During this time I was on the road on a one year trip around the world. My first trip that took longer than a month and the one who has put the traveling bug into my system.
I started with a month Interrail in Europe with a friend. It was sort of a farewell trip. We cruised from one end of the Interrail zone to the other, usually in night trains to safe the money for the hotel. This month included Paris (yet again), Bordeaux, Brest, Vienna, Amsterdam, Bruxelles, Munich and other central European cities.
Then we went back to Switzerland. I washed my cloth, repacked and left on September 8th, 1997 to Singapore.
There is not too much to say about Singapore .Fresh to Asian hotel rooms as I was, I picked the first free and cheap hotel. It had a bed to sleep, which was good enough. Later I regretted my rush, as I was chasing approx. 8 cm long cockroaches around my room.
From Singapore I went on to Hong Kong and China.
China was really a first good test of my traveling abilities. After spending one month in a country where I couldn't communicate properly and spent a lot of time alone, I was ready to take on the (traveling) world.
After a short visit in Tokyo, Japan, which cost me a fortune. I flew on to Australia. I didn't really like what I experienced tourism-wise in Australia. I'd compare the East Coast to some holiday ghetto like Mallorca or Cancun. Well, I like sex, I like parties and I like alcohol - but in Surfers Paradise I witnessed the loss of most peoples grace.
As for me, I had a pretty good time anyway. Nature is stunning and I tried to ignore what was going on around me as good as possible. One way to get away from everything was surfing, another were friends who visited me.
With the three month gone in Australia, I headed on to Fiji and spent about a month there. Traveling around was easier than I expected it to be. The only place that limits the freedom of traveling are the small islands. Once you're there, there is not much to do - and everything you want to do costs quite a bit. But still, at least once you want to go to the remote islands - just to have the paradise feeling.
Then came two month in New Zealand. The first month I hitchhiked down to the South Island and hitched around there. The people are extremely hospitable, I seldom had to wait for a long time and if this happened it was usually not because nobody picked me up, but because no cars were on this particular street. It was an excellent time, that I enjoyed very much.
During the second month I hung out with a girl who had rented a car and we traveled by this mean on the North Island. Both islands are astonishing with natural sights and diversity is unbelievable: glaciers, volcanoes, farm land, sounds, beaches, dense growth...New Zealand has it all.
When I was sitting in the plane, from Auckland to Buenos Aires an eerie feeling got hold of me. I thought myself nuts to arrive late night in a country that I didn't no anybody in, hardly spoke the language and which I heard so many violent things about. Two days later I was glad, that I had made the jump of the Pacific - and I still am.
At this point I had hooked up with a Swiss guy who I met in Auckland, shortly before leaving to Buenos Aires. As we had the same route for a while, we did some traveling together. First up north to the Brazilian border, then on a little odyssey through Paraguay and Argentina to Bolivia. We crossed Bolivia through the Altiplano and descended down to Cuzco, Peru and back down to Arequipa. There we enjoyed the World Cup feeling with the South Americans. After this we split and I headed down through Chile and back to Buenos Aires.
Coming from South America, I didn't feel much like traveling the USA. Moreover, my money was long gone and I lived on an increasing debt on my credit card. Therefore I didn't go up north to Montreal as planed and finished my trip in New York. After a little more than a week, I headed back to Switzerland.
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