Travel fever

It is actually kind of annoying to be leaving late at night. You are already set in the mood, you've checked yourself in on the net and now you just have to wait for 11 hours more. Damn. The tingling in your stomach is much nicer when you have to wake up early and head straight for the airport. Now it is just slowly escalating hour by hour.

Feels like I have everything in check so really all I can do now is just wait.

Packed already?

Well, that certainly went a lot easier than I anticipated. The total weight of my carryings seems to be pretty much 15kg. Kind of light and easy, especially since I can fit my smaller day pack inside my rucksack so the whole weight can be easily carried with no fighting with extra straps or anything. It is really starting to feel like the trip is about to start...

Only problem I have faced packing was that I forgot my travel towel to a friends house. And should one still need to emphasize the importance of a towel, I shall hereby quote the ever-amusing text of Douglas Adams:

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

But fear not, I will just have to make a small detour and my set is complete. :)

Packing once again

How come is it that I always leave everything to the absolutely last possible moment? I would like to go and sleep soon but I still have pretty much everything spread open on my bed. Tomorrow morning to Helsinki, a couple of nights there and on Monday my plane leaves. So that means that I need to be packed and ready to go tomorrow morning.

But I am really not stressing over it that much. As long as I have my passport, plane tickets and some money I'll be fine. Kind of takes the motivation out of me but I guess I should still throw in some more pieces of clothing or something. And my toothbrush.

But somehow I just couldn't be bothered to do that...Things have a tendency to sort out one way or another. They always have.

Getting real

I just realized that I need to be packed and ready to go on friday. Weekend in Helsinki and the flight will leave on monday evening. I just booked myself a 21€ flight from Kuala Lumpur to Indonesia for September 7th. So initially not much of Thailand but mostly heading south to Malaysia and after that to Indonesia.

I have been checking out some surf camps and there are some quite appealing all-inclusive offerings for $35 per day. Food, accommodation, teaching and the gear. Could easily imagine doing that for a few days. I've also heard that there are lots of seasoned pro surfers around Indonesia willing to teach you for money, but still an actual establishment seems nicer to me.

But anyway... After arriving to Indonesia I will most likely stay in Medan for one night and then head towards one of the largest (if not the largest) calderas in existence: Lake Toba. I've heard quite a lot of positive things about the place so I want to see it for myself.

The next fixed date after that is around Septeber 28th when I should be meeting a friend of mine - probably somewhere in Malaysia.

Travel plans

Last year I had a google map about my travels but that was a pain in the ass to maintain so I am now trying the dopplr-integration for change. You can still google the places if they seem unfamiliar but generally it is a lot easier for me to just type in the planned places than to draw lines on a virtual map. But it is definitely not a fixed plan but merely a sketch of my travel plans and thusly highly likely to change.

Redundancy

I like two keep two cards with me when traveling. One is Visa Electron and the other is a hybrid debit/credit MasterCard. The electron works surprisingly well all around but sometimes the reader only accepts "old fashioned" cards. It is a bit problematic as the MasterCard is nowadays also functioning like the electron because of its SEPA compatibility. Marvellous in theory but in practice it mostly just renders the card unusable wherever the Electron is not working either.

Anyway, I have a bad habit of mainly using just one of the cards at a time and generally I don't use the credit card at all. So now the situation is that I have been using only my electron for about 10 months straight without ever feeling the urge to wave around my ostentatiously flashy faux platinum MasterCard. During that time though, I have managed to forget my PIN code for the aforementioned card. Technically it's not a problem, just order the code from my bank but the funny thing is that before going to India last year I had exactly the same problem, that time just with the Electron.

Last october I actually managed to even lock my Electron two days prior to the departure by trying the wrong numbers one too many times. After the vehement PIN code recollecting I managed to screw up my mind in a way that I couldn't even press the right digits for my MasterCard card anymore! And I had been using that one for a few years without any problems. Luckily I managed to just sleep it off and the numbers were in my muscle memory but apparently I haven't learned anything from that.

Technically a good way to avoid situations like these would be to invent an imaginary person and add him to your mobile phone contacts. Phone number would be something incorporating your pin code. Then it would be available whenever you might need it... Retrospectively that actually feels like a brilliant idea all of a sudden. And no, it doesn't make me feel any better about it.

Net, set, go!

The mosquito net arrived today and managed to amuse me quite a lot. First of all just getting it in time was a nice thing overall. Secondly the lovely people at the Wiggle warehouse had put a small pack of Haribo Kiddies' SuperMix Mini's to the box. Always a pleasant surprise to get some unexpected extra and with your order.

Another topic of amusement was the Patented Lifesystems MicroNET Integrated Hanging Solution™ that was delivered with the net itself and presented here in the lower left corner of the picture:


Somehow I was expecting something a bit more high tech...

Nice morning

Thankfully I live around the southern parts of Finland so the lovely August mornings are just metaphorically freezing and the temperature doesn't go below zero... But it is always nice to see the friendly "caution, the road might be frozen" signal light during the summer months.

11 days.

Visafied!

I shall now officially stand up and salute the swift employees of the Royal Thai Embassy in Helsinki. I left the application last Thursday and already on Friday it was processed, granted and shipped to me. So I got the visa delivered to my home address in 2 working days. One for the processing and one for delivery. Wow. I am impressed.

Also I would recommend Kilroy Travels for getting "student priced" plane tickets for yourself. Finnair for example grants the youth discount for people under 26 but if you are a student, you get some extra time to fly moderately cheaply. You just need an ISIC student card and it can be purchased with the plane tickets straight from their website. It also took just two days to arrive so they are really doing their jobs well in there as well.

Let's just wait and see how the parcel from UK arrives. I hope my bad luck with waiting ended with the invitation letter, but still I am keeping my fingers crossed and not just trusting blindly for everything to work out. Even though it always does one way or another, my trust in the british postal service has been dented by some nice experiences from friends living in London. But we'll see.

Visa application

Yesterday I made a brief trip to Helsinki for the visa arrangements. Everything should be in order and the nice people at the embassy told me that I can just start off my travels with the Non-Immigrant visa. We'll see how it plays out but at least there shouldn't be the hassle of two different visas.

Today I ordered myself a mosquito net. I had borrowed one when I was in India but there it was mostly used as a travel pillow. Perhaps the rain season in Thailand will make the purchase more worth it... I opted for the permetrine-treated model that was selling for 55e in a finnish web shop, but wound up paying around 30 because I ordered it from the UK. Yes, including 8 euros of shipping costs.

Other than that, I think I have pretty much everything I need already. Just need my passport back. Let us hope that the Thai embassy has adopted the nordic way of doing things and it won't just hang around for a few weeks. :)

And then there was light

Invitation letter: arrived today.
Flight: departing on August 31st.
Mood: pretty nice.