a small taste of my travel adventures around this planet

The nice owner of my hostel in Darjeeling warned me: Take care when crossing the boarder in Siliguri, sometimes strange things happen there! Should have listened to him, but I was too lazy to travel down to Varanesi to cross into Nepal from there. So yeah indeed, strange things happened.

The spiv in the “office” on the boarder had hes feed on the table when his assistent brought me chai and we discussed about the price of the ticket to Kathmandu. He wanted to rip me off, I knew. But I didnt trust my feelings and 3 hours later we were sitting on a street in the middle of nowhere, an hour drive away from the border town where I bought the tickets, surrounded of Nepali kids laughing at us and with no bus coming. I was pissed off that I let this fucker rip me off, but sometimes u cant help it. I knew this ticket was worth a cow’s shit and no bus had reserved a seat for me. The Nepalis started to ask us if we like Maoists and I knew that things were getting worse.

When I finally managed to be on a bus to Kathmandu, I didnt gave a shit that the bus was so packed that there wasnt even space on the roof for the people who wanted to stop the bus from the roadside. Then the next strange thing happened. I realized that the crazy nepalise in the row behind me was transporting leeches. A lot of leeches. The hole corridor of the bus was packed with bowls full of a strange smelling liquid, just protected with a nylon. I got aware of the leeches when the bus drove in a sharp bend and the bowls fell over. Suddenly the hole floor was full of leeches swimming around and nepalis shouting at each other, everyone accusing the other for the mess, others trying to get away of the leeches sucking at their legs.  I putted on my earplugs and spent the last 7 hours of the busride sitting with my knees on my chest and trying not to throw up from the aweful smell the leeches were spraying. I should have listened to the nice guy in my Darjeeling guest house.

It’s loud, and it smells really fucking bad. Its kind of a mix between cow shit and rickshaw emissions, mixed with another 100 smells I havent even smelled in my life before. Its hot, I’m sweating like a pig, everyone talks to me but I dont understand a word when I walk through the packed streets. I dont know what to eat because all the thinks I see in the street-restaurants I’ve never seen before. The menus are in hindi, dont understand a single letter. I’m feeling tired of the 19hours journey from Bangkok over Dhaka to come here, but I couldnt sleep at night because the sleazy room I shared with the belgium Backpacker I met on Dhaka airport has mosquitos flying around and the people next door are watching stupid bollywood movies on full volume.Dont even want to watch what kind of creatures are living under my mattress.

Still, I love this place.  I think every Traveller will understand me. Its kind of the stuff we are searching for, something so completely different then home that we even forget that this other, “civilized” world even exists.

I got used to it pretty fast. After u get used to have diarrhoea for months without toilet paper and waking up every morning counting how many new mosquito bites u have u dont mind all the other stuff any more. I was eating Tali and Chana masala, I was adicted to that shit, so good! We traveled in 3th class train, encountering every kind of fucked up people like transvestite-prostitutes with 3days beards wearing Sari and asking u for sex for 10rupees. I used to say, If u travelled in India, nothing in the whole world can shock u any more.

We took the endless trainride from Suratthani down to Hat Yai and from there towards Penang, Malaysia. The border crossing was the easiest I ever had. As soon as we crossed the border, Malaysian students started to enter the train, they use as transport back home from school. Soon loads of Malaysian kids were analysing us and giggling at each other when we looked at them.

I want to make this short. We took the ferry over to Georgetown, where we walked through the whole city to find a cheap hostel. The food in this city was amazing. The whole town is a meltin pot of differend religions, cultures and nationalities. We walked by chinese temples and huge mosques, crossing catholic schools and jewish kids playing football.

We took our time to dicover the island with a motorbike. I survived a monkey attack in the biotopic gardens and japanese kids in the huge shopping mals laughted at us because of our dirty and disrupted clothes. After all I loved the place and expecially the food down there, I am 100% sure I will make another trip to discover more of the malaysian culture.

We arrived in Vang vieng around midday. We heared some awesome backpacker-stories about this place, and therefor we were excited to check everything out.

So came we spent the next days cycling around the cornfields, climbing around in the mountain-caves, tubing down the river while getting pissed, swimming in the bluest lagoones we had ever seen… Vang Vieng – an incredible place.

Hanging out at this beautiful swimming pool we met some local people and finished drinking beer and eating lao-food all afternoon.

After a bit we found out that they were 2 cops and a farmer. My drunk ass pretendet to be a cop as well and we finished up showing each other self defense tricks. When it became dark they gave us a ride in town with theyr transporter and we endet up drinking more and more beers at their house.

In vang vieng we could find everything we wanted. Good food, nice people, fun and adventure. After the crazy tubing trip we met a bunch of travellers which who we made a few good parties.

This place is one of the places I am sure I will go back.

After a while we had to leave and we went down to Vientiene, the capital, and got finally some money out of the famous cash machine.

Fillipp enjoing the last days in laos

The last night in thailand took place in a small border town.. damn i forgot the name.. Maybe Ko chang or something like that! We took a small boat over the border and the first troubled day in laos began. We got our passports stamped and wanted to get some cash in laos currency. Some smart english tourists teached us smiling that there is only one single Cash machine in the whole country, in vientiene. And that was bloody far away. Yeah we did not really plan a lot before coming here 🙂

Then the Laos people tried to rip us off with the boad transfer we pre-paid from chang mai. “Ohhh sorry sir the payment from the thai-people has not arrived! But if u pay us the same amount another time we can bring u to the boat now, otherwise u have to spent another night here!” .. Bullshit. Typical tourist-rip off thing in progress. Me and Filipp just sit down on a table and took out our poker-cards. “Ok man, no problem! but we wont pay for the hostel, if u dont bring us to the boat we will sleep right here on this table” And we startet playing cards while our fellow tourists startet to argue around. Finally after 2 hours of waiting, the laos people realised that we wont fell into the stupid trap and said: “Ohh, the paiment just arrived, now we can go”

So in the end we landet on the boat that would bring us down the mekong-river to Luang Prabang. The journey should take around 2 days and took place on a small boat filled up with backpacker who decidet to take the same route over to laos.

We left the main part of the boat and found the storage room, where all the backpacks were stacked. There we met four nice Thai-Students from Bangkok who made a holiday trip to laos. We spent the whole afternoon talking and playing cards, while the beautiful landscape of the mekong-river drifted by next to us.

We spent the first night in a small village. The people there survive only with the tourist business. They made theyr money with one night tourists which took the way down the river to luang prabang. I think it was there where we met the nice german girl, with whitch we hang out the next days a lot. In the town they had everything, and next to robbing tourists the young people there made their money with dealing. We laughted our ass off when we met all the wannabe hard dealers of this small town.

The next day at night we strandet in Luang Prabang. We took a long walk to get away from the main tourist area, where the rooms were 20-30 dollars a night. We wanted to spend he next day checking out the famous watherfalls in this area.

Now we knew why the watherfalls were famous. Amazing and huge, the most incredible waterfalls I had ever seen in my life. We took on our swimming throwsers and jumped in the cold but clear whater.

When we came to phnom penh and spendet more money for pot and food, we started to make our calculations of time and money.. which were horrible. We had almost no Cambodian money left because they tricked us on the border so we had to be reaaally careful.

Phnom Penh is the capital of Cambodia. And really poor. We crashed in a street near the lake, kind of a small backpacker district. Kind of a small and early version of Bangkokgs Khao San, but better 🙂

Phnom Penh is full of controversity. The modern center is modern and clean, the national museum and the government are made could make u believe u are in a modern city. But we started to explore the sideways of the city, and saw a lot of poverty and misery. After we visited the killing fields and S21 we were shocked, we didnt expect that. Western press did never told us how extreme the Red Khmer destroyed cambodian lifes. And the scars could be seen everywhere around us.

We decidet to leave Phnom Penh because we were short on time. We had less then 10 days left..

We had to decide either to go south to the coast or north.. to the .. hmm how could you describe it .. offroad track? 🙂

When we read about a lake in a old vulcanic crater somewhere in the northern provinces, the decision was easy.

We took a bus up to Krati to see the dolphines in the Mekong rivers. Then we got a ride to ban lung with one of the worsest vehicles I ever travelled with.

Too many hours and too many people 😉 With me and Cris there were 8 other people in this car, I still cant believe how we had space in there. The driver was sitting on another guy and crashed with full speed into the very deep holes of ratanakiris “roads”.

Ban Lungh is my favorite place in Cambodia. At the time we went there, there were only a hand full of backpackers hanging out there. There was lots of adventure up there, off road tracks, off the beaten track.. everything a backpacker dreams of.

And plus we could manage to hold our extreme budget, it was 1 dollar per day now for food and drinks. For that we buyed 2 baguettes, 2 liters of wather and a pack of cigarettes each. Thats how u save money..

At day we went to the crater lake to swim and get some cooling from the heat, in the evening we went to play football with the lokal kids. They went crazy when we said we are from italy, they kept on screeming WORLD CHAMPION, WORLD CHAMPION!!! singing the song of the Worldcup 08. We teached them some tricks with the ball and showed them how to play hacky-sack.

The next days we spendet finding waterfalls in the outback around the town. We could just afford to rent a bike, so we were going around for hours to find the waterfalls, while other backpackers overtook us with motorbikes.

The days up there went by way to fast. And then we were back to the long way to phnom penh with a lot of puking cambodians who were not used to theyr horrible roads.

The busride takes only a few hours sir, I promise sir!

What a bunch of bullshit! when we took off from bangkok to cross the boarder to cambodia, we had a nice small bus and perfect streets, leading us to cambodia in around 4 hours. Then we crossed the boarder and cambodias charme started to hit us.. with another additional 8 hours busride on a horrible street (if u can call it street, just a lot of sand with holes), crazy cambodians who ripped us of with money-changing on the boarder and so much dirt that I grew a second skin .. out of dirt 🙂

So we arrived in Siem Reap to see the Angkor Wat, the temple area of whitch every backpacker in South-east-asia had heared about before. A paradise for everyone who likes to explore ancient history. Apart of the other thousands of tourists who fly directly into siem reap and stay into their bunkers of 5 star hotels with AC.  Me and Cris crashed in a cheap hostel for a few riel and planned our trip to the temples, we wanted to see sunrise and sunset on the same day because we did’t had so much time left to stay in cambodia..

The Angkor was reeeeally impressive. We got the sunrise on the main temple are, together with all the other tourists which were after the clichè.

We used the day to explore the area on our own, and even with all the tourists there we found some nice places of the beaten track, about half an hour walk from the main area, where we chilled out and imagined how this place would have been a few houndred years ago..

After the sunset we were completely destroyed and shiped back to the hostel. The next day we proceedet to the capital, Phnom penh.

Soo I’m gonna keep it short. This is what happened:

We left echuca and got a ride to melbourne with angelos brothers truck. He left us in the middle of nowhere and we had to walk into the center. There we checked in into global backpackers, a hostel with a mix of crazy and even crazier people. We stayed in melbourne and I cancelled my plane ticket back home. Instead I made one back to Bangkok in a couple of weeks.

After Melbourne we did a trip to the great ocean road! It was fun, we met a lot of new mates and our tour guide was hillarious! haha it was santa clause. The people on this trip mixed withe the amazing views of the coast made it an unforgettable experience.

so yeah to go on, we finished that crusade and took a flight to brisbane and started to travel down the east coast, stopping by in Surfers paradise. If I remember well it was there that they kicked us out of the hotel. I was in badly hangover conditions and wanted to kick off with the hotel guy, but cris kept a cool head and got us safly down to byron bay!

Byron Bay is awesome. I enjoyed my time there so much! we had an awesome coast, rainforest, good smokes and the best hostel in town. It was probably the best part of OZ for me. Cris took off to some solo trips when I was lying in bed because of the horrible sunburn I got after going surfing the whole day without suncream. Atleast the sunburn burned away the moskito bites 😉

So yeah after Byron we took a ride down to newcastle and then to sydney. I only had a couple of days left here and wanted to work for some days in construction work there to save some more money for asia. Couldnt in the ende because of my smashed knee, another story 🙂

Thats where I said goodbye to my fellow Travel-Mate Cris, in the same hostel where we startet the trip in Australia. My ways would go back to Asia and further to India, and he was about to end his trip, going back home to Italy.

Was kind of strange to leave him now, after 3 months of traveling. We went thru a lot of shit together, and afterterwards when I was sitting in the plane back to bangkok, I thought wondered who will watch me now when I’m fucking shitfaced again, or who would do it for him 🙂

We left Katoomba because we got ourself a job in echuca – Victoria! Due to the crazy public transport prices on this continent we decidet to hitch-hike there. It didnt take long and we found out that the aussies had a crazy fear of that stuff because a killer killed a bunch of poor hitch hikers a few years ago. But we were lucky, we didnt got killed but we found the nicest lady in New south wales and she gave us a ride to the next train station and buyed us a ticket each for 200dollars!

We found our way to echuca after a hard night outside Wagga-wagga train station and started working on Angelos Farm, a few kilometers from echuca! We picked plumps and pears, got almost killed by the crazy amount of flies here and I got an eye infection after 2 days and had to call in sick 🙂 haha lousy workers

Hard work for just ok-money, but angelo is a nice italian whos parents immigrated to aussiland after WW2.

We stayed in the coolest hostel in Echuca. It was an awesome athmosphere, we got along great with the other workers. We had chinese, japanese, israelis, germans (of course), english, scottish, irish, estonish and so on. They were all working here, trying to save some money to keep on traveling. The best company for us to celebrate the end of a hard working day with a lot of drinks!

So yeah, finally our plane landet on sydney airport and i DIDNT throw up!! So proud.. After the airport security harnassed us for about an hour and took away my flick knife and checked us for drugs, we could finally ship off and get the bus downtown.

Endlich sind wir in Sydney angekommen. Der Flug schien gaaar nicht mehr aufzuhören. Nach 3 bescheuerten filmen und 3 mini-fläschchen gratis Flugzeug wein sind wir auf dem Sydney international airport gelandet! Nachdem und die Airport-security fast ne stunde lang belästigt hat, mir mein klappmesser abgenommen hat und uns auf drogen untersucht hat konnten wir endlich einen bus in die innenstadt nehmen.

The long walk down to kings cross took us a long while. And to find a cheap hostel there even longer! 28 dollars for a 6bed dorm thats what we got after 2hours of intensive searching and lurking on the street.

Ein billiges Hostel zu finden scheint hier unmöglich. Nachdem wir ne stunde rumgelatscht sind um nach kings cross zu kommen, hängten wir erstmal dort auf den straßen rum und quatschen leute an um ne billige absteige zu finden.

Ohne erfolg: 28dollar für ein 6bett-schlafsaal. AAAAAAHH

We stayed in sydney for a couple of days to sort out the shock of the prices here (haha coming down from Thailand). Then we got our Working on holiday permission and then took off to Katoomba to see the Blue mountains. yihaaaa

Wir blieben ein paar tage in sydney um uns vom Kultur-Preisschock zu erholen. Ernährung heißt hier Goon und Home Brand, die einzige marke um mit unserem engen Backpacker-Budget zu überleben 🙂

Nach ein paar tagen gings weiter nach Katoomba, um die Blue mountains zu bewundern.