Adrienne and me visited the Malaysian national park Taman Negara for three days. It is a magnificent rain forest area with a number of hiking trails. On the first day we went out and had a nice walk through the forest. We also walked the canopy walk, a 400 meter long walk over rope bridges connecting the tree tops.
On the next day we set out for a longer hike. We took a boat that dropped us one hour upstream on the river so that we could follow the trail back out of the jungle.
This turned out to be one of the toughest hikes of my life. My proper hiking shoes broke the day before so I had to walk the slippery trail on my regular shoes. As it had been raining the night before the jungle floor was not only muddy and slippery, but also crawling with leaches waiting to latch on to our passing feet. The path was difficult to walk, tree roots everywhere and the trail went continuously up and down very steeply. In addition the heat and humidity were sucking the energy right out of us. Within seconds I felt as if I took a shower with my clothes on.

Check out the video I made and edited with my iPhone.

With this trip still fresh in my mind, the Sweden forest hikes of last week were a walk in the park.

Of course you could shop in the most luxurious malls in Hong Kong, with marble floors, feng shui, expensive shops and maxed out air conditioning forming ice flowers on the shopping windows, but for me the busy streets and markets that you find all over are a lot more interesting! Do you need new fish for your aquarium? Perhaps fresh fish for eating? Or some dried fish? Everything is available.

At the yearly Ching Ming festival, the Chinese send their ancestors all kinds of gifts by burning paper versions of them at their gravesides. Paper money, clothes, luxury cars with drivers and even iPhones and iPads are offered. The most surprising gift for the beyond that I found however was a paper massage chair. Being dead even got more relaxing now!

Adrienne and me visited Hong Kong’s Sha Tin horse racecourse. It was a nice experience even though we didn’t really understand the rules. We lost twice but won a third time and played even.

With 25 degrees Celsius Eindhoven was the hottest place in Holland this Saturday. Combined with a PSV soccer match you have Eindhoven at its best. People and dogs getting baked at the coffee shop “The bakery”, public drunkenness on Stratumseind, PSV soccer fans, Noord Brabant stickers everywhere, and perhaps the strangest of all; a big ‘gumball’-globe to stick your used chewing gum on. Ah, home!

Often scientific conferences are held at nice places, but I never attended a conference at Disney World before! This year’s SPIE Medical Imaging conference took place at Disney’s Coronaro Springs Resort, right in the middle of Disney World. This resort is built around a lake, dotted with palm trees and hammocks. The weather was amazing and between sessions there was time to take a quick swim in the heated swimming pool, a drink at the bar, or short nap in the sun.
The day before the conference we visited NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. It was really impressive to walk through a space shuttle, to try and fit in the cockpits of different rockets and to see how and where the space shuttles are launched.
Of course we couldn’t leave without at least visiting one of the Disney theme parks, so yesterday we bought a half day ticket to the Magic Kingdom, the classical Disney park, with rides such as Space Mountain and Pirates of the Caribbean. Even though our ticket was only valid from 16-20h we still had enough time to see most of the park. The day ended with some amazing fireworks.
The conference itself was of course very useful as well, but I won’t bore you with the details. Have a look at the pictures.

Steve Huff, who runs a very nice Leica blog, started a Leica M9 give-away contest. To compete you had to send in two images that told a story.
After some thinking I chose to make pictures of my mom, as title I chose: “Free as a bird in her own world”. The pictures should tell the rest.

Update

We made it to the finals! Steve Huff is posting 3 pictures every day that go to the finals. When I received Edward’s comment on this blog-post this morning I found out that we were selected as one of the 15 finalists. The other images are amazing as well, so the competition is very tough. I recommend you to go ahead and have a look at the other images.

Update 2

Well, I didn’t win, but hey, at least I have a great picture of my mom!

Last weekend I organized a photo session with Neda in the Art Hotel in Eindhoven. I arranged a different suite than the one I used with Vesna and Paulo. The room had many photogenic spots and we had a great time taking many interesting shots.
Enjoy a small selection of them.

This Saturday Adrienne left for 3.5 months to do an internship with Philips in Hong Kong. It was weird to say goodbye for such a long period of time.
Luckily communication through Skype makes things easier, especially since they have enabled video chat on the iPhone.

Want to keep me healthy? Feel free to invite me for dinner…

Before going on this trip we read our Thailand travel guide thoroughly. KLM had a special 50% discount on all award tickets (tickets paid with flying blue miles) booked in December and after careful consideration we decided that Thailand would be an excellent destination for us. However when we were ready to book our tickets the only ones available would arrive in Thailand on the 24th and leave on the 27th. That wouldn’t have been much of a holiday, so we went through the award ticket list where we found that tickets to Kilimanjaro Airport had the best dates (going there on the 13th and returning on the 27th of December). We quickly checked Tanzania’s tourism website and found that December was a nice time for a visit. A couple of minutes later the tickets were booked. Thailand had to wait.
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