The time just flies by and our second year on this adventure is already over. After a few more weeks in Australia in the beginning of the year, we got to know a different face of this vast, open and dusty country. Tasmania was nothing like the rest and it felt more like beeing back in New Zealand. It was enjoyable to have some cooler weather though after what felt like a year of summer non-stop.
After one year in Australia, we left in April and it was amazing looking forward to a completly different world in South East Asia. Bali, as our first stop, was probably a rather smooth entry into that new chapter. Even though, I will never forget my first night after arriving: a cheap, small hotel room, with no real window, just clean enough, no toilettpaper and in the city there were too many people wanting to talk to me and sell me stuff, like taxi rides or whatever. We realized that starting in New Zealand and Australia was an easy start, we could experiencing travelling by bike, climbing hills, all day heat and everything like it. It was easy to communicate with the people, everybody was friendly and most of them loved to help us. After focussing on that, the new challenges were now: language barriers, different currencies, other cultures, new food and something other than the Western world we knew. I got used to the kind of accomondation as the climate was so humid and the hotels so cheap, that we always rather spend that bit of money for it rather than trying to find a spot to camp. Two weeks passed and we entered our third island, Sumbawa, and for our frst night we had to pitch a tent, as there were no hotels close to the port. It was horrible! We went in the ocean, but it wasn't refreshing and you were even more salty and sticky afterwards. We started cooking and pitched the tent, but eventhough it got dark already, we were still sweating – just great. A few days later we bought little fans which helped for future nights in the tent. As there were always cheap hotels around and it was quite hard to communicate with the locals, as well as the locals were living in really small houses and were rather poor, we hardly asked people if we could stay at there place. Even though those few times we did it, it was great. Many people were overly excited when we came passed and it felt weird to be treated in a special way and like a celebrity. In order to be able to commuicate as much as possible with the locals, we always tried to learn the most necessary words to get around local markets and (we think) it sometimes helped us not to be charged tourist prices.
After a bumpy start, we really arrived in that new world, but it was a different kind of travelling. Especially in Australia we would just cycle as long as we could and camp next to the road to cover maximum distance. We stayed with people randomly and hardly ever planned ahead. Here, we booked accomandations, also just one or two days ahead, but still we knew were we wanted to end up that day. If we were faster, we had an easy going afternoon, if it took longer, we still wanted to get there. Most of the time we didn't cook ourselves as it was just too easy to go around the corner to the next cute, local streetfood and try some of their food. There were so many new things to try, it was amazing. Some things were just a little bit too crazy though, like the half-hatched chicken egg that we tried for lunch in Cambodia, whole little crabs in the soup, snake, spider and scorpion fried on a sticks or just some really spicy food.
All in all it was an amazing experience and so different to our first year. We met so many great people, learned so much again and seen stunning places as well as dove in into a spectacular cultur. 2019 is going to be different again as we are going to cycle all the wayback home. After an Australian Christmas and New Years, we will start in Hong Kong in the beginning of March after spending a few more weeks on the cattle station in Australia to wait for the perfect conditions to cross back to Europe. The plan is to be back in Germany in November this year, we are excited.
See you soon ;)!
Joni, Droni and Ronnie
