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 on would no longer be open at that late hour of the day, as it was not a hotel but a privately run guesthouse. But we were lucky, after ringing the bell of the Kancil ... read more

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 (there was also a Dutch guy on board) and they were glad to reduce the costs by sharing the price with two more travellers. This car was empty and the driver had to reach Maumere ... read more

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 exaggerated use of air condition, this would considerably help save precious energy in a petrol-strapped world. Anyway we had to endure it on the airport as well as the following ice cold Air Asia flight from ... read more

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 bus suddenly stopped somewhere (we were definitely in Dali because we had already seen the pagodas, but this was not the bus station), but the spot seemed to be the right one, as a lot ... read more

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 across the almost finished railway line that will connect Lhasa with the western parts of Tibet (the Chinese really do everything to unblock Tibet from its geographical isolation and to further integrate it into mainland ... read more