Month: June 2019

We have never regretted anything.

Especially not the decision to sell everything we owned and start our new world drifter life. Not to regret anything is the most important statement after reviewing the last 6 months. We made a lot of new experiences, some of them were at the end totally different than we have thought upfront. We changed our views to lots of opinions we have had before. We saw animals, we even didn’t know existed. We met people who will be in our hearts forever (or on our back). We found places which made us breathless. And we never ever had critical encounters. We had no accidents and no severe illnesses.

Looking back we would say: we are blessed by life. And life was (and still is) thankfull for our openess and courage that we changed our life. And so are we. We have also found more to ourselves, we let behind several of our old patterns and borders, we were able to open our eyes, minds and hearts to all the beauty and unbeauty this planet offered us. We know now even better what we really like and what not, who we are and who not. Yeahh indeed, a kind of spiritual journey also.

And finally as a couple, our mutual respect and love got even deeper. We have been together, 177 days, 24h. This are approximately 15 million seconds. Yes, we also had a few not so happy moments together, but the other 14.5 million seconds of it we really enjoyed.

To conserve all of these experiences we established this blog. We wrote 160 posts with over 900 pictures. And the counter says we had overall 33500 hits. Sounds impressive but the truth is: maybe about 30.000 bots scanned our blog. But for all the other readers it’s a good time to say Thank you! Thank you for being part of our freaky and weird life the last 6 months. Thank you for your comments. And special thanks to our family and friends (missed you!).

But this is not the end! We are just finishing our Southeast Asia chapter and (after our family holidays) we will open a new chapter: being house and pet sitters. We are really excited and are so much looking forward to this new kind of world drifting life has offered us. But for sure lots of new stories about animals and people and countries. So stay curious (we will) and keep on reading. We will keep on posting…

Traveling nowadays seems to be for pictures not for the fun of it. Thanks to Instagram (and likewise platforms) sightseeing locations are often completely blocked by herds of tourists taking one picture after the other. Posing people is what you will see when you try to catch a glimpse of anything nice or important. Seems the person in front is the attraction, not the temple behind. In Bali we saw an add offering a taxi trip through the island just for taking Instagram pictures.

No problem with taking pictures, that’s what we also do! But having some photos to memorize a journey is something completely different than we are talking about here. Queuing in front of anything just to take some pictures… really? Women jumping in the air, again and again, to look like they would really enjoy their lives, or wearing fancy hats and dresses with perfect hair arrangements: a sure sign that this photo session can take hours!!! Meanwhile you will have no chance to glance at a beautiful location without all these Instagram junckies directly in front of it. Sometimes you can really wonder what happened to this world, as if most people only care about how they look on a pic instead of enjoying the real world in front of them. That’s also why they will just bump into you with their selfiesticks- you don’t exist in their world!

And the truth: It’s all fake! The pictures are not really real, the people don’t look happy at all, just on the pictures. Posing or jumping half an hour in front of a building isn’t fun or quality time, it’s just boring.

Fake pictures is also what you will see on the menue at restaurants, on airbnb or internet hotel booking platforms. One of the most frustrating lessons we had to learn: Don’t trust the pictures!!! (but try to tell this your mind that is just knocked out when it sees a pic of a beautiful lonesome beach or delicios looking huge bbq steak ^^) You so much hope that all these lovely pics of beaches, hotels and food are true, even if only partly, but the reality is: most of the time they are not. Some hotel pics seem to be more than 20 years old (seeing a tv on the photo helps a lot to classify the age). So we learned not to expect anything, just take everything as it is and that worked out best 😉

So, take care and don’ t trust any pics – ours included 😛

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To put it short: Same Same (as the Thai like to say) 🙂 We met very friendly people on our trip and not so friendly ones. Luckily no really unfriendly ones! In all the six months we had no frightening or terrifying encounters. Yes, people are of course very different- when you look on the outside and the overall social behavior. But when you watch closely, you will see „Same Same“. Especially when we have families we nearly all act the same: watch over our children, so that no harm can happen to them, make some fun and play with them and enjoy looking in their faces when they laugh and are happy. That was the most beautiful thing for us to see, our likewise behaviors.

Of course a lot of our overall behavior differs from country to country. As Thailand has been our „home base“ between our other travels, we started feeling like getting home when we came back and we really got used to the people here, who often seem to have sort of a „childlike“ behavior for us. You will hear laughter when you sometimes see the maids at work or even men starting to sing while they carry your luggage (can’t imagine that in Germany ^^). Also the integration of transgenders or ladyboys into normal daily life is impressive. Seeing the women being the bossy type (especially when it’s about money) and men doing the easier jobs has been really amazing. We have enjoyed being here deeply. But we also realized that we are used to think a few steps ahead, act a little bit more farseeing in our behavior (maybe more like „adults“ ). That was sometimes very strange for us (we already mentioned the environmental and pollution topics in Recap #1). If you look at the many hundreds of scooter death victims every year at the Songkran Festival, see them driving their scooter with one hand, little toddler in the other, no helmet of course, sometimes even 2 adults and 2 small children on one little scooter, you just stare in disbelief. Over ten thousand kids are killed every year on the Thai roads (you see youngsters driving scooters here already), they have worldwide the highest traffic deaths rate … but the governmental order for wearing helmets is just being ignored. They sometimes wear one when they know there’s a police control and afterwards put it down again. As this seems to be the case with many other government restrictions, too. Just being ignored as there are no real consequences anyway.

Maybe a mix between German thoughtfulness and Thai playfulness is a nice middle way 😉

All these months it has been really easy for us in Thailand as they are used to tourists here and even in Cha-Am, where you nearly only meet Thai, you feel comfortable as a foreign farang.

Quite different than we felt in some rural parts of Malaysia. Here we were sometimes stared at (not that friendly) and thought that it’s maybe not that clever going somewhere where there are no other tourists, where you don’t understand the language and are apparently no muslim. Same in Bali, trying to see these parts of the countries that are still unspoiled by tourists makes no sense when you don’t speak the language and thus feels kind of awkward (maybe a little bit naive of us to try it anyway). Therefore we were also a little bit disappointed by the much vaunted Balinesian friendliness. Yes, the people working in the tourism sectors were friendly and some we met were even very friendly (like everywhere else), but not everybody had a welcoming behavior towards us or looked happy to see us tourists walk through their village (as maybe in any other country, too). The taxi drivers waiting at every corner to offer you a ride really got on our nerves as they just didn’t want to accept a friendly NO. Therefore after a few days we also started to become kind of ignorant, if not even rude, just to be let alone. Nothing we enjoyed.

The Japanese were very polite and helpful everywhere we went, but we didn’t get in real contact with anybody. Therefore we could only watch them and see it also here: „Same Same“ when it comes to family life, but very different behavior on the outside, the social level.

This „Same Same“ everywhere is what showed us that we as humans all have the same deep longings: being with someone you love, enjoying your spare time as good as you can, and mostly being friendly and helpful to others. Few exceptions maybe … So you will find for sure some very friendly, some kind of friendly and some not that friendly people wherever you go and wherever you are … we‘re all just humans after all 😉

Wooooh, that was a topic we really underestimated before we went on our trip! We thought „Yes, it will be hot and the humidity will be high, but we will get used to it for sure after some time“ … Nope, we didn’t! Up until now, 5 days before we head back, we are smashed by the weather here.

When you combine heat with high humidity and mix it with awful smell (as it happens here sometimes) the outcome is one of the worst experiences we have made. Moments when you frankly think „What the f*** are we doing here“.

At the beginning we thought we can cope with the climate when we take a refreshing jump into the ocean and that was by far the biggest illusion we had! From December till February it worked out a little bit, but the box jellyfish warnings everywhere didn’t make us feel so relaxed as we would have liked when swimming in the ocean. (Maybe another outcome of the global warming…)

When we returned from Malaysia to Thailand in March the hot season started … You just cannot image how hot an ocean can get until you experience it for yourself! Anyhow the water felt even hotter than the outside temperature, we guessed over 32 C in the ocean, 34-35C at the shore while low tide. So no cooling factor at all, which really felt frustrating sometimes. Think about being at a nice beach, looking at the sea and knowing it is just no pleasure at all to go inside. Couldn’t have imagined that feeling before. Also in Bali: no real refreshing moment when you took a swim in the sea. That’s when we started to enjoy locations with swimming pools and never again thought about renting anything without air con (As we did on Koh Lanta in February when we rented the Jungle House and really went kind of mad after some days with only some mini fans around us). Even the Thai told us that’s it’s too hot for them, too. So we think this may also be an outcome of the global warming and climate problems you encounter everywhere nowadays.

Imagine having had a fresh shower, stepping outside of the building and being wet again within just seconds. Unfortunately you then just don’t enjoy taking a nice stroll outside, which is one of the things that we have really missed.

And: We nearly forgot how rain feels like – our rain jackets were in use about twice since we left Germany. The last week here in Cha-Am was the first time we enjoyed some heavy rain showers with thunder and lightning effects. What a joy 😉

The refreshing factor was what we enjoyed while visiting Japan. Okinawa had really nice temperatures of about 24 C and in Tokyo we even took some pullovers with us as it really got kind of cold in the evening. Also Bali did cool down a little bit at night, which felt nice and staying in the mountains of Kota Kinabalu was also refreshing at night. These were the times our bodies could regenerate and we enjoyed walking around.

Our solution for the hot season here in Thailand now: air con rooms, cold drinks with a lot of ice and staying in swimming pools until your skin feels like wrinkle-binkle 🙂

And let’s be completely honest: Worse sideeffect is that even we fired the global warming. We took cheap planes rather than trains, also privat taxis instead of public transportation, even speed boats rather than slow ferries, rented scooter rather than a bicycle. And overall we traveled a lot, several 1000 miles knowing that we produce some of the devastating CO2 emissions. Yes, we are aware of that and deep in our heart we must accept that our own comfort and wanderlust was more important for us than the climate problems on earth… 🙁