New Zealand

New Zealand had an easy time making me fall in love.

First of all, from the get go, you are surrounded by beautiful, lush green nature, very friendly people and more gourmet food than you can stuff yourself with in a lifetime. 

And while after a month in Asia, the prices here make you swallow hard at first, I must say it is really nice to be able to just drink water from the tap and speak English and all that. 
Like I said, falling in love with New Zealand is very easy. 

I'll be here for a while, so buckle up for some Kiwi experiences...

For example, on one of my first days in Auckland, the big Christmas parade was on. 

Certainly a spectacle, with the city centre being shut down completely, thousands of people lining the street (mostly people under the age of 10 with their parents and a life-time supply of snacks and drinks, spread out on picnic blankets along Queen Street).

I found a cafe with wifi overlooking the street, so set up shop by the window and started working, nibbling on a cinnamon roll that had to last for a very long time and at the same time, watching the show...

First up: A delegation from Korea, followed by super heroes, a brass band, the salvation army and a plethora of comic figures, then a Sri Lankan dance academy, Eco Travel Company, policemen dressed up as Santa, Cheerleaders, a band made up of Kiwi fruits, several more brass bands, 4 ginormous flying penguins, princesses, princesses and many more princesses, elves and more elves, several bagpipe combos, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate factory, walking houses with water squirting guns, and, finally, towards the very end, Santa: a lego man.  All interspersed with several big Farmer's signs  (that's a shop) and balloons, just to make sure everyone knows who's paying for all of this and also "where Santa buys his presents". 

By the end of the parade, I was surrounded by little people who were all annoyed at me for holding on to my place even though I was mostly working and only watching the spectacle with one eye. But hah, I had managed to make my coffee and pastry last 3 hours, so could demonstratively take a sip or bite once in a while, showing I was a paying customer (not that the kids cared about that, they just wanted to stand on my chair to see inflatable unicorns drift by, no matter my contribution to the local economy). 

Auckland is a wonderful city, small but colourful with lots of Polynesian influences and a very large crowd of backpackers (practically all of whom are German... German must be the second most spoken language in New Zealand in fact. Without knowing it, New Zealand probably hosts the largest community of Germans outside their native country. It is truly incredible and probably makes it hard for all those backpackers to actually meet people from other nations, as one normally does as a backpacker.)

Borneo

From Jakarta, I flew on to Kuching, Borneo.

Now, Borneo has been the island of my dreams for a long time. There’s pristine rainforest there, Orang-Utans are living freely in their natural habitat, you can do amazing hikes and see all kinds of fish when you snorkel. And that is just the nature side, I can’t even begin to speak about the wealth of cultures.

Having said that, I will leave most of this for another time. The nature of this trip is that I work, so I stayed close to the internet of hostels and cafes for most of the time and did only little excursions every now and then. 

The big advantage to being a regular guest in cafes (aside from the staff already knowing how you like your iced coffee) is the opportunity to interact with the often random assortment of people that work and visit there. I have had the opportunity to discuss the appalling Australian immigration policy with a very inspiring elderly lady from Queensland, learn about pollution from a Chinese couple (they told me there’s a special term for the colour of the sky when big events like the Olympics or the G20 are happening in China: they say the sky is “Olympic blue” or “G20 blue” then, as it normally the sky is not visible through all the smog, but when there's plenty of important foreigners in town, factories get switched off and the inhabitants get a very welcome break from pollution for a bit) and also discuss the influence on Islam in the lives of Malaysian people: a muslim is not supposed to be gay, but what happens if you add a rainbow flag to your facebook picture to show support for others that are? How do you get small communities to refrain from overfishing their waters if that is how they have been feeding their families for the last generations? 

Talking about fishing: Kota Kinabalu, or KK, as the locals call it, in the north of Borneo has a group of so-called boat people living off its shores: These people, effectively stateless, are not allowed to even set foot on land in Malaysia (or elsewhere), so there's little for them to do but hang out and fish. What sounds like a dream to many is certainly not a dream for them - they are unable to earn money, they can't send their kids to school, medical treatment is a problem and don't even think about ever seeing anything other than the very small neighbourhood that they were born in.

Malaysian Borneo has a large Chinese population (I read somewhere it is 25% and from my experience that might actually be true) and most tourists are also Chinese, a fact that not all Malaysians working in tourism seem to be too happy about. Chinese tourists tend to not speak English and do many of the things the Chinese are apparently infamous for: shouting, appearing in large groups and littering, spitting, slurping, burping, etc.

My main problem with Malaysia is something inherently European, I think: the missing awareness of environmental issues. I had the great pleasure of actually discussing this with a member of the Malaysian WWF team, a crazy environmentalist like me. We bonded over the fact that I refused plastic straws in a cafe and took out my bamboo straw instead. 

In Borneo, as in so many other places, plastic is a huge issue, recycling is just a word that looks good on a scrabble board, while trash of all kinds can be found floating in the sea, with the usual results of animals ingesting it and subsequently starving or being poisoned, and the trash eventually also making it into our food chain (which is only fair, let's face it).

The Malaysians even manage a special art of matryoshka doll-style plastic spectacle: a take-away drink comes in a plastic container with a plastic straw, and is then placed in a plastic bag, which is often placed in another plastic bag (in which you might already find your other plastic bags with a little bun or whatever you wanted to eat, all separately wrapped in plastic bag.)

Apparently though, recycling and a fee for plastic bags have been successfully introduced in Kuala Lumpur (or KL, as the locals call it), so there's a silver lining to the cloud of all the plastic bags on the beach. 

I subsequently lost the bamboo straw, by the way, which is not a bad thing as I would have probably not been allowed to bring it into New Zealand anyways.