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

Once again I am in the Himalayas, my favorite mountain range. Not the high peaks, these are a long way to the east, but today’s trip took me to Chambra at 2000m. It’s a long narrow road along the edge of the mountains that consists only of curves. Chambra itself is a nice town, but…

Rishikesh is a town further up on the Ganges. The town has a split personality: the larger part is a fairly generic busy town full of markets and honking traffic, a narrow footbridge over the Ganges connects it to the smaller part built up a steep hill. The bridge is not too narrow for motorcycles…

Haridwar means Gate of the Gods. It’s a town on the Ganges, up the mountains where Ganges water is still clean, in eastern India. At the ghats – waterfront stairs – people go swimming in the holy Ganges because it’s a shortcut to Nirvana, i am told. The river is flowing so fast that people…

Downtown Kyoto isn’t very scenic, but the parks around it certainly are. The temples, being made of wood, have a habit of burning down and having to be rebuilt over the centuries, but the gardens around them are often much older. This includes the Arashiyama garden and the golden Kinkaku-ji temple and bamboo grove at…

More temples in Kyoto! Buildings are often simple wooden halls resting on large pillars, with elaborate roofs but very simple inside. Walls are white or rice paper, or occasionally painted with murals; there is very little furniture. Floors are covered with Tatami mats. Tatami mats are made from fine soft woven straw, and are so…

It’s a little over two hours by bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto. Kyoto is not anywhere as busy and loud as Tokyo; the highrise downtown is fairly small and surrounded by more traditional small two- and three-story houses. People visit Kyoto because it was the imperial capital before Edo, now known as Tokyo, and…

Tokyo is an enormous city. Everything is bigger here, everything moves faster, and everything screams for your attention. Advertising covers entire buildings, especially in the electronics district of Akihabara shown below, and on the small clips on subway handles. Packaging is always as loud as possible; cookies, tiny bits of chocolates, and almonds are available…

This is what a proper four-course lunch looks like:… Read the rest

Some final photos from Ko Mook. Next stop Bangkok, via Krabi.… Read the rest

Another day on the islands. Relaxing! After the big tsunami in 2004 that washed away entire villages on the western coast of Thailand, they installed an earlty warning system, including signs on the islands that show which way to run when the tsunami approaches.… Read the rest

The beaches on Ko Mook aren’t quite as white as on the Parhentians, but the place is more authentic. Accommodations are more basic, and the locals live just around the corner in, for Thailand, very simple wooden houses. These people do not have much money. Otherwise it’s another tropical island paradise. They run long-tail boats…

Kota Bharu is very close to Thailand, there is a border checkpoint just west of it and the Thai city of Hat Yai is not far. Trouble is, using that checkpoint would take me through the southernmost three provinces of Thailand, where some crazies have decided that they’d like to re-establish some old Sultanate, and…

My last day on the Parhentian Islands, spent not doing very much at all, sampling the local cuisine, and trying to remember where I put the shoes that I am going to need off the island. Kota Bharu is an old Malay town on the northeastern tip of mainland Malaysia. It’s not a major tourist…

The Parhentian Islands are the sort of place where shoes are just a forgotten artifact left behind in a cupboard. It is just natural to step out of the door onto the beach barefoot. My hut is at one end of the long curved beach and the Quiver dive center is at the other, no…

It’s a long way by bus north along the coast, and I had to connect several times. All connections between different buses and the ferry worked like a Swiss clockwork, so I found myself looking at the lesser Parhentian Island from a speedboat in the late afternoon. The Quiver dive center is strategically located at…

… Read the rest

Time to say goodbye to Borneo. I had booked a flight to Kuala Lumpur on the Malaysian mainland the day before. Kuala Lumpur is Malaysia’s capital, and Kuala Lumpur airport is one of the main hubs is southeast Asia. Kuala Lumpur is polluted and Kuala Lumpur’s traffic is terrible. But I like Kuala Lumpur because…

Bako National Park is close to Kuching. A regular city bus brought me to a boat pier; the park can only reached by boat. They are not the kind called Flying Coffin but felt like one – the sea was very rough, and the boat went airborne a few times when crossing wave crests. The…

Most of Borneo belongs to Indonesia, except the northern coast which belongs to Malaysia. Went first to Pontianak, which sits right on the equator. It’s so good to be in a place where the satellite dishes point up vertically… First time I crossed the equator on the surface. After the rather unpleasant 11-hour night bus…

There are huge concrete bunkers all around Pangkalan Bun and elsewhere, emitting loud birdsong. The birdsong comes from loudspeakers, with the intent to attract shallows to nest in the bunkers. When the young have left the nest, the nests are collected and sold to China, where they are eaten as an expensive delicacy. The nests…

Pangkalan Bun has an original wooden palace, the kraton, three centuries old. I went there for a look. Turns out that they were in the last day of the traditional Initiation rites. The main hall was covered in golden drapes, and everybody wore yellow or traditional tribal costumes made of tree bark. The son of…

I was walking down the waterfront boardwalk of Pangkalan Bun to the market, enjoying chatting with the locals. One of them was an English teacher at a primary school nearby, and he asked me if I wanted to visit his school and let the children practice some English. Sure! The school had a large yard…

There’s a village across the Sekonyer river, just outside the national park. People there used to be farmers, but there is a palm oil Plantation nearby and the fertilizer runoff and the extremely high water use for Palm oil production has poisoned their soil, so no more farming. When the villagers protested, the farm oil…

In the 1950s, Professor Leakey sent out three researchers out to Africa and Indonesia to study primates: Jane Goodall, Dian Foster, and Birute Galdikas. Galdikas still lives in Pangkalan Bun on Borneo and runs a hospital. Her research camp can be reached by boat up the Sekonyer river from Pangkalan Bun, and a little hiking…

Orang-Utans live only in the rain forests of Borneo and Sumatra. I came to Pangkalan Bun in the south of Borneo to see these great apes. I had rented a boat with a guide (and a captain, and a cook, and a guy for everything else) to take me up the Sekonyer river into Tanjung…

The long-tail boat keeps going upriver, and the river is increasingly narrow. In one place it was blocked by a logjam big enough to build a house on, so we couldn’t just run over it at high speed. So the guide and Captain did what must be part of any respectable jungle trek: they got…

The Mahakam River in East Kalimantan is nearly a thousand kilometers long. Along its shores are primeval rain forests where one can spot some unusual animals like the long-nosed monkey and colorful kingfisher birds. I went up the river with a guide and a fast long-tail boat to see what nature has to offer, and…

To the south of the South Chinese Sea, complete wrapped by the other Indonesian islands, the Phillipines, Vietnam, and Malaysia there is a large white spot on my map: Borneo. Most of the island is part of Indonesia, called Kalimantan, and the main city is Balikpapan. From here I’ll start my explorations with a trip…

Eilat is a strange city. There is the eastern half with residential areas and industrial zones, and the western half with most of the big hotels, the marina, and the beaches. They are divided by the airport runway, making it awkward to go from one side to the other. The arrangement also means that all…

Petra in Jordan was the center of the Nabatean culture, abandoned in the 7th century after an earthquake. It’s built mostly in and above an extremely narrow two-kilometer canyon that is in some places no more than a few meters wide. Except that the city wasn’t built, it was carved, like a sculpture: start with…