Veron’s Adventures

The taxi driver was yelling at me making it clear he had no idea  where I wanted to go. Normally this wouldnt be much of a problem, but this time the yelling was in Cantonese and the man behind the steering wheel didn’t speak a word over the borders. My cellphone battery had just died so calling a friend to translate was no option, so I continued; A-D-M-I-R-A-L-I-T-Y station! The situation seemed quitte hopeless; I was already late for meeting friends at Admirality, I wasn’t able to tell the taxi driver where I wanted to go, and if I could, with the garantueed traffic jam for the Hong Kong - Kowloon tunnel, getting there would take atleast another 1/2 hour. Next to that I hadn’t had breakfast yet, had slept a solid 3 hours the night before and was planning to go hiking in 35 degrees Hong Kong summer weather….

I gave it one more try and switched taxis when I finally found one driver speaking enough English to bring me to one of the biggest MTR stations in Hong Kong. Not only were my buddies for the hike still waiting for me when I arrived, Dennis and Lex (my dutch friends and travel companions for 6 weeks) randomly bumped into us at the same time. What are the odds of walking into the only 2 people you know in a 5 million people counting metropol at a location both of you have never been?

The hike was tough for the first 10 minutes but after the second protein bar and a bottle of water (breakfast) I was feeling fine and was glad I went to enjoy my last day of 6 weeks travelling in Asia.

In those 6 weeks Dennis, Lex and myself travelled in Hong Kong, China, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore. Transport went from 1st class Malaysian ferry to 3rd class Thai train full of cockroaches and from a hitchhike in the back-seats of a twingo in Borneo to the usual AirAsia flights.

The most memorable moments of the trip couldn’t be read in guidebooks in advance as is usually the case when travelling on foreign continents. Think about stuff like;

- Playing dice and watching football in a karaoke bar with a hand full of Chinese people around screaming every time Germany got within 30 metres of the Spanish goal.

- Betting without a clue at happey valley horsetrack @ Hong Kong

- Getting a ride to the Airport of Tawau from two Malaysian moslimas because our taxi couldn’t continue due to a broken down bridge @ Sabah

- Watching a cuddlefish producing ink clouds as it gets attacked by a grouper while Lex and me were SCUBA diving @ Mabul Island

- Eating at a Chinese restaurant where the locals are eating barechested and playing card games during dinner @ Hong Kong

And I’m sure I’m forgetting tons of moments worth mentioning, good thing we still have the pictures:

Typical Hong Kong Billboards

If you’re going to Hong Kong then definitely go to a horse racing night at Happy Valley. The track is amazing in the centre of the city with all the skyscrapers in the background.

Lex and Q in front of the Big Buddha

View over Hong Kong from the peak.

Two different style temples; the first in Hong Kong and the latter in Bangkok

Not one salesman tried to sell me anything on the fish market in Guangzhou. The locals in China speak less English than they do in any country I travelled in.

I tried jellyfish sashimi, goose testicles and chicken claw in China. Here you see living grass carp and turtles in the window of a restaurant in Guangdong provence. The Chinese seem to eat everything…

This is geoduck and it makes for very tasty sashimi, try it if you get the chance!

A beautiful and deserted beach at Koh Phangan, Thailand

A local walking his bull in Thailand.

A sunset picture on the ferry from Koh Tao to Koh Phangan.

We did a jungle trip for 3 days at Sabah, the Malaysian part of Borneo where we figured out Lex’s future won’t be in law but in monkey spotting…

The Proboscis ‘Dutchman’ monkey only lives in Borneo. According to the Malaysian people it was named Dutchman because it looked like the Dutch people that lived on Borneo but according to the Dutch it’s called Dutchman monkey because it was discovered by the Dutch people. You be the the judge

So we had these really charming jungle outfits…

I took these pictures of the kingfisher and frog on two different night tracks in Borneo. There’s photographers in Holland that spend days and days to get similar kingfisher pictures, but in Borneo we could find them while they were sleeping with their eyes open and get to about 20 cm’s with our cameras, without them flying away.

90% of Borneo’s rainforest has been cut. Not only for tropical wood exports but also to plant palm oil farms (the palm trees on this farm have just been harvested).

These palmoil farms provide the western world with Bio-fuel. Environmentally friendly and sustainable economics?

We went diving for a couple days at Mabul Island in the Celebes Sea which was absolutely amazing. We saw lots of turtles, mandarin fish, scorpion fish, murray eels, rays and much more. The island itself is small and we stayed in one of those huts build on the sea.

Mabul beach.

I did underwater photography in my PADI advanced course at Koh Tao but unfortunately I’m still really bad at it. I basically took about 100 photos of fish missing their heads fins and tails on the picture but I’m glad I atleast documented this Blue Spotted Stingray in Thailand.

in Singapore.

Ending with the well known Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Hope you all had a great summer!

-Veron

St Julians, Malta

On the 15th of March I wrote in a blog entry that I was going to do an Olympic Triathlon on the 29th of May in Trinidad and Tobago. Planning the race ended up being more complicated than I thought so I switched race plans a couple times and eventually raced on the 13th of June in Amsterdam!

How was I supposed to know that the fastest trip from Cape Town to Trinidad & Tobago in late May was 36 hours with 4 stop-overs? Such a ridiculous trip right before I was supposed to deliver an extreme sports performance just wasn’t going to happen, so It was time to plan a triathlon in Europe.

Spain had two high profile ITU races that looked very cool in Madrid and Pontevedra, but I needed race ranking points in order to qualify for those races, so I looked further and came out very close to home. There was a great olympic triathlon going in Amsterdam the 13th of June, and after a couple e-mails with the direction they let me do a late registration!

I had trained hard in the 3 months prior to the race. I averaged about 11/12 trainings a week, a combination of swimming, gym, cycling and running. The swim training was the hardest. In every training I was hurting, fighting against not getting enough oxygen, and thinking about calling it a session almost every 25 metres I got to the end of the pool. I find it very hard to push myself in a swim session when I’m alone. I really needed a trainer to push me over my limits in the pool, not to mention learning how to actually swim.

The cycling and running comes much more natural to me and seems to suit my body better. It was great training in a fantastic city like Cape Town, where you cycle for 5 minutes to ride in the mountains overlooking the Atlantic and go running in Table Mountain National Park or on the beach. Not sure I would have enjoyed all the training in a country like Holland.

The conditions were perfect on raceday, 20 or so degrees, no wind..so no excuses to be made. Until the water exploded for the start that is….

Right before the start.

You don’t know what it is to swim a 1500m in a 200 athletes peloton until you experience it. In my training sessions I got to the point where swimming 1500 metres wasn’t that tough, but while receiving 3 kicks and two elbows in the face in the first 300 metres it is quitte hard to come in a rhytm. The swimming felt like being in a washing machine with 200 others that are all out there to drown you. During the swim it felt like it was taking ages to get out of the water. I was very surprised to see 30.58 as my time, which is definitely acceptable.

The end of the swim felt like such a relief!

After the swimming I got some calf and hip cramps in the transition area because my muscles were so cold from the swim. The 1st lap on the bike (there’s 8 laps of 5km total) I really needed to warm up and find rhytm.. but after that the biking went really well and I could finally enjoy being in the race, until I had to start the running….

The first 2.5km of the run were horrible. Calf, upper leg and shin cramps even forced me to stop and stretch for about 10 seconds. After that I started to feel stronger and stronger. The heavy training was starting to pay off. The last 5km of the run (10km total) I was flying. I didnt feel my feet anymore and had so much air. Was a great feeling. The picture is at the finish line.

My final time was 2.37.48, a time I’m very happy with. This whole triathlon experiment and experience has been very positive overall. Working towards a goal for months and reaching it is very rewarding and satisfying and in the process I lived a very healthy and energetic lifestyle. The downsides? Time. Training twice a day costs a lot of time and planning, and other priorities did suffer a bit. For that reason I will have to think a bit wether or not I want to take it to the next level and do a 1/2 Ironman sometime soon. But that’s for later, now It’s time for the beach

Later,

V.