After 5 months of crowdedness in Singapore with the only escapes being a weekend of Bintan and a week of Bali, Thailand seemed like a perfectly good place to unwind from my exchange semester. Having heard many good stories about Krabi, we decided to go for that instead of visiting Phuket, like most people do. 
I have to admit I was a bit worried. Some people advised against going to Thailand, not only because of the recent political unrest and closing of airports. Of course Thailand is known for its sex industry (pingpongshows and ladyboys) and nightlife, but that’s not really something we were interested in. 
We had a nice last evening in Singapore in the ‘New Asia Bar’, the Stamford hotel’s bar on the 72nd floor with an awesome view, which costed enough to convince us we didn’t need any more drinks for at least one month. 
Krabi is supposedly the place where you get your good amount of relaxation. So that’s where we started, taking a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Krabi airport with AirAsia. We used hostels.com to book a nice place for around 15 euros a night, which is quite expensive. But the same amount of money that buys you a shitty hostel room the size of a bed in Singapore, bought us an awesome spacious room, with balcony, paintings, tv and bath tub in a hotel 700m from the beach, with swimming pool and breakfast.

Huge Steps

And what do you do for relaxation in Krabi? We did nothing at all and it was awesome. A day at the beach, a day riding elephants and climbing stairs to a temple.
And of course eating. Thai food is delicious. We ate everything from plain rice with beef and garlic to crabs to fistsize shrimps to barbecue buffets. It costs practically nothing and it’s so damn good. And it puts your handling of spicy food to the test. I learned (or better yet was taught (or better yet was taught the hard way)) to appreciate spicy food in Singapore, but Thailand is in a whole different league. Especially hiding the incredibly spicy chili peppers in the not spicy and delicious Nam Pla fish sauce is a mean trick, that makes your eyes fill with tears. But all in all, the food experience is definetely worth repeating and recommended. 

The bad

Phuket is a shithole. I really can’t get why people would go there. The only things we experienced the first day were masseuses that actually grabbed my ass when I walked past them, with their whiney pronounciation of “massaaage” and the hundreds of tuktuk drivers going “tuktuk?”. Then there were the bars with scantilly clad women (or were they?) with old western guys ogling them. And to top it all off there was this one western guy with a 15 year old Thai boy around his shoulders chatting up other boys of the same age. Made me rage and that’s when we decided to get back to the hotel and not come back to see Phuket’s nightlife. The rest of our short 2 night stay we spent at the beach (as far away from the whole sex stuff as possible) and in the cinema watching the Thai movie Ong Bak 2. We could’ve done this practically everywhere, so in the end going to Phuket was not worth it. Good to experience for once, but not very enjoyable. 

Trashcan on the side of the road

Although in Phuket the filth was crawling around and trying to lure you to watch pingpong shows and get massages, throughout Thailand garbage is quite a problem. Even in Krabi, all of the streets were littered with garbage bags smelling up the place. It’s not really a problem, but it can be a bit annoying. 

Now 

After a one night stay in Kuala Lumpur we had our flight to Yogyakarta. The first day of Yogya is not really the way we imagined it would have been. Both a bit sickish with diarrhoea and a bit feverish, we have spent most of the time in bed. Because of this our plans are not fixed yet, but on our wishlist

 are visiting temples of Borobodur and Prambanan, climbing either the Merapi or Bromo vulcano and finding a nice place to have our Christmas dinner. We’ve got only one week, so it’s going to be a bit cramped, but it are all things you simply have to do when you are around here. And this is an opportunity that will not present itself anytime soon, so we have no choice but to grab it.

So already anticipating the time I would be spending on Changi because of going there too early, I decided to take a photo each hour of the remaining 24. No editting or even good quality pictures. Just quick snaps all at 35mm.

2100
The 24 hours started where they would end too, en route to the airport. Had to drop my gf off which was not much fun.

2200
Checking in at the terminal where I would be checking in a couple of hours later too.

2300
A German exchange student I met would leave the morning before I left Singapore, so we decided to meet up the last evening and have some drinks and just talk a bit. He travelled to Vietnam and Cambodia, so we had enough to talk about. We walked around Bugis for a bit, but then decided to get some Tigers at the 7-11 and drink them somewhere.

2400
We drunk the Tigers near Jalan Besar, near Chris’ hostel. We just talked a bit about the last semester and our travels. A worthy way of saying goodbye.

0100
Chris was already at his hostel, I still had to walk a bit. I walked past Mustafa center, a 24h shopping mall in Little India. The place where I bought my bag last year.

0200
Whe coming back to the hostel, I had to prepare for the voyage. Preparation involves putting the right music on my MP3 player and the right games on my PSP. Very important!

0800
I woke up too early because of some noises and presumably a bit of nerves. But there’s no point i sleeping too long and I decided that I needed to do a number of things, buying a new gaming mouse, finding a football shirt for a mate of mine and buying cuff links.

0900
Sadly enough it started raining, so I had to wait a bit at the hostel. Discovery was a good way to kill some of the time.

1000
And that’s where I realized I didn’t have to wake up that early. All the shops downtown were still closed and would only open around 11. So I bought a newspaper and an orange juice at the McDonald’s.

1100
I succeeded in buying my new mouse. Someone told me that razer is a Singaporean brand, so there wasn’t really an option but to buy one to replace the worn out G1 mouse I have now. A nice DiamondBack 3G with green light to match my wall .

1200
From Bugis, where I did not succeed in buying a football shirt because all the bootlegs were horribly obvious bootlegs, I went to Vivocity. Vivocity’s one of my favourite malls in Singapore, so I just went there to walk around a little bit and maybe find my cuff links.

1300
Walking from City Hall MRT station to Suntec City. A jacket I found at Vivocity was not available in my size there, but they did have one at Suntec. So I took the MRT again to go and get the jacket. The cufflinks were dropped as idea for stuff to buy.

1400
I had lunch in the basement of Central in Clarke Quay. I would meet with my ex-housemate Peter in Clarke Quay, because it was central and close to my hostel. I had a nice mixed roast meat plate which tasted very well. Sadly enough that was to be my last meal in Singapore.

1500
After my meal I decided to have my after lunch dip on the banks of the Singapore river. A nice moment to just think about the last semester, for which I took almost over an hour. I still don’t really like Clarke Quay, but this day it was nice and windy and not too crowded. Plus it was an easy place to rendez-vous with people.

1600
Peter and me sat in ‘the Coffee Connoisseur’ (no typo) with Peter, talking about his trip to the US and my tour around SE Asia while watching the pictures. Just sitting down for an hour and chatting was fun. But once again it was saying goodbye to someone, which isn’t really fun.

1700
Going back to the hostel to get my luggage and head towards the airport. Sadly enough this was the last picture since I got kind of nervous when heading to the airport. Plus I was very sweaty and gross, because the last day in Singapore was really hot.

All in all, the flight went ok. Transferring in Zurich was cold and it’s going to take some time to get adapted to the cold again. I lost 4kg during my stay and I think that’s all fat that I am going to miss when it isn’t there anymore to keep me warm. My new jacket has proven its worth already though .

It’s been a while since the last update on this page. Two (mutually exclusive) things are to blame: school and vacation. School is getting hard work nowadays, with 4 midterms this week and 2 projects starting next week. Plus the usual deadlines of assignments and tutorials. I think I’m working harder in Singapore than in Holland, even though I’m taking less courses.

Luckily we had a break last week. Recess week lead me together with 5 of my friends I met here in Singapore, to go to Bali. A place Dutch people normally only visit during their honeymoon, but since it tickets were only around 70 euros and hotel/food/daily life in Indonesia costs really little, although you have to pay millions of Rupiahs (yay hyperinflation), we decided to go there. So after finishing one last proposal for a course on Friday, we went to Bali on Saturday.

Bali

We had a hotel with swimming pool and breakfast, for a whopping 7 USD a night. It’s situated in the most touristy place on Bali: Kuta. You couldn’t go out without random Indonesians yelling obscenities like “transport?”, “rent motorbike?”, “buy t-shirt?”, “buy another t-shirt?”, “braid your hair?” and stuff like that, which was quite annoying. At night, the t-shirts changes into weed that smells like oregano and the braided hair changes into boom-boom. A dodgy place is what it is!

[singlepic id=4 w=320 h=240 float=left]Since we left Singapore to avoid a crowd and overstimulation, the first days in Kuta weren’t really the way to go. We left for a monkey forest on the first day, which was nice. But the second day already, we left to the north part of the island to a town called Lovina. Being the heroes that we are, we rented two motorcycles (proper ones! Honda Tigers! 200cc, monocylinder, 16.7HP, full manual gearbox and fugly helmets) and a map and tried getting up north, where the other 4 went by car. The only thing we needed to do is lie about drivers licenses and sign some stuff about how we accepted full responsibility in case of a crash.

Lovina

[singlepic id=14 w=320 h=240 float=right]Since I don’t actually have a drivers license, only a couple of hours going back and forth deserted roads on my dad’s bike, I was quite nervous. Needless to say, the start wasn’t the best ever. I got separated from my bikebuddy after about 10k and from that point on got completely lost. I was scared, but getting more confident with the bike, so we decided to meet up at our hotel and go for the second attempt.

And from that point on the day was made out of pure awesomeness. Being at ease enough to look into my rear view mirrors, we managed to leave the ridiculous traffic between Kuta and the capital Den Pasar behind us without getting separated again. We took breaks quite a lot, because of dehydration and fatigue. And eventually, since we had to cross some mountains, just to take pictures and admire the view. It’s a bit ridiculous that I can rent a bike without a license and see the beauty of the Balinese mainland, where the girls are beautiful, the view is breathtaking and the food is delicious. So that was one of the best experiences that trip I think.

After meeting up with the 4 others, we of course had only stories of bravery to tell and confidently started calculating our average speed which ended up around 15km/h… And that’s where the bravery stopped. We enjoyed our stay in Lovina with the obligatory eating and drinking, listening to coverbands and drinking, hanging around in our hotel rooms and drinking and sleeping and not drinking. We rented a boat to watch the dolphins the morning after.

I don’t really like dolphins, but in fact, when you see them swimming around and jumping and floating and what not, they are actually majestic sea creatures. I hate myself for liking it, but the majesticness was awesome! I didn’t bring a camera, since the boats were a bit dodgy, but I should’ve. Better luck next time.

[singlepic id=18 w=320 h=240 float=left]Since we didn’t want to drive into Den Pasar in the dark, we left for Kuta quite early. One stop at the Gitgit waterfalls, which were nice, and of we were. Same trip, but about 3 times as fast. Not as many breaks, since this time we actually knew the road and a bit faster, since we had been practicing riding bikes. We had heard stories about corrupt police stopping and fining/forcing to be bribed by tourists, so we half conveniently mistook the stop signs they gave for waving and half missed the stop signs. We did have the fastest bikes on the island, so no police chases whatsoever. It was easier for them to stop tourists on slower bikes. Awesome! Illegal driving _and_ not being fined.

Surfing

[singlepic id=26 w=320 h=240 float=right]The rest of the days we spent in Kuta. A bit of surfing, a bit of tanning, a bit of eating, a bit of drinking and all good fun. Surfing was hard to start with, since I don’t really like water. But after inhaling bucketloads of salt water, you learn to appreciate wiping out and being drowningish. Plus actually getting up on a wave and riding to the beach on your 8ft longboard is an awesome sensation. Yep, once again I was getting my rocks of riding. No asphalt this time, but water. And hey, water is nothing but liquid snow, so it’s basically snowboarding isn’t it?

One of the people I met here is here on a Rotary scholarship, so she knows all kinds of fancy people. One of which being the owner of the Ripcurl surfschool, who offered us free lessons. We didn’t even consider going there in the first place, with their prices starting from 60USD, but this was an offer we couldn’t refuse. One downside on the story: we had to wear helmets that lessons. One upside on the story: “Mark Grams” (I think that’s me) has a certificate that he can use the words gnarly, ripped and stoked.

In total we surfed for around 4 halves of a day and I kind of got the hang of it. But I still prefer wearing Burton over Billabong.

Singapore vs Bali

[singlepic id=25 w=320 h=240 float=left]Bali is actually just as crowded as Singapore. Just imagine a climate a few degrees hotter, replace all Chinese people with Australians. Replace all Chinese food with Nasi Padang. Replace staring Indian people with Indonesian people that offer shit you don’t need. And that’s Bali for you. It’s been awesome since it wasn’t as uptight as Singapore though. As opposed to Singapore, drinking was cheaper than in Holland, there’s no rules on crossing the road and you can spit everywhere you want. So we all got our compensatory relaxing in and are now able to study again!

We had one night of partying, since we had to celebrate two birthdays. We started off with eating cake, proceeded to a joint as stripclub as you can get without being dodgy and from there on it went downhill. What happens on Bali, stays on Bali.

POLITIXZ

Corrupt police sucks!

School

After recess comes midterms. I had one horribly difficult midterm and one really easy. I have two more tomorrow, I think they will be easy. Furthermore, two projects started. One is going to be on predicting stock prices based on information on companies derived from annual reports (so not me…) and one has its proposal pending on stabilizing videos we shot on the bikes on Bali. Using the perception topic of optical flow to do stuff is more me. It’s both going to be hard work, but I think I’ll like it.

The rest of this semester will not really be a lot of traveling anymore. I need to watch my money a little bit, plus I need to spend more and more time on school. And on top of that, Mrs. Grams is coming to Singapore on the 5th of december (64 days, I’m counting them…) for a month, which will surely lead to a bit more of travelage.

_{I should’ve probably broken this up into two posts, but whatever…}

_{Wat is het met deze neusophalende mensen? ik word para van al die mensen die naast me schudden met hun been en om de 5 seconden hun neus ophalen en gestresst kuchen. Ik voel me ook niet tof op een tentamen, maar ga ik geluid maken? bah bah!}