Four months of solo taveling

I just came back from a rather long backpacking trip, four months of asia and a month of europe (not solo but still backpacking, wont be included), and I am dead tired now. I cant wait for my next travel but I have to save up some money and recuperate before im ready to head out again.
It feels kind of weird to be back under my parents roof again after this much freedom, I also miss talking to new people every day, I get bored easily now, as if it wasn't bad before...
One thing I did miss about home, however, is my closet and my room, damn if I'm not materialistic. Being big into fashion and wearing the same two pairs of pants and the same 10 t-shirts is not for the weak. I'm glad I don't have to pack up and move every 3 to 7 days any more, but god I miss seeing new things every day and discovering new wonders. I miss motorbikes and I miss scuba diving and i miss the food, the friends, and the partying.

This is mere footnotes to the entire story, but I'm not even sure if I would remember everything in the right order anyway:

Indonesia:

I started in Jakarta where I was only spending one night before an early flight the next morning, this one night was however the foundation for many great nights to come (I didn't know this at the time). We celebrated a birthday and i went to bed way later than I should have.

I headed to Yogjakarta "Yogja" and got adopted by the first people i talked to at my hostel. We went to a temple and i rode on the back of a motorbike for the first time. We spent the next two days exploring and the nights drinking and smoking. Two in my four person group left the following day, and i had diverging plans from the last, so with another stranger from my hostel i went to a huge temple complex, it was amazing, and we took the scenic route back to the hostel. I'm embarrassed to say, but I never learned her name. Earlier the same day I had made plans with an other girl at my hostel to go to next city with her.

With this new stranger as well as a dutch lady from our hostel in Malang, I did the East Java tour, probably one of the best decisions ever, and if you're anywhere near Indonesia and don't do this you have failed your travel. Especially mount Ijen was amazing, a volcano with a piercing blue lake and sulphur mine in the middle, also one of the only places in the world with naturally occurring blue flames. Fucking awesome. It's three days of a lot of experience and very little sleep (i did it in four, but was still beat).

I never had any plans of going to Bali, but the tour ended there, and I wanted to see if it was as bad as I had thought. It was, I didn't care for it. Don't go here solo, but maybe with friends it's okay. After getting my back insanely sunburnt, like dangerously so, I headed back to Jakarta.

I stayed in the same hostel I had last time, and every local and long term resident remembered me, I felt like a fucking celebrity haha. I made new and old friends, someone had a guitar, because of course he did, we drank and we had fun. 

I wanted to go to Sumatra, but due to the end of Ramadan, this turned out to be more difficult than anticipated. Everything was closed for Eid and every plane cost 10 times more than it had last week. I took a 9 hour bus to a small city (with a population of 2 million but small for Indonesia) in the south of Sumatra, no one there had apparently ever seen a white person before, that was kind of funny, everything else there was awful. With broken Sumatra dreams and tears in my eyes i returned to Jakarta. 

This is where something crazy happened. On the bus back I was adopted by the only people who could speak even a sliver of English, and since the bus returned to Jakarta at 2 am, one asked if I wanted to come stay at her house. I said yes. I then stayed with locals in Jakarta for 3 days, every night we drank home-brewed liquor till the world started spinning, which was fun, but considering the fact that I was 20 and the youngest of them was 26, most being above 30, this was maybe not my best idea.

I left and went back to yet the same hostel, everyone was happy to see me again, I still miss them.

Finally Ramadan was over, and I was headed to the very north of Sumatra where I took a 3 hour car ride to Bukit Lawang and went to see the jungles and orangutan for three days, accompanied by a French couple and a British couple, as well as our two guides. This was awesome and worth all the previous Sumatra hassle. On the last night in the jungle I got a bad stomach bug, and cried the following morning because I felt like i ruined the last day for myself and the four others on my trip. When we got back to base camp I took some medicine and made my way to the airport.

Thus ending my one month in Indonesia

Malaysia:

Basically just a very long layover. I saw all there was to see in KL, met a lot of nice people, drank a lot of shitty beer. It was fun. I had a slight cold and this fucked up my ears on my next flight.

Thailand:

I really need to stop going places just to see if I wont like them. Phuket is fine or whatever, but ultimately a very touristy destination with little authentic feeling and large amount of Russian, Chinese, and European families. Anywhere with too many families is not a good sign. I took a day trip to Phi Phi, it was nice there, would probably be fun to stay there, if you weren't solo.

If I was smart this is where I would have gone to Kaoh Sok national park, I am not smart, I did not go.

Ao nang in Krabi was amazing, and I loved it there, I could have spent way longer just lazing at the different beaches on the nearby island. The water in Thailand has the most insane colour and won't cool you down, it's as hot as the air. Me and a stranger from hostel world almost got stuck at Railey beach because we didn't check the time while climbing up some cliffs. Luckily we made it back in time, and only had to pay a few extra Baht for the boat-ride home.

Staying at the right hostel can really make or break your experience with a place, I have heard a million stories from people who fell in love with Koh Samui, I, however, am not one of them. The people you spend time with really makes or breaks a place, and the lack of social activies or spaces at my hostel broke this place. I did rent a motorbike with a girl I met in Malaysia (not before dropping it on my foot, scratching the hell out of the bike, and bleeding all over the hostel floor when I went in to clean it up, fuck it looked gnarly) and we rode around for a day. She was nice, but we said goodbye shortly after sundown. The next morning I did as I've done so many times before, I put on my huge backpack, called a grab (asian uber) and rode to the ferry station.

Another place everyone who've been there falls in love with is Koh Tao, and I too am a victim of this. I got off the ferry and a million people were yelling at me about taxi's and parties, I walked five minutes up the worlds steepest hill and got to my hostel which had a complete lack of curtains, locks and any real doors. I heard someone later saw a tarantula in one of the bathrooms. Great and social people, there was a jungle party that night, was I going? No, I came to Koh Tao with one goal in mind, Scuba. 
And scuba I did. This was probably the highlight of my entire four months in Asia, and I am hooked. My instructor was Danish (same as me), and at the time I found him very hot at the time, I do apparently have a weakness for older people (he was 31). Me and five other students spent the next four days taking our open water PADI certificate, and i spent the nights watching the sunset and drinking with my friends from my hostel. 
On the fourth and final day we went to a jungle party to celebrate, but not before doing some serious pregaming at various 7/11s and bars. If I have one advice it's to never go to a jungle party sober, if I have a second advice, hit on older men, because they'll give you free buckets of drinks, and I don't pay to get shit faced. I had to walk 40 minutes back to my hostel after the party but I barely remember any of this.
I had a one day break, before my scuba friends had convinced me to join them for the advance course, this day I spent hanging out with a group of girls I had met in my hostel dorm.
Advanced diving is way more fun than normal diving. We went down to 30 meters, swam amongst ship wrecks, and even did a night dive. "The closest most of us will get to going to space." The course was shorter and I was drinking more. Queue me making out with a very adult diving instructor, sadly not my own hot one, but a Chilean less hot one. I showed up for the next morning dive (6 am) still drunk from the night before, but my instructor said as long as he wasn't drunk it was fine.
I also smoked weed and then went to a cabaret show, I think somewhere around here in the chronological sense.
It was perfect timing, as we ended our course on the 12th of April, and the 13th of April is Songkran, also known as New Years. A water fight festival that the whole island (country and basically Indo-Chinese peninsula) takes part in.
Oh did I mention the wound I got from dropping a motorbike over my foot hurt an awful lot and was seriously infected? and did you know you're not supposed to drink and take antibiotics at the same time? I only knew one of these things as I washed down a white pill I had bought at the pharmacy down with a 7/11 beer and went on with my day. Being drenched and drunk from the moment I left my house and to the moment I didn't go home with the Chilean dive instructor because I lost him in the crowd somewhere.

Originally I went to Bangkok to meet up with a friend from Indonesia as well as a Thai friend I had made a few years previously on exchange in Japan. I regret leaving Koh Tao when I did, and for the final day of Songkran Bangkok wasn't all that. I think I did it very wrong, but I was mainly just depressed from leaving Koh Tao. I took the night bus to Laos, that was three weeks well spent.

Laos:

Did you know you have to have money for the visa at the border? I did not. Thankfully there was a Danish man on my bus that had enough for me to borrow and I could easily transfer him some using a Danish money transferring app, very lucky huh, nothing ever goes truly wrong.

The capital of Laos is so boring I wouldn't even bother going here. I met someone from my high school though, so that was kind of fun.

If you go to Vang Vieng you need to be able to ride a motorbike, if you remember, the only time I tried I dropped it on myself, so I instead opted to rent a bicycle. Fuck. I died. I did also see some really cool caves tho! 

If you know anything about backpacking in SEA you've heard of mad monkey. A place 18 year old British people go to get drunk and forget which foreign country they are in. I thought I needed to go stay at one of these places, because I needed to see how bad it was of course. And I chose the one in Luang Prabang. I found the first and only people there who weren't British, and we went on an adventure. I drove a motorbike successfully for the first time, and it was super easy, I don't know why I'd been so scared. We bought weed from a sketchy tuktuk driver. I wish I had kissed the weird polish girl.

Instead of kissing we instead went to Nong Khiaw together to climb a mountain. I had yet another round of food positing, so we had to get a room and wait a day. I wish I hadn't gotten sick so we could've enjoyed our time together. We climbed this fuck ass mountain, I would've done something else in hindsight because it was not very adventurous, but we smoked our leftover weed and slept up there nonetheless. I woke up on the hard ground because apparently flimsy air mattresses aren't made for both yourself and weird polish girls to share one. Huh. Well I got food poisoning AGAIN. I took a pill before I even got seriously ill but I was still sluggish when we made our way back to the closest mayor city Luang Prabang.

We watched a movie in my bunk and when I woke up she had gone down to her own bunk. I flew out after just 9 days in Laos and she took a disastrous bus to Vietnam.

Cambodia:

Oh my love my life. I landed in Siem Reap, TAKE ME BACK! and at 4 am the following morning I went to one of the worlds wonders, Angkor Wat, with a bunch of girls I would continue travelling around with. Siem Reap is one of those places I regret ever leaving. We went to a lotus farm, they had bomb rats (so cool! I got to hold one!). We went out drinking and the next morning I texted my friends "I would love to go out for bagels but I didn't go back to the hostel." I was bought breakfast and kissed goodbye and he begged me not to go.

Batambang is a largely uninteresting place, they have a half day tour, which was fun, but after that it was time to leave.

Koh Rong was nice, white beaches, shitty hostels and shitter beer. I got sunburnt again. I went scuba diving again, Koh Tao was better, but I was happy to be back breathing underwater again. A guy lost his phone in the ocean. I went to a jungle/beach party, I took my friends leftover shrooms, they did nothing. There were a few too many British people on this Island. I went on a motorbike ride with a very negative German girl, it was fun, and I was glad I finally knew how to ride a motorbike.

The genocide tour in Phnom Penh almost brought me to tears and made me want to throw up. I would highly recommend. PP is full of nice cafes but I didn't feel very sociable.

I regret not spending more than two weeks in Cambodia, and I can see myself going back in the future.

China:

I didn't originally plan to go here, but then me and my sister made plans to go, and it was the best three weeks I've ever spent. My sister is probably my best friend and I could write a whole separate blog about China.

Intinatrary and highlights.

Beijing (our second time here)
 - The Great Wall
 - Summer Palace
 - Forbidden City
 - (Wanted to go see Mao's corpse but the building was under construction.)

Xian
 - Terracotta army
 - City wall
 - THE FOOD! God the food, we went to get Biang biang at a cute little lady's resturant, amazing.

Zhangjiajie
 - National park: Avatar mountains. (Chinese tourists are the worst, I bodied some man because i was dead tied and he pushed my sister very rudely, this was hilarious.)
 - Heavens gate, those 999 steps only took 10 minutes, easy.
 - Grand canyon

Furong & Feng Huang
 - Furong had a very fake plastic feel to it, it was fine though.
 - Feng Huang was a beautiful (still a little fake) old city.
 - Our hotel was awesome, right out to the river.
 - Street food

Yangshou
 - Xingping!!!
 - Nun mountain <3
 - Shitty little EL-scooter
 - Abandoned city and temple

Hangzhou
 - It was whatever

Shanghai
 - French quater (very busy tho)
 - The bund
 - Street fashion stores

I said goodbye to my sister who was headed to Albania and I continued solo.

Vietnam:

I had an end date for when I had to be back in Europe, and while on Koh Rong I had bought my ticket home. This meant I know had five weeks and one country left. I wanted to got to one more country, but I really did not want to rush Vietnam.

Saigon is a nice city, I didn't spent too much time her but I enjoyed the time I did spend here. I went out with some guys from my dorm room, and they had found this awesome street wear store that was open on our second attempt to go there. I saw a war museum that almost made me cry and went to the tunnels that the Vietnamese had used during the American war. I met two girls, one of which I could not escape for the remainder of my stay, lets call her S.

I took the night bus to Da Lat with the girls from Saigon. I spent my first day just riding around on a motorbike. The second day me and a girl from my hostel take the wrong way up a mountain, it was amazing, I got a  leech, 10/10. The next day me and the same girl goes canyoning, it was a little expensive but so much fun. The last day I go alone to some waterfalls and almost run out of petrol on serval occasions.

I had heard many amazing things about Hoi An, but could it really be that great? Was it really a place you would stay for weeks or even months? I booked two nights in a hostel in the old town. FAIL. Not a very social hostel, I meet up with some people to go on the coconut spiny boats, that was fun but ultimately a cash grab. While waiting, I see S and her friend walking down the street, oh they are here too? Not too weird but fun just running into them. 
I decide to go stay at a Hostel near the beach, I hadn't seen the ocean since Koh Rong and I miss it. The hostel I'm staying at doubles as an animal rescue, so many dogs and cats, and the day before I left, a chicken. I make friends in the common area and while playing pool, who comes walking up to me, S. We're staying at the same hostel, how funny.
I planned on staying in Hoi An for maybe 4 days total and end up staying a week, for me at this point this was a long time, the only place I had stayed for more than like 5 days was my 9 days on Koh Tao.
I Love Hoi An and I love the people there, S leaves before me and I take a solo motorbike ride called the Hai Van pass to Hue.

Hue was a nice stop over, they have the old imperial city and an abandoned water park, perfect for one day.

One thing about me is that I LOVE caves, so of course I have to go to Phong Nha. I spent my first day exploring caves solo, and the night drinking and smoking with people from my hostel room. The next day I go into a proper cave, with helmets and carabiners and such, fucking awesome. I get home from the cave and S walks up to me. We are staying at the same hostel again, how funny. We drink smoke and talk with people in the common area until my night bus arrives and I leave for the next place.

The hostel where I stay in Ninh Bin is HUGE. Too huge actually, I spent my first day doing jack all and when I'm just about ready to go to bed I run into a guy who was at my hostel in Phong Nha, we stay up talking until 3 am. The next day I go exploring on Motorbike, I ran into an entire school class out practising their English. When I get back to the hostel some girls in my dorm invite me to go drinking with them, and who am I to say no. The next morning (afternoon), S is once again staying at the same hostel as me. I was lazing around the pool and she came and joined me. The next day we go exploring.

Sapa was cool and awesome and I love mountains. I went trekking and stained my hands blue with indigo and then I climbed the tallest mountain in Vietnam with a bunch of Canadian girls. And who is staying at my hostel again, randomly, yes that's right S. We don't know it yet, but this is the last time we will meet. Still at this point only in Hue has she not been with me.

If you go to Vietnam you have to do the Ha Giang loop, its mandatory, you basically haven't been there if you haven't done this. It's a four day motorbike trip in the mountains of northern Vietnam. It's so much fun, the food was amazing (a lot of people complain but our food was great!), i felt a little left out in my group because they were all cishet guys, but it was fun nontheless. The final night we went out to a bar, someone yells my name. Its the Canadian girls from Sapa, I leave my group and join them instead. They ask if I have seen A yet, I have not, the guy I met in Phong Nha appeared. We get very drunk, it's very fun. 

After the loop I go to Cat ba, at this point in my travel I am SO ready to get home, i have five days left, and I am TIRED. I go on a one day cruise with a girl from my hostel room and a girl we met the night before, this was fucking awesome. The next day we go exploring before I leave for Hanoi.

I have gotten myself the worst throat infection ever, was it the Canadian girl from a couple nights before? who knows, it sucks. I am not feeling social. I go shopping, I see the sights (I SAW THE CORPSE OF HO CHI MIN!!! WOW) and i waste my last three days in Vietnam doing nothing in particular. A cry a little on my way to the airport, I love my life, I love sitting on the back of motorbikes and I love sunsets and I couldn't wait to be home again. (For only just a week)

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There are many things I wish I had had the time to do and many things i regret not doing, but over all this was an amazing experience and I'm thankful for all of it and especially for all the amazing people I've met. If I had to do it all again, with the knowledge I have now, it'd look very different, but I think my stupid mistakes are a part of the charm. I didn't go to the hospital once and I count that as a mayor win. I think everyone in their 20's should do something stupid like this at least once, either with a friend or, if you dare, alone. I know I'll be more prepared for my next trip, I can't wait.