The Netherlands (Belanda) is a very safe country: not because there are few earthquakes or other problems, but because there are no demons..
- Aside from Bali, Indonesia is mainly Islamic. The first I came in contact with this was last night, when I was woken by the call for prayer (I think) around 4am. It may also have been a special event given that it is full moon, and the Islams works with a moon calendar. Perhaps someone can tell me more about this?
Sorry, no pictures today: I forgot my cable so I’ll add a few extra next time.
Posted in Nusa Tenggara Barat | 2 Comments »
May 18th, 2010
A few days later I am now in Ubud, and a PADI Advanced Open Water Diver 
The diving is here is amazing! The water here is 30 degrees celsius, even at 30m depth! Compare that to 16 degrees in California, it makes diving so much more fun! For the Advanced Open Water I had to do 5 adventure dives, which included a little bit of theory but were mainly just fun. I started of with a wreck dive, in which we explored the USS Liberty which was torpedoed by the Japanese a long time ago. We saw a lot off beautiful fish, and there were all sorts of corals. The most memorable moment of that dive was seeing ‘Nemo’ – the clown fish – from Finding Nemo The coral that these fish live in is exactly the same as in the movie: with very squishy tendrils, seems like a nice place to live In addition to this dive I also did a Underwater Navigation dive, Night Dive, Deep Dive (to 30m) and finally a dive to practice better buoyancy control.
In these dives I saw to many fish and coral types to name, but a few highlights: during the deep dive we saw the rare Eagle Ray (about 1.5-2m in width). Also we saw a lot of Bumphead fish, which are about 1m long. It was such a great experience to be at 30m depth and to look up to the surface and in the distance to see a group of these huge fish swim buy! Some other fish that we saw: scorpion fish, stingrays, squids, octopus, cuttlefish and many others!
The place where we stayed was very nice as well (see pictures), and a stone’s throw away from the dive location. The name was Paradise Inn, which seemed very fit given the lush green plants spread throughout and the soothing quiet – which was a great relief after the noisy Kuta streets.
Part of the dive package was that they picked me up and dropped me off wherever I wanted. As I knew that a friend of a friend (Charlotte) was staying in Ubud for her thesis I asked them to drop be off there. Uud is a nice, small,but still very touristic town surrounded by rice fields (sawas). When I arrived I managed t find a very nice yet cheap place, and met up with Charlotte and a friend of hers. They introduced me to the local drink (of which I forgot the name, but its basically palm wine) and we had some good local food. We also ran into another Dutch girl who is traveling around here, so we had a small Dutch get-together :p
Later today I will be doing some exploring to really see what its like here, Ive already spent way too much time in this internet cafe..
For pictures see below:
Posted in Bali | 4 Comments »
May 15th, 2010
Last Friday I safely arrived in Bali after a not-so-bad flight via Hong Kong. In the past I’ve read a lot of other peple’s travels blogs so I feel I am falling into clichés, but it seems I’ve been here for ages already though its only been 48 hours!
When I arrived on Friday and finally managed to get my visa after standing in line for 1.5 hour I walked into the hot, humid Bali air. Hoping not to come over as a ‘stupid’ tourist I had prepared myself a bit in the airplane by learning the numbers from 1 to 10 and the tenfolds in Bahasa Indonesia. It seemed to have helped at least a bit because I managed to go from the starting price of 25 USD down to ‘lima puluh ribu’, which is about 5USD.
On the way to the centre of Kuta – where I had planned to find a place to stay – I was overwhelmed with how different it is here to anything I’ve seen before. It always smells of something, mainly food, but also things like incense. Then there is the temperature: during the day pretty much always over 30 degrees celsius. But mainly its just how things ‘are’: the roads, all the scooters, the people, the entire atmosphere. I guess it shows that I have never been to Asia before 
Yesterday I walked around a bit to explore the area; around noon I ended up in the A/C’ed M-minimart where I took a short break to get some water. Here I ran into Arnold: an Indonesian guy from Padang, Sumatra. He was sitting there being bored and browsing the web a bit (as there was free wifi in the minimart). We ended up talking a bit and we decided that since he was bored, and I didnt have anything in particular planned that we should hang out together. Arnold had worked in Bali before (he graduated from Tourism school in Sumatra), but had come back now to look for a job again. As his sister had a house on Bali he was staying there while she was away. We spent the day racing around Kuta, Legian and Seminyak on his scooter and had lunch in a nice local restaurant that he knew. He also showed me his (or actually his sister’s) place, and introduced me to his neighbor where we spent some time talking.
On the way back to Kuta I had an unfortunate incident: after we had stopped to get some petrol, I got back on the scooter a bit too careless and tore my pants open from top to bottom 
In the words of Arnold: it was a good things that I was wearing underpants Luckily they sell shorts on literally every street corner, and so the problem was quickly solved. This was alos when it started raining, so our plan to go to the beach changed to visiting Discovery Mall, where we had dinner. Finally the day came to an end after a good night of bar hopping and clubbing with Arnold and his friends
Perhaps this explains a bit why it seems like I’ve been here so long: a lot of experiences in a very little time Altoghether I am really enjoying myself! Tomorrow I will start my PADI Advanced diving course with Aquamarine Diving (Thanks for the referral Laurent!)
Below some pictures:
ps. I love this place: I just spent an hour on the internet for about 90 cents
Posted in Bali | 3 Comments »
May 13th, 2010
For now my last post from The Netherlands. I am writing this post from Schiphol airport while waiting for my flight to Denpasar via Hong Kong. Supposedly it’s raining in Bali right now, so I won’t be escaping the rain but at least it is twice as warm
I managed to keep my back pack fairly empty and in my cabin luggage I am bringing some books and my Ukulele I hope to find some time to learn to play it properly..
Till next post!
Posted in North Holland | 7 Comments »
May 6th, 2010
It’s nearly been two weeks since I arrived back in The Netherlands (or ‘Amsterdam’ as some people prefer to call it ). I’ve spent my time going around the country to see as many people as I can. It’s a strange period as on the one hand I am back for good in that I am not going back to the US anytime soon, but on the other hand I am already leaving the country again in a week.
One thing that I noticed over the past weeks is that there is not better way to re-integrate (or integrate for that matter) in a country than to be there around the national festivals/holidays. The period between April 30th and May 5th is a special time here, as it contains 3 major holidays: Queensday on the 30th, Remembrance day on the 4th and Liberation day (or Victory Day) on the 5th; each day has its own atmosphere. Queensday (and Queensnight, which is the night before) is a day of total celebration: everyone is out on the streets where they are either holding or walking by flee markets or they’re out on the streets dancing to one of the many DJs. Though each city has something going on, Amsterdam is definitely the busiest place during Queensday. On Remembrance day we commemorate those who died during past wars; WW2 is of course the war that gets most emphasis. At 8p the entire country holds 2 minutes of silence, followed by the national anthem. Finally Liberation day is a festive day with festivals all around the country with all kinds of performances (all Dutch artists but some known outside the country as well, such as Junkie XL).
That’s it for now: below I added some pictures from the last two weeks.
Posted in Europe, North Holland | No Comments »
April 25th, 2010
Yesterday I safely arrived home! The flight felt quite long in that I did not really sleep (maybe 2 hrs) so yesterday I was struggling to stay awake. Today was a nice sunny day, so staying awake was quite easy. It is great to be ‘home’ (at some point is starts to get hard to identify where home is..) again, and see my brothers and parents again. I already had the luck to meet with some of my friends already, and I hope more over the weeks to come. As I will be roaming around the Netherlands for the next few weeks don’t expect too many posts from me.
By the way, you may have noticed that I integrated my blog with Facebook’s Open Graph as an experiment. Its still a bit ugly as I didn’t really spend enough time making it fit in: maybe later.
Posted in Gelderland | 1 Comment »
April 17th, 2010
Yesterday was my farewell party: it was great to see most of you before I leave, and I am glad so many people came to the party! With altogether about 50-60 people over the course of the evening the atmosphere was good and the Sambuca shots were even better (an old Buisman-party tradition ). My last 7 days in the US will be filled with final arrangements, packing and of course hoping that the Icelandic ash-cloud clears up soon enough for me to get my plane!
I’ve uploaded a few pictures from the party which I made with my new camera (the Canon S90 – so far I am really happy with the quality):
Posted in CA | 1 Comment »
April 12th, 2010
My first real trip as part of my vacation As I mentioned in my previous post we had planned to go the Channel Islands to do some diving and hiking. The trip really worked out very well, as the weather was good (not too warm, but no rain) and the Channel Islands (Santa Cruz Island specifically) turned out to be very nice!
Diving on Saturday was great! I can really recommend diving with the Peace Dive Boat; the trip started at 6:30am (we could have slept on the boat the night before, which would have been even better but we did not realize this). Altogether we did 4 (!) dives, at 4 different locations and between each dives a hot meal awaited us (we had sausage and eggs, chicken and rice, and fresh brownies with ice cream!) The dives were nice as we saw a lot of wildlife such as Garibaldi fish, Horn Sharks, Spiny Lobsters and best of all: a seal! It was really nice to see a seal coming so close and experiencing it in its natural environment: on land they always seem kind of awkward but underwater we were definitely the awkward ones
The hike on Sunday was very nice as well: the island was very peaceful and mainly consisted of sloping hills with beautiful flowers and high grass waving in the wind. If you happen to be in the area its definitely worth a visit.
I posted my pictures to Flickr (which I will be doing for all of my pictures). Pictures of the dive boat are still missing at time of writing, but I will add them as soon as I have them.
Posted in CA | No Comments »
April 9th, 2010
Welcome to my new travel-blog ’120 Saturdays’. If you’ve reached this blog you probably know who I am, and that after close to 3 great years in the Bay Area I will be returning to Europe. Before I start my new job at Google though, I will have 4 months of vacation! Having experienced my first week of my temporary retirement I have found that it’s quite easy to get used to: every day I wake up and decide what I want to do that day, knowing that if things don’t work out today there’s always another free day tomorrow. So it seems I’m in for an exciting ride through 120 “Saturdays” which will bring me from the Bay Area to Zurich, via The Netherlands, Indonesia and Thailand and who knows where else!
On this blog I will be leaving notes as I go, to keep everyone posted. You’ll notice that the map at the top of this page will show you the places where I’ve written my posts. If you look at a subset of the posts – say by clicking on a category to the right or by looking at an individual post – it will show only those posts on the map. If you’d like to know what I did in a certain location, just click on the marker on the map and it will show you the post I wrote there.
I’ll probably be posting something soon already as I will be heading to the Channel Islands this weekend (with Borja, Gemma, Amir, Daniel and Nadine) to do some diving and hiking.
Posted in CA | No Comments »
