Last Updated on February 18, 2022 Until my recent visit to Istanbul, I was never interested in a Hammam ritual. I had visited Istanbul three times over the years, and a Turkish Bath was never on my “to do list”. Not because I don’t like spas and saunas – I loved cheap spa getaways when I still lived in Europe – but because somewhere in the back of my mind, there was a little piece of information stored, that made a Turkish Bath completely uninteresting to me. And that fact was that there was some level of nudity involved in the Hammam ritual.It always surprises people when it comes up in a con ..read more

Last Updated on January 23, 2022 The main draw for me to visit the Bahamas was to meet the swimming pigs. Prior to my trip, I hadn’t done much research – I had no idea where the pigs were living (did you know that the Bahamas are made up of 700 islands and 2,400 cays? But only 30 of the islands are inhabited.) or how to get there from the international airport in Nassau (the capital of the Bahamas). As I delved deeper into the topic of how to swim with the pigs in the Bahamas, I learned that they live on a small island named Big Mayor Cay, which doesn’t have any inhabitants other than a few do ..read more

Last Updated on January 4, 2022 Happy New Year, everyone! We made it through another pandemic year! Who would’ve thought at the beginning of 2021 that twelve months later, parts of the world would still (or again!) be in lockdown, that new variants of the virus continue to emerge, continuing to disrupt our daily lives. And who would’ve thought that I’d be homeless by the end of 2021. I certainly did not foresee any of these things, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself. Since my Year in Review has become quite long again, I decided to break it up into two parts, like I did last year. In part ..read more

Last Updated on December 6, 2021 A car-free island with only 475 permanent residents and more quokkas than people? An island with 63 pristine beaches, 20 picture-perfect bays, coral reefs, essentially car-free and the majority of permanent residents are nicknamed “the happiest animal on earth”? Who would NOT want to visit Rottnest Island?! Well, the problem with visiting Rottnest Island is that it is quite remote and quite expensive. It took me a 6-hour flight from Australia’s East Coast, a tram ride from Perth to Fremantle, and a 30-minute ferry ride from Fremantle to get to Rottnest Island ..read more

This is Part II of my 2020 review – everything I did in the second half of the year, including some travel stats and final thought on 2020. You can read the first part here. Here is what I got up to from July to December 2020: July: Germany I finished my 14-day quarantine at my sister’s house, and then I packed my bags: it was time to travel a bit. My first stop was Leipzig, where I spent a week with my nieces, my brother and my sister-in-law, and then I drove to Bavaria to surprise one of my best friends for her 40th birthday. I spent a week with her and her family and then I went back to my ..read more

When I put together my annual travel reflections for 2020, I did not expect such a massive post, but somehow, despite a global pandemic, this year was anything but boring. In March, when I returned to the U.S. from Australia, my first big trip of the year, just in time to see New York City shut down completely, I assumed that it would also be my last trip of the year. However, I ended up traveling quite a bit – and even ticked a major item of off my travel bucket list (you’ll have to wait until the second part of my 2020 round-up to see what that was) – something that I did not foresee at all ..read more

I live under the flight path of JFK Airport, and I am used to hearing the roaring noise of planes descending over Brooklyn as they are making their way to New York’s largest airport – usually every few minutes. Right now, however, I hear barely any planes, and what used to be a familiar sound now startles me every time it occurs. The sound of airplanes over New York City has become rare – which is something that I didn’t think was even possible.Empty street in Brooklyn But that’s only one of the many changes that I’m experiencing in New York City right now, one of the many things I am getting ..read more

Rach Gia wasn’t supposed to be more than a layover stop on the way from Phu Quoc to Can Tho, and I at first I didn’t even plan to spend the night there, thinking I could take a morning ferry from Phu Quoc, and upon arriving in Rach Gia take a cab straight to the bus station and hop on the next bus into the heart of the Mekong Delta. Upon second thought though, I decided the journey would be quite long (30 mins to the port, 2.5 hours on the ferry, 30 mins taxi, 3.5 hours on the bus, which makes this a 7-hour travel day), and why stress myself? I had time, I wasn’t in any rush, and if I spent th ..read more

As my taxi was driving down the island’s main street and we reached a touristy part that was lined with hotels, casinos and restaurants, I started to doubt my decision to come to Phu Quoc. Was I too late? Had this island paradise been completely destroyed, turned into a cheap package vacation destination, as several blogs and websites had suggested? Even before arriving at my guesthouse, I could already tell that it wasn’t the serene island getaway anymore that some travel guides (still) described it as.I based myself in the Long Beach area for my stay, knowing that this was the part of the is ..read more

As the year drew to a close, I sat down to look back on all of my travels of 2019. Even though I did not achieve my goal of visiting three new countries, all of my trips in the past 12 months were so fulfilling that I can’t be too mad about visiting just two new countries instead of three. Let’s start with some stats: 20 weeks of travel I added up all of my travels and was surprised to learn that I traveled 20 out of 52 weeks in 2019, which was more than I thought. I am still amazed that I was able to carve out a career that allows me to live in New York and still travel a fair amount of time ..read more