What's up?

It’s 10pm when Toni’s phone rings. “Ed! What’s up?”
Ed is wondering whether Toni would like to join him for a party. She does. I, on the other hand, have my doubts. I’m tired, and not sure what kind of party to expect. Thirty minutes later, Ed and his friends pick us up, and it’s clear that the guys already have had a drink. I get in the car, where a half empty bottle of whisky awaits me. The guys are driving around with a glass in their hands. Drinking and driving, literally. 

I look at Toni, and she agrees on the fact that I should have remained home. I would have felt a lot safer, but I also would have worried about her. We stop halfway to pick up another friend, and I find Toni sitting on my lap in the back of a small car. By now I am getting a bit used to the situation, and seeing that our driver still seems to be sober is also quite comforting. And would I complain with a beautiful girl on my lap??

The party turns out to be an open air birthdayparty for someone we don’t know. People bring their own drinks, and food is provided by the birthdayboy. One of Toni’s friends asks me if I smoke. “No, I don’t. Sorry for being boring. Get me a f**king glass of that whisky, brother!”
The whisky is good, as is the music. The DJ pumps up the volume, and I wonder when the police will arrive to end this gig. But no, people are very tolerant in Botswana and police is not wanted here. Culture shock!

Toni is working tomorrow, so we leave the party shortly after midnight and are given a ride home by somebody we don’t know. People help each other without asking questions, that’s the way it works.

When I’m in bed, the music from another party two blocks down fills my room.  I don’t even think about calling the cops. I can’t help but smile about what happened tonight. Somebody is making me happy in Francistown. Thank you, Toni!

Surfer's Paradise

Couchsurfing is not only a nice way of travelling on a low budget and breaking the habit of checking in and out of hostels, hotels and lodges. More than that it gives you the opportunity to look into people’s houses, to look into people’s lives.
Toni is an experienced host. She’s seen people pass from all over the world and the references on her profile made me quite sure about the request I sent her.

I was happily accepted and warmly welcomed into her house. The first day is always a bit odd. It’s like two dogs that meet for the first time and start sniffing on each other.
We went out for dinner, chatted time away and as the days pass, we are getting to know each other better.

When I encounter a small problem to find a bus to get to my next destination, I humbly ask her if I can stay another night. “No problem” is the short yet very clear answer. I passed a great time with her, and we had a lot fun, talked and laughed a lot and got to know each other quite well, I think.  Surfing her couch – that in reality is a king size bed – was a great experience.

On the last night of my stay, I pack my bags with a mixed feeling. I’m going to miss this nice person, but I guess it’s time to move on and get to my next destination. We sit outside on her doorstep, enjoying the end of what has been a beautiful evening, while we talk about our plans for the next days. As the conversation goes on, these plans are changing quite rapidly. I’m unpacking again.

The job beside the job.

Sometimes people try to con you, and sometimes they succeed. I got ripped off in India, in spite of taking the good advice of Lonely Planet, who told me only to book a train ticket at the New Delhi train station, on the first floor. But what do you do when those people tell you that all tickets are sold out? You believe them. At least that’s what I did. I decided to send an email to the Ministry of Tourism in Delhi to tell my story, and I have send an email to Rajan Tahim, the guy that set me up and who seems to be running a parallel business while working for an official Indian public service. This is what I had to say to him:

 

Dear mister Tahim,

 

I wanted to inform you that I have written an email to your superiors to complain about your way of working.
I was in Delhi a couple of weeks ago, and I needed to buy a trainticket to Agra. I came to the official booking office, on the first floor of the New Delhi trainstation, where I was told that all tickets for first and second class were sold out. That, of course, is information that I can not check. The ONLY other solution, so I was told, was to hire a private car. I was stupid enough to believe it all, and booked a car that was way too expensive. 9400 rupees (137 Euros) for a ride to Agra is a complete rip off!

Moreover: the first thing the driver told me, was that I could only go to see the Taj Mahal, and no other sites in Agra. This was not what you told me, so I insisted on at least visiting the Red Fort as well.
The car you arranged for me was clearly not an official service. It is very obvious that this car and this driver have no license to do the business or to provide the so called services that you sell. I could only hope that we would not be involved in an accident, because your insurance would never cover any costs for the passengers, since the driver is providing something he is not insured for.

The driver himself was a dirty, very impolite guy, who started asking for a tip five minutes after he picked me up. His English was not good enough to keep a conversation going, and he stopped at least 10 times to buy tobacco to chew on. He didn’t even have the courtesy to fill up the tank before he picked me up, so we had to stop to buy fuel. The toll that needs to be paid was included in the price, so you told me. Well, when we stopped at the toll booth, the driver asked me to pay the toll, which I refused of course. For the next payment he had no change, so he asked me for change. I was – once again – stupid enough to give him some money.
All the way to Agra and back, he never stopped spitting. He opened the door several times, while driving, to spit. This is not only dangerous, but simply disgusting!

It is very clear that you are risking peoples money and peoples lives by doing what you do. If you look into the mirror, and if you would be honest with yourself, you would stop this immediately.

I am travelling around the world, and publishing a blog while travelling. Well, mister Tahim, your name will be in it, and it will not be in a positive way. As a matter of fact, this entire email will be published on the web.

I thought it would only be fair of me to inform you of the fact that your superiors are getting this information too.

Kind regards,

 

David.

I am not naïve, and I assume that mister Tahim will just knod his head and continue his condemnable yet profitable side-job. At least my conscience is cleared now.

The basket.

Porters are machines. That is the only possible conclusion of the day. They get up at an ungodly hour, grab our bags and carry them, strapped around their forehead with a plastic ribbon, to our next destination. When we arrive, exhausted and with painful muscles, they are singing and dancing as if they just had a day off.

Today, though, was not an ordinary day. One of our group members is suffering and struggling to come downhill from Annapurna Base Camp and halfway through the day the inevitable happened. He was not going to be able to make it to the next destination, and thus the porters had to come to the rescue. While I was still stumbling towards our guesthouse, they took off in the opposite direction to pick up the unfortunate. They lifted him in a bamboo basket, strapped it around their forehead as if it were a piece of luggage and transported him downhill, taking turns every ten minutes, but not without jumping, laughing and cheering with 80 kilograms tied to their body. Porters are absolute machines!



 

Up and down.

Three days into the hike to Annapurna Base Camp, the first efforts are taking their toll. It’s obvious that this is not a competition, but some of us are better trained than others. Trying to follow the guys that set the pace is not always a good idea, and you might pay a price for it in the days to follow.

Food is also an issue. One of us is running off into the woods every twenty minutes, because his body doesn’t agree with what he ate.
Age and injuries play a role too. There is no doubt that a man in his sixties is not as fit as a twenty year old athlete.
As for myself, I’m not complaining. Apart from a cramped up belly, I feel quite good. My body is cooperating very well with my brain and does better than expected.

Let’s be clear, this is not a stroll in the park. It’s a hard and heavy trekking in high altitude. You can’t see thin air, but you can certainly feel it above 3000 meters. Breathing is harder and it takes longer to recover from an even minor exercise. Running up a staircase is out of the question, and a simple thing like sleeping is more difficult. It’s as if your nose doesn’t have the capacity to inhale the needed amount of oxygen.

Having said this, I realize that this is only day three out of ten. Four more days uphill before we start descending. And that too is relative. We’re sleeping at 2800 meters today, exactly the same altitude as yesterday, but that doesn’t mean that today’s hike was pancake flat. We climbed to 3240 meters, than dropped to 2600 and again uphill to 3100 meters, walked down again to 2300 before conquering another 500 meters of difference in altitude. And the hardest day is yet to come, according to the reliable source that our guide is.

It only means that I will continue what I’m doing: eat well and sleep well. Spaghetti for lunch and hit the sack around 8pm. I am definitely here to finish it, and let us hope that I will make it to base camp and back safe and sound.
Anyway, if there ‘s one thing I’ve learned from someone who did it before me, it is that everything always works out fine.

The war is over.

It’s been ten days now that I’m taking in Vietnamese cities, sights, sceneries and situations. Ten days amongst the most positive and friendly locals I have ever experienced on a trip. Always helpful, talkative, eager to learn and happy to practice their knowledge of Shakespeare’s language.

There’s only one subject about which I feel avoidance. A topic not taboo but suppressed. Not forgotten but ignored. Important but not anymore.
The Vietnamese war killed hundreds of thousands of people. Millions of lives were destroyed by agent orange, the deadly dioxin sprayed over vast areas by US airplanes. Even today children are born, missing limps or suffering from serious aberrations. Yet nobody speaks a word.

Visiting the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, I asked an eighteen year old girl if her parents and grandparents told her stories about that era. Did she get first hand information from her relatives? The girl left me devastated and speechless when she told me her grandfather was killed and her grandmother raped and murdered by US troops. Her parents’ village was set to fire and only a handful of people, including her daddy and his wife, managed to escape.

Chatting with a university student later that night I repeated my question. The answer was as simple as clear: “It’s the past. We talk about school. About boyfriends and girlfriends. About soccer and badminton. About dresses and shoes, but not about the war.”
Let bygones be bygones.

Vân and Húòng

The scent of exhaust fumes burns my nose when I find myself sitting on the back of a motorbike, driven by a young lady that I just met two hours before.
I’m in Hanoi, capital of Vietnam, and this is by far the most crazy traffic I have ever witnessed. Thousands and thousands of motorbikes and mopeds rule the streets. Thousands and thousands of young people are claiming their spot. Thousands and thousands of girls, boys, man and woman are zigzagging and criss-crossing each other in a constant zooming noise. I close my eyes and hear a million giant killerbees.

Vân has done this before, that is very obvious. She makes her way through this ants nest like you and I would step into an elevator. Vân is a gorgeous girl and a very good friend of my last couchsurfer. Law student, intelligent and funny. Very talkative too, constantly informing me about the building that we’re passing or the square that we’re crossing.
Our escort on the motorbike next to us is also a friend of that same couchsurfer. Húòng is different. Calmer. A little bit more carefull. Less talkative too, but when she says something, she hits the nail on the head. She’s very eager to tell me about her city and her country, and that makes her the best guide I can dream of. She has a natural interest in the history of Vietnam, and she wants to share it. The fact that she can do that while using her English vocabulary makes her even more enthusiastic.

I feel blessed to have met these girls. They’re the best friends one can dream of, and their generosity is hard to describe.
The way they treated me last night left me speechless. I can never thank them enough for the experience they brought to me. I got to know Hanoi and the spirit of Vietnamese people from the inside. That is beyond everything I expected before I stepped out of the airplane.

Spring rolls.

I can’t think of everything, can I?
Yesterday evening, I was sitting in the lobby of the place that I stay at, waiting for my host to come home from work, when I got my eyes on a magazine.

My Thai language knowledge hasn’t reached the 100% mark yet, so all I can do is go through it and have a look at photos and pictures.
I come across an advertisement for spring rolls. Hmmm, delicious. I still had some of those in my freezer when I left home. Whom did I give those to? I’ve emptied my fridge on departure day and gave the content of it to my mother. But that freezer, hmm, I must have overlooked it.

Spring rolls, a filet of Alaskan pollak, a slice of salmon, and half a bag of  curry rice with chicken will be defrosted by now. They will have transformed into the ideal host and residence for all sorts of little creatures.
I’m almost sure that the scent in my apartment has slightly changed since I left.
The salmon may have grown paws and reached the pond of the nature reserve across the street.

I have two options left: either I report this gently in an email, or I send a text message to Belgium, where it ‘s about 6 pm at that moment.
I decide for option number two, and immediately get a reply: “Just did it, and it started to smell nice”

Aaah, mom’s are the best!

Midair feelings.

So here I am, on day one of my trip around our globe. It’s been quite a week, with all kinds of last minute arrangements, a birthday to celebrate and a Vietnamese couchsurfer staying at my place. But all the pieces of the puzzle came nicely together and I am now midair on my way to Doha in Qatar for a stopover and a connecting flight to Bangkok, Thailand.

Am I feeling delighted? Hm, not really. Am I sad? Not at all! It’s something in between, a feeling hard to express in words. I somehow feel similar to other trips I’ve made. The only difference is the duration, right? Am I really on my way for eight months? I just can’t grab it.

All of a sudden, the lack of routine and not having a tight schedule is getting to me. I have no clue what I will be doing tomorrow, except for making my way to my first host.
“We ‘ll see” is a phrase that I use quite often, but this time it is brutal reality and I am somehow afraid of it. The unknown and the unforeseen are awaiting me and I can only hope that those two characters will not hit me too hard.

I am having trouble already to adapt to the right timezone. I guess a direct flight would have been better to set my mind and body in the right zone right away. Well, it’s a low budget thing after all, isn’t it?

As a PS to my previous post, I can officially announce that drunken promises are not kept. At least not by two of my friends…

Ready? Set. Go!

Those are the three words that precede every athletics race. I feel like I just started my own competition, although I am playing this in my own league and according to my own rules. This one is not about winning nor about being as fast as possible.

 

Ready?
Yes. This is my race in a true Olympic spirit: taking part is more important than anything else. I’ve been preparing myself and my environment for two years, and I’m pretty sure that we’re all ready for take-off. Except maybe for one person, but hey, is a mother ever ready to be separated from her child for eight months?

 

Set.
Yes. My legs are itching to start moving and my feet are  ready to take me wherever my heart wants me to go. I’ve set my mind on this trip a long time ago, and I’ve come to the point of no return.
My eyes are overlooking the track ahead and my heads nods approvingly.

 

Go!
Yes. My backpack is ready. Destinations are chosen. Tickets are printed. Today is the big day. A final lunch at my mom’s, and my sister and brother in law will pick me up and drive me to the airport. Let’s go!

 

I can’t help but wonder if those two crazy friends of mine will keep their drunken promise of waving me goodbye at the airport…

 

Lost and found.

On a random Tuesday, I ‘m standing in the canteen at work, ready to have lunch and waiting to be served.
I reach for my wallet to pay the obligatory 70 cents for my soup, and… it’s gone!

No panic. It’s at home, waiting for me on the kitchen table. I ask the kind lady to give me a 70 cent credit until the next day, and forget about this minor incident.

At home, in the evening, I have some bills to pay, start up my computer and surf to the website of my bank. First thing I need is, of course, my debit card. Which is in the wallet on my kitchen table, naturally. And for the second time that day I reach for a thing that isn’t there.
This is the moment that I start to get a bit annoyed and worried. If it’s not here, where did I leave it??

Not only my debit card is in it, but also my ID-card and my credit card.

Slowly I start retracing my steps, to find out that I last used it at the pharmacy just around the corner. So it must be either in my car, or at the pharmacy.
I turned the whole car upside down, walked the way back to the pharmacy, asked the guy behind the counter, but my little purse seems to have vanished.

This is where a slight panic took over. I am leaving the country in less than a month. I will be travelling for 8 months, and how is one to do that without money and ID… No way in the world will a country let me in. I suddenly feel like a sans-papiers in my own country.

I can’t find it, so the only thing I can do is start the official procedure ASAP. This means calling the police to report the loss, and blocking my bank cards.I can see the complete Belgian bureaucracy falling on top of me. I can only hope that I can get everything arranged before I leave.

I go to bed trying to catch a bit of sleep, and at 2:30 am, I wake up with the smartest idea ever.
Whenever I step into my car with my wallet in my hand, there’s this small storage space where I put it. Did I check that? Hmm, don’t think so.
I hop out of bed, jump into the elevator, run to my car and yes, oh yes: there it is. It’s been waiting for me for two days there…

Never overlook the obvious, I guess.

Change

In the streets, walking between a set of oldschool communist apartment blocks, Lada has been replaced by Audi, Skoda had to make room for Lexus and the odd Trabant has vanished completely.

New trams have been introduced (consider yourself lucky if you get to travel on an old communist one) and busses are everywhere. And running on time.

New and modern buildings are raising from a Polish ground zero. Communist times are over. Welcome capitalism, whether you like it or not.
Membership of the European Union, and organizing Euro 2012 have definitely helped a big hand.

For those who don’t like to read, I have to apologize. I could have limited this post to one sentence.
Mc Donalds, KFC and Starbucks have arrived in Gdansk…

Ryanair's special services.

While chatting with my Polish friend I decided very impulsively to take a cheap flight to visit Gdansk, a city in Poland that I really appreciated when passing through it in the summer of 2007.

At Eindhoven airport, I noticed this guy – travelling alone, just like myself – who was nervously walking around and pushing people when queuing up to board the plane. The young man didn’t bother me too much, so I didn’t pay any extra attention to his behavior.

Somehow he managed to get a whole row of seats to himself, but he also managed to get one of the flight attendant’s attention. Why? I still haven’t figured that out.
Anyway, it all didn’t seem that important to me. Until we landed…

You will have seen this before: you’re asked to remain seated until the plane has come to a complete standstill, but everybody starts to open the overhead lockers and a herd of passengers is running to the door, like a dog that’s been stuck in its doghouse for weeks.
When the vehicle stopped completely and everybody was up and ready to jump off, the well known “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking” sounded through the  intercom. We were all asked to take our seats again, and to wait calmly for further instructions.
Four seconds later, both doors of the plane opened and a couple of heavily armed guys took over. Three of them hopped on through the front door, and four other ninja’s seemed to be coming out of the plane’s tail.
They immediately surrounded the guy mentioned above, and the only thing he could do was freeze and show his hands where the ninja’s could see them.

The rest of the crowd was then ordered to leave the plane, and as I stepped through the door, I spotted the airport firefighters truck, blue lights flashing and 4 brave man ready to intervene.

Waiting for my friend to pick me up, I sat down in one of the airport bars, sipping a coffee and reading a book. When I looked up, I saw this same guy walking passed me, carrying his hand luggage and a happy, relieved smile on his face.

Things aren’t always what they seem. Luckily.