"KSOH", Anne of GG looked at ELVIS who was sitting in the old rocking chair in the house among the gum trees, with lots of plum trees, a sheep or two and a kanguru; "we forgot that it´s Uncle HO´s birthday today!" "Don´t bubble like a HOTPOT, missy missy!", ELVIS replied, "Get a pot of marple sirup, a dozen kiwis, some mangos and the cake from Rockaberry´s - we can take a tuctuc - or even better, we can ask the buffalo soldier to take us down the Green River in this kajak----we´ll face the eye of the bloody irish tiger and everything will be SWEET, EH?"
"Ready teddy?!?", he was shouting and started running down to the river while Anne was struggeling to keep up -whistling like a train passing through Flagstaff, stumbling across and hurting her feet at a piece of the Berlin Wall which forced her to do a little Haka-dance out of pain while thinking: "I don´t like dancing, no sir, no dancing today...or my boobs will kiss my big toes goodnight at the end of the day."

Doesn´t make sense? But then, how to summarize a year of travelling in 3 sentences? After a short stopover in Hong Kong to have a last mango-coconut shake in the place where my addiction began and a last stoll across the ladies-market I made it back to Germany yesterday - definitely the most wired country I´ve come across on my whole trip (everybody speaks german over here).I find myself grinning at every asian-looking face I come across, while I´m trying not to fall back into habits I became accustomed to like labeling my food in the fridge, squatting on a toilet and not flushing the toilet-paper or driving on the left hand side of the road. Anyway, I had a GRAND time seeing some parts of this fantastic planet which wouldn´t have be the same without the wicked, lovely and generous people I met on the way.

After hiking from one beach to the next on the western side of Phuket, I flew to Kuala Lumpur/Malaysia. I did some sightseeing and headed to Melaka, a small town further south. It didn't take long to explore this place, but just as in KL I was lucky to find a great place to stay, with some true "hostel spirit". The mango tree in the backyard contributed quite a few mangos each day while we spend the evenings in the cosy sitting - space playing backgammon. I finally made it to Singapore yersterday, just a short stopover ( without doing shopping!- I think there's nothing you can't get here.) before I head back to HongKong tomorrow.

I did kind of island-hopping the last week, I took a ferry from Krabi to Koh Phi Phi, didn't stay there for to long till I headed back to Krabi, took a bus from the western side of Thailand to the eastern side towards Surat Thani, where I took another ferry to Koh Pha Ngan. As I decided against testing my luck, I didn't take the train down to the border of Malaysia on the eastern side ( I originally wanted to catch the jungle train through Malaysia from the northeastern corner of the country), but headed once more to the western side of Thailand to Phuket, where I spend the last few days, waiting for my flight to Kuala Lumpur.

After another day in Chiang Mai I flew straight to Mandalay (Myanmar). It seemed to be a "flat" country, I walked around in Mandalay in the evening to find something to eat, trying not to stumble in the dirty dark streets ( electricity is rare in Myanmar, most of the time the power is off due to energy restrictions, lucky who has a generator ), finally I made it to a foodstall filled with locals, loud and busy. I shared a blue taxi with some others the next day to explore the ancient cities in the surrounding of Mandalay. We stopped at a snake temple, where they fed and bathed their 3 snakes. Close to it was a monastery full of little novice -nons, they were excited to have visitors, they offered us litle snacks to try and we watched them praying and learning, we took some pics and were quite flatened when a guy arrived on a motorbike with a huge thing wrapped in a blanket behind him - it turned out to be a high tech printer- they printed some of our pics right from our cameras and framed them into plastic for them to remember - just the thing you would expect to happen in a little monastery in Myanmar, right? We took a little ferry to the old city of Inwa, which is surounded by rivers, and over there we got around in a horse-cart to see an old mighty wooden monastery and a watchtower that could almost keep up with the tower in Pisa. ( There my sandal broke again, but unwilling to give up on my forth pair of sandals on this trip that easily, I fixed them with superglue later on ) We had a tea in a local "teahouse", another thing I became addicted to ( why only ramble about food when you can ramble about drinks, too? ), as the tea -served in small cups- consisted off approx. 1/5 of condensed milk - YUMMY! I rented a bicycle to explore the city-centre the next day, we stopped at the home/theaterstage of the famous MoustageBrothers - comedians who are not allowed to perform in their own language or at any events in Myanmar anymore and only perform in english for tourist nowadays, their popularity with tourists kind of keeps them alive and afloat. I decided to take the overnight bus to Bagan- the aisle up to the seats (and higher) and the roof of the old bus was packed with bags and packages of rice, mangos and whatever you could think of, I could hardly believe that this bus would actually move, but they called anybody by the name ( my name was tourist, being the only one with this name on this bus I had no probs to get identyfied by the driver ) to board the bus and we did move- at least till we had made it about 40 k's out of town, where we stopped. Dozing in my seat, I saw someone shifting packages to get to the tool-box. Later on I wondered where all the people were gone- most of them had fled the heat of the bus and were sitting next to the roadside, I realised that we stood there for 2 hours already, so I thought I might as well try my luck to find someone who speaks a little english to find out what's going on. At first nobody seems to be able to understand me, but they seemed to be quite amused, laughing and making jokes about that bloody tourist in their row - in the end a woman with the name ThinThin turned out to speak pretty good english: she told me that we were waiting for some people from Mandalay who would come to check the engine again as the driver/owner was pretty concerned about it because of the huge amount of freight...we sat down on the hot asphalt of the road and talked for about 2 hours about everything we could think off, beginning with the obsession of Myanmar-people with "thanakha" ( kind of yellowish sunprotection / makeup that almost everybody wears - that makes them look like actors in a stage play), about the government, we joked about our great bustrip and after learning as much burmese phrases as I could handle at midnight we compared the few words french we both knew. Well, we started off again at half 1 or 2, doing fine till about 8 o'clock...suddenly the bus got tired and decided to lay down for a nap...we left the street and tipped over..I've been dozing again, all I remember was hearing a long "OOOiii" uttered by someone, I opened my eyes while we were already tipping over, and then the frame of the bus hit he ground - anyway, as I was sitting on the left hand site of a bus that tipped over to the right, I somehow found myself standing upright very fast. Somewhere below me I saw 2 women, one of them ThinThin, between the seats, I pulled them up/out, then I realised that everything was a blur because I had lost my glasses, luckily they hadn't made their way through the whole bus yet and were somewhere nearby, I found my small backpack and my shoes aswell and we climbed out of the front of the bus. Most of the people weren't hurt, just a few scratches and bruises. Some people climbed out the sidewindows and sat on top of the bus in shock and disbelief, some tried to save some freight, that way Teddy made it to the surface eventually, and after answering some questions of a police officer me and ThinThin headed off to the next town to catch another bus to Bagan/Ngaung U. Bagan and surounding is filled with temples and stupas, climbing up on one of the temples you have an amazing view over the flat land filled with them...I cycled from one padoga to the next, lots of people tried to sell me sand paintings, some of them really good ( I resisted nevertheless-ha!) , while the sun burned down on me without mercy. After my bicycle trip I visited ThinThin at work in the market, she invited me into her house and we had a good laugh about our nice busride the day before and the busowner who tried not to cry. Another day, another bus: I went on to Kalaw the next day , where I made a 2-day trek through the surounding hills ( Yes, Myanmar has mountains after all!) , visiting different villages for tea and gosip, most of the people were busy selecting dried tea-leafes and packing them into bags to carry them down to Kalaw the next morning to sell it at the market. We stayed overnight atop a mountain in the house of a nepalese farmer family and stopped at the house of a sharmane (healer) well known in the area the next day, he and some men were sitting in his hut, smoking cigars and chewing betelnut, spitting the red saliva they produced by chewing it through a whole in the floor. I went on to Ngaungshwe, a bigger village in the north of the Inle lake. We took a little boat to explore the lake and it's suroundings, had a look at dozens of old stupas at Indein and jumping cats at a monastery, saw fisherman stirring their boats with their feet while their hands were occupied with nets, some of them collecting algae from the bottom of the lake (to use it as a foundation for new tomato fields). I traded a 20-hour busride down to Yangon for another day at the lake, amazing what distances you can travel within an hour in a plane :o). I had a last day of funny sightseeing in Yangon ( I accidently took someone for a taxidriver that wasn't one, but he took pity on me and drove me around the city for free, pointing out all the sights on the way) before I flew back to Thailand today, first to Bangkok and then straight on to Krabi, didn't take much time, althrough the last flight was almost twice as longer as planned because of the bad weather ( monsoon time ), it's been quite a while since I heard people clap in a plane after a landing.

Heading further north towards Nong Khiaw in a sawngthaew (small pick-up truck with two benches in the back) I realised that I had just made it to the real Laos. Small huts made of wood and bamboo on the hillsides and along the windy mountain road- and Nong Khiaw, where most travelers just stop to change the bus or get a boat further up the river, wasn't much different: just a couple of houses and huts along the river. We found a little restaurant where 2 women were preparing the lunch for the family: LAB ( meat mixed with herbs like mint), papaya salad, herbs, soup and sticky rice. They invited us into their kitchen to see how they prepared the food on the floor, and later on we had the same food as the family. We started to hike east on the road from the town, we walked for about 45 minutes until we got to the only "tourist attraction" in the surrounding: a cave - we kept on walking, and it was pretty amazing to see how far the travelers before us had walked: while the kids in the huts around the cave came toward us, greeted us and asked where we're from, the kids 15 minutes down the road, where most travelers obviously had turned around, were still able to say PEN ( for school) with the well-known suffering look in their eyes. We kept on walking for about 90 minutes and finally reached another village where we saw the kids shout at each other, pointing at us and then they disappeared inside or behind the houses to stare at us from a save distance - finally curiosity won and they followed us with a few meters distance giggling through the whole village, we greated the women who were sitting outside their huts and they stared at us before they managed a smile and one woman greeted us with "Sabadee falang". It was getting late, so we turned around and walked through the village again, the kids coming closer this time as they wanted to have a closer look at the displays of our cameras - the unexpected encounters are often the most authentic ones. It was quite a walk back, we made it to our hut way after sunset, but it was certainly worth it. A whole day of beeing in transit brought me to Luang Nam Tha and I headed on to Muang Sing the next day.I walked down the main street (not that there are many) of Muang Sing, I didn’t get far till women of a minority tribe, who were roaming the place looking for tourists, located me as their target ( it seemed that I’ve been the only westerner in this street at this time ) and offered me hats and bracelets- in their open hands you could see small packages of Opium shining through the uplined bracelets. We did some trekking through the surrounding hillsides the next day, we visited villages of the Akha & Hmong minority tribes which were almost unspoiled by tourists – definitely the best encounter with minorities in asia so far. Some of the older woman had black teeth from chewing betel nut, and although we saw many women in the villages we could hardly locate any men ( sleeping after smoking to much opium?) ,we resisted ( after being shouted at ) to get out our cameras most of the time and were rewarded with unforgettable impressions and scenes of their daily life. A doctor was visiting one of the Akha- villages, which was interesting to witness. We had a delicious lunch in a small covered place between two fields, our guide had brought yummy lao- food cooked by his wife and wrapped in huge leafes: sticky rice, steamed vege’s, lab, omelette and in addition baked or deep-fried bananas and crusty, dried beef which he had bought at the morning market in Muang Sing earlier (Oh my god, I’m rambling about food again!). Althrough we felt more like having a nap after that meal, we kept on walking. Many of the surrounding hillsides were just cleared of their natural vegetation to become fields, leaving only some burned stumps where used to be trees. When we left the last village some kids just returned on the back of water – buffallos. I took a private shuttle early in the morning of the next day back to Luang Nam Tha to catch the morning bus down to HuayXia next to the border of Thailand. As I got my ticket fairly early I was lucky to get one of the “regular” seats right at the back of the bus, I could even stretch out my legs a little, who would let this luxury be spoiled by having the only motion- sick woman sitting next to you: as this was the second time in a row, I was pretty prepared: after she had filled everything she had brought along I handled over my spare plastic bags which she thankfully filled as well while the bus slowly rolled downhill around another corner. The skinny old guy on my right leaned out the window: sniffing – he turned to me, we looked at each other and gestured at our noses to make sure that we smelled it both: must have been the brakes, not surprising with this mass of people in the bus, more surprising that we had made it up the hill in the first hand, while I was still wondering if all the traveling guides had something like this in mind while writing about getting into touch and interact with the locals….. I could ramble on about bus trips forever …. – thanks to the new highway we made it to our destination in the mid-afternoon, still in time to cross the border to Thailand by crossing a river- which I did. I got a shuttle-van to Chiang Mai in the evening, where I spread out over a whole row of seats while JonBonJovi and Extreme lulled me into sleep with some rock ballads and made unmistakable clear that I’m back to Thailand….how I missed Laos!!!! . I roamed aimlessly through the streets of central- ChiangMai the next day, passing loads of temples and even more travel agencies which offered “everything in one day”- tours: 40 min this, 15 min that, just reading made you sweat already, I guess I’ve been still exhausted from the day before. I fled to the countyside - a village called Pai - the next day, which you could describe as an INTERNATIONAL hideout, a small place at a river nestled between mountains, the main street consists of internet-cafes and restaurants where you can get everything you could possibly wish: thaifood, pizza & pasta, tapas, steaks, humus, even “Schnitzel”. Still very relaxing to sleep in a little bamboo hut next too the river. From there I made a day trip to Mae Hong Son, there’s a village with Kayan-people there, which are better known as “giraffe- women”. And unfortunally it’s really like visiting animals in a zoo: as there are only about 100 people with this very unique custom which came from Burma to Thailand recently as refugees – they were settled down in set-up villages which can be visited for an entrance fee. I just returned to Chiang Mai today, got a bicycle which makes it much faster ( and more “adventurous”) to get around.

I walked to the bus station in the early morning, got some sticky rice and 3 pork sticks from one of the "mobile" food stalls and jumped on a bus up to Nong Khai, a small relaxed town next to the Lao border. I crossed the border the next day and made it to the capital of Laos-the Land of a Million Elephants: Vientiane. Tried to relax with the obligatory beerlao after a lot of traveling lately ( what a stupid comment) and did some sightseeing, of course, cycled to the huge golden holy stupa - the most famous landmark of Laos, walked across the morning market and saw more temples ( unbelievable that I can still manage to look at more temples). I took a bus to Luang Prabang, passing small huts made of wood and bamboo at the hillsides next to the winding road. Luang Prabang is an amazing place: a pretty small town nestled between mountains and almost surounded by rivers - lots of golden temples and french colonial architecture using a lot of wood which gives this place a special flair. Althrough loved by tourists, this town seems to maintain a laid-back atmosphere where time seems to tick away very slowly. You just float through the small streets of the town, passing dozens of temples with hundreds of monks and a street market where Hmong people sell beautifully woven and embroidered blankets and clothing. I went to the elefant park project to do some elefant riding and kajaked down a river later on, which was very relaxing: just take in the beautiful landscape, paddling around some water buffallos which looked at us with big eyes and somehow managed to keep their heads above waterlevel while chewing in slow-motion....some kids playing in the shallow water while we made our way through some little rapids. At 5am today only a small strip of light suggested where the sun would rise later on, I started to walk towards the centre of town through empty streets, the town still seemed to sleep, I sat down at the riverside and watched the first locals open their foodstalls, a few minutes later a long row of monks in saffron robes slowly passed by to collect the morning alms ( rice contributed from kneeling women), I walked a few streets and found the street market, where locals were about to sell all kind of food: fresh vegetables like sweet potato, pumkin, chilli, cucumber and herbs; fruits like rambutan and loads of mandarines, fresh meat - even living frogs, tied with one leg to a bamboo stick. Later I saw some more monks hurry down the streets, about to finish the collection of the morning alms, at 6 sharp loads of tourists with their cameras seemed to pop up at the corners of the streets to get a good shot of them. I went to a waterfall in the afternoon, several pools with cristal clear water to swim in, and not to many people there as it was a little overcast today. Gonna leave this lovely place tomorrow to head further north.