We were back in Indonesia (almost) and the second attempt did not start very well. The flight from Kuala Lumpur to Medan took only one hour but the haze caused by severe fires on Sumatra had reduced visibility considerably, so that when approaching Medan the pilot informed us that most probably he would not be able to land and that the plane might be forced to return to Kuala Lumpur. After circling above Medan airport for some time, the pilot decided to give it a try and finally managed to land, though the landing was a bit rough. Anyway, welcome back [View Full Entry]

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This time we planned to stay some time in Malaysia before heading to Indonesia once again. Leaving Singapore and entering Malaysia was really a piece of cake, the Malaysian immigration being far less rigorous than the Singaporean one. We soon arrived in Johor Bahru and there it did not take us long to catch a bus to Melaka. We arrived quite late in the night (around 10:30), took a taxi whose driver spoke excellent English and was a real chatterbox disclosing some interesting information like the usual taxi price to us. We feared that the place we had chosen to stay [View Full Entry]

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We were definitely leaving Indonesia, our first Lion Air flight took us to Jakarta, whose airport we did not even leave, some hours later we boarded the following plane to Kuala Lumpur. Air Asia offers really cheap flights, according to the rules which apply to all no-frills airlines. The earlier you book, the cheaper the flights are (we got a flight Jakarta-Kuala Lumpur for only EUR 15), there is no food or drink of any kind served, except if you pay for it. This is all perfectly fine for us, we have never understood why meals absolutely have to be served [View Full Entry]

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The island of Flores stretches over 350 km east to west, but by road it makes easily the double, Labuanbajo is 528 km from Maumere, which is not yet the island's most eastern limit. Flores is crossed by a mountain range from west to east, and by rivers and valleys, which result in extraordinary landscape but also makes the roads more difficult to travel. But once we were lucky concerning transport. Last evening, when Stephan had gone to the Tourist Information enquiring about bus connections, he met a couple of young Danes who had already hired a car for tomorrow morning [View Full Entry]

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Our first stop eastwards was to the island of Lombok where we had planned a stay at one of the Gilis, three tropical islands off Lombok's northwest coast, for swimming and snorkelling. This sounds all very good, but we had to scrap these plans due to lack of time. Leaving Bali turned out to be easier than expected, we caught one bemo after the other until the port of Padangbai. A bemo is a small van where the seating benches are placed lengthwise, and represents the main form of public transport. For foreign tourists this kind of transport has some challenges, [View Full Entry]

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The plane from Macau departed on time, the only drawback was the low temperature - the AC in the plane was running at full speed and we were freezing and no blankets were available on this flight. Chilled to the bones we arrived in Malaysia’s capital Kuala Lumpur, where we were immediately granted a free visa for 90 days, finally a country without complicated visa formalities, thank God. We did not leave Kuala Lumpur’s modern and interesting airport but strove to get some sleep there, which was close to impossible due to the reigning cold. Asian societies should rethink their exagg [View Full Entry]

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Our trip from Dali to Kunming was characterised by a new motorway with three lanes, very little traffic and high speed. After staying in India for more than three months, we had lost the notion of speed, moving by bus at an intermediate speed of 30 km/h and the trains were not much faster there. In China we got this notion back, this bus for example was driving at a maximum speed of 120 km/h! Already upon our arrival, Kunming presented itself as a modern, bustling city with a lot of new roads on two storeys and much traffic, so that [View Full Entry]

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We again carried the luggage first down the uneven stairs and the cobbled road, until the tarred road running up the Lion Hill began. The weather was bad, it was drizzling and Peter and Klaudia waited with the luggage under a tree until Stephan returned with a taxi. We had hardly arrived at the bus station, when somebody shoved Peter and Klaudia into a small bus, while Stephan bought the tickets. And we were gone, heading for Dali, where we could not spend much time due to the uncertainty concerning our visas. We arrived in Dali in the late afternoon, the [View Full Entry]

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So we were travelling by bus once again and despite of the newest bus station in Zhongdian the bus was still built for the old Chinese size, which means that for most of them and particularly for Peter there was no room for the legs. Luckily the bus wasn’t full and he could therefore sit diagonally which was just a bit more comfortable. From Zhongdian we were constantly driving downhill and were slowly starting to feel hot. Peter grumbled that he had too many warm clothes with him (Stephan had urged him to not knowing how cold it would become in [View Full Entry]

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We were leaving the Tibetan Autonomous Region but not Greater Tibet yet, flying from Lhasa to Zhongdian (Chinese name, Tibetan name: Gyeltangteng). Public buses to the airport do exist, but since the airport is quite far from Lhasa (100km to the south) due to the high mountain ranges in its proximity, we preferred to take a taxi and start far earlier than we were supposed to. We already had some experience with road works in Tibet and did not want to run any risk concerning the flight. On the first kilometres the road was tarred and smooth, we once again came [View Full Entry]

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