Hanno's blog

I finished my Asia trip a few days ago. As you could obviously see, my motivation for blogging decreased during the trip. I'll finish with a quick summary of what I did.

I entered Laos from China, but I didn't spend a lot of time in Laos. The main reason was that I was quite frustrated with the weather. It was a comparatively cold winter in southern China and Laos and the buildings there are not really isolated at all and heating usually doesn't exist. While the days were all sunny and nice, the nights were sometimes quite tough. In Laos, usually the only mode of transport are buses and minibuses. I crossed the border at Houay Xai and quickly moved on to Bangkok by bus and train.

Travelling in Laos and Thailand was quite a different experience when compared to Kazakhstan and China. For the first half of my trip, I mostly felt like "the stranger going to places rarely visited by strangers". In China, even at touristy places there were mostly domestic tourists. Laos and Thailand are flooded with western tourists, so I was more like "the western guy going to places everyone else is going". Honestly, I felt much more comfortable with the first role. Malaysia was somewhat in-between. The most important thing I was looking for in this part of Asia was mostly nature and rainforests.

For the whole travelling with buses and trains, I was surprised that it was often much easier than expected. Maybe irrational, but when I planned this I often felt "travelling with a bus/train in a place I barely know anything about just must me difficult". If you have any questions about overland travelling in any of the countries I visited, feel free to ask me. But basically, it usually comes down to "write your preferred train, time, class and destination on a piece of paper and the people at the ticket counter will understand even without knowing your language". The only real obstacle I faced at all was that in China there are some train routes that are booked out early.

If you know me, you know that I try to avoid flying. But it was clear that doing this trip without would be close to impossible. So I flew back from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia earlier this week.

While I've seen a lot and experienced a lot, at the end I was at a point where I really didn't want to continue any more. I have a lot of respect and get inspiration from people people who consider themselves digital nomads, permanent travelers or something alike and I though a lot about that during travelling and in the months before. I'll probably write some more about that at a later point, as I find it quite desirable to organize life in a way to be less dependent on a fixed living spot. But for me, this has limits and I know where they are.

Hainan (海南) Island is the southmost point of China and has a tropical climate. It has some tourist-oriented cities with beaches and many coconut trees. We stayed some days in Haikou (海口) and Sanya (三亚).

Hainan also has some of China's rainforests. We made a trip to Yanoda rainforest park (呀诺达雨林). It was quite interesting, though somewhat unexpected: The trips to this rainforest are very organized - you never walk really in the forest, only on prepared wood-ways and the whole thing is more park-like and you're guided through it.

As I already wrote, we didn't manage to take the ferry and got to Haikou (and later to Sanya) by train - however, there is no bridge, so the train is put on a ship. Sadly, it wasn't possible to leave the train during that time. On our way back, it was somewhat difficult to get a ticket, as we left on the day after the typhoon - and all the people who planned to leave the day before either on the ferry or on a train also tried to get tickets so we had to queue for four hours.

Pictures from Hainan island
Pictures from Yanoda rainforest