Travel budget and smart during public holidays. Just go out of the crowd

Each family can feature only one relative - the most respectful
In Rock Graves, Suaya village
Tana Toraja, Sulawesi, East Indonesia

Most of my friends are very surprised to hear how much I travel, but they are more amazed, when they hear, that none of it is for business. Everything for pleasure! So here is a guide on how do I manage to get so many days off, keep up working full-time, and make really budget trips.

First of all I follow two principals, a) always use public holidays, especially religious ones, for travelling, combining free days with annual leave and b) always go to the countries, where there is no celebration of this holiday. For example, I was choosing my CNY trip destination very carefully. 

My choices were catholic Philippines or Muslim Indonesia. As it was already pretty close to the Chinese New Year, my choice was limited by prices of tickets. So I end up making simplest choice - Jakarta. Really, simplier is only Kuala-Lumpur. Well, consider, that I'm low budget traveler and couple of times made it 42S$ return to Jakarta with TigerAir, including all taxes (yes, guys, who don't believe me, try to subscribe to airlines offers, then actually check it and book trips in advance). Budget airlines often do promos, go-return-for-free, friend-for-free, 0$-seats. Also watch out for different ways to pay, for example, sometimes, you can pay through AXS machine (TigerAir), in 7-Eleven (Jet Star), eliminating costs of credit card transaction on-line.What else, of course, don't take any add-ons like choosing the seat, meal, travel insurance, board-me-first and so on, no luggage, only carry-on.
This time, even without all this, my tickets were 90S$, I felt it's not fair and too expensive for Jakarta, where I've been ten times, but the will to go out from Singapore during Chinese New Year was stronger. I also said myself, that I'm not going to stay in the city, but rather go to see Krakatoa, which had major eruption in 1883. Despite it's very significant nature object, it's extremely hard to get there. You understand me, if you ever been in Asia and experienced old transportation system, very bad narrow roads and millions of people travelling. Sometimes it can take whole day to travel 300 km, which can be made in one hour in Europe. So giving this, I just estimated 3 days for volcano, and from this three only one actually was for trip to volcano island, other two days were for travelling to and from the west coast of Java island.

Busy traveling, but still got published. My Asian life-story at RusTelegraph and sneak pics of my East Indonesia Sulawesi trip

Sneak pic of my trip:
Trust me, all other hanging and inscale graves are nothing
 comparing to horror you feel, thinking, that each tree
has around 40 babies inside...
And it's not a Halloween funny anymore

Some can think, that I gave up writing my notes of Blondie Asian, but no, I was just super busy traveling during Chinese New Year celebration. I went to one of my long time desired destinations very spontaneously, to East Indonesia, Sulawesi Island. 

I'm going to write couple of pieces about my amazing trip during which I went to see unique culture of Tana Toraja, stayed at new Arabic-look-like luxury house, went for refreshing breath-taking trip by Tempe lake and saw Muslim Venice-like village on the water, and swam couple of days with two turtles, which I accidentally found in sea just 2 meters away from the sand line, got spontaneous photo shoot at the beach, and then I stayed last day  for free in 5 star hotel in Makassar with personal local guide, who took me around on motorbike. By the way, he also appeared to be professional photographer, so I got my picture published in Business Indonesia news article about amount of tourists visiting Sulawesi... The link to the article is here and yes I will write more about this story in later articles about my trip, because there are so many thing to tell and sooooo many tips to give to those, who are only going to this remote destination. Sulawesi is still off the tourist trap. 

On numerous requests from my friends, I edited pictures first, as everybody was dying to see proven artifacts of adventures, that I had had during my trip, so I started to upload my photo diary first, as content is already ready, for writing parts, you need to wait a little longer. Meanwhile, you can start enjoying pictures. They are not all up yet, because I always have tones of, and yes, I love to comment each and equip with detailed explanations of what I see at this shot, and why I took that one, what surprised me here and there, because I want my friends and family to see, what I see, but pictures is the only way to make it happen. So yes, more pictures to come and you can check my albums for updates from time to time. Usually I publish whole album at once and it's dedicated to specific part of my trip. Then another one and so on, and so on. So people don't need to check, if I add more pictures to one album or another, the just see completely new album. Main part and primary purpose of the trip is, of course, Tana Toraja, its funeral ceremonies and different types of graves, Then another part: Sengkang, Tempe lake trip, Muslim Venice-like village on the water. Other parts are still to come. Although, there are no pictures from under-water, oh hell, how many times seeing amazing marine life I promise myself to buy underwater camera for next trip... Still not there and yes, you won't see turtles eating weed and swimming under water in my pictures. I only spotted turtle sunrise nesting at the beach near my hotel in Mirissa, South of Sri-Lanka, when I went to that great island for the second time last year for my birthday standard self-present solo 9 days trip. You can see albums and read about trip in my notes.

For now, please also enjoy reading my article, published by former colleague Alexey at his Russian press-agency web-site, which proves once again, that media connections last forever. Another prove was piece by former University mate Olga, who briefly wrote down my Asian story at her on-line magazine and web-site Prestons.com. I also made a blog note about it earlier. Opposite to Olga's magazine, RusTelegraph published article written by me, where I explain in details, how it turned to be, that all my friends think I went to Asia only to work as a model, while yet I'm here because of my main job, which is serious Analyst position. Alright, enjoy the article and please, use Google translate to turn it to English in one click.  I will try to put my trip memories into articles and publish soon, despite I got super busy again planning my Birthday trip for this year, which should happen very very soon, starting 14 March or so.