Friends Travelling Around The World

Colourful Thailand

Hey guys, we are in Thailand and very welcome at Peters brand new resort near Udon Thani. He is a friend of Uno, a nice guy and built up his own romantic resort. Also a crazy guy, he showed us some really nice places around the village he is living in. So we got in touch with the original thais also.Look at the temples we have been to, where we sit around the monks! They are not like touristic ones you see in Bangkok, but really genuine. That was a very nice experience. You see the big Buddha under construction on top of the hill? Peter knows all these places, he really checked out the surroundings. Astonishing were also the waterfalls (although not that big) we went to visit in the jungle. Thanks Peter!�

Arrival in Bangkok

Hey, only 1 hours flight to Bangkok, and everything went smooth! Only 20 min from leaving the plane to getting into the car to the Oriental Hotel - which is very nice! Of course we had to check out the nightlife first to get a feeling for the city, so we went to the famous bed supperclub, a nice location to eat, hang around and party.

More Bangkok

Crew Pictures

From Bangkok to Siem Reap, Cambodia

We are starting the second leg joined by two new crew members! In Bangkok Mats and Niels left us (thank you for the great company and everything!) and Anthony and Daryl joined the team. Flight to Angkor International Airport was really short, everything was perfect!

Angkor Wat

So, we really made it: We got up 4:30 in the morning and left 5am the Hotel to see the ancient temples of Angkor Wat, one of the man-made travel wonders of the world, thinking we would be the only ones to do so… but surprise, surprise: the world was out there to see it! Among hundreds of other tourists we followed our guide through these still amazing temples, where ages ago the king ruled.

Stuck in Cambodia

Indonesian authorities are not making it easy to get into their airspace. Yesterday we spent half a day at the airport waiting for the coordinators to get the permit, then we had to get back to town, doing customs again. We have to go through indonesia, and we have to leave cambodia at least around 1 pm to make it to our next destinations airport. So if there is no permit by noon today, we can screw it and stay another day waiting here. Thats really annoying…

The floating village

Got up this morning with the question “What doing in Siem Reap, when you already did the temples?”. The answer was the floating village. 4 months in a year the land around Siem Reap is flooded and waters are up to 5m depth, and for this time of the year a lot of people live on and from the water. People go fishing, hunting cobras and other snakes, taking crocodiles as tourist attraction, and there is a whole village out on the lake. Look at the pictures, these people live on boats and have a very colourful environment! The day was not useless so, and tonight we got the good news that the permit to fly indonesia is given. Hooray!!!

Up, up and away to Borneo.

This morning we will start direction Borneo. We also did some route changes, have a look at our map. We are very keen on seeing some rain forest.

The Borneo Ultimatum

Leaving the cambodian airport of Siem Reap direction Pontianak, Borneo, we all were very happy and in the perfect mood. We really made the best out of the one-and-a-half day waiting in Siem Reap, but as this trip is about going forward, we were glad to be airborne again. As we had to fly around the typhoon which messed up Bangladesh one week before, this time again we had to change the route to avoid getting into the next one.After four hours of flight Jorn brought us down through very thick clouds and strong rain, safely to Pontianak airport.Being in a good mood, we expected visa on arrival and get to our hotel soon - but the immigration officer told us that this airport doesn’t offer any immigration service and we must leave it immediately after refueling! There were no way to convince the authorities to let us stay overnight in the city, we offered them from money to bring in the immigration service from another airport, 2 hours flight away.



No chance.“This has no solution. You go, or penalty.” Four police officers suddenly appeared, made us believe. As if leaving would have been easy: We had our flight plan to Ambon, also Indonesia, which we could not reach in one day because of time loss and airport closing times. Thats why we had to stop and stay in Pontianak. But flight plans in Indonesia are not that easy to get as they are in Europe. You can’t fly around spontaneously in this country, everything has to be approved days in advance. Obviously we were stuck again!We tried to communicate that we would have to go east, but there was no chance to anywhere without waiting days for a permit and new flight plan.After hours of waiting and discussing we managed to get a permit and a flight plan to leave and fly to Jakarta, a 24-hours opened airport with visa on arrival.



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We grabbed our things, said good bye to security, secret agents, customs and immigration officer and went off to Jakarta, where we arrived 9 pm local time (UTC+7). Fortunately we were lucky here to find the handling agent very helpful. He will manage to get us the permit to fly with one stop through Indonesia to Papua New Guinea where we hope to get by tomorrow evening.