Kydroon

Category: travel

  • Sea Turtles from Puerto Escondido

    Sea Turtles from Puerto Escondido

    Sea Turtles (Chelonioidea)  are the panda bears of the seven seas. Everybody loves them, as they are cool, cute, and endangered. There are just seven types rooting back some 150 million years, and you will find them all over the globe close to the equator.

    The first time you see one, you will go wild, but then you will realize they are quite common. It doesn’t change the fact that sea turtles have this built-in coolness feature.

    Freshly hatched young sea turtle babies, or Tortuguitas, add on top an unholy sick amount of cuteness.

    Usually, the nests are at an unknown location, and it is hard to predict when they hatch. For a regular traveler, this means, forget it! Your odds are not in your favor.

    Travel Hack:

    You do not have to book a tour for this. Get a taxi, drive to Coco’s Beach Club, at the beach walk about 500m to the right, support Viva Mar and just enjoy the moment.

    However, there is a perfect spot in a highly unexpectable place: Puerto Escondido, a relaxed town on the west coast of the pacific ocean in Oaxaca, Mexico. A go-to place for Lonely Planet backpack hikers resulting in a very vivid trashy nightlife around the central beach. A little to much action for sea turtles, but!

    Playa Punta Colorada
    Playa Punta Colorada

    If you travel to the very west of Puerto Escondido, you will find a pristine endless sand beach, the Playa Punta Colorada, which is west of the Playa Bacocho. Such a beautiful place is, of course, the property of a very rich person. In this case, it is within the Carlos Slim Foundation portfolio.

    • Viva Mar Station
    • Beach Police

    You can only reach it through the Coco’s Beach Club that belongs to the Posada Real, more on this later, therefore no Lonely Planeters, no noise, and no pollution, just the right spot for cute little sea turtle babies.

    • Crowd gathering at 5 p.m.
    • Ready to release
    • Your baby sea turtle in a bowl

    The Vive Mar cooperation operates there a hatch station. They patrol together with the police every day 30km to protect newly found nests. This translates to a constant supply of eggs ready to hatch, and they have a hatching every evening at 5 p.m.

    Sundown
    …and then you enjoy the sundown…
  • Nicolae Ceaușescu (Part One)

    Nicolae Ceaușescu (Part One)

    This is a fun, travel, foodie, photography, and laziness oriented blog where I am working hard to avoid serious stuff. Usually…

    As I have promised more in-depth material on Romania in a recent post, I am now running into a severe conflict of interests, as you can not post on Romania without touching Ceaușescu, so let me take you on a sarcastic, ironic personal perspective on the “Titan of Titans.”

    Warning, this is my perspective influenced by my early childhood in Romania and lots of Romanian relatives, especially my parents.

    • The first lesson from Ceaușescu is: Education is far overrated if you aim to become Dictator. The right time, the right place, and a good network are by far more critical! Four classes in elementary school will do the job. That is: how it all started.
    • The second lesson is: a highly exposed position is also highly attracting to bullets. That is how it ended.
    • The third lesson is: take a view on the system. It is still alive and vivid and well prospering.

    Until my visit to Romania, after my parents were able to escape in a James Bond-like spy story in the mid 70ties, I did not meet or know a single person who was not spitting on the floor, when hearing his name.

    When I was talking to the guides of the Ceaușescu Mansion in Bucarest, I got new insights. It seems, as so often, that it is far more complicated. I would put it this way: he was a perfect system component as well as a system glitch at the same time. Other as Honecker, who was quite similar to him but remained a pure idiot, Ceaușescu has gone seriously mad at the end of his reign.

    However, there was probably one smart move, or let us call it a high-risk all-in stunt, that is remarkable. For this, you must know that Romania is a blessed beautiful country. It has a highly fertile ground. It has its own resources. It has a lot of smart people. It is, even though far to the east, totally Europe oriented throughout the last two millennia. It also had oil, which made it to an ally to Germany in WW2 but was depleted by the big brother through the Soviet era afterward.

    Therefore, in the 70ties Romania had a well developed large scale petrochemical industry without oil. The master plan was now to win Persia as a partner and to export its knowledge to the Shah. The plan miserably fizzled, and the debt towards the IMF started to drown the Rumanian economy to death. It may have turned out different…

    In this time of growing madness, Ceaușescu left some remarkable ugly pieces of history behind I would like to share here.

    His villa or the Ceaușescu Mansion

    You have to visit it. It is the ugliest place to live (as a dictator) I could think of but shows the very core of his mindset. The fever dream of a poor shoemaker from the province of being rich.

    His palace or the Palatul Parlamentului

    You have to visit it. More on this in a later post…

  • Camels

    Camels

    Camels are formidable animals. Besides being so useful at carrying goods through the desert which includes the ability to domesticate them which applies only to very few animals, besides offering milk which is not my cup of tea, besides the fantastic meat which I love even though it takes nearly a day to get it tender, so besides this all…

    They have this extremely relaxed camel stance. This:

    • I do not give a 💩 about the sun and heat here
    • I am thirsty and could drink a well dry, but I do not give a 💩
    • I do not care about the fly cloud around my face
    • I do not care about you, human
    • I do not care a rats ass on anything

    Aren’t they cool? 😎

    Oh, and you have to watch this TED talk to be astonished to learn where they come from. It fits the list above quite well.

  • Airports

    Airports

    OK, this is a German insider 😆 …it seems, that everybody on this planet is currently building nice new airports, like this one (MCT) with only one exception: BER 😅😂🤣

    Travel Hack:

    There are terminals all around where you can scan you passport to get a free WiFi code for four hours. Use them before you enter your gate! 🤓

  • Romania

    Romania

    Before heading to the desert to do a lot of nothing, I have to share some gems from a hidden treasure in Europe: Romania. I will come back to all those topics, as they deserve more details, but for now, enjoy the appetizer.

  • Chapulines from Oaxaca

    Chapulines from Oaxaca

    Authentic Mexican food is, by far, my favorite food. Why?

    • I love Italian cuisine. It is through its simplicity unbeatable.
    • I love French cuisine. It is through its history of aroma refinement and presentation unbeatable.
    • I love Spanish cuisine. It is both in traditional tapas as in the molecular cuisine unbeatable.
    • I love Japanese cuisine. The pristine quality of the raw products is unbeatable.

    However, Mexican food beets it all. It looks back on a long history and combines more products that originated from there. It is the very source for the global cuisine we all enjoy today.

    I am not talking about Tex-Mex, and not at all, talking about the even more diluted European version of Tex-Mex that is served here.

    I am talking about Oaxacan food. The herbs, the chilies, the meat, flavors, the rolled cheese balls, the raw mole creme, and the secret ingredient that no money can buy here: the Chapulines!

    Chapulines, Chapulines with garlic, Chapulines with chilies, Chapulines with garlic and chilies – it is by far the most superior snack on this planet. 😋

    When you have some time in Oaxaca, you have to visit Isra & Tuti where you will be involved in the gathering at the market, the preparation, and the cooking itself. You will love it!

    Chicken Galantine with Chapulines
  • Oman

    Oman

    In preparation for our upcoming trip to Oman, I scanned my archives on the first trip to Oman back in 2014. Oman is a fascinating country with an incredibly long history back to the times of the old testament and even pre-biblical times.

    Oh… I am shuddering in awe as I really like old stones and here you can see some ancient stones. Stones from the time when humanity invented civilization, a highly successful but tricky concept we all still have to practice now and then. 🤓

    Oman was the very first trade center around something nearly useless but still highly valuable: Frankincense

    No temple could be successfully run in the past without this stuff, and as its importance faded and oil took over to run things, the Omanis were lucky to find the oil too. A fortunate country indeed and today no Omani has to work. They are busy, but this is not work as you, and I understand it. 😉

    Salalah and along the coast

    The more exciting part is around Salalah, where you have access to some interesting archeological sites, the coast, the Jabal Samhan, Wadi Darbat, and the deep desert. Maskat is to clean and lacks the old Suks that are all gone. Unfortunately, Arab taste is a blend of Disney, glaring colors and even more plastic but not the authenticity of patina on old stones you can expect in Europe.

    Jabal Samhan

    View from Jabal Samhan around 1800m high and with a free view on the Indian Ocean.

    This is a mans world…

    Deep desert

    …this is far away from Arrakis 🤓

  • Manta Fever at the Manta Campfire

    Manta Fever at the Manta Campfire

    The Maldives should be definitely on your short term travel list. See it and check it off from your list as long as it is still there.

    We traveled the Maldives in December 2015 on the MV Orion, and two aspects poke into our eyes.

    • Massive coral bleach, as the year before in Bikini, due to the warm water that was at 28 degrees Celsius in 30-meter depth right in a strong current. No chance for the corals to survive this and the result is no (big) fish. At least not during my dives, when I was waiting at depth in currents for at least some lost reef sharks. After all, this was only proof that the impact of the coral bleach arrived at the top of the food chain. The poor sharks are the salami in the disaster sandwich of collapsing ecosystem and lots of shark-fins loving Chinese.
    • The second aspect is a shifted and more unstable climate pattern leading to clouds and rain in a time when the sun was guaranteed just ten years before.

    This is a massive challenge for the crew, as the mood of the travelers spirals down the drain as the hope to see them again in the following years. To prevent this, they will cook a plankton soup and invite you to a Manta Campfire.

    There is a very famous one in Hawai, but actually, it is straightforward and easy to arrange. The effect is totally and absolutely mindboggling and results in a lifetime experience you should not miss if you enjoy diving, as we do.

    Receipt for a plankton soup to serve at the Manta Campfire:

    • Get to a spot where mantas regularly pass by
    • Anchor somewhere, where you can drop your divers on a flat undemanding sand floor not to deep, best around 10 meters.
    • Switch on all your boat lights and point them to the sea. We talk about massive 1000 watt lights here.
    • Now, wait for a little. After about one hour the sea is full of plankton, and somehow the mantas taste this. They will come to this spot from everywhere around.
    • After you have briefed your divers that you will personally fin them if anybody touches the mantas you can send them down with their lights, where they have to lay on their backs in a circle and point with their lights up to form the cone of a campfire.

    You have a lot of plankton, and the mantas around will go crazy right into a feeding frenzy. If you are one of the lucky divers down there, relax and enjoy the show.

  • Zipriding Cascada El Chiflón

    Zipriding Cascada El Chiflón

    With some delay, but better late as never I am starting to post from my recent Mexico trip. Enjoy!

    El Chiflón is an incredible beautiful waterfall you do not have to miss. Want to see more stuff like the next picture. Then wait for the next post…

    El Chiflón

  • Bikini Atoll Shark Pass

    Bikini Atoll Shark Pass

    The Shark Pass is in the Bikini Atoll which is part of the Marshall Islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It is basically as far away as you can get from any other place along the equator.

    There are two spots there, that can bee seen from space.

    The castle bravo crater in the northwest, where a poor understanding of lithium 6 and 7 isotopes, led to the largest unplanned nuclear disaster of the US…

    …and, far more enjoyable: the shark pass in the southwest!

    Our dive briefing was a little unsettling for me:

    ‘Do not jump into the water!
    This makes them curious and they may bump you.
    This sometimes makes people nervous…’
    Well, now I am nervous…

    Looking around: 3, wait 5, no 12, OK forget about counting, but how do I get through? OK, I will make myself invisible and dive below them…
    Some sources claim this shark pass has the highest permanent grey reef shark density on earth. There is definitely always a nice school of grey reef sharks as well as some silver and black tips.

    My personal theory for the density is, that this is simply due to the remote location and the shape and depth of the channel that forms a perfect funnel into the lagoon.

    Some sources claim, the channel has been bombed into the atoll by the exploration ship USS Sumner to pave the way for the larger ships to follow with 90 tons of dynamite, but I think it has been used somewhere else. It is really a great diver lifetime experience, when the sharks explore you – a very nice twist!

    The trip to the shark pass was a great escape from our wreck diving. Exceptional visibility, nice colors and life – and even though we had plenty of gas left, we had to get back.