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 [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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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. [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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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 la [View Full Entry]

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Well we're back on the road and boy is it a good feeling! Dirt under your fingernails, sun on your face, life does not get any better. We're currently doing a little 2,5 week trip to the south-west of WA. Right now we're in Yallingup, which is near Dunsborough just below Cape Naturaliste. It's a beautiful area of rugged cliffs, eucalypt trees, shrubs and rocky beaches with big surf. On our way out of Perth we stopped in Yalgorup, a national park just below Mandurah for our first night of bush camping. It was great to be able to light a [View Full Entry]

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