English journal

This page will host the english part of my journal from my trip to Oceania & Asia 2009. It’s intended for my english speaking (or reading) friends who are not that familiar with norwegian, or don’t undertand one word norwegian for that matter Or for everybody else who just happenes to come by my little blog.

Preparations

Inspiration

Most of this blog will be in norwegian, but some of the traveling parts will also be in english for my english speaking friends. And so I begin, the inspiration for this blog..

I’ve been thinking about starting a blog for a quite a while but I’ve never gotten around to it. I never found the occacion or the big reason for doing so. But after seeing the blogs of my friends Andreas and Ronny (see blogroll on the right) I got inspired – my own blog. The occasion? Me and Bjørn, a good friend of mine, are traveling “all over” Oceania and Asia this November. So I thought – why not finally create a blog, and make it ready before my trip so I can easily post to it on my journy through Oceania and Asia.

Preliminary route

This plan for a trip actually started out with quite a different travel route. My friend wanted to go fishing with the big fishes in Australia and then head over to New Zealand. I’ve never been to neither Australia or New Zealand myself (he has several times), so spending one week on a fishing boat wasn’t that appeasing to me; not as my first trip ever to Assieland and New Zealand, so I started planning for a week in Thailand, planning to hook up with an old tenant of mine (I have a big appartment in Oslo so I rent out two rooms), before meeting my friend in Australia _or_ New Zealand.  A long story short – my friend had to cancel his trip because a his traveling mate (a mutual friend of us) was unable to go. Cutting short again, me and my friend ended up with a much bigger route, and also a week or two more on the move

Our current traveling route looks at the time being more or less like this: Melboune, Australia - Tasmania -New Zealand - Singapore - Malaysia - Philippines - Vietnam - Cambodia - Thailand.

A lot of places in just five short weeks. But plans may, and will, change. We may be derailed and end up visiting other countries instead, who knows (we do, two and a half month from now . Anyway, we have only booked the trip from Oslo to Melbourne on October 31st, and a return trip from Bangkok to Oslo on December 6th, landing in Oslo around 7am, ready for work @9am sharp (yeah right).

What happens between those dates are yet to be decided as I said, most likely things will change, and be decided then and there, but the first few days are more or less planed out - Melbourne Cup. And then a trip to Hobart, Tasmania. Not more than a night or two, probably Friday to Saturday/Sunday.. time will show.

Over the next month and so me and my friend will probably read up on all the countries and places we want to visit and have different ideas on what we want to see and what we _have_ to see. With nine countries/places to visit and only five weeks we are bound to miss a great deal, so what? We can go back later

e-Visa

I did some research on visa rules last month. As we were going to a number of countries some of them where bound to have immigration restrictions, demanding visa to enter. It appeared that Australia and Cambodia were the contries where we needed visa, and we could apply online:

• Australian Imiigration – info
• Australian Imiigration – e-Visa/e-Visitor application form
• Kamobodsja – Ministry of Foreign Affairs – info
• Kambodsja – e-Visa application form

Not all entry points in Cambodia supports e-Visa. Chech the table or look at the map, and also check out theFAQ.

Cambodia e-Visa map

The e-Visa application for Australia took under a day to get granted and didn’t cost a dime. I’ve not yet applied for e-visa to Cambodia. It is almost free, only $25, or about NOK 140,-.

We will probably enter Cambodia by land at Bovet eller by plane at Phnom Pen. This will be decided on the road as we go about.

I’ll update this page as the time goes by and we visit the places we visit.

The Trip

Australia & Tasmania

I’ve come to realise it’s not that easy to keep this blog updated in both norwegian and english.

At least for pictures, you should se the norwegian overview and check the links.

So far we’ve been in Melbourne, Australia and on Tasmania (Launceston and Hobart). We rented a car in Launceston and drove to Hobart the second day on Tasmania, visiting a few point-of-views on the road. Pictureshere and here.

We will fly to New Zealand and Christchurch on Monday morning.

New Zealand

For pictures, check out the norwegian overview and check the links under “New Zealand”.

Most of the time in New Zealand has been spent in Queenstown. We landed in Christchuch, but took the bus to Queenstown the day after, early in the morning. We’ve been doing lots of stuff, seen some of the Lord of the Rings scenery, Jet boatride, gondola, mini-golf, gondola, offroading (4-wheel motorbikes), city walk etc.

It’s been a great week. Soon we will be heading to the Phillippines

Philippines

One week has past and we ended up staying in the Philippines for almost twice as long as first planed. First we spent two nights in Manila before we set course for the “paradise” island Boracay. Pictures here and here(check the norwegian overview from Philippines for even more pictures). After serveral days in Boracay we decided to fly out on Saturday, just to find out there are no flights on Saturdays from Boracay (Caticlan airport actually, just a short boatrip away). So we had to stay one more night. Still, it was not a bad thing. Boracay is just so nice, everyone is friendly, the beaches white and the girls sweet…

This time there is actually a normal post in english, not just this single page. Two australian women we met at the resort we stayed (actually the aussie owners sister and her friend) at wanted to do a post on my blog, so I let them. It’s called “We Know Better!!!“. Check it out.

We are leaving from Manila International Airport in about an hour an a half for Singapore, so stay tuned Hopefully I find some cheap electronics I want to buy, like the Sony Vaio P mini laptop…

Oh, we also met the Miss Earth contentants, or most of them anyway. Miss Norway wasn’t there for some reason, we never entered the contest I think. But we got to have a chat with Miss Denmark. She actully envyed our backpacking trip. They ‘just’ traveled around the Philippines for three weeks taking pictures, taking pictures and taking even more pictures. And they weren’t allowed to have a drink, leave the hotel without makeup and high heels, and also needed to be escorted by a bodyguard.. Oh, they also planted a tree. You can see a few picture here.

Whats missing…

And that was all I managed to blog in english on my trip. We got to see Singapore, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand before we had to go home