storiesfromtravels-blog

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The original plan was to travel the Irawady by boat. But travels wouldn’t be fun if there was no change of plan ;) Emil was sick that day and I feared he would have to throw up but nothing happened. Also we had to sit on plastic chairs lined up in a row on the small boat. I had actually expected a real boat, like a regular ferry or something. The 4 hours passed well with me watching the river (have I mentioned that i love rivers) and Emil listening to audio books and amazing our fellow travelers.

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There are certain places one has a (romantic) imagination about. For me one of those "places" has been the Mekong. We left Laos 🇱🇦 by boat because I prefer to cross borders overland. And also because of the above. So we spent two days on the mighty Mekong admiring the surrounding beauty and regretting to leave this country. The trip wasn't romantic at all, the slow boats are more like busses and of course there are a lot of tourists around. But still there is a certain atmosphere around the river that did live up to my imaginative expectations. And that's all those romantic imaginations about distant places are about, right?

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We had just entered Argentina after spending a couple of days in Torres del Paine National Park, Chile and were desperately looking for gasolin as there was none in the park. The first gas station on the Ruta 40 marked on our map was out of fuel so we had to go another 80 kilometers and managed to refill just in time. I think we were on the last drop when entering the gas station.

This picture was taken at the grounds of the empty gas station.

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The day we wandered up and down the steep roads of San Francisco and discovered so many nice places. I don’t know how many miles we walked but it was a lot. From time to time we stopped at a small park or a playground to have a rest. And we started to like this city which we had a rough start with as our hotel was in a quite unpleasant area.

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That day we had so much fun kayaking on the Nam Xong river in Laos. We had a picnic at this spot; Emil had a swim in the river while our guide prepared the food. The banana leaves that served as our plates we had collected on a walk through the jungle just before.

The scenery was truly beautiful - just as I had imagined. Those rivers were one of the reasons I wanted to go to Laos for.

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Bangkok - where our adventure began and everything was still new and exciting. Exciting it continued to be. But nothing beats this feeling when you just start something you longed to do for a long time.

We took a local ferry along the Chao Phraya to see some of Bangkoks famous temples that day.

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Typical evening scene at a campground along the Carretera Austral. We had to share this campground with cows which were brought there after we had payed a small fee to the owners of this peace of land. The night was dark, from time to time a truck was passing by the road. 

This was on our last days on the Carretera, in the Northern part; the road is almost completely paved here. Development is fast and one day the entire Carretera Austral might be paved.

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A free campground in a small township along the Ruta 40 in Northern Patagonia. We stopped here for the night and to refill on gasolin before taking almost 200 kilometers on an unpaved road to cross into Chile again and hit the Carretra Austral. Owner Carlos came by to say hello. Later in the evening we were joined by a hitchhiking argentinian couple plus guitar. Two bikers on a roadtrip stayed at the townships hotel which was also the bar, the grocery store and the gas station at the same time. And probably owned by Carlos too.