Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand

'Why would you mash these three countries together in one post?' you might ask. 'Didn't each of these places provide you with a different experience and unique anecdotes?' And you are right, they probably did. Only we couldn't really tell the difference anymore. Because after six months of hardly spending more than three nights in one place our memories had run full. We were in desperate need for some rest and some routine. For some well-known terrain and some friendly and familiar faces.

The roughly one month we spent in Malaysia and Singapore made this need perfectly clear. We found ourselves on the east coast where most facilities catering to tourists were starting to shut down as rainy season had begun. And we were glad. We spent our days with the few remaining travelers in the few places that were still open and moved at a sloth's pace. The thought of speeding things up again and heading to Myanmar straight away (which was our original plan) seemed repellent and utterly weird.

Let's start at the beginning though. We flew to Kuala Lumpur from Indonesia and we just loved it there! Maybe it was the city itself with its first world infrastructure, its high-rise buildings and its well-lit malls on the one, its crooked local markets, its decaying houses and it's hidden alternative bars on the other hand. Maybe it was the enticing atmosphere of a place where three cultures lived together and blurred into each other (Indian / Tamil, Chinese, Malay). Maybe it was our couch surfing experience with Shanice. She was a private banker who seemed to be doing everything at full speed: working during the day, attending events that required her to wear cocktail dresses in the evenings, calming down with several joints and documentaries about numeric patterns at night. We had our own private room (and bathroom!) in her luxurious flat and were additionally provided with a keycard to access the building's pool, sauna and gym.

Then, during our brief four-day-visit to Singapore, we got a glimpse into the future. We experienced the island as a man made utopia where the unpleasant features of the real world had been banished and hidden away behind metal-and-glass facades and carefully planted gardens. The city was ridiculously clean and all the trees and flowers had been squeezed into a corset that turned them into decorative items in between the skyscrapers and rebuilt houses from the colonial era. Everything was sterile, air-conditioned, optimized, efficient and eventually controllable by a smartphone app. Oddly, the same seemed to be true for this utopia's inhabitants. Everybody seemed to be in a constant hurry and doing at least two things at the same time. One day we saw a little girl of not more than two or three years of age who had already been trained to count her building's 40-something floors in four languages.

So far we had only been to countries that were (or at least seemed to be) less developed than Germany. It felt a little weird not to be the rich outsider for once. To be intimidated by the quality (and the price tag) of, well, basically everything. And it didn't stop there: if it's true that the state of development of a society is determined by the amount of prohibitions its citizens can agree on, Singapore must be the highest developed country on the planet. The number of prohibition signs that lined the streets and subway stations was just as staggering as the height of the draconian fines.

Even though we normally don't enjoy the posh and polished facets of the places we visit, we really liked Singapore. Everything was so incredibly convenient, pleasant and easy there. And we had a reunion with Mayank, the fellow traveler we had met in Iran. He put us up in an apartment that belonged to his family and was not rented out at the time. The place was located on the 19th floor of a condominium which (again) had its own tennis court, pool area and fitness studio. And it had a TV which we used quite excessively after being abstinent for almost six months.

Then we went back to Malaysia and traveled the rest of the country. And our experiences there can be best summed up in one word: 'uneventful'. We felt like it was almost too easy to travel there. And everything was quite touristic. And everything was nice, but it was really not too exciting:

We went hiking in the Cameron Highlands. The paths required us to do some mild climbing and led us through one of the largest tea plantations of the country.

We went to Cherating, a tiny village which turns into a hot spot for surfers during monsoon season. We were there off season and thus among the only guests. We stayed in the kindest family's home stay and spent our evenings in the kitchen of their beach bar cooking together with their staff.

We enjoyed five nights in paradise on Pulau Perhentian Kecil, an island with white beaches and rolling hills covered in jungle flora. The season had already ended and everything was closing, except for our two favorite restaurants and the resort that showed bootleg Hollywood movies in an open air cinema on the beach. And the office where they sold the snorkeling trips, of course. We spent hours with our heads under water hovering over colorful corals and swimming with baby sharks, giant tortoises and a whole bunch of fishes we greeted with their made-up names thanks to 'Finding Nemo'.

We had one of the weirdest couch surfing experiences in Georgetown on Pulau Penang: We stayed there with Ziggy, the biggest Iron Man fan and collector or Marvel memorabilia on the planet. He had turned his huge house into a communal living space where a bunch of his friends and half a dozen couch surfers would hang out together and enjoy the tremendous cooking of his Tamil friend in the red skirt.

And we spent our last days in Malaysia together with Julia and Frank, our new friends from Holland. We had met them on some bus station when the four of us got stranded there and had to get a taxi to eventually reach our destination. Getting ripped off is way more pleasant when you can share the experience with another couple. Plus we could spent hours drinking beer, talking about our bands (Frank's is called Faux Nom, find their music here), and agreeing on the others' views on basically everything.

After reading this you are probably thinking that all of this doesn't sound uneventful at all. And still that's how we felt at the time. We just didn't get psyched anymore. We were simply overwhelmed by everything that had happened so far. We slept until noon every day and even then we couldn't pick ourselves up to go out and do stuff. It was then when we realized that we couldn't keep up the pace of moving on to a new destination every three or four days. We needed a break. Some quiet. Some routine.

Originally we hadn't planned to go to Thailand at all. We had traveled the country extensively in 2012 and therefore didn't really see the point. In our particular situation it seemed like the perfect solution though: we were already in touch with some people there, we knew how to get around and, most importantly, we had visited all the sights before so we wouldn't feel like we were missing out if we just focused on ourselves for a a change. So messaged Darren, a former employee at the institute where Lea and got our Master's degree, who had moved to Bangkok a few years earlier with his wife Stine. They took us in for about a week and let us figure out what to do next.

First, we opened accounts on Workaway and found jobs at two different hostels in two different cities in the north of Thailand. Lea left Bangkok earlier to work in a hostel in Pai as a housekeeper. I decided to stay for a few more days to properly re-record and re-work all the material I had created in the course of the songwriting and recording project The world is mine. I spent my days at local recording studio Brownstone and my nights on the tennis court of our building losing to Darren. Then I went to Chiang Mai to work on the construction site of an Australian-Thai couple who wanted to open a hostel there.

From what she told me Lea must have had a splendid time at her working place. The hostel itself was every hippie's wet dream: it featured colorful murals, countless hammocks and cozy bamboo huts set in a garden of exotic plants. Julie (the owner, originally from Wales), Nim (the manager, Thai) and her co-worker Jade (from England) were just the type of people you would want to be around when you are trying to take a break from your normal routine. She made friends quickly. Her days were packed with leisure activities and her nights featured considerable amounts of booze.

I, on the other hand, wasn't so lucky. First of all I felt like they didn't really need me on the construction site. I spent my days trying not to be in the way and getting tools for my host Golf, a tiny Thai version of Home Improvement's Tim Taylor. In between I cleaned up after the workers which led to an unforgettable episode of Golf, his uncle and me driving out to a suburb and unloading a whole truck of garbage onto a piece of land in between a bunch of families' homes. I shouldn't worry about pollution, they said. Next year they would throw sand on the pile and built a house there. Well alright then! That's a load off my mind!

There was a general attitude of carelessness floating through the place. This was both a very good thing (when I got extra days off due to the overall lack of planning) or a very bad thing (when they didn't even bother getting out of bed to say goodbye after I had stayed with them for two weeks). Golf was a professional gamer who spent every minute of his free time in front of the computer playing some Japanese role playing game. Amy, the Australien hostess and Golf's wife, and Pak, their Thai hostel manager, spent their days looking at their phones and / or their laptops watching series on Netflix. Needless to say, the amount of social interaction I had with them was reduced to a daily maximum of about half an hour. Again this was both a good thing (when I had enough time to work on the material I had recorded in Bangkok) and a bad thing (when I spent most of my free time alone in my room watching random documentaries on some German TV channel's web outlet).

Things only picked up in the last three days when Pak took me to Chiang Mai's Lantern Festival along with some other guests. Building little floats out of bamboo, banana leaves and flowers and watching them sink almost immediately on River Ping was a very touristy thing to do. Still it was just as welcomed as joining Amy, Pak and some of their friends for Golf's all-you-can-eat birthday dinner at a Thai barbecue place.

Needless to say I was not feeling too bad about leaving that place. I went to Pai to reunite with Lea. We stayed in the hostel where she had worked and hung out with her co-workers and the other guests. Pai was one of the most amazing places I had ever been to: it was a tiny, hippiesque village with a whole variety of unique foods, a night market that sold stuff beyond the regular tourist crap, and a chilled bar on every corner, most of them with an open stage (yes, I did play a few of my songs there. But understandibly people seemed to find the hot Korean chick and her Ed Sheeran covers more interesting). However, the best thing about Pai was the nature surrounding the town. We rented a scooter and spent our days driving through the incredibly peaceful nature of lavish meadows, mountain waterfalls, hot springs and natural canyons. It felt like we had finally gone on that well-deserved vacation and were refueling our batteries. And it's a good thing we did: we have spent almost two weeks in Myanmar by now and visiting this country is anything but boring.