Posts in Category: Southeast-Asia
Hong Kong
Labour day offered an excellent opportunity for a long weekend trip. When asking some friends who are doing internships in Taiwan and Shanghai, we concluded to meetup in Hong Kong. After disembarking the plane and the bus skipping a few stations due to labour day protest-parades, I checked in at the CheckInn hostel which turned out to be a really good choice. We spent the weekend catching up, discovering the town and visiting Macau with some new friends we made at the hostel.
Vitoria peak offers a stunning, contrastful view of the city embedded in hills covered in forests and trees. Eager to see the “worlds longest escalator” – which turned out to be a huge disappointment since it’s just many short individual 1-way escalators connected by walks of up to 5 minutes and only runs downwards until 10 a.m., we had to walk all the way down back to the city. The aqua-cocktailbar offered strange and “forgotten classics” cocktails with chilis, a pepper-rim on the glass or other exotic mixtures. Unfortunately, the casino in Macau didn’t offer Texas Hold’em and we weren’t that lucky while playing roulette, so we had to stick to the ferry instead of returning via helicopter-cab :(.
Krabi – even more of a paradise
My last weekend trip took me to Krabi, Thailand. Located on the same bay but opposite Phuket, it’s a famous tourist location with lot’s of hotels, bars and massage centers. Since they realized on friday that sunday will be their most important public holiday, the thai new year, they cancelled my prebooked hiking/jungle trip for sunday. I spend saturday travelling around a few islands by speedboat and met some cool people to have a few drinks at night. It went crazy when all waiters suddenly attacked you with waterguns while you were drinking cocktails. Everyone got wet and we had a great start in the songkran festival (and luckily my camera survived without any damage unlike my completely soaked passport)! On sunday, I hiked a little, walked to bay that can’t be reached by cars and swam around a few smaller islands (besides getting completely wet again). Luckily, the blueish blur on a few pages of my passport still counted as travel-visa-stamp and I was allowed to travel back to Singapore ^^.
Singapore again
When my parents visited me in Singapore, we went to some really nice locations where I got the chance to capture these pictures:
Jakarta
A few weeks ago I spent a weekend in Jakarta.
When I booked the trip, I was really excited – JAKARTA ! One of the few cities in Indonesia you know. From movies.
Excited, until everyone I mentioned it to toled me: Stay at the airport, grab the next plane to somewhere else.. – Is it THAT BAD??
Wikitravel and the internet confronted me with similar advice.
I still went there – but I probably won’t do it again. I stayed near the old town which is the poorer part of the city. Poor, simple, sometimes a little dirty – but not dangerous at all and everyone is helpful. On the opposite, the south of the city is like singapore. Giant shopping centers with all brands you ever heard of. They even sell cars on the ground floor.
Singapore Zoo
Even big kids like the zoo ;). Here’s what the Singapore zoo offers – besides some 1m lizards walking around the public area.
Weekend in Paradise
I spent the last weekend in the paradisic Tioman Island!
After a long bus ride we boarded our “jetty” and spent the night on a 6 hour ride to the northern part of Tioman Island near Pulau Sayok. After our chili-rice breakfast on saturday morning we headed off for the PADI open water dive course. Beautiful blue water, a coastline that mainly resembled untouched nature and could easily be featured in a pirate or castaway movie and many colorful fish =)
Singapore – being a Tourist
While I waited a few days before I could move into my appartment, I used the time to do sightseeing. Here are some of the best views I got.
Ps: I managed to change the media format. You can enjoy FullHD in FullScreen mode now ;). I might reconfigure it depending on the time it takes to load… Please comment if you encounter problems!
Pps: I reduced the size to 1/2 Full HD which reduces the Filesize by up to 44% for faster loading. On most screens, Fullscreen stays FullHD!. Additionally, I’ll manually set only the newest post to start the slideshow.
Sentosa and the SEA Aquarium
During my Tourist-time after finding an appartment, before being able to move in, I stayed at the Kiwi-Hostel. This typical Backpacker hostel with a huge fan-“cooled” area full of bunk beds was located quite close to the city and the staff was awesome. They gave great advise while sipping a can of Tiger at night or during the fruit and kava-sandwich breakfast.
Anywat, I decided to discover the most prominent recreational area of Singapore: Sentosa Island. The MRT easily takes you to Vivo-City, another of these typical shopping malls where you can switch to a monorail to drive to sentosa. After passing by the harbour, you pass through the amusement and movie-park area before reaching the beachside. A small tower offered a great view over the swimming bays and – the ships. I never expected to see that many ships afloat around singapore, probably waiting to load/unload their containers, for their next contract or the next fishing trip. (You best see them on the Marina Bay Sands post.)
Afterwards I went to the Aquarium. Besides an exhibition about the silkroad the whole building was equipped with different tanks or fish-tunnels. Since It was the day before chinese new year, they even performed an underwater “Lion-dance”