Traditional Hungarian wedding in Transylvania

What remained from my time at Ingams is the friendship with some really great people, two of whom invited me their wedding. In Transylvania. Yay! That's what I call exotic.

Arrival at Târgu Mureș, a town well connected to the world by the budged airline Wizzair, with a smooth 3-hour transfer to the middle of nowhere, that is, the village of Izvoare. You won't be able to find it on a map unless you know that it is near a town with the impossible name of Odorheiu Secuiesc.

 

The rest: great weather (for most of the time), fairy-tale landscapes, great company, real comfort-food and lots of it, even more Pálinka, kitties and bears and pottery and orphanages, just see for yourself:

Transylvania, Sep 2014

Mallorca in Spring

The traditional yearly trip with my mum lead us to Mallorca this year. Surprisingly, it was cold and windy, so hanging out on the beach was not an option. Instead we drove around the island and caught some amazing views!

Mallorca, May 2014

Bali and the islands

Time flies - only 2 weeks left! And so many things happening and still so many things to do, I don't really want to leave, would there not be new adventures be waiting for me back home: going skiing, seeing how my kitten has grown, finding a place to live...

The visitor flow to Bali does not seem to end (it's great though) - first Henrik, a friend from Berlin, whom I explored the hights and depths of Nusa Lembongan with: that is jumping from 13-m-high cliffs and being underwater with enormous Manta Rays and other big fish.

Then Ingrid spontaneously came over from Austria and we settled for a few days on the paradise island of Gili Trawangan, cultivating beach bumming and all-night-dancing to Nirvana/RHCP/Kings of Leon cover bands. Gili T. is white sands, turquoise water, no cars or motorcycles, party nights, gigantic seafood BBQs, hundreds of cats (but not a single dog!), chilled out atmosphere, turtles on the reef just off the beach, and even a small surf break in the south, what more does one need...?

Back in Bali, a cultural visit to Ubud was not to be missed, even though the monkeys in the monkey forest were slightly more entertaining than the Puri Lukisan art museum.

Then another friend from Berlin arrived in Bali to spend a month in a Surfcamp, and finally - after having seen most of Bali's tourist attractions - I started to focus on regular surfing. Since I have not really progressed during the past 12 years of my attempts at this difficult sport I decided to take a reputable surf coach, who would run through his success-proof one-on-one training programm with me.

After 2 training sessions and surfing every day for 10 days in a row every muscle in my body hurts, my feet are an assembly of coral cuts and I have blue and black bruises all over. I have caught amazing waves, bigger than anything before, but none of them without help, so I still have a long way to go.

Unfortunately my training programm has come to an unexpected break. Yesterday evening on the way home from a friend's restaurant someone driving by tried to snatch my bag and knocked me off my motorbike. I had to go to hospital to get stitches on my elbow. Luckily I was all covered up and the other wounds are just minor scratches. My clothes are totally torn, though. The stupid guy did not have a chance to get the bag, I had the strap across my shoulders and held it in front. No idea why he still tried.

So now I am confined to stay out of the water for at least a week. I should be ok, hopefully, before the next friend from Berlin arrives, so we can go surfing together during my last days in Bali :)

Click here for new amazing Bali pictures!

And finally... Bali

Three weeks ago, when I arrived from Sumatra sick and exhausted, Bali seemed like paradise - and it still does! Especially, since I am living a lifestyle that one can only dream of back home - eating out every day, and really delicious food at that, getting massages, facials, pedicures at least once a week, staying in a villa with garden and pool only 500 m from the beach, and spending less money than I would in Berlin! No wonder the place is full of expats.

Before "settling down" I wanted to see the island, and the best way to travel around is by motorbike. So I spent 8 days doing this round:

On day one I had some difficulties to get started: a police hold-up and my failure to present an "international driving licence" resulted in lengthy debate and a fine - this procedure is a favorite occupation of the local police in order to make some extra money, and they are not even discreet about it, as this Dutch guy's secretly filmed video shows - and immediately after that I had a flat tyre. So instead of making it all the way up to the north coast as planned, I only made it as far as Perasi with its secluded White Sand Beach - quite a treat since most beaches on the island are volcanic black sand.

The beach was so nice that I did not want to drive all the way back into town to look for a guesthouse, so I decided to sleep there on a beach bed at a little restaurant. The owners did not mind, they left me some candles and there I was - alone with a pack of beach dogs, who would not stop fighting amongst each other all night.
So after a rather sleepless night I drove up to the north coast the next day. On the way I stopped for a refreshing swim at Tirta Gangga (a water temple and public swimming pool) and Pura Lempuyan, a mountain temple with great views to Bali's highest volcano, Mount Agung.

In the following days I zigzagged between mountains and the sea, alternated between snorkeling shipwrecks and coral reefs, visiting temples, hot springs and waterfalls and driving through pretty rice fields.
I did not see many tourists - the north of Bali is pretty quiet anyhow and now it is deepest off-season. In small mountain villages my passing seemed to be quite an event, people would stop whatever they were doing to stare and/or smile at me, kids always enthusiastically waved, shouted hello or laughed their heads off, and everybody was really friendly.

My last stop was Permuteran on the very northwest of the island, where I went snorkeling at the nearby Menjangan island surrounded by an amazing 30 m coral wall. On my boat there was a Spanish/French couple who planned a trip to the Ijen volcano on Java for the next day. It sounded quite exciting so I decided to join them.

We left at 11 pm to set over to Java by ferry, drove another hour to the start of the trail and hiked up the steep path to the crater with our headlights on. You do this at night so you can see the blue fire coming out between the rocks of the sulfur mine. The air was thick with smoke and stank of sulfur, we needed masks to be able to breathe and our eyes were burning. It got worse and worse as we approached the bottom of the crater where the workers were cutting the sulfur, it was really sickening. The working conditions of the miners are unbelievable - they have no proper equipment or protection from the toxic smoke, and they carry up to 90 (!) kg of sulfur up the crater and down the mountain, up to 3 times a day.

Per load they earn less than 10 $. One guy showed us his shoulder: the bone had deformed from carrying the weight. This photo essay describes it better than I could, it was truly horrifying.

We returned from our volcano excursion the next day around lunchtime, it had been a long but memorable night. The next day I drove back down south, stopping only once to see the famous sea temple Tannah Lot.

With no time to rest I had to organize my visa run to Singapore and find a place to live. I went to look at a few rooms but the second place, the Villa Vintage, was unbeatable. So now I share a villa with an Australian couple, who teach at Canggu international school, and a German guy, who is working on a PhD project on recycled shopping bags, which is why there are tons of blue shopping bags all over the place, and with a sweet 4-month-old puppy named Pina. All, except the dog, surfers.

It's hard to think about work in this life of tropical luxury but eventually I will have to start. Even my laptop refuses its services, tomorrow I have to take it to the Acer service shop in Denpasar to see if it can be saved. If not - what a tragedy - I might not even be able to work!

Bali Photoalbum - more details in comments of pics!

Singapore - short'n'sweet

4 days before my tourist visa expired I found out that I would have needed to apply 10 days in advance for a visa extension. So I had to leave the country quickly or else face steep fines for overstaying.

Singapore turned out the best option, plus I could visit my friend Aynur, who I had not seen in over 5 years. Booked a flight on Monday, sat in the plane on Thursday. Aynur was on a business trip so I stayed in a hostel, where I met a bunch of people from Jakarta who all went to the Laneway Festival on Saturday. After seeing the line-up - and to keep myself out of the shopping centers - I decided to join them.

The setting was amazing, the crowd relatively small, the music great, the beer expensive... but my savior Anthony from Melbourne with his infinite supply of drink tokens (as friend of the organizer)  took care that I didn't have to remain thirsty. The party was memorable... as far as I remember :)

The next evening was quite the opposite but no less enjoyable - with Aynur and her little son Noah.

Lunch at Google, Chinatown and the Arab Quarter were on my agenda for the last day before I returned to Bali, and to my new home: the Villa Vintage.

Photos of Singapore

K.L. - Sumatra: Monsoon, bugs and other inconveniences

During the past couple of weeks kind of everything that makes traveling unpleasant happened, so I hope I have everything covered for the rest of the trip now:
Bedbugs in Kuala Lumpur - a sleepless night and 5 days of crazy itching, getting sick with a bad cold and cough, torrential rains for 2 days almost nonstop at Lake Toba, a most complicated roadtrip from Lake Toba to Medan: only minutes before we passed the road got completely blocked by a "tree-slide" resulting in a lengthy detour on a mountainous dirt road, a real offroad experience...

...followed by the longest and craziest traffic jam I've ever been in - we covered 120 km in 13 hours (!). On the next day encounter with stupid local motorbike-taxi guy who wanted to molest me and steal my phone and money (screamed at him and ran away), then, just after New Years food poisoning in Banda Aceh and 4 days later again in Pulau Weh, and all that was rounded off with painful bladder infection - yay!

Luckily I still was able to do a few nice things, for example celebrate Christmas with a new-found friend in K.L. (who incidentally lived in a building with an amazing pool in the 34th floor next to the Petrona towers), climb Mount Sibayak in Berastagi - the volcano next to the one that erupted only a few days later (!). Visit traditional Batak villages on Samosir island at lake Toba in the company of a really nice Italian family who let me join them for a few days, celebrate New Year's eve on a lonely beach with a group of surfers in north Sumatra, visit Tsunami sites and the Tsunami museum in Banda Aceh, snorkel around the island of Pulau Weh, and drink cat-pooh coffee with a lovely girl from Upper-Austria, who I met on the ferry back to Banda Aceh.

Now I had a few days to recover in Bali and so far I have only met great people, so I am really looking forward to my time here. Tomorrow I set off for a trip around the island on my motorbike with only a small back-bag, so no computer and no internet for the next few days.

**K.L. and Sumatra Pics**