Southeast Asia, for the first, and not for the last time

At the end of June, we finally left India to fly to Southeast Asia. We decided to fly to Bali, because Indonesia was the only country not suffering from monsoon at that time of the year and because Bali is so frequently visited, there is a large selection of cheap flights to get there. For us, Bali was a "grand relax" after India. We stayed in Ubud, a quiet town about 2 hours away from the airport, and there we were finally able to eat beef, fruit, vegetables (without the risk of getting a stomach infection), relax and even enjoy the silence in some places. We had the contact of a local driver, Wayan, so he took us to many places and we did a short trip to the south of Bali, to visit the temples of Tanah Lot and Uluwatu and the beaches of Seminyak, Kuta and Padang Padang. Clearly, beaches are not the highlight of Bali, because the ones they have are packed with stores and tourists.

In Uluwatu, which is on the southern coast of Bali, we watched the sunset and a Kecak show, the traditional Balinese dance you know from pictures. The dance is actually a representation of a story based on the Hindu religion. It is very interesting, the dancers wear colourful clothes and makeup and the play does not have any music. Instead the sounds come from a choir of 70 men. We enjoyed it a lot.

Indonesia is very big and is composed of 17.508 islands, of which only 922 are permanently inhabited. It has 250 million inhabitants, which makes it the fourth most populated country in the world. To travel from one island to the other, the easiest (but not cheapest) way is to fly; if you don’t have problems flying with airlines that has a lower safety ranking than Air Zimbabwe. Since we plan to be alive for many more years to come, we decided to fly with Garuda Airlines, which is the one which has the highest safety standard.

So, after some days in Bali, we flew to Labuan Bajo, the starting point of our trip to the islands of Komodo and Flores. Labuan Bajo is a very small town, but it serves as base for all diving tours to the islands, so the infrastructure is good and it has a variety of international restaurants, which becomes a very important issue when you are travelling in Asia for a long time. We stayed in an Airbnb, which was very close to the restaurant of Zana, a lady from Montenegro. Through her, and just by chance over lunch, we met Wida and Danielle, an Indonesian-French couple, who happened to own a boat and some cottages on the beach nearby. We agreed to rent their boat for 4 days and stay with them for one night. Besides that, we booked a 7-day tour around Flores, through another company, owned by another French girl and her Indonesian boyfriend. Until today, as a tourist, you are not allowed to drive a car on your own in Flores and you need to use a tour guide.

Our boat trip through the Komodo islands was the highlight of our trip to Asia. We left early from Labuan Bajo together with our crew: Tinus, the captain, Vincent and Yulianhuz, his assistants, plus Charles and Francisco (aka, “Chico”), the captain’s sons. Our first destination was the island of Rinca, where it is easier to spot the Komodo dragons, because it houses 1.700 of the total of 5.000 dragons that inhabit the islands. We arrived to Rinca around noon and when we started the walk, we found a couple of dragons mating in a shed very close to the entrance of the park. These were the biggest dragons we saw and they measured almost 3 metres.

During the rest of the walk we saw small and medium sized dragons, walking around on the ground or lying on branches in the trees, to prevent them from being eaten by bigger sized dragons. When we reached the highest part of the island it started to rain as it only does in the tropics. We ended up covered in mud by the time we returned to the ranger’s house, so I ran to the bathroom to wash the mud off my pants, only to find a huge dragon resting inside the bathroom. He almost gave me a heart attack! Luckily, because it was raining and cold, he reacted very slow to my presence and I was able to leave very quickly. Carsten later took the camera and walked to the bathroom to take some pictures of him, or her, we don’t know.

After the visit, we had lunch on the boat (fish with rice and vegetables, as is common in Indonesia) and we headed for Kalong. This is a very small island where thousands of flying foxes live. When the sun sets, they head towards the nearby islands, catching insects as they fly. When the sun rises, they repeat the routine returning to Kalong. We saw thousands of them flying above us, very silently and calm. It reminded us about the sunset at the Kaieteur waterfall in Guyana, when the thousands of swallows that live behind the waterfall, started to fly to catch food in mid-air, and once they were done, dove with speeds of about 100 km/h, back to the waterfall. It was an unforgettable experience.

By the next morning, we headed to the island of Padar, which we had seen in many pictures and which we wanted to see in person. On the way we saw manta rays for the first time and this was where Carsten shot the video of the mantas you can see on Facebook. We were able to snorkel next to six of them, it was very special and we enjoyed it a lot. These animals are so big and so peaceful, and we noticed, once again, that if you leave the animals alone, most of them don’t mind you being around them. There is no need to follow them, grab them or touch them. Chico, who is 8 years old, had never seen mantas before, so just like us, he was a happy camper.

During that day we snorkelled many times on very beautiful reefs with a lot of coral and colourful fish. The view from the top of the hill on Padar was amazing and we took some time to take pictures with the crew, who were wonderful people, and who provided an excellent service while we were on the boat. Besides that, Vincent found a very beautiful Blue Pit Viper, very poisonous and not very common, which we would not have seen had he not been there.

The next day we headed to Komodo Island and we stopped by the town of Komodo. It is really a very basic town, but people, as it happens all over Indonesia, were very smiley and friendly. They never pushed us to buy things from them, as it happens in many other places in Asia. After lunch, we sailed off again and stopped at a reef called “Manta Point”, which is where the manta rays normally feed due to a strong current and a lot of plankton; so we jumped in the water with them again.

Our last stop with the boat was the island of Gili Lawat, where we saw the most amazing sunset, which we hope you can see in our pictures too.

The next morning, we started to return to Labuan Bajo and we stopped at a place called “Kanawa Beach”. It was very beautiful for swimming and snorkelling and we saw a lot of coral, fish, starfish and giant clams with bright neon colours. We arrived to Wida and Danielle’s place in the afternoon and we spent an excellent night, dining and talking about their experiences of living in this place after a whole life of living in Paris. Even though they have had a few bad experiences with customers who had tried to leave without paying the bill or who had complained about everything, they would not change their way of living for anything. The following day in the afternoon, we returned to Labuan Bajo and we had some days to do laundry before heading deeper into Flores island.

Flores was originally named “Cabo das Flores” by the Portuguese, who arrived there looking for spices and raw materials during the 16th century. Afterwards, in the 1800s, the Dutch found out, there was a lot of high value wood on the island, so they settled there too. Today, Flores’ economy depends on agriculture and fishery. Many of the fruits they produce are exported, which means the island keeps mostly low quality products the locals can afford. The island, in general, still has a lot of vegetation. Probably not as many trees as 5 centuries ago, but it still looks green, lush and beautiful.

This island is one of the places in Indonesia where some tribes still live in villages, as they did centuries ago, and which are now open to visitors. One of these villages is Wae Rebo, in the Manggarai regency. Flores is still divided in regencies today.

Our guides in Flores were Faldy (our Manggarai – reggae guide) and Noyman, the driver. We walked for three hours uphill to get to the village. It was all worth it because it was a very interesting place to visit. It is obviously prepared to receive tourists, but not in an invasive way; they welcome very few visitors every day. The idea of making this visit available for tourists came from one of the village’s chiefs, searching for a way to keep their traditions alive by showing the village to other Indonesian people. He personally developed this project together with the tourism organizations and the regional government. In Indonesia, much as happens in the rest of the world, the youngsters are not interested in old traditions. They want to live in the big cities, dress in modern clothes, have access to the latest technology and work in a place that has air condition. It is hard for today’s native people to maintain their traditions when the young people are not interested. Besides that, Indonesia is a country with a lot of young people. The median age of the population is 28 years, while it is 33 years in Chile and 41 in Denmark.

We spent the afternoon and the night in Wae Rebo, talking with the tribe (as much as we could, because most don’t speak English), learning how to make coffee, listening to their music and sleeping on some banana leaf made cushions in the cottage, which was prepared for tourist accommodation. The following morning, we hiked back to our car. The inhabitants of Wae Rebo must take this long and steep walk many times a week, to deliver the coffee they produce and bring back food and animals from the nearby town in the valley. But today you are never really so far from civilization anymore, so they have a wholesaler who comes and buys the coffee in the village regularly.

Wae Rebo is only one of the many villages you can visit in Flores. We also did a day tour around the villages of Luba, Tololela, Bena and others where it is said they still practice human sacrifices (kidnapping young kids) in order to “satisfy the gods” by making drums from the skin of their stomachs.

We also visited the craters of Kelimutu volcano while we were in Flores. On the morning we went there, all three craters had the same turquoise green colour, but depending on the amount of oxygen in the water, two of them sometimes change colour to a deep red or black. It was a very beautiful sunrise, but very touristic as well, as it was full of people. We said goodbye to Faldy and Noyman in the city of Ende, and we prepared to fly back to Bali to meet up with our friends Søren and Charlotte, whom we had not seen for a year, and after that climb the Ijen volcano on the neighbouring island of Java.

Ijen is very impressive, but obviously the pictures we had seen in National Geographic showed a place with much more “blue lava” than we actually saw. The crater lake of Ijen is the world’s largest volcanic crater filled with hydrochloric acid (which makes the water green). From the crater, miners extract sulphur and it is the liquid sulphur (which is cooled sulphuric gas) that creates the colour of the famous blue lava. The blue colour can only be seen at night time, so you need to be at the crater before 04:30 AM, i.e. you need to start climbing before 01:00 AM.

The gas emissions are toxic, hence it is recommended that you wear a gasmask, but obviously many tourists do not use them and neither do the miners who work there extracting the sulphur. We had toxic gases blown straight in our faces by the wind for some minutes while we were in the crater and it is truly unbreathable air. Besides that, the sulphurous gas mixes with your tears producing sulphuric acid, which makes your eyes burn.

The harsh conditions under which these miners work are endured by them because it is the only way they have of making a living. They have rejected many offers to provide them with machinery to ease their work, because this would mean unemployment for many of them, thus they maintain mining it by manual labour as it has always been done. From one basket of sulphur, which weights between 70 to 90 kilos and has to be carried on their back from the volcano’s crater (walking on a narrow path while trying to avoid the hundreds of tourists that are walking around them) and then three more kilometres down the volcano into the nearest town, they can make a maximum of USD 5 to10.

Our visit to Ijen was an interesting experience and it left us thinking about how disconnected or uninformed most city people are from the reality, the needs and the poverty of many people. I could not stop thinking of our family trip to the north of Chile, more than twenty years ago, when we met many artisanal miners, trying to extract a little bit of mineral in the most miserable working conditions. I’m still wondering if some of the prosperity derived from the past 15 years of mineral boom in South America has reached them too?

Ever since we did our sailing boat crossing between Cartagena (Colombia) and San Blas (Panama) in 2013, we have been talking about the possibility of buying a boat and crossing the oceans in it. This year, we decided that before buying a boat we needed to have some sailing experience and actually try to live on a boat for a longer period of time to see what it is really like. So, one day Carsten received the contact of the owner of a Danish sailing yacht, which needed crew in order to sail from Philippines to Indonesia between August and September of 2016. We had an interview and were accepted as crew, ten people in total, which meant we had to get on the boat on August 13th in Dumaguete, Philippines. So, after the tour to volcano Ijen, we spent some days together with our friends in the “Asian Mallorca” (aka Bali) and the extra time we had until we had to be in Philippines, we used to visit Singapore and Myanmar.

Singapore had been on my wish list for as long as I can remember. I used to want to work there many years ago. It is just like people had told us it was. Everything is spotless, everything is organized, everything works and is easy to achieve; which is very different from what we had experienced in other places in Asia. We used these days to meet with friends I had not seen for more than 15 years, and some of them told us funny stories about the life there: “Singaporeans are millionaires in debt”, as one of them said. We did city touring and visited most of the typical “must see” places. We had a lot of good Singaporean and Chinese food, but also international food, with the mandatory “Singapore Sling” at Raffles Hotel being taken care of too, and overall it was a very interesting visit.

Even if Singapore has its own challenges in terms of aging population and availability of workers, as well as percentage of debt in the overall population (much the same situation as in other countries in the world), it is undoubtedly an example of how a small port, with minimal natural resources, could become - in less than forty years - one of the richest economies in the world. They did this by applying a concept at which Chinese culture excels and Chileans lack terribly: long term vision, planning and execution. The government asked itself, and its people, where they wanted the country to be in fifty years, not in four as in Chile. How does the education system have to be, so everyone can have a better life; not just part of the population. I hope, that someday in Chile, we can influence the government to start asking the right questions for the future of our country, and we manage to get going before we sell all natural resources we have and are left with nothing.

Another thought that stayed in my mind after visiting “Gardens by the Bay” park, is how it seems that people in Singapore only have the possibility of seeing so many trees and flowers in these enclosed parks. Whilst us, in Chile, have many national parks and lots of nature close to our houses, we do not seem to know or enjoy what we have. I hope our future will not be like the life in Singapore, in that sense, and that the future generation’s only possibility to experience nature will be in a museum.

Leaving Singapore, we headed for Myanmar, or Burma, as most locals still call it, so we “could see it before it became too touristic”, as many people on this trip had advised us to do. The first surprise we had in Myanmar, was that it already is touristic. At least it seemed like that to us because we did not travel to Malaysia or Thailand, which from what we heard are probably the most touristic destinations in Asia. Myanmar’s citizens have already learned well how to squeeze tourist’s pockets and even if people are kind and nice, we left having the feeling that not all smiles and kindness’ were for free.

Myanmar, is a former dictatorship which only in the last 20 years has been open for tourism; so there is basically one tourist route, which everybody follows. We travelled from Yangon, which was the country’s capital until 2005, then by bus to Bagan – the temple city – and then to Mandalay and the Inle Lake.

There were two places which we really liked in Myanmar. One of them was the Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, which is really impressive due to its size and amount of treasures. The crown of the pagoda has more than 5.000 diamonds and 2.000 rubies, and the pagoda itself is covered in golden plates, most of them offerings from the people in respect for their ancestors, which in total weighs more than 67 tons.

Being Latin American, my head kept spinning on how come all this gold and jewels were still there and people had not yet tried to steal it. How did they prevent that from happening? I thought about extreme theft punishments, but in the end it seems there is only one explanation: religion. Shwedagon is the most sacred of all the pagodas in Myanmar, mostly because it contains eight of Gautama Buddha’s hairs, plus three relics of subsequent Buddhas. For those of you who didn’t know, and neither did I, Siddhartha Gautama was not the only Buddha…. there are more than 30 of them, depending on which Buddhist beliefs you follow. You can be Buddhist, or Tibetan Buddhist, or Zen Buddhist or any of the intermediate variations. In the end, Myanmar is a country where 80% of the population is Buddhist, so, religion is everywhere and you will not be very popular if you steal other people’s respectfully offered gold.

After Yangon, we took the night bus and travelled to the small town of Bagan, whose most famous attraction are the 4.444 temples surrounding it. We hired a horse cart with a driver and with him we visited around ten temples. After a full day we had seen enough Buddhas. Some sitting, some standing, some smiling, some serious, some with closed eyes, some golden, some white, etc., etc., etc. During our days in Bagan, we visited the Shwe San Daw pagoda four times to watch the sunrise and the sunset and we could not really understand what the big fuzz is about this place. Always full of people trying to sell you all kind of things and ridiculous tourists, many of them meditating, sitting in the lotus position, trying to attract people’s attention. Sunrises and sunsets you can see everywhere in the world and for us, this is definitely not one of the best spots to see them. Honestly the best memory we have from Bagan, was the “tea leaf salad”, a kind of salad-ceviche style with tea leaves, tomato and fried beans, which was very delicious.

From there we travelled to Mandalay. The road between Bagan and Mandalay is not very nice and it shows how much deforestation this country has suffered, and still is suffering, especially in the north of the country, which borders with China and is an area closed for tourists, because there are many landmines which were scattered during the ethnic conflicts. The city of Mandalay is only worth mentioning because, while trying to find a Buddhist temple (which we never found), that is famous because you can see the monks having breakfast together, we stumbled upon a very nice young monk. He wanted to practice is English and he walked with us for a while and helped us find the post office so we could send some postcards. He was one of the only people that truly helped us without asking for anything in return.

The second place we liked the most in Myanmar was the pagoda (or “stupa”) complex of Kakku, which lies about two hours away from Inle Lake. A stupa is a structure that contains relics and is used as a place of meditation. Very few tourists go there, as it was not opened for tourism until 2012 and since it’s not close nor cheap to get there, it is not very well known. It’s a very quiet and peaceful place and the only sound you hear comes from the thousands of small bells placed on the 2.478 stupas when the wind blows through.

Religion, much like we saw in Bali, is present everywhere in Southeast Asia. Asian people spend a lot of their time in ceremonies, prayers, masses, offerings, etc., which take place at any time of the day and any day of the week. We remembered our Balinese driver Wayan, who said he had quit his job as a receptionist in a good hotel, to work independently because otherwise he “did not have enough time to attend all the ceremonies the Buddhist religion demands”. Their ceremonies are also not like our church masses, they are real events, which last for many days and everybody from the family is supposed to attend them, otherwise “there are consequences”. Mainly family criticism.

Inle Lake is one of the so called “not to miss” places to visit in Myanmar, but really for us the experience was way too touristic. The famous fishermen are striking poses for money and after countless discussions, we finally managed to take pictures of them from far away, doing their real job and not just posing as models for tourists. The tours in Inle allow you to see people making silver jewellery, weaving textiles from fibres of the lotus plant, making cigarettes, forging knives, building boats, etc. All of these tourist traps accept Mastercard, however for all your normal purchases in Myanmar only cash exists....if they happen to have a credit card machine it is mysteriously always out of order.

One of the funny experiences we had in Myanmar, was to visit the cinema in Yangon. When in Myanmar, you need to stand up and sing the national anthem before the movie starts. Besides, the movies do not have subtitles, so people start talking really loud in the cinema, probably because they do not understand and they get bored.

Finally, in early August, we left Myanmar and flew to Manila, Philippines, to head for Dumaguete the day after. In Manila we met another friend I had not seen for over 15 years and we spent a great afternoon, and enjoyed a delicious traditional Philippine dinner, talking about Philippines, Asia, and life as it is today.

We were supposed to embark our sailing boat S/Y Orbit on August 13th, but it was delayed for two days because the boat could not travel to Dumaguete, so we had to travel to Cebu instead. Therefore, after the flight to Dumaguete and one night in town, we took multiple means of transport to get to Cebu. We had a stopover in Oslob, where we could snorkle with whale sharks. After we had paid our entrance, we regretted having gone there because it was an extremely touristic place, it was packed with people and the animals are fed in order to keep them there. This obviously prevents them from migrating and affects their genetic pool due to inbreeding, so if you want to see whale sharks, do not do it here. Instead brace yourself with a lot of patience and go dive with them in the wild.

China’s economic growth has turned Southeast Asia into a major attraction for Chinese tourists. I have to say they are not the most discreet, silent, brave or respectful of animals nor other human beings for that matter. In their defence, I believe Chinese people from big cities have never experience much wildlife or nature, so they don’t know how to react around it. Many are afraid of animals and some have the strangest theories. I heard of somebody who said that an elephant can eat a person for example. Plus, in China, they are always surrounded by people, so the concept that somebody is taking a picture and maybe you should not step in front of them, does not occur in their minds; especially when they are travelling outside of China for the first time and they don’t know any foreigners.

In any case, for us, the whale shark experience was not different from jumping into an aquarium and swimming with the fish. It was a very different feeling from the one we had with the wild manta rays in Komodo.

So, after a very long and tiring day of traveling, we arrived to the port of Carmen Bay, in Cebu, and to our cabins in S/Y Orbit, which were really no bigger than a coffin. This would be our house for the next 49 days. Besides S/Y Orbit, we would be joined on the trip by two other sailing boats, S/Y Amazing and S/Y Wow.

Our sailing route was from Carmen Bay to Comotes Islands, from there to Limasawa and Padre Burgos, ending with a stopover in Surigao. In Surigao, Philippines, we would stay some days to buy provisions and clear migration and afterwards, sail for five days in open sea until we reached Bitung and the Lembeh Strait in the peninsula of Sulawesi, Indonesia.

Carsten and I had a clear goal in our minds with this trip of learning how to sail and understanding what it is like to live on a boat for so long. We can say that having a sailing boat to travel around the world is much like having a house (without a garden) and a car (without the option of getting out of if), at the same time. All the daily duties of cleaning, cooking, shopping, maintenance, repairs, washing, etc., etc., are there. It is a lot of work and cooking, trying to sleep or cleaning while the boat is sailing in winds of 25 knots, thus having an deck angle of 45 degrees, is not easy nor comfortable. We were also ten people on S/Y Orbit in total, so shopping for food and water and bringing everything into the boat with a dinghy, is not comfortable either.

The good thing in Asia is that cold water or cold weather is not something you need to worry about. And like in the rest of the world, night sailing, when the stars are bright and the moon is shining on a calm sea with good wind, is a very beautiful and unique experience.

We sailed about 555 nautical miles between Surigao and Bitung in five days and we decided that if one day we want to sail from Chile to Easter Island and from there to the Marquesas Islands, which is a total trip of around 12.000 nautical miles, we will not sail in a boat with 10 people and we need a sailing boat with more comfort. So, that might come in the future, but it is not our immediate plan.

The crew of S/Y Orbit, besides myself, was Danish, so for me, it was a very good opportunity to practice some Danish and especially, to get my hearing used to it again. I was able to read a full book in Danish, “Drageløberen” or “The Kite Runner” from the Afghani writer Khaled Hosseini. I recommend it fully to those who have not read it yet. It is a beautiful story about how hard life in Afghanistan can be.

One of the things we noticed on this trip was that when we stopped on any island, we could not hear birds singing, cicadas or monkeys; it seems as if there was nothing around. Carsten also tried to fish every day without any luck, and from what we could see that the local fishermen brought in, especially in Philippines, there were only very few and small fish left in the ocean. Again, an example of how overfished the Southeast Asian seas are. Very different from the experience we had sailing in Central America, where we could see a lot of fish around us all the time.

Regarding marine wildlife, while sailing of the coast of Comotes we saw a group of around 20 dolphins, which one of the people from the boat was able to film underwater with his GoPro and once we arrived to Indonesian oceans we saw a small sperm whale and a group of around 8 pilot whales swimming in the morning. We saw our first tuna in Indonesia, but only at the local fish market in Bitung, probably from one of the long-line fishing boats operating in the area. A 9 kilo yellow fin tuna, which Carsten filleted, was enough food for the 26 people travelling on S/Y Orbit, S/Y Amazing and S/Y Wow.

Between Carsten and I, we only dove 12 times during this trip. We saw many turtles, colourful corals, tons of small fish of all the colours and shapes, barracudas, octopus, etc. It was very pretty, but we also realized that for us, the safari or the hiking experience in national parks, has been much more rewarding and special compared to scuba diving. So, that was another lesson learned on this trip. We did not take a lot of pictures, mostly because the coast line seen from the boat always looks green, flat and uninteresting. There are only so many photos you can take from a boat until it starts to look the same, so many of the pictures we put on our website were taken by the rest of the crew, but they will give you have an idea of our experience aboard S/Y Orbit.

Right now we are in the small city of Manado, in the northern part of the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia; just opposite from Bitung, where we disembarked from S/Y Orbit. We are taking some days of rest before we travel to Cairns, Australia, this Sunday. We are both very much looking forward to seeing Australia and we hope we can share many interesting experiences with you afterwards. We will be there until November 23rd, when we will fly to Denmark to celebrate Christmas and New Year with Carsten’s family.

Before we go, we want to post a few thank you notes:

Dear Donna, terima kashi for all your great tips about Indonesia, it really helped us to decide where to go and we had the most wonderful experience in your country. We will be back!

Many thanks to Peck Chin, Ming, Scott and Jennifer for taking some of your time to spend it with us in Singapore. We really hope to meet you again somewhere in the world before another 16 years pass by!

Salamat, Kriz, for an excellent evening in Manila! The gifts you gave us saved everybody on the boat more than once, so we should also thank you from everybody else who was aboard Orbit.

And to Claudia, our dear Brazilian friend from S/Y Tao, muito obrigados pra vocé, for all the advice, the gifts and the good vibes before we sailed from Carmen Bay. The “real” coffee and French Press coffeemaker was a saviour for everybody during our days of sailing. We really hope we can meet you, maybe in French Polynesia, one day.

Big hugs

Claudia y Carsten