Backpacker 1

ini artikel lumayan oke..

it's about dream..

Yok Jadi "Backpacker", Jelajahi Asia Tenggara

Jumat, 16 April 2010 05:47 WIB

Pergi ke luar negeri sekarang ini bukan lagi mimpi. Dengan makin banyaknya tiket penerbangan murah, menginap gratis di rumah sesama backpacker di seluruh dunia, mimpi keliling dunia bisa jadi kenyataan.
Tapi sekarang ini kita ngomongin backpacking ke beberapa negara di Asia Tenggara saja dulu ya. Negeri-negeri yang dekat dengan Indonesia. Ayo, cobain saat liburan mendatang....
Backpacker berasal dari kata backpack, yang artinya tas punggung atau ransel. Sedangkan orang yang melakukan perjalanan dengan menggunakan ransel disebut sebagai backpacker. Jadi aktivitas perjalanan yang dilakukan oleh backpacker disebut backpacking.
Melakukan perjalanan sebagai backpacker identik dengan perjalanan murah meriah. Semua lini pengeluaran diusahakan mencari yang semurah mungkin, bahkan gratis.
Pengeluaran yang terbesar dan terpenting dari seorang backpacker yang akan melakukan perjalanan ke luar Indonesia adalah tiket pesawat dan penginapan. Karena itu, kamu harus rajin mencari informasi penerbangan mana yang sedang memberikan harga diskon atau menjual tiket murah.
Rute-penginapan
Menentukan rute harus disesuaikan dengan waktu dan anggaran/dana yang kamu punya. Jika kamu punya waktu satu minggu, lebih baik memilih rute Singapura-Malaysia saja atau Malaysia-Thailand atau Thailand-Kamboja atau Kamboja-Vietnam. Atau kamu fokus di satu negara saja.
Kalau punya waktu dua minggu, kamu bisa pergi lebih jauh: Singapura-Malaysia-Thailand atau Thailand-Kamboja-Vietnam.
Kalo punya waktu satu bulan, kamu bisa pergi menjelajah lima negara di Asia Tenggara: Singapura-Malaysia-Thailand-Kamboja dan Vietnam.
Selama perjalanan, kamu bisa menginap di guest house atau hostel. Ada dua website yang bisa diandalkan untuk pencarian hostel, yakni http://www.hostelbookers.com atau http://www.hostelworld.com.
Contoh di Singapura satu malam di dormitory room (sekamar berempat, berenam, atau berdelapan) kamu harus membayar sekitar 20 dollar Singapura (Rp 140.000).
Kalo tidak punya cukup uang untuk membayar penginapan, kamu bisa menginap gratis di rumah backpacker di negara lain dengan bergabung dalam komunitas Jaringan Silaturahmi (Hospitality Exchange Network): Hospitality Club http:// www.hospitalityclub.org atau CouchSurfing http://www.couchsurfing.org.
Ini cara lain untuk menyelami kehidupan masyarakat lokal dengan tinggal secara gratis di rumah mereka.
Destinasi
Banyak yang bertanya, kalo ke luar negeri itu ngapain aja sih? Intinya ya jalan-jalan, mengenal kebudayaan bangsa lain, mengunjungi situs-situs modern atau bersejarah di negara tujuan, ke tempat-tempat terkenal atau sekadar nongkrong dengan backpacker lain atau penduduk lokal.
Di Singapura, selain nongkrong di Orchard Road yang terkenal itu, kamu juga bisa ke area Bugis, Little India, atau China Town. Ada beberapa museum yang bisa kamu datangi, ada Japanese and Chinese Garden, Jurong Bird Park, atau berkunjung ke Pulau Sentosa.
Dari Singapura, kamu bisa bergerak dengan bus menuju kota kecil Melaka. Arsitektur kota ini gabungan antara Portugis dan China. Sangat menarik buat pencinta gedung-gedung tua. Ada gereja, ada bekas benteng, juga ada museum. Selain itu bisa berkeliling Melaka dengan becak.
Di Kuala Lumpur, kamu juga bisa naik ke Sky Bridge gratis di Menara Kembar (KLCC Twin Tower), jalan-jalan ke Petaling Street, Bukit Bintang, ke Batu Cave yang letaknya 13 km dari Kuala Lumpur. Batu Cave ini merupakan tempat ibadah bagi orang Hindu di Malaysia. Juga bisa berburu oleh-oleh di Central Market. Jangan khawatir, banyak hostel murah di depan Terminal Bus Pudu Raya.
Jika kamu punya cukup waktu, bisa berlanjut ke Penang dengan bus. Kalo tidak punya cukup waktu, kamu bisa terbang dari Kuala Lumpur ke Bangkok. Cek penerbangan murah.
Bangkok
Di Bangkok, tinggal di area backpacker Khaosan Road juga menarik. Di hari pertama bisa berkeliling Bangkok dengan tuk-tuk hanya 30 baht (Rp 9.000) diantar ke empat tempat, yakni ke patung Buddha berdiri, Wat Bencha, Buddha Golden Mount, dan Grand Palace. Namun, kamu akan dibawa oleh sopir mampir ke toko perhiasan. Jangan khawatir, cuci mata saja di toko itu karena dengan membawa kamu ke toko perhiasan, si sopir mendapatkan bensin 1 liter secara gratis dari toko itu.
Kamboja dan Vietnam
Dari Bangkok, kamu bisa melanjutkan perjalanan dengan bus selama 10 jam ke Siem Reap Kamboja. Ingat, meski Kamboja termasuk negara ASEAN, untuk masuk Kamboja kamu harus membayar visa on arrival, harga resminya 20 dollar AS.
Di Siem Reap kamu bisa melihat matahari terbit di Angkor Wat, sebuah kompleks candi yang isinya 80 candi lebih di satu area luas. Jangan lupa mampir ke candi Ta Phrom, tempat pengambilan gambar film Tomb Raider yang dibintangi Angelina Jolie.
Ada akar pohon raksasa yang melilit candi Ta Phrom ini.
(Elok Dyah Messwati)

What You Don’t Know Makes You Nervous

Thanks God, I've found this journal..
Journal di New York Times ini menurut saya bagus banget, sederhana tapi bermakna..semoga suatu hari saya bisa melakukan hal seperti ini.

Take a dream then make it comes true..
check this out..

May 20, 2009, 9:30 pm
What You Don’t Know Makes You Nervous
By DANIEL GILBERT
Shoboshobo
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Seventy-six years ago, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took to the inaugural dais and reminded a nation that its recent troubles “concern, thank God, only material things.” In the midst of the Depression, he urged Americans to remember that “happiness lies not in the mere possession of money” and to recognize “the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success.”
“The only thing we have to fear,” he claimed, “is fear itself.”
As it turned out, Americans had a great deal more to fear than that, and their innocent belief that money buys happiness was entirely correct. Psychologists and economists now know that although the very rich are no happier than the merely rich, for the other 99 percent of us, happiness is greatly enhanced by a few quaint assets, like shelter, sustenance and security. Those who think the material is immaterial have probably never stood in a breadline.

Money matters and today most of us have less of it, so no one will be surprised by new survey results from the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index showing that Americans are smiling less and worrying more than they were a year ago, that happiness is down and sadness is up, that we are getting less sleep and smoking more cigarettes, that depression is on the rise.
An uncertain future leaves us stranded in an unhappy present with nothing to do but wait.
But light wallets are not the cause of our heavy hearts. After all, most of us still have more inflation-adjusted dollars than our grandparents had, and they didn’t live in an unremitting funk. Middle-class Americans still enjoy more luxury than upper-class Americans enjoyed a century earlier, and the fin de siècle was not an especially gloomy time. Clearly, people can be perfectly happy with less than we had last year and less than we have now.
So if a dearth of dollars isn’t making us miserable, then what is? No one knows. I don’t mean that no one knows the answer to this question. I mean that the answer to this question is that no one knows — and not knowing is making us sick.
Consider an experiment by researchers at Maastricht University in the Netherlands who gave subjects a series of 20 electric shocks. Some subjects knew they would receive an intense shock on every trial. Others knew they would receive 17 mild shocks and 3 intense shocks, but they didn’t know on which of the 20 trials the intense shocks would come. The results showed that subjects who thought there was a small chance of receiving an intense shock were more afraid — they sweated more profusely, their hearts beat faster — than subjects who knew for sure that they’d receive an intense shock.
That’s because people feel worse when something bad might occur than when something bad will occur. Most of us aren’t losing sleep and sucking down Marlboros because the Dow is going to fall another thousand points, but because we don’t know whether it will fall or not — and human beings find uncertainty more painful than the things they’re uncertain about.
But why?
A colostomy reroutes the colon so that waste products leave the body through a hole in the abdomen, and it isn’t anyone’s idea of a picnic. A University of Michigan-led research team studied patients whose colostomies were permanent and patients who had a chance of someday having their colostomies reversed. Six months after their operations, patients who knew they would be permanently disabled were happier than those who thought they might someday be returned to normal.
Similarly, researchers at the University of British Columbia studied people who had undergone genetic testing to determine their risk for developing the neurodegenerative disorder known as Huntington’s disease. Those who learned that they had a very high likelihood of developing the condition were happier a year after testing than those who did not learn what their risk was.
Why would we prefer to know the worst than to suspect it? Because when we get bad news we weep for a while, and then get busy making the best of it. We change our behavior, we change our attitudes. We raise our consciousness and lower our standards. We find our bootstraps and tug. But we can’t come to terms with circumstances whose terms we don’t yet know. An uncertain future leaves us stranded in an unhappy present with nothing to do but wait.
Our national gloom is real enough, but it isn’t a matter of insufficient funds. It’s a matter of insufficient certainty. Americans have been perfectly happy with far less wealth than most of us have now, and we could quickly become those Americans again — if only we knew we had to.


Daniel Gilbert is professor of psychology at Harvard University and author of “Stumbling on Happiness.”