MartinNL
Martijn Feller Joined: March 6th 2008
Logged in: October 10th 2011
Logged in: October 10th 2011
Travel Blog Posts
Riding bareback
Thailand 1: Basking in the Beauty of King Bumipol’s Thailand Another day, another blog. It’s a bit hard for me to write a very upbeat and happy blog at the moment since I’ve had to put my beautiful girlfriend on a plane to Germany a few days ago and am now going it alone in the massive country-continent of Australia. So if this blog is slightly less engaging than usual, please understand. I’ll give an update on my continued existence as a backpacker in Oz in an separate post soon, but for now I’ll pick up where I left off last time. After a long but interesting train trip on the third class train from Aranyaprathet, we arrived at long last in the city of cities in South-East Asia: Bangkok. Like with many places we visited ... read more
Bend in the river in Luang Prabang
Saw that this blog was still waiting to be published. I never quite got around to writing the text for it. And hey, it's only about 1,5 years ago now so that's hardly surprising :) Anyway since I went through the trouble of sorting, resizing and captioning the photo's I might as well post them. After our first stay in Thailand we went to Laos and travelled down the Mekong river to Luang Prabang and from there north to a little village in the mountains, all by boat. Then back to LP and on to Vientiane, to cross the border back into Thailand. I was a bit disappointed by Laos, maybe because I had quite high expectations. For a supposedly untouristy country it was all very organized: we weren't allowed to take normal busses, only tourist ... read more
Bayon. Where we are sitting would normally have been a statue, most likely a buddha but after the Khmer reverted back to hinduism, most of the buddha statues in the temples were unfortunately destroyed
Cambodia II : Angkor Wat Part two of my Cambodia blog will cover our visit to the temples at Angkor Wat in the north-west of Cambodia as well as the rest of our stay in the country. It’s a bit strange as I’m writing this on the boat to Koh Tao in Thailand and the contrast with Ankor could hardly be any bigger. From Phnom Penh it’s an easy six hour bus ride up to Siem Reap, which is the closest town to the temples. It used to be something of an arduous journey as the roads were really bad and a lot of people chose to take a boat instead but a few years ago the government poured millions of the money it carefully schemed out of tourists and its own population into building fancy ... read more
In the tuktuk on the way to the bus in Phnom Penh
As promised, I’ll continue my update with the next country on our list: Cambodia. It will be in two parts since there is much to tell and the temples of Angkor Wat really deserve their own blog. We left Saigon on the Mekong Express bus to Phnom Penh after an enjoyable stay in Vietnam, very much looking forward to coming back some time to explore the beautiful coastline and many other sights Vietnam has to offer. There are many bus companies running this 400-odd kilometer route, but Mekong Express came highly recommended by many other travelers and with good reason. The buses are clean and comfortable with friendly, English speaking guides, a toilet and even a complimentary breakfast or lunch, cold water and a wet wipe. While this may seem fairly normal, bus travel in Asia, ... read more
Different...
Yes, I’m back. After much deliberating and many hours spent walking around various malls in Bangkok I decided that I really did need a new laptop. I settled on an Acer Timeline AS1810T which is one of the latest in the small pc segment, like the Asus eeepc or Dell mini. Except that it’s slightly bigger so it’s still got a pretty normal keyboard and the screen is 11.1” which is about as small as I would like to go since we also use the computer to watch movies. With a 320 GB hard disk, 2 GB RAM and a decent processor it can run most software that I need it to run. It came with a free external DVD player so we can finally watch the rest of the cheap movies we bought along the ... read more
Back in 'Nam in '69 with my M16...
Hello from Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. It's a great city with good food, great architecture and nice people (not to mention 35 degrees, 90+ percent humidity and corrupt police). However, the news is not all good. We arrived here on Friday after spending about a week in Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City if you prefer - another great city. We had a brilliant day with really good food and some nice locals but at night disaster struck. In the room next to ours a pipe burst around midnight, flooding the entire first floor with about 10cm of water. We were first aware of this when we got up to check out what the noise was about and stepped ankle deep in water... next to our bed. As we had only just arrived, our ... read more
Welcome to World Heritage Listed Komodo Island. Oh, and it's mating season so you'll probably see jack shit.. great!
Or how we got stuck in east Nusa Tenggara. As I’m writing this we’re sitting in the departure lounge of the airport of Denpasar, Bali. We’re not having a nice coffee, we’re not having any food. We’re not even having a plate of nasi goreng. What we are having is lukewarm water and cookies. The reason for this is that we had to leave our last few rupiah at the airport in Bima, Sumbawa for an unexpected departure tax and all the ATMs at this airport are broken. Since I left my US dollars in my backpack by accident and my backpack is in transit between planes, we’re stuck here without any money. Before I tell you the story of all the wonderful things we’ve seen and experienced over the past three weeks, I’ll elaborate on ... read more
Easy Rider. This little honda machine was our best friend for five days
After our very memorable trip up to Mount Bromo as the conclusion of our visit to Java, it was time to leave this first island and move to the in this great nation of Islands. The trip was another pretty long one but at least this time we were on a comfortable bus with legroom and the voyage was broken up by a trip on the ferry between the islands. Originally our plan was to bypass the tourist hell of Kuta, in south Bali but since we wanted to book a ticket to Flores from here and had to go to the airport to do so, we decided to spend one night there. Things turned out a bit different and anyway, Kuta turned out not to be all that bad, well not for a day or ... read more
Nice backdrop
Long hair, long life! This is the greeting I receive a lot from Indonesians. I think it’s a fine slogan and I hope it’s true! Long hair is not uncommon here for men, but limited mostly to artists and musicians. I’m writing this blog from outside our bungalow in Yoshi’s Hotel at Gunung Bromo, a volcano in Java Timur, or western Java. We’ve been here for two days now and it’s a beautiful area. Unfortunately it was very cloudy yesterday so we couldn’t see much of the volcano, but this morning we went up for sunrise (5.15, had to get up at 3.00am!!) and had a beautiful view, but more on that later. Back to where we left you. My last blog was from Denmark, in the far south of Western Australia. As predicted the weather ... read more
Giant Tingle Tree
If there’s such a place as Europe in Australia then I think we’ve found it: the South-West. Between the forests, the vineyards and the hills it’s often a little like Germany. Since my last report we’ve traveled further down. We were in Yallingup, on the northern end of the ‘bulge’ of South-West WA and we’re now in Denmark, on the southern side. A different ocean crashes onto the shores here, the Pacific Ocean -although the Australians call it the Southern Ocean. We continued our wine and food tasting with a visit to Vasse Felix Estate, quite a large vineyard north of Margaret River who make a very impressive range of reds and whites. We tasted most of them, from their entry level wines up to the flagship reserves and even after visiting some more wineries afterwards, ... read more
