Corfu, Greece – Diving europe
2 years ago I started diving while being in southeast asia. Sadly, it’s not that easy to go diving in europe. A friend of mine and me, we gave it a try in Corfu, Greece in may. It was a trip over on an extended weekend so we arrived thursday and left Sunday – leaving 2 full days for diving :). We didn’t plan much, but decided for Paleokastritsa in the west of the island. To get there, we took an overnight ryanair flight with a stopover in Milano Bergamo – but sleeping at the airport wasn’t a real option because the airport closed at night. So we went for a walk to and around Bergamo. Not much to see at night :D. After another few hours of waiting, a flight and a bus trip, we arrived on the west coast of corfu where the hotel’s owner picked us up from the bus stop to the hotel which was situated about 5 minutes uphill. We spent the next 2.5 days hiking around the island and diving below it’s waters including 2 cave dives. Visibility was awesome, so I could test my newly bought actioncam and the color-filters – but there were really few fish around.
Prague and Trdelníks
A friend of mine found an advert on facebook offering a trip to prague over the long weekend – intended for students and probably mainly erasmus students who want to see more european cities and party in all of them. The offer claimed bus trips from Aachen/ Cologne and other cities, a city tour, boat trip, pub crawl and party with accomodation in prague which included a swimming pool. The price was too good to be true… we should’ve known it – but we booked.
1st bummer: No pickup in Aachen due to few participants from there – we were asked to come to cologne to start from there – reasonable.. ok.
during the trip: We’re not staying in prague. “the hostel made some errors” we’re staying 15km out of town – and there will be a shuttle service – WTF?!? But somehow most participants didn’t seem to bother much. Since we wanted flexibility to e.g. go to the city and go home whenever we wanted, we started to discuss about this ‘shuttle’ and it’s schedule. Finally, we got promised it’d be hourly. – annoying but acceptable.
After the city tour, we met back at the bus to go to our accomodation 15km away – It was in the middle of nowhere and took us about 2.5h hours to get there :-O And we ended up in wood-bungalows without electricity, heating or isolation. But the travel-time was the most annonying. Also, suddenly the schedule for the shuttle was ‘After partying we meet at 3:30 a.m. to leave to the camp. That’s the only bus.’
Long story short: when the price seems to good to be true (given you’re familiar with the local price level) don’t do it :D. We spent most of the weekend with annoying discussions with the organizators who broke their promises again and again – and finally managed to get 30% off our initial payment. We tried to enjoy the beautiful city anyway so here are a few pictures ;).
Next time: Plane + Airbnb
Vietnam
| Pictures from my Vietnam-trip in January & February 2016. We only had 2 weeks so we had to skip some parts – And we really wanted to go diving (see post below) and see sapa. Unfortunately, there was some heavy fog in sapa so we didn’t see all it’s beauty while getting our trousers and shoes soaked in mud. |  |
Diving Vietnam
While in vietnam, we went diving in Nha Trang 2 consecutive days. We had 2 Nitrox and 2 normal dives in divesites situated around a small island 30 minutes off the coast. The sight-distance wasn’t great but I still managed to make a few pictures of all the Lionfish we saw.
Dublin
A few pictures from my first trip to Ireland! Thanks to the Unitech EOY-Event hosted by Trinity college dublin,
Iceland!
I finally made it to Iceland 🙂
1.5 weeks ago I got into a train to go to the Düsseldorf airport – bound for a country with only 323k Inhabitants – less than most cities.
Tabea and me, we didn’t really plan… we googled a few places we had heard of and put it on a ‘want to see / maybe / naaah’ list. And we booked a car.
After arriving at eleven at night, I intended to go to a kiosk to find something for breakfast the next morning. The ’10 minutes that way’ turned out to be measured in car-minutes and I’m only a quarter as fast. After walking through wind and rain, I had definetly seen all of Keflavik (although everything was closed and covered in clouds and rain.) The next morning we picked up our Peugeot 208 and started our journey along beautiful scenery and hundreds of waterfalls. It took us 2 days to realize how to get music from our phones out of the car speaker (aux was disabled, usb sticks and my phone didn’t work and the bluetooth-options were quite hidden) and I emptied lots of coffee-cups as well as 3 camera batteries. Long story short, we had an amazing 2400km around iceland – but see for yourself 😉 [fullscreen suggested – upper right corner.]
The World
I’ve seen quite a few countries so far but the scratch world-map on my wall is still pretty single-colored…
Fortunately, I’ll be scratching of 1 more place soon: I’m going to iceland tomorrow! Finally. I’ve wanted to visit this supposedly beautiful country for years – and now it’s for real! I’ll tell you next week if the landscape really is as stunning as the pictures online suggest 😉
Unfortunately the map below isn’t very detailed… I’ve only seen small parts of the US (Florida) and Australia (Queensland’s east coast), Argentinia (Buenos Aires & Iguazu) and I barely set foot into Brazil (Iguazu) but I got the passport stamp :D.
light blue: posted pictures from there
dark blue: been there, no pictures though
Grey: haven’t been there yet
Iguazu
From la paz, i took a complicated flight via multiple spots and ended up in Iguazu where I met Laura and a few friends. We stayed at a nice hostel including a pool for 2 nights and visited the brazilian and argentinian site of the iguazu-waterfalls as well as to a bird-parc on the brazilian side.