Beginning of New Year is usually a time to make a list of New Year’s resolutions. So we also want to share ours with you! Actually it’s not a list. And maybe not a resolution. Just one big dream that we hope to implement this year. And we’ve been living with it for already quite a while, it got matured, and is ready to be shared. Actually it’s already more than a dream, it’s a plan! And that dream-plan is called – our own café in Vilnius!

Not a simple café. A travel themed café. For travellers. For those dreaming about travelling. And for those travelling in their rich inner lands. A cosy place with soft sofas, where you could feel like at home sipping some herbal teas. Or wander far away reading travel magazines and tasting coffee from the lands of Sumatra. Maybe even swing in a hammock on a cold winter day and eat a coconut dessert dreaming about sun and palm trees. Check changing travel photo gallery on the walls to get inspired and watch travel related movies or listen for storytelling in the evenings. Or just come for delicious specially prepared coffee, tea, bakeries or lunch from different corners of the world. Everything simple, but special.

We know it will be difficult. Yes, we’re not experts, but everything is learnable. And we like to learn. And we have learnt much already. When having a chance we have been reading a lot about everything from coffee, tea, cafes success (and failure) stories to Lithuanian legislations, hygienic requirements and café forums messages. And spending hours collecting ideas of what to paint on the walls or how to creatively refurbish old chairs. And even accounting or legislative info can become an interesting evening read when it concerns your dream. Of course reality will be different and more complicated. But if we leave all these ideas just in computers’ memory we’ll never know how it would really be!

For now we still follow bumpy roads of South East Asia. But our café is already living in our minds. We note all the little details in all the cosy places that we come upon on our road. We visit the lands of coffee, tea and cacao. We see how its’ grown and processed. We get some ideas of exotic, but simple desserts that might be part of our menu. We chat with people who have similar ideas or work in cafes. We’re still in Indonesia, but in some part of our minds we are already back.

And now a message to all of you our friends, for those we met and those we haven’t yet, travellers and non travellers, coffee drinkers and those with sweet teeth! We’ll need your help, especially when our dream starts getting real shape. But already now if you have any great ideas, knowledge or enthusiasm and would like to share them with us, we would be very very happy! Or more practically, if you accidentally come upon a place for rent in Vilnius oldtown that might be perfect for this café or know where to get cheap second hand furniture or other interesting stuff especially related to travels, let us know! Big big thanks!

A bit late, but still happy New Year for all! Follow your dreams!

Sometimes waking up early brings me good mood. Even at 7 o’clock. Maybe it’s this sunrise light that makes me feel like grabbing a camera and catching all this beauty around. Instead this morning we catch a ferry. Blue water, blue mountains, blue sky, everything seems to have dissolved in magical blue. I stare at the lush green hills, with their peaks still sleeping in the clouds. At women in the pier with towels on their heads. Some cutting fresh fish, some rinsing clothes by scrubbing them into the hard stone. All calm and captivating your glance.

Then some cooling wind blows on my shoulders, bright morning sun touches my face, and sleepiness is gone. One of such moments when I feel happy for no reason and want to smile to everybody. To greet every person I meet. Even all the van drivers, guides, tourist hunters, who wave, shout and approach us just half step out of the boat. And I just smile, shake my head, observe and all the pier-bus terminal-market noise seems just a nice huddle.

Bumpy roads seem nothing when you’re passing cosy messy villages and palm tree forests. Mandarin plantations and stalls selling huge piles of these orange fruits make you feel hungry. Hordes of schoolchildren with red school uniform baseball caps and locals jumping in and out of the bus entertain your eyes. Then your glance jumps to a bus-boy, who suddenly sneaks through the window onto the roof. Just to reach some sacks there. Efficient service. But the most interesting is to follow the road. Up and down, right and left – you jump here and there. Partly as a car racer and partly concerned for your safety, you observe trucks, motorcycles and huge holes in asphalt you’re overtaking. And feel happy after each successful turn. That’s on the good days.

But there are bad days. Or just days when it seems you forget to put a smile on your face before getting out to the street. Or you just got out of the night bus and all you dream for is a soft bed and a pillow. One of such days we find ourselves in a bus station in Bukittinggi. Bad place to be. All the folks around seem to attack you. Hello, how are you? Where you go? Maninjau? Medan? Hello sister, buy banana? Where you go? And you start shaking your hands. No, no, no need. I know where I go. Suddenly you feel an urge to explain. Where you go, and why you don’t want to take their expensive vans. That you want a public bus. That you ate breakfast and don’t want any bananas. That you’re tired and would like to be left alone. Very bad tactics. Doesn’t work at all. Only you get a bit angrier.

Then you finally pull through all the vendors to 20 counters of the bus station and hear different prices, times and lengths of the journey. After half an hour asking around you finally realise it’s the same bus. You feel cheated. But you have no choice. Sit and wait. Even though the dirty bus station full of mostly men hanging around doesn’t seem a cosy place to linger for 3-4 hours. But you must forget about time in Indonesia. Especially when your bus driver zigzags to the other side of the city, just to bring friend home or stops every hour at some roadside kitchen to watch football match on TV. It’s easy to get annoyed when your trip should take 10 hours but probably will last 15. It feels ages if you can’t fall asleep flying on the backseat on the patched roads. Your ears seem to explode being too close to the speakers blasting loud boom boom music. But there is one little secret.

The secret is to observe. Look at those people, who look at you. Look at all the details among dirty surroundings. And suddenly there is a man with a guitar filling the noisy station’s air with some soft sounds. A small girl with shiny eyes is hiding behind the bench. Too shy, but curious to look at foreigners. The next moment there’s a youth asking us about the Indonesian book I read. He speaks good English and ends up recommending us some good Indonesian writers, movies and musicians. Nice surprise.

And even when you’re trapped in a bus in a never ending journey, you get over it. Your ears get used to the terrible music and nose doesn’t feel the smell from smoking passengers anymore. The sun rises and you start observing changing landscapes, animals and people along the road. Who sells what, who goes where, who looks how. You focus on all the little details and forget your tiredness. And you even start feeling some kind of lightness. Beauty around appears even more outstanding because of all the trouble behind. And when you finally reach your destination, you’re exhausted, but you know why you’re here.

So that’s how our days flow in Indonesia.

Instead I have sun and turquoise blue water. I’ve been snorkelling today with fishes as bright as Christmas decorations and my Christmas carols are all the buzzing jungle around me. And I do enjoy it! I even know that next year in the freezing cold I’ll be dying to recharge my inner batteries in such tropical sun and longing for lazy days in the hammock. But still deep deep in my heart I miss Christmas.

And it’s not really about religion or tradition. It’s more like a little girl inside of me still craves for Christmas miracles. I grew up melting candle vax into the water to see what next year will bring, dragging hey straws from under the tablecloth to see how long I’ll live and listening for stories about all other witchcrafts my ancestors came upon on Christmas Eve. More earthly, even preparing and packing some handmade gifts or noticing unexpected snowflakes on snowless Christmas night would make me feel that night special. And when I think, Christmas Eve is the only evening in all 365 days per year that I’ve been spending exactly the same way in the same place for 27 years. Being me, moving from place to place, it’s a miracle by itself.

I really wished to make a traditional Christmas Eve dinner this year. Of course no grandma’s mushroom dumplings, poppy seed milk or kūčiukai here. But just symbolic, my own variation of 12 fasting dishes. Like 12 different fruits. Would have worked in Berastagi with wonderful fruit market, but we left it behind. We are on the small volcanic island, in a tiny divers’ village where getting even fruit other than banana or coconut is impossible. And few existing shops sell only chips, imported cookies and synthetic drinks. And no kitchen, of course. So my Christmas Eve dinner consisted of veggie curry and banana shake. And a cup of tea with cookies on the coast staring at the blackness of the sea and listening for the waves crashing to the rocks. But it felt special.

According to the peculiar Lithuanian Christmas traditions, animals talk on Christmas Eve. Here in the jungle, it really seemed so. Restless monkeys, fighting each other with weird sounds in the nearby tree. Geckos appearing in our room through the holes in the wall with their funny birdlike sounds, chasing night butterflies allured inside by our light. Goats hanging around with loud mee-mee. And some insects making unbelievably loud chain saw sound. And you just need to stop and listen. Listen to all this clatter in the darkness of the night. And you start feeling that you’re the weird one here.

And if you want to find miracles, they are everywhere. Little shells running around on the ground with well hidden crabs under them. Light touch of raindrops on your skin while lying in terrace. The bridge you’ve crossed to just a few minutes ago splashing underwater as the sea levels rises fast. Wonderful structures of huge shells, corals and stones all mixed together into wonderful formations. Wind and sea. And darkness all around with only little flashlights blinking here and there.

Of course it’s just everyday things. But when that little girl in me asks for miracles, I say here they are, look around! And of course not only on Christmas Eve.

I wish you all beautiful Christmas! With snow or not. With sunshine or grey clouds. Little surprises are hiding all around, like little crabs under seashells.

If you ever visit Melacca, visit Ocean cafe!

So we’ve been deep in Laos, survived the dengue fever and got a bit tired of moving around… Thus we decided to leave Cambodia and Vietnam for later, crossed all Thailand again, and got into Malaysia! It welcomed us as a completely different world again, with its contrasts grabbing our glance and shiny multilingual people making us feel like home. We entered through impressive Penang where we nearly got stuck for longer, but then while going to check KL, ended up to Malacca and couldn’t help but stay here longer…

It all started with searching for a flat, we asked a few guesthouses about renting a room for longer, got some directions. And then it all went on like a roller coaster: go ask William from New Zealand, he might know; check at Soon from a bookshop, he knows everybody, ask Walter over there two streets left and then right, framing shop, he has a friend Nelson who might have a room for rent, oh and there is a man who owns a teashop, there over the bridge… and so on and on… Isn’t it cooler than just pressing a few buttons on your cell phone? Imagine after such searching for a room just after a day you have a bunch of new acquaintances! And then you always happen to bounce to them in the street, because the city’s oldtown is veerry small… After a few days you already feel like a part of community!

And it’s so easy to meet people here because life goes on basically in the street. Here you don’t shut the doors under seven locks to hide in your safe palace, no, you open them wide to see and be seen! Most of little houses in the centre consist of two-three floors with a shop/working place in the garage-like ground floor and living space upstairs. We were taking care of the friends’ house in the weekend, which looks just like that, but instead of a shop there is a living room downstairs. So we were sitting in comfortable wooden chairs in our “own” workplace (people in front sell axes and knives, and we are pressing keyboard buttons for most of the day).There is a lady sewing behind all these axes, sometimes she lifts her head and smiles back when catching my glance :) Next by is a framing shop, then another one is selling antiques, and all these people moving here and there, passing by saying hello or asking you something. Then you have some Singaporean tourists, widening their eyes at the sight of unusual “shop” and quickly snapping some photos of you. You observe passers by, but they observe you too!

People are talkative and curious here. It’s normal for somebody you don’t know to pop into your house and stay chatting for a few hours. May be annoying if you are busy, but eh, no need to rush here! If you keep your ears open you’ll learn a lot from them: from Melacca’s history, country’s discriminatory politics, to how the city looked like in preUNESCO heritage times (now it’s shiny in all meanings) and that monitor lizards you might meet along the river can be as big as crocodiles. And of course never ending chats about languages and cultures (which are plentiful here), but more about cultural contrasts later…

So the life is simple and beautiful here, we love it!

Bus station officer takes it easy

Couple of days ago we spent 10 hours sitting in a boat from Luang Prabang to Pakbeng. Mekong is just great! No bumps nor curves. You just float in peace – if you can forget about the loud engine and the heat, that is.

But now it’s no more peaceful river under us. I put Balkan gypsy music to play, as this dusty mountain road seemed an appropriate place for it. I turn my head and see a duck biting a dog. I turn my head again and I see how pig is shitting on the roadside. Cows, horses, ducks, dogs, goats, chicken and half naked kids running freely all around between straw-build huts.

Our minivan ride is supposed to take 4 hours to our next destination, but such things as timetables don’t apply here. It depends when our driver is ready to go – like today at 10am instead of 9am. Also mudslides, occasional shopping stops etc. slow down the trip.

On the other hand minivan is very swift vehicle on these curves. Ours has 11 seats and space for luggage on the roof. We have 18 passengers today, though, including constantly puking, traditionally dressed granny. Also a basket full of chicken should be mentioned here.

Shabby village after village is left behind and we reach our destination Nong Khiaw, where our next adventure would soon to be starting!

After 3 hours of our bumpy journey towards Luang Prabang, our bus suddenly stops its loud motor. The end of the curvy mountain road. For now. But certainly it is forever for the little muddy path on the hill several meters above us. Mudslide. A few yellow excavators are busy making a new path below and dumping all the ground down on our layer and below. I stare at the bunch of colourful people gathered up the hill, at the very end of the path leading to nowhere now. From below they seem like a small group of explorers who after making their way through this tiny route are now standing at the end of the world.

Now we understand why the bus timetable states a journey takes 7-11 hours. 4 hours here or there, you can never be sure in Laos. We have plenty of time to explore the surroundings though. The roadside shops selling a strange selection: eggs, beer and soymilk. Small straw-wood houses with satellite antennas. Groups of locals gathered on the roadside and surrounding hills amazed by the “event”. Local kids and women running around with baskets full of corn, bananas and soft drinks, certainly pleased with sudden influx of customers. And lazy cows, munching the grass in all the buzz and not even caring about some foreigner trying to take a picture of them.

Cows don’t care, but local kids do. After taking a photo of one kid, we’re suddenly surrounded by a good bunch of them, all attempting to show their best poses. Serious faces with hand under the chin, almighty victory signs or just big sincere smiles – all that not only makes us smile, but makes them laugh, chuckle, tease each other and jump around. And what a fun they have scrolling pictures in the camera afterwards amused by seeing themselves. And then running back to freeze in a new pose before bursting into laughter again. Their liveliness and energy is contagious. Finally we say good bye but these shiny eyes are hard to forget.

So no need to rush to the destination, you’ll never know what you’ll discover on the road to there.

Go and see an article about us in Lithuanian webzine Kelionių manija!

Good opportunity to learn some Lithuanian, if you yet don’t master this language.

See those baggies hanging up there? Locals can't keep it in very well. We didn't need a vomit bag no matter how curvy and bumpy our muddy mountain "highway" was.

The bus trip was awesome! Not only because of the rural mountainous landscapes but because of the bus itself. Additionally, bus seemed to operate as some sort of a carrier truck. In few occasions it was packed with 20 or more packages (of cookies, some sauce and what so ever). At the end some hundred packages took all the available space not only on the roof, but also walkway and free seats were fully packed.

We had a few stops on the way, usually at some markets so people could buy snacks from the windows. The trip even included a toilet-pause. Somewhere in the middle of the jungle – welcome to the biggest toilet in the world! Though to get out from the bus one needed to crawl over all the boxes first.

Welcome to Lao PDR!

In Thailand roads are often better than in Eastern Europe, public transport usually runs on time and from everything you can see Thailand being one of the locomotives of the economic development in South East Asia. In word, Thailand seems now very developed country indeed.

In the capital of Laos, Vientiane, you can see how Laos is certainly being dragged with Thailand. Outside Vientiane is another story; much of the country lacks sufficient working infrastructure as well the masses of tourism its neighbour gets. Most of the roads are deteriorated and 80% of them remain unpaved. People’s median age is just over 19.

There isn’t freedom of the press nor democracy. Instead the country is ruled by communist party, even though for a traveller all this isn’t too visible. You can see red hammer and sickle flags everywhere, though, but to really understand the situation in here, we ought to have chats with locals.