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

Bogor is a town south of Jakarta that is in grave danger of getting swallowed by its big neighbor. The train station spits out passengers directly into a shantytown bazaar made of tarp and corrugated metal, very crowded and dimly lit. At the opposite end of the bazaar, across a small street, is the Abu…

Took the ferry back to Uleh Leh, VIP class this time. They are running a Karaoke video of ’60s rock songs. A becak driver took us into town, chatting all the way. Banda Aceh is known to the world as the place of a civil war between a fierce Islamic separatist movement and the military…

There is no beer on the island, officially. Sumatra is Islamic. But they aren’t too religious about Islam here so they smuggle beer to the beach, and store it in a separate refrigerator and list it on the menu as “B”. A can costs as much as a meal but it’s not going to run…

No scuba diving today. We rented snorkeling equipment instead and explored the bay for three hours. They have quite a lot of corals close to the beach, green, yellow, brown, sometimes with blue tips; in all kinds of shapes from big mushrooms to spindly treelike ones. Fish dart in and out of the corals and…

Pulau Weh is an island in the Sea of India off the northern tip of Sumatra. We chose Kabang Beach to stay. That’s just a beach, not a village, and it looks exactly like a beach on a tropical island is supposed to look like: green warm water, a crescent of white sand lined by…

Saturday was mostly a travel day. Settled the hotel bill – 65 euro for two people, three nights, and all meals and juices – the ferry to Parapat, a minibus to Medan, and a flight to Banda Aceh. There is a restaurant with a juice bar at the airport, but no matter what you order…

Rented bicycles to ride to Tomok a little south on the island, but it’s basically a cluster of souvenir shops. The ride north to Simanindo was much more interesting. The road at first ran between the lakeshore and the mountains, through incredibly green fields and tiny villages, and grazing oxen led by ropes. Later the…

Didn’t do very much at all. There isn’t really a town on Tuk Tuk, just a long circular road around the peninsula we are on. It takes about 90 minutes to walk the loop. There are lots of small children playing, and they all want their picture taken, posing for the camera, jumping into the…

Danau Toba is a volcanic lake four hours southwest from Medan and 900 meters up, with an island called Tuk Tuk where all the good hotels are. It’s cool up there, and our hotel is a tranquil resort at the lakeshore with small huts built in the traditional style with steep swept gables, in a…

Medan in Sumatra is not a major tourist hub and boasts exactly two important sights. The Mesjid Raya mosque has impressive black domes, and a simple and elegant, although slightly worn, interior. People were sleeping on the carpets. To get in, we had to hide our shorts with sarongs available for tourists at the entrance.…

The boat from Penang to Medan, crossing the Strait of Malacca, takes six hours. It’s fairly small, old but in good repair, and rather loud. The passenger deck is dark and crowded with seats, but only 10% full. It’s refrigerated and drafty. We got invited upstairs to the pilot cabin (“kaptan”) and could watch them…

Penang National Park is at the northwest corner of the island. It’s a primeval jungle, overgrown, full of animals calling (why do most wild animals sound like ringtones?), with a few paths leading to the main attractions. The Canopy Walk consists of 250 meters of 30cm wide walkways strung between trees some 10 m above…

Cheong Fatt Tze was the Asian Rockefeller a hundred years ago. When he died, he left his huge mansion in Georgetown to his son under the condition that it won’t be sold until he dies, so after the family fortune went south they had to sell the furniture and rent rooms to over 30 families.…

Pulau Pinang, aka Penang, is a large island off the west coast of Malaysia. The main town is Georgetown. Our hotel, the Segora Ninda, is a heritage building opoen to visitors. It’s charming but not as cosy as expected, and its heritage DHCP server is unbearably slow. Georgetown’s Chinatown is a Unesco world heritage. It’s…

The twin Petronas Towers are the main landmark of Kuala Lumpur. It takes four hours to get tickets and enter, but bwe had reserved tickets at the hotel the night before. First, visitors have to sit through a cheesy company PR video with bad 3D effects and an excited narrator praising the Petronas oil company…

I have been keeping count of all the countries I have been in over the years, and this is an anniversary: Malaysia is number 50. The “executive bus” from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur is spacious, comfortable, and falling apart inside, but I found a seat that worked. The formalities at the border are simple, the…

Orchard road is Singapore’s main shopping street, but it’s unimpressive. The nearby Fort Canning Park is quite pleasant though, although the fort is curiously absent except for one remaining gate, and the little lake is fenced in and hidden, with big red no-trespassing signs showing a policeman pointing a rifle at a stick figure with…

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…