Travelling Southeast Asia 🇻🇳🇱🇦🇹🇭🇲🇾🇸🇬❤️

⚠️ Please take the time to read this section of my profile for better understanding 🙂

Dear hosts,

I would love to be hosted and have cultural exchanges however during my travels, I have encountered a few interesting experiences:

Please only host me if there’s an extra key 🔑or an easy way to access my own stuff 🙆🏻‍♀️ at most times. I had a bad experience once where a host told me while I was jetlagged at midnight that I had to be up and out by 9am for over 10 hours by myself while feeling ill and asking her several times if it was okay to leave the house at noon the entire evening getting only vague answers. I do not wish to face this again 🌸

Please understand I travel for long times and sometimes I hit exhaustion or an illness 😥It is not intentional if I encounter a rest day on my trip. I had one host reassure me it was okay to rest on day 2 and leave the house late on day 3 the day her friend arrived. Later she blocked me without explanation, wrote me a bad reference despite my clear communication, questions, cleaning help and a gift to her. Mostly I try to explore a few hours bare minimum every day, however I encountered a few bad experiences with hosts when I tried to rest up a little on a trip of many months 🌺

Please let me know if you are a smoker, I have sensitive eyes that could get irritated, however if it’s a brief stay or not inside the house much, it could be fine! 🌻

Now about me properly:

I am half 🇳🇱 half 🇵🇹 nowadays travelling ✈️ or staying near London 🌆🇬🇧

I have a boyfriend 👩🏼‍❤️‍👨🏻🇬🇧 he doesn’t couchsurf with me yet, but one day I like to try!

I am vegan 🍃 but I can manage myself. It means no animal products including milk, cheese and eggs.

I play 🎸🪈🎹🎤

I speak 🇳🇱🇬🇧🇵🇹🇩🇪 and I learn 🇷🇺🇨🇳🇯🇵

I like to take photos 📸 and make videos to hopefully one day become a YouTuber 🎥

My Instagram: @zenithseye 🌸
My YT: Mara Bakkenhoven 🌺

https://youtu.be/-i68v7EQHAQ?si=U6Vn2wc300sPH4wE

As a person who grew up between the tulips fields of the Netherlands, life felt quite monotone. My country is small, the tulips are only in bloom for a few months per year and the rain never relenting. My heritage of the lands of far away explorers makes me want to see what I cannot see beyond horizon. As soon as I realised my capabilities of going abroad, I didn’t hesitate a single second. I lost my momentum during the world’s shutdown at the age where people are figuring out what to do with their lives. But now I’m back in full swing. The goal of seeing every country one day is vividly imprinted on my mind. I want to see more than what I know. The cultural exchanges, talks and help from the local people turn it into a far more memorable experience than the 4 walls of a closed in box after booking a hotel for the night.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

To meet new cool people where you can have a great time and feel the local experience to also get that deeper information that you don't get staying in a hotel by yourself

Interests

• arts
• singing
• interior design
• fashion
• photography
• cooking
• vegan
• running
• traveling
• music
• rock music
• guitar
• metal music
• hiking
• geography
• mountains
• nature
• reading books
• gaming
• china
• museums
• programming
• making friends
• making new friends
• portuguese
• botany
• portugal
• making videos
• southeast asia
• kazakhstan
• k-drama

Music, Movies, and Books

Music: Audioslave, Pearl Jam, Black Sabbath, Rainbow, Arctic Monkeys, Guns N' Roses, Måneskin, Muse, Highly Suspect, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Metallica, Ghost, Iron Maiden, Eric Clapton, Dio, Rammstein, etc.

Also K-pop, but mainly SHINee and Twice

Movies: Some WW2 like Inglourious Basterds/The Pianist/Schindler's List, most Ghibli ones, most Tarantino ones, Limitless, The Last Samurai, The Notebook, I Tonya, But Always, etc.

I really love WW2, documentaries too! I still have many movies to watch actually…

Anime: Monster, Akatsuki no Yona, Fullmetal Alchemist, The Apothecary’s Diaries, etc.

Books: The Girl with Seven Names, The Book Thief, This is Going to Hurt, Educated, The Lost Bookshop, Sovietistan, In Search of Kazakhstan, Born a Crime, 1984, The Witcher series, Jane Eyre, Howl's Moving Castle trilogy, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Me Before You, The One Plus One, The Song of Achilles, Circe,The Queen's Gambit, Edgar Allan Poe, The Catcher in the Rye, The Lunar Chronicles, Heidi, Strange Weather in Tokyo, Kim Ji-young born 1982, The Cat who Saved Books, The Midnight Library, From the Land of Green Ghosts, Man’s Search for Meaning, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Anna Karenina, The Priory of the Orange Tree, Feeling is the Secret, Edgar Allan Poe, etc.

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

So many! Some examples:

I spent my 25th birthday in Sanrio Puroland

I saw F1 twice in Bahrain and one of those times attended an Eric Clapton concert right after the race

I slept one week in the favela of Vidigal having an amazing time after spending some less amazing time in a regular Rio tourist area

I visited Stalin’s birth place Gori and toured the entire city

I took a 24 hour long train across western Kazakhstan spotting wild horses and camels

I hiked up to a forest temple in Nagano Japan where I drew my fortune

I travelled 33 hours on a bus from Hanoi to Luang Prabang where the drivers were on drugs with no sleep going over dirt roads in the mountain in full darkness

And so many more!

Now I’ve backpacked across Southeast Asia (with a suitcase) staying in budget hotels seeing Ba Na Hills, Kuangsi Waterfalls, Carnival Magic, etc.

I had the privilege of staying with over 50 hosts some never left a reference or I met them offline and they didn’t have a profile on here!

Teach, Learn, Share

Well I speak Dutch, English and Portuguese enough to teach and also play the guitar. I have bits of random knowledge in many areas

What I Can Share with Hosts

My great energy, crazy travel stories and whatever I could help with.

I can also help with dishes, but preferably only with gloves 🙂

Countries I’ve Visited

Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malaysia, Netherlands, Oman, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, Uzbekistan, Viet Nam

Countries I’ve Lived In

Greece, Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, United Kingdom