Around the World Trip

It has been more than two years since my last post, which of course is due to my life being completely boring during that period of time ;) Well now I'm up to something interesting again: a trip around the world.
After finishing my studies Alexandra and I left to travel the world for an entire year. We started a month ago with a flight to Bangkok, we initially intended to travel to Cambodia overland, but in the end we booked another flight to Phnom Penh, Cambodia. We did this in order to avoid the trouble caused by the Red Shirts in Thailand.
We stayed in Cambodia for more than a week and had a very good but extremely hot start. It was the hottest time of the year, just before the rainy season started. Extremely hot and humid and almost no difference between night and day! Incredible, we spent the whole day sweating and running from one place to another hoping for it to be cooler never resting always running (not literally!) from the heat, then when night fell in we thought it would finally cool down, but it didn't.
Cambodia is a interesting country with very nice people who have a shocking recent history: From 1975 to 1979 Cambodia was ruled by Pol Pot an the Khmer Rouge. A frightening regime that enslaved the whole country to work in the rice fields and killed more than a quarter of the country's population in only three years. Lots of them were killed and buried in mass graves all over the Cambodia, but even more died of starvation and hard work.
We also visited the Angkor area, which is one of the biggest ruins on the planet. In its heyday it was the biggest pre-industrial city in the world home to roughly one million inhabitants. Beautiful and fascinating.

Then we took a boat down the Mekong to Vietnam. Much cooler here. Traveled south to north in Vietnam. Currently we reside on Cat Ba an Island at the Ha Long Bay, a beautiful place were we climbed the first routes on our trip and the first place where we stay a bit longer, settle down a bit. Our backpacks are quite big and heavy because of all the climbing gear that we brought along - it feels good to put it to use so we didn't carry it around in vain.

Shortly we will be heading further north to Sapa where we plan to cross the boarder to China, which was not part of our original plan. But the opportunity arose and that's the whole beauty of our travel experience - we are free to go where we want to, whenever we want to.

Update: We posted some pictures on my flickr account. Here is a link to the set Cambodia & Vietnam