On top of it all

Let it go
There’s one tourist attraction that every visitor in Hong Kong seems to have to do: take the cable car up the steep hill and enjoy the view over Hong Kong and the harbor from Victoria Peak, or simply: the Peak. I went there on a Sunday, which might have been a bad idea, but as […] Read More

Lei Ho , Hong Kong

Let it go
It’s Cantonese for ‘Hello’. Even though I reckon I will be perfectly fine with English here…. The flight to Hong Kong was smooth. We were a bit delayed for take off, but then favorable winds made us make good on the delay and we even only needed 15 hours to fly to Hong Kong. All […] Read More

Polar route

Let it go
And I am off to my longest flight ever, on this trip, and beyond, beating my previous 14h record for the Frankfurt-Buenos Aires route in 2011. I’ll board a United Airlines Boeing 777 today, to fly 15h35 to Hong Kong, on a polar route that will bring me within some 70 miles of the North […] Read More

The Heisenberg principle

Let it go
In quantum physics, the Heisenberg principle describes the impossibility to measure both the speed and the place of any particle precisely. The more precise you are on its speed, the less precise you can say where the particle actually is. And vice versa. I discovered today that this also applies to me. My own private […] Read More

Interesting times

Let it go
‘May you live in interesting times’  is said to be a Chinese curse, that we all have heard at one point or the other. Seeing the protest that have sprung up in Hong Kong over the organization of somewhat free elections promised for 2017, I came to realize that I have ‘escaped’ a few political […] Read More

Asian update

Let it go
The past days I was busy planning a bit more of the Asian leg of my journey. First, I booked a place to stay in Hong Kong. I’ll be in the Sai Ying Pun Neighborhood on Hong Kong Island. It sounded good, was affordable, and seems to be well connected with public transport. I will stay […] Read More

Future Chinese Adventures

Let it go
I have a flight into Hong Kong on 15 October. Hong Kong because: a) the flight was available to get with my miles, and b) because Will, who let us stay in his apartment in Melbourne, lives close-by in a multi-million city called Jiangmen. So, pending the open Indian Visa question, I hope to get a Visa […] Read More

Visa application

Let it go
I spent the last two days assembling my visa application for India. Honestly, without Renato’s patience and help, I would not have made it. It’s a cumbersome, bureaucratic, ridiculous process. The embassy has outsourced the check of the documents to a private company, which only forward the complete, correctly filled out applications to the embassy. However, […] Read More

The great Indian Visa Panic

Let it go
I always assumed I could enter India without a visa. For months and months, the information given on the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated that from October 2014 on, German nationals would no longer need a visa. Today I discovered that this had vanished and replaced by the usual visa procedure. Shoot. […] Read More

Chinese visa hassle

Let it go
For a long time I wasn’t even sure I’d visit China on this trip. I could not make up my mind, but leaving it out of my itinerary seems like the trip would not be complete, after all it’s such an important country, one of the oldest civilizations on the planet. So in the end […] Read More