Vagabonding in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, without plan or destination.

The taxi to the Hangout Hotel on top of Emily Hill is cheaper than the bus for two people. The hotel is simple, clean, modern, and offers free WLAN and a fantastic rooftop terrace. Bugis street is very close to the hotel. There is a large covered bazaar selling everything – cheap clothes, watches, cell…

It’s a very long flight from Amsterdam to Singapore, 12 hours in a cramped cattle class seat, in a row shared with two obese tourists. The video system had to be rebooted twice, and 500 people got to watch the boot messages. It’s an old 2002 RedHat Linux on the world’s slowest processor, a Geode,…

This blog is about to wake up again. I enjoyed a beautiful summer in Berlin, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, and Portugal (see www.bitrot.de), but now it’s back to Asia. On Monday evening I’ll arrive in Singapore, and from there travel to Malaysia, Sumatra, Java, Bali, and other islands of Indonesia and beyond. Let the odyssey…

Did I mention that my palace suite in Ooty had a fireplace and a jacuzzi? The Residency Towers room in Chennai has neither, it’s more like an economy version of a Western Grand Hotel with lots of marble and columns. But it has a pool. Chennai (formerly Madras) itself is not very attractive; there are…

Made an excursion into the hills around Ooty. Wonderful views of the valley and the hills stretching to the horizon. There are many tea plantations. It’s another warm sunny summer day, but I am told that in two weeks the monsoon will bring lots of snow, in June! Took a local bus to Mettupalayam, a…

Amazing. I actually got a train ticket to Chennai tomorrow. Not the slightest bit sold out. The narrow-gauge mountain train, which somehow got Unesco World Heritage status, is booked solid well into June though. You don’t rush from one temple to the next in Ooty. It’s too relaxed for that, and besides there aren’t any…

The Maharaja of Mysore and I agree that Mysore is too hot in the summer. He owns another palace in Ooty, a hill station 100 km south at 2200m, where it is dry and cool. I like Ooty’s palace much better than the one in Mysore – it’s older, but a lot more cozy; everything…

Mysore’s palace was rebuilt in 1912 after a fire, and it now looks as if they got a Victorian railroad engineer to do it. The steel structure is never completely hidden even though they hung tons of Indian ornamentation on it. It’s grandiose all right, but it doesn’t feel right. Only the throne room is…

Although I wasn’t quite up to exploring Mysore after that 18-hour bus ride from hell, I did walk around town in the evening a little. It’s the usual chaotic south Indian town, without much colonial atmosphere. They have a large partly covered bazaar where I walked for a while, striking up conversations with vendors. Most…

Can’t really spend time in Goa without hitting the beaches, so I hired a motorcycle driver for an excursion. Fort Aguada and Candolim are a little west of Panaji, looking out on the Arabian Sea. All the things one expects on any beach of that kind are there – beach pubs, huts for rent, white…

Old Goa was a great town once, in the sixteenth century, larger than Lisbon and London. No longer. But the huge elaborate churches, convents, and some ruins are still there, scenically scattered about a very large park with palm trees (one of which tried to drop a huge frond on me but missed), forests, and…

Goa, on the west coast of the India, surrounded by beaches and old towns that look more Portuguese than Indian, has been known as a 60’s hippy hangout ever since the Beatles found their Baghwan here. The hippies are gone, but this is not the place to rush from one church to the next. This…

The hotel breakfast isn’t very good (“continental”, ugh) so I went to Leopold’s. That’s an old institution in Mumbai dating back to the British rajs. It was one of the targets of November’s terror attacks, and the bullet holes are still there. I hope it’s the last bullet hole I’ll encounter on this trip. Dharavi…

The interesting part of Mumbai, where nearly all the sights are, is a peninsula between the harbor in the east, and Back Bay in the west. Another, much narrower, peninsula wraps around the other side of Back Bay, and that’s where I went today. They have a few very nice parks (where “straineous exercise” is…

The Gateway of India in Mumbai is a monumental arch facing the sea. It’s best seen from the harbor so I took a harbor tour boat. It didn’t really work because it’s full of Indians; at first I didn’t realize why the two seats next to mine saw so much traffic, people constantly getting up…

The original idea was to take the bus to Varanasi in India, but that would have meant about three full days in buses in places that aren’t very safe (they still have communist rebels in the Terai and in northeastern India), and it’s difficult to go south from Varanasi too, so I reversed my schedule…

Kathmandu is only one of three royal cities in Nepal. The other two are Bakhtapur and Patan, each of which has a Durbar Square similar to Kathmandu’s. Smaller, but much less commercial, and there are few tourists. (I seem to be fairly lucky on this front so far.) The Bakhtapur temple complex contains an Erotic…

Got a thunderstorm in Pokhara last night unlike any thunderstorm I have seen before. Strongs wind bent the trees, there is torrential rain, and lightning. At home you can estimate the distance of a lightning flash by timing the delay between flash and thunder. Not so here. There are many flashes per second, far too…

PG50. Some material in this post may not be suitable for parents. A van took me up 600m on top of Sarangkot Mountain. I got a harness that is clipped into my pilot’s harness, I run a few steps down the hill, the parachute inflates and we are up in the air above Nepal’s Pokhara…

Walked around the dam into the hills. There are no signs, so I work like a wild west trapper – broken twigs, a paletr shade of brown leaves, scratches on stones – and of course the trail of plastic bottles, soda cans, candy wrappers, and chips bags also helps. I always know after 50m that…

Not much to report today – the bus ride to Pokhara takes seven hours. The bus is supposed to be the best they have but it’s wheezing up the mountains at 25 km/h. But it’s clean and everyone has a seat, unlike on Nepalese local buses, which pack as much people, bags, and animals as…

There’s more than Kathmandu in the valley. Swayambhunath, a.k.a. the monkey temple, sits on top of a hill with a very long stairway leading up to it. Visitors get waylaid by souvenir vendors every 20 steps or so. The main stupa totally looks like a huge birthday cream cake with a candle in the middle.…

Kathmandu’s Durbar Square is a temple complex centered on the old royal palace, now a museum. Dozens of pagoda temples with tiered roofs and stepped terraces, some low and some nearly as tall as the pagoda on top. Plus a shining white neoclassical palace in the middle that looks quite out of place there. The…

Zhangmu is built up a hill on both sides that is so steep that the houses seems stacked. In my hotel, what’s first floor in front is fourth floor in the back. I had to leave early because the border station is only open in the morning. After the first checkpoint, we walked down a…

A travel day. Tola pass at 4200 meters, Gatso pass at 5200 meters, and later another at 5100 meters. Passes are marked with spiderwebs of prayer flags strung over the street, from poles, or even power masts. The sun is hot but the wind is very cold. None of the blue-black skies again. The mountains…

It’s a short drive to Shigatse, famous for its large monastery founded by the first Dalai Lama, and seat of the Panchen Lama. The complex is huge – much of it is old whitewashed quarters for the 600 monks. Three large white stupas are a memorial to the people killed during Mao’s cultural revolution; people…

Tibet, roof of the world – I always thought that was hyperbole. But after our car left Lhasa and climbed out of the Tibetan Plateau to over 5000 meters, passing through valleys with the Himalayan mountains on all sides, I can see how apt the expression is. The horizon is incredibly clear and the sky…

The Potala Palace is certainly the most famous building in Tibet. Ten of the fourteen Dalai Lamas ruled over religion and the country from here. It’s supposed to have 999 rooms but it felt more like 999 stairs in the thin air. Many rooms are quite small, including the personal apartment of the Dalai Lama;…

Lhasa has a forgettable Chinese new town, and a Tibetan old town called Barkhor that is centered on the Jokhang monastery. The first thing you see is people prostrating themselves at the entrance, flat on the ground. The main room inside is dark and gloomy, with a biog golden Buddha in the center. People move…

On the train to Lhasa, I had to sign a plateau travel health declaration. Among other things, I had to certify that I am not a “highly dangerous pregnant woman” and that I don’t get “the heats are above 100 times per minute”. I can see how that would be very exhausting. The Chinglish is…