From here to Tokyo Tour

The end of the line

2013-02-15T16:37:00.000+00:00

Russia
The bus trip towards the Russian border was very fast and prosperous. I had to change in Riga and once I left there was a lady waiting for me to pick me up and guide me to the other bus which would take me directly through Panazevis to Kaliningrad.

However after leaving the Lithuanian customs I would delay the bus for about half an hour at the Russian side. First of all they were obviously astonished by the amount of visas in my passport (45 out of 64 pages have been stamped at least once by now) but after browsing through my passport I understood that they weren't to happy with my Georgian stamps. If you know a bit about politics and history you should know that Georgia and Russia are having armed conflicts now and then, the latest was in 2008. Apparently the border control guard didn't seem to like Georgia that much and wouldn't let me go through without a bit of hassle. After some questioning and stuff my passport was taken to the big boss of the border patrol who examined it for a minute or 10 in her office before I got it back. It seems to me that their controlling system is very advanced since they could see my current reservation in Kaliningrad and my other movements (from what I saw on their screen).

Once in Kaliningrad I had some trouble with a drunk (at least that's how he seemed to me) tram driver who wasn't really helpful and wanted to kick me out in the wrong part of town. Anyway, after some hassle I finally got back to the bus station and walked an hour to the hostel. I didn't want to be bothered any more by taking the public transport. In the city itself I just walked around and went to the main cathedral and its museum about Immanuel Kant (the philosopher from Koningsberg, currently Kaliningrad). One day was more than enough so I was glad to leave the next day in the afternoon.

The cathedral and the main touristic site of Kaliningrad.

I would delay this bus also. But not after being bothered by a Russian passenger in the seat in front of me. The bus passed a police car and he suddenly became very stressed. Apparently from what I understood was that he was smuggling (or at least taking more than allowed) cigarettes into Poland and started asking me and everybody around if we didn't want to put two cartons of cigarettes each and put it in our bags. I acted like I didn't understand him and ignored him but since he was obviously very drunk (and didn't stop drinking Russian whiskey during the whole trip) he wouldn't stop bothering me until he fell asleep. At the border an Uzbek guy and me were taken separately. I don't know what was wrong with the (papers of the) Uzbek guy but in my case it was my visa. The border guard noticed that my passport number wasn't correctly written down on my visa. Only the numbers were written at the section for the document number, not the letters. After half an hour the border guard said everything was okay and excused himself for holding me up. The Uzbek guy went along over the border as well.

Poland
But he didn't last long. Once we got at the Polish side he had to leave the bus with all his personal belongings and didn't come back. The same happened when I went from China to Russia. I've seen many Chinese people who had issues with the Russian visa and were taken from the bus and never returned.

Once in Warsaw I couldn't find an ATM but fortunately I found a taxi driver who took Euros. He had no English but his Russian was about as good as mine so we managed to have a short conversation. He knew the hostel by name and address so I arrived somewhere after 11 PM. The next days I visited the War memorial museum and some other touristy sights. Two days were just perfect to see the city. The city seems to be a quite small place to me and I couldn't have spent more time there. So after two days I was glad to take the night bus with the direction West to another city which I never visited before: Berlin.

The old town of Warsaw.

The trailer below is the one from the movie "The Pianist". It's based on the true story from a pianist that tries to survive in the Warsaw ghetto.

Germany
I didn't arrive in the best shape obviously but it was okay. With only one full day in Berlin I tried to see as much as possible, mostly related to World War II. Since I didn't have too much time I decided to join the free walking tour. This is a new concept from which I learned very recently (Tallinn). Basically you don't pay any money up front but you pay afterwards an amount of money which you think is proper for the tour. The guides call it a tip but actually it's their salary. I think it's a real good concept since the guides are really trying their best as freelancers to make the tour as interesting as possible because they're really dependant on the tips. After the 4 hour lasting walking tour I went to the Jewish Museum after which my day was over.

The vibe of the city is really interesting and the (too short) day I had was just mostly to get a feeling of the place. Anyway, I'll be back for sure.

Check point Charlie in Berlin.

The Netherlands
The next morning I took the ICE from Berlin Hauptbahnhoff directly to Amsterdam Centraal Station. After a couple of minutes of transferring I took the train directly back to my temporary room at my parents' place in Heemstede. A couple of days after I moved out to my other temporary room in Haarlem, which I took over from my friend Bart who is travelling right now through Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and China.

Don't worry, this isn't the final blog!! Another blog will come eventually with all statistics, facts about where and how much money I spent and other random things. First it's time for relaxing though, finding a job and realizing where I've been in the past 3 years, 2 months and 2 weeks.

This was a short one... Anyway, thanks for reading!!

The final (train) stop: Heemstede/Aerdenhout.

From Russia with love

2013-02-08T12:34:00.002+00:00

South Korea
Today, now I'm writing this blog, it's been exactly a month ago since I left South Korea and a fair amount happened since then. I hope you enjoy reading one of the final blogs of this crazy trip.

Japan
I only transferred in Japan. I was planning to meet Shoko at first but in the end she couldn't manage because of her busy job. Since I booked two separate flights I still had to go through immigration which went fairly easy. Of course they asked a couple of questions since I spent almost three months there, went to South Korea for a couple of weeks and came back. A lot of illegal workers in Japan are there on a tourist visa, make a short trip abroad and come back to work on a tourist visa again. Anyway, I could prove that I would leave the country again the same night so obviously I didn't get into trouble.

Hong Kong
After receiving my 8th entrance stamp for the special administrative region of Hong Kong I decided to crash on the airport for the night since I arrived after the last train left the airport. Early the next morning I went to the same hostel where I always go to (Tin Tong in Kowloon), left my backpack and went to the Russian tourism agency (which is just across of the Russian embassy) to sort out my visa. Everything was pretty much settled within a couple of minutes since I prepared everything on forehand. However rush service isn't available for non Hong Kong residents which meant that I had to stay in Hong Kong for more than a week, since the train to Beijing doesn't depart every day. I was a bit afraid that I would be bored to death since I've been to Hong Kong so many times but fortunately I wouldn't be. Outside of the city there was and still is a lot to explore, so I went trekking with a Slovakian guy called Martin outside of the city and we went to an island together. I had to kill the time in the evening so I visited a huge amount of cinemas and saw a bunch of movies including Django and Skyfall.

Believe it or not, this is Hong Kong.

China
With my double entry Russian visa in my hand I boarded the direct train to Beijing where I would just stay for one night. There I met at the same hostel where I always go to (Sanlitun) Wang Xue who is also known as Christine. Also I bought there my Russian style hat which I needed for my next destination in China: Harbin. I bought my Chinese train tickets in advance in Hong Kong since the Chinese New Year was coming up. It costed me EUR 10 per train ticket extra but it was worth it. Otherwise I would have been stuck for an unmentioned amount of time in China. During the day I went back to the Summer Palace, where I was one year ago. However I liked it that much at the time that I wanted to come back there, so I did.

Summer Palace during the Winter.

I spent the whole day in Harbin and visited there the famous ice festival, where they built huge and artistic snow structures. Normally there are boats to cross the river to the park where the ice festival is held but with minus 22 degrees Celsius the river was obviously frozen so I walked over to the other side. Other ways to cross the river are to go by cable cart, sledges pulled by horses or just by car.

Huge snow castle.

In the evening I went with another overnight train to Suifenhe, a main gateway to Russia. At the bus station I found a nice lady who changed my remaining Chinese yuan for almost the official rate to Russian rubles and I was ready to go. The bus left 8:30 AM and it was going to be a very long day.

Russia
The bus goes from Suifenhe to Pogranichny and the distance between the two cities is only about 40 kilometers. However, it would take a ridiculous 6 hours filled with checks and especially waiting for hours for no obvious reasons. Because of the 3 hour time difference I arrived at Pogranichny at 5:30 PM. From Pogranichny I took the 6 PM minibus to Vladivostok where I arrived one and a half hours later, more or less. From Vladivostok I had to go to the hostel which would turn into another adventure...

In broken Russian I asked the bus driver how I could get to the train station, since my hostel was located there. The administrator who collected the money, a big and tall guy around my age said that I could join him for a (unofficial) taxi. When the price was discussed the hassle started. The guy who I joined said that the price would be 500 rubles which I should pay all (EUR 12.50) which I obviously didn't agree on. The price went down to 300 rubles so I explained him that I would pay 150 rubles since we were sharing the ride. He started shouting a lot and kept on talking in Russian which I didn't understand and he seemed to be stupid that he couldn't understand that I didn't understand him. After that he wanted to have my wallet to take out the "right" amount to make me understand, which didn't seem a good idea to me since I had like half a month of a Russian salary in my wallet. The alarm bells immediately started ringing like I had with the Iranian bandits and the corrupt police in Kyrgyzstan. Eventually the taxi driver explained me in broken English that his price was 300 rubles and who paid what wasn't his problem. Fortunately my backpack was next to me in the back, so I just gave 150 rubles after arriving and left the car. Even though I was on the main road the city was really quiet for 8 PM and there weren't too many people in the streets. It was hard for me to find the right building of the hostel and I figured that it might be up the stairs somewhere in a back alley. I saw a couple walking up somewhere but lost sight of them when they went around a corner somewhere. I thought that I probably went into the wrong direction and turned around and saw the same guy who I was in the taxi with. First he seemed to act normal but suddenly he grabbed my backpack and started to shout and behave aggressively. He didn't let go of my backpack and the situation started to become very dangerous. I started to make as much noise as I could, like I did in Iran and shouted in Russian to him "Ya ni ponimayu, ya ni ponimayu!!" (I don't understand you, I don't understand you!!). The stairway was slippery and I started to move down to the main street while I was shouting at the guy. The main street was just a couple of tens of meters away and I was hoping to get the attention of somebody and hoped that somebody passed which didn't happen during our struggle which would last a couple of minutes in total. Unfortunately (or maybe not) I got kind of experienced in fights and can kind of estimate where a fight is going and in this case it seemed that it was going to be okay as long as I moved slowly to the street. However it seemed to get very nasty when he was holding my backpack firmly with his right hand and started to look for something in his left jacket pocket with his left hand, which I assumed to be a knife. Thank God it seemed that he couldn't find and just after that he slipped and fell on the ground. He let go of me and I felt his breath in my face, which smelt like alcohol (what else). I ran down the stairs to the main street where I finally saw people, made a left where the hostel should be and while running I turned around. I saw that he was following me, though it was on a slow walking pace. I went into the first possible restaurant on the left totally out of breath and asked them if they spoke English and showed them the address of the hostel. Outside of the window I saw my aggressor passing by, he probably didn't notice me going in there. The guys from the restaurant helped me out and showed me the place on their smartphone. It was indeed up some stairs, but not the stairs I climbed initially.

After finally checking in the hostel I contacted my Vladivostokian friend Valeriya who I met more than a year ago in Beijing. She took me around that evening and the next day and helped me with buying all my train tickets all the way until Moscow for which I'm very thankful. She is a reporter for a weekly newspaper in Vladivostok so she also kind of interviewed me and wrote an article about me which I will upload sooner or later.

I only stayed one night in Vladivostok and took the train in the evening to Irkutsk to visit lake Baikal. I would be three nights on the train in total in one go. I think the first part of the trip was the most interesting for me because I met quite some characters. The most interesting one was a guy called Andre who is the captain of a special task force for the military. His code name is "Typhoon" and he didn't see his occupation as his job... he actually called it his "hobby". He told me that his "hobby" was to get rid of, as he put it, the crazy Muslims and terrorists (they're the same in his opinion) and his dream was to be stationed in either Dagestan (Caucasus) or Chechnya to serve the country. He also had some interesting opinions on "niggers" like a couple of other Russians who I met afterwards with which I won't bother you as a reader. Racism is very much alive in Russia indeed, but that's something I already heard and was aware of.

"Typhoon" and me.

In Irkutsk I met a lot of backpackers with who I went to explore the city and the lake. Siberia was incredibly warm (2 degrees above Celsius) while it was supposed to be minus 30 or something. I wasn't expecting that in Siberia during the coldest Russian Winter in I don't know how many decades. The lake itself was very cold though and the wind was killing as you can imagine. Everybody who I hang out with I would meet later again during my trip. Andreas (a Norwegian who studied in China) in Moscow and Pierre, Charlene, Melanie and Arto (students in Saint Petersburg from Finland and France) in Saint Petersburg.

Lake Baikal.

I continued to Yekaterinburg which is a very beautiful place in Russia as well. My experience there wasn't that good though because of the inhospitable place where I stayed at (don't ever go to Domino Hostel in Yekaterinburg). I was glad that I stayed there only for one day.

Fortunately the hostel in Moscow made everything better. I had an amazing stay there and the people who ran the hostel were just amazing and fluent in English. After their working hours they took us to all kinds of special places where the locals didn't go so it was just great. If you're ever around I highly recommend you to stay at Apple Hostel. In the Kremlin I had an issue with one of the security guards because I accidentally walked into an apparently forbidden direction but he didn't make clear where I was allowed to go so I made the same mistake again and started to ask for my passport and stuff. Of course the last thing that you trust are the people who protect Putin so I pretended like I didn't understand Russian and ignored him. Almost two and a half years ago I was stopped by the Russian police while I was cycling from Saint Petersburg to Narva and was asked to pay 50 US dollars for no reason, which was the first thing that came up to me when the Russian security guard asked for my documents.

Saint Basil's Cathedral at the Red Square, Moscow.

I took a night train from Moscow to Saint Petersburg just to spend the day there because the students who I met before in Irkutsk convinced me to come to Saint Petersburg to visit the Hermitage. I didn't visit that last time and they told me that I really should and I'm glad that I went there to see it. It's seriously the most beautiful museum I've ever seen and there is an amazing amount of things on display including a huge amount of Dutch and Flemish painters like Rembrandt and Van Gogh. I took the train from 6 PM sharp to Tallinn at the same day.

At the Hermitage, Saint Petersburg.

Estonia
The train was really good and there were power plugs for every seat so I plugged in my phone and watched the movie "Les Miserables" twice in a row before I finally arrived in Tallinn. I almost did 15.000 kilometers by train from Hong Kong in about three weeks. Two years ago when I was in Tallinn I met Trevor and Lisa who were travelling for two years nonstop. They stayed for a week or more in Tallinn and loved it that much that they decided to open up a hostel there which is the best rated hostel right now in Tallinn. So of course I stayed with them and obviously we had a lot to talk about. I also met up again with Anna who I saw two years ago for the final time in Narva. She is studying now in Tallinn so we went out for dinner and had a good time. Her and my friend Albina is studying at St. Andrews in Scotland which is a country on my to do list, so hopefully I'll meet her again very soon as well.

Latvia, Lithuania and Russia... again
Tonight I'm taking a bus from Tallinn all the way to Kaliningrad which is between Lithuania and Poland. It is a part of Russia but it's supposed to be quite interesting because it's separated from "mainland" Russia and is heavily influenced by the Germans and the neighboring countries of Lithuania and Poland. One night should be enough to cover the place but we'll see.

After
After Kaliningrad I'll take the evening bus to Warsaw where I'll spend two nights and after that I'll take the night bus to Berlin. Both cities I've never been too and it's much too short to properly visit everything but at least I'll get the feeling of the place. From Berlin I'll take train directly to Amsterdam and from there to home. I'm due to arrive at 5:33 PM at the train station and I'll be home 5:37 PM if the trains ride on time. But in The Netherlands you never know of course.

See you soon!!

Koreafication

2013-01-08T07:07:00.000+00:00

South Korea

I've been already back in Korea for over two weeks and soon I'll be on a couple of airplanes again with one of my favorite, if not my favorite, destinations in Asia: Hong Kong!! I fly out on the 9th and will arrive somewhere in the night in Hong Kong.

In the past couple of weeks not too much happened which is interesting for you as a reader so I'll keep it as short as possible. I've been working for a change in South Korea, in the hostel where I stayed before. The name of the hostel is Pencil Guesthouse and it's one of the highest ranked hostel in Seoul and especially in Hongdae, one of the "party districts" in Seoul. If you check out my Twitter or if you follow me on Foursquare you probably have seen some pictures passing by. If not you can check out the website www.hostelhongdae.com. Basically I've been doing everything around here and working fulltime with the awesome staff of the guesthouse and... for the first time in more than two years I actually earned an unmentioned amount of money for a change.

Christmas and New Year's Eve have been pretty quiet around here. I spent Christmas with my friend Seohee, her brother, her mother and her best friend Bobe. New Year's Eve I spent with the staff of the hostel without any official countdown in a karaoke bar without any fireworks somewhere around Hongdae because it was too cold to go far away (around minus 15 Celcius). In Gangnam I met two girls who I met on Jeju island before: Anna and Mirinda. Their friend Bobby didn't come along because he was gaming in an internet cafe somewhere.

I mostly spend my time here cooking with Pei and the other staff members. Until so far we made some Dutch dishes like "appelflappen" and for the first time ever "kaassouflees". Cooking stuff like that is quite a mission since it's very difficult to find things like puff pastry, "special" herbs and spices. So we had to make a few trips to Itaewon, the expat/foreign district, to get all the things we needed. After all the work, cooking and stuff there might be some spare time for going out or watching a movie but mostly I'm too tired so I often call it an early night.

South Korea is a pretty nice country and I often missed its food sometimes, especially the spiciness (something that Japanese food mostly lacks). The people are generally very nice but in some districts like Gangnam the people tend to be quite rude, especially compared to Japan. Everything is pretty much as convenient as Japan but thank god much cheaper compared with the land of the rising sun.

South Korea is (in)famous for three things. I guess number one these days is the song "Gangnam style" from PSY which reached a billion views on YouTube one day after I arrived. The second thing is the ongoing war between North and South Korea and the final thing is... plastic surgery. For me it's after spending almost two months in South Korea still a bizarre thing to see all the (semi) famous people on television or all the random Koreans in the metro who obviously had their eyes or nose done. My friend Seohee told me that in the good old days 40% of the population had double eyelids. These days it's 80% of the population. According to some sources on the internet every year 16 out of 1000 people do plastic surgery. Of course I continued calculating some things myself... It means that averagely a Korean who reached the age of 62.5 did plastic surgery once and with the average life expectancy of 78.8 it means that when you die you did plastic surgery about 1.26 times. The average for women is much higher compared to men, since there is more pressure on them to be beautiful. When you apply for a job you pretty much always have to send your picture with the application and if you're not beautiful enough (read: if you didn't do plastic surgery) you'll probably don't get the job. I called this crazy (cultural?) thing "Koreafication" (from the song "Californication" from the Red Hot Chili Peppers).

Anyway, that's it for now. I'll write again if I know more about how the final part of my journey will end. If everything goes well I'll come home through Russia. We'll see!!

New Year's Resolutions

2013-01-05T06:55:00.002+00:00

Last new year's resolution was the following:
"Sticking to the status quo, obviously!! I will continue travelling and eventually get to Tokyo, no matter what!!"

Obviously I reached that goal, just before the end of the year 2012. The resolution for the next year(s) when it comes down to travelling is filling in the blanks in Europe and possibly Asia. So what's left to discover?

Europe

Andorra
Cyprus
Gibraltar
Guernsey
Greece
Ireland
Isle of Man
Jersey
Malta
Monaco
Northern Ireland
Portugal
San Marino
Scotland
Vatican City
Wales

Asia

Brunei
Eastern Timor
Indonesia
Laos
Malaysia
Myanmar
Pakistan
Papua New Guinea
Singapore
Thailand
Vietnam

The rest of the world

Australia
New Zealand

The countries I just mentioned are on my priority list. Obviously I want to see the whole world but I'm mostly interested in Europe and Asia. There is a chance that I might move to either Australia or New Zealand for a year or two. The money you can earn there is huge and it's close to South East Asia, so pretty much the perfect spot for me.

Next to that I have some other resolutions, but those I will keep to myself (for now) ^^. After returning home I might start blogging about other things. You'll notice when it comes that far.

Hope you all enjoy the next year, I'm looking forward to it!!

새해 복 많이 받으세요!!

2012-12-31T14:59:00.000+00:00

새해 복 많이 받으세요!!

Happy New Year!!

While it's only 4 PM back home in The Netherlands the final countdown here already began. So I wish you a happy new year from Seoul in Korea and wish everybody the best. And don't forget: "Grab somebody sexy, tell'em hey..."

The final stretch

2012-12-28T06:01:00.000+00:00

Fortunately after the whole issue with my international license (see previous post: "The wrong turn and lost in translation") I had an incredible prosperous journey all the way to Tokyo. So once again I try to keep it short and will use a lot of pictures to keep it interesting.

So on the 21st of November I left Shoko her place and continued towards Shikoku with my Suzuki Alto. From that moment on I would only sleep in a hostel close the most Southern tip on the main islands of Japan, Cape Sata. For the rest I would only spend the nights in my too small car.

The bridge from Okayama to Takamatsu.

I was on Shikoku before and made it to Kami just before Kochi before my scooter broke down. Once I made it back to Kobe I realized that I still had the key in my pocket of the hostel in Kochi so I decided to bring the key back while visiting some places on my way there. So I visited Koraku-en garden which is in Okayama and made my way through the mountains all the way to Kochi where I first visited the amazing caves of Ryuga-do before returning the key to the hostel. Of course I also climbed Kompirasan which is one of the main shrines of Japan. I was planning to stay in the hostel of Kochi there but unfortunately the nice couple had no room for me so I spent the night in the car next to a manga kissa while making use of the wifi of the place. Every day I managed to get free wifi, either I found it close to a manga kissa or I just scanned living areas for households that had unsecured wifi networks set up.

Kompira-san.

After visiting the local castle I continued and drove to the most Southern tip of Shikoku: Ashizuri-Misaki. It's an incredibly nice place and houses also one of the 88 temples of the famous pilgrimage. On purpose I didn't visit too many of them, since I want to leave something for when I come back one day to Japan.

Cape Ashizuri-Misaki, the most Southern tip of Shikoku.

I continued to Matsuyama which was highly recommended by the owner of a hostel in Nara where I stayed at (Kosuke) so obviously I had to check it out. Even though it's the capital of Shikoku it is in an incredibly nice and quiet place and has a great castle which I visited after enjoying the atmosphere of the city.

Origami cranes that are being folded by school classes and delivered to the monument of Sadako Sasaki.

Next thing on the list was the infamous city of Hiroshima, famous for being the first test site of the atomic bomb. The whole city has been rebuilt and, believe it or not, feels like the most peaceful city in Japan. The peace park is very impressive as well and therefore Hiroshima goes into the books as my favorite city in Japan. Obviously the museum about the atomic bomb and the after effects are extremely impressive. The most famous story is the one from Sadako Sasaki. When the bomb dropped on August 6th, 1945, she survived after she was blown out of the window due to the explosion at the age of 2. At the age of 11 she was diagnosed with leukemia but determined to become better she started to fold origami cranes since an ancient Japanese story tells that everybody who folds a 1000 cranes is granted a wish by the gods. The most popular story among the Japanese is that she folded 644 cranes and that she passed away at the age of 12 before she made it to a 1000 cranes. Her friends continued to fold cranes until they reached the magical number of a 1000 cranes and buried all the cranes with her. The real story is that she actually surpassed folding a 1000 cranes by far but still passed away. When you pass the exhibition about Sadako Sasaki you can see a lot of old men and women who can't keep it dry and take out their napkins to dry their eyes.

The A-bomb dome: just above here the atomic bomb exploded and it's one of the very few buildings that survived the explosion.

From Hiroshima I also visited the famous Itsukushima Shinto Shrine (the floating shrine you always see on the front of every travel brochure of Japan).

The famous floating Itsukushima shrine.

After leaving Hiroshima I found a trucker stop where I finally took a shower after not having one for about a week Next to that I managed to wash all my clothes there and take a rest in the Japanese style bath before continueing to Shimonoseki. Shimonoseki is famous for its fish market and it was highly recommended (by Lonely Planet, never trust them) to go there early in the morning (preferably around 4 AM). So I crashed in the car and slept a short while and went to the market early in the morning around 4. Even though the market is famous for the blow-fish (the fish from which you can only eat the liver since the rest is poisonous) it's honestly not really worth it to visit since it took me only about 15 minutes to cover the whole market with an extremely slow pace. After visiting the market I decided to drive a bit more before crashing down again after I went through the tunnel to Kyushu.

Fish market of Shimonoseki.

I wanted to see Aso-san really badly, which is the largest volcanic crater on the planet Earth. On my way to there I passed a lot of beautiful temples like in Usa Jingu and I also visited the ancient Buddha statues just outside of Usuki. I thought that I found the official road up to the vulcano but after I parked my car and I started climbing I noticed that the cable car up to the top must have been out of order for a long time. It seemed that a heavy storm or possibly a typhoon damaged the cable car station at the top pretty badly. The windows were broken and parts of the roof were scattered all over the place. Once I reached the station there was a sign stating that it was dangerous to continue due to hazardous gas. Since there was a lot of wind and the fact that it must have been a long time ago that people went up there I figured that the signs were out of date so I decided to go up. Once I reached the top I had amazing views over the active volcanic crater but decided not to stay too long because of the possible gas. Later when I continued with the car I saw the sign for the official observation post so I went up to the mountain once again. Once I reached the check point before the road all the way up to the top it was stated that it was dangerous to go up to the mountain. Fortunately I already went up from the unofficial road at the other side of the mountain.

The biggest volcanic crater on earth: Aso-san.

After Aso-san I made it to the most Southern tip of Kyushu, cape Sato-misaki. Before getting there I visited the Saitobaru Ancient Mounds and Udo Jingu. It's a nice place with a lot of nature but honestly next to that there is not too much to see. Anyway, I can say that I made it all the way from the North to the South of Japan, for whatever that is worth something. Fortunately There would be a lot more to see on my way back to Shiga.

The most Southern tip of Japan: Sato-misaki.

I visited another active volcano called Sakura-jima. It's a nice area and there are some small time sights to see. There is a road that goes up to about halfway of the volcano which I decided to follow. Once I was up it was raining heavily so I stopped the car for a minute or two just to snap some pictures. After I came back I noticed that the wipers were hardly moving... I figured out that it was because of the ash that came down with the rain so I decided to leave the place. From Sakurajima I took the ferry to Kagoshima where I booked a hostel for two nights two write my previous blog. Here I also decided not to go to Yaku-shima because of the lack of time and the money (I already spent too much in this country and I want to leave the South West Islands for another time).

After the mayor 1914 eruption of Sakura-jima the altitude and the size of the whole island grew. Actually the island became a peninsula after the eruption.

From Kagoshima I went to visit Megumi (who I met in Uzbekistan, see previous posts) her sister Nozomi and her husband Tane. They also have a son Noe and three cats. They are doing organic farming right now in a very basic cottage without toilet seat heating for a change. They showed me around and told me about how they left Tokyo right after the Fukushima tsunami and how it all affected the (organic) farming through the whole of Japan. We also went to a hot spring together and visited many of their friends around their area in Mizukami. I only stayed there for two nights though I would have loved to stay there a bit longer. However my schedule started to kill me.

Sakura-jima at a clear day.

From there I made it to Nagasaki where I visited some nice parts in town before entering another heavily loaded atomic bomb memorial museum. Before making it to Nagasaki I first stopped at "Huis Ten Bosch" (theme park with buildings copied from The Netherlands like "De Dom" from Utrecht) and Holland Village to feel like I'm back in the country where I was born.

Back in Holland for about half an hour.

Eventually I made it to Fukuoka but the city didn't appeal to me at all so I didn't even stay there. I visited Daizafu temple which is nearby before spending the night in Shimonoseki once again.

The replica of "Fat Man", the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki.

The next morning I visited Rurikoji temple with the five story pagoda from my Christmas picture (see previous post). As you can see it was snowing like crazy and it was then that I figured out that the rental shop didn't provide the car with snow tires. I wanted to go to Izumo where you can find the oldest Shinto shrine but I couldn't even drive up the smallest hill. I turned around and parked the car at a parking space when the police passed by to check if everything was alright. They told me it was too dangerous to continue and that it would snow even more the next couple of days, so I decided to turn around and followed the highway all the way back to Shiga where I stayed once again with Shoko and her family.

My Suzuki Alto and me, just before Nagasaki.

From there I continued back again to Nara where I stayed once again in the hostel of Kosuke. Because I stayed there last time for about a week he gave me my bed that night for free (!) so I was really happy. The next morning I thanked him a lot and said goodbye since it was time for... the final stretch.

The final stretch

I met Megumi (this is another Megumi who I met in Uzbekistan as well) and her friend Mimi at the Nara JR station. Megumi lives in Tokyo and was about to get home after travelling for about one and a half years so basically the both of us had Tokyo in our minds as our final destination. Megumi cycled in many countries around Europe and Africa. Next to that she traveled in Asia and South America as well. After reaching Cape of Good Hope in South Africa she flew to Seoul, took the ferry from Busan to Fukuoka and went to Osaka by night bus from where she took the JR to Nara and now she was sitting right beside me after more than a year. The funniest thing for me was that she even picked up the African accent.

Tokyo Tower, the higher Japanese version of the Eiffel Tower.

We had lunch together in Nagoya where Mimi lived and we continued together towards Tokyo. We didn't take the highway so we arrived very late in the night in Tokyo BUT we made it on a magical date: 12/12/12. The first night we crashed with her sister and her husband Ayumi and Mitsuru and their little boy before we continued to her and the place of her parents in Akihabara, Tokyo. I was very lucky that I could park the car for free in front of the house of Ayumi and Mitsuru, if I would have parked in Tokyo it would have costed me a fortune. Megumi and I went together to Tokyo by train and I was so lucky that I could stay with her and her family. I even got my own Japanese style room!! And even better was the fact that her parents are running a coffee shop below their apartment... Which is like heaven on earth for a coffee addict like me. The next 5 days we would both experienced Tokyo like tourists, even though Megumi lived there her whole life. For our Tokyo experience see the pictures below.

Imitating the Kamehameha wave with the feminine version of Goku from Dragonball Z.

After 5 days and 4 nights we stayed one more night at Ayumi's and Mitsuru's place before heading back to Shiga. Megumi went with me until Nagoya since she still had to meet some friends there who she met while travelling around the world. After our separation I continued to Shiga to stay one more night with my friend Shoko and her family. The way back from Tokyo we took the highway all the way since one of Megumi her friends was willing to pay for it until Nagoya (toll is expensive, like more than EUR 50 one way from Tokyo). From Nagoya I took the highway once again which costed me a little bit more than EUR 15. I had a great semi final evening there and I think I have been very lucky to meet Shoko in Spain and meet up again almost 7 years later.

The busiest pedestrian crossing in the world at Shibuya station in Tokyo.

After saying goodbye or rather "see you later" I returned the car to the car owner in Shiga. Earlier when I was reversing to park the car backwards I hit a rock which left some small scratches on the back bumper. Fortunately the damage was close to much bigger scratches that were there earlier so they didn't stand out so thank god I didn't have to pay the EUR 200 penalty. That night I stayed in Osaka and slept about 12 hours non stop because I was so tired of the whole trip.

Megumi and I at the Tokyo Skytree.

The 20th of December I flew from Osaka back to Seoul to celebrate Christmas and New Year's Eve there and... even work there a little bit!! You will read about that next time in the first blog of 2013. Until that comes I already wish you a happy new year!!

Cycling around Tokyo to the fish market and other touristy hot spots.

And if you wondered why it took me so long to arrive in Tokyo? Because I followed the one and only right approach there is for travelling...

メリークリスマス!!

2012-12-25T07:18:00.000+00:00

メリークリスマス!!

Merry Christmas!!

The picture below was taken at a pagoda close to Yamaguchi in Japan. However, in the meanwhile I already made it to Seoul in South Korea. The post titled "The final stretch" will be up very soon, so keep checking out my blog ^^!!

The wrong turn and lost in translation

2012-12-03T04:30:00.000+00:00

In this blog it will become clear that even when you prepare yourself as good as you can, making the wrong turn can end up in a situation you couldn't have imagined happening.

8th of November until the 13th of November, 2012
From Nara I took a trip to Mount Koya (Koya San) where there are loads of temples and of course Kobo Daishi who is the most famous Buddhist grandmaster in Japan. He died already in the 9th century but believers think that he is meditating in his tomb until the end of days. So only the highest monks are allowed to go into his tomb to change his clothes and to feed him. Before getting to his tomb you have to cross the Kukai graveyard which is immense and the biggest graveyard in the whole of Japan.

After leaving this major touristical site I considered sleeping in a toilet for the disabled once again, but since I've been doing that so much I decided to find a manga kissa or ride all the way back to Nara in the night. Luckily I found a real manga kissa this time (not a cheeky one) where I crashed down on the matress after checking my mail and stuff. The next morning I went back to Nara, but not before receiving hot coffee from the amazing and friendly staff. I can be wrong but to me it seems that offering coffee is like an 'ice breaker' in Japan as it is in The Netherlands or other places in Europe.

Anyway, once arrived in Nara I wrote my previous blog and continued to plan my trip... not knowing it would take a drastic turn.

The next couple of days I would move to Kyoto and meet up with three people who I met before. I met Megumi who I met in Uzbekistan more than a year ago, Pei who I met in Seoul a couple of months ago and of course once again Shoko who I met about seven years ago in Spain.

All together I had an amazing time in Kyoto but I was glad that I could hop on the scooter again to get out to the country side.

14th of November until the 16th of November, 2012
Everything seemed to be going to plan and I was very happy to be back on the scooter again. The weather was great and I was having a good time. It only took me two or three hours to get to Kobe city and I arrived there somewhere in the early afternoon. But then... I took the wrong turn which would turn everything upside down.

I wanted to go to the harbor to catch a boat from there to Takamatsu on Shikoku island but I chose the wrong direction so I ended up on the highway which took me to 'Harbor Island' which is the harbor for cargo only. So I had to get back on the highway which direct me a couple of kilometers back to Osaka. I managed to get of the highway and made two times a left to get back on track. I was on a kind of secondary road and considered to go back to the main road. I got the opportunity twice to do so and for a reason I thought I had to but in the end I didn't. Not paying attention to the road so much and looking for signs I passed a guy in a uniform sitting on a chair. And I knew it was time to pretend to be the stupid foreigner again.

I obviously was stopped for speeding, again. This time the copper actually wanted me to pay the penalty for a change for speeding 19 kilometers per hour. The fee was 7000 yen or a little bit less than EUR 70. That is one of the things that is cheaper than back home, in The Netherlands you would pay at least the double amount. Gas is cheaper as well, as low as 137 yen per liter. Before the Fukushima tsunami it was apparently even much lower.

Anyway, one of the coppers asked me for my papers and that's when the hell began. I didn't get any handcuffs but I had to get into the police van immediately and the guy who stopped me confiscated the scooter. All together we went back to the police office and there I was told in broken English that my papers were not sufficient to ride a scooter. I got upset of course because I was sure it must be a kind of misunderstanding since I checked twice with the rental company and twice with the tourism organisation back at home (ANWB).

A phone call came in and I heard a voice that I recognized from before... It was the voice of the same translator who I talked to before when I tried to cross the bridge to Shikoku illegally... Lucky me!! I kept this knowledge in the beginning to myself until very late in the conversation since I didn't want to create the impression that I was a regular customer (which I obviously am, who gets stopped 5 times by the police for breaking the law within one month?). The translator came to the police station which would end up eventually in a similar scene like the one in the movie 'Lost in translation'.

An eight hour lasting interrogation would follow... And it was dead serious. Nobody offered me coffee. Every time I took a leak a police officer would follow and wait at the door to make sure that I wouldn't escape because I didn't just speed, I committed a crime. Because technically I have been riding around without a valid license for over a month. I wonder what would have happened if I ever got involved into an accident or something... Anyway, the scooter was impounded and I couldn't continue anymore.

The whole issue was about the stamps in the international license. There is an A stamp which is for all two wheeled motorbikes and you have a B stamp which is for regular cars. I obviously only got the B stamp which is for regular cars. The ANWB (Dutch Tourism Organisation) told me that I could drive a scooter if I showed my Dutch license and the international one together. I asked them that already back home in Haarlem so I was sure that everything was in order. I had an issue before though on Jeju island in South Korea. A rental company told me that I couldn't ride a scooter without the A stamp. I called the ANWB in Haarlem and they told me the same: just explain that the Dutch and international license are valid if they are together, that's how it works in The Netherlands!! I eventually ended up going to a different rental shop and they gave me a scooter... even a 125 cc one without any hassle. Because I wanted to be sure I called the rental company in Osaka (Asit Rental) on forehand and asked them if an international drivers license for a car would be sufficient. He agreed it was and later on when I picked up the scooter and made a copy of both licenses and said it was okay. So I figured everything was okay after two times double checking but I can't blame the copper: the international license indeed stated only that I was able to drive a car. He told me that Japanese people, even though they have an international drivers license for cars they can't officially ride a scooter in The Netherlands as well. Later I figured out that some countries, like the UK, have a special spot on their international license for scooters. I still don't understand why we Europeans don't have that. Anyway, it's weird also since I have been stopped by the police so many times and it took 5 times before somebody figured out that I didn't have the right papers. When I mentioned this to the translator it was clear she had problems with admitting that some policemen might have made a mistake. This loss of face thing is everywhere, I know it's a cultural thing but this (and the thing that everybody just follows the rules without thinking) is one of the few things that I don't like about Japan.

The coppers were very friendly though, but serious. The coppers seemed to be explaining everything in a nice way but the translator, though she was nice too, gave me the idea that I was in serious trouble. They wanted to know if I have any friends in Japan and their phone numbers so they could reach me because... I had to go to court. I committed a crime so very possibly, she told me, I had to go there and explain what and why happened. I know that the Japanese are quite rigid when it comes down to rules and such, so obviously I didn't want to be sentenced there and started of thinking all the possibilities. So I lied in the beginning and told them that I didn't have any Japanese friends because I didn't want them to get into trouble as well. I wanted to talk to the embassy and a lawyer (I'm glad that I covered myself for jurisdictional issues) but they didn't let me use their phone for that. It would take some time before they could call me to court they told me but I was curious how long it would take and of the consequences if I wouldn't show up. Anyway, the last thing that I want to happen is to become a persona non grata in one of the nicest countries in the world. I wasn't sure about Japan but heard that if you get into a bar fight in South Korea you'll be kicked out most likely and get expelled for the rest of your life, so I figured that Japan was possibly as rigid if not even more. So I already started to make plans to escape to Hong Kong or Korea, crazy as it sounds. After 8 hours of interrogation they understood that I didn't committed this crime on purpose and was released around 10 PM. I crashed down in a manga kissa close to the Kobe JR station after a well deserved dinner and I would be busy the next couple of days with dealing with the rental company and the Dutch embassy. In the end I didn't had to pay the 7000 yen fine because if there will be a fine it will be decided by the court.

During the whole day it was quite stressful but decided to make the best of it so I tried to joke around with the policemen when they wanted to take pictures for their record. When they asked me that they wanted to picture of me I asked them: ichon? (means: together? Like a group picture) which made them laugh. When the guy lined me up against the wall I threw up the classic Japanese peace sign and I asked him if he wanted me with or without it on the picture. That definitely helped to reduce the tension a bit in the whole room where loads of people were working to register this case (or were just curious and hung around me). I got my passport checked maybe like five times by different people in suits who had nothing to do with the whole thing but were just curious where I traveled. In the end the whole thing would be an interesting experience, after all.

The next morning the rental company picked up the scooter and returned me a very low amount of the paid money. The new rental period started just and for using the scooter 5 days (while it was in the parking lot in Kyoto for most of the time) he charged me 10.000 yen while the monthly fee is 15.000 yen. Fortunately I made the payment by credit card so I'm working on it through the credit card company to get my money back.

After a lot of calling around I decided to stay for one more night in the manga kissa before returning to Osaka to visit the Dutch consulate. The guy from the consulate was surprised as I was since he has been living there for a long time and exactly thought the same as I did. He called his colleagues in the embassy of Tokyo and they said the same. They even thought that the police might have made a mistake and they decided to get to the bottom of it. The result however wasn't in my favor: the police was right in the end. So they figured out that technically it's illegal to ride a scooter anywhere around the world without a motorbike license (except for the European Union).

I asked the ambassador to contact the Kobe police as well and he talked directly to the police officer that stopped and interrogated me. The impression that the copper gave to the ambassador was totally different from what the translator gave to me: he just said that I shouldn't worry, that I probably don't hear anything from the court and that he wished me a good journey. He even told the ambassador that he was most worried about the money issue between the rental company and me. Yes, it's easy to get lost in translation in Japan... it seems.

17th of November until the 20th of November, 2012
During this time I stayed in Osaka thinking about how to continue my trip. My sweet friend Shoko figured out that there are quite a lot of cars available which you can rent for a (everything is relative in Japan) low price. I decided to do so since I figured that I could also sleep in the car. We sorted everything out and I stayed with Shoko at the night of the 20th. My parents sent a package from The Netherlands as well with some Dutch syrup waffles, old Gouda cheese and liquorice. Next to that my warm winter clothes were in there as well. I gave all the Dutch stuff to Shoko which made her very happy. She and her mother especially like the cheese.

We celebrated with the best sushi I had in Japan (and probably ever in my life) so far in a restaurant where she took me and later in the evening we dressed up like rabbits (pictures will not be made public). Next morning I left for the next geographical extreme: the most Southern tip of the main (is)land(s) of Japan: cape Sata!!

After the 21st of November, 2012
In the meanwhile I already reached cape Sata, crashed my car into a rock, got the car covered in volcanic ash of Sakurajima and spent 10 nights straight sleeping in a too small Suzuki Alto. But that story is for the next blog... so be patient and stay tuned!!

Japan special, dattebayo!!

2012-11-09T06:25:00.000+00:00

Cute Japanese girl performing on the riverside in Osaka.

Japan
In last short update on my blog I wrote that I rented a scooter and seen a lot since. This blog is about the past month which I spent on a rental scooter. I made it all the way to the most Northern tip of Japan (Cape Soya-Misaki) and made it all the way back down again to Osaka and beyond until Shikoku island. There is another month to come so this is just part 1... If you want know about my encounters with wild bears, dodgy places where I spent the night, how I dealt with the police, the problems I had with my scooter, the great people I met and everything else: please keep reading!! I try to keep it as short as possible.

Camping just outside of Obama.

Wednesday the 10th of October, 2012
I rented the scooter from Asit Rental in Osaka (if anybody is interested in renting a scooter, just google this name). I left somewhere in the afternoon and did not really have a plan so I just picked a place nearby called Obama, just because the name was Obama. It seemed a quite nice place at the coast and the ocean view was pretty amazing because of the rock formations and such. Personally I think that the coast often looks like the fjords in Norway so I immediately felt kind of at home after my first encounter with the Japanese coast. Through my whole blog I will continue making comparisons with Scandinavia since this country really reminds me of it in many ways. Anyway, just outside of Obama my yellow warning light warned me that I was running out of petrol. The guy from Asit told me that it meant that I had 1 liter remaining so that I could at least ride another 50 kilometers or so. It was already getting dark (the sun sets here between 5 and 6 PM so I pitched up my tent somewhere out the city and called it a day.

Thursday the 11th of October, 2012
Next morning I figured out that the estimation of the guy from Asit was kind of... optimistic. After about 20 or 30 kilometers I still did not find a petrol station so I started to become nervous. Obviously I already learned how to ask the way in Japanese which is one of the most important lines: '... wa doko desu ka?' . After following the directions I figured out where the next petrol station and thank god the petrol just ran out a couple of hundreds of meter away from the drinking place of my thirsty racing machine. It was a self service petrol station so everything was in Japanese but fortunately there was still a worker around to help me out. Anyway, I learned that the scooter doesn't drink 1 liter per 50 kilometers but more like 1 liter per 35 kilometers.

That day I went to the Eiheji temple which is a famous temple in the area and exists already for more than 700 years. Meditation was a possibility but I decided just to visit it and make my way further up North to another touristic hot spot called Kenroku-en Garden which is a traditional Japanese garden where I spent my final hours of the day until the park closed at sunset. I rode a little bit further and found myself a kind of bus shelter which could be totally closed. So I parked my scooter inside and rolled out my mattress inside and slept.

Stunning views at the West coast of the peninsula of
Noto Hanto (Honshu).

Friday the 12th of October, 2012
This day I discovered the Noto Hanto peninsula which is famous for beautiful and stunning views and great seafood. So I pretty much explored the peninsula (and the food obviously) all day before heading back south again towards Takayama. But not before having a small adventure in the mountains.

I chose a secondary road which I followed into the mountains. The road was much longer than it looked on the map because of all the zigzagging and the climbing with which my scooter clearly had some trouble with. Normally the maximum speed is about 50 km/h but going up hill it sometimes only just reached 15 km/h. There were not so many street lights in the mountains so it was easy to miss a sign (which I eventually did). I ended up asking a Japanese guy who seemed to be kind of lost too. Thanks to his navigation we figured out where to go and he (fortunately) took the lead. In his car he was obviously faster but occasionally he waited after a couple of kilometers to check if I didn't get lost in the darkness somewhere. Somewhere around the top he stopped again and seemed to be a little bit stressed or excited. He told me that he just saw a bear on the road, which explained the reason for this. I asked him about the size and showed me that it was only about a meter big so probably just a baby bear but we decided to move on quickly because you never know if 'big momma' is around.

Once outside of the mountains I found another bus shelter in which I would spend the night. Unfortunately this one was not totally closed so it was quite cold and loud because of the passing traffic at the adjusting road.

The city of Takayama.

Saturday the 13th of October, 2012
I just slept outside of Takayama so next morning I just rode into the city and found by accident the local youth hostel which was located in a traditional Japanese building. I decided to spend the night here and discover the old city of Takayama with its traditional buildings, morning market and nice mountainside which is good for hiking a bit. Next to that I figured that I had to wash some clothes before heading North.

Sunday the 14th of October, 2012
I wanted to go to Sado island so I knew I had to make my way to Naoetsu which is just next to Joetsu. I found on the map a secondary road over the mountains and obviously like the times before it took me a long time to get to the top. I saw some Japanese signs next to the road which I didn't understand of course but finally on the top I figured out what they meant: they were repairing the road so I had to turn back and ride back for at least another half an hour. Somebody on the road told me that I should go back all the way to Takayama (which would take me between 1 or 2 hours) but fortunately he was wrong. There was a toll road through a lot of tunnels which I fortunately was allowed to take with my scooter.

After visiting Zenkoji which is a mayor temple in Nagano I continued to Naoetsu where I arrived at the beginning of the evening. At the ferry terminal they told me that I could crash down somewhere under the rooftop of the building but since the night was beautiful and clear I decided to find a spot somewhere behind a sea container in the parking lot from where I could see the stars and not be disturbed. Eventually I would be disturbed by some fishermen passing by who fished throughout the whole night but that wasn't a big deal.

Sunset from the ferry on the way to Sado island.

Monday the 15th of October, 2012
The next day I took a ferry to Sado island which is famous since it's kind of the Japanese version of Alcatraz. Next to housing exiled prisoners Sado is famous for mining gold about half a century ago and the locals consider Sado to be 'the real Japan' (not like big cities like Kyoto, Osaka and Tokyo). I arrived at the end of the afternoon in Ogi so I found a roof of a house somewhere in Sobama next to the beach and spent the night there.

Tuesday the 16th of October, 2012
This day I explored the whole of Sado island. I wanted to hike up to the highest mountain but unfortunately couldn't make it before sunset. I decided to look for a place to sleep at the ferry terminal of Kyotsu (another ferry terminal then the one where I arrived). I could stay inside until the evening but eventually got kicked out and spend half a night on a bench in my sleeping bag.

The rising sun in the land of the rising Sun.

Wednesday the 17th of October, 2012
I took the early of about 5 AM in the morning so this day I could actually see the sunrise in the Land of the Rising Sun. Something else that I noticed in Japan are the cloud formations from which I thought that they were only to be seen in The Netherlands. Apparently I was wrong.

I arrived in Niigata and decided to ride as far as possible. Many people told me that there were not so many touristic hot spots in the North of Honshu so I did this day maybe like 400 kilometers or something like that. I came as far as Hachirogata which is close to a small peninsula far up North. I got extremely wet because of the terrible rain which surprised me in the beginning of the evening. I bought an additional rain jacket at the 7-Eleven in Naoetsu since the sleeves of my Vaude jacket aren't waterproof anymore at all. However the cheap 7-Eleven jacket also only postpones the time it takes before I get wet. Anyway, I found a resting place for drivers (which are an amazing invention since they are everywhere around the country) with a kind of room where you can just enjoy your take away dinner (or beer like some Japanese) before hitting the road again. Some Japanese men who I met there told me that it wouldn't be a problem to sleep or rest there until the rain was finished, so I slept and wouldn't wake up until next morning.

I forgot to tell that on the way I had a small accident. I just parked my scooter at the 7-Eleven (where else) and when I wanted to pay for my groceries I noticed that it was on his side. A woman (of course) made a major parking mistake and damaged (fortunately only) the paintwork of my scooter. So the next hour I spent trying to communicate with the insurance company and trying to the rental company where nobody picked up the phone. Anyway, in the end it was all solved and the lady offered me 2000 yen for the inconvenience on which she insisted that I took it.

Thursday the 18th of October, 2012
Fortunately the weather cleared the next day and I followed the coastline to the harbor of Aumori where I took the ferry to the island where few Japanese come: Hokkaido. It became clear to me that 3 layers of pants and 3 layers of shirts, 1 sweater and 1 rain jacket were not enough to protect me from the cold of Hokkaido (which is by the way far more up North than Vladivostok) so when I saw a secondhand shop I didn't hesitate and found myself a (I guess) leather jacket with a warm lining for only 900 yen which would keep me pretty warm until all the way up. I was really happy when I figured out that I could take a shower on the ferry (Japanese style) since I didn't had one since Takayama.

It was late again before I arrived at the ferry terminal but I decided to go a little bit further and I stopped after about one hour in Mori. In Norway I slept a couple of times in public toilets where it's much warmer than outside so of course I had to try this in Japan as well and I have to say that the public toilets of Japan are approved and probably the best ones I've slept in until so far!! They're warm, clean, have occasionally floor heating and mostly toilet seat heating. Later on during my trip I even found one with free wifi!!

Friday the 19th of October, 2012
This day wasn't really special except for the place where I slept and something else that would cross my path in the night. I just wanted to get to the most Northern tip as soon as possible since the weather was getting damn cold. I just passed through Sapporo but didn't really stop there since it just looked like another city (and according to travel guides it is just another city) so I continued after a short stop.

Vending machines in Japan sell about everything.

I traveled a lot of kilometers once again and the further up North I got the more Autumn colors I saw. It's clear that every part of the country is in a different season here. Autumn is in Hokkaido everywhere but in Honshu it sometimes still seems to be Summer because you can see yellow flowers everywhere (which made it look a bit like Denmark). During the day I saw monkeys everywhere and during the night I found another big animal crossing the road... First I couldn't really distinguish what it was. Its eyes glowed up red in the dark when my light pointed in its direction. I could see that it had eyes in the front of his head and I could tell it was quite big and really furry. After it ran away I realized that it must have been a bear because it also moved in away that other wild animals which I have seen don't do. Anyway, it's well known that there are loads of bears around Japan but they seldom attack so I continued without fear.

I couldn't find a resting place for drivers but I found something else. It was basically a room with only vending machines for eggs somewhere in a village called Pippu. I was really tired and it was too cold outside to continue so I just crashed down there and slept.

Saturday the 20th of October, 2012
The next morning I woke up because somebody decided to buy some eggs for breakfast so I had an early start. I continued and a nice Japanese girl gave me some warming pads (you can put them on your body and produce warmth because some kind of chemical reaction) so I was sure that I would make it to Cape Soya-Misaki today without a doubt. I was wrong.

In Nakagawa I had kind of breakfast at another resting place before making the final run to the most Northern tip of Japan. But after breakfast the scooter didn't want to start anymore... So the guy from the restaurant called the local mechanic but he couldn't find the problem. He thought that new parts had to be ordered which he couldn't get earlier than about three days so he brought me back to Ebetsu (for free!!) where they possibly did. In the end some essential wires got rusty because of the wet weather and because of that it suddenly didn't want to start anymore. After a lot of cleaning the bill was presented to me of 5000 yen (which I had to pay since the rental company considers this as 'own risk' (if I would have been in Osaka they would have repaired it for free)). I said that I thought it was kind of expensive for changing the spark, changing the oil (which someone from the petrol station apparently messed up the day before when I asked him to change it) and cleaning some wires. So I got a 1000 yen discount and continued my way. I would make it only to the place where I had lunch in Nakagawa because of the bad weather. Once again I crashed down in the disabled toilet and slept quite well.

After more than 3000 kilometers I made it to the most
northern tip of Japan.

Sunday the 21st of October, 2012
This day I would make it to the most Northern tip but I have to say it was bloody cold and I was very lucky because I saw the first snow of the year on that day. I stayed only for half an hour because the weather and the wind there were really terrible. I followed the secondary road East and everything was going pretty well on this traffic free road until I suddenly saw some red flashing lights in the back mirror and heard a Japanese voice shouting at me: the police arrived, finally. The official rule is that on a scooter you can only ride 30 km/h but of course I never do because it's just way too slow and I can really feel that when I only ride 30 km/h the cars behind me are really irritated and annoyed because there's another slow scooter in their way. Anyway, I pointed at the 50 km/h sign and acted like a stupid gaijin (foreigner) and of course after a warning I was free to go. I made it to Abashiri in the end where I crashed down in another toilet.

This is not Holland!! You can find this Dutch style
windmill on Hokkaido, the Northern island of Japan.

Monday the 22nd of October, 2012
This day I would make it through the Akan National Park to a random small place called Hidaka. On the way I wanted to bath in a Japanese public onsen (hot spring) but in the end I decided not to because the weather was too cold and windy outside and it didn't seem to be a very clean one (there was algae everywhere). Last time when I was in a hot spring (which was somewhere in Nepal) with that kind of weather I got otitis so I didn't want to get that again. While crossing through the national park I had once again (like everywhere in Hokkaido) quite a hard time finding a petrol station so once again I ran out of gas and had to walk a little bit less than a kilometer to fill my girl up again. In Hidaka I want to fill up the scooter again but the only gas station in town already closed down at 7 PM and I didn't want to risk anything like that again so I stayed (again) in the disabled toilet of a resting place for drivers.

Tuesday the 23rd of October, 2012
The weather was really terrible again this day so fortunately I didn't have to go a long way. I arrived in Tomokomai quite early in the morning and the ferry left in the beginning of the evening so I used this day to read a book and to check my mail and stuff. At the ferry itself they were clearly not so used to foreigners (like everywhere else outside of Osaka, Kyoto and other major touristic spots) so in the restaurant I became friends with the girls of the restaurant and got special service the whole evening long (free coffee).

Pagoda at Nikko, clearly a very
touristic attraction.

Wednesday the 24th of October, 2012
In the morning I received special service again with which I was extremely happy since I'm pretty much a coffee addict. Bathing on the ferry was once again very pleasant, especially because of the ocean view which you had from the bathing area.

I arrived in the port of Sendai and made my way through Fukushima city to Aizuwakamatsu which has a rich Samurai related history. Before arriving there I of course had to make my way through the landscape which we all know so well from the television because of the 2011 tsunami. At the local grocery store I asked where the closed area was so that I was sure that I wouldn't end up there. Anyway, the people told me that the main road was open so that there was no problem and I didn't have to take a detour or something.

I decided not to stay in Aizu and went down towards Nikko and as always I found a disabled toilet to crash down for the night, this time in Tajima.

Thursday the 25th of October, 2012

Somewhere around 3000 meters on Mt. Fuji.

From Tajima I went to Nikko where I spent like whole morning and the beginning of the afternoon. There are a lot of temples, beautiful nature and other places to see and I think it's one of the most beautiful places I've seen in Japan until so far. And therefore of course also a little bit more touristic so I saw some white people there again.

From Nikko I made it to Fujiyoshida which is next to the famous mountain Fuji. I would stay there for two nights in the youth hostel. I also learned here that I just escaped another earthquake. Shoko told me that there was one in Sendai area the day before.

Friday the 26th of October, 2012
There are 10 stations on Mount Fuji and a lot of people start at the 5th station. So I took my scooter up there hoping to make it to the top. However it snowed a couple of weeks before so the lady from the hostel already told me it was very probably going to be impossible. And she was right.

Already taking the scooter to the 5th station was troublesome because it could hardly handle the altitude of approximately 2500 meters. Climbing was difficult because the snow turned into ice but fortunately there were chains next to the path with which I pulled myself up to somewhere between station 7 and 8. Somewhere around 3100 meters it became impossible and too dangerous to climb further. However I did continue for just a little bit but after deciding to turn around I regretted it since I had do a lot of acrobatic stuff and climbing without being secured to some kind of rope so it was totally irresponsible and pretty dangerous. Going down again to the 5th station was pretty difficult and it definitely took me longer than climbing up. Fortunately there was a bath in the hostel which I thankfully used to relax all my muscles. However I would have muscle pains for the next couple of days.

In the evening I met Vanessa again (we met already twice before) from Australia. She was staying at another hostel so I just went there for an hour or two before returning back to my own hostel since the curfew was like 10 PM (like a lot of hostels here in Japan).

Nagoya is the hometown of the Pachinko, a gambling
game which I still do not understand.

Saturday the 27th of October, 2012
This day I would ride all the way to Nagoya where I met Masako (who I met before in Kathmandu in Nepal). I arrived quite late because it was kind of difficult to find my way. Well, the way was easy to be found but I wasn't allowed to ride on it with my scooter. Sometimes it was allowed on parts of the main road but sometimes it wasn't so it was kind of confusing and it took a long time before I finally arrived at Masako's place. At that day I was escorted by the police for a couple of kilometers as well because apparently I was driving illegally on a part of the road again. Of course I wasn't fined. In the evening we went to a traditional Japanese pub where we had some amazing food and amazing drinks (sake of course) before crashing down.

Sunday the 28th of October, 2012
Today I met up with Yani who was working in the hostel in Xi'an in China where I always stayed. I was supposed to meet her earlier (in her hometown Dalian) but plans changed so I couldn't make it at the time. However she has a lot of family in Japan so she studies and works there right now, so we spent the day together.

In the night I went to what I thought was a manga kissa (place where you can surf the internet, watch DVDs and read comics). In a place like that you can spend the night for 1500 to 2000 yen and it's a cheap budget option. I read about it before and Shoko also suggested me to try it... however, when I entered the place I learned that this was like a 'cheeky' manga kissa. So I could choose 6 DVDs and stay in the room for 9 hours and it would cost me 2000 yen. The DVD collection was pretty much like 5% Hollywood movies and about 95% censored Japanese pornographic movies. Obviously I choose 6 Hollywood movies and crashed down without watching one of them in this 'wank mansion' (that's the name I gave it). Later my suspicions would be confirmed by Shoko: this was not a manga kissa.

Monday the 29th of October, 2012
I gave the scooter obviously a hard time and decided to return it to the rental company Asit in Osaka to let them check everything so I could continue with confidence to the most Southern tip in Japan. So I left Nagoya for Osaka and had to go through Kyoto where I was stopped by the police (again) for speeding. Once again I got away it. After riding it about 5000 kilometers I delivered the scooter to the rental company for a check up. I spent the night in the place where I always stayed in Osaka: a capsule hotel close to the city center (something that you definitely have to try when you visit Japan).

Tuesday the 30th of October, 2012
On Tuesday I went to Higashiomi where Shoko lives since I was invited by her and her mother. I arrived somewhere in the afternoon so Shoko and I went around for a bit and she showed me the local temple and her working place (she works as a wedding planner) which is right on the lake. Afterwards we went to a Thai restaurant before calling it a day.

Wednesday the 31st of October, 2012
The next morning I left Shoko and her mother but of course I couldn't leave without an amazing breakfast and lunch for the road!! I headed for Himeji Cstle (famous because of James Bond: You only live twice and The Last Samurai) which I visited but unfortunately they're restoring the castle right now so you have to use your imagination a little bit.

After that I went into the direction of Kobe to cross the bridge to Shikoku island. There were once again no clear signs if I was allowed on the road or not so I just went for it and hoped for the best. Once I arrived on the island between Honshu and Shikoku (Awaji-Shima) I thought it'd be nice to follow the coastal line so decided to go off the main road. There I found a toll gate (which I apparently ignored at the beginning of the road) and I learned that my 50cc scooter of course wasn't allowed on the road. The bridge to mainland Shikoku had the same restrictions: no 50cc scooters. So I was basically like Robinson Crusoe stuck on the island.

Fortunately the police came and helped me out. I first asked for an escort to Shikoku but they wouldn't give it to me. So instead of that 4 policemen spent their valuable (?) time on bringing my scooter and me back to Kobe. Next to that I had to go to the police office so they could make a report which all together took quite a long time (maybe 2 hours). I got the idea that I probably was going to be fined for at least one of my violations but in the end I walked away free again. I rode in the night all the way to Tamano where there was a ferry (only option, otherwise I had to go Hiroshima and go over the bridge there) to go to Shikoku. I arrived 2 AM and slept with my head on the table in the terminal until I took the ferry from 7 AM.

Thursday the 1st of November, 2012
I arrived in Takamatsu where I visited the Japanese garden which is the most beautiful garden I have seen until so far here (or anywhere). After that I went towards Naruto and Tokushima where I visited the first temple of the 88 temple pilgrimage. Of course I started thinking if I wanted to do this pilgrimage, too. I haven't decided... yet.

From there my goal was Kochi but in Kami something terrible happened: the scooter broke down and didn't want to start again. It stopped exactly for a coffee machine so I decided to first drink a cup (or actually a can) of coffee to over think what I was going to do. So I started walking with my scooter after a couple of attempts and believe it or not... the scooter stopped less than 10 meters from a motorbike shop.

Engine overhaul. After more than 5000 kilometers on
the scooter I had to go back to Osaka to change my
rental scooter for another one.

So the scooter was examined and the result was terrible: the motor was done for. It would take a couple of days to repair the scooter and it would cost me about 40000 yen (or more than the deposit). It would be free if it happened in Osaka but unfortunately I was far away from home. After calling with Asit there was a possibility to take the licence plate with me which meant that I would lose 10000 yen (rest was insured) on my deposit but of course I wanted to continue travelling. After a lot of talking and thinking we figured out that the owner of the shop was going to Osaka on the 21st so he could take the scooter with him and I wouldn't lose anything on the deposit. Next to that I would be able to pick up a new scooter already on the Saturday.

I was so incredibly lucky in this case, really unbelievable. In the evening I was invited to a Chinese restaurant with the owner, his wife, children and coworkers. Afterwards they brought me to the youth hostel in Kochi where I was very well taken care off.

Friday the 2nd of November, 2012
The next morning I went back to Kami to sort everything out with the scooter. After some curry rice for lunch I got a ride of a friend of the owner which saved me a lot of time, hassle and money once again. I've got to say that the hospitality in Shikoku has been amazing. Later I heard that also in Japan Shikoku is famous for their hospitality.

Anyway, I was dropped off at the ferry port of Takamatsu once again and waited till the ferry of 1 AM.

Saturday the 3rd of November, 2012
I arrived in Kobe early in the morning from where I went by train to Osaka. I waited there for a bit until the shop opened at 9 AM and picked up a new scooter (this time a black one). I continued directly towards Nara which is famous for temples and its deer which are all over the place.

Sunday the 4th until the 7th of November, 2012
Nara has a lot of historical sites because it's the ancient capital (Kyoto was the capital before Tokyo and before Kyoto it was Nara) so there's a lot to see. Next to visiting temples and such I also went to Peter (a guy from Slovakia) to a sake brewery to taste different variations of the rice wine. I went for a day trip to neighboring town Iga which is famous for its Ninja past. They have a museum there and some pretty amazing ninja demonstrations as well. And today (the 7th) I've been pretty much writing my blog all day since it was really necessary to do so.

Naruto is a Manga and Anime about Ninja which is one
of the most popular ones in Japan.

Update from Mercy Home in India
The rocket stoves are still working very fine and money is being saved by your donations, so thank you for that from all the children in India!! I learned another thing about my bicycle that never arrived... Apparently it was sent to Hong Kong but something went from there since nobody picked it up (but according to my knowledge nobody has been informed about the arrival even though I provided multiple telephone numbers) so it has been returned again to (somewhere in) India. I'm going to try to get the bicycle back to The Netherlands since I can't and don't want to continue travelling.

What's next?
I'm meeting some people who I met during my travels in less than a week in Kyoto so I will stick around this area. After that I will continue West towards Shikoku (attempt number two) and afterwards to the most Southern tip before heading back again and passing through Nagasaki, Fukuoka, Hiroshima and (hopefully) eventually Osaka. Shoko is flying around the beginning of December to Okinawa so I hope I can join her. From there I might fly back to Osaka or fly directly to Tokyo where I hope to meet up with another fellow cyclist who I met in Uzbekistan. Depending on time, money and my motivation I still haven't decided if I want to do the 88 temple pilgrimage here as well. It looks like it that I won't, though, so I have at least something left in one of the greatest countries in the world for when I come back.

I have to get back to Hong Kong as well to arrange my Russian visa (if I still have enough time) and if I get it (which is not sure) I will go through China to Vladivostok and from there to Europe. It seems very far away but actually it's only about three months from now on, more or less.

Anyway, sorry again for this too long blog but there was just too much to tell. Hopefully it will be shorter next time!!

Short update

2012-10-29T11:15:00.000+00:00

China
I stayed in the Meizhou area for about a week since it was impossible to move around to another place because of the mid-Autumn festival which means that prices get doubled and trains are fully booked. Next to that I realized that the Winter is getting closer so that it would be better to go to Japan directly now the weather was acceptable. So I managed to get a bus ticket to the Hong Kong and Shenzhen border.

Hong Kong
Once arrived in Hong Kong I first went to Ting Tong Hostel (the hostel where I always go in Kowloon area) to drop some stuff that I would not need in Japan. After that I went directly to the airport to catch my plane to Osaka. On the airport the staff of Peach Airways (the budget airline of Japan) told me that they would not let me board the plane unless I had an exit ticket (apparantly requiered for getting your visa on arrival). So I booked a ticket for a month later since I wanted to rent the scooter for at least one month.

Japan
After landing in Osaka I managed to finally meet up with Shoko, a girl who I met during my first long trip from 2005/2006. For the ones that do not know me or have forgotten: I walked from my hometown Heemstede in The Netherlands all the way to Santiago de Compostella in Spain (the way of Saint James). After almost 7 years we met in the train station of Kyoto and I have to say that I hardly recognized her. We had dinner and catched up a bit but far from enough so we will meet again tomorrow in her hometown Shiga. I rented a scooter almost three weeks ago and have seen a lot and have been through a lot since.

Japan special, dattebayo!!
For my full Japanese adventure you will have to wait a bit because I am currently writing my blog about Japan and it will be a special edition. So stay tuned, dattebayo!!

Day 1001

2012-09-17T03:36:00.000+01:00

South Korea
The typhoon Bolaven that was expected to hit Seoul didn't do so in the end. Just a couple of hours before impact the typhoon changed its direction so it was just rainy and windy, that's it.

After the typhoon went it was time to start walking to the South. The staff suggested me to take the subway to a small place called Cheonan to start my trip. The first night I just managed to get out of town there and put up my tent somewhere on a football field.
The next day I made quite a lot of kilometres when I ran by accident into a local man who goes by the name of Yung Yu. He collects medicinal plants in the mountains and manages to lives from that. He had a car so we went to a lot of places around, like a traditional folk village, some other traditional buildings and we cooked lunch in the woods next to a waterfall. After dinner he dropped me off at a so called "jeong ja" (resting place) which is a kind of hut with benches or a platform. So I just rolled out my mattress there and went to sleep.
The next day I walked all day long and nothing significantly happened except for that I did like 40 kilometres or something. The knee was bothering me a little but not too much. These days it's more the ankle that's bothering me. Anyway, I found another shelter in the coastal city of Gunsan where I crashed down just before a thunderstorm arrived. The platform was quite big and the roof too but because of the heavy wind and its constantly changing direction I had to change my position a couple of times in the night to not get wet.
Next morning I noticed a tent which was put up in another jeong ja not to far away from me. Apparently some locals spent the night there, just like me. At that point I noticed the condition of my shoulders which was quite bad. There was an ugly rash on both shoulders which looked similar to what I had in Nepal. In Nepal I thought it was due to the humidity but in Korea this couldn't be the case. So I guess it has something to do with the friction and, or the weight. However it's strange since I had no problems at all with my shoulders during my 99 day lasting trek to Santiago. Anyway, I talked to those guys and before I knew it I was having breakfast and soju (Korean rice wine) with them around 8 in the morning. They dropped me off at the bus station from where I took the bus to Jeonju.

From there I decided to start backpacking again until Mokpo from where I took a boat to the famous island of Jeju. I rented a fast scooter (125 cc) there and went around the island on that. The first night I made it to the island Udo which is located East of Jeju island. It's really small but there's loads to see and when I woke up next morning (once again in a jeong ja) I even saw dolphins swimming by just off the coast. I made really long days and did a lot of trekking so I just made it around the island in two days. I was planning to go up to mount Hallasan, which is the highest point in South Korea, but a new typhoon coming up shattered that plan.

I decided to fly from Jeju to Busan since it was cheaper than taking a boat and a bus. Next to that I didn't want to risk being stuck on the island with my scheduled flight coming up from Seoul to Hong Kong. In Busan I went around with a couple of American English teachers and had quite some fun there. Of course I also saw some of the cultural sites there like the Korean War cemetery and some temples in the mountains.

From Busan I took the train all the way back to Seoul where I did some trekking and of course I met up again with Seohee and other people who I met during my travels in Korea.
One night before my early flight I slept in the airport. After a terrible night of sleep I encountered a group of foreign men sitting together who were clearly looking for eye contact. Apparently they were Russians because they asked me in Russian if I was one of them. I took the opportunity to practise my Russian and they were apparently impressed when I told them that I learned my Russian in Central Asia, not in school. Before I knew it I was drinking dry gin and boarded the plane pretty "happy".

Philipines
For some reason the cheapest way to get to Hong Kong was with a two night stay over in Manila which seemed to me the best way to get a small impression of what South East Asia is like. Manila is quite dodgy in a way but most people are very friendly. Of course I had the usual trouble with my blond hair: ladyboys, prostitutes and just random girls where hitting on me all around the place. Anyway, I decided that I definitely want to see the Philipines and the other countries around here.

Hong Kong
I'm once again back in Hong Kong, so it's now my 5th time around here. Like always I'm staying at Kit's place in Kowloon area. Unfortunately the visa regulations changed so rush service for my Chinese visa isn't available anymore, which means that I have to wait for four days instead of two. There are also Chinese holidays coming up so it's really hard to get tickets to anywhere in the country right now. Fortunately Estelle helped me out and got me a ticket to get at least to Meizhou from the border.

Yesterday it was day 1000 since the start of my trip and I celebrated it with going to the cinema where I saw the latest Batman. So that means that today is day number 1001. Magical numbers!

Shooting stars and fireflies

2012-08-27T11:48:00.001+01:00

China
After a couple of days taking a rest in rainy Guangzhou I finally moved on to ChengDu to see the pandas by train on the regular hard seat. Since it's holiday season here everybody's travelling around and all the sleeper berths are sold out so hard seats were the only way. It's far from comfortable to sit for two days but much cheaper so I spent much less per day in China than during my previous visits. Next to that it's very easy to get in touch with the locals and learned a couple of card games without being able to speak the language.

I stayed for a couple of nights in ChengDu and met loads of people with which I won't bother the reader. Next to seeing the pandas I really badly wanted so see the IKEA to learn how they market the famous product to the Chinese. Prices tend to be very similar to Europe and it seems that the Chinese especially focus on getting the best out of small spaces (which makes sense with so many people). It looks to me like IKEA is for the upperclass Chinese since the prices are quite similar to Europe (maybe 10 to 20 percent cheaper). Funny things that you can notice are that there Chinese people sleeping everywhere on couches and beds. A Chinese with who I was visiting the IKEA the seccond time told me that she saw a news item on national television about the problem that some Chinese people just come there to take a nap and leave again. The lay out of the IKEA is exactly the same as the ones I've seen in The Netherlands. There's the usual shop with Swedish stuff, Swedish books of course and you name it. However the food in the restaurant offers next to the Swedish meat balls some really amazing Chinese food for extremely good prices. ChengDu being famous for its extremely spicey food proved its reputation in the IKEA restaurant when I couldn't taste anything after eating my noodles after a couple of minutes. Only in the area of ChengDu you can find certain infamous peppers which make your mouth feel numb. Apparantly some dentists also use those peppers as aneasthetics.

After ChengDu I went on a train (again with a hard seat) to Xi'an to meet up with the awesome people from the hostel who I met before. In the end I spent more time than expected since I was waiting for a mail from Estelle, who is a girl that I got to know in Beijing earlier this year during the Winter. I stayed for almost a week in Xi'an before I stepped on the train back to Guangzhou. I wanted to book a ticket to Xiamen and Quangzhou at first, but there were apparantly no tickets for that train anymore.

After arriving on a hard seat in Guangzhou I booked a train ticket to Meizhou which is only a couple of hours away from Guangzhou. In this place I met up with Estelle with who I was planning to do some trekking around the area. However, the poor girl just strained her anckle a couple of weeks before so she wasn't really able to move around without her nordic walking stick. So instead of hiking we decided to take the scooter and went around the country side for 3 nights and 4 days. The first night we camped which was pretty horrible, because my tent is quite hot and the ventilation is designed for colder weather. However the weather outside was very comfortable and except for the musquitoes and the ants we had the greatest time. With the clearest weather you can imagine we could see the milky way, shooting stars and fireflies everywhere. This has everything to do with the Perseids (or tears of St. Lawrence) that are coming over every year around July and August and reach an all time high around the middle of August, so we very lucky. After our trip I stayed for a couple of days more at Estelle her place with her grandmother and cousin who took very well care of us. I expected that I would get a lot of attention in Meizhou and the surroundings because it's everything but a tourist destination, but it seemed that all the attention was focussed on poor Estelle who was limping very badly. It seems that everybody in China is pretty much used to foreigners these days, even in the more remote places.

First my itinerary was to make it all the way up to Dalian and take a boat from there to South Korea but with time running out I decided to fly from Hong Kong instead. However my flight was canceled so I booked a new ticket from Xiamen. In the meanwhile I visited Daniel in Quangzhou which is about an hour North from Xiamen. He used to teach English there but because of circumstances he will study in Xiamen soon at the famous University of Xiamen where he managed to get a scholarship. Apparantly it's quite easy to get one around there for foreigners, so he suggested me to get one too. It's definitely something to think about, time will tell if I will miss China that much and decide to apply for one or not. Daniel and I spent two days together around Quangzhou and Xiamen before he left to Guangzhou to get some new pages in his passport and I left to the airport for Seoul with a transfer in Macau.

Macau
My flight from Xiamen to Macau was delayed for an hour but when I landed I still had enough time to discover a new part of the city where I had never been before. Macau is the Las Vegas of Asia or so they say, so the city is packed with extremely beautiful and huge hotels and the night is everything except for dark because of all the flashing lights everywhere.

I went out of the airport to get some fresh air and escape the airconditioning which made the airport extremely cold. Next to that I still had loads of Chinese Yuan from which I wanted to get rid of. At one point I was at a big crossing with loads of chique hotels and the atmosphere was really weird: when I reached the crossing I immediatly noticed that there were too many girls with too short skirts hanging around at the same spot doing nothing. One of them approached and I have to say that I wasn't really surprised when one of them approached and asked me "Massage?". In fluent Chinese I told her that I didn't want any and continued. When I came back an hour later and after not being able to find a money changer I noticed that the girls were replaced by a couple of policemen.

South Korea
I left Macau at 2 pm so arrived in Seoul somewhere in the early morning. Except for the signs this country seems pretty similar to China to me. From some people you can tell that they're Korean but some of them are very comparible to the Chinese. Other just look like the Japanese and some of them are just somewhere in between. For the rest it seems that everybody is very relaxed, very friendly and... very organized. Seoul is the seccond biggest city (after Tokyo) and the metro system is therefore huge and confusing to me. It took me a couple of days to kind of find my way around the city. Some areas seem to be busy but since everybody's following the rules so it doesn't bother me like in some Chinese cities (like Guangzhou) and of course it's nothing compared to the madness of Dhaka in Bangladesh.

In the meanwhile I met up Georg who's almost flying home (hopefully tomorrow) who did his interimship at the Seoul University. Maybe you can remember: I met him before in Copenhagen and afterwards I met him once again in Vienna and now in Seoul. Next to that I saw Seohee again for the first time since about one and a half years (I met her in Tallinn in Estonia while she was studying for half a year in Deventer, The Netherlands). Georg isn't sure yet if he'll be out of the country by tomorrow since there's a huge typhoon coming in from Okinawa. The owner of the hostel DJ already prepared everything for tomorrow, with the huge amount of bread, noodles and candles we're definitely not gonna die around here.

In a couple of days I will start trekking towards Busan and from there I'll probably take a boat to Jeju Island before returning once again to Seoul. From there I hope to take a plane to Okinawa from which I will make my way up all the way to Tokyo, hopefully on foot. It's much easier to communicate from South Korea than from China since there's no censure here anymore and there's free wifi almost everywhere, so I hope I can update my blog and facebook more than I did in China.

안녕히 가세요

Goodbye!!

Flight 14 & 15

2012-07-26T14:54:00.001+01:00

Herewith I post a new blog, from China, regarding my fourteenth flight from this year and the upcoming flight number 15. Flight number 15 is probably not the final flight of this year.

Flight 14
This was a flight that was already scheduled for a very long time. For more than seven years to be precise, since it was a gift for my 18th birthday.

With more or less two weeks left in The Netherlands I planned to do the 400 kilometre long walking trail which takes you all the way around the IJsselmeer. After one day my feet were totally finished and before my first night I already decided to go back home. I still blame it on the fact that I almost only walked on my sandals during the past trip.

Anyway, I informed Yoch about me returning home and he directly came up with the brilliant idea to jump out of an aeroplane (and of course end up safely on the ground with a parachute). So before we knew it we were on our way to the beautiful island of Texel on a sunny Sunday afternoon. We arrived at 10 in the morning and were scheduled for the first possible jump which was at 2 pm. With some time to kill we drove a bit around the island and did some sunbathing at the beach of De Cocksdorp.

We were lucky with the weather so we could see all the way to Terschelling. The instructor (who's attached to you on your back) technically jumps for you, all you have to do is enjoying the ride. You jump on an altitude of 3 kilometres and make a free fall to the altitude of 1.5 kilometres. It only takes 30 seconds to get to the 1.5 kilometres border since you drop to the earth with a speed of about 200 kilometres an hour. After that the instructor opens the parachute and you have all the time of the world to enjoy the view before you land safely on the ground. All together the whole experience takes about 30 minutes from taking off until landing on the ground.

After that we left to meet up with some friends in Leiden and enjoyed homemade pizzas fresh out of the oven from Folkert and Inge.

All together I did three trips before I left for Hong Kong: Texel, Zuiderzeepad and a crazy short visit to Paris where I met up with Zol and walked through the city for a bit more than 24 hours without breaks or sleeping.

Flight 15
I took a direct flight from Amsterdam all the way to Hong Kong on the 24th fortunately we landed just after the crazy typhoon Vicente, especially arranged for me. With time pressure from my expiring visa I had to go directly into mainland China. I landed half past 2 and finally walked into my hostel in Guangzhou around half past 9. I slept an incredible 13 hours before awaking from the death and starting to discover the still very rainy city of Guangzhou.

I'll keep you up to date about my movements as much as possible through my blog and my website.

The final volume?

2012-07-17T20:18:00.000+01:00

India

Let's start with a short update from the orphanage Mercy Home in India. About one or two weeks ago layer two has been put on the adjusted oil barrel, which functions as the chamber for the oven. This means that there's only one layer of clay remaining that will be put on eventually. The ones that will put on the final layer are also having a kind of holiday right now in the North of India. So it will take a little bit longer before I can finally show you some nice pictures of happy children with apple cake!!

The rocket stoves are a big success since the cooks started using them. This means that the costs of the fire wood already dropped significantly with 25%. It will probably be further reduced to an astonishing 50% and maybe even more!! I also hope to get some pictures from the rocket stoves in action sooner or later.

The Netherlands

After coming back to The Netherlands I unfortunately didn't return to Turkey due to unforeseen circumstances. So I have and will save that trip for when I come back.

While writing this blog my bicycle still hasn't arrived in Hong Kong. The Indian post office told Luben that it's still in transit for another couple of unmentioned amount of weeks. Of course as you and I both know Indians are not high on the list of people to be trusted.

When I came back I also got pretty sick. In total it took like a month to "find" the problem and cure me. After two weeks of problems I got tested on parasites in the hospital. After one week of waiting for the results I finally got a negative result. The doctor thought that I was possibly not used anymore to the Dutch bacteria anymore so he prescribed me (believe it or not) a week of drinking Yakult. This didn't help me of course like I kind of expected so I returned to the doctor once again. In the end I still walked out his office with medication against parasites. With the tests I had you apparently can only find the most common parasites. Anyway, the stuff cured me so I didn't have to come back for a rectal exam with which the doctor threatened me if the medication wouldn't help.

Because all of the stuff mentioned before I had to change my flight which is now on the 24th of July. I'm not really planning on waiting weeks, months, years or possibly the rest of my life on a bicycle that will not arrive I had to think about possible backup plans.

For this I started training once again after a long time. My friends always joke that I've seen the whole world except for my own country. About 8 years ago I walked a part of a long distance trail around the IJsselmeer. In the short amount of time I had I wanted to do as many kilometres as possible but already after 40 or 50 kilometres I had immense pain in both of my feet and an aching knee so I returned home much earlier than planned. I suspect that it has something to do with the fact that I've been walking for about half a year without my supporting soles. My soles only fit in my trekking shoes and not in my sandals and sneakers. Obviously I didn't wear my trekking shoes not too much in India where temperatures reached about 45 degrees Celcius. I will have to take it easy during my trip, I know that in the beginning 25 kilometres will be the max. This will not be a problem because with that speed I will make it to Tokyo before the Winter (see plan B).

Plan A
Current plan. The bicycle will arrive before I do. I will take it to South East Asia and eventually take it to Tokyo before returning to Europe.

Plan B
I will go to China and take the boat to South Korea and walk all the way to the East coast before taking a boat to Japan and very slowly make my way to Tokyo. From there I will take the boat to Vladivostok and take the train to Europe.

Plan C
Plan A and B combined.

Follow me
This is hopefully the final stretch of the FHTT Tour and while doing so you can keep following me on my blog and maybe even participate if you feel like it!! Plans always change, especially in my case.

For the first time in my life I bought a smart phone with which I will post my blogs from now on (like this one). With the amazing inventions like Swype and free wifi all over Asia it means I don't have to carry my laptop anymore or spend money and time in internet cafes.

I will keep updating my blog at least once a month and I will keep up doing so until the end of my trip. Depending on how everything goes down I will be either back before X-mas or otherwise before my 26th birthday the latest, which is on the 1st of March 2013.

I'll keep you posted!!

48 uur/48 hours

2012-06-10T15:51:00.000+01:00

India
Na het schrijven van m'n vorige blog kwam ik na een lange rit in Tiruvannamalai aan, net na de zonsondergang op vrijdagavond. De volgende dag zou een hele drukke dag worden, ik zou vooral bezig gaan zijn met wachten... heel lang wachten. Met de chauffeur bracht ik het olievat en een net aangeschafte fire blower (apparaat waarmee je handmatig extra zuurstof in het vuur kan blazen om het aan te wakkeren) en net voordat we aankwamen bij de lasser begon m'n voorband raar te bewegen. Eenmaal bij stilstand werd m'n vermoeden bevestigd: de voorband was lek. De lasser was nergens te bekennen dus ik stalde alles in zijn werkplaats en reed met de motor naar een werkplaats. Dit was rond de klok van half 2 en de motor zou rond 3 uur wel weer klaar zijn voor vertrek.

De lasser traceren was de meest vermoeiende en tijdsrovende klus van de dag. Het kwam er uiteindelijk op neer dat niemand zijn werktijden wist en dat ik elke 15 minuten maar moest langskomen om te checken of hij terug was van zijn lunch. Lunchtijd duurt normaal een half uur maar deze beste man had maar liefst 2 en half uur lunchtijd nodig. Toen ik hem eenmaal trof was ik wel ontzettend blij dat ik op hem heb gewacht. Volgens alle lassers die ik heb gesproken was hij dé man die de klus wel kon klaren. Hij sprak goed Engels en begreep direct wat ik wilde en waar het olievat voor gebruikt zou gaan worden. Blijkbaar doet hij ook goede zaken in Tiruvannamalai met de Ashram en volgens hem hebben de westerlingen een goede invloed op India. Vooral omdat ze de Indiërs het belang van punctualiteit bijbrengen, iets waar ze in India een gebrek aan hebben volgens hem (en ik ben het daar totaal mee eens). Een van de woorden die constant hier hoort is "naliki" (Tamil voor "morgen").

Datzelfde hoorde ik net daarvoor rond 3 uur bij de motorwerkplaats: "No power!! Come back tomorrow!!". Ik ben natuurlijk niet dom en weet dat je voor het plakken van een band überhaupt geen stroom nodig hebt dus ik vertelde ze dat "naliki" geen optie was. Ze hadden de band blijkbaar nog geeneens weggebracht en vertelde me nu dat ik maar weer een uur later moest terugkomen. Gelukkig kwam de lasser toen terug en nadat ik alles geregeld had met de lasser stond de motor klaar.

Na een kort bezoek aan Ananda's farm waar Brant nog steeds rondhing ging ik uiteindelijk terug naar Mercy Home en ging na een paar KF's onder de wol.

De volgende dag bezocht ik in de ochtend wederom Ananda's farm en in de middag bezocht ik Wide Home Orphanage. Dat is een ander weeshuis wat gerund wordt door Kumari en Xavier wie ik al eerder bezocht had om te kijken naar de solar ovens die zij op hun dak hebben staan. Het was een lange en gezellige zit en uiteindelijk had ik er ook lunch met wat kip voor de verandering. Rond het eind van de middag ging ik weer terug naar Mercy Home met ongeveer 20 liter aan fris- en fruitdrank om te trakteren aan de kinderen. Daarnaast haalden we maar liefst 150 barotha's op bij een restaurant om de hoek voor een gezellig laatste avondmaal. Goede en betaalbare taart was helaas niet te vinden, dus dat moet nog ongeveer twee weken op zich laten wachten tot wanneer de oven klaar is.

De volgende ochtend bracht ik een bezoekje aan het postkantoor aangezien m'n fiets nog steeds niet is aangekomen in Hong Kong. Als het goed is weet ik hier meer over binnen een week als ik de manager mag geloven.

De weg naar Auroville liep iets anders dan gepland. Ergens halverwege sneed een bus me af en raakte hierbij m'n rechterzijspiegel. Natuurlijk maakte dit me boos en deed een poging om hem in te halen en van deze gestoorde chauffeur af te zijn. Bij het opschakelen besloten twee mensen om op het asfalt te gaan lopen en toen was het al te laat. Ik probeerde nog te remmen en voor de twee uit te wijken maar faalde. Ik ramde met de rechterkant van de motor in de linkerkant van de bus en ging onderuit, gelukkig net achter het achterwiel. Tijdens m'n valpartij raakte ik alsnog een van het tweetal in de rug die vervolgens kermde van de pijn. Eenmaal opgekrabbeld maakte ik de schade voor mezelf op die uiteindelijk meeviel. M'n spijkerbroek was done for en had een open schaafwond op m'n rechterknie, de voorkap had ik een lelijke tear opgelopen en een deel van het ijzeren rek dat bescherming bied was verbogen. Vanuit allerlei hoeken kwamen mensen aanrennen die tegen me aan begonnen te schreeuwen in Tamil en het was wel duidelijk dat ze mij beschuldigde van het hele euvel. Ze wilden dat ik bleef waarschijnlijk om geld te vangen of iets dergelijks of om te wachten op een of andere corrupte politieagent maar daar had ik uiteraard totaal geen zin in. Dus ik deed iets waarvoor je in Nederland voor de gevangenis in gaat: wegrijden van een ongeval waar ikzelf in betrokken was. Bij het eerste beste restaurant kocht ik een halve liter frisdrank, dronk het op en behandelde m'n wond met m'n EHBO kit. Dit was de eerste keer dat ik hem gebruikte in twee en een half jaar reizen, dus geen slechte score. Het enige wat ik nodig had was een alcoholdoekje om de wond te ontsmetten en daarna was ik weer klaar om te gaan. Een paar minuten later vond ik een lasser die alles wist terug te buigen voor slechts 30 rupees. Ik vervolgde m'n weg naar Auroville en voor de rest liep alles gesmeerd.

Op dinsdag bezochten Rene en ik Sadnaha Forest voor de laatste voorbereidingen voor de oven. In de pot voor de rocket stoves en oven zat nog iets minder dan 4900 rupees en door gebrek aan wisselgeld gaf ik hem 5000 rupees om de klus te klaren. Dit bedrag is net aan genoeg of net niet; het wordt spannend dat is zeker!! Hij zal mij vanuit India over alles op de hoogte houden van het gehele project.

Ik ging naar Chennai op de 5de maar eenmaal aangekomen kwam ik erachter dat ik me vergist had met de data: m'n vlucht ging op de 6de in plaats van de 5de. Dus ik verbleef een nachtje in Chennai in een hotel waar a la Bangladesh voor elke beweging die het personeel deed om fooi werd gevraagd. Hoe dan ook heb ik ze bijgebracht dat wie vraagd wordt overgeslagen.

Door m'n onoplettendheid kwam ik erachter dat ik nu slechts 8 uur in Iraq te spenderen had in plaats van 32 uur. Heel erg jammer maar helaas kon het niet ongedaan worden. Het maakt niet te veel uit want ik wil sowieso terug naar die hoek wanneer het weer wat rustiger is.

Sri Lanka
Na een korte vlucht van Chennai naar Sri Lanka kwam ik erachter dat m'n double entry visa verlopen was. Ik legde de immigratie uit dat ik voor de volgende ochtend een vlucht had en het bleek dat ik zowel niet in aanmerking kwam voor een transit visum maar eigenlijk ook niet voor een nieuwe toeristenvisum. De man vroeg zichzelf de vraag die vele Zuid-Aziërs vragen: "What to do?". Hij vertrouwde me op m'n blauwe ogen en gaf me gratis en voor niets een visum voor twee dagen en ik mocht doorlopen. Vanuit Colombo vloog ik naar Dubai, gelegen in de Verenigde Arabische Emiraten.

Verenigde Arabische Emiraten (Dubai)
Ik dacht dat ik wel naar buiten mocht met een overstaptijd van meer dan 8 uur maar ik zat er helaas naast. Eenmaal in de transithal kwam ik erachter dat ik hier gedwongen opgesloten zat en niet de stad kon bezoeken (of dat is in ieder geval wat ze vertelde bij de informatiedesk). Uitgehongerd na m'n low budget flight van FlyDubai was ik hier gedwongen om te ontbijten met broodjes a 10 USD per stuk. Ik besloot m'n tijd maar wijs te besteden door deze blog grotendeels te schrijven. Om half 5 's middags pakte ik m'n vlucht naar Erbil in het Koerdische gedeelte van Iraq.

Irak (Kurdistan)
Ik arriveerde om half 6 's avonds en wist gelukkig hier wél uit het vliegveld te komen. Gelukkig was het stadscentrum maar 7 kilometer van het vliegveld dus ik heb wel nog het een en ander kunnen zien en een beetje de sfeer proeven. Voor het midden van de nacht was ik wel weer terug op het vliegveld om een beetje rust te pakken voor de lange vlucht naar Nederland met twee tussenstops in Turkije.

Turkije
Eerst vloog ik naar Ankara met een korte tussenstop van ongeveer een uur om vervolgens te vliegen naar Istanbul waar ik zo'n twee uur te spenderen had. Gedwongen moest iedereen door de douane in Ankara om zo even de Turkse schatkist aan te vullen. Het visum is een multiple entry visum en kost 15 euro maar dit maakt niet uit, aangezien ik voordat ik naar Hong Kong vlieg hier nog een week (of twee) terugkom voor een vakantie van vakantie.

Nederland
Uiteindelijk arriveerde ik 1 uur 's middags op Amsterdam en nam de trein op eigen initiatief naar huis. Even kort de feiten: 48 uur reistijd, 7 vliegvelden, 6 landen en 6 vluchten met 3 verschillende maatschappijen. Totaal gedurende FHTT Volume 5 heb ik maar liefst een schandalige 10 keer in het vliegtuig gezeten, 11 landen bezocht en om en nabij 22.000 kilometer afgereisd.

Ik besloot om niet heel lang in Iraq te blijven vanwege een verjaardagsfeestje dat georganiseerd werd door een van mijn goede kameraden in Nederland. Zoals ik wel vaker doe kom ik zomaar uit het niets mensen verrassen met m'n terugkomst en deze keer was Rogier de gelukkige!!

Het vervolg
Wanneer er meer nieuws komt vanuit India licht ik jullie hier uiteraard over in. Voor de rest moeten jullie nog even geduld hebben tot m'n volgende blog waarin alles wordt verteld over From Here to Tokyo Tour: Volume 6 (The Final Volume). Deze keer vlieg ik naar Hong Kong om mijn reis te vervolgen naar Zuid-Oost Azië en uiteindelijk het einddoel: Japan!! Meer informatie volgt.

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India
After writing my previous blog I arrived in Tiruvannamalai after a long ride, just after the sunset on Friday evening. The next day was going to be a busy one, I was especially going to be busy with spending my time waiting… for a long time. I brought the oil barrel and the recently bought fire blower to the welder with the help of the driver. Just before we arrived my front tire started to shake. Once stopped my suspicion was confirmed: a puncture. The welder was nowhere to be found so I put everything in his working place and rode the motorbike to a workshop. That was around half past 1 and according to the guy I would be able to hit the road before 3.

Tracking down the welder was the most fatiguing and time consuming task of the day. It came down to the fact that nobody knew his working hours and I had to return every 15 minutes to check if he returned from his lunch. Lunch normally takes half an hour but this guy needed a ridiculous two and a half hours. When I finally tracked him down I was glad that I waited for him. According to all the welders I spoke to this was the guy most suited for the job. He had good English and understood instantly what I wanted and the purpose of adjusting the oil barrel. Apparently he also does business in Tiruvannamalai with its Ashram and according to him the westerners have a good influence on India. Especially because they teach the Indians the importance of punctuality, something which they don’t care about in India according to him (and I totally agree). One of the words you constantly here around here is “naliki” (Tamil for “tomorrow”).

I just heard the same before around 3 PM at the motorbike workplace: “No power!! Come back tomorrow!!”. I’m obviously not totally stupid and I know that for fixing a puncture you don’t need any power so I told them that “naliki” was no option. Apparently they didn’t even bring the tire away and now told me that I had to return again one hour later. Fortunately the welder returned just after that and after I arranged everything with him I found the motorbike ready to go.

After paying a short visit to Ananda’s farm where Brant was still hanging around I finally returned to Mercy Home and went to bed after a couple of KFs.

The next day I once again visisted Ananda’s farm and in the afternoon I visited Wide Home Orphanage. That’s another orphanage which is managed by Kumari and Xavier whom I visited before to check out their solar ovens which they placed on their rooftop. It was a long and cosy meeting and I eventually had my lunch there which included some chicken for a change. Around the end of the afternoon I returned to Mercy Home with approximately 20 litres of soda and juice to give to the children. Next to that we picked up 150 barothas at a restaurant around the corner. Good and payable cake was unfortunately nowhere to be found, so that has to wait for another two weeks until the oven is finished.

The next morning I paid a visit to the post office since my bicycle still hasn’t reached Hong Kong. According to the manager I should know more about it within one week.

The road to Auroville didn’t actually go according to plan. Somewhere around the middle a bus cut me off and hit my right mirror while doing so. Obviously this made me upset and I tried to take over the bus to get rid of this crazy driver. While I was shifting up two men decided to walk on the asphalt and it was already too late. I tried to brake and evade the two but I failed. I hit with the right side of my motorbike the left side of the bus and fell, fortunately just behind the rear wheel. During my crash to the ground I still hit one of the two persons in the back who was in pain afterwards. Once I scribbled myself from the ground I figured out the damage and it seemed to be not too bad. My jeans were done for, I had a scratch on my right knee, the front body had an ugly tear and a part of the iron rack that offers protection was bent. From all direction people came and started to yell to me in Tamil and it was clear to me that they blamed me for the accident. They wanted me to stay to get some money out of me or something or to wait for some corrupt copper but obviously I wasn’t looking forward to any of this. So I decided to do something which you will go in jail for in the Netherlands: driving away from an accident I was personally involved in. At the first restaurant I found I bought half a litre of soda, drank it and treated my wound with my first aid kit. This was the first time in two and a half years that I used it, so not a bad score. The only thing I needed was an alcohol tissue to sterilize the wound and after that I was ready to go. A couple of minutes later I found a welder who bent everything back for 30 rupees only. I continued my way to Auroville and for the rest it was a smooth ride.

On Tuesday Rene and I visited Sadnaha Forest for the final preparations for the oven. In the jar for the rocket stoves and the oven there was only a little bit less than 4900 rupees remaining and because of a lack of change I gave him 5000 rupees to finish the job. This amount should be just or just not sufficient to finish everything; it’s going to be a tight one that’s for sure!! He will inform me about the whole ongoing project from India.

I went to Chennai on the 5th but once I arrived there I figured out that I made a mistake with the dates: my flight was on the 6th instead of the 5th. So I stayed the night in Chennai in a hotel where a la Bangladesh the personal asked for tips for every movement they made. I taught them however that everybody who asks for tips doesn’t get it.

Because of my inattention I figured out that I’m now only going to stay for 8 hours in Iraq instead of 32 hours. It’s a shame but it can’t be undone. However it doesn’t matter, I want to go back to that corner anyway when everything is settled down a bit more.

Sri Lanka
After a short flight from Chennai to Sri Lanka I figured out that my double entry visa expired. I explained the immigration officer that I had a flight for the next morning and it seemed that I wasn’t either qualified for a transit or a tourist visa. The man asked himself the question that a lot of South Asians ask themselves: “What to do?”. He trusted my blue eyes and gave me a free two day visa and I could continue. I flew to Dubai from Colombo, situated in the United Arab Emirates.

United Arab Emirates (Dubai)
I expected that I could go outside with a transferring time of more than 8 hours but unfortunately it wasn’t like this. Once arrived in the transit hall I figured out that I was locked up and couldn’t go out to visit the city (or that’s what the information desk at least told me). Starved to death after my low budget flight from FlyDubai I was forced to have my breakfast here with sandwiches costing like 10 USD a piece. I decided to use my time wisely by writing the biggest part of this blog. At 4:30 PM I took the flight do Erbil in the Kurdish part of Iraq.

Iraq (Kurdistan)
I arrived about 5:30 PM and fortunately managed to get out of the airport here. Fortunately the city centre is only situated 7 kilometres from the airport so I had the time to see some stuff and grasp the atmosphere. Before midnight I went back to the airport to get a little bit of rest before the long flight to the Netherlands with two stops in Turkey.

Turkey
First I flew to Ankara with a short layover of about an hour followed by flying to Istanbul where I spent another two hours. Everybody was forced to go through customs and in doing so topping up the Turkish treasury. The visa is a multiple entry visa and costs 15 EUR but that doesn’t matter since I will be back here for a week (or two) before I fly to Hong Kong. I will have a holiday from my holiday here.

The Netherlands
I finally arrived around 1 PM in Amsterdam and took the train on own initiative to home. The facts: 48 hours of travelling, 7 airports, 6 countries, 6 flights with 3 different flight companies. Totally, during the 5th Volume of the FHTT Tour I flew in the scandalous of 10 airplanes, I visited 11 countries and travelled approximately 22.000 kilometres.

I decided not to stay too long in Iraq since one of my comrades organised birthday party in the Netherlands. Like often I just show up sometimes to surprise people with my return and this time Rogier was the lucky one!!

The continuation
When news comes from India I will obviously inform you about it. For the rest you have to be patient for a little while until my next blog comes out in which I will tell everything about From Here to Tokyo Tour: Volume 6 (The Final Volume). This time I will fly to Hong Kong from which I will continue my travels to South East Asia and eventually the final goal: Japan!! More information will follow.

Rocket stoves zijn klaar!!/Rocket stoves are finished!!

2012-06-01T11:17:00.000+01:00

En bij deze weer een korte update met betrekking tot het ovenproject, deze keer vanuit Pondecherry.

Wederom is er in de tussentijd een hele boel gebeurd. Zo zou ik op de 23ste India verlaten maar heb ik dit uiteindelijk toch uitgesteld tot 5 juni. De bestemming is nog steeds hetzelfde: Erbil in het Koerdische gedeelte van Irak. Hoe lang ik daar ga blijven is nog niet duidelijk, maar je krijgt maximaal maar een visum voor 10 dagen bij aankomst.

Afgelopen weekend zijn we met 14 man sterk, mezelf incluis, vanuit Auroville naar Tiruvannamalai afgereisd om het veelbesproken ovenproject eindelijk te starten. De Fertile Community en ik arriveerden eerder om het een en ander voor te bereiden in Mercy Home. Uiteindelijk pikten we de rest in de avond op bij de tempel en brachten hun naar hun hotel waar ze voor die avond zouden verblijven. De Fertile groep en ik marcheerden zoals we eerder al hadden gedaan de berg op en overnachtten op dezelfde plek als altijd. Na ongeveer een half uur lopen van de voet van de berg vindt je een grote rots met fantastisch uitzicht op de tempel wat waarschijnlijk de mooiste plek is in Tiruvannamalai, vooral 's avonds.

De dag daarvoor hadden we een lezing gehad van Mouhsine Serrar van het bedrijf Praktidesign in Sadnaha Forest te Auroville. Hij heeft ons weten bij te brengen over de werking van vuur en over rocket stoves. Ik had deze ontzettend vriendelijke man al een paar keer daarvoor gesproken en tijdens die gesprekken heeft hij mij alle bouwtekeningen gegeven en ook moeilijk te verkrijgen materiaal: AAC bricks. Dat zijn speciale stenen met een insulerende werking die worden gebruikt in de verbrandingskamer die de effectiviteit van het vuur verhoogt. Daarnaast heeft hij ons voorzien van wat specifiek gereedschap om de rocket stoves te bouwen. Mouhsine Serrar is een stove engineer en board member van de non-profit organisatie DEW Labs (Designing and Engineering for the World) welke is opgericht door zijn bedrijf Praktidesign. DEW Labs is volledig verantwoordelijk voor zowel het design als de technische ondersteuning voor de gehele bouw van de rocket stoves in Mercy Home te Tiruvannamalai. Voor meer informatie kun je terrecht op de websites http://www.praktidesign.com/ en http://www.dewlabs.com/. Mocht je specifieke vragen hebben die niet op de website vermeld staan of misschien zelf zo'n rocket stove willen bouwen, dan kun je altijd een mail sturen naar info@dewlabs.com.

Dag 1 van de bouw van het ovenproject
De volgende ochtend liepen we terug naar het hotel van de Sadnaha groep waar we opgepikt werden door de reguliere chauffeur van Mercy Home. Eenmaal aangekomen kwamen we erachter dat de geregelde mason uiteraard niet kwam opdagen zoals niet geheel onverwacht. Het betrof natuurlijk dezelfde mason die na een jaar nog steeds niet de garage van de bus heeft afgemaakt. Gelukkig vond Luben snel een andere mason geschikt voor de klus. Aangezien we met 14 man waren kwam het vast niet op in het hoofd van de andere mason om deze óók in elkaar te slaan.

Met een wat trage start kwamen we uiteindelijk een heel eind de eerste dag, ookal leek het voor Luben en Mercy niet het geval. Er moest veel berekend en getekend worden en daarnaast veel materiaal worden verzameld vanuit de achtertuin (klei en zand) dat vervolgens gefilterd moest worden. Voor de oven hadden we een lasser nodig voor het olievat om deze aan te passen en uiteraard was het juist op deze zaterdag dat er de gehele dag helemaal geen stroom was. Zonder het vat konden we totaal niet beginnen met de oven dus we bleven hopen op dat er een lasser beschikbaar zou zijn op zondag. Op de eerste dag wisten we een al bestaande verhoging uit te breiden. Op deze verhoging moesten uiteindelijk de rocket stoves komen te staan. Ook hebben we veel voorbereidend werk weten te verrichten voor de oven: het hele onderstel waar het olievat op komt te rusten is gebouwd. Dit hele onderstel moest vervolgens gevuld worden met alle stenen die we konden vinden en alle plekken waar nog lucht was te vinden werden opgevuld met cement.

In de avond verkasten we met z'n allen naar Ananda's farm wat een plek is dat gerund wordt door Ananda (een Indiër) en zijn Spaanse vrouw. In het kort is het een plek waar spiritualiteit, schilderen en werken op het land worden gecombineerd. Ik heb beloofd om er niet te veel over te zeggen en over rond te vertellen omdat het een klein project moet blijven dus als je er meer over wilt weten kun je mij contacteren.

Dag 2 van de bouw van het ovenproject
Ook de zondag hier is heilig dus we moesten met riksha's terug naar Mercy Home komen aangezien de chauffeur ook gewoon vrij was. Het opstarten ging wat langzaam aangezien een aantal mensen het laat hadden gemaakt de dag daarvoor dus we waren pas rond de klok van half 11 bij Mercy Home. Aangezien we ook nog een behoorlijk stuk moesten lopen voordat we riksha's vonden voor een normale prijs duurde het allemaal langer dan verwacht. Het grootste deel van de groep moest ook rond twee uur alweer op de bus zitten dus heel veel kregen we niet gedaan met de Sadnaha groep op de tweede dag. Wel hebben we met z'n allen er voor kunnen zorgen dat alle materialen waren verzameld voor zowel de oven als de rocket stoves én de oven, dus zeker weten heeft iedereen een goede prestatie geleverd.

Samuel en Vanessa van de Sadnaha groep wisten er voor te zorgen dat ze toch nog wat langer konden blijven. Stephanie van Fertile moest ook terug omdat ze de volgende dag moest werken dus we bleven met 6 man achter in totaal: Brant, Rene, Richa, Vanessa, Samuel en ik. En natuurlijk de mason die het leeuwendeel van het werk deed. Aan het einde van de dag wisten we een deel van de eerste rocket stove af te krijgen en voorbereidingen te treffen voor de tweede rocket stove. Het lassen lukte achteraf allemaal niet want ook de lassers willen blijkbaar een vrije dag. Dit zorgde ervoor dat de oven tot over twee weekenden definitief werd uitgesteld (weekend van 9 en 10 juni) dus ik kan er helaas niet bij de afronding van het project zijn.

Samuel en Vanessa gingen uiteindelijk in de avond terug naar Auroville dus we bleven met z'n vieren over. We besloten om weer terug te gaan naar Ananda's farm omdat het ons daar zo goed beviel en we werden dan ook hartelijk ontvangen.

Dag 3 van de bouw van het ovenproject
De chauffeur kwam op deze dag niet opdagen, achteraf hoorden we dat hij ergens een ander klusje had gevonden voor meer geld. Opzich geen probleem als hij dat even had laten weten aangezien hij de dag daarvoor in de avond had beloofd dat hij ons wel wilde ophalen. Weer verlaat stapten we in een riksha en arriveerde weer te laat in Mercy Home waar de mason minstens een uur op ons had zitten wachten.

Dag 3 ging extreem voorspoedig. We vonden een lasser die de beschermbeugels voor de rocket stoves wel kon lassen maar hij kon ons niet helpen met het olievat. Wel verwees hij ons door naar iemand die dat wel kon. Alleen zonder chauffeur was het niet te doen om daar te geraken dus we hoopte dat hij de volgende dag er wel zou zijn (wat uiteraard niet gebeurde). De eerste rocket stove was aan het eind van de dag bijna helemaal klaar en met de tweede en grootste rocket stove was er veel progressie gemaakt. We hadden gehoopt dat we alles op dag 3 zouden afkrijgen maar dat was te optimistisch achteraf.

Aangezien Ananda ver buiten Tiru woont besloten we om de nacht op de berg te slapen en rekenden bij voorbaat er niet op dat de chauffeur zou komen opdagen.

Dag 4 van de bouw van het ovenproject
De volgende ochtend namen we een riksha naar Mercy Home om daar eindelijk de klus te klaren. Richa ging in de ochtend weg dus we bleven met z'n drietjes over. Er was een deadline die gehaald moest worden aangezien we de volgende dag in Auroville moesten en wilden zijn.

Aan het eind van de dag was bijna alles klaar behalve het interieur van de tweede rocket stove. We raakten een beetje in conflict met de mason die claimde dat hij er de volgende hele dag nodig voor zou hebben wat duidelijk niet waar was. Hij wilde slechts een klein deel van het geheel doen voor 150 rupees en dan alsnog de volgende dag terugkomen om de klus te klaren en nog eens 500 rupees te vangen. Gelukkig werd Mercy boos en klaarde hij alsnog het gehele project voor slechts 100 rupees zonder de volgende dag terug te hoeven komen. Wel kwamen we erachter dat hij het niet geheel zorgvuldig en mooi heeft gedaan toen de vogel al gevlogen was, maar dit heeft geen effect op het gebruik ervan.

Brant besloot om nog wat langer in Tiru te blijven terwijl Rene en ik heel graag terug wilden naar Auroville en dit dus ook deden. 2 uur 's nachts kwamen we dan eindelijk aan in Auroville en vielen als een blok beton in slaap na 5 drukke dagen.

Het vervolg
Volgend weekend komen er ergens tussen de 5 en 10 mensen naar Mercy Home om de oven af te maken. Ik kan er dan wel niet bij zijn, maar ik zal zeker weten via Rene mezelf en jullie op de hoogte houden over hoe het project gaat. De rocket stoves zijn nog niet gebruikt want hier gaat ongeveer 7-10 dagen aan droogtijd aan vooraf. Als er nieuwe foto's beschikbaar zijn dan deel ik ze zeker weten!! In totaal is er nu 470 euro opgehaald waarvan nu 243.38 euro gespendeerd is. Dit bedrag kan als het goed is al met minder dan een half jaar weer terugverdiend worden door de besparing op stookkosten!!

Ik schrijf m'n blog nu vanuit Pondy en als deze klaar is stap ik op m'n gehuurde Honda racemonster om vervolgens in de loop van de middag aan te komen in Tiruvannamalai. Ik moet daar het cement gaan nathouden voor een optimaal resultaat, anders kan het wel eens te snel drogen waardoor barsten mogelijk kunnen ontstaan. Voor de rest "moet" ik uiteraard een leuk vaarwelfeestje geven met veel cola en andere lekkernijen. Hopelijk vind ik ergens degelijke niet zelfgebakken taart!! Ook moeten er nog wat foto's genomen worden aangezien het 10-jarige jubileum op komst is (24 juni) dus dat is ook een taakje wat ik op me genomen heb. Zondag of maandag ga ik weer terug naar Auroville om vervolgens op dinsdagavond weg te vliegen vanuit Chennai.

Dat was het voor nu, ik hou jullie op de hoogte!!

Dag 1 / Day 1

Dag 2 / Day 2

Dag 3 / Day 3

Dag 4 / Day 4

And once again a short update regarding the oven project, this time from Pondecherry.

Once again a lot happened in the meanwhile. I was supposed to leave India on the 23rd but I eventually extended my flight until the 5th of June. The destination is still the same: Erbil in the Kurdish part of Iraq. How long I'm going to stay there is still not clear, but it's for a maximum of 10 days since you get this amount of days on a visa on arrival.

Past weekend we left with 14 men (and women) strong, myself incluided, Auroville and travelled to Tiruvannamalai to finally start the oven project. The Fertile Community and I arrived earlier to prepare some stuff in Mmercy Home. Eventually we picked up the rest in the evening from the temple and braught them to their hotel where they would stay for the night. The Fertile Group and I marched up the mountain like we did before and slept on the same spot as ever. After walking for half an hour from the edge of the mountain you can find a huge rock with a fantastic view on the temple. It's probably the most beautiful spot in Tiruvannamalai, especially at night.

Just the day before we had a reading in Sadnaha Forest in Auroville from Mouhsine Serrar, who is the CEO of the company Praktidesign. He taught us a lot about the mechanics of fire and about rocket stoves. I met this incredibly friendly man a couple of times before and during our conversations he gave me the blueprints of the rocket stoves and he also donated us some materials that are hard to get: AAC bricks. AAC bricks are special bricks which we would use for insulating the combustion chamber. This raises the effectivity of the fire significantly. Next to that he lent us some specific construction material to build the rocket stoves. Mouhsine Serrar is a stove engineer and a board member of the non-profit organisation DEW Labs (Desiging and Engineering for the World) which is founded by his company Praktidesign. DEW Labs gets all the credits for the design and the technical support for the whole construction of the rocket stoves in Mercy Home in Tiruvannamalai. For more information you can visit http://www.praktidesign.com/ mand http://www.dewlabs.com/. Might you have any specific questions that aren't answered on the websites or if you consider building a rocket stove yourself, feel free to sent an e-mail to info@dewlabs.com.

Day 1 of the construction of the oven project
The next morning we walked back to the hotel where we left the Sadnaha group where we got picked up by Mercy Home's regular driver. Once arrived we figured out that the arranged mason didn't show up like not totally unexpected. Of course this considers the same mason that still didn't finish the bus shed after we hired him a year ago. Fortunately Luben found another mason suitable for the job very soon. Since we were with 14 men it probably didn't cross his mind to beat this mason, too.

After a slow start we got a lot done at the end of the day, although it didn't seem that way to Luben and Mercy. A lot of calculating and drawing was requiered and next to that a lot of material had to be obtained from the back garden (clay and sand) that had to be filtered too. For the oven we needed a welder for the oil barrel and of course it was today that there was a full powercut in Tiruvannamalai. Without the barrel we couldn't start with the oven so we started hoping that there would be a welder available for the next day: Sunday. On the first day we managed to extend a excisting elevation. On this elevation we eventually had to build the rocket stoves. We also prepared a lot for the oven: we built the platform on which the oil barrel will rest. This platform had to be totally filled up with all the rocks and rubble that we could find and we filled up all the empty spaces with cement.

In the evening we went to Ananda's farm which is a place that is being runned by Ananda (an Indian) and his Spanish wife. In short it's a place where spirituality, painting and working on the land are combined. I promised not to tel too much about it because it's supposed to stay a small project so if you want to know more about it please contact me.

Day 2 of the construction of the oven project
Also the Sunday here is holy so we had to go back to Mercy Home by rickshaw since the driver wasn't available. Getting started took quite a long time since some people went to bed late the night before so we arrived at Mercy Home around half past 10 or so. We also had to walk quite a long time before we found the right rickshaws for the right price so it took all longer than expected. The majority of the group had to be on the bus around 2 PM so we didn't get too much done with the Sadnaha group on the seccond day. However we managed to get all the materials together for the oven and the rocket stoves, so everybody definitely did his job.

Samuel and Vanessa from the Sadnaha group managed to stay a little bit longer. Stephanie of Fertile had to return too since she had to work the next day so in total we remained there with 6 people: Brant, Rene, Richa, Vanessa, Samuel and I. And of course the mason who did the majority of the job. At the end of the day we mamnaged to finish a part of the first rocket stove and make preparations for the seccond one. The welding didn't work out in the end because like expected they all took their day of. This caused us to postpone the building of the oven for two weekends (now it will be built during the weekend of the 9th and 10th of June) so unfortunately I'm mnot going to be there.

Samuel and Vanessa eventually went back to Auroville in the evening so in the end of the day we were with four. We decided to return to Ananda's farm since we had such a good time there. We were heartly welcomed by him when we returned.

Day 3 of the construction of the oven project
The driver didn't show up, afterwards we heard that he got another job somewhere else for more money. Not necesarry a big problem if he just could have informed us since he promised the evening before that he would pick us up. Once again belated we stepped into a riskha and arrived late again in Mercy Home where the mason was waiting for us.

On day 3 everything went extremely prosperous. We found a welder who welded the protection bars for the rocket stoves but unfortunately he couldn't help us with the welding of the oil barrel. However he forwarded us to a somebody who is supposed to be able do so. However without a driver it's pretty impossible to get there so we continued hoping that he would show up the next day (which didn't happen). The first rocket stove was almost finished at the end of the day and we made a lot of progression with the seccond and biggest rocket stove. We hoped to finish everything on day 3 but looking back on this it was way too optimistic.

Since Ananda lives quite far out from Tiru we decided to sleep once again on the mountain and didn't count on the driver to show up to pick us up.

Day 4 of the construction of the oven project
The next day we took a rickshaw to Mercy Home to finally finish the job. Richa left in the morning so three guys remained. There was a deadline that had to made since we wanted and had to be the next day in Auroville.

At the end of the day everything was almost finished except for the interior of the seccond rocket stove. We got a little bit in conflict with the mamson since he claimed that he needed the whole next day what definitely wasn't true. He just wanted to finish a very small part of the project and catch 150 rupees and still come back the next day to get another easy 500 rupees. Fortunately Mercy got angry and eventually the mason finished the project for only 100 rupees without having to return the next day. We figured out afterwards that he didn't do it totally perfect but fortunately only affects the looks, not the usage.

Brant decided to stay a little bit longer in Tiru while Rene and I really wanted to go back to Auroville, so we did. We finally arrived around 2 AM in Auroville and crashed down fullfilled after 5 busy days.

The continuation
Next weekend somewhere between 5 and 10 people will go once again to Mercy Home to finish the oven. I won't be there but through Rene I will definitely keep myself and you up to date about the progression of the project. The rocket stoves haven't been used yet since the construction has to dry for another 7 or 10 days. If there are any new pictures available than I will definitely share them with you!! In total there has been raised an amount of EUR 470 and until so far we spent EUR 243.38 of this money. This amount of money can be earned back within half a year by saving money on wood costs!!

I'm writing my blog now from Pondy and once it's finished I will step on my rented Honda race monster to arrive eventually around the end of the afternoon in Tiruvannamalai. I have to check and wet the cement there for an optimal result since the construction might crack when it dries up to quickly. For the rest I "must" give a nice farewell party with a lot of cola and other sweets. Hopefully I can find some decent not selfbaked cake!! I also have to take some pictures since the 10 year jubilee is coming up (24th of June) so that's also another small task that I have to do. Sunday or Monday I will return to Auroville to fly eventually away on Tuesday evening from Chennai.

That's it for now, I'll keep you up to date!!

Bedankt!!/Thanks!!

2012-05-16T05:29:00.000+01:00

Sinds mijn laatste bericht kan ik mededelen dat er een zeer groot bedrag is binnengesleept voor Mercy Home Orphanage!! Zoals beloofd zou ik de inkomsten openbaar maken dus dat doe ik ook dan bij deze. Sommigen hebben wellicht al op Facebook gelezen dat er maar liefst 460 euro precies is overgemaakt!! Daarom wil ik bij deze iedereen bedanken die heeft meegeholpen om dit fantastische bedrag binnen te halen. In het speciaal moet ik het verenigingsbestuur van de BIM-Bakenessergroep te Haarlem bedanken die ervoor gezorgd heeft dat mijn actie naar alle leden gecommuniceerd is. De vereniging heeft ook besloten om vanuit de stichting maar liefst 100 euro over te maken, hartstikke bedankt!! Het blijkt maar weer dat vrijwilligers echt begrijpen waar vrijwilligerswerk om draait.

In de tussentijd ben ik druk bezig geweest, al zeg ik het zelf. Ik ben twee dagen op bezoek geweest in Chennai om van alles en nog wat bij elkaar te sparen voor het project. Na 5 gigantische winkels vond ik eindelijk m'n taartbodems, een weegschaal en nog wat andere benodigdheden. Ik vervolgde mijn weg naar Pondy en Auroville omdat ik van degene die het solar system in MHO installeert (Rishi) een tip had gekregen om te kijken bij ene Johnny van de community Fertile die ovens had gemaakt die met hout aangewakkerd worden. Voordat ik hier kwam kijken had ik alle andere opties bekeken, zoals een solar oven bij Kumari van Wide Home (een andere orphanage in Tiruvannamalai), de magnetron en de gasoven. Allen waren geen goede oplossing (solar oven is te klein en onbetrouwbaar, elektriciteit is onbetrouwbaar en gas is niet altijd voor handen en ook nog eens ontzettend duur). Na veel heen en weer rijden, zoeken en vragen vond ik de Australische Johnny ergens achterin het bos in the middle of nowhere. Daar ontmoette ik ook de Canadese Rene die net terug kwam van Occupy Toronto. Beide waren heel behulpzaam en lieten me weten hun hulp te willen bieden. Ik heb ook een heel kort bezoek gebracht aan Sadnaha Forest waar ik doorverwezen werd naar Mouhsine die hierin gespecialiseerd is. Daarnaast kwam ik tijdens mijn werkbezoek, als ik het zo mag noemen, meer te weten over "rocket stoves". Dat is een soort van fornuis dat eveneens werkt op hout, maar waar totale verbranding in plaats vindt zonder veel rook. Naast gezonder is het eveneens veel sneller en goedkoper om hierop te koken. Met tekeningen van Johnny ging ik huiswaarts om deze te presenteren aan Luben, Mercy en de mason.

Toen ik vanuit Pondy (Puducherry) in Tiruvannamalai was het heel laat. De volgende dag stond de verlate viering van de internationale vrouwendag op het programma waar ik als "chief guest" fungeerde. Mijn grote rol was dan ook vooral de blanke man uit te hangen door gewoon als kunstobject naast de lezers te zitten. Ik heb geen enkel woord gezegd en ik snap nog steeds niet waarom ik erbij moest zijn. Behalve dan natuurlijk dat het heel interessant voor hun is om een buitenlander te zien en dat ik heb gemerkt dat in heel Zuid-Azië je vaak gebruikt wordt als een statussymbool gezien wordt, net zoals een auto dat is. Ik bedoel dan in de zin van dat ze hier graag buitenlandse vrienden hebben en je graag aan iedereen willen laten zien. Zo moest ik in Bangladesh een keer met mijn nieuwe "vriend" de hele buurt af en iedereen die mijn pad kruiste wilde m'n telefoonnummer al me dan niet toevoegen op Facebook.

Anyway, de volgende dag hadden we de "mini tourtrip" naar een grote speeltuin met een krokodillenkwekerij daarnaast. De "grote tourtrip" is uitgesteld omdat veel kinderen ziek zijn omdat ze de mazelen hebben. Naast van de glijbaan glijden worden er daar ook gigantische vissen gevangen à 3 kilo per stuk waarvan we met z'n allen 5 van hebben opgegeten nadat Mercy haar kookkunsten uit de mouw kwamen. Na een lange dag gesloopt en wel gingen we op huis aan.

De volgende dag gingen heel veel kinderen naar huis toe (van hun overgebleven ouder, voogd, of iets dergelijks), iets wat ik de dag van tevoren te weten kwam gedurende de tourtrip. Helaas is daarom mijn missie gefaald als het aankomt op appeltaarten voor iedereen te bakken. Hopelijk lukt het me wel nog om dit gedaan te krijgen voor de overgebleven kinderen (stuk of 20).

De dag daarna ben ik terug gegaan naar Pondy om op bezoek te gaan bij de community van Satna Forest om te praten met onder andere Rene van Fertile en een hele boel vrijwilligers die geïnteresseerd waren in het bouwen van rocket stoves en een grote houtoven. Gelukkig is er gebleken dat er heel veel animo voor is en dat ze graag naar Tiruvannamalai komen om daar te helpen!! Ik weet alleen nog niet of ik het ga zie gebeuren dat de ovens klaar komen want dat gebeurd op z'n vroegste begin juni, omdat ook de vrijwilligers verplichtingen hebben in de community van Sadnaha Forest. Hoe dan ook zorg ik ervoor dat er een cursus appeltaarten bakken voor beginners gedaan wordt met behulp van een magnetron. Doordat er zo weinig kinderen zijn moet dat geen enkel probleem zijn. Aangezien je er (meestal) de klok er op gelijk kan zetten wanneer de stroom uitvalt moet het wel lukken om 2 à 3 appeltaarten te bakken in die interval van 2 à 3 uur.

Ik heb m'n vlucht veranderd naar de 23ste van mei en kan m'n vluchtschema aanpassen zoals ik dat wil. Hoe dan ook moet ik 8 juni uit het land zijn want dat is de verloopdatum van m'n visa. Als er ontwikkelingen zijn dan licht ik jullie uiteraard weer in!!

Since my last message I can herewith inform you that a huge amount of money has been raised for Mercy Home Orphanage!! Like promised I’m herewith making all the donations public. Some of you might have already read that an amount of EUR 460 has been raised!! That’s why I herewith would like to thank you all for making this possible. I especially have to thank the board of the BIM-Bakenessergroep in Haarlem who is responsible for communicating my fundraising project to all its members. De board also decided to donate an amazing EUR 100 which comes directly from the foundation, thank you very much for this!! It’s clear that volunteers really understand what volunteering is about.

In the meanwhile I have been quite busy, to be honest. I’ve been visiting Chennai to collect a lot of stuff for the project. After visiting 5 gigantic stores I finally found malls for the pies, a weighing scale and some other required items. I continued my trip to Pondy and Auroville because I learned from the one who is responsible for installing the solar system at MHO (Rishi) that Johnny could probably help me out with an oven, running on wood. Before I arrived here I checked out all the other options, I visited Kumari for example from Wide Home (another orphanage in Tiruvannamalai) to check out their solar ovens. Next to that I researched about the microwave and the gas oven. None of them were an ultimate resolution (solar oven is too small and unreliable, electricity is unreliable too and gas is not always easy to be found and expensive too). After driving a lot back and forth, searching and asking I finally found the Australian Johnny somewhere in the backside of the forest in the middle of nowhere. That’s where I also met the Canadian Rene who just returned from Occupy Toronto. Both were very helpful and informed that they were happy to help me out. I also paid a short visit to Satna Forest where I was forwarded to Mouhsine, who is specialised in all this kind of stuff. Next to that I learned about “rocket stoves” during my working visit, if I can call it that. It’s like a stove working on wood but it’s realizing full burning of the wood without too much smoke. It’s healthier for the cooks and next to that much faster and cheaper to cook on this. With Johnny’s drawings I went back home to present those to Luben, Mercy and the mason.

When I returned from Pondy (Puducherry) to Tiruvannamalai it was already late. The next day we celebrated the belated international women’s’ day where I was the “chief guest”. My big role was playing the white man by just sitting next to the readers, functioning as a piece of art. I of course didn’t say anything and I still don’t understand why I had to be at the meeting. Except for the fast that it’s very interesting for the ladies to see a foreigner and that I noticed that I have been used in the past as a symbol of status, like a car. I mean that in the sense of that foreigners love to have foreign friends and want to show off with them. Once I had to visit the whole neighbourhood with my new “friend” and everybody who crossed my path either wanted to have my telephone number or to add me on Facebook.

Anyway, the next day we went on a “mini tour trip” to a big playing ground with a crocodile farm next to it. The “big tour trip” is postponed because many children are affected by the chicken pocks. Next to sliding from the ramp there are also loads of fish that get cached there from about 3 kg a piece from which we all ate 5 together after Mercy showed off her cooking skills. After a long and exhausting day we returned home.

The next day many children went back home (to their remaining parent, foster parent or something like this), something that I only learned one day before during the tour trip. That’s why I failed my mission if it comes to baking apple pies for everybody. Hopefully I manage to get it done for the remaining children (approximately 20).

The day after I returned to Pondy to visit the community of Sadnaha Forest to talk with Rene from Fertile and a whole bunch of other people who are interested in building rocket stoves and a big wood oven. Fortunately I figured out that everybody seems to be very interested and loves to go to Tiruvannamalai to help out!! I only don’t know if I will see the ovens be built since they’re finished at the earliest around the beginning of June. This is because also the volunteers have some responsibilities in the community of Satna Forest. However I’m going to make sure that the remaining children receive a course of baking apple pies for beginners with the help of a microwave. Because there are so few children this shouldn’t be a problem. Because you (mostly) can tell exactly at which time the power cuts start and end it mustn’t be a too big problem to bake between 2 or 3 apple pies in the interval of 2 or 3 hours.

I changed my flight to the 23rd of May and I can keep pushing this date forward as much as I want. However I have to leave the country on the 8th of June because that’s when m visa will expire. If there are any developments I will of course inform you like always!!

Inzamelingsactie voor een nieuwe oven!!

2012-04-30T04:30:00.000+01:00

Voor de verandering eens een blog in het Nederlands!! Hopelijk schrijf ik nog in correct genoeg Nederlands.

Graag wil ik in het kort aandacht vragen voor het weeshuis voor Dalits in Tiruvannamalai waar ik momenteel help: Mercy Home. Dit weeshuis is een thuis voor momenteel 65 Dalit kinderen, vooral meisjes, die zonder Mercy Home geen eerlijke kans hadden gehad op een waardig bestaan, laat staan een opleiding. Ik heb het geluk dat ik daar nu mag meehelpen en de kinderen kan vermaken.

De geschiedenis van alle kinderen hier is zeer triest. Van een kind heeft de moeder zelfmoord gepleegd door zichzelf in brand te steken en de vader heeft ernstige psychologische problemen. Drie weken geleden zijn er drie zusjes hier gekomen van wie hun pleegvader ze probeerde om te brengen. Veel andere kinderen hebben beide hun ouders verloren door AIDS al dan niet door de tsunami van kerst 2004. Zo zijn er nog vele andere verhalen die je kunt lezen in mijn blog van gisteren.

Ik ben op het idee gekomen om een kleine inzamelingsactie te houden voor een nieuwe oven en magetron combinatie: iets waar op dit moment geen geld voor is. Hiermee wil ik voor de kinderen oer-Hollandsche appeltaarten bakken: een combinatie van gezond fruit en zoetigheid, iets waar de kinderen gek op zijn.

Meestal eten de kinderen hier twee à drie keer per dag rijst met wat Indische curry of iets anders uit de traditionele Indische keuken. Met een oven en magnetron combinatie worden de mogelijkheden voor gevarieerd en gezonder eten vergroot. Daarnaast kan overgebleven eten opgewarmd worden in plaats van dat het aan de honden gegeven wordt.

Ik hoop dat jullie me hiermee kunnen helpen om dit te realiseren!! Als alle vrienden en familie slechts 5 euro geven dan komt hier zeker weten een oven en magnetron combinatie te staan en hopelijk een hele grote!! Dat is namelijk wel nodig voor een 65-koppige familie...

Je kan helpen door geld over te maken naar 53.67.49.582 t.a.v. Vincent van Zadelhoff te Heemstede vóór maandag 7 mei 2012. Al de gestorte bedragen worden openbaar gemaakt tenzij je aangeeft bij de transactie dat je dat niet wilt. Ik maak de bedragen in principe openbaar om zo transparant mogelijk te zijn en om te laten zien dat de volle 100% aankomt hier in India in plaats van bij normale commerciële goede delen waarvan miljoenen naar reclamespotjes gaat en naar die vervelende student in de Grote Houtstraat die commissie ontvant per "abbonnement".

Ik hoop dat ik op jullie kan rekenen en elke euro is mooi meegenomen!! Dus schroom niet om iets over te maken, iets is altijd beter dan niets!!

Life in Mercy Home

2012-04-29T11:07:00.003+01:00

India
"Mother committed suicide by setting herself on fire and father is mentally ill." is just one of the many sad stories that I read in the 64 files of the children here in India. I arrived early in the morning in my home for the next 5 weeks in Tiruvannamalai: Mercy Home, an orphanage for Dalit children in the heart of the province of Tamil Nadu in India. They focus on girls since they have the fewest opportunities because they're surpressed three times: for being poor, for being girls and for being Dalits (low cast, untouchables, look for more information on Wikipedia).

After an incredible welcome organized by Luben and Mercy and an amazing Eastern lunch consisting of spicy chicken biryani (just the way I like it) I started to get through all the files of all the children. After a while it seems to me that the stories are very similar. Loads of the children are half orphans, in most cases the father passed away and the mother isn't able to take care of her child anymore and sends him or her to an orphanage. Most of the fathers seemed to have died in an accident at work but I also noticed that there were loads of children with parents with mental problems. Another very common reason why children come to Mercy Home is because one of the parents took of with someone else or was cheating his or her husband. The latter one is directly or indirectly a reason for a lot of children to come here: all the children that lost both their parents all died from AIDS which is a growing problem these days in India. About a 6th of the children in Mercy Home are here because at least one parent got killed by the 2004 tsunami. The night before I arrived three girls of 1, 2 and 3 years old arrived in Mercy Home with their mother because their stepfather tried to kill them the day before.

The mother of the three children who just arrived one night before I did.

Speaking about the tsunami: a couple of days after I arrived in Mercy Home I was sitting around noon in my bed when I fell some shocks. I thought that it was my imagination since I sometimes feel fictive shocks after my earthquake experience in Kathmandu from the Summer of 2011 (or I got hypersensitive for every movement of the tectonic plates). Apparantly so it wasn't my imagination and as most of you probably know there has been sent out a serious tsunami alert with as result that the harbour of Chennai here closed for a long time until the tsunami alert was cancelled. At that moment I was really happy that I wasn't sleeping in a little hut on Arugam Bay on the east coast Sri Lanka. In North Korea I shared my hotel room with a Dutch guy who moved to Christchurch in New Zealand. Of course he was also in the catastrophic earthquake there and told me that once you've been in an earthquake (and especially like that one) it doesn't seem to get out of your system. I guess the same goes for me.

I got a big to do list from Anneke, the sister of my big sponsor El (from Café El & Ben). One of the things on the list is teaching English which I did mostly every night. I was mostly teaching the 4th until the 6th standard (lower school) until the Summer holidays started a couple of days ago. I didn't teach them English for one night since I wanted to surprise the kids with a little idea that popped into my mind. I was informing Mercy one day about my little plan to make a dessert for the children. Apparently the word "dessert" was something very unknown to them but with a little help of a translation programme on the phone of Mercy she kind of understood what I was talking about. I went to the supermarket and did some mayor shopping: I bought 30 (melted) chocolate bars and 80 bananas. I also need aluminium foil but to find this was much harder than I thought. It literally took me more than an hour to get a hold on it. In my private room I cutted all the bananas open, put 3 pieces of dark chocolate in each banana them and wrapped them all in aluminium foil. It's a famous boyscout recipe for the bonfire: delicious, filling and easy to prepair (if you only have to make it for yourself). One curious girl named Florence sneaked into my room to check out what I was doing but as fast as I was I just shut the door in time so she didn't manage to find out what I was preparing for them. She asked if I was cleaning so I decided to say yes. When I asked her how she knew that she told me because there was a sweet smell coming out of my room. The smell of banana mixed with chocolate would stay in my room for about 3 days. Anyway, in the end I prepared all the bananas on the remaining charcoal of the kitchen and when the children dug in a big silence fell and at that point I knew that I succeeded.

Preparing chocolate bananas.

Talking about the boy scouts: I noticed that there are loads of similarities between the boy scouts and the system of the orphanage here. There's a high rate of independence here as well and the older children are taking care of the young in ways of like checking their hygiene, clothes and so forth. The oldest child is responsible for the room (consisting of maximum 6 children) and makes sure that everything is in order. The older children are also correcting the younger ones in a way that parents would normally correct their children. However, everybody is equal and everybody calls each other brother (little: tambi, big: anna) or sister (little: tangechi, big: akka).

About sightseeing: there's a great temple over here with a huge elephant. If you give the elephant a coin it will put his trunk on your head. I guess it's for fortune. There's a holy mountain here also which I climbed one day. You are supposed to take between 4 and 5 hour for it but I went up and down within 2 hours and probably set a reccord on that one. The view from the top is amazing but the top itself is terribly slippery and dirty. The whole top is covered in ashes because of the huge bonfire they make every New Year's Eve. There's a shed there for emergencies on top but even in case of an emergency I wouldn't consider going in there because it belongs to the Kingdom of Monkeys.

One day like expected two people came from Auroville (check Wikipedia for more information about this special place) to talk about the installment of a solar system, a project that is been worked on for already about two years. The Dutch Rotary Club wrote out a big check to fund this system which will lower the footprint of Mercy Home and also substantially lower the energy expenses. The money (over EUR 15.000) was transferred from Rotary Club Holland to Rotary Club India but the director in Tiruvannamalai is trying to get a piece of the action. I heard before in The Netherlands already that he asked for a substantial amount of money (50.000 Indian Rupees or about EUR 750) to relieve the funds. Obviously the Mercy Foundation in The Netherlands didn't agree on this and came to a different deal: 25.000 rupees in the form of material to support other projects of the Rotary Club in Tamil Nadu. When this guy walked in on the turf of Mercy Home I immediately hated the guy (and at this time I didn't know that it was this guy) being late for almost an hour. He totally ignored me and it seemed that he didn't dare to look at me. Like I mentioned I immediately hated this guy and I tried to figure out this person and grasp every detail of him so started staring at him to get the full image. He only dared to look at me once for a quarter of a second and nervously looked away. I heard later that this was the corrupt boss of the Rotary in Tiruvannamalai who is apparently very powerful and has political connections as well. I also found out that he wasn't happy with the offer of the Dutch Mercy Foundation and now was asking money from the people from Auroville to relieve the funds. The fee he wanted for his services this time was an amount of 100.000 Indian Rupees (EUR 1.500) or... an Apple laptop. I honestly think he totally lost it. Anyway, the money should be relieved sooner or later because if the money isn't spent on the purpose of this solar system it will be automatically returned to the Rotary Club in The Netherlands after two months. Time will tell what will happen.

Back to what I did in Mercy Home. Two or three days ago I started checking the bicycles with the boys. There are like 15 bicycles and all of them had flat tires and other issues. 4 bicycles have been fixed now but the rest are in need of some small parts around the valve (without them you can't pump up the tires of the bicycle). Mercy told me that four of the boys have been bad boys because they took the small parts of the bicycles and sold them. Fortunately the costs for obtaining these parts is quite low: for all bikes it will cost like less than EUR 2.

Kanan working on one of the bicycles.

For the rest I made sure that the children are going to the dentist soon and I also asked about the bus shed that is supposed to be built soon. This has been delayed because of some Mafia practices going on in the contractor scene of Tiruvannamalai. The contractor who is the most powerful contractor in Tiruvannamalai mostly overcharges its customers so when Luben and Mercy asked about the price to make a bus shed he naturally asked a too high price. So Luben and Mercy found a different contractor who asked a price which was 25% lower so they agreed on this and this contractor started to dig holes for the construction of the bus shed. However one day the powerful contractor figured out that the other contractor took "his" business, paid a visit to Mercy Home and beated up the other contractor. The contractor ran away and didn't come back so now the powerful contractor will do the job for the same amount as the small contractor. However the construction hasn't been restarted yet.

About my bicycle: it arrived in quite good condition, however there were three holes in my back tire (probably the mice are responsible for this) but the boys were very happy to help me fix this. After this I decided to repack the bicycle and send it to the hostel where I always stay in Hong Kong. I paid like 5 visits to the post office before I finally managed to send it though. First I went to a private company where they should've been able to pack it for me, however they were very unhelpful there and refused to do so. A boy called Kanan from the orphanage helped me to get to this place by showing me the way on his bicycle. At one point he started ringing his bell to make the people get out of the way but one man ignored the bell so he crashed into him (he tried to evade him but just didn't manage to, so he just grazed his arm). The man clenched his fist and was about to hit him until I started yelling at him in English: "Hey, if you touch the boy I will F-word kill you!!" and with the "cut your troath" sign I made sure he understood me... and he did because he backed off surprised by the big mean white man yelling at him. Anyway, after making the package smaller and taking it to the tailor to pack it in cotton I finally sent it to Hong Kong.

Playing games with the kids.

I'm writing this message right now from Pondicherry (or Pondy as they call it here) where I just went for the weekend. It's a previous French colonial town and quite beautiful but my first experience here wasn't good at all. Luben suggested me to go to the Park Guest House where all the tourists are staying. To make a long story short: within 3 minutes I was kicked out and told the receptionist to F-word himself and left. The receptionist didn't receive me well at all and to be honest I've never received this terrible inhospitable reception at a hotel before (and I never told a receptionist to go F-word himself). He ignored me when I entered, asked for a too expensive rate and didn't want to show me a room without me giving him my passport. I just wanted to see the room before agreeing on anything but apparently so his rule was to show your passport first before you are even allowed to see a room. With my passport somewhere down my baggage I told him I would give it later after I agreed on the price and the room. It became in the end a very childish yes and no kind of game. Like I wouldn't have a passport or something, damn the guy. This continued until I got so angry that I threw my bag on the ground and grabbed my passport and threw it on the counter, but before I got my passport I already wasn't allowed to stay there anymore. Throwing things was the reason I couldn't stay there anymore, not that I wanted to. I continued my little show by saying like the bad white mean colonial surpressor that I could throw with money too if they just would show the goddamn room.

Outside I found a TukTuk and asked him if he knew a place with a price of about 400 Rupees and he was so friendly to take me there. Fortunately this was the hotel I wanted to stay at. It was a basic guest house owned by a French guy who married an Indian woman and had some adorable hot daughters to look at. He didn't even ask me for my passport and helped me out with renting a cheap scooter that I took to Auroville one day. As usual the guy from the gas station tried to cheat me (I paid him 150 but he only entered 100 on the panel, mentioning this was enough). After checking the internet I figured out that people shared similar experiences to mine on Tripadvisor and that the owner is totally lusu (Tamil: crazy). It's always good to find confirmation of your own conclusions, because the incident upsetted my quite a lot. Apart from all this I had a great time here and I'm about to go home after lunch... and I'm actually really looking forward to be honest!!

Kavitha, a 14 year old girl who lost both of her parents due to AIDS.

For the next two weeks I'll be in Mercy Home helping out and I'm leaving on the 12th of May for... Iraq!! The Kurdish part obviously. My flight to Istanbul was cancelled by FlyDubai and I had to choose a different destination. The cancellation was actually quite welcomed since due to some other issues I will meet up with Pinar a little bit later than planned. I'm estimated to be back home around the middle of June, but everything can change... like always.

I will blog tomorrow about raising a little amount of money for a small project in Mercy Home, so stay tuned!!

Tsunami survivors

2012-04-07T08:55:00.000+01:00

Sri Lanka
Even though I had my international drivers license the car rental company advised me to get the temporary license because loads of policemen can't either read or speak any English. The bureaucracy in Sri Lanka was just like anywhere else in South Asia: I had to visit like three different people multiple times to get the license and it took me a couple of hours to get the job done. After that I returned to the hostel and made a couple of phone calls to find the right car for the right price. I found a guy who rented basic but reliable cars for 20 US Dollars a day and he seemed like a nice guy so the next day he brought me a Toyota Carola that would be my vehicle for the next days. I found cheaper cars but the rental company’s required me to have an address in Sri Lanka and a proof of registration by the local authorities.

The car arrived a little bit later than planned so once I got it I had to go directly to the Colombo airport to pick up my friend Yoch. I learned very fast how to drive like the locals which comes down to honking as much as possible and reckless driving. It took me a very long time to find the airport since loads of people showed me the wrong way as usual (due to the (South) Asian culture it isn’t appropriate to give “no” as answer so they just point into any direction). I arrived one hour after Yoch landed so it took me like 3.5 hours to get there. The way back went much faster though, it only took us two hours with a little bit of asking here and there. Our hostel had a curfew which we just found out when we got back so we rushed over to a local eating place since we both didn’t have dinner yet. Yoch clearly had a hard time to combine the hot and humid weather with the spicy food and couldn’t finish it. He was very unlucky with the weather I guess, because that night would also be the hottest night I would witness during my total stay in Sri Lanka.

Day 1 of driving around Sri Lanka (Colombo – Kandy)
The night before and in the early morning we tried to confirm with the woman from the hostel to arrange a taxi for Yoch to the airport since it would be better for the both of us. We didn’t want to risk to not making it to the airport in time and I also had quite a drive ahead of me since I had to go all the way to Kandy. After 5 times we thought that the lady finally got it that we wanted a taxi at 11 AM so we went out early in the morning for breakfast at another local place and walked along the beach for a couple of hours and walked around the local quarter to get a feeling of the place.

We returned at like half past 10 and both had a shower and we were ready to go at 11 AM. Showing up late is normal around here but after 15 minutes of waiting we got a little bit worried and decided to ask the lady once again. We figured out after another 15 minutes of waiting, talking and convincing her to call the taxi company that nothing had been arranged. In the meanwhile we both got pretty pissed off since the lady also didn’t show any form of own initiative to make everything right. At 11:30 we jumped into the car with our luggage and off we went to break my personal record of 2 hours, since check-in started at 13:00. Yoch screamed to the Tuk Tuks now and than to ask if we were on the right way and I drove like I would normally drive in videogames like Grand Theft Auto. Speeding, overtaking on the wrong side, ghost driving and once I even ignored a police officer that signalled us to stop. Anyway, I would have lost my license a couple of times and probably be sentenced to jail in the Netherlands for driving like I did on that day in Colombo. I crashed my record by about 30 minutes so we made it to the airport just in time and Yoch could continue his trip to Singapore.

I managed to get on the road to Kandy pretty easily but I arrived quite late in the afternoon. Next to that the city was extremely busy because apparently the president was coming. It seemed impossible to park anywhere and if I found a parking spot the local police urged me to park my car somewhere else. After three times being urged to move my car I finally found a spot at the supermarket totally outside of town and visited the city. The hotels in town were pretty expensive so I went outside of town for a couple of kilometres where I got received very well: the receptionist opened the door with a loaded shotgun in his hands. He assured me that the gun was not for shooting guests but only for shooting monkeys. He just managed to shoot one before I arrived, he told me. The animal got wounded but managed to get away. Apparently monkeys raid the hotel twice every month so they try to make them scared and get rid of them. I also found, if you ask me, a lost arrogant soul and of the biggest pricks I’ve ever seen. He told me that since his grandfather passed away he just lived of the interest of his money. Working was nothing for him and when he asked me where I was from in the Netherlands I told him the answer “Haarlem” but reacted in an arrogant way like I gave him the wrong answer (he’s from Amsterdam and according to my knowledge there’s no rivalry between Haarlem and Amsterdam but please correct me if I’m wrong). He told me proudly that his father is very famous so after asking who his father was I figured out that he is the current director of insurance company “Agis” and the founder of the hardware shops “Karwei”. He told proudly the staff that I “knew” his father. After talking with the staff I figured out that he lived in this hotel outside of the town of Kandy for like 4 months and the only thing that he had been doing was watching television. His visa got extended 3 times but the local authorities weren’t planning to extend it again so he has to leave Sri Lanka soon. I considered calling his father to tell him what a useless prick of a son he has but my headset broke down so I haven’t gotten to it yet.

Day 2 of driving around Sri Lanka (Kandy – Ella)

The next morning I left to Ella and it would be the most adventurous road of the trip because of the bad conditions. It was a real dirt road filled with potholes that I had to circumnavigate but that only made it exciting for me. There was almost no traffic anymore after Kandy so that made it much more exciting to drive around here as well. The hotel staff suggested me to visit a waterfall on the way so I did and I have to say it was well worth it. Finally I made it to Ella around 3 or 4 PM and figured out there that I had an appointment with Sonja and her boyfriend who I met in Xining in China. We had a couple of drinks together and got back some memories but we both had to go back to our home stays because dinner was being served. We only spent like 2.5 hours together and definitely not enough but is was the only opportunity to meet up on the way so we made the best of it.

Dunhinda Falls, close to Badulla city.

Day 3 of driving around Sri Lanka (Ella)

I stayed in Ella to climb the Ella rock. I took the wrong way in the beginning so made a bit of a detour getting there but that’s what kept me entertained. I probably got to many places where most tourists wouldn’t and I didn’t meet any foreigners until I made it to the top. I met a local guy on the way who was happy to show me some spots for a small fee of course. I took the conventional touristy way down and met some Buddhist student monks who showed me around their temple where they were studying to become true monks. They were free today since their teacher was on leave to Singapore and Malaysia.

When I was back home at my (by the way great) home stay I saw that the mud flaps of my Carola were about to fall off. I figured out that most screws were very rusty so I decided to take all the mud flaps off to prevent myself from losing them.

Day 4 of driving around Sri Lanka (Ella – Arugam Bay)
After a big breakfast I left for Arugam Bay in the morning and arrived quite early in the afternoon because the road conditions were much better than before. I found a nice fellow who rented out huts for a 1.000 Sri Lankan Rupees (this is the amount that I paid every night for staying in Sri Lanka) which is a little less than 6 Euro’s. He told me about the tsunami that hit his coastline on Christmas Day in 2004. He told that there were many guests at his place and that he noticed (in time) that there was something wrong with the ocean: the water on the horizon seemed much higher than the beach which obviously should be the other way around. He commended everybody to make a run for it and managed to save his whole family. He was lucky since the land where he had his hotel business going on is relatively high so the water “only” got as far as a couple of hundreds of meters. His sister from the next village wasn’t so lucky: she, her husband and their 5 children all died. The land there was much lower so the water managed to get as far as 5 kilometres. “But what can I do?” he said with a smile. So he rebuilt his hotel with the money of the government and the international Red Cross and business is doing pretty well. He has less land to built rooms on because of new government regulations but apparently the tsunami was good for one thing: American tourists. Since the tsunami the Americans started to visit the island like crazy. Before that they probably didn’t knew it existed.

Also Terre des Hommes from The Netherlands supported the survivors of the 2004 tsunami.

Day 5 of driving around Sri Lanka (Arugam Bay)

I decided to stay for another day to enjoy the good climate, swim a little bit and enjoy the fresh seafood. I became kind of friends with the owner of the restaurant next door and also he told me his story. He had been working for over 20 years and had been saving up all his money to build the finest hotel rooms of the bay. 6 months later the tsunami came and destroyed everything he possessed. He only rebuilt his restaurant (which was painted by tourists) because he couldn’t get enough money together to build hotel rooms again. And surprisingly he also said with a smile like the hotel owner: “But what can I do?”.

Very applicable name for a hotel in Arugam Bay.

Day 6 of driving around Sri Lanka (Arugam Bay – Weligama)
I planned to drive all the way from Arugam Bay to Galle but so much happened that day that I wouldn’t make it.

I first had a small accident with a rock. When driving in reverse to park into the petrol station (they’re quite small here) I hit a rock which damaged a part of the back of the car. After that I would be pulled over by the police twice within one hour. The first time I was taking over a very slow lorry loaded with wood. Just when I almost took over the vehicle I saw the car driving into my direction flashing with his head lights and I already figured out that it was too late. I took over the lorry and braked as fast as I could so the officer only got me at 72 km/h (depending on the road it’s allowed to drive 50 or 60 km/h). When I explained that I wanted to take over the lorry and had to go a little faster than normal and promised to not do it again I was allowed to go without bribing anyone to my surprise. A little less than an hour later I was pulled over again, this time for overtaking a Tuk Tuk in a corner and crossing the road separation line. However in this area it’s almost impossible not to not overtake in corners because the road is just one big corner anyway. I acted like I thought that I didn’t do anything wrong and when he told me about crossing the white line I told him that I didn’t see it. After the standard questions like “where are you from”, “do you like my country”, “how long are you here for” and “where are you going” I was once again free to go and didn’t have to pay anyone. I wonder how I would’ve been treated if I was just a local.

A couple of miles later I saw a yellow sign that I should be watching out for crossing elephants and baby elephants and another couple of miles later I saw a baby elephant standing next to the road and decided to stop. The curious elephant came over to my car and putted his nose right inside my car less than one meter away from me and started sniffing. I decided to make my first V Log (video log) of the situation and to close the window just in case. I was considering to step out of the car but than it came to my mind that this baby elephant is probably at least 10 times my weight and that the mother might be still around… so I wisely decided to move on.

After a while I saw three old ladies standing next to the road and one of them was sticking out here hand. I saw it a little bit too late so I braked and went in reverse for like a hundred meters to give them a ride to the next village. You can imagine that they were totally surprised to be picked up by a foreigner and were truly grateful for me bringing them to the bus stop in the next village a couple of kilometres away.

The three local women who I gave I ride.

I figured out that I wasn’t going to make it to Galle so I found a place before Galle called Weligama. Apparently it’s a surfing paradise like Arugam Bay and it’s packed up with foreigners that are surfing from the early morning to the end of the afternoon. It was really a good place to stop and all the beaches around the south part of the island are just the most beautiful beaches I’ve ever seen in my life so I stopped loads of times just to make stunning pictures.

Sunset at Weligama.

Day 7 of driving around Sri Lanka (Weligama – Colombo)
The next morning I went to Galle to visit the Dutch fortress that was built a couple centuries ago (obviously by the Dutch). Sri Lanka has been occupied in their history 3 times and each occupation lasted about 150 years. So the Dutch, the Portuguese and the English have been here. All together it was a very short ride so I already arrived in Colombo at like 1 PM. I decided to call the guy from the company to let it be picked up directly instead of the day after (the day until I rented it). I was totally honest about the rock thing which he truly appreciated so he didn’t charge me that much for it. If anyone wants to rent a car in Sri Lanka just go to rentalcarslanka.com and contact the guy because he’s really good, fluent in English and offers the lowest prices I’ve found on the web.

Tomorrow very early in the morning (3:50 AM) I will fly out to Chennai and go directly to Tiruvannamalai (from now on I will just write Tiru) to help out in the orphanage. I’m not to be reached on my Dutch SIM card anymore but only on my Indian one, just to let you know.

So now it’s time for India, Jai-ho!!

From here to the Maldives

2012-03-29T10:23:00.001+01:00

The Netherlands
Just like two other previous trips (during the 3rd Volume of the FHTT Tour to Turkey and during the 4th Volume to China and Mongolia) I would be accompanied by my dear and good friend Yoch. On Thursday the 15th of March, a little bit more than one month after my return to The Netherlands, I was on the road once again. We decided to travel by train since it’s obviously a nicer way to travel than with the plane. We took our trip on the train ride very serious so we bought two six-packs of beer and a load of food.

In Rotterdam we faced our first encounter with cultural differences. We were standing before an open train door that could’ve taken us all the way to Brussels directly… but the Belgium conductor decided that he didn’t want to let us in. The final whistle was just blown 5 seconds before and apparently (someone told us later) the Belgium conductors aren’t allowed to let anyone on the train after the final whistle is blown. But that’s on Belgium soil obviously, not on Dutch soil. Anyway, we were pretty sure that a Dutch conductor would’ve let us on but there was nothing to do about it so we spent an hour enjoying the beautiful weather on the train station.

Belgium
In Belgium our six-packs were already finished and we were already quite happy. On Brussels we bought a new six-pack that had to last us to London. Because of the Belgium conductor in Rotterdam we missed our connection to London so we had to wait another hour in Brussels. Like expected we faced some Belgium people that refused to speak any Dutch so we did everything on purpose in terrible French.

France
Once on the Eurostar train to London we both blacked out like halfway and slept for about an hour and woke up again once we arrived in London.

England
We made it to Jola’s place (a Polish girl we celebrated NYE with in Mongolia) where here friend Karolina received us and showed us our room with… a double bed. So Yoch and I would sleep in the same bed for four days what would become a challenge because of Yoch’s weird sleeping noises and his ability to roll in his sleep from one of the bed to the other side and pushing me out with waking everybody up except for himself.
We went directly to the Easton Pub were Jola was working and had our dinner there and spent the evening there. The next couple of days we would do the basic London stuff like visiting the Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, the London Bridge and such. Jola was not always available because of her work so Yoch and I were also just doing things together like going to the cinema. We also went bowling when we met up with a Thai guy called Hope who we also spent NYE with. He was travelling by land from Thailand when we met him in Mongolia and was on his way to Russia. If you’re Thai you don’t need a visa for Russia but you do for Belarus, something what Hope forgot about until he was in the country itself. Sentenced to one night in jail he still received a visa but because of some trouble at the border of Poland with his Schengen visa he decided to go back into Russia and flew to London. He’s now there working part-time and studying as well. That night we celebrated St. Patrick’s Day together but still I haven’t found out the purpose of this feast except for the fact that it’s apparently necessary to drink a lot, so we did. Yoch had to return to The Netherlands early on Sunday morning because he had to work in the afternoon and Jola had to return to Poland for a couple of days to sell her house there. So I was alone for two days and visited two huge museums: the British museum and the War museum, especially the latter is highly recommended by me. On Wednesday morning Jola returned so we spent the whole morning and beginning of the afternoon together until I had to catch the Eurostar to Paris.

France
In Paris I was very happy that I could stay with Marianne and Millad who I met first in Toshkent in Uzbekistan and later also in Dushanbe in Tajikistan. Also Zolaïkha came for our reunion dinner and got back some good old memories from Afghanistan. It was really good to be back in France again for practising the language but also to remember how good the food is there… Especially the wine and the cheese, obviously. We all went out together a couple of times and went around Paris to do the basic stuff like the Notre Dame, walking along the Seine to the Eiffel tower and so on. Of course all of them were busy with working and studying too, so I went alone to the Louvre where I spent the whole day and still didn’t see anything. Three nights were way too short so I definitely want to go back there sooner or later. I went to Charles de Gaulle to fly from there to Frankfürt.

Germany
In Frankfürt I only had to wait for an hour or two before I could take a flight straight to the Maldives. Since I’m not really good at falling asleep in planes I drugged myself with Zoplicon, a sleeping medicine and it definitely worked… I slept all the way on the flight from dinner until just before breakfast!!

Maldives
After a long flight it took a while to get through immigration. Honestly I was very surprised by the amount of people that are visiting the Maldives. Apparently there are like 30 flights arriving per day carrying a couple of thousands of people but most of them will go directly to some resort very far from the main island to chill out there. Most people that come to the Maldives are couples on their honeymoon so I was definitely the kind of person to be asked questions by immigration. However, showing my flight out of the Maldives was sufficient for them to let me into the country.
After I took a boat from the airport island to the main island where Male is located I checked in at my hotel and met up in the evening with AJ. AJ is a Malaysian guy who’s currently working on the Maldives in Male arranging all kinds of holidays for people. I met AJ a little bit more than two years ago in a hostel in Bergen (Norway).

The next three days we would be hanging out a lot together and AJ thought me a lot about the mentality of the islanders of the Maldives. Apparently in the Maldives you have the highest divorce rate of whole Asia, the highest import and consumption of cigarettes in the world and if you ask me they’re also the laziest people I’ve ever seen. All they do all day is drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, hanging around in their hammocks and driving circles around the island on their motorbikes because there’s nothing else to do (and since it’s a Muslim country alcohol is very hard to get a hold on). Recently the president has been kicked out by the military so the vice president is now ruling the country who wants to wait for about a year before getting new elections. This obviously raises suspicions amongst the islanders and everybody is suspecting the vice president of planning the military coup d’état. There have been some demonstrations and uprisings before I arrived, AJ told me, leaving one police officer dead.

The main island Male is really small (1.7 by 1.0 kilometres) so you can basically walk around it in one and a half hour. With over 100.000 people it’s by some measures the densest city in the world. So a couple of times I escaped to Hulhumalé (airport island) to grab some (alcoholic) beverages at an international hotel (which is the only place to get some alcohol around the Maldives) with AJ. Once I went to another island Villingili which is a much better place than Male if it comes to experiencing the slow life of the islanders. Male is just too crowded and too noisy with its huge amount of motorbikes. The three nights on the Maldives were great but also just enough. AJ lived there now for about a year and he really can’t do it anymore, so he’s going back to Malaysia quite soon. I said to AJ “see you later” because we will probably meet again in Kuala Lumpur, Amsterdam or somewhere else in the world. Once on the airport I had trouble with changing money because apparently the money changer was having coffee and a cigarette according to the shop owners. That lasted for over an hour so I had to take my worthless money all the way to Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka
I flew with Emirates and arrived on the airport around 6 PM. Normally it should take like half an hour to the hostel but because of the insane traffic jam it took like two hours. Once I arrived I met some people that are flying to the Maldives soon so I managed to sell my Maldivian money for a good rate. My flight to India and back was cancelled and I was informed by Kingfisher that the line was terminated from the 3rd of March and I still wonder how it was possible that I could book this flight at least a week later. I rescheduled with another company so I will fly now on the 8th early in the morning instead of on the evening of the 7th of April. On the 30th of March Yoch will arrive and hopefully I will be able to pick him up with a real TATA rental car. He will only spend one night in Colombo before he flies on to Singapore to meet up with our school buddies Jouke and Joost who are travelling right now around South East Asia.

I have to go to some office now to get a temporary license for Sri Lanka and I guess that will be all fine. That’s all for now, I wrote quite a lot again so will write you again once I reach India!!

FHTT: 5th Volume

2012-03-06T17:53:00.000+00:00

The itinerary for the FHTT Tour part 5 is known. The mentioned schedule describes the itinerary but is subjective to change. Everything depends on the visa for India which I'm still waiting for. I've been applying for the Pakistani visa for about 5 times but the embassy has been turning down my application and I'm not a rare case: after the execution of Osama Bin Laden apparantly almost nobody managed to get a tourist visa. Next to that I also had a little bit of bad luck that there were some fatal terrorist bomb attacks in the region that I wanted to go to. Anyway, I did my very best and went to The Hague in total for like 5 times (and even once on my birthday) hoping to receive the visa... but with no luck. So I decided to apply for the Indian visa instead of doing so in Kathmandu in Nepal.

So here's the itinerary of the 5th volume of the From here to Tokyo Tour:
15th of March: Fly or take train to London with my dear friend Yoch and meet people who we spend NYE in Mongolia with.
21st of March: Latest date of arrival in Paris, now alone again. Meet up with people who I met in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
24th of March: Fly from Paris Charles de Gaulle to Male with a short stopover on Frankfürt.
25th of March: Arrival in Male. Meet up with someone who I met in Bergen in Norway about two years ago.
28th of March (ish): Fly from Male to Colombo. Meet up with someone who I met in Xining in China.
7th of April: Fly from Colombo to Chennai and go directly to Tiruvannamalai where Mercy's Home is located (orphanage).
13th of April: Helping out until this date at the orphanage home. Returning on this date to Colombo.
20th of April (ish): Fly to Istanbul with a long stopover on Dubai. Stay a couple of days in Istanbul and travel to Ankara to meet up with someone who I met in Tallinn in Estonia. Travel a bit around Turkey and maybe Cyprus and/or Greece.
June: Fly to Amsterdam from wherever I may be. The end of volume 5.

After that I will start with the (hopefully) final part of the From here to Tokyo Tour: Volume 6. I only know right now that I fly to Hong Kong on the 1st of July. The rest is very flexible. I might also reschedule this flight since I figured out that the finals of the European Football Cup are during the evening of the 1st of July and I prefer to watch the match in Holland if The Netherlands make it to the finals. We'll see!!

That's it for now. I keep you up to date as usual. Please notice that you can support the orphanage home by donating some money. For more info please visit http://www.vriendenvanmercy.com/ (everything is in Dutch so if you need a short explanation, please let me know).

4 borders, 4 versions of China and the end of volume 4

2012-02-22T15:58:00.001+00:00

China, Taiwan, Macau and Hong Kong have all borders and have their own visa rules, but they all used to be part of the bigger China. In the last volume (number 4) I visited all of them and witnessed their similarities and their differences.

Hong Kong
In Hong Kong I managed to get another Chinese visa (this is already number 4) and was ready to head back into the mainland of China to catch a boat from Xiamen to Taiwan. Anyway, after some further research I figured out that it was extremely complicated, time consuming and not necesarrily cheaper to travel by boat from the mainland to Taiwan and back again. At the moment I was overthinking all this I met the South African/Russian/German/Brittish Laura. Laura is not really from a country since she posesses 3 passports, speaks fluent English, German and Russian and next to that a little bit of Afrikaans and Chinese. Currently she's studying the latter in Shanghai and since she had a Summer break she decided to come to Hong Kong first and also had the idea of going to Taiwan. However, her mother wouldn't let her go alone so she was very lucky that she found a trustworthy person like myself. Four nights after we met we were on a plane together from Hong Kong to Taipei. I had only some troubles before the flight with my credit card but eventually everything turned out fine.

Taiwan
The first night I obviously stayed in Taipei but decided to get out of the city as fast as possible despite how pleasant the city is compared to cities of the mainland. However in the only day I was in Taipei I managed to see the most important site of Taipei: the National Palace museum with the world's best and most complete collection of Chinese artifacts and antiquities. After that I spent two nights in Jiufen which is an old miners town which is now a tourist highlight especially because of the picturesque landscape and the good food. The weather wasn't that good so I continued to the south where I first stopped in Taroko where I did some small treks. After that I took the bus to Hualien where I explored the wonderful ocean views and the gorgeous mountains on a scooter which I rented there. It's far more exciting than it sounds since the scooters aren't like the 50 cc's we have in The Netherlands. The ones in Taiwan are more powerful and reach easily about 60 miles an hour instead of a small 30. The weather still wasn't right so I headed more and more South hoping for tropical weather at the most Southern tip at the island: and I got it!! In Hengchuen it was somewhere around 25 degrees Celcius so there was no reason to complain at all. In Taiwan it's a lot of times pretty hard to come around with the public transport so I ended up renting a lot of scooters... the same goes for Hengchuen.

After two days in the South I knew it was time to head up North again because of the simple reason that I had to catch a plane on the 8th of Feb to Hong Kong. I stopped in Tainan since it's the previous capital of Taiwan and therefore has the most historical interesting buildings as well. Tired of Chinese cities I decided to only stay there for one night and head back into the nature the next day. I stayed at a nice homestay family in Wufeng where I once again did some short treks. It was an interesting family since the family also posessed a tea plantation, so I had the opportunity to taste some of the best tea I ever tasted in my life. After two nights here I went directly back to Taipei in one long stretch. I mostly visited some temples there and saw the famous Taipei 101 tower which was the highest building in the world until some filthy rich oil sheik decided to build a bigger one in Dubai. I really liked Taiwan and its people since they're extremely helpful and friendly so it was a shame that I had to go.

Hong Kong
In Hong Kong I received the news that my grandfather wasn't doing to well in the afternoon of the 8th so I contacted my insurrance asking them if they could get me out of Hong Kong on a direct flight to Schiphol for the next day. My insurrance company (ABN Amro Bank) already helped me out a couple of times during and after robberies before and also this time they were very helpful, so they put me on a direct flight of 11 PM the next day.

Macau
I had a whole day to kill so decided to take the ferry from Hong Kong to Macau for a day trip. Macau is the Las Vegas of Asia and loads of rich (mainland) Chinese people come here to gamble their money away in endless amount of casinos. It was a Portugese colony and sometimes you indeed meet people with some Southern European facial features. The Portugese also left a great deal of architecture and once again... great food!! I've never been in Portugal so I wonder what the differences and similarites are with "the real thing" if it comes down to food and so forth.

Hong Kong
As you might have noticed Hong Kong is a great hub for a lot of destinations so that's the reason why I already collected 5 Hong Kong entry and exit stamps within less than half a year. Next to a great hub it's just an amazing place to chill out so I'm already looking forward to return. I booked my return ticket on the 1st of July back from Amsterdam to Hong Kong since I didn't knew at the time how much time I needed in The Netherlands.

The Netherlands
My flight departed just after 11 PM and since the weather and wind conditions were good I arrived earlier than scheduled: instead of 5 AM I arrived just a little bit after 4 AM. The insurrance even arranged a taxi back home which slightly arrived later due to the bad road conditions. I arrived home just after 6 AM and learned that my grandfather unfortunately passed away less than an hour before my plane made the touchdown on Dutch soil.

From here to Tokyo Tour: Volume 5
Since my flight is scheduled for the 1st of July I will first visit Pakistan, Nepal and India in the meanwhile since the visas are much easier to arrange in The Netherlands than abroad. I will have a couple of days until a couple of weeks in Turkey since it's much cheaper to fly over Istanbul than to fly directly from Amsterdam. The visa for Pakistan is pretty though to get so I calculate some extra time for that one. I will arrange my Indian visa very probably in Nepal since it's straight forward with no further questions asked as I learned from my previous experiences there. If I have my Pakistani visa I'm ready to rock and roll and if that moment comes I will let you know, but until that time I will just socialize and maybe do some trekking in The Netherlands if everything goes according to plan.

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Chinese cinema perfection

2012-01-24T00:20:00.000+00:00

In this blog I will combine what I’ve done and seen in China with some trailers of Chinese movies that you definitely have to see. Chinese cinema has one of the biggest markets if it comes to movie production worldwide together with Indian Bollywood. That’s not too hard to imagine since in China has a population of about 1.4 billion and India 1.2 billion. Personally I’m not a big fan of Bollywood or Indian cinema but I definitely am a fan when it comes to Chinese cinema. Obviously I hope that you’re going to watch at least a couple of the movies I mention. You might have seen already “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (臥虎藏龍) which is a movie from early of this millennium that gained a lot attention in the USA and Europe and therefore Chinese cinema got more attention of the world.

To be honest I thought that “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” was totally overrated and not that good as the movies that will follow.

Mongolia
While everybody in The Netherlands was toasting on the New Year of 2012 Yoch and I stepped into the train that would take us all the way back to Beijing. Mongolia was a great experience but to be honest we were pretty glad to be on the train again that would take us out of this strange country with sometimes strange people and its sometimes violent atmosphere. In Ulan Bator there’s also not so much to do so we were already looking forward to climbing the Chinese wall.

China
We spent our New Year’s Eve with Jolanta and we decided to team up for the rest of our time in Beijing. Happy coincidences were that we were all on the same train and Yoch and Jolanta were even on exactly the same flight from Beijing to Moscow!! We already spent 5 days before together in Beijing so we saw quite a lot together, including the famous Forbidden City which you can also by the way see in the quite famous movie “Hero” (英雄) with famous actor Jet Li.

However we didn’t manage to get to the Great Wall yet so we went there together for a daytrip. And at that time it was more or less already time to say goodbye, unfortunately!! However after leaving I obviously wasn’t totally alone since we met again in the hostel a hell of a lot of people. With Kim and Bart from my country I went to the art district the next day and a Chinese girl called Estelle helped me out with booking a train ticket to the coastal town Qingdao. However when I arrived at the train station I figured out that my ticket wasn’t there!! Apparently something went wrong in the booking procedure since according the guy from the ticket booth it was impossible to book tickets with a foreign passport number online but still they took my money… Anyway this nice girl lives close to Guangzhou where I will soon be and she is so nice that she is still trying to work things out with the website so I might still get my money back. Anyway, because of this unfortunate happening I had to go to the ticket office once again and on my way I accidentally bumped into the Argentinean Dan with who we celebrated our NYE in Ulan Bator as well!! He left UB later than us and stayed for a couple of days with a couch surfer but was now heading for the same hostel as where I stayed, so we could still spend a part of the evening together before I headed out to Qingdao.

Qingdao is also a great city and I probably will be back here to take a boat to South Korea one day. The Germans were once here around 1900 and left a great deal of architecture and even better than that they brought a recipe for beer here that nowadays is the most famous beer brand in China and if you ask me also one of the best: Tsingtao. Of course there’s a brewery which I had to check out. From Qingdao I took a very comfy night bus with beds to Nanjing. The only challenges I dealt with on this trip was that I had to kick out a Chinaman out of my bed since he took the wrong one and that the driver was still playing Karaoke TV around 12 o’clock in the night, but next to that it was the best night bus I ever had.

I read about Nanjing and the Nanjing massacre before and I really wanted to go to the museum and memorial hall. When I arrived again in Beijing in December last year I saw the posters hanging in the subway about a new movie coming out known as “The Flowers of War” (金陵十三釵) with Christian Bale. A happy coincidence let’s say that such a movie just came out before I was going there. I first went to the museum and the memorial hall but I would see the movie a day or two later in Hangzhou. On December the 13th of 1937 the Japanese invaded the capital of China at the time: Nanjing. During the siege the Japanese totally went crazy on the harmless population and the reason was not really obvious.

Like a Chinese wise man said: "There is no obvious explanation for this grim event, nor can one be found. The Japanese soldiers, who had expected easy victory, instead had been fighting hard for months and had taken infinitely higher casualties than anticipated. They were bored, angry, frustrated, tired. The Chinese women were undefended, their menfolk powerless or absent. The war, still undeclared, had no clear-cut goal or purpose. Perhaps all Chinese, regardless of sex or age, seemed marked out as victims."

The numbers are still being discussed. Of course some Japanese researchers believe that only 100.000 have been killed while other sources claim that 500.000 lost their life during the 6 week lasting siege. According to the international war tribunal an estimated of about 340.000 people have been killed (two times the total amount of casualties in The Netherlands during the whole Second World War). More recent investigations confirm that during the siege at least 300.000 people have been killed, which is also the number that is shown at the memorial hall. That’s an average of 1 person every 12 seconds. There’s obviously a reason why this incident is also known as the “Rape of Nanjing”: at least 20.000 women were violently raped and often killed afterwards. Some sources claim that the number is much higher: 80.000. Since there might be younger readers I’m not going to describe specific cases since they’re too disgusting and horrible to describe. If you want to read more you can look it up on Wikipedia or either watch the movie since it also shows some cases that truly happened (it’s based on a book). It definitely has been one of the very few movies that really made an impact on me and perfectly fits in the row of “Schindler’s List” and “The Pianist”. I highly recommend it but it’s not a movie that you watch for fun as you can imagine.

After such a heavy subject it’s obviously time for some a more relaxing topic!! I went with the high speed Shinkansen train from Nanjing to Hangzhou and topped the incredible speed of 300 kilometers an hour. It sounds much more exciting than it actually is since it doesn’t feel like that at all. However I really liked it and I think it’s an incredible comfortable way of travelling. However I have been quite unlucky with the weather since it has been raining here for almost a week, nonstop!! However that gave me the opportunity to write a big part of this massive blog. On the day of my departure to Shanghai I visited the famous West Lake which is apparently the most beautiful West Lake of all the 36 West Lakes in China. Recently a new movie came out in China that is a remake of an old movie about a famous Chinese fairytale starring Jet Li. A part of the story takes place at the West Lake in Hangzhou. Normally I don’t really like fairytales but I really recommend you to watch “The Sorcerer and the White Snake” (白蛇傳說之法海) which is also known in the West as “It’s Love”. It’s about a snake that falls in love with a man in a world of humans and demons. The special effects, humor, passion and fighting scenes make it a must-see.

I had to stay five nights in total since there were no earlier trains to Hong Kong due to the upcoming Spring Festival or Chinese New Year. To be honest I didn’t like Shanghai too much, partly also because of the terrible weather that has been bothering me for the past week (clouds, rain and cold wind). But next to that there’s not so much to do in Shanghai as in for example Beijing. Anyway, I took the Maglev train since the one between the center of Shanghai and its airport should reach speeds over 400 kilometers an hour. As you can imagine I was quite disappointed when the speedometer “only” reached 300 kilometers an hour. I’m not sure if they lowered the speed of the Maglev as well like the other fast trains because of the incident with a high-speed train in China a couple of months ago. The business center is actually also disappointing especially if you’ve been in Hong Kong before. The buildings in Shanghai are taller than the ones in Hong Kong but how the place is put together is by far as beautiful as how they did it in HK. Honestly I was very happy to leave the place and continuing further south towards warmer lands.
Another Chinese movie that I can’t really place in this blog but is one of my favorites is “House of Flying Daggers” (十面埋伏) which is an ultimate combination of martial arts and a love story. Enjoy!!

Hong Kong
First of all: Happy Chinese New Year!! However, due to the Chinese New Year the consulate for China is closed so I probably have to spend some more time in Hong Kong than planned. I'm going to apply here (once again) for a double entry Chinese visa since it's apparantly very hard to apply for Chinese visas elsewehere. After obtaining the visa I will first visit Macau before heading back to the mainland of China.

[press] Vincent van Zadelhoff follows his Asian dream (long version)

2012-01-23T01:05:00.002+00:00

Published on the 29th of December, 2011, at 10:29 AM in "Haarlems Dagblad" (Haarlem Daily).

HEEMSTEDE, THE NETHERLANDS - Cold, crashes and robberies. There's little that has not happened to Vincent van Zadelhoff (24) during his cycling tours all around the world. In the meanwhile he has seen many countries. He was back for just a short while to visit his family and friends, but with Christmas he was already in Mongolia.

He enjoyed it to be home, even though it was for a short while. “The health of my grandparents is not too well. So I wanted to visit them, just like my friends and my sponsor “Café El & Ben” in Haarlem. With the sponsor money and my own savings I can do a lot. I live as cheap as possible. I also do couch surfing (sleeping at the place of persons that provide a bench for free to crash down on for the night, red.) and I can keep going like this for quite a while.” Just before Christmas he left again. “I agreed with a Dutch friend to meet in China. We’re going do to some backpacking for a while.”
On New Year’s Day 2010 he departed for the first tour through Eastern Europe and Asia. He didn't choose the shortest route, but wanted to visit as many countries as possible. By bicycle, on foot, by train and sometimes by plane. First he pedaled to Cape North to see the northern lights. Therefore he faced cold, snow and rain and many crashes.
His current journey is not the first big expedition of Vincent. Once he walked to Santiago de Compostella in Spain. The cyclists that he met on the way were inspiring him to use the bicycle next time. It’s much easier to get around with a bicycle than on foot.
Vincent faced the coldest winter in 108 years. He sleeps in public toilets, emergency shads, in tunnels and at the homes of people he met on the way. With a detour through Iceland he arrives after six months in Estonia. There some guys stole his bicycle and luggage. He only possesses his mobile phone and his wallet. That he lost his pictures and his diary is the worst of all, he thinks. There’s no other option than returning home.
In November he makes a new start. Switzerland is the new starting point. Time doesn’t matter. He wants to see countries and meet people Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Slovenia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Belarus, Ukraine, Estonia (where he once again stands on the same square where his bicycle was stolen), Turkey, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Iran, China, Hong Kong, North Korea, India are just a few of the countries that he crosses through.
Quite often he is stopped by the police and therefore needs to spend some travel money on bribes. With some haggling Vincent manages to keep the damage low. Endless patience, persistence and bribes are necessary to obtain all the visas necessary for entering all the countries. In Nepal he climbs the Annapurna with a top of over 5400 meters. Shortly hereafter he gets shaken up in the Nepalese capital Kathmandu by an earthquake with a magnitude of 6.9 on the Richter scale.
In Iran it goes wrong once again. Vincent lies in his sleeping bag in a tunnel in an area far out of the civilized world, when he wakes up from the sound of footsteps. He gets cornered by three men who are demanding his belongings. He resists, yells and gets into a struggle. His attackers try to get a hold on his bag and his clothes. They all jump with his belongings in a pick-up. Vincent jumps with only his undies on in front of the car. He acts impulsive, but can tell from the behavior of the robbers that they’re not really professional criminals. He manages to get his trousers and some other small belongings back. He lost his wallet but he still possesses the money that he hid in his book. He’s lucky, since withdrawing money in Iran is impossible. With some scratches and a damaged knee he manages to get to the next village and gets help there from the owner of a shop.
He goes to the police to make a statement. But the police distrust him and think that he is a spy. Hereafter he contacts the embassy. The people from the embassy warn him that he can be arrested for espionage. That’s a violation which is punishable by death. Vincent directly arranges a taxi and crosses the border to Turkmenistan.
Not every country that he visits is easily accessible. A visit to North Korea is only possible by touring car. Vincent also uses public transportation a lot. But he also cycles a lot. “Punctures occur seldom but it is really time for a new rear tire.”

El en Ben
Christmas next year Vincent wants to end in Tokyo, the ultimate goal of his trip. Vincent has since his High school time a big fascination for the land of the rising sun. But before that he will help out as a volunteer in India. “Anneke Bouman works there, a sister of El (from Café El en Ben), at an orphanage home project. I’m planning to help out for about half a year.”
Before he reaches his final destination he wants to visit at least thirteen Asian countries. “I want to go back by boat and train to Estonia. And from there I want to cycle home.”
Once home he has to get back to work once again. “Maybe I can become a manager in a youth hostel. In the meanwhile I really figured out what travellers want. But I’m also interested in other jobs.”
All the experiences from Vincent can be read on his website: http://www.vincentvanzadelhoff.nl/. Who wants to support the project of Anneke Bouman can donate money on bank account 625042794 to the attention of Stichting van Vrienden van Mercy Home, website: http://www.vriendenvanmercy.com/.

Original article in the Dutch newspaper "Haarlems Dagblad" (Haarlem Daily).