Splette's Travel Blog
  • A surfer at sunset at Tamarindo beach, Costa Rica
  • A street in the colonial town of Granada, Nicaragua, photographed from a church tower.
  • Waterfall at sunset in Costa Rica
  • Who's this lady? Saw her in New York...
  • On the way to the top of volcano Barva you pass by some 'magic forest'
  • The San Francisco skyline (easily recognizable by the Transamerica Pyramid on the left)
  • Panama City - I love the grungy look of the city
  • Caribbean beach at a peaceful summer night, captured by long exposure.
  • The active volcán Arenal is close to La Fortuna and too dangerous to climb
  • Sleeping yellow eyelash viper in the wild. Small but deadly.
  • Me on volcán Santiaguito
  • Chicago (aka Gotham City)
  • One of the iconic yellow New York City cabs
  • Chrysler Building, New York
  • Times Square, New York
  • The White House
  • Towards the light
  • Nuclear Reactor at the Oak Ridge National Lab
  • Featured Content

  • September20th

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    Proof of Onward Travel

    My fake flight ticket: Bogota -> Frankfurt

    My fake ticket: Bogota->Frankfurt

    In many regards traveling the world has become so much easier these days. But there is one thing that can cause the world traveler of today some headache: The onward travel requirements that many countries have implemented. What’s an onward travel requirement? Well, you are only allowed to enter a country when you have proof that you will leave this country. This is a major inconvenience when you are backpacking across a continent. Often you don’t know how long you will want to stay in a country. If it’s nice you stay longer and otherwise you move on sooner. I mostly travel by bus anyway and often these tickets can not be bought online.
    So, what to do?

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  • September18th

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    Sensation Seeking

    Sensation seeking anno 2001. I found this monitor lizard and let him bite in my hand in order to test the strength of his jaws

    Lizard-bite sensation, Australia 2001

    Some people say what I do is dangerous (hello mother). Is it really necessary to travel to countries like Honduras (highest murder rate in the world) or Colombia? In fact, why travel at all when home is a safe, convenient and rich country like Germany? I get this question a lot. There are many reasons for why I travel. It makes me very happy. But it’s also exciting. There is always something new to discover, new experiences to be made. I always saw myself as an explorer type of person.
    Recently, my clinical travel psychologist Dipl.-Psych. R. Voegler introduced me to the concept of ‘sensation seeking’. Apparently, people that fall into that category have a tendency to pursue sensory pleasure and excitement. It’s the trait of people who go after novelty, complexity, and intense sensations, who love experience for its own sake. Sensation seekers are easily bored without high levels of stimulation and therefore seek thrills.
    I instantly liked the concept. It’s certainly something I can identify myself with. Sometimes it’s nice to fit so well into a category that gives some explanation of why I do the things I do.
    What is your opinion about all this? Many of you, my faithful blog readers, know me well. Do you believe that I am seeking the thrill?

     

    Am I a sensation seeker?

    • Yep (80%, 8 Votes)
    • No, you are just weird (20%, 2 Votes)
    • Not sure (0%, 0 Votes)

    Total Voters: 10

    Loading ... Loading …

    And what about you? Are you a sensation seeker? Here is a test with 20 questions (of which I answered 16 with ‘yes’) that might give some indication.

  • September16th

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    Panama

    Cloudy Panama City

    “Oh wie schön ist Panama” is a popular German children’s book about little bear and little tiger who live in a house by the river. One day, a wonderful-smelling crate floats past them, with the word PANAMA written on it. Little bear and little tiger decide that Panama must be the land of their dreams, and set off on a quest to find it…  A touching story about learning to appreciate what you have.

    While bear and tiger never actually make it to Panama, this is already my third visit here, though a short one – just two days. From San José in Costa Rica I took the Ticabus to Panama. It was supposed to take 15 hours, which is quite comfortable when you travel first class. No comparison to the Greyhound buses in the United States. The border crossing, however, took over three hours because nobody seemed to feel responsible to stamp our passports or check our luggage. They could put up a sign saying “We are sorry, you can leave the country only during our opening hours.” After 16.5 hours the bus eventually arrived in Panama City. The climate here is quite hot in comparison to San José. I was proud to make my way to the hostel with public transportation, which is amazingly cheap. I had a window seat in the bus; the traffic can be crazy and when a taxi got so close that I thought it would hit the bus, I got scared and winced – much to the amusement of the Panamanian girl sitting next to me…

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  • September15th

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    Farewell Costa Rica

    The active volcán Arenal is close to La Fortuna but too dangerous to climb

    Volcán Arenal, La Fortuna

    I’m on the 16-hour busride from San José to Panama City. After six weeks in San José, it feels quite strange to leave. I got pretty attached to this place and my stay here has been quite different. I wasn’t really travelling, I was living and working. It’s great that I got a taste of how living in Latin America feels like. My Spanish skills made microscopic improvements, though some of the words I learned (such as Polo or Pura Vida!) are Costa Rican slang and pretty much useless in the rest of the Spanish-speaking world.

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  • September9th

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    Timeline and the end of the journey

    This figure depicts the two ends of a sausage

    Fig. 1: Sausage with two ends

    As we say in Germany: “Alles hat ein Ende nur die Wurst hat zwei“. Literally: Everything has an end, only the sausage has two. (If this doesn’t make much sense to you, check out this educational video about German sausage culture and humor.)

    Until now, this journey was open-ended, only limited by my motivation and bank account balance. This has changed a few days ago when I decided to attend (and bought the ticket for) the creative arts festival OFFF in Barcelona in May 2012. It would be too expensive to fly from South America to Barcelona just for the three days of the festival. Therefore, I decided that this will mark the end of my trip. Time- and location-wise, I am about halfway there. My upcoming (and ever-changing) plans include two days in Panama, a month in Colombia (incl. a Spanish course) and four weeks of traveling through Ecuador and Peru with my temporary travel companion Wolle from Germany. After that I might continue to Bolivia and Chile, possibly fly home to Germany for Christmas via Mexico (which I skipped on my way down here) and return to South America on January to visit Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and finally Brazil. After the journey I plan to move back to Germany for the foreseeable future and concentrate on my freelance business. I haven’t decided where, though.

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  • September4th

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    Waterfall Rappelling

    On the rope I descentI am in La Fortuna, Costa Rica, a small town close to volcán Arenal. While the active volcano is hidden in clouds most of the time and too dangerous to climb, there are plenty of other outdoor activities. I went on a waterfall rappelling tour (or ‘abseiling’ how the New Zealanders would call it). You trek along a small river through the forrest with several waterfalls that you climb down on a rope.

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  • September1st

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    The Caribbean Coast

    Punta Uva beach in Costa Rica. Not sure if this photo does justice to the actual beauty of this place.

    Punta Uva beach: sand, palm trees, blue sea

    After spending a month in the San José area, most of the day on the laptop to earn some money for the rest of my trip, I really needed a break; get away from the computer screen and the city for a bit. So, I decided to visit the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica of which I heard plenty of good things. A four-hour bus ride later, I arrived in Puerto Viejo, a small village on the Caribbean that is overrun by party-hungry college kids, potheads and a couple of surfers. Looking for something more quiet and laid-back, I decided to settle a few kilometers further down the coastal road in Punta Uva at the ‘Casa Viva Beach Houses’. Not the cheapest place but the cabins were just a few meters away from a gorgeous beach. There were never more than a handful of people at the beach – but a few thousand sand flies. It felt like I got bitten by every single one of them. The water was great. I haven’t been swimming in the sea for at least a year.

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  • August29th

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    Working and living in Costa Rica

    My future room? I love this style but this guy will have to move out first... (from the now! furniture catalog)

    My future room back in Germany?

    Yes, you read correctly – working and living. My time here in Costa Rica is very different from the kind of nomadic lifestyle I followed the past couple of months. After eight months of travelling I started to get tired in some ways. Moving to a new hostel every other day, figuring out where to find a good place to eat, laundry, an ATM that accepts my credit card, places to go out, and meeting new people and tell them the same story all over again. Don’t get me wrong, I still love to travel, but I just got a little tired. And I started to miss certain things. For example my own place. Since January I don’t have a home anymore. Over the last two months this desire for a permanent home has been growing. Eventually, I fell victim to the IKEA nesting instinct and started browsing online furniture catalogs and imagined how I will decorate my future home once this trip is over. My favorite one is the now! no.12 (here is the full pdf version). I checked apartment listings online although I won’t move to any place before May next year. And in my mind I already assembled my next desktop computer, carefully choosing every component. Ha, it’s going to be super fast and gets a new ultra-cool case. I even checked out reviews for vacuum cleaners (I’ll get this one). No kidding!

    Yes, I needed this break. I rented a room in a house in San Sebastian (just South of the capital San José) where I could work without hassles. It felt a lot like home. It was very safe, clean (okay, that part did not remind me of my place in Heidelberg) and with all utilities and facilities I could possibly need (even a gym! …that I never used). For the first time in months I cooked my own dinner. My landlady Vilma was very friendly and motherly to me and even cooked for me a few times. I got spoilt. But I got much work done this month and my financial situation looks better now. This was a good balance to all the non-stop travelling over the past months and I start getting this feeling of wanting to ‘move on’ again.

  • August4th

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    Mobile phone number

    I am in Costa Rica and for the next three weeks or more I will be available under this mobile phone number: +506-57040651

    You know… in case you missed hearing my voice…

    Update #1: My SIM card stopped working after two days. I was told they distributed the same number twice (how is that even possible). Will have to get a new one…

    Update #2: I got a new SIM card: the number is: +506-85013762

  • August3rd

    2 Comments

    The map is back

    Google map of my trip

    You might have noticed: The Google Map is back. A few months ago I had some technical problems with the map and took it offline. I was now able to fix those problems and put the map back online. Due to the number of markers and lines on the map it might be slow on older computers or when you are on a slow internet connection. As a new addition, many of the map markers now contain links to the corresponding blog posts. I hope this will be useful.

    Visit the map here

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