Thailand pt4: Kwai and Ko Samet

So many beautiful things already, but here is a lot more! This post I will show you our trips to the river Kwai in Kanchanaburi and the island Ko Samet. Let’s start with our journey to Kanchanaburi. The river Kwai was made famous by the movie ” bridge on the river Kwai”, even though the …

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Thailand pt3: Jungles of Khao Yai

We traveled to the jungles of national park Khao Yai on the second day we arrived in Thailand, jetlag and all! The first evening we went out to go to a batcave. On the way we visited a local market where they sold all kinds of vegetables from the mountains around it, but there were …

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Thailand pt2: Ancient Temples

Thailand is marked by many splendid temple complexes, often covered in gold and beautiful patterns. We visited a couple in Bangkok, but also went to the more mysterious abandoned and overgrown temples of Ayutthaya. Ayutthaya used to be the capital of Thailand (or the kingdom of Siam) and was founded in 1350. There are stories …

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Thailand pt1: Busy Bangkok

Thailand pt1: Busy Bangkok For Christmas and New Year we traveled to Thailand! I didn’t realize how diverse Thailand actually is, you can find old temples, a cyberpunk city, jungles full of monkeys and snakes, and beautiful white sanded beaches. We went to all of that! I’ve divided the posts up in to four parts: …

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Rome pt 3: Vatican Day

And after Art day and Archaeology day we also had a Vatican day! Usually there are 3 hour waiting lines to get in, but we bought our tickets to god in advance and could walk right through :-) Inside is an endless collection of riches from antiquity. In some ways it made me feel a …

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A Buddhist break

Before we were going to start with all the stress of moving and packing and saying goodbye etc. we decided to take a nice and peaceful break. And what would be better than a Buddhist break? So we traveled all the way south to mount Koya, which is a secluded mountain village that consists of …

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Real Soba

Last week a colleague took us on a roadtrip to eat some “real soba” !It was a very cool and Japanese experience. The restaurant was located an 1,5 hour drive from Osaka, in the middle of farmlands and rice fields. The restaurant had no sign or anything, so it was a place that you hear …

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Australia bonusround: Wildlife!

Ok I want to dedicate this entire post to all the animals we encountered in our roundtrip through Australia! You get warned often to watch out for kangaroos….Wombats….And koalas…But fortunately we only encountered them in the wild and not on the road! Let’s start with the farm where we stayed for one night. There, they …

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Australia pt5: Kangaroo Island

Kangaroo Island lies near Adelaide, and it has less kangaroos than the name might suggest haha :p But it has a lot of beautiful wild nature and beaches. By ferry, we arrived at Kangaroo Island in the early morning. We took a tour where we explored the island by bus with a group of about …

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Australia pt4: The Great Ocean Road

The Great Ocean Road! Woohoo! Driving along epic beaches and cliffs for two days and spotting a lot of wildlife! Sure, it was a bit rainy when we started…But those clouds headed towards Melbourne and flooded the city (they really did, we were lucky we missed that). So our Ocean Road was pretty sunny :)And cliffy …

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Australia pt3: Blue and Snowy Mountains

We’ve visited two famous natural parks in Australia: The Blue Mountains near Sydney, and the Snowy Mountains on the way to Melbourne. First, the beautiful Blue Mountains! Amazing right? This huuuuuuuuge nature area consists of many canyon and valleys. It smells sweet from all the eucalyptus trees.We hiked a few trails too! We then visited the …

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Australia pt2: The Cities

Our travel through Australia was so inspiring! We have so much photos to show, but let’s start with the big cities we visited!We arrived in Sydney, where Wards aunt picked us up and gave us a tour of the city! We finally saw the beautiful operahouse. We climbed the bridge to have an awesome view …

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Australia Roadtrip: The Highlights

We traveled to Australia this christmas!! We rented a car and for two weeks and drove along the southside of Australia, from Sydney to Melbourne to Adelaide. It was a fantastic trip and I am going to write several posts about it, but for now, I just want to quickly summarize our trip and show some …

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Japan Roadtrip!

We rented a car with a friend and did a little roadtrip! First we visited Takeda Castle! This 15th century castle was built on top of a mountain and overlooked the valleys around it. Now there are only ruins left, which are really impressive.  The most popular time to visit these ruins is in autumn in …

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Yama no Be no Michi

Or, in English, “the mountainside trail”. This famous trail leads alongside the mountains of Nara, through farmlands and past old temples, it is one of the most beautiful daywalks to do if you want to experience a bit of Japan’s rural areas. We walked this trail a couple of years ago, but wanted to come …

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New Zealand Dream Trip: The Highlights

We spent three weeks traveling around New Zealand this winter and it was the most amazing trip we have ever made. New Zealand has so many different landscapes all packed together on car-drive distances, it is amazing how much we saw in three weeks. The people are extremely open and nice and everyone is so …

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Deer Nara

We spent a lovely day in Nara, the old city located right on the other side of the mountains we see from our balcony. Once the train leaves the tunnel through the mountain, it’s like you’re in a different world! Gone are the endless concrete buildings of Osaka, here are the rivers, green hills and …

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To the top and back: Mount Fuji

Yes, we did it!! We climbed mount Fuji!! This was something we had on our wishlist since we moved to Japan and now we can finally say, we stood on top of Japan! Mount Fuji is with its 3776 meters the highest mountain of Japan! It is also one of the three sacred mountains, two of which we have …

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Shigaraki Fire Festival

In summer there are festivals everywhere in Japan, and we went to a very magical one this year: the Shigaraki Fire Festival! And we did more than just watch, we participated :-)!! This beautiful festival takes place in a little village east of Osaka and Kyoto. The village is famous for its ceramics, and its …

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Yoshinoyama: Sakura Mountain

Cherryblossom season gooooooo! Every year we try to go to a special place to enjoy this pink explosion, and this time we travelled two hours southeast of Osaka to the famous Yoshino region. Basically, it’s a mountain range that’s completely covered in sakura trees. Yes, more than 30.000 trees can be found on the slopes of …

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Ward Matsuri!

Ward Matsuri, or ” Ward Festival”, because for his 30th birthday Wards family paid a surprise visit to celebrate his birthday for a whole week :-D It was a biiiiig surprise because Ward had absolutely no idea they were coming to Japan!!! And so, we celebrated, gave presents, baked an applepie, took some days off to visit …

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Vietnam Pt4: Saigon’s Secrets

After all of our travelling in Vietnam (the past three blogposts took place in 9 days), we had one day left to explore Ho Chi Min City (also called Saigon). So we made the most of it! Saigon is very modern, and reminded us a bit of other big Asian cities, though it still has a …

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Vietnam Pt2: Halong Bay and Ninh Binh

  The limestone karst landscapes of Vietnam are mesmerizing. It’s like you’re in another world. During our stay in Hanoi we did two overnight trips to these limestone landscapes: Halong Bay and Ninh Binh.  First we travelled to the north to Halong Bay: this dreamy mountain area in the sea is a Unesco World Heritage site and rightly …

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Vietnam Pt1: The Old Quarters of Hanoi

  We have spent our Christmas in beautiful Vietnam. It was one of the most inspiring trips we’ve ever made! We took thousands of photos of the jaw-dropping scenery of bustling Hanoi, the peaceful and imposing Halong Bay and Ninh Binh, the fantastic Mekong Delta, the warfields in Cu Chi, and the modern Ho Chi Minh …

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Bali Illustration Workshop 2014

For work we traveled all the way to Bali to attend the Bali Illustration Workshop! How cool is that! It was a week full of drawing, meeting other awesome artists, eating strange foods, almost karaoke, monkeys stealing glasses right from your head, sundown at a watertemple, incredible wood/gold/silver and bone carvings, beers on hotel rooftop overlooking …

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Summiting the Sacred Mountain

I think the Japanese Alps are one of the most epic, beautiful places I’ve been… If you scroll back a few posts, you’ll see we went there in winter, back when the great Murodo Plateau was covered in meters of snow. Even that time we were overwhelmed by the beauty of this place. We were …

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Honeymoon in Paris

So we had a tiny little three-day honeymoon in Paris before heading back to Japan! Aaaah the beautiful city of Paris… we visited some fantastic musea, ate delicious dinners and cheeses, drank some nice wines and walked around until our feet fell off (particularly Marthes…). It was a really inspiring trip and I tried to capture …

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Skies over Holland

We haven’t been to the Netherlands in almost 2 years, and we almost forgot how amazingly beautiful the Dutch skies are! No wonder they were often portrayed in paintings.  Since there are  no mountains in Holland, the sky is everywhere! I made  some photos with my with my phone during our travels through the Netherlands :-)     …

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The Nara Mountainside Trail

Now is the season in Japan to go outside! The temperature is perfect, the weather is sunny, the mountains are green. Next month the rainy season will start, and after that the unbearable heat of summer, and it won’t be until October when it has finally cooled down enough to actually do stuff outside again. …

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Epic Mountainscapes: The Japanese Alps

So we went for some mountaineering in the Japanese Alps, the northern ones to be precise. From Osaka, you can take the “Thunderbird” train to Toyama (the city next to the Alps where we stayed) in 3 hours. When we arrived, we were welcomed by a huuuuge impressive mountain range!!! And we were going to …

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500 Disciples of Buddha

During our holiday in the Japanese Alps, we stayed in the city Toyama. There we visited a very impressive shrine; 500 statues of disciples of Buddha, overlooking the city from a beautiful green hill just west of the city center. This place is magical, since all the statues have their own design, facial expressions and …

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Trip to Mie

In Japan, most big companies own a couple of hotels on scenery locations in Japan where employees can spend time free of charge. Now that’s nice! So we traveled all the way to Mie prefecture, about 3 hours south-east of Osaka, to spend a night in our company’s hotel, which included a luxurious dinner, bubble-baths, …

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Fuji, Pirate Ships and Black Eggs

Together with Wards family, we spent a weekend in Hakone; a really beautiful green area of Japan located near Mount Fuji! The nature is beautiful in Hakone, it’s a volcanic area with active sulfur vents that produce natural hot springs. The place to be to relax! And so,  we had some adventures involving hot springs, …

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Hiroshima & Hikarimono

For obon matsuri, the summer holiday during which the Japanese honor their ancestors, we traveled to Hiroshima. The city has a very nice atmosphere, with trams and rivers and trees. Nothing except for the the Dome reminds of the atomic bomb that was dropped here by the Americans during the end of World War II. It …

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Bunnies and Poison Gas Factories

Okunoshima. An island located in the sea near Hiroshima. Packed with bunnies. And abandoned gas factories from World War II. Sounds interesting right? And so we took a 2 hour train to a tiny village somewhere between Hiroshima and Kobe, and took a boat to this beautiful island. It looks really tropical, turquoise waters and …

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Ishigaki: Japan’s Tropical Paradise!

Golden Week is the only long holiday in Japan and so this was our chance to go on a tropical holiday to the southern Okinawa island, Ishigaki. Flying to Ishigaki takes two hours from Osaka, and the subtropical island is located almost next to Taiwan. Ishigaki is surrounded by smaller islands, some formed by coral. …

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An inspiring trip to Singapore

I went to Singapore for 5 days to attend the FZD workshop “concept art for next-gen videogames”. I went with a colleague and we really had a wonderful time, learned a crazy lot and  even had some time to do some sightseeing in this amazing city.   During the day, we were attending a concept …

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Back to Japan

Yes, we succeeded in fulfilling our goal, we both got a job as a concept artist at a Japanese game company! Marthe will work at a huge gamestudio in Osaka, and Ward will work on an exciting new gameproject  in Tokyo. We were interviewed about our adventures in Japan by Karel Millenaar and Niels t …

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Asia-trip PART 3: Seoul

After visiting Busan we took the high-speed train right through South Korea to the capital Seoul. This city is absolutely amazing!! It’s almost unbelievable how this city has grown into such a vibrant metropolis, when you consider that it has seen so many devastating wars and it wasn’t before the 1990’s that is was properly …

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Asia-trip PART 2: Busan, South Korea

After spending a couple of days in the west of Japan, we took the ferry to South-Korea. This boat only takes three hours to soar across the sea to Korea! Our hotel was located at the beautiful beach of Haeundae. Busan is a lively and huge port town, the second largest city of South Korea. …

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Asia-trip PART 1: Fukuoka and Nagasaki

We have just returned from our amazing trip to Kyushu and South Korea! First we travelled to the far west of Japan to Fukuoka. This harbour town has the most delicious ramen (noodles) and a beautiful beach. We met there with Yoshiko, and she took us out to dinner for motsunabe, a hotpot made of …

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Otsu Fireworks

Yesterday we went to Otsu to view a fireworks show. Otsu is a city on the other side of the mountains from Kyoto, and is beautifully located next to a huge lake (the biggest in Japan). Every year there is a fantastic fireworks show above this lake, and this time we went to see it! …

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