The search for the inner I

This post comes a bit earlier than originally anticipated, partly due to the fact that my impressions of Tibet are still very strong, and partly due to the strike in Kathmandu, opposing the Kings measures in Nepal, which forces us to stay in the city for a few days longer, not good to travel when demonstrations are planned, especially since there have been pretty fierce retaliations by the King's military before.


One for the engineering nerd in me... solar power: tea kettle heater!

The last 15 days i have spent on a semi-guided tour around Tibet and into Nepal, following the friendship highway.... Semi-guided mainly due to the fact that China is milking the Tibet Cow as much as it can, and only guided tours through Tibet are allowed, with many permits which are cheap for our standards, but still too expensive compared to the previous travel budget we had.....
After Wulumuqi we flew to Chengdu and organised a trip which would take us to Lhasa by plane, spending 6 days acclimatizing to the altitude change (3700 meters over sea level, or appx. 12000 feet...) then travelling onwards with guide and driver in a Toyota landcruiser to Nepal.

Roger standing in front of the potala palace....

Once arrived in Lhasa we did acclimatize for 6 days really, we spent the first four days walking around the beautiful old town (the part the Chinese did not spoil with their architecture), hang out in cafes drinking yak butter tea (which 99% of all non-tibetans despise but I somehow really like, call me an oddball), writing postcards and doing a little bit of trekking gear shopping, to be used in Nepal on our 20 day trek.... During this time not much else happened, so after the second day my hyperactive nature kicked in and I had to climb some mountains, as Manfred was not silly enough to join me i walked up two 4000+ meter mountaintops, and spent some time reading books between the prayer flags which span most tibetan mountains... really nice...

No words necessary....

After the 4th day we started by visiting the Worlds most famous monastery, the Potala Palace in Lahsa where 12 of the 14 Dalai Lamas are buried in beautiful stupas which are covered by up to 200 kg of gold per stupa, and decorated with immensley beautiful jewelry. The potala palace is gigantic, once had roomed 7000 monks before the cultural revolution, before the Dalai Lama had to flee to India. After visiting the palace, we visited 3 more great monestaries in Tibet, all with a guide that is active buddhist and that gave us a good insight into the buddhist tradition and way of living...

After the 6th day we rose early and started our 4WD trip to Kathmandu, which would last 7 days... we first passed 3 mountainpasses of which 2 were over 5000 meters (16.500 feet), and rested on a beautiful mountain lake, admiring the tibetan landscape.... After three days visiting further monasteries along the way we went onwards towards Rongbuk monastery (worlds highest monastery at 5000 meters) and the Mount Everest basecamp, just 5 miles up the road....

Scary driving manuevers got us there, not before getting stuck a few times...

Tibetan prayer flags.. always an inspiration
Unfortunately, I did get my deserved ratio of Travellers Diarreha that almost everyone gets here and there when travelling in 3rd world countries... but getting it at 5000m elevation with temperatures ranging from freezing to lets not go there.... this was no walk in the park.

Mount Everest and a Yak in the way...

Let me quickly tell you about bathrooms in

Tibet (really just citing the average out there)....
-Imagine the worst squat toilet at train stations you have EVER seen in france or italy..
-Multiply by 10
-Remove the top of the building, add freezing temperatures and high winds...
-Reduce the wall height to 60 cm (with surrounding buildings much higher so everyone can watch the foreigner suffer)
-Remove all doors
-Add smell to that equation
-Much, MUCH smell
I do have a tendency to exaggerate but not on this one, trust me...


Anyhow, no complaints here, that belongs to it as much as actually being able to SEE mount everest when you have to go Nr.2, YEEEHAAW!!

To round up that trip, we did get to the everest base camp without a cloud in-sight, it was beautiful really, very cold but amazing.... sleeping at 5200 meters above sea level does not allow you to sleep much (I think i slept most of us with no more than 3 hours that night), so we descended the next day to "only" 4200 meters, where sleep came easier....

Now i am in Kathmandu, about to leave for a 20 day trek around the Annapurna mountain range, a trek of pretty epic proportions, 200-220 miles, about 10000 meters of elevation changes, and which will take us up to 5416 meters at highest altitude.... bring it on!

Wulumuqi! (yeah, you d like to know what that means right?)

I am about to leave for the biggest, most exciting adventure of this trip so far, that will take me to Tibet, starting in Lhasa, travelling with a 4WD throught the Tibetan Highlands via the Friendship Highway
The last three weeks in china took me around regions sparsely populated and visited by very few foreginers. The northwestern regions of Gansu and Xinxiang, which are about evenly populated by Han chinese and Uighur people. Leaving Chengdu, i took a 22 h train to Xian, where the word famous terracota warrier army is situated.
However gave that a miss as i had seen it in 98' when I travelled the north with my ex-wife Theresa, but met up with Manfred and Francesca to continue our travels together.
After a night of good sleep (the 22h in a sleeper train do not qualify as quality rest time, the compartments are nice, but the chinese snore louder than canadian woodworkers), we took another 33 h train to Dunhuang.

Some city wall...

Random friendly locals wanting to take a picture of the weird, bearded foreigner

The train ride was much more beautiful, I like the north better, even though its sparser in terms of vegetations, the changing colors of the deserts and mountain ranges are super impressive! Thirty-three hours of constant train riding (maybe two times 30 minutes to strech the legs at a larger train station) is no picnic for the faint-hearted traveller, but with books, games (even though Manfred and Francesca do not want to play!), and a couple of interesting tourists such as the canadian guy that I chatted to for many hours about philosophy and philantropy.

The camel on the camel's back

Crescent Moon lake nestled between two large sand dunes...

Sand dune sledge race!

In Dunhuang, the lush green regions ofchina give way to sand dunes, mountain-tops covered with snow and deserts of all kinds (sand, rock, dirt)...
After a bit of a fallout wiht Francesca (gosh is she complicated, close minded and terribly boring), Manfred and I went off by ourselves for a day and decided to play real Tourist just that one time.... we rode a camel!! , and also surfed down the sand dunes on a boogie board, causing massive sand deposits all over my body which seemed to last for days to clean out... but boy was that fun! There was like a bit of a fair between dunes with tours, camel riding and boogieboarding down dunes, plus we rented a bike and explored the whole area which was much more fun than taking a taxi.

The real reason to go to dunhuan was naturally not the camels and sandunes, but the word famous 1000 buddha (Ma-Gu) caves, which were built around the time the silk-route was flourishing. Over about 1200 years, new caves were constantly added by rich and poor buddhists, adding up to 750 caves that can be visited today!!! Surprisingly most of them survived the cultural revolution, it is unclear why, the very decentralized location, or maybe they were hidden.... We spent many hours there and looked at a good two dozen caves and were astonished by how wellthese amazing caves were conserved... clearly because after the English, French, Russians and Japanese explorers stole most of the valuable goods, deporting them to their museums, the chinese ended up closing the caves again for a long time, thus no sunlight could destroy the thousands of wall paintings and buddha statues....

After Dunhuang, the real hardcore travelling started, taking bus, overnight train and overnight bus in a row. We wanted to make it to Kashgar in one step, but even with good travel organisation, one can not avoid the MASSES of people travelling in china. Coincidentally, October 1st and a week thereafter, several hundred million people were planning to return home to see their families due to a big national holiday....

We started off by taking a beater bus and then tracking down one last 1st class compartment from Dunhuang to Korla, about halfway to Kashgar, where we intended to go. There we did not know what expected us, no city for tourists.. in fact noone had heard of it, and the fact that its not in the lonely planet speaks books of how unimportant it is to tourism..... Well we got there fortunately in the morning, and after talking to about 75 different random people on the street I did what I always do... statistics.... see most people tell you their best guess, and they never say no, its supposed to be unpolite.. so deducing the correct information can be tricky...

After a bit of searching and constant asking (it helps the conversational chinese so it really is a win-win situation) we found the bus depot and one bus that claimed it would go the 600 miles or so to Kashgar..... "only" 16h.... yeah, right... and i can fly. These are very common things to get used to when travelling, why tell the truth when you can make it sound better... not that we have a problem with that, whether it takes 16 or 30 hours, we need to get there, so lets hop in....


The bus was half empty (or almost empty) when we left the station, yeehaa, would we have a row of seats all to ourselves until we reached Kashgar? Hehehe, here is a funny one... buses have to charge passengers an added tax (like 20 cents) when in a bus station, so its a bit cheaper to track down the bus along the route, even if for a 600mile ride that means after 0.25 miles... so there were hordes of people (mostly sheperds with a LOT of livestock) waiting along the road to track down the bus... cheaper, but with the risk of the bus blowing by.... well this one didnt, and stocked up about 20 of the smelliest men plus chickens, goats, whatever you can herd... in the bus. So we ended up squeezed into the back, for 28h (16h plus the time they did not account that is needed driving through completely rutted river beds, and fix a broken bus by pounding on something at the bottom with a metal object for hours during the middle of the night when we tried to sleep. We got there, not though before we saw the most amazing and scary thing during the first 5 months of travelling...... the driver was heavyset to make him a compliment, more like 5ft tall and 300lbs (1m60 and 150kg), and had a seat with shock absorber.... at one time, when we finally were able to get the bus above 60mph, we hit a huge pothole and the driver's seat ended up as a spring, catapulting the driver out of his seat, straight up... somehow he held on to the steering wheel and ended up landing back on his seat... the bus swerved like crazy and we almost tipped over at full speed.... there it goes... Roger's first encounter with Death during traveling #1, with many more to come!

Anyhow, I am exaggerating a bit as usual.... we got to Kashgar finally, the norhwestern most city of China, where in the vicinity of few hundred miles, countries such as Kyrgistan, Kasachstan, Usbekistan, India, Pakistan, Afganistan and Russia lay, and one finds an immense multi-cultural scene, even exaggerated by the worlds biggest Sunday market, where about an additional 50'000 people from the surrounding cities and countries flock into to sell everything from rug to potato, from watch to camel....

Hordes of well dressed men selling grapes at the market...

Spending 3 days in Kashgar, we did nothing much other than eat tons of mutton skewers and enjoy the different kinds of Uighur breads (much like bagels in the states), sit around and watch the people (and being watched too, obviously)... it was traveling at its best... just being part of the city... watching and interacting...

After Kashgar we decided to make our way to Wulumuqi, all the way north, trough travelling the southern silk-route to hotan, and via several busses, cross from there through the taklamakan desert via a 700 km road straight through the desert. We used a sleeper bus, wich is really only slightly more confortable then the small busses, where even 1.60 meter (5ft) chinese suffer, not to talk about my 1.93cm (6ft4), which really gets in the way sometimes i must say.

Colorful vegetable store....

I really enjoyed that part of the trip and was happy to practice my chinese and guide our travel group savely to Wulumuqi....There, in the largest city in the north (3 Mio), we left quickly for Heavenly Lake, where a lake serves as a backdrop for a scenery much like the Swiss mountains...

Colorful Market

We stayed for 2 days and slept in Yurts with Kasak people, enyoing the warm hospitality and food in the cold surroundings, and absolutely stunning views.... it was a great start for acclimatization and getting ready for the Tibetan and Nepali Mountains, with more, much more to come.....

Of Horses and Men...

When I grew up I wanted to be a lot of things (firefighter, spaceman, professional soccer star (i know, how prissy)) and do a lot of things... but riding a horse came about at the end of the spectrum, right around competing in creating the longest apple peel. This I have to say has not changed much in recent years, except maybe that time when Bo Derek was riding around in Bolero, but that s a different story :).
Anyhow, when travelling there are few better ways to explore the surroundings than by foot, as you can really intake the stunning landscape beauties and get to places that cars/busses may not.... however in the pre-tibetan highlands getting very far (high altitude, distance, terrain) is hard, and horseback riding is the best way to explore.
Not being one to shy away from new experiences I changed my mind, and signed up for one.... but how did I get there....
We all got to Chengdu, which we knew was split up town for us... Manfred wanted to go check out Shanghai/Bejing, Manuela had to go home, and Monica wanted to go visit friends, so Vi and I decided to go check out the mountains.... not before we would explore the town though. Chengdu is gigantic...., a 10+ Million City, it sprawls with life and shopping here feels like NY city, especially after the countryside where there was no western influence at all. We spent two days there, visiting the pandas and walking about town. The panda breeding center is the largest in the world and we got to enjoy seeing some young ones play around and even saw some newborns..

Baby Panda's playing around

Roadside hot pepper drying, we are in Sichuan after all!

So after that Vi and I booked a bus trip to SongPan, a small town in the pre-tibetan highlands that offers horseback rides through the mountains, ranging from 2-15 days... two days had to be enough I figured, so that is what we booked.

The ride (bus that is) up there was nice, a new road ensured a fast 5h trip (as opposed to the 16h it was the year before they built the new road), and we found ourselfs in a pretty touristy town, bustling with a few foreginers, more chinese tourists, and good cheap shopping for arts and crafts. The mainly tibetan population is very good with making arts and crafts and the off-season gave way for some nice deals to stock up presents for family and friends when returning home, Manfred being a shopping addict would have loved it up there! Before getting a good night's rest we went and tried some Yak and Beans (Yak is good and a local delicacy!) and then haggled the horseback ride to a ridiculous 10 dollars a day (everyone else paid 15$, not sure if we were that good or the guy just too tired to care), which apart from the horse, each person's guide and his horse, camping and all you can eat, what a deal!

So we left that morning and rode two days through the mountain ranges.... Vi and I were joined by two teenage swedish guys and a dutch couple that had been travelling for over a year alreay!

Six travellers and six guides, twelve horses, .... the first hill of the day was a 3000 foot ascent in very gnarly terrain, and by the time we got up to the hill one of the swedish guy's horse was already dying, it just fell over when we got to the top... not sure if it played dead to lighten the load but the guide decided to let the guy use his horse, walk and have the "dead" horse walk without any load..... at the "hot springs" where we camped, we found out that the "hot springs" were mineral water springs, hardly warmer than your average mountain spring... so bringing the swimsuit was a bit over the top, but oh well. We spent all evening watching the guides put up an extremely sieve-y makeshift tent, cook while smoking 20 cigarettes nonstop, and then ate, drank, and sat by the fire singing songs from our countries... I sang "Vogellisi" and everyone understood about as much as when the tibetans sang their folk songs, sounded a bit like Bejing Opera to me, but the stashed beer (that the tourists brought) and 200-ish proof rubber alcohol (that the tibetans brought) eased the vocal pain a bit....

We be ridin' dirty...

Brrrrr, why am I doing this again?

The night was wet, cold, and filled with intermitten sounds of freight trains moving through (which was actually the men snoring until someone got up and kicked them quiet), and I got up with a heavy head, not looking forward to another day of pain in the @$$, e.g. riding a horse.

Vi and Roger with their borrowed tibetan overcoats...

We made it back allright, and it was certianly an experience I am happy I did, doubtful I will ever become an avid rider though.

Alles hat ein ende nur die Wurst hat zwei...

Nope, ain't gonna start with all ze german now... this is just a funny song and saying in german, all has to have an end only the sausage has two... speaking of two... or three, after two weeks of travelling we all split a little, Vi and I are the last men standing here in Chengdu, Manfred took Manuela to the airport in Shanghai (well they had to fly there, it was about 500 miles away), Monica left, and Vi and I are about to go horseback riding in the mountains... yup, Roger s gonna become a chinese cowboy, yeehaaaw...

So after a good five days in Yangshuo biking through rice patty fields, rock climbing a bit and teaching Manfred his first chinese sentence he could say almost perfectly (san ping pijiu pin de, "three bottles of cold beer please") by constantly having him re-iterate the sentence every time we saw a waitress walk by....


During that time in Yangshuo we all figure out a way to travel together for a good while longer, by slightly adjusting our schedules... and so we all left for Kunming, a bustling city in the highlands of the Yunan province, and a major turnoff point to Lhasa/Tibet. However we were there to hop on a bus headed for Dali, the only other backpacker haven that established itself like Yangshuo a long time ago. Dali, in comparison, is a small town surrounded by big city walls in the pre-tibetan mountains, where one can relax from the otherwise so busy chinese city life.

Three golden pagodas above the roofs of Dali


Climbing the wall of Dali..


During the few days there, we were riding bycicles and reading/relaxing at the very nice backpacker hostel (large wooden building complex with ancient chinese architecture and pirated movies shown every night on a projector, where old and new mix well! ).

After a few days Manfred, Vi and I got restless, while the girls wanted to hang out some more in Dali, so we did an overnight trip to the Tiger Leaping Gorge.... not sure if the smart chinese named this due to some rock formation that looks like a tiger taking a leap, or such that more tourists would come visit the gorge, c'mon, I totally feel cooler now that I have trekked the Tiger Leaping Gorge! Anyhow, the adventure was a hoot, taking a bus out there, staying at the CRAPPIEST hotel in all of china (I swear you do NOT want me to talk about the bathroom situation there), then getting up at 3 am to sneak by the entry gate to save the 7 dollar entry fee, and therefore being there in the middle of the night, taking the wrong (well marked in the daytime) route and basically criss-crossing the valley for hours without ever really finding the right path... ending up at the road ten exhausting hours later and hitching a ride back... hehe, serves the cheap bastards well... but we actually had a lot of fun off the beaten path.....

Vi caught a bit of a surprised gecko...

Back in Dali we immediately took off to Lijian, a UNESCO cultural heritage site with its famous chinese style roofs and narrow cobblestone pathway, one finds himself like in a 40s chinese movie, incredible.

Typical Lijiang pictures, temple-style roofs and cobblestone walkways, with intermitten rivers

There was not much to be done in Lijian other than enjoing the scenery, but we found a hike out to some monestary that was torn down by the Maoists and there encountered a roughly 90 year old man who returned after the distruction and ended up staying there, an interesting trip into the history of china and an unforgettable, eery place.

Yummy, typical lunch noodle soups for about 12 cents...

Bus haiku

China has the fastest growing economy in the world, combine that with roughly one billion people and you get one mean powered machine when it comes to forward progress.... not just that, but with a quasi-totalitarian regime that can invoke just about any law they see fit, and quite modern thinking processes (favoring forward movement over antique ideas), a rapidly changing country is the outcome... DUH, like I just told you something you did not already know... but here is the jist of it in a day's travel.
While we as travellers would love to have the places stay the way they were then (e.g. 1998 for me), it is nice when it comes to transport to see the progress, like building new roads.... when a new road is built in europe, it is usually planned to death before a couple of ten guys start buidling it with big machinery, moving at the speed of glacier towards completion...
In China this seens to go like a fast forward compared to Europe, well if you have to pay someone 0.05$/h vs 25$/h it is a little easier getting 1000's of workers to the site, give em all a hammer and have em hammer away (somehow they all seem to know what to do, even though it looks super chaotic.)
Ok, I am finally getting to the point...
We took the bus from Lijiang to Chengdu (or near there, last part by train)... heard that there is a new road that they are building, and that right now it is really difficult to say how long the trip will take.. partly due to the fact that it is rainy season and partly due to the road building... so it was going to be roughly 300km to get to the train station and it was supposed to take 16h.. what!?! Hmm, I was seriously considering biking... sub 20km per hour sounded ridiculous...
So we took off and rode out of town on a newly built freeway going 80km/h, the tar looked half-past fresh and the chrome rails were shiny like some english butler just polished them... 16 hours my @$$ i though! After about an hour of going at full speed we started seeing a couple of chinese workers cleaning up the road, and the quickly became more numerous, when we started slowing down... well we had covered 100km in less than 1.5h, clearly we d be there in less than 10h... chinese bus times were notoriously unreliable. After a bit of a traffic jam dropping onto the old road, I realized this would be an entirely different trip now. The road was rough, narrow, the potholes were so huge that small childred could have swam in them, every time our bus would go faster than 20 km/h a big bump would send us bobbing up and down... not the most comfortable feeling when your butt is sitting on a wooden plank. Now we saw the extent of chinese roadbuilding... hundreds of workers lined up left and right to the road in distances of just a foot or two and were kneeling down, chiseling away whatever it was they were doing, an impressive sight. This continued on for what seemed like an enternal distance, but certainly a couple of kilometers... amazing. The sheer power of masses, these roads were built in minimal amounts of time.

Our trip ended up taking forever, well not quite, but even longer than they announced, 21h I believe, and which was due to party the bad road conditions, the many "normal" traffic jams, but the two most excruciating 2h delays were caused by a fallen over truck (overloaded) and the ability of the chinese drivers to jam themselves into a one way road from both sided so far that neither south nor north was able to retract to let the other party through (would have cost 5 min and saved 2h)... such is traverllers life... no pain a good book cannot alleviate.

Close but no banana... we almost made it past the stranded turned over truck, but unfortunately the bus ahead of us got stuck sliding into the accident vehicle...

Swiss Miss and Representin Deutschland YO!!

A month on the road, and not regretting it a bit... not like I ever thought I would....
So after a very quick stint in Bangkok Manfred and I flew off to Hong-Kong, beginning our longe Superman S shaped journey through China, if all goes well, South, Shouthwest, East, NorthEast, Northwest...
We met up with Manuela, another aquisition by Manfred's ad in some travel magazing that suggested travelers to join us at various parts of the journey.... do I sound sceptical? Well I am a little less now after we are 1 for 2... Manuela is cool and a good travel companion for our trip through China since she speaks Chinese at about the same level (say 2nd grade with a learning disability and a heavy stutter :) than I do, so we are double tackling those chinese railway stations talking to the girl behind the counter while Manfred blocks off the pushy crowd of anxious and impatient chinese that would very well crawl underneath your legs and pop up in front of you trying to snatch a ticket....

Train Tickets: cheaper than an ice cream at a touristy spot in downtown Zurich and harder to get than a front row seat at the superbowl... you have to literally beg borrow and steal, and without persistance there is always going to the local chinese foregin travel office and paying the extra 50% on the ticket so they will do it... but what about honour?? Seriously... I have spent five months in China in 1998 and therefore must be able to buy a ticket by now... so here is how it goes.... you say blablablabla the ticket lady says "mei you" (we dont have it), you say blablabla and something else the ticket lady says "mei you"... you say it (phrase #1) again and she starts realizing that you will probably just stand there all day saying it again and again.... meanwhile Manfred is too bulky and good of a blocker than any of the chinese can run through and stuff money on the side of the little window to buy tickets.... so she gives up and actually looks up all possibilities and you end up wiht a ticket... AMAZING!! Now I am really not making fun of the Chinese of the system, I love the lines, the haggling, and the train rides themselves.. but nothing there comes easy that s for sure.


HongKong in the smog...

So Hong-Kong was pretty good, but a bit anticlimactic after Krabi.... the good part was we got to fly business since the plane was super empty and china air choose to rather let the five dirty funny looking tourist fly business than the well dressed chinese... weird but hey I did not mind!
After buying an altimeter watch and doing my first substantial amount of haggling in chinese we climbed the Victoria Peak and walked down to Aberdeen and took a Songchow (funny looking boat) for a spin... Manuela joined and we took off to Guangzhou to travel onwards to the famous Guilin/Yangshuo (just like Aberdeen/HongKong yet another scene from the Tomb Raider 2 movie coincidentally!)....

Along the way I had a chance to talk to a 23 year old very pretty chinese girl during the 18h train ride.... hey, brushing up on my chinese can be easy on the eyes! :)
Truly though those long train rides in sleeper compartments are the best way to relax and learn some chinese.... the chinese are very curious about the foregin travellers and not shy at all about asking all kinds of questions once they figured out you speak even just the littlest bit of chinese...
So on that same train we met Vi and Monica, not usually very big deal, we meet plenty of travellers... who would have known that these two germans would follow us (or we them!) for a long time!


Cycling in Yangshuo...


Kormoran fishermen use the birds to get the fish out...

They both are finishing their degree in Germany in Chinese and Business.... funny, now poor (or lucky!) Manfred ended up travelling with four bloody foreginers (Vi is Vietnamese and can slightly pass for chinese at times) that all speak chinese.... needless to say funny situations occur like that when we are in stores or restaurants.... it comes wiht the gigantic advantage that we pay the chinese not tourist price wherever we go, we eat at local inn's and hole in the wall restaurants where they have never seen or spoken english language, and the food is better and much much cheaper.
Monica taking a picture of Vi, Manuela, Manfred and I having "Baozi" for breakfast, a massive amount of vegetable and meat dumplings for 5 cost about 30 cents per person...



Yangshuo is phantastic, set with limestone sharp hills with plenty of vegetation surrounding the Li river they are a perfect backdrop for tourists to relax, rock climb, bike, or take trips up the river by boats... unfortunately this backpacker haven has already been discovered by the mass tourism and now (4 years, later, I was there in 1998 with my ex-wife Theresa) there are a lot more "tourist cafes" and resort style hotels.... however there is still plenty of room for cheapo backpackers like us too....

Bouldering wiht the local climbing guides












Typical limestone formation along Li river

Of Lion King, Babes in Thailand and Genghis Bond

These names, my friends are not just ramblings of the sun-fried, curry overloaded and beer withdrawn mind.. they are what we so eagerly try to tackle and redpoint these days here at raylay bay.... still not understanding me.... ok, let me back up a bit....

Thai fisherman bringing us to the penninsula...
I met Andrea and Jan ten days ago and they have become great friends in no time, particularly Andrea who is the quintessential travel buddy and climbing partner in so many ways... Jan is a bit slow at times but an exceptionally strong climber so we spend a lot of time waiting for him to get ready while climbing a few routes to warm up or just smoking too much... my cigarette throughput has triples since I ve been climbing, due to the fact that everyone here seems to smoke....
Ok, refocusing here to try to tell the story.... Raylay Bay, incredible, an absolute paradise for climbers.... for 50 thai bath (roughly 3 dollars) a night we get our own bungalow and food is no more than a few dollars a day, for fantastic Thai food, incredible.
So this is what we do pretty much every day.... sleep in, get up, have a very tasty "museli", the cambodian girl that takes the breakfast order sure does not know how to spell "muesli" but it sounds so much better that way :)


Lunch: Sticky rice in bamboo canes is the best!


Bored? Well lets bury Roger in the sand... cant climb 24/7

End result...

So a big old muesli with plenty of exotic fruit and soy milk for the sore muscles, then off to explore another climbing area, intermitten lunch from the guy with the bamboo canes filled with sticky rice, a bit more climbing and then laying at the beach with a cold beer, playing guitar or going for a swim.... it can't get much better than that. They don't call Raylay Bay the southeastasian bermuda triangle for nothing... travellers have been planning to spend a few days there and ended up staying there for weeks, months, even years... no joke!

On my way up to Genghis Bond, 6b


Yeah you guys are the coolest...





The climbing here is OUT OF THIS WORLD... a couple of pics will hopefully document that....
I am now climbing in the high 5.11's (or 6c/c+ for the rest of the world) and that gives me a fair amount of choice here, the routes are mostly overhanging (see below Jan in Tidal Wave, 7b), and have "motorcylce holds" but still one needs a fair amount of technical skills placing the feet, and a good chunk of power....

Jan in Tidal Wave, 7b, and plenty of admirers....

Since I have started climbing I have transformed my exceptional tiny upper body into something like a climbers upper body, not too big but fairly muscluar, and I like it.. it does not require powders and shakes, just plenty of training which comes natural here, 5-7h of climbing is no exception. I have been working on Lion King (6c+) all week, and am pretty close to finally redpointing it, these projects are cool, and Lion King is close to our quaters so we can just walk over to go and try it one more time in the evenings...

Lion King (6c+), close to the top, trying to hang the rope...

A week ago, after climbing for about 7 days Jan and I decided to join another austrian climber and do one "big wall" climb, which essentially is only 4-5 pitches here, but still when you are about 300 vertical feet above the beach where everyone is laying out sunbathing or having a coke at the restaurant IMMEDIATELY below, it gives you a bit of a funny feeling... below is a picture Jan shot immediately across the bay from where we climbed.... if that is not the classic Krabi/Raylay climbing picture, nothing is..... there is actually a climbing route (5 pitches) that includes a vertical tube one has to climb through to get to the top... NICE!
Time passed quickly, spent climbing, bouldering, getting 3 dollar massages (1 full hour!) at the beach by thai women with years of experience, nothing better after being sore from all the climbing....


Outch! Nice! Outch! Nice!... repeat...


Jan and I on a 1/2 day multipitch mission to the highest point out there...


View from the top...

Lots of time was spent enjoying the delicious Thai food and hanging out with fellow climbers at the few bars that were open (it was officially raining season, though it barely ever rained during the two full weeks spent there).


Dumbass drunk try (included a couple of concussions) to climb around the table without hitting the floor... yeah right!

Last night came for me, it onward to Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland to travel to the northwestern asian countries, and it was hard to say goodbye.... since I did not want to leave without a big last bang we decided to go to one of the bi-monthly big parties at the other side of the island, where drinks are huuuuge (though they cost almost 10$ they come in gigantic buckets and several straws that everyone can join in!)....
It was a wild night I wont forget so quickly, saying goodbye to all the friends I made, most I will never see again but I am sure Andrea I will, we became great friends in just two weeks time and without her this climbing vacation would have been less than half the fun...


A bucket of MaiTai... hey it was my last night! Jan looks a wee bit drunk.

So I left, took a 20+ h sleeper bus to bangkok where some israeli girls were incredibly obnoxious and would not shut up yapping through the night, thanks to my MP3 player I got some rest anyways looking back at Raylay with a smile, knowing that i had just spent two of my greates weeks in my life there....

North by northwest

So we have left the Cameron Highlands and have made our way through Malaysia travelling North by Northwest to Penang, where we spent a couple of days visiting temples and hanging out at the beach. The highlight was riding around with a rented 80CC scooter all over the island exploring, not necessarily the safest but certainly the most fun!

So we have come as far as Krabi in Thailand, and Manfred and I are about to split up for a couple of weeks, has been planned for a rather long time. Manfred is going onwards to explore the few places in southeast asia he has not visited yet, Cambodia..... not that I am not intrigued by a country so different in its history than the peaceful Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, but it will have to wait a while. My friend Michael Eglin introduced me to rock climbing about 2 years ago and I have gotten quite nuts about it over time, spent several weeks in Italy and France, and many weekends in the Swiss Alps, not to mention the 100s of hours in the climbing gym. What better thing to do than to go to THE climbing mekka in asia, Railay in Krabi.....


Exploring Pulau Lankawi...

The how was harder than the where really, but with a bit of initiative and luck this is how it panned out.... wrote a note on a climbers website asking for climbing partners, hoping to find someone that will bring the heavy rope and quickdraws out there for me to use... funny enough the people that answered were Andrea and Jan from Austria, and Andrea has family in Switzerland so she was able to bring out my rope and draws for me.

It's a Man's World....

I am not a sexist... sorry, I really am not... I was raised to treat men and women equally, have no problem buying tampons for a girlfriend or crying a little when watching poor Leonardo die on that wooden door.... but for a few days now I feel extremely annoyed by the other sex... what happened? Not sure, I started traveling with Francis and then Claudia joined us in Pulau Tioman. The whole thing started becoming a Boy vs. Girl thing, shopping vs. hiking, tanning vs. hanging out in restaurants... carrying around half your belongings vs. traveling with bare minimums... yours to figure out which belongs to who, but I all of a sudden could not wait for Manfred to join the travel. Now this is the skinny in a nutshell... went to Kuala Lumpur and ditched (or got ditched, mutual) the gals the night before Manfred arrived... the thing that I feel bad about is that he was supposed to go traveling with the gals while I will be climbing in Krabi next month, but oh well.

Anyhow, we left KL immediately (he s been there before) and made it up to the highlands. Since then my heat rash has disappeared (it is a moderate 20Celsius here every day) and we have been hiking plenty, spending most evenings drinking beer at the hostel and talking to other travelers... much more my style than spending hours in aisian shopping centers "looking around".

Yesterday we hiked almost 6hours up the longest and steepest trail to the top of the highlands, and followed several miles of tea-plantations down to town, an incredible sight. The humid environment and constant temperature are an ideal ground for these plants and they are cut to the perfect size for the workers to pick the leeves, as seen in the pic. At night they had a big go away party for the cook of the hostel, and man did they! They roasted a big ole pig and we sure took advantage of having burned 1000s of extra calories!


Yum!

Happy Birthday ole Switzerland

So it is 1st of August, I am enjoying my chicken chow mein while drinking a coke and streching my legs, overviewing the beautiful ocean, stereotypical of what swiss do on our national day, ...NOT! Strange, but even though I have only travelled for a week now I feel quite far removed from cell aspiration, cleanroom etching, protein labelling and paper writing... and have settled into what is going to be my life for quite a while.... this does not come without speedbumps.. I seem to be rather unpopular at the moment with my two fellow travellers (picked up another girl through manfred's dorky travel idea... way too long of a story to be told at this time... ), differences in opinions of ways to travel and live are blown out of proportion when you spend 24/7 together.. anyhow, we ll figure it out or split, easy as that..

That s the smaller of two evils, the latter being a hot rash from sudden transfer into tropical environment that keeps me from sleeping EVER... well I think I have slept a few hours in the last few nights but its hard to say...

Anyhow, EOR, we have been exploring the island and done a rather gnarly trek throught to the other side of the island (monkey bay) where we then decided to get a boat ride back...

They even let Frances steer the boat... girl's charm always works...


Still life...


Beach relaxation....

The island is full of wildlife even tough its no more than a few square miles... there are tons of quite annoying (and potentially dangerous) monkeys, and we saw a gigantic geko (think very very elongated cat or dog!) and apparently there are cobras as well though I d rather not see one, figure i have plenty of time chasing down animals that can bite, strangle or eat me alive...