der weg ist das ziel

I realise some people might call this blasphemy, but I want to get away from the beaches right now... I need something to do. Not just sitting around on a beach all day. And watching other tourists completely ignorant of any cultural sensitivity walking around topless or in thongs. Apart from the fact that they are in Southeast Asia, a part of the world where people generally dress more conservatively, a lot of the population on this island (Ko Lanta) are muslim.
We're heading to Krabi tomorrow to drop off our mother at the airport, and then we're going to fly to Kuala Lumpur on the 14th. Fly, because we don't want to change busses in Hat Yai (in southern Thailand), where there's been a lot of trouble; last May there were 7 bombings there...
But we went on a snorkelling trip to Ko Phi Phi, which was great. We saw a porcupine fish and a leopard shark. And I realised that I do really miss diving, but when Luise get's her certification in Thailand in February I'll be able to dive with her :-)

tomorrow we finally leave for koh mak! i am looking forward to the beach A LOT!! finally out of the craziness that is bangkok. i have never seen shopping malls/complexes as gigantic as here. it's celebrate capitalism there...
anyways, i went on a visa run to cambodia last week, 12 hours on a 3rd class train, somewhat uncomfortable. between the thai and cambodian border posts are two huge casinos. for people coming from thailand on weekends...
i probably won't be in touch from ko mak due to high internet prices, so HAPPY NEW YEAR everyone! :-)

I hate airports. I was hoping not to have to deal with them during this trip, but I hadn't factored in bringing people to and picking people up from them... The two hour journey back from the airport to my hostel by public busses was far more enjoyable than finding my way through the airport past starbucks and such to the bus station...
The reason I was going to the airport was Coco going to Kathmandu for 5 days. Her best friend lives there, they hevan't seen each other in years and this was probably the closest (geographically) that they'll be for a while. And now I'm alone in Bangkok for those 5 days. It's very strange being apart from Coco now. We had been together 24/7 for 3 months...
But my hostel has a pool, so all's good ;-)
Anyway, if anyone feels like calling me, here's my thai cell phone number: +66 8 3573 8494.

I wanted to take a cooking course and had found one on an organic farm for one day at an affordable price. We were having lunch and wanted to book the course afterwards, when we saw a poster from a different organic farm that offered a 3 day cooking course with homestay and yoga (colette had been looking into yoga courses here in Chiang Mai). It seemed to good to be true. But we called and the next morning (Monday) we were off to You Sabai / Pun Pun organic farm. And the poster didn't lie, it was fantastic! We learned how to cook lots of yummy dishes and even how to make soymilk from dried soybeans and tofu from the fresh soymilk. It was absolutely delicious. And having a bucket shower in a sarong was also an interesting experience :-)
Now we're back in Chiang Mai, laeving for Bangkok on Sunday.

Coco woke me up in the middle of the night, not being able to sleep, thinking about our plans for southern Laos. The thing is, since we need to be in Bangkok by Dec 10 (Coco is flying to Kathmandu Dec 11 to Dec 16 to visit her best friend Sujata), and since the Lao National Day is Dec 2, which means nobody works (except the police, making sure that no one else is working), as celebration is mandatory (how sad, that a country has to make celebration of its national holiday mandatory...), we would have had only very little time in southern Laos. (by the way, in German these long sentences are considered fancy...) So Coco came up with the idea of going to northern Thailand now, so we can have 2 weeks in southern Laos late Feb/early March next year. This means that I will have to do a visa run to Burma late December, but that should be interesting...
Anyways, so we took the 14:30 Thai-Lao International Bus from Vientiane to Nong Khai, where we caught a Bangkok-headed bus to Udon Thani (we literally jumped onto the moving bus), where we quickly got a tuk tuk to the other bus station, where the Chiang Mai headed buses leave, where the 19:00 bus was about to leave (it was 19:20), and we had to convince the woman selling the tickets that we could pay in dollars, as we only had about 40 baht (what I still had from last Summer in Thailand minus the money for the bus to Udon Thani and the tuk tuk to the other bus station). And then we were off. We arrived in Chiang Mai at 6:30 after a freezing night on an uncomfortable bus (it was so cold I could see my breath...).
Anyways, now we're here and it's a bit strange to be back somewhere I know after 2 1/2 months in Russia, Mongolia, China, Laos...