Asian Traffic

It's really amazing to see and understand traffic in the various countries of Southeast Asia. While in Malaysia it's basically like in Europe, in Thailand traffic laws are more regarded like a guide of conduct - You CAN follow them, but you don't really HAVE to, but if you do, it works out okay. Motorbike riders frequently jump red lights in Bangkok (the only city i know with 5 minute red light intervals) when they don't see anything coming, and cabbies just turn the opposing lane into an extra right-turn lane when they see that the opposing traffic has a red light. On highways with separate streets for opposite directions, you quite often see vehicles that go the opposite direction on the stopping lane on the side of the street.
In Bali, there's only one law: The bigger vehicle has the rightaway. Other than that you can pretty much do whatever you want.

Cambodian traffic is pretty special though: As with most other things in Cambodia, there just seems to BE no regulation whatsoever! It's pretty much complete anarchy, you'd be hard pressed just to find a traffic sign here (there are some, but only very very few!) and quite a few cars drive around without any license plates (!). People just drive however they want to, a red light isn't much more than a suggestion to maybe stop. Only in Cambodia you can see people going straight AND people from the opposing lane making a left turn (crossing the ones going straight - Cambodia is one of the few asian righthand driving countries) at the same time, crisscrossing eachother like the finale in a Chinese acrobat circus show - without any accidents!

One thing seems to be very important in most asian countries: Always make extensive use of the horn. Mostly to show other drivers and people on the side of the street that you're there. When we drove from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh the driver must've been honking his horn for almost half the whole trip in total (that's about 3 hours). And it was a VERY LOUD horn. Overtaking in Cambodia just seems to work so much better if you constantly honk your horn while doing it. A vehicle here is only considered disfunctional when the horn's not working! ;-)

Update: I have gotten confirmation by locals that there really WERE no traffic laws or regulations whatsoever in Cambodia until last year! They're working on getting them established though..

Holiday in Cambodia *) - Siem Reap

So I finally made it there, about a month later than originally planned. The trip to Siem Reap was quite an adventure. The street, even though it is one of the most important in the country, linking Cambodia to Bangkok, is nothing but a very very bumpy dirt track. And if that wasn't enough, it was pouring down with rain that day, too. So all the vehicles you saw on the street were covered in dirt like hardcore rally cars, it looked like one giant Colin McRae tribute. It took us over six hours for 160km.

There are rumours that Bangkok Airways, "the boutique airline" and the only one that flies to Bangkok from Cambodia, makes sure the money that every year goes into improving this road disappears somewhere along the way in the system of happy corruption that is most of Southeast Asia.
Cambodia itself is really nice though. The people here are very friendly, and like Malaysia, sometimes enjoy chatting with you or merely greeting you just for the sake of it, without trying to sell you something. This is maybe because almost anyone here speaks at least English, some even really well. Little four year old kids that can talk English, this is even better than Malaysia! Quite a few Cambodians even speak multiple languages, we've met a cambodian painter trying to sell his works that spoke English, French, Japanese and some bits of German and Spanish! This is quite amazing when you realize how young tourism is in Cambodia compared to Thailand, where after 30 years of tourism you still meet a very large number of people that don't even speak a single word of English, and quite a few of them even work in the service sector, e.g. restaurants or as cabbies.
But this also has its downsides: A lot of -mostly very young- hawkers are relentlessly trying to sell their -mostly identical- souvenir merchandise almost anywhere here, but then again the temples here are THE main attraction in Cambodia (not only for tourists!), Angkor Wat is actually on the Cambodian flag itself. The children entrepreneurs used to be begging kids (run by pimp rings) not too long ago, but with great effort various organizations got them off begging and onto education, so I'm trying to support this by buying some of their merchandise every now and then. They're not only good in languages, but also in geography, wherever you come from - they can tell you the capital and the number of people in your country!


Cambodian kids - they're relentless entrepreneurs, but you gotta just love 'em!

Things can take quite a bit longer here, Cambodians never seem to be in a rush. It may happen that you wait for 10 minutes in a restaurant for your change or 20 minutes for your (quickly made) food. It's a bit cheaper here than in Thailand, in some areas even quite a bit. You notice almost anywhere that tourism is still fairly young in Cambodia, there are huge building projects everywhere, and building proper streets and a nice communications/internet infrastructure is currently underway.
After what the USA has done to Cambodia during the Vietnam War (Christmas offensive, Ho Chi Minh trail carpetbombing) it is the ultimate irony and pretty sad to see that these days the US Dollar is the dominant currency in Cambodia, with the Cambodian Real mostly being relegated to the role of a substitute for US coin change. Cambodian ATMs give you Dollars, and even if you pay in Dollars, you get mostly Dollars back in change.
At the moment I'm travelling with Reto from Switzerland and David from Austria, two really nice chaps i met on the Bus to Siem Reap. We also met Martin from Sweden on the border, who is coaching Cambodian kids in football.
We checked out six temples the other day, Angkor Wat, Angkor Tom, the one where some scenes of Tombraider were shot and three more. It was interesting because they were all fairly different:


The main temple in Angkor Tom had loads of amazing spires with faces on them


The Tombraider one was loaded with huge trees that grew their roots all around the stones to find some soil. I call this the "Davy Jones Tree" for want of the proper name.


Angkor Wat is the one that feels most like a Palace, it used to be the center of the Khmer Empire some 1000 years ago.

Siem Reap, being the second most important city in the country besides Phnom Phen, is fairly touristy with most of the nice bits i enjoy (24h supermarkets, ATMs, vibrant nightlife, cheap accommodation and (riksha) Tuk Tuks at any time you need them, while still retaining a bit of that "smalltown feeling", with a fairly modest "townscape" and not that many tourists around hell-bent on partying all the time - which is probably also due to it being the low season right now.

We hang out in the Temple Bar on Bar Street every night, which is a great place with free pool and fairly cheap drinks ($5 for a bucket, $3.50 for two cocktails).



From left to right: David, Reto Mario, Martin

Dinner is usually consumed at one of the various food stalls near Bar Street for very small money, and I'm delighted to say that it was there where I finally found (for just $0.5!) what I've been looking for all over Asia for ages:


A Jackfruit shake! THE mother of all shakes, pure delight!

*) A Song by DK - Dead Kennedys! ;-)

You always come through Bangkok

Back in Bangkok I helped Nadine with finalizing her ticket-change and brought her to the Airport to say goodbye after a day of shopping on Khaosan.


Nadine's last Singha beer. She was so sad to leave...

Then I went back from Khaosan to Asha Guesthouse for some recovering (I had sprained my ankle while dancing on Phi Phi and also had some herpes cold sores) and to have a nice quiet place to contemplate if I should extend my trip for another month. I met some nice people there, but it wasn't a partycrowd like Rachel, Caz, Kieren, Konstantin, Richard and Jamie back in May. But I had some really quality conversations with James, an electronic music and experimental audio nut who's been living in Bangkok for a few years and who liked hanging out at the Asha Guesthouse bar (I had met him in May already).
I ended up extending for another month, and I barely made it: Unfortunately the flight was on monday morning at 3:15 (!) and i decided to extend on friday night. The problem is that Emirate Airline's Bangkok office is not manned during the weekend, and there was just nobody reachable on the airport counter under the "emergency number", too! So I shot off a mail to my travel agency calling for help on moving my flight another month while desperately going through the Emirate Airlines website trying to find either information on how to change your flight online or a number of a 24-hour-hotline (there is NOTHING, don't bother checking!). My travel agency was manned till 13:00 on Saturday, and with the time difference it was just 12:00 when i sent off my mail. So just before they closed i got a mail back that some angel there had just changed my flight! Hooray! ;-)

Phi Phi - Three's a charm?

So we did go back to Phi Phi. It was basically Nadine's stage, and I just tugged along as an extra, but I knew that already when I agreed to come. We didn't stay at Tropical Garden this time, but at her place, Phi Phi Chukit, right next to Hippies Bar down by the beach strip. The room was okay, but they were a bit bitchy about the "free breakfast", which ended way too early (10:30) and was all of a sudden not part of our 500 Bath accommodation anymore, even though they said so when we checked in.
Nadine really enjoyed hanging out with the Thai guys from Apache and Hippies Bar, but they wouldn't go anywhere near her while I was around, so I offered to leave early (around 2am when the music stopped) while she'd hang out with them till the early morning. Not very social of them if you ask me, but whatever, I guess that's Thai guys for you..
The course of the day was pretty much the same every day: Get up around noon, have a chicken sandwich at her favourite place, chat and practice English, maybe go to the beach for a while if the sun was out, get a bucket and kill it infront of our room, go to Apache at night. Any of my tries to break the cycle, like going to Cosmics for food or to the Sunflower bar for some live music were thwarted by "the leading lady"! ;-)

On the last day before leaving we did finally get our asses up to actually do something different, so we went cliff jumping. The highest ledge I jumped from was 12 meters, it was quite fun! We did go to Monkey Beach (yet again) and some snorkelling (yet again) afterwards, but for Nadine it was the first time snorkelling, she had never worn a mask or fins before, and I think she quite liked it (not the fins though).
We flew back to Bangkok on One-Two-Go Airlines, a budget Airline I hadn't been on before - but Nadine had, and she said it was a really really scary flight. And sure enough: The plane that crashed a few days later killing about 90 people on Phuket was One-Two-Go!

Back in Malaysia: Langkawi

Langkawi is on the west coast of Malaysia on the top, pretty much opposite the Perhentians on the other side, and you can go there directly by ferry from Thailand. We didn't get to see very much of the island, since taxis are fairly expensive, as is renting your own car. Nadine was outraged when I told her that the muslims there expect their women to always walk behind them and never do the talking. So we (mostly) did it the other way around, which i happily agreed to, because it was fairly confusing for them, and spreading confusion is always fun! ;-)

This cat from our guesthouse had 24 toes, 6 on each foot!

Nadine, an optician who had just decided to go back to school after her vacation for her "Abitur", is a really sweet and pretty special girl and never ceased to surprise me with not-very-common talents (e.g. drumming, wrestling (!), playing chess). However, English wasn't one of them, so we practised every day, and I feel it improved quite a bit during that time, since she's a quick learner. But only when her "attention light" is on, which seems to happen fairly random! ;-)

(Click for animation! 8)

We did go to the Underwater World on Langkawi, which is quite expensive but really amazing and worth every Sen (Sen is the Malaysian Cent). Just when we thought "is this it?" when reaching some restaurant that looked like it was leading to the exit we had actually just entered the REALLY amazing aquariums. They have hundreds of different species there, ranging from penguins to seals to crustaceans to sharks to sea dragons. Basically everything interesting living in the sea can be found there, some of the aquariums are even built like a tunnel, it's very highly recommended!

I call this the "Airbrush shark", looks like some badly airbrushed haunted house façade from the fair..


Sea dragons must be among the strangest creatures on this planet

We usually hung out on the beach at night watching the great sunset and chatting, one night we built our own "Jurassic Park" by making dinosaur footprints in the sand - fun!
After I helped her move her departure flight ten days later we went back to Thailand on the fourth day. She desperately wanted to go back to Phi Phi (She'd been there twice before already as well!), and I really didn't want to go as I was fed up with it and would've much rather have gone to Kho Tao, which I haven't seen yet. But you know how some women are when they've really got their mind set on something - you just don't stand a chance! ;-)

Re-visiting Raileh Beach

So after planning it every single time I was in southern Thailand I finally made my way back to Raileh Beach, where I spent a great week with Steve and Matt from England two years ago. Unlike Phi Phi, the place hasn't changed at all, probably because it wasn't affected by the Tsunami.
There wasn't much to do, cause it was mostly raining all day with the occasional streak of sunlight every now and then. I was mostly hanging out with some great dutch guys i had met on Phi Phi, Judith and Harro, a really nice couple that got engaged in Kho Chang, and Nephtalie, a really clever and charming English teacher, all from Utrecht (though Nephtalie is originally from the Dutch Antilles, Curacao to be exact).

Me, Harro, Judith and Nephtalie in the Lucky Restaurant

One night I was only going out for one beer and ended up almost with a broken nose, a ripped shirt and a really wasted bar owner ("I am mafia on this island!") threatening to kill me, and all just because i helped some Canadian girl bring home her totally wasted friend. More details are available on request! ;-) Let's just say that "Ladies' Night" at the Gecko Bar seems to mean "spiked drinks for all the Ferang girls"..
The day after that I met Andrea (Austria) and Nadine (Germany) at the pool, two fairly crazy girls that had just run out of digital cameras (rain treatment and pillowfight respectively), so I offered to be their "Kamerakind". ;-)

Nadine and Andrea and a lovely sunset on Phranang Beach

We had one really crazy night out at the Gecko Bar, and the next day Andrea came back from the internetcafe in tears: Her grandfather had died some days earlier, the last thing you want to hear when you're on vacation... So she flew back to Austria for the funeral (which was on very short notice, but she made it in time) and Nadine and me went on to Langkawi - In Malaysia, where I had just come from, great! But since she hadn't been anywhere else than in Thailand for almost three months and since there's no Visa fee to be paid for Malaysia (and since I hadn't been to Langkawi) I came along.

Back in Thailand - yet again!

So I went back to Kho Phi Phi, the plan being to return where I started out from in April (I won't count Patong Beach, in retrospective it mostly sucked! 8) to "go full circle", as they say. Ofcourse, I did stay in the Tropical Garden again! ;-)
I spent almost 2 weeks there and had some good times with various people from Australia, Ireland, Holland, Austria, Canada, Spain and England. We had a fairly good posse, but not as good as back in April/May, which was really something special.
It was back to partying every night once again, but it got kinda boring after a while. Too many people don't go to the bars just to have a good time, but merely to pull something for the night.. Some exceptions though: The Sunflower bar on "the other beach" (the one opposite the pier) had a live band playing twice, and it was both times a really really good fun night with alot of bouncing around to the music! ;-)


Apart from lying around on the pool all day working on my suntan or reading Terry Pratchett in the hammock or watching movies and ofcourse partying at night I didn't do much. Oh yes, i went up to the viewpoint and I did finally go on the sunset trip that included some snorkelling, which i hadn't done on Phi Phi before! ;-)


A boxfish! I hadn't seen that before (sorry for teh blurry, best picture I could get!)

When the weather got bad for several days in a row (it is the rainy season after all) I decided it was time to move on to Raileh Beach, which I always wanted to go back to (had been there 2 years ago and liked it lots!)

Exploring Malaysia

Coming back from Bali, I planned to stay in Malaysia for a few weeks to check it out. Also, I was supposed to meet the Aussie posse (Becs & Nat) for the third and final time there. We met in Kuala Lumpur and (after checking out the view from the KL Tower, 335m without antenna!) went pretty much straight to the Cameron Highlands. I enjoyed it a lot there, because it was so different: Being the highest spot in Malaysia at 1500m above sea level, temperatures and climate were completely different then what I was used to. It was still very humid, but cold enough to want a blanket at night. It was quite refreshing for a change to wear the same T-shirt for 3 or even 4 days before having to wash it! ;-) Also, it rained a lot there, but Daniel's Lodge, the place where I stayed, provided a small "movie theater", free WiFi and comfy areas to sit around and chat to pass the time. I had a go in Photoshop to fix a new profile picture for Natalie, some random idea Becs and me had when uploading her pictures to Facebook. Check it out, it turned out really nice (and Nat was overjoyed! ;-):


You can go hiking in the mountains there and go on trips that take you to various sights. They're awfully proud of their strawberry fields, the Cameron Highlands being the only place where they grow (as so many other things like f.ex. Tea), but obviously all the Europeans weren't quite so impressed! ;-) The Insect/butterfly farm was probably the most impressive thing, they have all kinds of weird insects and reptiles there.



Daniel's Lodge was really awesome (and no, i didn't get a discount! ;-). I met loads and loads of awesome people there every single day (most of which were always set to leave the next day - grr!), and at night they have a comfy bar with a campfire right next to it. Spent some quality nights with people from England, Scotland, Australia, Switzerland, Holland and Germany, happy times!



Next up after about 12 days was the Perhentian Islands, Long Beach on the big island to be exact (which is the most popular place). It's fairly underdeveloped compared to the Thai party islands, but it's still good, only Diesel Generators but fairly fast Internet via satellite. Lots of huge (about 1.5m) Komodo dragons walking around there, quite scary! They seem to like to hatch their eggs or take a shit in Bungalows, so watch out!



I re-met Kirsten from England there, who I had first met in the Cameron Highlands (left). She was with Stasa from Slovenia (right), not exactly a common nation to meet while travelling. She also worked in PR for Microsoft Slovenia, but that didn't spoil the fun we had in any way! ;-)



I also met Andi from Germany, a really great guy that I unfortunately only have one really bad picture of... One of the few people that would still keep regular email contact after splitting up, very cool! ;-)

There's really long snorkelling trips available for small money, and this was really the best snorkelling I've ever had. We saw beautiful corals, huge shoals of fish, blacktip reef sharks, eels, clownfish and TURTLES! Yes, they had turtles, and if you wanted, you could go watch them lay their eggs at night.



After that it was back to Thailand, Kho Phi Phi to be exact. Combined journeys aren't quite as readily available in Malaysia as they are in Thailand, so the trip was quite an experience and involved a fair bit of figuring stuff out for yourself, e.g. how to get where exactly for the next connection ride.

Summing up: While not very different geographically, Malaysias population is pretty different than Thailand. First of all, most of them speak really good English, since they were part of the Commonwealth until just 50 years ago. Then there's very many Chinese and Indian people around, which adds to cultural variety (and food-choice! ;-). They also like to chat to you for merely having a nice chat, something that barely ever happens in Thailand (people there will only talk to you when they want something from you). This took a bit of getting used to, since the suspicion was rooted pretty deeply by now! ;-). In general, they're very nice and friendly people, and only in Malaysia you could meet a girl like Ruby, who at the age of 6 spoke 3 languages fluently (Chinese, Malay and English).



It's a predominantly muslim country, but it's quite mellow (probably also due to the ethnic variety of Chinese and Indians!), not like you'd expect muslim countries to be. You could buy booze everywhere and see women with scant clothes walking around in Kuala Lumpur, and that included local women, too! However, you occasionally see BMOs (Black Moving Objects, women covered completely in a burka), usually with their husbands who were dressed quite western with baseball caps and printed shorts. Oh, the good old irony of "do as i say, don't do as I do"...

One quite surreal experience happened in a gas station. Some malay guy asked me where I was from, and when I said "Germany" he threw a Hitler salute and asked if I liked Adolf Hitler. When I said no, he replied "Why not?", which really had me dumbfolded for the mere surrealness of the question, I didn't know what to say! I also saw a guy with a swastika (not the Hindu sun-wheel variety!) on his motorcycle helmet, and a malay guy showed me his passport which said "valid for all countries except Israel", which is in every malay passport. Considering that Intel, a jewish/israeli company, has a fab in Malaysia it does make you wonder how the people working there visit their headquarters in Haifa..

It's a small world

Here's a list of all the different nations I've met on my trip (and with whom I atleast spent a few hours). Will be updated when neccessary!

Argentina
Chile
Brazil
Belgium
China
Japan
Germany
Switzerland
Austria
Australia
USA
Israel
England
Scotland
Ireland
Wales
Spain
Italy
Holland
Sweden
Finland
Norway
New Zealand
Denmark
Slovenia
Ethiopia
South Africa
France
Canada
Thailand
Indonesia
Malaysia
Laos
Cambodia
Russia
Oman