Flights are booked

Finally! After searching and monitoring the prices on kayak and other pages for days and weeks and bugging plenty of experienced Asia travelers I know with questions like: should/can I fly via Hongkong or Peking spending several hours there or only directly Bangkok in and out or Singapore in and out or whatever (so sorry and thankful for all the advice folks!!!) I BOOKED TODAY. Prices went up and down all the time, but I finally accepted, that there won´t be a price below the 700 Euro mark in the summer. It  is somewhat my fault of course: as an ambitious mileage hunter with the Lufthansa miles-and-more program I only checked for flights with airlines of the Star Alliance. Did pretty good at the end and booked a flight with Turkish Airlines from Cologne via Istanbul to Bangkok (Suvarnabhumi) end of July and out of Singapore (Changi) same way back end of September for 720 Euro and 14 hours of travel each way which is pretty good. That makes one month for Thailand and one month for Malaysia including Borneo. I´m really getting excited!

Vaccinations 2

Okay, vaccinations are a bigger issue than I thought. Some need several shots...so almost one needle each week for a couple of weeks. Getting addicted to it :-). Most of them are okay, but rabies and Japanese encephalitis are tough, I can tell you!!!

Vaccinations

The guides are great. But I have to confess my first greatest attention and concern is focused on the precautions. You shouldn´t start reading the official warnings of your State Department, if you are an anxious person. But of course there are some preparations an precautions you should take, especially on the medical and behavioral side. Most of it is just sensitivity and common sense travelling in a different climate with different hygienic standards. Drink bottled, eat cooked and shell fruits are some of those basic principles. Stefan Loose sums up all the necessary ones from travel experienced people in his guides. He also sums up the contents of the bring along first aid kit including malaria precautions. What I definitely need are some vaccinations. Especially when you plan to leave the tourist routes like I want to do. Hepatitis, Japanese encephalitis, polio, rabies and typhus for example. Thankfully in Germany we have some basic vaccinations almost everybody gets, so I don´t have to do them all until summer...