Island Hopping in Paradise

There is a reason Filipino cuisine never conquered the world. All major global cities and most minor have its assortment of Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Vietnamese restaurants, maybe even a few Malaysian and Cambodian. You rarely hear of a Filipino restaurant – in fact, in all of New York City, only a single one springs to mind. Thus, in a period of six days spent in Manila, I ended up consuming more McDonalds than in 4 years in NYC. All of a sudden, biting into a Big Mac brought out happy memories of a childhood long before taste buds and stomach had evolved to steer me away from the Golden Arches. Manila is not your typical tourist destination, but we enjoyed our time relaxing with Icelandic friends in preparation for the two weeks of island hopping adventures awaiting in Palawan in Western Philippines. At first we flew to Coron in the Northern region of Palawan. We met up with my Swedish friend Wictor, who was quick to make fun of our Western style dinner selections, while he proceeded to order local, authentic grilled chicken. Nine days later, after 24 hours of unintterruped vomiting and a night spent hugging our hostel toilet, Wictor was a defeated man and unable to even look at a grilled squid. His final Filippino meal was a pizza. Luckily, in the days prior to his day of misfortune, Palawan had proven to be quite the place that made me this happy: I won’t bore you with too much detail and instead let the pictures do the talking, but basically we flew into Coron, think Mordor meats Neverland, where we spent three or four days renting small bangkas (boats) and driving around stunning lagoons and snorkeling areas. Besides a minor mishap when somehow the misconstructed Filipino boat I was paddling together with Oskar Fulvio decided to take in water and sink, and Oskar Fulvio had to be paddled to safety by the local park guard, things were pretty great. Next we were heading to El Nido, the tourist hub of the region, but instead of jumping on the 8 hour straight boat ride, we booked an island hopping tour that stopped at beaches and snorkeling areas in between and halted for 3 nights at a tented paradise resort on the island of Ginto, which we used as base for further island exploration. This area between the more popular Coron and El Nido was fantastic and completely void of other tourists. It is also known to have some of the clearest water in the world and we experienced some fantastic snorkeling. Finally, we reached El Nido…the place that 5 years ago was what Thailand was 25 years ago. Surrounded by an archipelago of breathtaking islands with dramatic cliffs and (not so) hidden lagoons. So more island hopping on the agenda obviously. No longer a secret from the tourist masses, we had to be a little clever and I think we did quite well in avoiding the packs of orange life vests carrying lagoon clogging Asian tourists. After almost a whole month in the Philippines, we had to say goodbye to Southeast Asia and the third world as we were moving onwards to Australia. No more island hopping adventures, no more meals under $5 and no more locals with random t-shirts carrying important messages such as “Voted most likely to wear this shirt” or “I´m the loud one.” Palawan was an absolute highlight and a worthy end to the first half of our six month trip. But we were also looking forward to the comforts of the western world, and to eating lots of meatpies. So far I think I have had 17.

Manila night tour

Manila greets us with an hour long taxi line, not because there were so many people but rather for the lack of taxis offered. There seem to be two lines people are getting in, one is the official line and the other where we see people being dropped off and tired travellers grabbing the recently empty ones. I line up in the official line (because we all know I am no rule breaker) and Magnus goes for the drop-off one (because… you know). Taxis are just flying in for the taxi line but the poor official line gets one every 20 minutes or so. When the clock is approaching 9pm we still haven't gotten one and are getting pretty tired from travelling from Boracay at 2:45 pm. We had booked a hotel 3km away and could not wait to crash on a bed with AC and a TV. I was next in line for the official rule-following line when Magnus catches a cab in the rule-breaking line. I reluctantly leave my spot and we jump in a cab that is indeed official and has a meter. We give the taxi driver our address and to our surprise he suggests not using the meter and offers us to pay just 500 pesos instead. Warning bells start ringing in my rule-minded head but they are ignored due to fatigue. We order the taxi driver to turn on the meter and take us there, after all it is only 3km away. The taxi driver says something in Filipino and English about it being far away and we say no, it is close by. And so it goes for the first 10km, the taxi driver rumbling something about traffic and far away and us looking at each other like, jeez another taxi driver out to get us. Those second warning bells were also ignored and on we went for another hour before I had the brilliant idea of turning on RunKeeper to see if we were just being driven in circles. Of course we had no map and no data on our phones, all we could do was to put our trust in the kind heart of the angry taxi driver. RunKeeper showed that we were not being driven in circles but in almost a straight line away from the airport. When two hours had passed Magnus and his rule-breaking mind had enough, he ordered the taxi driver to stop and ask another taxi driver where the hotel was. The angry taxi driver agreed and through the window I can see Magnus become even angrier than the taxi driver. It turns out that we were right (well of course we were!) and the hotel was by the airport 2 hours away! With smoke fuming out of Magnus’ ears he tells the taxi driver to turn off the meter and take us back to the airport hotel, we would not pay for his mistake that we tried over and over to tell him. The taxi driver did not take the news so well, and now also fuming from his ears tells Magnus “no pay –you go to jail –I stop the police” and before I could even register this turn of events the taxi driver had indeed chased down a police car who was then stopped and trying to settle things between Magnus and the taxi driver. At this point Óskar had woken from his nap and turns to me and says “mamma, oh ohhh police”. All the bells rung in my head now and all I could ask for was for Magnus not to be arrested because he had all the money on him and I didn´t want to spend the night in the taxi with our friend. Finally the police had a solution, they found us a new taxi but we had to pay the angry one. The police was nice about the whole thing, telling us they were sorry we had to go through this. Our new taxi driver was much better and after detailed information from the police he said he would get us there in an hour and a half. At this point I managed to squeeze a little smile out of Magnus by laughing at the fact that he could have been put into a Filipino jail. After a short hour and 10 minutes we were almost there and the taxi driver just needed to get some quick little tips to find the hotel. The police did not know where it was, the taxi driver we asked had never heard of it and Magnus was fuming again. Did this hotel even exist? I started doubting the webpage Magnus booked it on and feared the worst. Finally it took a tricycle driver to show us the way and just before 1 am we got to the hotel (that really did exist) after landing in Manila at 8pm. For the first time this trip Magnus crawled into fetus position and told me he just wanted to go home. I smiled and started laughing but was met with “I can not laugh about this yet”. The next morning we set sails yet again to meet up with Ray and Gebba, my friends from Iceland but Ray is playing professional football in Manila with a team called Global. Before daring to sit in a Manila taxi again we printed maps, got detailed information about where they were staying and made sure the taxi knew exactly where he was going before getting in. To our relief the taxi knew exactly where it was and got us there without any issues. The next few days we spent with Gebba and Ray and their two daughters in Bonifacio Global City, a modern high-rise neighborhood, different from all the other places we visited the night before during our Manila tour. It was great seeing some friends after a while on our own and Óskar was glad to get some playmates! We have now said goodbye to Gebba and Ray and we have made our way to the amazing Palawan –stay tuned for the next blog and please be careful when choosing your taxi driver!

Cambodia

There appears to be an inverse relationship between the level of progress of a country and the amount of paperwork required to enter. Sweden and Iceland: Barely any; USA: A fair amount; Cambodia: Six pages per person. A short 45 min flight from Bangkok to Siem Reap was the only time allowed to execute the project of filling in the Cambodian paperwork for a family of three. I was hoping for some assistance from my dear wife but unfortunately she did not have a pen at her disposal, leaving myself with the total of 18 pages to complete before the landing. Right hand started cramping halfway through but eventually the paperwork was finished, just a minute or two before Camobodian touchdown, a few curse words uttered in the process. Our first impressions of Cambodia, which we mentioned in the previous blog post, were highly favorable. People were very friendly, food was quite good although not at Thai levels, and we were staying at a great hotel. For those unfamiliar with this place, Siem Reap is one of the biggest tourist destinations in Southeast Asia, famous for its temples of Angkor, dating all the way back to the 9th century. As I would soon find out, Siem Reap is also the region´s inofficial capital of ballsweat, with humid 36C (97F) days tormenting the poor tourists. The main temple is Angkor Wat, built in the 12th century, but there are literally hundreds of temples scattered over an area roughly the size of Manhattan. We ended up purchasing a three day pass as one day would not nearly have sufficed. The temples really were incredible. The coolest one by far was the Ta Prohm, a temple in the middle of the jungle overgrown by huge trees. Exploring the temple with Oskar Fulvio was awesome as he would just run around randomly, which meant you did not follow any set path. The main Angkor Wat temple actually ended up being the only somewhat disappointing experience, but only because the expectations were unhealthily high and because the higher quantity of tourists. The heat didn’t help either. In fact, those three days we had temple tickets for would only consist of 1 to 3 hours of actual sightseeing per day. The heat made it highly unpleasant to continue longer. And that is where the benefit of our hotel kicked in. Post Tanzania and our first two nights in Bangkok, we had been limited to budget bungalow or tented accomodation in Thailand, but in Sieam Reap we were finally able to redeem some Starpoints and check in to a nice ass hotel. The room itself was very nice, the breakfasts awesome, and the swimming pool truly amazing. At the end of a full day (well 3 hours max) of sightseeing, it felt pretty damn good to jump into the Roman bath style pool and relax for 3 or 4 hours, especially with Oskar Fulvio loving life swimming non stop in his Sponge Bob Square Pants floaties.

After 5 days in Siem Reap it was time to move on. We ended up flying to Sihanoukville on the coast of Cambodia where we found our happy place at an Italian owned place called Papa Pippo, on the great Otres Beach. The beach itself was NICE, but nothing like the truly top class beaches of this region. However, sometimes nice is good enough (nice in Southeast Asia still means better than anything Europe can offer and better than all but a handful of American beaches) and we ended up staying at Otres for over a week. Basically, the beach just had a very chill atmosphere with an older backpacker crowd where we were among the younger guests. We had travelled from Thailand, with the median 24 year old dreadlocked Swede traveller, onwards to Siem Reap, the young Swede replaced by a 67 year old recently retired American sporting the lethal white socks/TEVA combo, soaked through short sleeve dress shirt and one of those hats you tighten with a ribbon underneath the chin, and further onwards to Sihanoukville with a median lost boy 43 year old, still enjoying his occasional shrooming moment.

Besides being an incredibly chill and friendly place, Papa Pippo also had some absolutely excellent homemade pasta, primarily the Tagilatelle Carbonara and the Gnocchi Bolognese which we OD:d on for the next week or so. We did take a break for two days and went out to the amazing Koh Rong Island. We steered away from the backpacker beach and headed to the 6km long Southwestern beach where the 250 man strong “Survivor” filming crew resides while the contestants compete at some isolated Cambodia island not too far away. Unfortunately we spent our two nights at the northern end of the beach where trash had a tendency to wash up, but on our last day I ran to the midpoint of the beach and found an absolute stunning white beach with no tourists in sight. I also found a guesthouse but we had to return to shore the next day so we did not end up staying there….BUMMER!

It was time to leave Cambodia. I had struggled from some severe case of auto-foot shooting planning, which meant we had to back track from Sihanoukville to Siem Reap in order to catch a flight to Philippines (basically because we decided to postpone Vietnam to our next trip instead of rushing it). The flight from Siem Reap to Manila was overnight, which makes no sense when the flight is only 2 hours. We were supposed to connect in Manila to catch a flight up north to the amazing rice terraces of Banaue and surroundings. However, in keeping with the Tanzania tradition and ending Cambodia with a gastronomical bang I decided to have crocodile for my last meal (along with ostrich and kangaroo). I threw up twice at the Sieam Reap International Airport and once in the airplane restroom. I was feeling really shitty and as we were about to land the flight attendant called out to make sure we had finished our immigration paperwork before landing in Manila. My nausea immediately got even worse just thinking of filling in a bunch of fucking forms with birthdates, passport numbers and expiration dates (sidenote: I now have my entire family´s passport details memorized in my head), but then the wonder woman that is my lovely counterpart showed up at my row (I had resided in an empty backrow the whole flight while she was taking care of our beloved child) with all the paperwork ready! Once in Manila, we decided not to jump on our connecting flight to the rice terraces but rather go sleep at a shady hotel close to the airport and board a flight to the beach paradise of Boracay instead. A wise decision for sure, even though the amazing White Beach of Boracay is filled with green algae from March to May (once again failure of the trip planner to do proper research). Turns out the treated sewage of the island runs out in the water and the ammonium kills the fish, which means nobody is around to eat the algae, which means we have to wade through a few meters of green before we get to relax in the picture perfect turqoise water (buhu life is so difficult). Either way, we are loving life and staying at a great hostel mixed with drunken youngsters and drunken 60 year old Aussies. Our next tough decision is whether we do a booze cruise or rent our own bangka (sail boat) to head to some nearby islands tomorrow. We just got back from celebrating St Pattie´s day at a bar called Hobbit House, staffed singlehandedly by dwarfs. Life could be worse.

Searching for The Beach

The Chinese really do know what they are talking about: time does fry when you are having fun. We have been on the road for a month and a half and have already breezed through both Tanzania and Thailand. After our relaxing weeks in Tanzania where we rested comfortably on the hills of Lengijave most days, we entered into backpacker mode once in Thailand. Before saying goodbye to Elliot and Jana, I did have the questionable pleasure of tasting a few Tanzanian delicacies. Together with Elliot I walked over to Lice´s house (Lice works for Elliot and Jana) nextdoors to thank him for the help the last couple of weeks and pay a modest tip. His thanks in return was to invite me over to his family´s house for some goat meat. They were preparing for a wedding ceremony and barbequing the goat as a gift to the parents of the bride. Didn’t sound too bad in my mind. We´d barebequed goat around the campfire a few nights before and it was delicious. Well, it turns out they were saving all the good parts for the dowry so really what I was invited over for was the leftovers, which started with the tongue and went downhill from there. It all ended with a massive bowl of goat intestines, smelling just the way you´d expect goat intestines smell. With the basic mental strength I have in my possession I managed not to throw it up. I kept telling myself this was my Bourdain moment and failure was not an option.

Our 12 hour Nairobi layover turned into an 8 hour Kilimanjaro delay. Turned out they had a superb lounge so no problem. The 8 hours disappeared in a haze of whiskey/coke, beef samosas and the Australian Open final. I also managed to take a fantastic 1 hour nap in a massage chair, while Olof attended to Oskar Fulvio, who was busy abusing the pool table. In Bangkok we met up with Donald and Kateryna (Donald is a dear (ex)colleague and (non-ex)friend and Kateryna is his wife; they are on a 6 month honeymoon trip, also courtesy of Delta Skymiles). After 48 hours we moved on to Khao Sok, an awesome national park with a man-made lake best described with pictures. Post Khao Sok, our journey turned into a joint struggle to find The Beach. Not talking about Leo´s beach but our own, perfect beach. This proved to be a bigger struggle than we first thought. We all wanted to check out Phi Phi Islands just beacause that is the actual setting of The Beach and just so we could check it off our list. It turned out Phi Phi Islands were more like Poo Poo Islands and one night proved one too many. We did not even bother to do the day trip to “The Beach.” We set off to Koh Lanta, a place loved by Swedes for some reason. A subjectively estimated 25% of the island´s tourists are Swedish, and that might even be conservative. We ended up renting a bungalow at the same beach and hostel that my brother had inhabitated together with his family on their journey a few years ago. At this point I was happy to just relax for a few days. Turns out the beach did not meet the standards of the other three adults in our party. I found this mind boggling, and somewhat dramatically started raising the issue that if we are just going to travel around finding the ultimate beach and never relaxing we will ruin our whole travel experience. The way the others described this place you´d have thought we were looking at an Estonian sewage pool. At this point, perhaps it is time to reflect on what constitutes a perfect beach. The Beach needs to have 1) Fine white sand 2) Turqoise water 3) Awesome snorkelling 4) Excellent scenery 5) Mindblowing sunsets 6) Absence of other people 7) Access to good food 8) Access to good beach bar. Some of these attributes become more or less contradictory, so no single beach can fulfill all of these (for example: if you want awesome snorkelling, you need corals, which in turn means the beach will not purely consist of fine white sand; if you don’t want people around, odds are there is no good beach bar and no good restaurants in sight). It is also interesting to reflect on the amount of research you do before your travels. Olof tends to make fun of me for over-thinking our travels, but that was before we joined up with Donald and Kateryna. Their process goes something like this: Read Lonely Planet or similar for rough inspiration, start googling more information, check out some images online, re-visit Lonely Planet for more details….ok, so far we are more or less the same. The next step though sets us apart: Google Maps Satellite View. They would seriously look at satellite images of beaches and assess the color of the sand and the turqoiseness of the water before making a decision. I admit I never thought of this, and find it quite brilliant. I was happy to settle at Koh Lanta, but with the extensive research by the two-man research army and a desire to find something better, we decided to move on. Next destination: Koh Kradan, one of the Trang Islands located south of Koh Lanta. The eastern beach had most the resorts on the island but at the southeast point we found what we believed to be the ultimate spot. White sand: somewhat; Turqoise water: Indeed; Snorkelling: Definitely; Scenery: Some; Sunsets Nope; Absence of other people: Yup; Food: Lackluster; Bar: Non-existent. We ended up staying there for five awesome nights. During the days we would either snorkel or go on a daytrip to a nearby island. We were having a great time with Donald and Kateryna but unfortunately they had to continue their journey with a Philippine flight ticket calling on them to head north. During one of our joint day trips from Kradan, we had visited an island called Lao Liang, which (of course) Donald and Kateryna discovered and originally wanted to head to instead of Kradan. We decided to join forces with the parents of Zeno, an Italian-Austrian kid who Oskar Fulvio befriended at Kradan, and head to Lao Liang. And once again, we found the ultimate spot. White sand: somewhat; Turqoise water: Indeed; Snorkelling: Yup; Scenery: Amazing; Sunsets: Nope; Absence of other people: Yup; Food: Surprisingly decent; Bar: Contradicting the paradox (ie. really good). This place was just flat out awesome. One single beach on the whole island, surrounded by crazy cliffs and beautiful reefs. The only way to stay at the island is in tents, which are actually quite comfortable and much preferred over a shitty beach bungalow. The place is also a Mecca for rock climbers and the “resort” was founded by rock climbing backpackers around 10 years ago. Initially we had planned on staying for two nights, which quickly turned into five. We would basically just lie on the beach and if we felt energized we would go watch some of the rock climbers. I actually tried some climbing myself, which went surprisngly well although it got increasingly uncomfortable and embarrassing as my fear of height set in towards the end, ultimately leading to unsuccessful mounting of the end goal. Another activity was trying to guess who on the island was a climber and who wasn´t. Fit 25 year olds: Definitely; Backpacking 45 year old Swede misfits: Definitely not; Spanish middle-aged nudists: Fuck if I know. The only thing we regret about our stay was that we couldn’t experience it together with Donald and Kateryna. After all, it was thanks to them that we ended up there in the first place. We really wished they would have had the opportunity to stay there longer as they definitely would have loved it. Unfortunately, our time was up and we had to move on. Life could be worse though as our next stop was Railei Beach, the heaven where we spent 10 days during our last trip in 2010 together with a bunch of friends. Our good friend Jesse and his family had generously made their amazing house available to us for our stay, but of course this time our good friends weren´t there to enjoy the place with us. Railei is a far more popular and touristy place than Kradan and Lao Liang, but it remains awesome, even though the number of people at the beach had easily tenfolded since our last stay here (combination of 5 years passed and proximity to high season). White sand: kind off; Turqoise water: Yup; Snorkelling: Not really; Scenery: Amazing; Sunsets: BEST IN THE WORLD, REALLY; Absence of other people: Nope; Food: Fantastic; Bar: Not needed, we had a fridge. So, in conclusion, our search for The Beach ended up with three. We were of course sad to leave Thailand, but incredibly happy to get to our new destination Cambodia, starting with Siem Reap and the amazing temples of Angkor. We have only been here for 24 hours but already love the place, famous for the most amazing temples in this world, but also includes a nice modern touristy city. Being able to redeem some starpoints for a few nights at a nice hotel also helps. My only beef with the place is that one´s ability to barter with a local becomes significantly more difficult when the counterpart is missing limbs. At lunch today we were approached by a man who handed us a note describing how he lost his both arms from a landmine, yet still had to provide for his family, 35 years later. He was selling books and of course Olof jumped on it. So now we had to buy a book we didn’t want. I mean what kind of person negotiates with a land mine victim? (He wanted 10 USD, I offered 5, we settled on 7.) Alright, pretty sure this blog was longer than my senior capstone paper in college (no exaggeration). If anyone is still reading: cheers.