Tag Archives: on the road

South Island: leftovers

by ladina

The last two weeks on New Zealand’s South Island consisted in a lot of driving and stopping on the way at famous sights. From the alpine scenery in Mount Cook National Park, we crossed the Alps to reach the West Coast with its famous Fox and Franz Josef Glaciers that are partly embedded in rainforest; only to arrive, a few hundred kilometers further north, at the marvelous beaches of Abel Tasman National Park. At the end of this road trip, I felt very tired for we changed our campsite every night and did not have time to relax properly. In this sense, I was relieved when we finally boarded the ferry to cross the Cook Strait and reach the North Island. But it also meant leaving this marvelous, diversified part of the world behind us…

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Otago Peninsula, New Zealand

by ladina

New Zealand, one of the countries on the very top of my list, awaited us with new adventures: the very first and most demanding consisted in driving on the “wrong” side. We decided to rent a small car for our time in NZ, a little extra to our backpacker’s existence which would allow us to visit more secluded places and give us a whole new feeling: freedom to go wherever we wanted to, whenever it pleased us, without depending on others.

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The Great Ocean Road, Victoria

by ladina

We had hardly put our feet on the Australian continent when we set out to discover one of the most impressive coastlines in the world: the Great Ocean Road. Built in the 1920s, this world-famous road runs along the wild ocean in the south-west of Victoria. During our roadtrip together with my aunt and uncle, though the weather was definitely not postcardlike, I felt that the clouds, the wind and the rain actually showed the force of nature: its domination was immensely present. After all, those elements — together with the constant coming and going of the waves — shaped the cliffs and rocks over thousands of years to the stunning form they have today.

Standing near the edge of a precipice, surrounded by this powerful nature, I was overwhelmed by the vehemence and beauty of our planet.

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Arrival in Yogyakarta

by jose

The rising sun was painting the sky in hues seldom heard of: shy purple, hesitating blue, grays melting into whites as the stream of dreamy clouds passed by. I closed my eyes, at peace.

I opened them again what seemed but an instant later. New colors had appeared behind the windscreen: different tints of orange were struggling to see which one would become yellow first. The time read 6.14. The lady had said we would arrive at 6, but then, we had left an hour and a half late, so…

The bus stopped, once more. I lazily let my eyes wander to the side to watch the passengers recover their luggage from the hold. There was actually only one passenger. It was hard to focus, but I did nonetheless.

It was Aldi.

And he was frantically making me sign to get off the bus.

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Bus journeys

by ladina

You might have been wondering how the daily life of a traveller looks like? Though we would love it to be so, it is not all about admiring amazing landscapes, eating delicious food, lying on the beach and gaping before ancient monuments — it also involves sleeping in creepy places, sweating in the heat of the merciless sun and being shaken for hours on bumpy bus rides. About the last, I want to tell you a bit more, for we often spend fairly long hours in those buses. After all, they are the cheapest and most common option to get from one place to another. I do not know how many times we already made our way to the bus station, had to ask at least five locals which one was our vehicle and if it really went where we wanted to go, then waited for the bus to come, holding our backpacks before storing them in the luggage rack — only keeping our valuables, the guitar and a pullover (for the air-con) with us — and, finally, got into the bus. During those journeys, I always learn a lot about the country, how its system works (or does not work) and how its people behave. Let me take you on rides through different nations we have visited!

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Countryside

by jose

“Left or right?”

I had no memory of that roundabout. The way to the bridge we had taken to cross the Ayeyarwady river was ahead, but I could not recall which direction we had come from. I had been too busy striving to follow the villager — who had showed us the way to Sagaing Hill on his own motorbike — to memorize reference points.

“No idea!” came the reply behind me.

“Whatever. Let’s eat at that restaurant over there,” I suggested while pointing at a building, which was actually no more than a roof above packed tables and low stools set on the bare ground. It was filled with locals. That was a very good sign.

“Yeah, looks amazing”

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