After a month of theoretical studies and field work, however interesting it might have been, it was wonderful to start the actual holiday part of the trip. When I left Finland I didn't have any plans about where or with whom I was going to travel for the last two weeks in the Philippines. But luckily enough I met some fabulous people on the course with whom we decided to travel together! Our first stop was the island of Palawan, which lies in the western parts of the country quite isolated from everything else. We quickly visited the capital of Puerto [View Full Entry]

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After spending two weeks in a classroom we were all really eager to get into the field work! Our first stop was the Phlippine General Hospital, which is one of the biggest public hospitals in the Philippines. At PHG and other public hospitals even the poorest of the poor will be admitted. But to my surprise we learned that there are separate wards for those who can pay for their treatment and for those who can't. So while the charity wards were litterally bursting from the overload of patients, upstairs on the ward for the paying patients they were carrying in [View Full Entry]

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After my around the world trip in 2008 I felt that I've done enough sightseeing and travelling around just for fun for a while. Instead of being just a bystander and a spectator I felt that during my next travel I would like to somehow be a part of the local life, learn something new and actually maybe be to some use. So when I heard about the Global Health course I immediately applied and luckily enough I got accepted. The first two weeks in the Philippines has gone by in a mere blink of an eye. The Global Health course [View Full Entry]

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I have to say I've been quite nervous about this trip. Although I've travelled quite extensively, I've only travelled alone on very few occasions and for only a few days at a time. So a 2 months trip alone in South East Asia made me feel a little bit uneasy and restless. And yes ok, 1 month out of that I'm attending a course so I won't be alone, but still. But all the nervousness just magically disappeared when I sat myself in the plane seat. I know how to do this, I felt. After all it's not exactly the first [View Full Entry]

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We arrived to Argentina with the plan to stay a few weeks in Buenos Aires, studying spanish and maybe taking some tango classes in the evenings. After all the travelling around and having to constantly move on from one place to another I was really looking forward to staying in one place for a longer time. We arrived to Argentina in the autumn so it was time to say goodbye to warm weather and that lovely tan of ours that we had been working on for so long! The start to our trip in Argentina wasn't too great. We arrived to [View Full Entry]

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We left New Zealand at 6.30 pm on Sunday and after a 11 hour flight we arrived to Santiago at 2.30 on the same day! Very confusing this date line business... We were a bit of a mess, but had decided not to go to bed before the evening, because we wanted to prevent getting a bad jetlag. Our host Carlos came to meet us at the airport and kept us busy the whole day making sure we didn't get to bed at any abnormal time. We went out for lunch after which we met up with Carlos' friend Majid. We [View Full Entry]

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The start of our trip in New Zealand was very exciting and a bit nerve wrecking. We arrived in Christchurch by air and went straight from the airport to pick up our car, OUR CAR! Very exciting! Driving on the wrong (a.k.a. left) side of the road in a foreign country might not sound like a good idea, but it was. We stayed one night in Christchurch, which is a city on the northwest coast of the Southern Island, and started our roadtrip the next morning. We were supposed to leave really early, but Helena forgot to reset her watch to [View Full Entry]

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After 3 months in South East Asia it felt a bit like coming home, when we landed in Australia. Everywhere is clean and pretty quiet, all the streets aren't completely full with people and the traffic is very organised. The cities have lot of nice parks and gardens... It felt good to be in a western country again. It just makes life so much easier that people understand what you say, you understand them and you pretty much know how it all works! Although I have to admit, that I didn't really remember how it all works in a western country. [View Full Entry]

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After 2 months of travelling around and always having to move along to the next new place we felt we wanted to go somewhere familiar, where we had been before and where we had some friends. No we didn't go back home to Finland... We went back to Malaysia, of course! We'd had enough of those crappy buses so we decided to catch a flight. Our first stop on the way was Singapore where we met up with Partha, the partyboy. After only one night we continued to KL and reunited with our friend Pika and his wonderful family, that we [View Full Entry]

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Just when we thought it couldn't get any worse after the bus ride from Hell... We arrived in Vinh and we're dropped of at a random street somewhere. As our guidebook didn't say anything about the place, we didn't have a clue of where we were and where we should be going and we didn't have any Vietnamese currency, only a few US dollars. A small comfort was the fact that we weren't the only ones with this problem. We were accompanied by two malaysian guys we met on the bus who didn't have a guidebook nor a map. We started [View Full Entry]

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