Fairly Local

Thailand 2.0 - Same Same but Different

Bangkok - Same Procedure as Every Day

This pretty much sums up my experience in Thailand. If you visit this country, I am sure you will be impressed on your first days there - astonishing golden temples, delicious street food and wild parties everywhere. That being said, I’d like to put the emphasis on EVERYWHERE and ALL THE TIME in the case of Thailand. My first impression of this place was truly overwhelming since I had never seen Buddhist Temples like this before and I just loved the food. After a few days however , I actually got a bit tired of it since I established quite the daily schedule: walking around from temple to palace to temple to palace (...), eating Pad Thai (delicious), Pad Krapao (yummy) and Thai Curry (indulgent) for all my meals during the day as well as partying in Khao San Road at night. 

Hanoi - There and Back

After finishing up my exchange semester in Hong Kong, I determined Vietnam to be the first stop on my “journey back to Germany“. I had planned around 10 days here, thinking that I could make it all the way from North Vietnam to South Vietnam...far failed. In the end I only managed to explore the area around Hanoi which, hands down, was a blast. 

Hanoi itself is not much of a sightseeing place to be fair, besides the Old Town, there is nothing much to see besides street vendors popping up and disappearing in a for me unpredictable manner. Taking advantage of them, I had an authentic backpackers’ experience there: burying myself in Vietnam’s  delicious and cheap street food, including Pho, Banh Mi (trust me this is THE substitute for your late night Diner Kebab in Germany) and Bun Cha but also spending late nights partying in my hostel and the hidden underground clubs while being supplied with 20ct beers by the lovely ladies on the streets of Hanoi.

After having my fair share of this backpackers’ life, it was time to delve deeper into the beautiful nature of Vietnam. Here I started with a boat trip through Ha Long Bay, one of the 7 Natural World Wonders. Those impressive rocks towering out of the sea are not only home to cute monkeys but also (obviously) to bars where tourists can work on their ‘sea sickness” for the next day...

A bit more layed back was my time in Sa Pa, which is a village in the mountains from which you can go trekking through the mountains, native villages and rice paddies of North Vietnam. Having a bunch of lovely female guides who made sure we wouldn't slip on the muddy trails, we spent 2 days walking through that amazing environment. If you look at the pictures, you might think I have an obsession with rice paddies so here’s what’s behind it: Yes, I don appreciate rice more than when I came to Asia but No, I am not (yet) so obsessed that I would eat it straight from the paddies. In the case of Sa Pa, it was simply so impressive to see those rice stairs covering each and every mountain slope as far as your eyes could see.

Yogyakarta - The city of haggeling

My legs felt like bags of cement when I woke up inside a little cabin in the mountains at 5am. I was cold, hungry, sleepy and definitely not ready for the day that was about to begin. I had to drive 12h from Semeru to Yogyakarta which was supposed to be the last stop of my backpacking adventure. Nevertheless I managed to drag myself out of bed to the breakfast table where my hiking buddies and I enjoyed our last breakfast together - grilled toast with chocolate and cheese. That probably being the 6th meal within two days where I had to eat toast I was still glad that for once it was actually warm and crunchy. With these raised spirits I jumped onto my bike (luckily I didn’t have to use my legs today in any way after that) and started my long journey.

After arriving exhausted in the evening I still had to find accomodation somehow. I remembered that my host sister in Makassar had told me that it was possible for travellers to sleep in mosques. I thought I’d give it a shot just for checking that off my bucket list and it was not even toooo bad. Except from sleeping on a stone floor and being woken up at 4:30am by the people walking around me to prepare the 5am prayer it was ok-ish and hey - it was for free so who am I to complain?!

Being up so early made it quite difficult to find a breakfast but luckily there’s always some street food sellers that would help me out in situations like that. After that I was wandering through the empty market streets towards the cultural centre of the town where I’d find the Sultan Palace. To my surprise within the 2h I spent there the streets came to life and when I returned to the market I entered a vibrant athmosphere with hundreds of street sellers trying to sell their goods for as much money as possible. My heart started pounding and I dove right in there in the attempt to score some nice deals. I think I did quite well and managed to purchase some cheap souvenirs. That was already the end of my days there since it took so long to go through all the small shops and haggle with the owners about as few as 10ct price differneces.

Semeru - A world above the clouds

After leaving the big city of Surabaya I decided that it was time to get back into nature - so I took my phone and googled “highest mountain on Java”. To my pleasant surprise it was just a few hours of driving with my motorcycle to get there. Obviously I hopped right on it without planning a whole lot before (turned out to be a big mistake but oh well, I’m here for adventure!). On the way I bought some food and drinks which would enable me to spend 2 days out in the wild. My choice fell on oats, some milk, peanutbutter and toast and I didn’t yet know how much I’d wish for a warm meal after finishing that hike... After reaching the foot of the mountain, I had to borrow some camping equipment and while I did that, my fortune decided to be very nice to me: I met two guys from New Zealand and Brazil. Turns out that they were the best hiking buddies I could have wished for. Not only did they probably save me from falling down a cliff at night because I didn’t bring a flashlight but they also brought some diversity into my diet. 

We went together the entire way, only slept 3h in our tents and basically stormed the mountain to witness the view at the top at sunrise. Our legs were about to give up on the last piece (if you’ve ever hiked a volcano then you know it’s definitely no joke wandering through volcano ashes - poor Frodo, now I can totally understand why you needed a carrier for the last piece.) but as soon we reached the pinnacle everything was gone except for that feeling of accomplishment and the amazing sight of an active volcano growling below our feet and spitting out smoke as soon as we reached the crater. 

Speakers’ Night

Language is by far humankind’s most important communication tool. We use it to exchange ideas, share our feelings through it and sometimes we even bring a smile on someone’s face with. We decided that we want to use it to talk about the issues that move us - environment, health and social engagement. That’s why we held a speakers’night on last Monday where we invited experts on these topics (we also proclaimed ourselves experts on social entrepreneurship after we spent the last 5 weeks trying our best to become exactly this) who would then provide guidance, experience and motivation for the listeners.

It’s all about publicity!

After you have a finished product, probably the most important thing to consider is how you can actually get it out there. I mean having a nice product is great and such but if nobody wants to buy it, in our case you’d end up being stuck with about 100 plant pots. Unless you want to start a vegetable plantation that’s not quite the goal you’re aming for so you need to think about advertising your product to the public. 

For us this meant travelling around the city for meeting with partners that helped us to reach out to the people of Makassar. We ended up doing what seemed to be countless presentations in schools (and we’re by far not finished with those!), giving interviews for local newspapers (tomorrow we’ll have another one - wuhuuu!!!) and even doing live talk shows on the radio (after all these nights of little sleep it was probably better to hide our faces...). 

We’ll continue doing so for another week and at the end, we’ll probably have reached a large enough amount of people to call ourselves “succesful”. But what does this term actually mean for us?

I’ve thought a lot about this during the past days because I was not quite sure what the goal of this endeavour actually was for me: Did I want to sell as many of our products as possible? Did I want to learn something for myself? Did I want to teach people about a healthy and green life style?