Shame on me!

…for never finishing what I started! Oh you poor readers who never got to know what exactly went down on my magnificent trip! It’s been 4 months since I’ve come back so I feel it’s about time to give this story the ending it deserves. A happy one, of course! Here’s my trip, in a fairly large nutshell.

The first 5 weeks I spent in Down Under getting used to the traveling vibe and dodging fornicating youngsters at shitty hostels. Australia. What can I say? It was way more touristy than I had ever expected, but the blame is of course on the route choice. I did the basic East coast (from Cairns to Melbourne) track and let’s just say that track is not off the beaten track… The nature was amazing! There was a time, when I was standing in a rain forest facing a plant that was over 2000 years old (!) when I seriously considered changing my career path 180 degrees and becoming a wild life expert… Can you think of anything more interesting than to study tigers and rain forest and hairy spiders and…? I came to my senses of course when I reached the point of hairy spiders; screw the eco system, those bitches deserve to become extinct!

We had terrible luck with weathers; whenever we visited places that were supposed to be THE ultimate paradise locations, the weather turned out to be awful. But hey, all the more reason to go back one day! My favorite beach location was Byron Bay. It had a cool small town surfer-vibe and although it practically lived for the backpacking culture, it still felt authentic. I heard the people in Byron Bay are fighting against big corporations like McD’s to preserve their “localness”. Sydney and I didn’t really fall in love with each other. It was a great city but for some reason I didn’t connect to it. Could be that I just didn’t spend enough time going through the different suburbs and funky places. But boy did I love Melbourne! It had that cool European artsy cafe-vibe with underground rock gigs.. And I had my first ever couchsurfing experience there! I was happy to be hosted by two amazing girls, Bridie and Josie, who let me sleep on their couch for two days. I seriously couldn’t have hoped for a better first time to lose my CS-virginity! The first thing the girls asked me after meeting me at the tram station was: “I hope you don’t mind, but we kind of used you for an excuse to throw a dinner party and invited some friends over!” (Do I mind?? Is a bean green? Do eagles fly?) Needless to say, I had a great time over some pasta, wine and awesome conversations. Girls, I hope you come to Finland one day so I can pay my dues to you. I will not promise homemade dinner, but all the more wine and even finer conversations <3 I will defnitely go back to OZ one day as I never got to experience the infamous outback… Isn’t that where Hugh Jackman lives anyway?

From Australia it was time to go to New Zealand. Aaah New Zealand… Where do I start?? With the obvious, I guess. If Australia was my holiday fling, New Zealand turned out to be the love of my life. EVERYTHING with me and Aotearoa clicked! Not immediately though. After arriving to Auckland it all seemed a bit of too citylike to me, I was expecting to magically transform into an aristocratic elf with long blonde hair and pointy ears surrounded by lush forests and misty mountains but what I saw was just another big city. But like with all great loves, appearance is not everything. When I came back to Auckland at the end of my 6,5-week trip in NZ I have to say I found places in Auckland that I really, really liked. Big thanks to Ponsonby-region for stealing my money with a) amazing vintage stores and b) cool tattoo shops (I mean, what tattoo?where??).. Which reminds me, New Zealand believe it or not, had just about the coolest vintage shops I’ve ever been to. That one comic-book coat is still haunting me.. Poor baby, didn’t get to come with me to Finland. But back then a 100 euros made all the difference! Another money hole I discovered with my lovely friend Sarah was old book stores. We seriously spent hours wondering around old book stores in Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland in the search of the next literature treasure. And did we read! I read, what I discovered to be THE book for backpackers, Shantaram and although didn’t love it, it created a desire to travel to India. One day, inshallah.

Man, what is there to say about New Zealand? My heart aches just thinking about the beauty of it all. I had the pleasure of making a lot of friends on my bus trip with Stray (which I recommend, by the way, and let me know if you’re interested in going coz I can hook you up with a great discount!)  and the experience was beyond anything I can describe. I discovered myself the other day writing on Stray’s FB page a reply to a girl who was asking where to go in NZ and the list just kept on going. Tongariro, Hahei, Raglan, Wellington, Abel Tasman, Franz Josef, Queenstown, Wanaka, Christchurch, Milford Sound,… And there is still a lot left for me to discover. One of my favorite things on my trip was the road trip me and Sarah did from Queenstown to Milford Sound. We spent the night in a car telling each other horror stories (there is one particular one that still makes the hair on my arms stand up..) and talking about religion and life and death. Needless to say, it was terrific. I was lucky to get such a dear friend from her. I’m still looking forward to that trip to India/South-America/Asia, guuurl!

If you consider visiting the ever-amazing Middle-Earth come to life, don’t hesitate to call me for tips! I got my Lonely Planet covered in scribblings that I’m more than happy to borrow. Be careful though, I might tag along.

Of course I need to share now all the crazy extreme things that I did back in NZ, since it is the capital of extreme sports… Here we go!

5. Rafting down the biggest commercial waterfall in the world in Rotorua! Kia kaha, kia toa, kia manawanui!

4. Cayaking along the Cathedral Cove, THIS is what the Australian paradise locations were supposed to be like!Cayaking in Abel Tasman, the most beautiful national park in the world (that I’m aware of..).

3. Crossing Tongariro alps, nearly 20 km, baby! That’s right, me, trekking happily for 9 hours (occasional throwing up aside..). The track went up to almost 2000 metres, I’m so going to make it up Mt. Everest!!!

2. Skydiving! Jumping from an airplane with the glaciers, snowy mountains and NZ’s highest mountain Mt. Cook beneath you, it will take, your, breath, away. I remember that after my tandem partner opened the parachute I screamed on the top of my voice: “I want your job!!!!!”

1. Bungy jump in Queenstown. 134metres, Nevis Bungy. That’s the closest I’ve ever been to fainting. I can’t tell you how it felt cause I barely remember but next I’m aiming for the world’s highest bungy in Macau. 210 metres. Fuck, I am addicted to adrenaline.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

After running around New Zealand my flight took me to Hong Kong. I must say, the change of scenery from majestic mountains and green, lush forests to skyhigh buildings was not what I needed. I was pretty exhausted from traveling in the bus and constantly changing places, waking up early (I don’t wake up at 6 am when I’m working, why should I on a holiday?) and just general not-standing still. I felt it to be quite a culture shock. On top of it my “hotel” (it was more like a building with a room with a bed…) was somewhere waaaay off the center of the city and there was not a westerner in sight. Nobody spoke a word of English but I managed to get some food from 7/11. I spent 5 days in Hong Kong during which I met up with a school buddy, and my work collegues. I’ve been working for a company for 4 years that has a sister company in HK so it was very nice to get a face on all the e-mails I had been writing to. I did the Buddha-tour and other touristy stuff and in a different time Hong Kong could’ve become my favorite big city in the world. But timing is everything my friend and right now all I needed was to rest. The hectic lifestyle and massive crowds made me all the more exhausted. So I decided to get away from it all and go someplace familiar. Bangkok!

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

On the plane from HK to Bangkok I realized that I really wasn’t in the mood for another big city, so I decided to continue straight from the airport to a serene beach location. I had already been to the west-side with Ao Nang and Phi phi’s and as appealing as it seemed to go to familiar surroundings I decided to try something new. I had a faint memory of people recommending me Koh Chang, and since it didn’t seem (I was proved wrong!! so very wrong) to be that far away from Bangkok, Koh Chang it was! I had huge difficulties in finding a bus that actually goes to Koh Chang, and it would be another looong story how I finally got myself there. But in the end, the bus trip with the locals took hours, I had to spend a night in a small town I can’t remember the name of, take a ferry, and another bus and a taxi to find myself in Lonely beach, which I’d heard to be the most remote and quietest place on the island.

Koh Chang proved to be exactly what I was craving for. It was in the  middle of the jungle with nothing but one proper hotel and mostly bungalows. I stayed there for 2 weeks and those 2 weeks are so far the most zen-like time of my life. I did absolutely nothing. I met amazing people, every night, and engaged myself in the most interesting conversations about global warming, heart ache, family problems, traveling. Some I knew for one night, others I still keep in touch with. If you ever go there, please visit a restaurant called Treehouse. They serve the yummiest food, the place is built on water and you can experience the sunset from the deck while sipping an ice-cold Chang (which I consumed litres of..). And there are a lot of alone-travelers. That’s what I call people who travel alone . So it’s easy to go up to someone and say, hey, you’re alone, I’m alone, do you mind if I eat with you? And you never know how the night ends! Mine ended with a robbery, staying up to see the sun rise with a miniature pig and a cute puppy and talking about indian ashrams and your favorite childhood movies and everything in between.

On Koh Chang I met lots of lovely people, and among them Casper, Peter and Jay-Jay. The result of one afternoon’s hammocking (this is a verb that Casper I think invented and boy, did we do a lot of hammocking in Koh Chang..)was that all of us had been thinking about doing a PLAN, where to go next, but had felt a little too lazy to act on it, so we put our wise sun-burnt heads together and decided to visit Cambodia!

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Aaah Cambodia. My memories are clouded with vomit and shit. Sorry. Mainly because that’s all I did. What’s wrong with sharing one’s intestinal problems on social media? Kay back to biz. So we did Angkor Wat and Siem Reap. Siem Reap, not sure what to say. “Please buy somthing miiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiIIIIIIIIIIISSS!”  The temples of Angkor Wat were amazing of course. Poor Casper had to take 50 pictures of me kissing a Buddha’s face until I was happy with the angle of my leg and the curve on my back hahah.. Women, eh. Whether it was the evil spirit of Buddha having been violated by obnoxious me, something somewhere attacked my intestinal system with the most vicious disease I’ve ever had the pleasure to encounter. The result was, I was hurried to a hospital for an IV and never felt so sick in my life. A word of wisdom, if you can, stay far away from Cambodian hospitals. Not really the happiest place on Earth. I had a cute male nurse and our converations were translated by a mobile dictionary he had on his phone. He also offered to sleep in my room (for protection, I take it?) but I kindly refused. That was all of Cambodia I got to experience and after a week of feeling awful it was time to get away. Casper and I had a serious talk if we should part our ways since it seemed that we only brought each other bad luck. After all, I got robbed while partying with him, his foot got sliced into too while drinking with me, and we both got incredibly sick in Cambodia. So he went on to Vietnam and I decided to get to Bangkok where I would re-consider my options.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

There wasn’t a lot of time left and I had to plan where to go and what to do next quickly. After Cambodia I wasn’t in a happy place and was in a desperate need to be somewhere “safe”. So I decided to go to Bali, where some of my friends (back then they were people I knew, now they are more than  my friends! they are my GOOD friends!) were planning to have a few weeks of holiday In the Bali region of Indonesia.  Bali was.. different from Thailand to say the least. It had more people and small, small alleys making me get lost all the time. People were constantly trying to sell you stuff from “real RayBan’s, miss, I swear!” to any drug you could name. But there was some vibe that I loved. My surfing career came to a great start but grew to frustration and ended with desperation as I met people who had practised it for a year and still didn’t know how to turn the damn board. We visited an amazing small village called Ubud which was one of the highlights of visiting Bali. All in all at Bali it was time to be lazy again, eat well and enjoy the sun. The only thing was that the nature wasn’t quite as amazing as I’d hoped it to be, but then again I didn’t get a chance to visit the Gili islands, which I recon to be breath-taking. Another one for the list, eh! Now to make things more interesting dear karma had decided to bless me with yet another disease to take me to a hospital. I had to fight the doctor to let me go explaining that as much as I trust in my travel insurance, rearranging 4 flights to get me to London on time would not happen. (Another tip: do not spend 48 hours flying if you have a bug in you. Let’s leave it there.)

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Can’t believe my time was seriously running out and it was time to turn my gaze towards Europe and home. But before home there was one more place to go, London!!! My best friend’s husband had his 30th bday and I thought it’d be a perfect occasion to surprise her by flying via London. Everything worked out and she sure was surprised! I will never forget her look when she turned around as I tapped her shoulder. She thought I was a ghost! I gotta say, the hardest part of London was to change my hippie-clothes to smug dresses and heels again.. I got so used to my reggae-outfit! If I’m honest, my harem-pants times twenty with small bells hanging from the waistband are still safe and sound in my wardrobe closet. He he he.

Well, that’s all folks! Can’t believe over 4 months of life could be recapped in just 2705 words. Until next time…