This was a busy day, way too tired now to write anything longer. We departed the house early in the morning, drove around the island, visited a waterfall which required a long walk on steep hills in the forest and so on.
Damn. Why do all the small islands like this have huge amount of roosters? At least they make waking up easy. At five in the morning there was already horrible noise outside, roosters yelling and fighting.
It was raining heavily during the night, let's hope the weather stays sunny and decent during the day. Time to leave the house to explore..
The rest of the journey went smoothly, and we landed to Palau just after the sunset. Our first Airbnb host was welcoming us at the airport, a nice lady with her sister. We are staying two first nights in their guest house with some Polish people and also renting their car for exploring the area. The house seems to be big and nice, with free internet access (a rare thing on this remote island) and air conditioning (another rare thing).
It has been dark all the time, so difficult to say if the islands are as beautiful as they are supposed to be. Well, tomorrow morning we plan to wake up at six and start exploring the islands by car.
New car combination for me by the way.. Normal right side traffic, but the car is imported from Japan so the steering wheel is also on the right side. Well, that was surprisingly easy to adapt to, and there is basically no traffic on the island.
Sometimes.. Or always.. We manage to make ourself busy. Spent a bit too long walking around the city, took a taxi to wrong terminal and so on. A lot of running, but we are finally boarding the flight to Palau and even our lost baggage should be in the plane.
Walked refreshing 10km to Taipei 101 skyscraper, fifth tallest in the world.. To notice the walking took too long and the tower had already closed. Well, at least a Korean restaurant nearby provided some good grilled meat.
Flight to Taipei was spent sleeping, so even the flight being an hour late didn't really matter. Naturally China Airlines had managed to leave our bags behind and they would come on the next flight, but.. That's not really a problem, there's nothing we would need right now in the bags and the airline will check them onto the next flight. Otherwise we would have done that by ourself due to some customs regulations.Taipei is also rainy, and it's surprising how dark it was already at 4pm when we landed. We took a train to the city, located our capsule hotel and plan to go walking around the city after long awaited shower.The capsule hotel is really not a solution for the claustrophobic. They have managed to fit two levels of beds in a room barely the size of a single bed. Well, it's enough for this night, we don't really need more space for anything. They even have USB sockets for charging devices on the walls of the mini beds.
The layover problem was relatively easily solved with some persistence. "So, going out of the airport costs 105eur in taxes and stopover fees?" "Yes" "Can we change to an earlier flight to Taipei?" "No, not possible" "Can we speak to your manager?".
Now we have tickets on the 11:10 flight to Taipei instead of 17:30, and that's just fine. We have about three hours to spend, and first class lounge is an excellent place for that. Some light breakfast and gin&tonic.. :P
After long 11 hours flight we finally landed to rainy Bangkok and learnt that we wouldn't be allowed to leave the airport without paying a stopover fee and airport taxes. Lovely..
Well, our flight would have originally been in eleven hours. Let's see if we can change it to an earlier one, then the unpleasant change of plans wouldn't matter so much.
Renting a bicycle from the hostel sounded like a good idea, so that's exactly what I did despite some random rain showers. Biked around the city for some hours, snapping photos and so on, nothing special. Hanging around in a city alone is always a bit boring.
Early morning departure, a well slept short flight and I'm in Amsterdam. Should find something to do here for a day, before our flight to Bangkok departs tomorrow.
Luckily Schiphol airport provides baggage lockers, so I didn't have to carry the dive gear and other at the moment unnecessary stuff around the city.
Waiting for the check-in time at the hostel now and wondering if I should rent a bike to explore the city.. The hostel is in a funny location by the way: Just a couple of hundred meters from the central railway station, but on the another side of a river. So, a free two minute ferry trip had to be taken from the station to reach the hostel.
