Author Archives: kevin

Remote work Thailand

Sawasdee krab! (‘Hello’ in Thai)

As pictures speak more than a thousand words, I decided to just create a photo/video compilation  and write a little text with it.

Earlier this year I was in Bali for two months, to do a combination of work and travel.
In Bali I was together with Sven (my brother) and Fleur (my girlfriend). After my return home, the concept of working remotely stuck with me and I really wanted to do another trip. So I decided to take some action. 
Destination: Thailand (Bangkok and Chiang Mai). I chose this destination after using the website www.nomadlist.com. It’s a website that shows all places around the world with all sorts of ratings regarding working remotely. Chiang Mai and Bangkok are both high on the overall rating list.

After getting allowance from my employer to go, I planned 1 month Thailand.
As I expected.. it a great experience! Chiang Mai and Bangkok were indeed perfect locations to work remotely. I think the ease of living in both places is the thing I enjoyed the most. Nice weather (30C+), great and cheap food all around and very good facilities to work. And outside working hours I could do some tours and get to know Thailand a bit. What more do you want?..

I’m certain this won’t be my last remote work trip. I really like the mix of my life in the Netherlands and these remote work trips for a couple of months a year. Looking forward to the next one already!

Anyway I hope you’ll enjoy the compilation, it’s only 2 minutes as I didn’t take a lot of photos/video’s.

Wrapping up the Bali adventure

Two days ago I arrived back in the Netherlands. Of course I’m happy to see everyone again, but to be honest.. If I could, I would jump on the plane back to Bali in an instant. But oh well, who wouldn’t?

During the last weeks I was together with Fleur. We made Canggu our home base and from there made trips to the North of Bali, the Islands Nusa Lembongan and Nusa Ceningan and later also the East of Bali.

Nyepi day

The day before I left back to Holland it was Nyepi day. This is Balinese New Year. In advance of Nyepi, there are a lot of ceremonies throughout the island. One of these is Ogoh-Ogoh (the day before Nyepi). The Balinese perform a parade with large self-made devilish looking creatures and afterwards burn them to scare away the bad spirits. After that on Nyepi day, Bali is completely shutdown. Everyone is required to stay inside, no lights are allowed, airport closed and even the internet was closed off for a day. Amazing how something like this is possible in 2019. It is said, the reason for this is to let the bad spirits believe Bali is deserted and no one is living there. The Balinese use Nyepi (aka Day of Silence) to overthink last year and think ahead about next year.

This time I’m not going to write much more than this and let the photos and videos speak. I made a photo/video compilation of the complete trip:

Chilling in Canggu and blown away by Nusa Penida

The first three weeks in Bali have literally flown by. Life is good in Bali!
Good weather (despite the fact that it’s rain season), delicious food, amazing nature and very friendly people. I’m so happy and thankful that I still have 5 weeks to go here.
Last 2 weeks were great, I’ll try to share some of our experiences and add some photos with it.

Canggu got us hooked

After we stayed in Kuta the first week, we went to surfer village Canggu. We were immediately caught by the relaxed vibe. Everyone is minding their own business, but at the same time very friendly and helpful if you need something. I wouldn’t mind living in Canggu for some time longer.

On one of the weekend days, Sven and I took a surfing lesson at Perencak beach. I’ve had a surfing lesson back home, but in general the sea in Bali is a lot rougher than in the Netherlands. So this was quite a different experience. After an hour Sven and I both had some successful waves rides (but still pretty much near the shore and just standing up and going straight towards the beach). We were about to go for a second time, but arriving at the beach found a sea that was at least twice as rough compare to when we had our surfing lesson. So we wisely backed out and watched the pros do their work that day. We’re planning to go surfing again when we come back in Canggu later this week

For our working days we found a nice cafe/coworking place, District Canggu. A basic working space with good internet and a nice view on some rice terraces. It provided us with all we needed to do our jobs.

Sneak peaked Ubud

With Canggu as base, we decided to take the scooter to check out Ubud. Ubud is a town located among the rice paddies in the inlands of Bali. Where Monkey Forest is one of the highlights you can’t miss. We didn’t visit Monkey Forest yet, but passed by it. Enough to catch a glimpse of some monkeys crossing the streets.

One of the monkeys freely living in and around Monkey Forest
We also visited the Tegenungan waterfall surrounded by the green wilderness.

We’re staying in Ubud until Thursday this week and will explore the area in the coming days. Our first impression of Ubud is positive. Nice restaurants all over, streets are quite busy but not as crowded as Kuta.

Weekend trip Nusa Penida

Nusa Penida is a beautiful island near Bali. From several beaches in Bali fast boats take people from and to Nusa Penida. As we came from Ubud, we drove an hour on the scooter to Kusamba beach and took the fast boat (+/-30 mins) to Nusa Penida.

We were told the island would be an amazing experience, although roads would be horrible in some parts, we were advised to rent a scooter. So we did. Yes, some parts of the island had some hellish roads. So if you don’t have too much experience driving a scooter, think twice before attempting to reach the highlights by scooter. But anyway, most of the roads were perfect and crossing the island in and on itself was an amazing experience!

Beside all great viewpoints Nusa Penida has to offer, theres also the unique opportunity to go snorkling with Manta Rays. We got up early and left at 7:00AM for the trip. And we had success! It was a magical experience.. The Manta’s of at least 1,5m by 2m seemed to take pleasure in heading straight onto you and just turning away at the last moment. Unfortunately we don’t have any footage ourselves, but to give an idea I’ve included someone else’s YouTube video.

One of the biggest undertakings during our trip to Nusa Penida was climbing the ‘stairs’ to Kelingking Beach. Looked from above Kelingking has a t-rex looking shape. It is possible to descent to the beach by a path made out of wooden sticks and carved out steps. Some parts are really steep and some climbing is required. It’s quite a challenge to do this, so I think 95% of the tourists don’t go down. There were also no boats at all, which made Kelingking Beach a very secluded and quiet place.

Kelingking viewpoint

I’ve included two videos, one of the climb on Kelingking and one of the sea down at the beach. By times the waves certainly got to 3-4 meters of height. Sven and I were both swept away by it multiple times, which was pretty funny.

Sven is returning home on Saturday and Fleur will join me next week on Wednesday. I’m really looking forward to the weeks to come. A lot of things to do here!
Thanks for reading, see you all soon!

First week in Bali

Last week my brother Sven and I started our long awaited adventure to Bali Indonesia. Sven will be  working remotely from Bali for one month and I’ll be staying for two months. On Saturday morning we departed from Amsterdam Schiphol airport. We had an overlay in Jakarta, so after 13 hours and 45 minutes, we set our first foot on Indonesian soil. Two and a half hours later our next fight departed to the end destination Bali. After another two hour flight we touched ground in Bali (around 12:35 in the afternoon). At this time the outside temperature was at least 32C and the sun was giving us a warm blazing hot welcome.

Getting to the hotel

In advance of our trip we were warned about the taxi drivers on the airport being pretty pushy and trying to overcharge arriving tourists. So we decided to attempt using Grab instead (which is basically an Indonesian Uber). Grab drivers are not regular taxi drivers but private drivers verified by Grab. A big advantage of Grab is that you see the price of the taxi trip in advance, so no discussion about the price whatsoever and the driver receives the exact location of our hotel on his phone. A perfect example of how technology can make things a lot easier. But in our case, it turned out as a small disaster..
Before our trip I got a heads up that using Grab in Bali is not appreciated by regular taxi drivers. That’s actually an understatement, as I found out later that Grab drivers even got beaten up by taxi drivers before..  Anyway, we followed the advice to use Grab and tried to find the departures hall (away from the regular taxi drivers) to meet a Grab driver over there.
We dragged our luggage along in search for the departures area, in the burning sun, passing all of the regular taxi drivers asking us “taxi? taxi?”.. And most of them were not giving up after a gentle “no thanks, we already have a driver”.
After 5 minutes of walking, we ended up at the international arrivals and departures hall. Which was also packed with regular taxi drivers. Anyhow we decided to book a Grab there, and within a couple of seconds we had a driver sending us instructions where to meet him. The instructions were pretty complicated.. We had to go a garage, get into an elevator, get to the 5th floor and meet him in parking spot E54 or something. Obviously this was quite a puzzle not knowing anything about the airport. Besides that, he explicitly stated not to have anyone follow us. Which in and on itself didn’t sound very comforting to me.. We started our search for the elevator and failed miserably. We couldn’t find any elevator. Meanwhile a regular taxi probably picked up that we were searching for a Grab and decided to follow us and kept telling us that we didn’t know how things work. We tried to get rid of him by thanking him friendly, but he was persistent to follow us. The longer we tried to ignore him, the more annoying he got. After another 5 minutes of searching for the elevator and still getting followed by the same guy, Sven and I got pretty stressed out and overheat so we decided to abort the search and asked the guy following us to bring us to our hotel. Of course he charged more than the normal price, 150.000RP (10 euro) for a short trip to Kuta (and of course the 10 euro isn’t the problem, but being overcharged just doesn’t feel good). The taxi driver also didn’t feel the need to be very friendly anymore and kept on babbling about how bad Grab is and how happy he was to have taken the drive from this guy. So our first introduction to Bali was not what we had hoped for, but I think for the larger part our own fault.

Our second acquaintance with Bali was at our hotel Bali Bustle, where we got a very warm welcome. We could directly access our room even though we arrived before check-in time, which was very nice as we where both broken up by the long trip. It took us 24,5 hours to get from our hometown The Hague to the hotel room in Kuta Bali. Time for some sleep in a nice bed!

First evening diner in Kuta

First days of working

We arrived on Sunday afternoon and on Monday we both had our first remote working day. Even though we both had a jetlag, working went very well. Large determining factor was the great accommodation that Bali Bustle offers. Good working desks, fast internet, good airconditioning and a very calm, clean and open working space. The first days all went very smooth and Sven and I both enjoyed working remotely a lot.
Our days mostly started between 11.00AM and 12.30AM (4.00AM-5.30AM Dutch time), then around 4:00PM we would have a quick break to have a late lunch, then continue working until 8.00PM and then go out for diner in one of the nearby restaurants and afterwards get back to make our last hours of the day. It has worked pretty well for us like this and as far as I heard for my colleagues as well, so that’s great!

Co-working @ Bali Bustle

Staying in district of Kuta, moving to Canggu

Kuta is the area we’ve been staying our fist week. It is well known as the most touristic area of Bali and in advance I’ve mostly been discouraged to stay there, as there are a lot better places in Bali. Despite the advices, we decided to book our first week at Bali Bustle in Kuta as it looked very nice in the pictures, was close to the airport and very affordable. And yes Bali Bustle was a very good choice. But Kuta… hmm, not so much. The part of Kuta where we stayed was not even that touristic. It was just very crowded and on nearly every street corner there would be locals yelling “taxi?” “massage?” while we passed by. You could call it courtesy to help out, but after  having it happening 10 times on our way to a restaurant it gets somewhat annoying.

After a couple of days we rented a scooter, so we were able to get out of Kuta and discover more of Bali. On our first day off, we visited Canggu (a district known as a surfer district, just above Kuta). This was a completely different experience. Way more relaxed opposed to the busy streets of Kuta. We were both very eager to move to Canggu, so luckily we only booked a single week in Kuta.
We’ve been in Canggu for two days now, and yes.. this is where we found the Bali feeling we were searching for. Chill, laidback, no pushy shop owners, nice small restaurants all around, great beaches. Basically all we could’ve wished for. The streets in Canggu are pretty busy though, but whereas Kuta felt like overcrowded, Canggu is better described as lively. All in all we really look forward to stay at least a week in Canggu.

Tanah Lot – temple in the sea

 

Weather

Regarding the weather, it’s quite unstable. Sometimes the sun is shining for a whole day (we enjoyed a full day at the beach last Sunday), but for instance yesterday it has been raining (very hard) for 10 hours straight. Nevertheless the temperature stays between 27-32C all day. Hearing about the freezing temperatures in the Netherlands makes us extra thankful to be here.

Chilling at the beach in our spare time

We now booked for one week in Canggu and I can imagine we will stay for another week in this area if we keep liking it like we do now. We’ll see how it goes!
This is it for now. Warm greetings from Bali and see you all soon!

Remote work Austria part 2 and preparing for Indonesia (Bali)

Part 2 of remote work in Zell am Ziller

The weekend before my third (and last week) of remote work, two of my friends joined me in Zell. They landed on Saturday morning at Innsbruck airport, which is just an hour drive away from Zell am Ziller. After picking them up, we directly hit the slopes. As it was still early in the wintersport season (15th of December), we enjoyed a full weekend of nearly private skiing on the slopes of Zell.

After the weekend I started my working days around 7AM, as my two friends would go out for skiing around 9AM. In that way my working day ended around the same time they would come back from skiing and we could have a drink, dinner together and play some games in the evenings.
During this week, we stayed in Gielerhof in Zell am Ziller, on an approximately 15 minutes walk from the slope lifts. But theres also a free shuttle bus to the slope lifts that stopped almost next to our apartment. The Gielerhof farmhouse houses several apartments. It was very clean and furnished with everything we needed. It was also a very good location for me to do my remote work. The only negative thing I experienced, was on one day where video calls I made for my work where a bit unstable. This was because the speed of WiFi (and even the internet connection on my mobile phone) where insufficient to support this properly. But beside that single day, I was able to do my work without any problems.

After this week with my two friends, I joined my girlfriend with her family for holiday in Hochkrimml (which is in the same area, Zillertal Arena, as Zell am Ziller). We spent the Christmas holidays in Austria and drove back to the Netherlands the day before New Year’s eve.

Preparations for remote work in Indonesia Bali

After a month in Austria, the next adventure is following up very fast: 2 months of remote work from the Indonesian island Bali. My brother Sven is joining me for the first month. We’ll both be working 4 days a week for our employers in the Netherlands. The second month I’m in Bali, Fleur (my girlfriend) will also come over for 2 weeks. I took some days off to have time to travel around Bali with her.

I have been to Asia before (Vietnam), but not as a remote worker and Bali might have some completely different rules. So I took some time for a good preparation. I collected information from the internet (which is full of good tips and advices) and spoke to some people that did something similar to my plans. With all that information, Sven and I decided to only book an accommodation for the first week (Bali Bustle in Kuta). Arranging things on location is a lot cheaper and very accustomed. Some of the other important tips we got was to rent a scooter for 2 months and get a local SIMcard to have mobile internet and be able to do phonecalls cheaper. I also arranged a 60 days visa for Indonesia beforehand in the Netherlands (at the Indonesian ambassade), this is a lot easier and doesn’t require me to go to the ambassade in Indonesia. If you stay 30 days or less, you can just get a visa on arrival in Bali.

Another thing I had to arrange was a proper insurance. I’ll be taking some costly computer equipment from my employer. To have this properly insured I had to take a temporary valuables insurance next to my regular travel insurance.
Time difference between the Netherlands and Bali was also a point of attention. It’s 7 hours earlier in Bali opposed to the Netherlands. As I work in a team, it’s good to have aligned working hours. I agreed with my employer to work from 11.00 in the morning when I’m in Bali, at this time it’s 4.00 in the morning in the Netherlands. Which means theres at least half of a day overlap to work together with my colleagues. We’ll see how this works out, I can imagine that (if necessary) starting later won’t be such of a big problem for me.

In our spare time Sven and I are planning to do some trips around the island and for sure do some surfing. Bali is a perfect location for surfing, so that’s certainly something I want to get better at there.
Once we’ve arrived and settled I’ll certainly share an update from Bali!