tuk tuk, lake toba, sumatra

so i was in medan and after saying goodbye to piotrek again i got on a bus to prapat. at the middle of the trip i was starving. breakfast had been cakes and a mango shake to break the normal fried noodles in the morning thing. i was still on an aceh mood when i wouldn't be able to eat till 7pm... but i was soooo hungry!! and suddenly we stopped in the middle of nowhere and lots of people got on the bus selling food and i realized i was out of aceh! really close to this seriously catholic land. and so i stepped out of the bus and got some pastries :) i found a cake made of my favourite south east asian fruit - jackfruit :D yumm!!

with a fuller belly i got to prapat in a much better mood :) and i got on the boat to tuk tuk. this place is really GORGEOUS!! it's the biggest lake in south east asia and it makes me think of inle lake in burma a lot :) i got a really nice guesthouse and my room has a huge window to the lake :) there's a garden with a pretty way into the lake and there are a few batak houses around - such pretty houses they are!!

so far on this trip i seem to end up chatting a lot with people who are either 10 years older or 10 years younger... but today i met a 70 something year old australian that has been living here for 5 years :) and he introduced me to tuak - palm wine! can't say i likely at start... but i sure loved it after the 2 glass ;) amazing talk with royle!! he told me "misfortune is what good fortune leans on" :) among many other wise things ;) if you come this way go meet him at horas chill out and homestay xx and if you have any extra room on your backpack please bring a teddy bear for one of his kids! even if i have to say that they may lack a teddy bear or 2... but they have a monkey as a pet!

this is a really beautiful lake :) and a there's a pretty mountain next to the island i'm in... i can't wait to see more of it tomorrow!!

it's raining again tonight! a kiwi i met yesterday who has been coming here to surf for the last 10 years told me the seasons are all changed since the tsunami and this might be the rainy season showing up before october when it was expected! and by the way, for the fans of dr. house out there - this kiwi was so similar to him piotrek thought it was his little brother. little house ;)

looking back on pulau weh

one day we wake up to a really shinny sky, beautiful transparent water and bright sun :) we had breakfast at mama mia and by the time we finished our pancakes and coffee the rain had settled in... then it got a bit better. then a bit worst. then a bit better. we went over to pino's and had coffee and i thought i'd make it a reading game. the book i got from canadian jay on my flight to dubai is really good and i feel better reading it in the rain than in the sun because the book is set in a working camp in kazahkstan and it feels strange to read such words when i feel all tropical. we were having coffee with pashu and cedric, a really nice couple (french girl, american guy, married 6 months ago). even thought it was stormy, the boys decided to go for a swim and some snorkelling. me and pashu stayed at pino's. and then the storm got really mad. and it got even worst as the time passed... we ended up taking the guys' shoes to the other side of the island because that's where the current usually takes you. there was no side of them and by then pashu was already really worried... we walked back to pino's in the rain and by now the russian book was soaked wet, just like us. back at pino's there was also no sign of the boys. but the weather got a bit better so we relaxed. and had coffee with the sumatran version of condensed milk. then the real big storm came in..... and pashu was understandingly worried... she got a migraine and the pills for that were inside of the bungalow that could only be opened with the key that cedric had taken with him. and there was still no sign of them. they could have crossed the island in front of us as they were swimming towards it before... but they could as easily have been taken by a strong current... and to make things even better... that sea has sharks... so this was not a pretty sight of this sweet french girl thinking she could have lost the man she had just married... and of course in the end it was all fine and the guys came back saying they couldn't tell how bad the storm was from the water and all that and they had spent the time looking at the amazing blue and yellow fishes, corals and nemos...
but the whole thing made me think... how we sometimes make other people worry for us when it would be so easy to avoid it xx

ramadan

i love this time of the year :)
yesterday waiting for the time to break the fast i couldn't stop thinking of friends in pakistan and morroco and india and sri lanka and burma who are doing the same... such a beautiful thing :D that last half an hour is so beautiful... and today the same thing happens... :) till the 19th of september ;)

pulau weh

the island was great :D the weather was really terrible and we got some of the most fierce rain i have seen lately... but when you have a bungalow right next to some perfect turquoise water with a hammock... it doesn't matter all that much! i loved the island days :) and when it felt too much like london - when you know things could be so great but there's always the rain.... - then we left! and hopped on the boat back to banda aceh and then on a 12h bus to medan where we just visited a mosque after breakfast and then me and piotr splipt up! well, he's still at an internet cafe next doors, but this is where we go our separate ways (it has been a true pleasure to travel together piotrek! terimakasi por todo!!)

pulau weh is full of mysterious characters and really nice people :) and i really recommend the place for those of you who are into diving (amazing scenery for 25Euros a dive!). if you go there it's impossible not to meet the crazy lady, mama mia... if you figure her out please let me because i know i couldn't! then there's pino... great guy who's a master of the guitar :) and there are lots of sailors ;) my favorite one was the guy who looks like che guevara and knows a bit of italian and i hope his boat gets fixed so that he can go back to singapore!!

pulau weh is a place to go back to :) for 150 USD a month you can have your own bungalow for a month there...

sumatra - timor

the distance from sumatra to timor is the same as the distance from lisbon to moscow

banda aceh, sumatra

got to banda aceh around 3am. what a crazy trip up here! me and piotrek just came from ketambe which means we spent 2 hours on the first minibus, 8 hours on the second mini bus and 7 hours on the last one... i hadn't anticipated how scary it would be to sit on a minibus in sumatra after having had a car accident on a van pretty much the same size as these buses... it's bloody scary and my heart has jumped out of my chest a few dozen times on the way up here! the first thing i did when i got on the bus was imagine how everything would feel if the minibus flipped over on the road full of landslides in the middle of the night... of course these minibuses don't have seating belts and the road... even though it goes by the enthusiastic name of "trans-sumatran highway"... it looks like something i would hardly call a road. but anyway, we made it! and this seems like a nice place :) as it's ramadan everyone was out eating late and we joined in while waiting for the 9am boat to go to pulau weh for some great beach days snorkeling :D can't wait!!

meanwhile in ketambe we went to see the orangutans and they were so cute!!!!!! also lots of thomas leaf's monkeys and many macaques :) and beautiful birds and butterflies with amazing colors :):):) after the long day in the jungle my knee hurt like hell!! i also hit it on a branch... which didn't help... but anyway, for me the best of ketambe was the family that owned the guest house, they were sweet and cute and gentle and it was so hard to leave... the mom was a great cook and an amazing healing woman who massaged my knee 3 days in a row making it sooooo much better :) they put a huge smile on my face!! and as if it wasn't all already enough... in the morning we had pancakes with banana and coconut and amazing coffee roasted with cocoa grains... true happiness :D

and then those great things, like how it's always the people you meet and end up traveling with and sharing your days and your meals and your emotions and your trip... that end up being your journey :)

sumatra

this is sumatra calling.
it had been a long time since i had been in such an exciting place. the roads are bad, there aren't many foreigners at all, the food is great, the volcanoes are gorgeous, there is music everywhere, the sound that calls for prayers happens like a clock, the people are super friendly and the kids want to play and laugh all the time :) and on top of all that, the desserts are amazing! and they have pancakes and GREAT COFFEE! so basically... this is the place to be!

the boat from georgetown was a crazy experience! i met piotr, a cool 22 year old polish guy with a serious hangover ;) we were the two solo travelers on the boat so we sat together. the 6hours across the straight of melaka were passed chatting and making travel plans and feeling dizzy, sometimes very dizzy and piotr ended up vomiting all that he had inside of him! haha, we can laugh about it now!

i thought i'd go up to banda ached straight after the boat but the thought of taking a night bus for 15hours right after the super fast and rough boat trip... i decided to go to berastagi. so me and piotr became travel mates - and we make a great team!!

that same day we found a super cheap guesthouse in berastagi and wondered off after dinner looking for something... it was just not the time to go sleep yet... we heard some music and got closer and we met the youth of berastagi gathering in front of the church with a guitar and 2 great singers :) they played traditional karo music which makes me think of pete doherty :) with a tropical tone ;) very cool tunes! piotr is recording the sounds of the island so one day i'll have the cd! we soon got back to the guesthouse to study some indonesian but ended up listening to polish music - great stuff!

the next day we got up early and after breakfast and a huge glass of strong coffee we went up gurund sibayak, a really cool volcano. amaziiiiiiiing trek! lots of little fumarolas (geysers?) and a crater that was surprisingly filled with messages and names that people wrote with stones :D gorgeous views! then on the way down we went to the hot springs and we soaked for some good 3 hours to make the muscles tender again :) it was great!! then we still had to head back to town and we thought we'd walk until we got caught in the rain and so we sat for a long time talking about deep stuff (sometimes!) and watching life unfold. soon we realized the rain would not stop so we hitched and ended up getting a bus at some intersection and eventually made it back to berastagi. it got quite cold and we were annoyed with the weather, especially the dampness - it felt like london!! so we went for an excellent dinner to feel happier. and so we did :) had great desserts too and then studied this pretty language! we seem to keep on forgetting how to say thank you though...!

oh, and last night i went to the ATM and got a million and 200 thousand rupiahs :D i am therefore a millionaire!! even if that only means i'm in possession of 88 euros :) hehe

today we didn't want to respect the alarm clock at 7.30am..... but we had because the trip ahead of us was long! so amazing noodles for breakfast and we hit the road. buses are fun here but we wanted to hitch hike...... so we got on a truck. and then another one. and another one. and yet one more. and we got here to the town with internet (finally, as other places didn't have it or had power cuts) where i'm now writing from with a cool teenager staring at the screen from behind my shoulder :)

so we need to get one more car to take us to ketambe to see the orangutans :D:D:D:D:D

sorry if it takes a while until the next update, this is not a good place for internet! it's great for many other things though :)

georgetown, penang

the music on my bus here.
i just arrived and it feels romantic and nostalgic and filled with dreamers and poets and sailors. this is where i'll take a ferry to sumatra :) but it feels like i could live here forever, in one of those many meanings that 'forever' can have. this is the place to fall in love many times. and maybe because of that most guesthouses are on the love lane. i'm writing from the love lane inn, on 54 love lane, georgetown.

kuala lumpur

loved it!
will come back to this latter, it's time for a shower ;)

xx

ok, took me a while to come back to this... but KL was great!! there where lots of juice fruits and delicious meals in chinatown and i stayed at the same hostel where kyle stayed a couple of years back (who knows, maybe the same bunk bed??!) and the city was really nice!! usually you have to queue up at 6am to get tickets for the petronas towers but i went there at 5pm and asked really nicely and smiled and put on a sweet tone and the guy let me in :) i also managed to get an italian couple in with me with the same smile ;) so, not bad at all! after that and walking around and riding the fast monorail i thought it was time to leave KL and i took a morning bus to georgetown. breakfast in KL was an amazing bun with peanut butter and another one with kaya - the delicious malaysian spread with coconut and eggs and dark sugar... yumm!

if i go back there i might go see the butterfly garden :)

melaka

melaka is a charm! it's a funny place for a portuguese, as we always hear stories from that town. and the portuguese are still very present there with ruins of stuff built on the 16th century. my favourite portuguese thing was the galeon that hosts the maritime museum - amazing to be in that boat and look to the straight of melaka. makes you think of afonso de albuquerque and all those old portuguese. after the portuguese came the dutch and took it all away. then the british. then japanese and now more contemporary economical and political interests seem to rule. chinatown is huge and one of the prettiest i know.
i stayed at a great guesthouse in melaka - KANCIL guesthouse :) ibrahim, the guy running the place (friend of the owner) is really nice and we found a common love for cybernetics! at the garden at kancil GH we shared lots of malaysian fruits - 2 new fruits for me in the middle of the typical south east asian variety :D yumm! and one day ibrahim took me for a walk around the city - what an amazing way to discover melaka! it was great because he's a civil engineer, so all the time he was pointing out evidences of past times in the buildings, like the bricks that made the foundations that would sometimes be dutch sometimes british. he also showed me the airplane used by the malaysian prime minister to go and get the paper declaring the independence of malaysia! (you can celebrate that onthe 31st of august) and then we walked around trying to pick the place for a new guesthouse - he had the engineer view on things, i had the traveller's insight ;) we found the perfect house with beautiful malay carvings and a huge garden around with palm trees and a nice welcoming look!
there's a portuguese settlement in melaka :) where they have a museum (closed when i got there) and 5 restaurants with "portuguese specialties". at the settlement they celebrate sao joao and sao pedro and they dance the portuguese folk dances!! quite impressive!
i left melaka in the early morning to go to a city i always wanted to go to..... kuala lumpur :)

singapore

singapore is one of those places that feels really tropical and one wonders who would go there and create a city as it feels more fit for just going on being a jungle. it's almost constantly very humid and has that sticky jungle feeling while you are amid really high, grey and shinny buildings and you are stepping on concrete and taking public transportation with freezing air-con and going in and out of fancy super modern malls.... it's strange! and that's a nice strangeness :) like a few other asian cities, it is really organized and there is so much information around that you hardly have to ask questions to find your way. as a result you also interact less and people seem to keep to themselves a lot more than in less overly organized cities. but people smile back at you if you smile at them!
for me the most intriguing thing about singapore is that chewing gum is forbidden! strange, isn't it? and if i find that a weird law... i find it even stranger that people have conformed to it - why not start a chiclets revolution?! maybe bring in international resources to fight for the right of chewing gum?!
anyway, the best in singapore were the food courts :D there you can find cuisine from china, malasya, india, thailand, vietnam, korea... all of the best food in the world - excellent!
of course for me, personally, the very best of singapore was visiting sara (obrigada for everything sara!). sara was the perfect host as we devoted the great part of our time to chating :) (and sara, i think that was the reason for the sore throats as mine got way better as i traveled a bit into malaysia and didn't have your great company to chat away!)
another highlight of my singapore days was the hot flow yoga class (thanks for that sara!). the class happened on the 23rd floor of a fancy building and we had a great view and a funny teacher :) great experience! halfway through the class i realized that the room being heated up at 40 degrees meant that it wasn't much warmer than outside!
leaving singapore was easy and straightforward and when i boarded the bus to melaka i bumped into a portuguese couple! maybe because me and sara chatted till late every night in singapore i didn't feel like talking to them. and if i don't tell people i'm portuguese, people usually won't tell that's where i come from. so i kept incognito :)

dubai is a strange place

i left lisbon to go spend the day in london. this time the mad city felt great :) first of all because i know i don't live there anymore. it was cold and wet and i felt so thankful for the lovely weather in portugal in the past 14 months :) now london took the best form possible as i stopped there to enjoy the best that london has to offer, my friends :) i had a great day! and i agree that scheduling only 1 day for this was not a proper thing to do! but on the way back i'll have many new stories and our conversations will be filled with exotic tales :D (thanks you lovely londoners for the hugs & smiles!)
i'm now at the airport in dubai. weird place.
i slept heavily on the airplane until the canadian guy sitting next to me woke me up all excited saying he was seing a place he knew from up there and i had to see it. in the middle of the desert he recognized a place where he spent 2 months doing the art direction of a kurdish film. in the film a village is invaded by crows and in the end all the population acts as scarecrows. it all sounded dry and strange and deserted of several things. that was the guy sitting on my left. he said he doesn't like canada and i got all defensive because i love the place (and i feel a bit canadian). anyway, i thing i got his heart when i told him i'd love to get a double double now :) and he laughed out loud when i told him i went out curling in sudbury last january! we hangued out at the airport till 2am when he boarded his flight to corea, where he lives. we shared dinner and film tales, family stories, love stories, weird stories, and both smiled at how great it is to be all the way in dubai in the middle of the night sharing bits of intimacy you don't share with friends back home :) i presented him to herzog and robert fenz's films :) he offered me his coppy of 'a day in the life of ivan denisovich', a book i always wanted to read. i have a strong belief that books find you, and this one just bumped into me when it must be the time to read it :)
so that was jay, the guy sitting on my left.
on my right i had kamal, a sweet pakistani guy from lahore. i managed to sit in between people from 2 of my favorite countries in the world :) we talked about lahore and i shared my love for the icecream place that is open well into the middle of the night selling you a variety of flavours that makes it hard to chose and impossible to eat only one cup! so me and his family had a nostalgic moment thinking of the joy that places brings us :D he's a professor at cambridge and seems to think i should go do a phd in the US, maybe in boston. kamal is going to be in lisbon next year as he's organizing a conference there. it's on economics and it will be in mid july. i'm in charge of finding a bar where he can organize a party for 100 people who'll be at the conference. kamal's kids bought a souvenir from emirates that was called pedro - a stuffed bear disguised as a mix of a bird and an indian. he also had a belly button which made him a very unlikely bird. pedro was an enigma, strangely sold inside of a little purse from the emirates and came with a little story explaing how pedro flew here from south america, where he comes from...
haha
so these are the tales from dubai airport. up in the plane i could only see sand and sand and more sand. until many lights started to form a road arriving into a wild amount of bright lights showing huge and fancy buildings in what looks like a mad city! the airport in itself is strange, it's like a giant corridor that is made in a way that you always need to keep on walking, like you're not meant to stop here. so you walk and walk and you go by ridicoulous amounts of shops. they sell the whole world in here! it's mad! except that they don't have the lonely planet indonesia, so i still don't have a guidebook for the 17.000 islands :) anyway, it will be fine!
very happy to be here :D this is a really different journey as i feel i have painfuly earned my right to be here :)i survived a huge car crash and then spend 7 months living with a hurt knee. then got surgery and spent 14 months recovering the whole body. now i can walk properly and have the strenght to carry the 7 kilos i'm traveling with :) i want to thank all the people that helped the rehabilitation of the left knee and all the connected things :D a huge thank you!!!! (you all travel with me as i move now!) and most of all i want to thank kyle, for supporting me so much with this! (k, you're the best! even though you live so many miles away you were always there! never to be forgotten!!)
i'll be boarding the flight to singapore soon. and still have a stopover in colombo. it will be great to see sri lanka from above. i'll try to spot my amazing meditation centre :) and wink down at it!
i haven't been sleeping properly for over 2 weeks now and maybe because i'm so exhausted i still haven't realized where i'll be tomorrow... it's either that or it just stopped mattering so much, the being here or being there. as moving is so natural and traveling is a way of breathing. i feel excited with what's to come and at the same time i have the relaxed posture like when in lisbon i take the tram downtown.
there is a swiss looking guy at a lindt chocolat counter and he just took a huge block of chocolate and is cutting it into little pieces. i might have to go there.
be well everyone!

on my way

una ballata del mare salato - hugo pratt

Pandora: Buon giorno Corto Maltese

Corto Maltese: Eh, ma che bella! Chissà perché mi fai ricordare un tango di Arola che ascoltai nel cabaret della "Parda Flora" in Buenos Aires.

Pandora: Forse perché c'era qualcuna che mi assomigliava?

Corto Maltese: No! Proprio perché non assomigli a nessuna avrei voluto incontrarti sempre... In qualsiasi posto...

Pandora: Good morning Corto Maltese

Corto Maltese: Eh, how beautiful! You make me think of a tango from Arola that I listened to at the "Parda Flora" cabaret in Buenos Aires.

Pandora: Probably because there was someone there that looked like me?

Corto Maltese: No! It's exactly because you don't resemble any other that I would always like to meet you... Everywhere...

this is what i have in mind...

islands

"Dreaming of islands - whether in joy or with fear, it doesn't matter - is dreaming of pulling away, of being already separate, far from any continent, of being lost and alone - or it is dreaming of starting from scratch, recreating, beginning anew. Some islands drifted away from the continent, but the island is also that toward which one drifts; other islands originated in the ocean, but the island is also the origin, radical and absolute. Certainly, separating and creating are not mutually exclusive: one has to hold one's own when one is separated, and had better be separate to create anew; nevertheless, one of the two tendencies always predominates. In this way, the movement of the imagination of islands takes up the movement of their production, but they don't have the same objective. It is the same movement, but a different goal. It is no longer the island that is separated from the continent, it is humans who find themselves separated from the world when on an island. It is no longer the island that is created from the bowels of the earth through the liquid depths, t is humans who create the world anew from the island and on the waters. Humans thus take up for themselves both movements of the island and are able to do so on an island that, precisely, lacks one kind of movement: humans can drift toward and island that is nonetheless originary, and they can create on an island that has merely drifted away."
Gilles Deleuze - Desert Islands, in Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953-1974)