Bouldering Getaway

This weekend we focus on some more physical activities. The name of the game is bouldering. Bouldering is a part of the general sport of rock climbing. What makes bouldering bouldering is that one only climbs lesser heights and without the aid of ropes.

Getting back into the Stockholm scene I decided to get into this sport which has seen a high increase in popularity during the last few years. After all it's like this almost valid excuse to climb trees and be a kid again ;)

I've engaged in bouldering for about two and a half month or so now after getting back and I've finally gotten to the level where I don't fall down on everything. Yay!
After our usually sauna time after hanging upside down Stefan told us about the cool spots on Åland that we could climb.
Åland is technically a part of Finland but they speaks Swedish and actually wanted to belong to Sweden back in the day when the decision was made.
Ok, lets go! I replied and so we arranged to go two weekends after or so.

Getting to Åland is quite simple and one can just take the ferry over from a number of locations.To find some good info just check out Ålands tourist office. To find more specifics about bouldering spots take a look at 27crags.com

The bouldering was fantastic and it's was an awesome weekend. I recommend this to anyone that likes rock climbing and nature.

Stockholm Nights

After a short visit back home I'm now back to writing and traveling. Sort of. I realized that although Stockholm feels very much like my home town I'm  not really in touch with what others have seen and done in Stockholm. Sure the girls are nice and the city beautiful. There are so many other sides to my Stockholm though. Skipping the first fever ridden day of my home coming I'll share my second fever ridden night instead. Mind you that I'm not talking about some phenomenon like Stockholm feaver but an actual getting sick fever.
After being gone for a while the first thing that popes into ones mind is meeting up with friends and doing something really quaint. So we decided to do something we all had grown up with. Yup that's right a Gibb, a Haxx or a LAN gaming night as it is also called. This is when you chill out together and play computer games. A tradition starting early for me growing up in the suburbs of Stockholm. Growing up we used to haul our old stationary gaming machines of differing caliber over to each others houses or some communal building we had access too. A couple of times I think we even got some locale sponsored by our municipality.
Growing older and as laptops got more powerful an office or a lecture hall where the new spots of gaming and fiddling around with computers. Now although we could most likely scramble a few gaming machines we go old school and visited a gaming cafe to do our gaming. Being a bit older it's nice not to have to deal with the hassle of distributing all the games and such and making sure every machine works and all.

Although the more typical clientele of an internet cafe like inferno online are considerably younger than us we figured we'd have a great time anyway. Besides we'd probably kick ass with these kids anyway. Yup that's right we probably would. We're not your ordinary bunch of old school gamers. Having an previously no1 ladder ranked FFA WC3 player, a old national team captain in dota, ladder ranked no1 in 2v2 at SC2, previous QA lead at DICE, game designers and game development entrepreneurs and with more random remarks within the gaming world our bunch of peeps still managed to keep it civilized and all just for fun. I do guess we are getting older though since people started to drop off around 2am instead of the 8am customary retreat time.  Despite this and a few technical issues we still managed to play a list or recommended games.

• WC3 TFT dota
• Q2
• L4D2
• CS 1.6
• SC1

I guess reading this list does reflect on the fact that we are a bit old school. Still we had a good time and I recommend you to have a go at it while in Stockholm Sweden. After all we do host the largest LAN parties in the world and have a very very strong gaming culture.

Fast and Sandy

Bali is a place where you live the dream or maybe it just seems so as you are covered in purple haze. It's a place in Australia where people form all over the world go to forget, to adventure and live. Great surf and good weather is what drew this particular traveler here. I was well prepaired with flip flops and board shorts as I took on the challange of Bali.

Managing to surf for two days, Sleep (passing out totally counts) in five different places in three nights, riding around lost on my motorbike a whole night, clubbing, eating lots of good food, befriending the local surfers, a Czech surf community, chilling with Russians, do some shopping and even get some pictures of it I have to say I got the most out of my stay.

I'd like to give some estimations of what tings might cost you. These are not the prices I paid  but I think they are what you can use as an estimate

• Motorbike 50K Rp a day
• Housing 50-150k Rp a day
• Food and drinks (non alcoholic) 60K rp a day (3 Indonesian meals) 150K Rp for western food
• Surboards 40K an hour
• Taxi from the Airport 50K
• Taxi to the airport, meter + 5K
• Fake brand sunglasses 25K

Let me know if there are any other prices you might want

Have fun in Bali guys

Time Out Jakarta

Life in Jakarta is in the middle of everything and far away from far away. Sometimes When the tingling feeling of pollution or the hours spent in traffic jams seems to be getting to you it's time for a time out. Getting far away needn't be too hard or too far away. Weekend trips offers a range of destinations even if one is not taking a flight to get there. A popular destinations of the Jakartonése is the mountain resort of Bandung with it's cooler climate. Me, originally from a small cold village of Sweden (Stockholm), beaches and warm waters are much more enticing.

A few hours of driving is what it takes to reach the south coast of west Java where the surf destination of Cimaja offers what Jakarta does not. A slow pace of life, clean (or cleaner) beaches and unstressed locals.

The best way of getting there is by car but there are also buses that make the trip for those who want to save the coin for other pleasures. Traveling as a group makes the trip very affordable even for the most stingy backpacker. I think Gas, Housing and Surfboards hit me with a total damage of less than 150.000 Rp which is comparable with 112 SEK, 17.5 USD or 12.2 EUR. I easily spent more money on food and drinks during these days than that.

For housing we rented the upper floor of a villa which we shared for two nights. Despite no AC or mosquito nets I can't remember getting bitten even once. This is without using any mosquito repellent.

For your basic needs there are always alfamarts and indomarts not too far aways but I would recommend some of the many restaurants offering Ikan Bakar or BBQ fish. The fish is usually caught not too far off shore and is usually fresh. There are also a variet of shell fish available like lobster or why not try some barbequed squid.

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Missing the Snow

Coming from a nation plunged into darkness and cold for most parts of the year, spending time in the Tropical regions of the world seems like a great vacation. It does replenish ones energies and I can't say I miss the snow too much. That's what I told myself at least. I am starting to realize that I do miss some parts of the frozen world. This being mainly Snowboarding and what comes with it.
Snowboarding is a passion of mine I discovered not too many years ago. I'm mainly self though and like most people I had my part of bloodied noses and bruises. This being said I still love the sport and would recommend anyone to try it.
I specially remember this one night in Andorra where my buddy Simon Wagemyr and I decided to play around in the fresh snow after a beer or two.

This is some footage of us playing around in Soldeu after we left our "go to" bar, The Harp.

A night on the town from Filip Marzuki on Vimeo.

How I chose where to do my Dive Masters

Spending two months on the beaches of Koh Lanta isn't all bad. Koh Lanta is a larger small island on the west cost of Thailand. It is definitely one of the calmer beach places one can find in the region.
There are plenty of foreigners on the island but since it's all quite spread out the beaches always seems quite empty.

Before coming to Koh Lanta I was looking for a place to do some serious diving. To get my Dive masters. I tool a couple of requirements and places into consideration before I decided.

Requirements.
Cheap living, Convenient travel, Friendly people, Good food, Good diving.

With these I ruled out the Americas, Africa and Europe. Egypt was in fact a candidate but since there where ongoing riots throughout the nation I decided not to.

Looking at prices and dive spots it came down to three countries.
the Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand. Although Indonesia has plenty of great diving is also have plenty of corruption and little annoying things to deal with. Besides I was planning to spend the following two months after my Diving in Indonesia so Some variation was required.

So what where the differences between the countries in question. Well a good thing about the Philippines is that it's Christian or rather not Muslim. The implications of this is that beer and pork dishes are commonly available. This also goes for most of Thailand as they are Buddhist.
When if comes to food I have to say that the Thai food is on an un-threatened favorite among these countries.

The cost of living is cheapest in Thailand compared to the others.

Language wise Malaysia is definitely a favorite. Since I speak the language or at least enough to interact with the locals quite easily. This would mean that I cound integrate with the community fast and easy, a big bonus.

So basically it was down to Thailand vs Malaysia. Personally I think the best dive sites in the area are around Borneo. But then again the simian island and north of there in the Andaman sea are not too bad either.

Taking the living environment into consideration I decided I wanted to try out the island life and so I listed a few options.

Location	Cost of Living	Quality of Diving	Beaches	Cost of Diving	Food	Cummunications
Phi Phi	High	Medium	Medium	Medium	OK	OK
Koh Lanta	Medium	Medium	Good	Migh	Good	Good
Perhentian	Medium	Medium	Medium	Medium	OK	Good
Sipadan	Medium	High	Small	High	OK	Good
Tao	Medium	Low	OK	Low	OK	OK
Similan	High	Good	OK	High	OK	OK

Having this in mind I decided to just go down and try out a few places before I decided.

That's when my girlfriend informed me that she got a volunteering gig at Koh Lanta. And soo it was all decided. Haha.

Here are some of my photage from one of the dive sites. Koh Haa.

Scaling Jakarta

I'm having some trouble writing this post since my fingers are't adhering to my will completely. The reason they're on strike is that I went rock climbing for the first time in ages.

After some searching I managed to find Jakarta's only place to Boulder. I'm quite amazed by the obscurity of the sport in a city hosting 20 million people or so. There are a few places where you can do some wall climbing with a bilayer but only one place to boulder.

The place is quite small and it's in a abandoned staircase of a football stadium. It's like if someone ghetto rigged a bouldering gym. But it's perfectly good to practice at. Just like at almost every climbing place the guys there are really friendly and talkative. It's a great atmosphere to hang out in it you don't mind the mosquitoes and neon lighting.

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My shopping addiction

I have to admit that I too enjoy shopping. Today I spent a bunch of cash on sports gear. I tend to spend my money or sports, travel, tech stuff, food and nerdy stuff. Can’t say it’s any different from anyone else I guess.
I am curious about my ability or lack of restrain in spending far too much of my available funds on a whim when it comes to these things. I think that if one made a graph of spending over time I’d be similar to a heartbeat. quite low for a long time and suddenly consumption rises enormously with some smaller variations in spending amount before and after.

This time I happened to spend it on a new Badminton racket. Last trip around the world I think I bought a couple too. Anyway it ended being a nanotech 200. It felt good so I hope it works well too. Stringed it with BG 66. tried to find BG 80 but I’m not sure if it doesn't exist any more due to my long time absent from the world of Badminton or if they just didn’t carry it.
Did learn that it is impossible for me to play with a traditional grip in this hot weather due to not being able to hold it sweating like crazy. I changed to a towel grip long ago but I never realized it was vital for me to even being able not to drop the racket.

Playing the Hood

It's in the humid and dirty streets of Jakarta where it goes down at night. Where it's decided who is the strongest, fastest and most dangerous. At Badminton that is.

Badminton is the national sport of Indonesia and it's played my most people in most places. In fact there is a street badminton court outside of where I live where the local crew hang out at night. And as the ''new kid on the block'' I had to throw it down too.

Jakarta Street Badminton from Filip Marzuki on Vimeo.

Pain I tell you. My right leg is so tiered and I realize I'm so out of shape. I have been spending some time looking for a gym around here but maybe these night badminton games will serve just as well.

Playing barefoot on a concrete court my old practice with Suryanaga Gudang Garam Badminton in 1998 paid off. I did win my games despite problems with, well everything haha. Maybe I'll get to play someone better next time. Win or lose it's real good fun and besides I need the practise if I'm gonna be in shape or the annual get together with my old club mates from Täby Badminton.

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Right off the bat

Well pretty much right off the bat I managed to engage in random activities with some peeps in Jakarta. Like some of you might now I do like to try new sports. This time it was a sport called Kasti. It's like a variation of softball or Bränboll as they say in Sweden. the major difference it that someone throws the ball to you from the side so you hit it from a 90 degree angle. Don't know why but I really sucked at it. Think I only hit the ball once in nine tries.

Here it's played in grade school and it's really a lot of fun. Some of the really fun parts is when you need to throw the ball at an opposite team member when you change sides.

Spending the afternoon playing Kasti was a lot of fun and I recommend you to try it if you're ever in Indonesia.

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