Here we go. It was last year (in 2010), early spring vacation in France-Germany-Switzerland.

Thank you Ryanair for the 500 kroon tickets Riga > Frankfurt.
Winter was still ghosting Eesti, so minutes after reaching Strasbourg we felt the urge to have a picnic outside. Didn’t matter it was around 10C. Cheap wine and not so cheap strawberries from local groceries was all we needed.

Continued by early morning bicycle lessons in the roundabouts.

This is not one of these before and after pictures.
It is the my-bike-dies-and-i-will-leave-it-here-to-die-peacefully type of case.

Staying at Ines’s place. This street was our home street for few days. Mommy Ciconias calling daddy Ciconias. Just watch out for the splashes when walking the pavement.

What do you do when you go to a french jazz club and hava bunch of foreigners in your table. You start playing Muts Notsu - an ancient Estonian card game (or is it?). Something we have all played when we were at the age of 5 or so. Spreading the culture. yeah

Must start going to the clubs with bicycle back home also. It’s damn convenient. Not mentioning how much better cyclist you are on the late hours.

Alps. Here we come!

The plan was simple. We had a brand new rental Opel (literally 7 kilometers on the odometer) and take it from Germany to France, back to Germany, from there to Switzerland, then France again and finish in Frankfurt Airport, Germany. All that in 6 days. Easy!

Autobahns with our crappy engine - almost got the tear out.
Cheap fine wine from everywhere you go - good!
Quality turkish kebabs from every town - very good!
Estonian oat porridge in the mornings - almost as good as kebabs!
Small German towns with “lively nightlife” - need an improvement!
70 vol asian sake-likes (it was like sake) - can’t remember.
German bratwursts - a must have!
Iranian disco night - survived without any explosions.
Boys havin cold room and girls having nice warm room every night in Strassbourg - not cool.
Europapark and Europe’s fastest roller coasters - über cool!
Getting a speeding ticket and losing 50€ from credit card a week after trip - canceled the card
Going to central Europe again - for sure!

Bangkok. Spent 4 days here. First day visiting the temple and learning local history. Next days passed in markets, shopping malls, more markets and visiting suit-maker.

Bangkok is full of contrast. It resembles a bit with KL, but people seem to be bit friendlier. You will find ultramodern city center with high-end fashion district, traffic jams, monorail etc etc. On the other hand you have these old school tuk-tuk drivers on the roads side by side with Lexuses and very old and dirty looking houses few hundred meters on on the opposite direction.

It is also a massive city (6-10 million people, nobody really knows ..or cares), so it’s hard to really understand this place with 4 days I had.

Bon apetit!

It’s okay to rest at noon when the temperature is around 40 and you feel like a beauty nap. Local park will do fine.

Even the dogs feel that way..

If you’re going to Chatuchak weekend market, picture like this is very common. If you see something you like, you wake up the guy. Or just take it and walk away

Overall, I liked Bangkok. All the annoyances aside.

After arrival I hooked up with a tuk tuk driver who I hired for the next two days for draging me around into the temples, silk factory and just around the city. Cost me 12$ a day. Not bad.

The entire second day was spent in the Angkor Wat temples (listed as one of world’s wonders), which is massive. The architecture is astonishing. Most built around 13th century, these guys didn’t miss any details while carving the sculptures out of stone. If you reach there yourself, then you’ll understand what I’m talking about.

Day started around 5am. With monkeys in sunrise.

It was funny. Every day few hours after noon it started raining. Lasted an hour or two, and back to normal again.

Petrol station in cambodian way.

My tuktuk driver Sam! WHo was by the way very friendly and humble. I recommend him.

After 3 nights in Siem Reap took the night bus to the famous beach town Sihanoukville. I’d heard some good things about this place. As you can see yourself from the picture below.

Unfortunately I didn’t find this town to be much. Beach wasn’t very pretty, lots of dirt, too touristy, bad weather!

In here was probably my dodgiest place to spend the night. 3$ a night got me this cardboard shack (notice how the walls let through the light) with moskito nets around the beds cause. It was nice and cozy, that if you could not think about the possibly infected malaria moskitos flying inside at night.

And my last stop. Phnom Penh, the capital.

Airport, here I come. Off to Bangkok. To stack up my racksack with souvenirs, clothes and everything that can be bought with ridiculous price.

Welcome to Patong - the heart of Phuket. Glowing of lights, people, bars, pubs, restaurants, tuk-tuks, tourists, ladyboys, people selling you all kinds of stuff, constant hassling etc.

Our bartenders.

This would be the best example to describe the nightlife in Patang.

And here’s mr Escobar on the left again, who I met randomly on the street here. And Chris on the right.

But I can tell you this - you don’t wanna spend more than one night in that place!

Next day - the beaches (and sunburnes, again!). Followed by a trip through the whole peninsula with our hired motos.

So, as expected, Phuket was touristy and overcrowded in certain areas.

Next stop: Phi Phi islands. There’s a ferry going there. And of course you meet fellow travelers on it who become your companions for a few days or maybe more. There’s a great thing about these ‘friends’ you get. Although the time you spend together isn’t much, but maybe some day when you decide you want to visit South-Africa for example, you have a contact in Facebook who you have met somewhere on the road and who lives there and is kindly ready to show you around saving you the trouble of reading through few lonely planet’s chapters.

So this was our crew in Phi Phi.

I’d say this is a place for a perfect vacation in Thailand - Phi Phi islands. Go there!

This is Estonia!

After sunset, things start happening in the beach.

And there was a bar in these small narrow streets here called Reggae Bar. In the middle of it, there was a traditional Thai boxing arena. And as you can see, a guy with that poster.

So after an hour. Or two. After our drinks were close to finish, me and Andrew decided to get some free drinks in the reggae-bar-way:

Fight was real. 3 rounds. Finished all. Sport won. No visible bruises. Estonian flag was held high again!

And every night usually ends in beach here. Together with fireshows, music, good food and fine drinks.

This is the island, where The Beach was filmed. Unfortunately my camera got jammed for some reason and this is as close as I’m able to bring it to you this time. Luckily I got it working again in the evening.

About this ‘magical beach’. Can be way way over touristy as we experienced it - lots of people in really small strip of sand. But then again, half of us went there late afternoon with a ’storm approaching’ weather and they said it was completely blank and not a soul there. Must have been awesome. I can already imagine the dark stormclouds, windy ocean and the view from that beach..

Next stop: Krabi.

I didn’t find much else do here, but rock climbing. And I think I’ve found my new hobby! If only we had these rocks now here in Estonia also.

After 5 or 6 days, heading to Bangkok with a nightbus, to take regular bus to the Cambodia border to take a taxi to Siem Riep (read: 24hrs on the road)

Ceiling of my transport from Krabi to bus-station. Seems like this pickup truck has seen quite a fewbackpackers in its life..

1) Technology comes from here. Wifi is literally everywhere and it’s free. Electronic gadgets are cheap and best you can find from the market. Everyone you see in the streets have the latest cell phone model or a PSP to play around with.

2) It’s an ultra modern city. They have touch-screen everything. Nice public transport. Very clean streets. Lots of skyscrapers. Not a single car is older than 10 years. Electronic gadgets for everything that makes their lives easier.

3) Although ethnically it’s mainly chinese, a bit of india, malay and bit of everything else, the first language here is english. Which makes things actually complicated. Why? First off, their accent can be terrible to understand (but I guess you can get the same shock when first arriving in Australia also). Secondly, they have developed their own language called senglish which is like a mix of all the languages they speak around here (whichever chinese dialect, malay, english mixed into one pot) and it’s like.. impossible! Luckily they use it accordingly how they speak with

4) Architecture is great. A fascinating mix of modern and asian that combines into something completely different.

5) Every single person I met and talked more than few words was friendly, open-minded and kind. They didn’t have this superficial shade that I encountered in US and Australia. They actually look into your eyes while you talk to them.

6) They value their green culture which can be measured in enormous taxes for cars (can you imagine paying $60k for a new Toyota?) and seemed like they had set up a minimum number of trees or bushes to be planted on every street, cause there were a lot of them, everywhere.

7) Chewing gum is illegal

Shopping-malls. Everywhere. That’s their biggest hobby - shopping.

9) If you spend a bit more time here and observe these different details then you get the feeling that they’re playing safe on everything - lots of rules and regulations for everything. They might check your trunk when entering into parking lot. Or have these safety videos playing in metro that tells them to report ’suspicious people’ to the staff (I mean, this is clearly discrimination - how can you determine if a person classifies as a ’suspicious?). Or have marked lines and arrows in the subway telling people to go straight from left side and come back from right side (to avoid the mess of people struggling against each other).

10) It’s very safe here. Not a worry in a world when walking in streets.

10) I love Singapore!

Streets on daylight.

Shopping street on night time

Clearly I’m too tall for this country

Night Safari.

Underwater world in Sentosa island

Probably the only negative side of it all. 360 degree radius sea full of ships, ships and more ships.

Overlooking the city area. Continuous construction, cranes, something new being built in every corner. I guess I like their views on progress and creating something new all the time. Constant change is what it seemed like.

And person who made my time in Singapore a worthwhile - ms Foo.

2nd stop - Kuala Lumpur.

1) After Singapore, KL didn’t seem that much anymore. It’s like Singapore, but poorer, less maintained and just not that of a city as it wants to be.

2) But nevertheless, it has it’s own character

Totally random place and you get this sculpture. ???

Sitting in this small chinese food court where people had their morning coffee or breakfast.

Monorail! Monorail!

The famous Petronas twin towers.

And view from somewhere in the middle of it.

On the left, mr Escobar from Chili who promised to visit Eesti in winter. Lets hope he makes it.

And airconditioners are the main thing here.

Next stop - Thailand.

Getting closer to the end of Australia now. Seen above is just a sunset walk in the gorges of Exmouth. Simply beautiful.

Exmouth is west coast paradise of snorkelling. That polaroidish quality of the picture above is not photoshop but a cheap underwater camera i bought. Didn’t get many good pictures with it cause of lack of light on these days, but just take it from me - if you’re patient enough, you can see everything starting from sharks, tortoises and finishing every fish seen on the Nemo movie.

There are colorful fish beneath my arm. You just need to look very hard..

This one above is a regular humpback whale doing its thing in the water.

And the king of it all. A whale shark. Without exaggerating it’s a 20 feet beast who’s ready to eat! And me (..and 20 other wealthy tourists who paid more than $300 to encounter with this one behind me..) no more than 3 meters from it. I guess there’s not many places in the world where you can see something like that.

And next day after leaving Exmouth we found this awesome track that wasn’t mentioned in any tourist booklet or guide. It was like a walking track along the tip of the mountains. I mean.. wow! We have to take it, said all the estonians.

The sign didn’t stop us for a second.

After a decent 2 hours of walking on the edge of the world I think we all felt that this was like a walk of a lifetime. There’s just something thrilling about doing this on a half a meter wide rocky track, having a decent 500m of fall on both sides without any fences or any other touristy things that would keep you alive. Just you and your two feet leading the way. Super cool!

And this is where our tanking saga continues. Smile on Kalle’s face is from the fact that this is the point where we found out that the gas tank for our Commodore isn’t actually 60 liters, but definitely more than 63,75 liters. Fuel indicator had been below 0 level for the last 80km. Lucky? yes.

Serving my gratitude towards Morris dry white. Hope you Ines and Craig still remember that from our nights in Melbourne.

Followed by local nature in Karijini National Park.

These red gravel roads have something very australiash in them. Can’t explain.

80 mile beach. Plain sand and shallow Indian Ocean as far as your eye can see.

And somewhere in the middle of nowhere we finally needed our spare can of fuel.

Next stop - the Kimberlys. Most talked about and presumably most beautiful region of WA. With a small note - most roads considered 4WD only. Khmhmh. Problem for us? Mk-mm.

Beacause these 4WD roads take you to places where the aboriginal ancestors had once done their cave-drawings for example.

Or into the shallow waters together with fresh-water crocs.

Or bring you the views like this.

It’s kind of place where you are really in the outback. No cell coverage around 500km. No traffic at night-time and maybe few cars an hour in daytime. If something happens to you here - let’s say an unpleasant encounter with a spider or a snake of deadly kind - then you’re.. in deep shit (of deadly kind also). Life can be fragile here if you think about it. So it’s best if you just don’t think of it.

I was told that it was not healthy to take photos of aboriginals, so this one is probably the only decent one I managed to get. From our car or course with 300mm tele-zoom focal length.

A bush-fire!

After our last night in Broome (keywords Cable beach, Passion Pop, Tooheys Extra Dry and australian fine wine). Our last hangover. Our last common breakfast with Ele’s copyrighted very special pancakes, Homebrand bacon, tomato, sour cream, jam and freenut butter (kind of healthy version of peanut butter, a classic!).

Cable beach in Broome.

Our last sunset.

And this is it. Australia is done for me. Finished. Over for this time. To sum it all up - nice trip, nice people, will come back here!

Next stop - South-East Asia!

After a rainy day we decided to take a look at local sights. And this seahorse farm was one of them. They were breeding seahorses there. These funny small fishlike things that live in water and look like horses.

Don’t have a clue where this picture was taken or why or why we would have stopped there and why did I take out the camera. The wind and light games that sun is playing here with clouds is ..nice. I reckon.

A must have tourist photo in this place (above).

In another national park (Kalbarri was it?). Decided to take a closer look into the valley. It was a good choice cause we spent an hour just sitting there. Listening silence and occasional birds passing by and just enjoying the place without any other persons but us in sight.

Following night spared us a bit of rain I guess

Cause, in the morning it was like this again.

Then. The beach of seashells. No sand. Just seashells.

Everything that looks like a sand here is actually not. Seashells.

Somewhere on the road we must have entered the tropical latitudes. Heat was taking over.

So were straight roads and fellow backpackers

And just a spot with a good view where we spent the night camping between sand dunes.

Picture above is significant because it marks another jetty that I was unable to finish to the end.

Termites. And their big nests. Some of them over 2 meters. The story behind it is quite complicated actually. Apparently these small insects have unbelievably strict hierachy and system how everything works. As always, most of the termites over there are workers. These guys have no eyes and just do the dirty work. Heaps of them. And then there are handful of them who have gone to the gym a lot and are double the size. They are the guardians of the masters - a king and a queen. Royal family rules the place, live in their huge rooms with best views overlooking everything you can see from the top of the nest. They haven’t got a care in the world except reproducing. The good life.

More camping under the stars. Acutally I must say this here now that how amazing it was here how much you can really see the sky here at night. One can clearly distinguish the milky way from bundled strip of stars going from east to west. And as the night goes on, how everything turns and somewhere at midnight the picture is completely different. And how bright everything is. And how many of these falling stars there are all the time. You could wish all the things in the world after spending few weeks in the outback and looking for falling stars. Something completely different to the picture we see in these warm Estonian summers.

Beware of emu crossings in the middle of highway.

The gang. Happy with what they see.

Our first encounter with these orange creatures jumping on two legs. Came out of nowhere, took an unfriendly greeting from our bumper and vanished. Luckily the car was fine. Not sure about the roo though..

Life is ironic here in outback.

More to come..

So there it was. I was saying goodbye for the place i had been living in for the last few months. Pulled my stuff together from closet into the rucksack again, and there we were - on a sunny Sunday afternoon starting this 20 days of journey into WA’s nature.

We began from the wineries just beside Perth. Must I say that we tried lot of wines there? But yes we did.

There was something in the air already on that first day. That this is the beginning of something really good. In a way this was also a beginning of the end of “the trip” for me because after this one I would have few weeks in South-East Asia and that would pretty much be it. Nevertheless, it was a good start for it all.

By the nightfall we hadn’t got much further from the wineries. Time flies in these places!

Next day followed by a set of sand surfing in a remote place with white sand, blue skies and good spirit.

Accidentally after applying too much wax on the board, it became quite challenging to finish that small hill on both feet. But in the end we all managed. Without injuries.

These are famous pinnacles. A rare form of nature that you cant see in many places of the earth. But here, somewhere in middle in nowhere they were. A lot of pictures followed.

In fact they were that awesome that we decided to visit them twice - after sunset and again in early morning.

Then we found these caves called Stockyard Gully.

Road that lead to them was a 4WD only. After a small test whether we can manage that with our reliable commodore and getting stuck, we decided that hey we’re here, so lets walk. So we did. For 5 km there in 30 warm with sun gently on our heads. And countless amount of flies with us.

Disregarding the signs noting everyone to have a decent torch before entering (as we did 1 lousy one for four of us that occasionally dipped) we didn’t hesitate to take this journey into darkness. And it’s a good thing we didn’t. I reckon these caves were one of the highlights of our trip. Maybe because we had to make this “walk” to really get to there, maybe they were just amazing. Doesn’t matter. It rocked.

Somewhere on the way I saw my first salt-field.

And this one is significant for two reasons. One: this is the place where we were able to fill up our tank with 59,xx liters while knowing that our tank was 60 liters. Two: later came out that tank is not 60 liters. And thank god it wasn’t.

“If you take this one down, we’ll have enough fire for t’nite”. And so we did.

This is pretty much how we spent most of our nights. Good Company. Food. Fire. Drinks. Waterpipe.

However, usually next mornings weren’t like this. An hour before taking this photo it was raining, most of the stuff was just randomly around the car taking heavy rain and roof of our tent had been blown away by the wind. Surely I was only one who wasn’t wasted enough to clear this mess up. Charming.

This especially was a tough morning for Kalle. What happened? I remember you sayin something like “i dont remember morning that bad since highschool”. Well.. It was a night to remember then

Seemed like the weather was leading the way how we felt after last night.

That’s how the outback welcomed us on these first days. End of part one in there.

But more is to come. A lot more.