i was in a rush when i flew into Madrid - so much of a rush that i actually spring for a taxi from the airport into town. i was really not in the mood for fucking around. i was supposed to be at an orientation lunch for my Pueblo Ingles programme at 2PM, and the flight didn't arrive until 40 minutes past that, so i sprinted into the city, dumped my backpack and powered across town. i missed the free lunch, of course, but i got a couple of coffees into me, listened to the live flamenco music and caught the briefing, which was the most important part - i kinda wanted to know what was expected of me over the coming week, and what i could expect in return.
Pueblo Ingles is a company operating primarily in Spain which teaches English. they do the standard courses, but they also have a programme where they take the students out to one of several little villages dotted around the place and immerse them in the language for a week. to keep the costs down, and to give them the most natural experience outside of spending time in an English-speaking country, they get in volunteers to spend the week with them and make us talk to them for hours and hours and hours on end. the biggest rule is that you never speak Spanish to them... although sometimes that gets bent if it means getting a better understanding. it's a lot of work for a volunteer - you have to get yourself to Madrid for the pickup, but they make it worth your while with free accomodation and 3 meals a day with just about as much wine as you'd want to drink. they say 3 meals a day. what they mean is a buffet breakfast, then 3-course banquets lunch and tea with morning tea and stacks of coffee thrown in, then they let you loose out into the town while you get paired up one-on-one with one of the Spaniards and suggested topics of conversation.
sounds like fun, yeah? well, it is. it's also surprisingly tiring. i like to think i can talk the ear off just about anyone, but at the end of the first day i was about ready to fall over from mental exhaustion and barely able to string a sentance together. it turns out i was the hardest person there to understand when i spoke naturally - i was actually told a couple of days in that the Spaniards were afraid to talk to me, i was so hard to follow, so i wound up doing my usual trick of adjusting my accent to make it easier to follow. this helped, i think.
it was an entertaining week, all told. we were in a little town village called Valdelavilla which literally translates as "Village In The Valley", with no mobile reception, a dodgy internet connection and no one else for miles around. the place was deserted back in the 20's when the government planted a pine forest which sucked up too much water for them to continue farming, then was redeveloped back in othe 80's/90's as a Rural Tourism resort. Pueblo Ingles has more or less permanent, exclusive access to the place for their programmes which run back to back, friday to friday, so the place is almost constantly in use so it works out well for everyone. what this all comes down to is that i got to see a part of Spain i'd never have seen if i'd done the tourist thing in a peaceful, quiet part of the middle of fucking nowhere in northern Spain. there were some surreal moments being out in the countryside, like when i took one of my victi... i mean charges for a walk, and on the way back was floored with the view of wind turbines up on the hill over the village, or when i woke up at 3 in the morning to a munching, crunching sound, looked out the window and saw 2 stags feeding on the green grass under my bedroom window.
the Spanish were hillarious fun, too. most of them had been sent by work to improve their English, but there were a few who'd paid out of their own pockets to be there, and at 1800 Euros each it's not a cheap proposition. i love the Spanish though - these are people who dance a the drop of a hat, and they all seem to learn at about the same time as they learn how to walk. seriously, these people can fucking MOVE, and they don't care who they dance with. the IT Manager in his 50's from Catalunya is dancing with the 19yo car salesman, then will pass him off for the pretty young OBGYN who was previously being spun around by the singer/dancer from Minnesota while the Russian/American dance-instructor tries to get the hairier of the two Australians to come salsa, gives up when he resists (by grabbing hold of the bar and refusing to let go) and instead grabs the photographer from Melbourne. ignore what you see on the streets of Madrid - the scam artists, the prostitutes, the thugs. don't let that be your impression of Spain. there were some beautiful, genuine people on the programme. take Olga and Clara, the OBGYN's. Clara had to be the sweetest lady i've ever met - always smiling and enthusiastic. she made me promise to let her know when i was in Rome so she could come and hang out with me, and how could i say no? take Jose Luis who was always stone-faced, then would come out with the driest humour i've heard in forever and having everyone on the floor laughing. then there was King Arthur (Arturo) and Pablo-the-Fifth (Pablo V) who were constantly dragging me aside to learn slang and swear words, and Marta who, at 17, became everyone's little sister. leaving was an emotional time - you spend a week of concentrated time with a bunch of people and when you suddenly have to go back to the real world you don't want to leave.
the Anglos were an interesting bunch, too - there were a couple of backpackers doing it for a bit of a change of pace (and a cheap week - my bar tab at the end came to 7.40 Euros), the regulars who've done programmes before, a number of Americans who'd flown in just to do the programme and were then heading straight home. a few of them had brought their teenage children with them who were involved in one of the teen-programmes.
that all said, i was pretty glad to get back to Madrid and not have to think so hard about what i was saying or how. making yourself easy to understand means speaking slowly and clearly, and keeping a conversation interesting without going into too many esoteric topics that they're not going to understand kept my brain working overtime. i was really looking forward to meeting up with the folks i'd met when i'd first pulled into Madrid, when i walked out of the orientation planning on heading off sight-seeing and was grabbed by Nic, the Mad Scotswoman, who dragged me out for a beer... or three. Nic's a veteran - she's done something like 6 different programmes over the years, so she's been in and out of Madrid enough that she knows her way around. i wound up hanging with her and Pete from Watford until past midnight on that first night and we'd exchanged numbers so we could find each other again afterwards, so at 9 i was waiting at the Bear statue just off Puerto Del Sol. it's a fairly famous little monument - only a metre or so high on a metre-high plinth, a bear reaching up to eat from a strawberry tree. i found out later that it symbolises the religious and secular sides of Madrid living in harmony from when the church held the land and mining rights and an agreement was made to not make life too hard on the town. the Bear statue is the standard meeting place for non-Spaniards in Madrid, so i had a fun time waving in the background of other people's photos while i waited for the rest of the crew to show up.
i liked Madrid a surprising amount. i was told not to expect much, but the dry heat agreed with me - it saps your strength far less than humidity, and there's a background buzz of energy that runs through the place. every city in Europe is built on a major waterway - an ocean, or a river - except for Madrid. it's fed water from an underground spring, but being inland keeps it dry and means you don't get the clinging heat you do elsewhere. you find yourself thinking at 2AM that it's really too early to head to bed because the party's only just beginning. Spain runs at a different pace and timing to anywhere else i've been in the world. forget about the siesta - business people don't have one, of course, you can also forget about finding an open shop between 2 and 4 in the afternoon because the shopkeepers DO. the good restaurants don't open until 9, where in most of Australia they're starting to shut down, and Spanish people think nothing of sitting out to dinner until 2AM, grabbing a couple of cervezas until 4, then meeting up at 9 or 10AM the next day. i have no idea how they do it, but i like it.
i met up with Pete the next morning at 9:30 back at the Bear to go sightseeing and spent half the day wandering around, grabbing coffee in Plaza Mayor and cruising through the Egyptian Temple. back in Egypt i was told that when UNESCO helped save Abu Simbel and the Temple of Isis a number of smaller temples were gifted to the countries involved, and the Temple of Dobod was one of them. it was kinda nice to have my memories of Egypt refreshed, if only for 5 minutes. shortly later we were back at the Bear to meet Nic and Sarah from California, as well as Fernando, one of the Spaniards from Nic's programme and Claire, a mad American who seems to have been everywhere and has more energy than i do at twice my age. by the time i climbed onto the night-train to Barcelona i'd been at the Bear 3 times as we met, split and met again. we'd done a brilliant tapas lunch and checked out some of the less-famous touristy sites, including the Don Quioxte statue i'd walked past earlier but in my rush to get where i was going hadn't noticed.
Madrid's a surprisingly addictive town. first glance says it's nothing much - just another European city, but when you're out on the town the resonance of a few million Spaniards pushes your energy levels right up, and sleep becomes this thing that happens to other people. now it's receeded into the distance and it's dark outside the carriage i'll be trying to sleep in tonight. tomorrow i wake up in Barcelona and i have high hopes for a good time there - it's been massively hyped and i'm hoping that the 2 full days i have scheduled will be enough. meanwhile it's time to curl up and see if Andy Mckee can play me to sleep so i have the energy to get through tomorrow...
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Portugal: i went to Lisbon and somehow i managed to not find any roast chicken. i feel ripped off...
1/7/09 11:53PM
in the last 2 days i've been offered pot and hashish on a total of 14 occasions. i've been offered cocaine on 4. most of the time it's regular looking guys, although twice it was middle-aged gents in a suit or a tweed jacket and cap. that was a little... odd. it's a little disconcerting when a guy walks up to you with a stick of what's unlikely to actually be hash or probably isn't marijuana in his hand. fortunately for everyone involved in the complete lack of a transaction they were happy to take a polite no thanks with a good grace and moved on. thanks, but i like to have my lungs and my nasal cavity on the inside, not the outside, and i have no interest in spending tonight in a Portugese jail... or worse: hospital.
Lisbon's pretty. actually, it reminded me a lot of parts of Croatia - old-school limestone buildings with terracotta roofs, smallish alleys emptying out onto wide streets. the majority of the Old Town is flanked by a pair of hills, forming a shallow valley leading down to the harbor on the Tagus River. on the eastern side, overlooking the city, is an old castle. on the west, a really very pleasant restaurant and night district. i'd heard that Lisbon wasn't really worth seeing, but now i really wish i had the chance to get down to Lagos which i've heard is nicer, but i have places to be and only so much time in any one country.
i rolled into town yesterday with about 3 hours of sleep under my belt. i got an hour and a half at Heathrow, then about the same again on the plane. i rememeber it taking off, then someone giving me food, then coming in for the descent. one might consider crashing out at the airport to be a bit ill-considered, but it served its purpose and i knew for sure that i wasn't going to be late for my flight. i wish i'd had more time to prepare... but then, you always do. i'd printed out a map to my hostel, then promptly forgotten to pick it up off the fucking printer. it's typical - as my grandfather used to say: "Less rush, more hurry." either way, i managed to make do with that i found at the airport, although i'd i'd been paying better attention i could have gotten off the airport shuttle right outside my hostel, and not half an hour's hike uphill. by the time i finally got here i was dripping with sweat and must have smelled a treat... and i know it's only going to get worse as the weeks go by. the Hostel Without A Name was fine as far as things go, although its claim to be in Central Lisbon was a little creative. oh well. shit happens. i dumped my bag, changed my shirt for a singlet and headed off into the sunshine. 6 hours later i collapsed into my bunk having hit the castle, the foreshore, the Baixa (the dip in the valley) and a few of the rambling, medieval areas either side. my feet had barely left the ground when Pietre, my Italian dorm-mate asked me what i was up to, and whether i wanted to come out for a beer and while my brain was formulating the phrase i'm tired and i didn't get much sleep last night so i'm going to have a quiet one in my mouth jumped in with why the fuck not? and it was another 5 hours of wandering around the town before i was finally in bed again. damn beer-hungry mouth...
by the end of all that i more or less felt like i'd done Lisbon which is a little sad all told, so i checked out the Lonely Planet guide to Western Europe i'd borrowed from Moonbug and decided to hop the train and head for Sintra - around 40 minutes on the Lisbon commuter rail. Sintra was the holiday-home for the Portugese royalty, back in the day when they had any and is basically a pretty little forested area with a Moorish castle on at the top of the mountain which dates back to the 9th century. i got in with a basic plan revolving around "show up, see what there is to see", so i wandered into the town looking for lunch to find that everything was touristy and expensive so i kept heading up, up, up the mountain. another picturesque location, another fucking mountain. as i walked i realised i was surrounded by a band of OAP's cluttering up the footpath from somewhere in South America, probably Brazil from what little i know of Portugese. not a problem... except that they were slower than an inbred retard. fine - i can get past them... and then they decided that the best way to tackle a slow walk was to sing. i had enough of singing Latin American motherfuckers ruining my peace and quiet in Egypt, so i legged it faster to get away from them and found a nice little spot to have a light lunch... only to find that they'd followed me into the cafe and hadn't given up on the singing bullshit. no lunch for me then. thanks a fucking lot you noisy slow-walking throwing-off-my-chi sons of bitches.
so i decided that eating was just not going to happen and headed on up the mountain, to get away from the Brazilians if nothing else.
so it was that i got to the bottom of the castle section of the climb and was sitting down for a bit of a break that i met Mieke and Wiebe and somehow fell in with them for the rest of the day. Wiebe (think Wilbur) lives in Lisbon doing more or less the sort of work that i do and his mum Mieke (think Mika) had come to visit him for a bit. by the time we'd climbed to the top, tried sneaking into the castle without paying (and failed), taken a stack of photos and headed down again we were getting along roaringly. beers at the bottom, you say? how could i say no? we even wound up on the same train back to Lisbon together, and i couldn't have been happier with that arrangement. Wiebe and i seemed to share the same twisted sense of humour - there were a couple of times when he had me in stitches, rolling around my seat on the train. he's even started reading my blog, which has me worried. maybe i should say something nice about him?
it's these little things that really put a smile on your face when you're traveling - the 24 hour friends who add colour to the place. if i'd been only my own i think i'd have been pretty bored, but i was stoked beyond words to have interesting people to hang with, and to this day i'm glad to say i've never met a Dutch person who wasn't pleasant company.
tonight is quiet time. i'm checking out tomorrow and on a flight to Madrid to kick off what will hopefully be an entertaining interlude in Spain. flight? well, it was acutually cheaper to fly than to take a train, not to mention much, MUCH quicker. i really want to be avoiding air travel as much as possible. this is a train/bus trip for me, but when needs must to the airport i will go, and probably give EasyJet even more of my cash. otherwise, it's been a good start to the trip... 2 days down... and... what is it? 70 something more to go?
in the last 2 days i've been offered pot and hashish on a total of 14 occasions. i've been offered cocaine on 4. most of the time it's regular looking guys, although twice it was middle-aged gents in a suit or a tweed jacket and cap. that was a little... odd. it's a little disconcerting when a guy walks up to you with a stick of what's unlikely to actually be hash or probably isn't marijuana in his hand. fortunately for everyone involved in the complete lack of a transaction they were happy to take a polite no thanks with a good grace and moved on. thanks, but i like to have my lungs and my nasal cavity on the inside, not the outside, and i have no interest in spending tonight in a Portugese jail... or worse: hospital.
Lisbon's pretty. actually, it reminded me a lot of parts of Croatia - old-school limestone buildings with terracotta roofs, smallish alleys emptying out onto wide streets. the majority of the Old Town is flanked by a pair of hills, forming a shallow valley leading down to the harbor on the Tagus River. on the eastern side, overlooking the city, is an old castle. on the west, a really very pleasant restaurant and night district. i'd heard that Lisbon wasn't really worth seeing, but now i really wish i had the chance to get down to Lagos which i've heard is nicer, but i have places to be and only so much time in any one country.
i rolled into town yesterday with about 3 hours of sleep under my belt. i got an hour and a half at Heathrow, then about the same again on the plane. i rememeber it taking off, then someone giving me food, then coming in for the descent. one might consider crashing out at the airport to be a bit ill-considered, but it served its purpose and i knew for sure that i wasn't going to be late for my flight. i wish i'd had more time to prepare... but then, you always do. i'd printed out a map to my hostel, then promptly forgotten to pick it up off the fucking printer. it's typical - as my grandfather used to say: "Less rush, more hurry." either way, i managed to make do with that i found at the airport, although i'd i'd been paying better attention i could have gotten off the airport shuttle right outside my hostel, and not half an hour's hike uphill. by the time i finally got here i was dripping with sweat and must have smelled a treat... and i know it's only going to get worse as the weeks go by. the Hostel Without A Name was fine as far as things go, although its claim to be in Central Lisbon was a little creative. oh well. shit happens. i dumped my bag, changed my shirt for a singlet and headed off into the sunshine. 6 hours later i collapsed into my bunk having hit the castle, the foreshore, the Baixa (the dip in the valley) and a few of the rambling, medieval areas either side. my feet had barely left the ground when Pietre, my Italian dorm-mate asked me what i was up to, and whether i wanted to come out for a beer and while my brain was formulating the phrase i'm tired and i didn't get much sleep last night so i'm going to have a quiet one in my mouth jumped in with why the fuck not? and it was another 5 hours of wandering around the town before i was finally in bed again. damn beer-hungry mouth...
by the end of all that i more or less felt like i'd done Lisbon which is a little sad all told, so i checked out the Lonely Planet guide to Western Europe i'd borrowed from Moonbug and decided to hop the train and head for Sintra - around 40 minutes on the Lisbon commuter rail. Sintra was the holiday-home for the Portugese royalty, back in the day when they had any and is basically a pretty little forested area with a Moorish castle on at the top of the mountain which dates back to the 9th century. i got in with a basic plan revolving around "show up, see what there is to see", so i wandered into the town looking for lunch to find that everything was touristy and expensive so i kept heading up, up, up the mountain. another picturesque location, another fucking mountain. as i walked i realised i was surrounded by a band of OAP's cluttering up the footpath from somewhere in South America, probably Brazil from what little i know of Portugese. not a problem... except that they were slower than an inbred retard. fine - i can get past them... and then they decided that the best way to tackle a slow walk was to sing. i had enough of singing Latin American motherfuckers ruining my peace and quiet in Egypt, so i legged it faster to get away from them and found a nice little spot to have a light lunch... only to find that they'd followed me into the cafe and hadn't given up on the singing bullshit. no lunch for me then. thanks a fucking lot you noisy slow-walking throwing-off-my-chi sons of bitches.
so i decided that eating was just not going to happen and headed on up the mountain, to get away from the Brazilians if nothing else.
so it was that i got to the bottom of the castle section of the climb and was sitting down for a bit of a break that i met Mieke and Wiebe and somehow fell in with them for the rest of the day. Wiebe (think Wilbur) lives in Lisbon doing more or less the sort of work that i do and his mum Mieke (think Mika) had come to visit him for a bit. by the time we'd climbed to the top, tried sneaking into the castle without paying (and failed), taken a stack of photos and headed down again we were getting along roaringly. beers at the bottom, you say? how could i say no? we even wound up on the same train back to Lisbon together, and i couldn't have been happier with that arrangement. Wiebe and i seemed to share the same twisted sense of humour - there were a couple of times when he had me in stitches, rolling around my seat on the train. he's even started reading my blog, which has me worried. maybe i should say something nice about him?
it's these little things that really put a smile on your face when you're traveling - the 24 hour friends who add colour to the place. if i'd been only my own i think i'd have been pretty bored, but i was stoked beyond words to have interesting people to hang with, and to this day i'm glad to say i've never met a Dutch person who wasn't pleasant company.
tonight is quiet time. i'm checking out tomorrow and on a flight to Madrid to kick off what will hopefully be an entertaining interlude in Spain. flight? well, it was acutually cheaper to fly than to take a train, not to mention much, MUCH quicker. i really want to be avoiding air travel as much as possible. this is a train/bus trip for me, but when needs must to the airport i will go, and probably give EasyJet even more of my cash. otherwise, it's been a good start to the trip... 2 days down... and... what is it? 70 something more to go?
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
3, 2, 1... blast off (sleeping at Heathrow for fun & profit, but mostly desperation & convenience)...
the last tube from Piccadilly to Heathrow Terminals 1,2,3&5 passes through Piccadilly Circus at 12:32AM. i know this because i have to know this - that was the latest possible time i could get there and still get out here tonight. i made sure i had plenty of leeway, and if i remember right i passed through there at around 11:47PM. TSO headed off on Sunday morning, leaving me to the last of my packing and running around. our last few days together were spent chilling out most of the time, with trips to the pub and a night out watching As You Like It performed at Shakespeare's Globe thrown in. all told, i think we had a really nice time - a lot crammed into a relatively short period of time, but none of it rushed. lots of walking, trips to Cambridge and Paris, nights at the pub and living the London life... it was a good way to finish off my time in this town.
i took a timeout and hung with the Grey Man in Hyde Park for the afternoon, which was probably a poorly considered move, but still something i wasn't going to miss - one last pleasant couple of hours sitting around on the grass sinking the last of the beers from the fridge. i hit the flat to throw the last of my shit into my bags and bolt off to Woolwich and a night crashing on SiJ's couch before the end. i was exhausted dragging all my crap through the bus and train, then up the hill to her place but relieved that at least it was all finally done and spent the rest of the evening sitting around with her and Lisa shooting the breeze until it was time to pass out.
my packing took days - frenzied periods of throwing things into one bag or another interspersed with time spent backing up data and preparing my Eee for 3 months on the road, my 500GB external hard drive full of movies and backups of crucial data (music, photos, that sort of thing) copied onto my 160GB backup drive which was then wrapped deep in clothes and soft things for preservation in case of the worst. i've done runs to the charity bins to throw out clothes that no longer fit and which i have no real need to drag back across the world (can somebody please think of the carbon?), and went into Bite with a bag load of stuff which i gave away in a joke auction... and somehow managed to score 10 quid for my troubles. i've packed and moved so many times in the last decade that you'd think that i'd be an expert at it by now, but i was still astonished by the number of bags of junk i had to run downstairs to the bins. old paperwork for a job i had for 3 days? bin it. this sock has a hole in it. in the bin with you (i stocked up on multiple pairs of identical socks before i left Aus specifically so that i wouldn't lose a pair if i went through the toes of one). small piles of detritus that you seem to hold on to until it comes time to move? gone. somehow, though, everything's got done and i've managed to not stress too much about it.
i got my bond back earlier today and promptly spent it on booking travel at STA - here one minute, gone the next, but i now know how i'm getting around 2/3 of my route with 3 days sunbathing on the southern Italian coast thrown in near the end, plus the best travel insurance i could afford in case something happens on the road. it's been a long day flying around the city, but productive. i was finishing off my last re-pack 5 minutes before walking out the door this evening and saying goodbye to Moonbug and Simono - a sure sign that i gave myself exactly the right amount of time to finish off the laundry-list of things i had to achieve before i came out to Heathrow tonight. in the end my farewell to SiJ came on the street - she was returning home just as i was leaving and i caught her for 5 minutes in the street as we crossed paths.
tonight i sleep at Heathrow Terminal 3. my flight leaves at 7:40AM and from Woolwich Arsenal i knew i'd never make it out there in the morning in time to catch it, so i decided to pull the classic backpacker's trick of trying to sleep at the airport. i'd probably be trying to pass out already if i hadn't met a guy from California called Gardener who was looking for the right terminal for his Singapore Air flight. we spent the last 2 or so hours chewing each other's ears off, comparing notes and generally keeping each other company. right now he's bedded down near a power-point across the hall from where i'm sitting, ear plugs in his ears to block out the beeping noise of the floor-polishing machine as it cruises around the Arrivals lounge (Departures doesn't have any seats). there are more than a couple of people here. the early-birds have scored the seats without arms and are laid out, happily snoring away. others are sitting awake. others still have laid out on the floor in sleeping bags. one thing's for sure - hardly anyone looks particularly comfortable and looking at what i've managed to scrounge i have the feeling i'll be lying here listening to Andy Mckee for quite some time to come before i get any sleep... if any at all.
in around 7 hours i'll walk off a BA flight and into Europe, leaving behind yet another phase of my life. i've packed it all in once more and between now and October 7th i officially have No Fixed Address and my home on my back with a wish-list of destinations that i know i have no possible way of fulfilling with the time and budget i have available. still, as far as ways to head home go, i'm reckoning that there are far worse than falling over at Canberra Airport off the back of 11 weeks in Europe, 2 days in Hong Kong, a wedding and far more reunions than i care to think about right now.
in the meantime, i'm going to pack my Eee back into my shoulder bag which i'll then throw under my head as a pillow and see whether sleep's going to be an option. if anything's certain about the next 3 months, grabbing sleep wherever i can find it is going to be absolutely cruicial...
i took a timeout and hung with the Grey Man in Hyde Park for the afternoon, which was probably a poorly considered move, but still something i wasn't going to miss - one last pleasant couple of hours sitting around on the grass sinking the last of the beers from the fridge. i hit the flat to throw the last of my shit into my bags and bolt off to Woolwich and a night crashing on SiJ's couch before the end. i was exhausted dragging all my crap through the bus and train, then up the hill to her place but relieved that at least it was all finally done and spent the rest of the evening sitting around with her and Lisa shooting the breeze until it was time to pass out.
my packing took days - frenzied periods of throwing things into one bag or another interspersed with time spent backing up data and preparing my Eee for 3 months on the road, my 500GB external hard drive full of movies and backups of crucial data (music, photos, that sort of thing) copied onto my 160GB backup drive which was then wrapped deep in clothes and soft things for preservation in case of the worst. i've done runs to the charity bins to throw out clothes that no longer fit and which i have no real need to drag back across the world (can somebody please think of the carbon?), and went into Bite with a bag load of stuff which i gave away in a joke auction... and somehow managed to score 10 quid for my troubles. i've packed and moved so many times in the last decade that you'd think that i'd be an expert at it by now, but i was still astonished by the number of bags of junk i had to run downstairs to the bins. old paperwork for a job i had for 3 days? bin it. this sock has a hole in it. in the bin with you (i stocked up on multiple pairs of identical socks before i left Aus specifically so that i wouldn't lose a pair if i went through the toes of one). small piles of detritus that you seem to hold on to until it comes time to move? gone. somehow, though, everything's got done and i've managed to not stress too much about it.
i got my bond back earlier today and promptly spent it on booking travel at STA - here one minute, gone the next, but i now know how i'm getting around 2/3 of my route with 3 days sunbathing on the southern Italian coast thrown in near the end, plus the best travel insurance i could afford in case something happens on the road. it's been a long day flying around the city, but productive. i was finishing off my last re-pack 5 minutes before walking out the door this evening and saying goodbye to Moonbug and Simono - a sure sign that i gave myself exactly the right amount of time to finish off the laundry-list of things i had to achieve before i came out to Heathrow tonight. in the end my farewell to SiJ came on the street - she was returning home just as i was leaving and i caught her for 5 minutes in the street as we crossed paths.
tonight i sleep at Heathrow Terminal 3. my flight leaves at 7:40AM and from Woolwich Arsenal i knew i'd never make it out there in the morning in time to catch it, so i decided to pull the classic backpacker's trick of trying to sleep at the airport. i'd probably be trying to pass out already if i hadn't met a guy from California called Gardener who was looking for the right terminal for his Singapore Air flight. we spent the last 2 or so hours chewing each other's ears off, comparing notes and generally keeping each other company. right now he's bedded down near a power-point across the hall from where i'm sitting, ear plugs in his ears to block out the beeping noise of the floor-polishing machine as it cruises around the Arrivals lounge (Departures doesn't have any seats). there are more than a couple of people here. the early-birds have scored the seats without arms and are laid out, happily snoring away. others are sitting awake. others still have laid out on the floor in sleeping bags. one thing's for sure - hardly anyone looks particularly comfortable and looking at what i've managed to scrounge i have the feeling i'll be lying here listening to Andy Mckee for quite some time to come before i get any sleep... if any at all.
in around 7 hours i'll walk off a BA flight and into Europe, leaving behind yet another phase of my life. i've packed it all in once more and between now and October 7th i officially have No Fixed Address and my home on my back with a wish-list of destinations that i know i have no possible way of fulfilling with the time and budget i have available. still, as far as ways to head home go, i'm reckoning that there are far worse than falling over at Canberra Airport off the back of 11 weeks in Europe, 2 days in Hong Kong, a wedding and far more reunions than i care to think about right now.
in the meantime, i'm going to pack my Eee back into my shoulder bag which i'll then throw under my head as a pillow and see whether sleep's going to be an option. if anything's certain about the next 3 months, grabbing sleep wherever i can find it is going to be absolutely cruicial...
Thursday, June 25, 2009
France: one night in Paris...
24/6/09 11:21PM
sometimes you can't help but make a bad joke, no matter how much you know you'll have to pay for it later. that said, a day and a half in Paris was nowhere near enough. i didn't stay in a Hilton, but it was cheap and pleasant and in a decent enough area to get around from. i've been seeing ads posted all over London talking about how cheap and easy it is to get to and from Paris by the Eurostar. hop a train, go through the Chunnel, pull up in Gare Du Nord 2 hours and 15 minutes later. it was something i thought might be fun to do while TSO was in town and since we agreed, we booked it back on her first night in town. we've been active, she and i. on Saturday we went to Cambridge for the day with the Grey Man while really quite hungover... well, he and i were, anyway. i knew we shouldn't have hit it so hard the night before at the Red Lion, but we had such a great night out these things happen. she bounced back like a trooper, the healthy wench. it was a really nice day regardless, wandering around the quaint little town, dodging students earning a bit of extra scratch peddling punting boats up and down the Cam. the night before we headed for Paris, however, i made sure i got a bit of an early one. i got at least 4 hours of sleep, i'll have you know. i still passed out somewhere in the Chunnel though. i'm getting really good at passing out for power naps on the train.
don't believe what people tell you - they're full of shit. i've been hearing for years the the French are rude, particularly Parisiens. this is crap. the rudest person i met in 2 days was the UK Border Guard at the train station on the way back to London. knowing English but refusing to speak it? bah. the number of times we'd go to order food with a bonjour and have them come straight back to us in English was phenomenal. it WAS a good chance to practice my meager French though - i've picked up a little bit here and there, and memorised a couple of new phrases before i left, but i still only stretch about as far as hello, i'd like a white coffee please. no, a big one. how much is that? thanks. goodbye which is... well, about as much as you need as long as you like coffee. still, we were both having a blast butchering the language and by the time we left i was able to conduct entire transactions in French, which made me feel pretty good about things.
we packed a lot into our day and a half, too - a hike across the south-end of Paris to the Eiffel Tower. the queue was there, but broken up into stages, but it wasn't a disgustingly long wait to get to the top where the view is incredible (and there's a Champaigne Bar, if you'd believe it), then across the Seine and through leafy bolevards to the Arc du Triomphe before we had to fly back to our hotel to meet up with a professional friend TSO had run into in Toronto for dinner. it's not often i've spent 47 Euros on a meal, but it was 3 courses, with wine and coffee, and it was incredible. a charcuterie platter to die for and a massive plate of bacon and sausage products on a pyramid of saurkraut, then a berry, custard and ice cream creation with crumbly bits and raspberry puree that was enough for a serious diabetic-nightmare. we ate really very well in Paris - crepes or baguettes for lunch, far too much Tartelette Citron and Flan, even some decent Turkish food at the end of the second day.
we filled in the second day with the Catacombs - over a kilometre of corridors lined with the bones of something like 6 million Parisiens, exhumed in the early 19th century and re-deposited in old limestone-mine shafts near Montparnasse. from there we hiked back to our hostel on Rue de Creperie (not its real name, but my name for it. there were something like 7 different crepe stores within sight of out hotel's front door. Paris seems to like having everything grouped together - on our walks we also came across Rue du Bookshop and Promenade a la Petstore...) via the Montparnasse Markets, then spent the rest of the hot, sunny day getting to Notre Dame via Jardin de Luxembourg with a little sit-down by the Seine on the way, then on to the Louvre to sit by the fountains before we took a meandering route back to Gare do Nord for the train out. we got there just in time - we'd not been on the train for more than 5 minutes when it left, so i'm counting it as well-timed.
i really liked Paris... and by extension the French. i threw some bad-French at them, they smiled, took pity on me and helped me out. it's a town with a busy, but chilled out vibe. everyone seemed really easy-going, in a "i don't give a fuck what you think" sort of way. where in London people dress like peacocks, everyone in Paris was... well, elegant. it occurred to me that this must be why people think the French are so arrogant. they literally don't give a fuck about what anyone thinks. if they're nice to you, it's because they want to be. if you piss them off they'll give you the evils. they don't feel the need to impress anyone, so they dress to feel nice, not to show off their plumage. i can't help but like these people more and more as time goes by. they have a rich and extensive culture and kinda appreciate it if you respect that in their country by learning to say Bonjour and not being an arsehole. that's too hard for some people, apparently. make an effort and as nice as anyone i've come across.
meanwhile, i'm going to have to head back to Paris at some stage soon to pick up on a few things i missed the first time round. i didn't get to go into the Louvre, for example. and i didn't get to try a Croque Madame - they looked cool... and i certainly wasn't responsible for the torture and murder of anywhere near enough geese. you know... maybe i just need to book a month or so and try to eat France, starting from Brittany and working my way east...
sometimes you can't help but make a bad joke, no matter how much you know you'll have to pay for it later. that said, a day and a half in Paris was nowhere near enough. i didn't stay in a Hilton, but it was cheap and pleasant and in a decent enough area to get around from. i've been seeing ads posted all over London talking about how cheap and easy it is to get to and from Paris by the Eurostar. hop a train, go through the Chunnel, pull up in Gare Du Nord 2 hours and 15 minutes later. it was something i thought might be fun to do while TSO was in town and since we agreed, we booked it back on her first night in town. we've been active, she and i. on Saturday we went to Cambridge for the day with the Grey Man while really quite hungover... well, he and i were, anyway. i knew we shouldn't have hit it so hard the night before at the Red Lion, but we had such a great night out these things happen. she bounced back like a trooper, the healthy wench. it was a really nice day regardless, wandering around the quaint little town, dodging students earning a bit of extra scratch peddling punting boats up and down the Cam. the night before we headed for Paris, however, i made sure i got a bit of an early one. i got at least 4 hours of sleep, i'll have you know. i still passed out somewhere in the Chunnel though. i'm getting really good at passing out for power naps on the train.
don't believe what people tell you - they're full of shit. i've been hearing for years the the French are rude, particularly Parisiens. this is crap. the rudest person i met in 2 days was the UK Border Guard at the train station on the way back to London. knowing English but refusing to speak it? bah. the number of times we'd go to order food with a bonjour and have them come straight back to us in English was phenomenal. it WAS a good chance to practice my meager French though - i've picked up a little bit here and there, and memorised a couple of new phrases before i left, but i still only stretch about as far as hello, i'd like a white coffee please. no, a big one. how much is that? thanks. goodbye which is... well, about as much as you need as long as you like coffee. still, we were both having a blast butchering the language and by the time we left i was able to conduct entire transactions in French, which made me feel pretty good about things.
we packed a lot into our day and a half, too - a hike across the south-end of Paris to the Eiffel Tower. the queue was there, but broken up into stages, but it wasn't a disgustingly long wait to get to the top where the view is incredible (and there's a Champaigne Bar, if you'd believe it), then across the Seine and through leafy bolevards to the Arc du Triomphe before we had to fly back to our hotel to meet up with a professional friend TSO had run into in Toronto for dinner. it's not often i've spent 47 Euros on a meal, but it was 3 courses, with wine and coffee, and it was incredible. a charcuterie platter to die for and a massive plate of bacon and sausage products on a pyramid of saurkraut, then a berry, custard and ice cream creation with crumbly bits and raspberry puree that was enough for a serious diabetic-nightmare. we ate really very well in Paris - crepes or baguettes for lunch, far too much Tartelette Citron and Flan, even some decent Turkish food at the end of the second day.
we filled in the second day with the Catacombs - over a kilometre of corridors lined with the bones of something like 6 million Parisiens, exhumed in the early 19th century and re-deposited in old limestone-mine shafts near Montparnasse. from there we hiked back to our hostel on Rue de Creperie (not its real name, but my name for it. there were something like 7 different crepe stores within sight of out hotel's front door. Paris seems to like having everything grouped together - on our walks we also came across Rue du Bookshop and Promenade a la Petstore...) via the Montparnasse Markets, then spent the rest of the hot, sunny day getting to Notre Dame via Jardin de Luxembourg with a little sit-down by the Seine on the way, then on to the Louvre to sit by the fountains before we took a meandering route back to Gare do Nord for the train out. we got there just in time - we'd not been on the train for more than 5 minutes when it left, so i'm counting it as well-timed.
i really liked Paris... and by extension the French. i threw some bad-French at them, they smiled, took pity on me and helped me out. it's a town with a busy, but chilled out vibe. everyone seemed really easy-going, in a "i don't give a fuck what you think" sort of way. where in London people dress like peacocks, everyone in Paris was... well, elegant. it occurred to me that this must be why people think the French are so arrogant. they literally don't give a fuck about what anyone thinks. if they're nice to you, it's because they want to be. if you piss them off they'll give you the evils. they don't feel the need to impress anyone, so they dress to feel nice, not to show off their plumage. i can't help but like these people more and more as time goes by. they have a rich and extensive culture and kinda appreciate it if you respect that in their country by learning to say Bonjour and not being an arsehole. that's too hard for some people, apparently. make an effort and as nice as anyone i've come across.
meanwhile, i'm going to have to head back to Paris at some stage soon to pick up on a few things i missed the first time round. i didn't get to go into the Louvre, for example. and i didn't get to try a Croque Madame - they looked cool... and i certainly wasn't responsible for the torture and murder of anywhere near enough geese. you know... maybe i just need to book a month or so and try to eat France, starting from Brittany and working my way east...
Thursday, June 18, 2009
in the company of friends part 2: last chance to see...
my aversion to early mornings is well publicised. i fucking hate them. i have a preferred sleep cycle of 2-3AM until 10-11AM. it's always worked nicely for me. fortunately i've managed to learn how to get up early when i have to for important occasions - those early flights, cross-timezone phone calls, or picking up a dear friend from Heathrow T5 when her flight arrives at 6:40AM on a Monday. why didn't i provide the same service for Ondine when she and the Marten arrived? well, being out of town at the time didn't help matters. sometimes things just don't mesh. The Short One, on the other hand, i could accomodate and so i did. sure, i had something like 4 hours of sleep the night beforehand, but these things happen. i'm rapidly getting to the point where i'm getting too fucking busy to sleep properly anyway. hitting the Big Red Button was one thing - now i'm going to be happily running around like a fucking maniac until the bombs hit, but that's another story.
TSO's spending a fortnight in London between a conference in Toronto, Canada and a Research Fellowship in Mannheim, Germany, and will be staying in the recently unoccupied bed in my room. you see, there are plans within plans in most of the things that i do and this is one of them. the main reason i haven't already fucked off into the distance is because i wanted to make sure i was in town when people who were coming to see me were there, so i've arranged my plans and timed the explosions to trigger less than 48 hours after she heads east. anything else would just be rude and while there are plenty of people in this world i'll happily be a fucking arsehole to with a smile on my face, TSO's not on the list. not even close. you don't get the title of one of my oldest and dearest friends for nothing, after all.
so far we've had a seriously fabulous time. my goal for the first few days was to walk the girl until her legs fell off. i've found it to be the best way to see this metropolis, and when the weather's been this stunning i've been taking every opportunity. it helps that it's also the best way i've found to break jetlag - get the fuck out in the sunlight and walk until you fall over, have a nice big meal in the evening and pass out early got a good 10 hours passed out, followed by a coffee served in a mug i can fit my head into... not that this size of coffee is unusual for me. my "regular" size of coffee is a Starbucks Venti mug.
what this all adds up to is that since she pulled into town i've made her walk from London Bridge to the London Eye, then across the Thames and up to Leicester Square via Cleopatra's Needle and Trafalgar Square (including a quick look into the National Gallery, naturally), down Whitehall to Westminster, then across the Thames again, down to Vauxhall Cross and then back to Oval on Day 1, then a day spent going from Victoria to Buckingham Palace, through Green Park to Leicester Square via Piccadilly Circus, up Regent St to Oxford, then New Bond and Bond Streets followed by a quick tube ride for an exploration of Harrods and Knightsbridge and finished off meandering up to Hyde Park Corner to chase squirrels around the grass. today was a tour of Camden Town which included an exceedingly long haircut for her and a short, stabbing pain for me then a quick trip down Tottenham Court Road before hightailing it down to Brixton. most of these haven't been solo missions - we had Jacq and Dan with us on Tuesday with Marta joining us for tea at the Eritrean place (yes, twice in 3 days. it's a great little place!) near to mine, then Jacq and Marta again on Wednesady, winding it all up with Caribbean food then cake at Jacq & Matt's place. i'm killing as many birds with as few stones as possible at the moment. if i ever get really good they'll fall from the just sky just by me wanting it. until then, however, i'm including as many people as i can in any activity i organise so that TSO gets the joy of exploring London, with the added benefit of meeting some of the many people who've helped to make my life interesting in the last 9 months. partly, they're going be hard to explain to people back home (even harder than trying to stuff them into my carry-on) and i know in the back of my head that a lot of them i'll never get to see again beyond Facebook and i want to make the last few weeks count.
it's been a grand few days. the majority of the walking's over for now, and i'm now looking at fitting as many other entertaining activities together like a jigsaw puzzle. there's a play to be seen at Shakespeare's Globe, a picnic at Spiral Hill near Woolwich and a couple of pub nights on the cards, two days in Paris booked for next week, and of course somewhere in the middle of all that i need to pack up my shit and find time to sleep. this is something of a "One Last Hurrah" for me - an opportunity to fly around London and take in all the touristy things i've enjoyed seeing one more time before i leave with no serious likelihood of return in the near-future. if i was bumming around on my own for this last fortnight i know i'd never bother, but having TSO around makes it seem far more worth-while. i won't do it for me, but i'll play tour-guide in a heartbeat and i'm loving it. for just a little while longer i can think of London as my city and remind myself of all the little stories and trivia i've picked up over the months by repeating them, things i notice triggering tales that string the town together like a spiderweb and draw it all together, making it come alive in a way that only standing on the precise spot and seeing it all in your mind's eye can do.
the insane thing is that it's all coming together. i'm done with failure and fighting a losing battle with employment. i hit the Big Red Button and set my world in motion again after months of stagnation, dumping me straight into my element. this is what i do best - we're in my world now, where my goals are reliant on no one but me; twist the throttle back until it stops, become a relativistic blur of motion and ride the phase shift into next week. everything's planned and fuck-all's organised, but the crucial pieces are coming together and i know i'll have all of the critical elements in place in time, even if i'm finishing my re-pack in the last 5 minutes before i have to walk out the door and get myself to Heathrow with a spring in my step and my responsibilities catapulted out the window and into oblivion.
but that's all little over 12 days away now and i have other things to worry about, like how to squeeze as much British comedy as possible into what little spare time we have scheduled and who to invite to the pub for drinks on Friday Night. it's a hard job, but some motherfucker's gotta be hated for doing it...
TSO's spending a fortnight in London between a conference in Toronto, Canada and a Research Fellowship in Mannheim, Germany, and will be staying in the recently unoccupied bed in my room. you see, there are plans within plans in most of the things that i do and this is one of them. the main reason i haven't already fucked off into the distance is because i wanted to make sure i was in town when people who were coming to see me were there, so i've arranged my plans and timed the explosions to trigger less than 48 hours after she heads east. anything else would just be rude and while there are plenty of people in this world i'll happily be a fucking arsehole to with a smile on my face, TSO's not on the list. not even close. you don't get the title of one of my oldest and dearest friends for nothing, after all.
so far we've had a seriously fabulous time. my goal for the first few days was to walk the girl until her legs fell off. i've found it to be the best way to see this metropolis, and when the weather's been this stunning i've been taking every opportunity. it helps that it's also the best way i've found to break jetlag - get the fuck out in the sunlight and walk until you fall over, have a nice big meal in the evening and pass out early got a good 10 hours passed out, followed by a coffee served in a mug i can fit my head into... not that this size of coffee is unusual for me. my "regular" size of coffee is a Starbucks Venti mug.
what this all adds up to is that since she pulled into town i've made her walk from London Bridge to the London Eye, then across the Thames and up to Leicester Square via Cleopatra's Needle and Trafalgar Square (including a quick look into the National Gallery, naturally), down Whitehall to Westminster, then across the Thames again, down to Vauxhall Cross and then back to Oval on Day 1, then a day spent going from Victoria to Buckingham Palace, through Green Park to Leicester Square via Piccadilly Circus, up Regent St to Oxford, then New Bond and Bond Streets followed by a quick tube ride for an exploration of Harrods and Knightsbridge and finished off meandering up to Hyde Park Corner to chase squirrels around the grass. today was a tour of Camden Town which included an exceedingly long haircut for her and a short, stabbing pain for me then a quick trip down Tottenham Court Road before hightailing it down to Brixton. most of these haven't been solo missions - we had Jacq and Dan with us on Tuesday with Marta joining us for tea at the Eritrean place (yes, twice in 3 days. it's a great little place!) near to mine, then Jacq and Marta again on Wednesady, winding it all up with Caribbean food then cake at Jacq & Matt's place. i'm killing as many birds with as few stones as possible at the moment. if i ever get really good they'll fall from the just sky just by me wanting it. until then, however, i'm including as many people as i can in any activity i organise so that TSO gets the joy of exploring London, with the added benefit of meeting some of the many people who've helped to make my life interesting in the last 9 months. partly, they're going be hard to explain to people back home (even harder than trying to stuff them into my carry-on) and i know in the back of my head that a lot of them i'll never get to see again beyond Facebook and i want to make the last few weeks count.
it's been a grand few days. the majority of the walking's over for now, and i'm now looking at fitting as many other entertaining activities together like a jigsaw puzzle. there's a play to be seen at Shakespeare's Globe, a picnic at Spiral Hill near Woolwich and a couple of pub nights on the cards, two days in Paris booked for next week, and of course somewhere in the middle of all that i need to pack up my shit and find time to sleep. this is something of a "One Last Hurrah" for me - an opportunity to fly around London and take in all the touristy things i've enjoyed seeing one more time before i leave with no serious likelihood of return in the near-future. if i was bumming around on my own for this last fortnight i know i'd never bother, but having TSO around makes it seem far more worth-while. i won't do it for me, but i'll play tour-guide in a heartbeat and i'm loving it. for just a little while longer i can think of London as my city and remind myself of all the little stories and trivia i've picked up over the months by repeating them, things i notice triggering tales that string the town together like a spiderweb and draw it all together, making it come alive in a way that only standing on the precise spot and seeing it all in your mind's eye can do.
the insane thing is that it's all coming together. i'm done with failure and fighting a losing battle with employment. i hit the Big Red Button and set my world in motion again after months of stagnation, dumping me straight into my element. this is what i do best - we're in my world now, where my goals are reliant on no one but me; twist the throttle back until it stops, become a relativistic blur of motion and ride the phase shift into next week. everything's planned and fuck-all's organised, but the crucial pieces are coming together and i know i'll have all of the critical elements in place in time, even if i'm finishing my re-pack in the last 5 minutes before i have to walk out the door and get myself to Heathrow with a spring in my step and my responsibilities catapulted out the window and into oblivion.
but that's all little over 12 days away now and i have other things to worry about, like how to squeeze as much British comedy as possible into what little spare time we have scheduled and who to invite to the pub for drinks on Friday Night. it's a hard job, but some motherfucker's gotta be hated for doing it...
Monday, June 15, 2009
Croatia: the most awesome way is often not the most sensible...
you get back from a week of sunbathing and swimming and drinking in the piazza of medieval towns and you kinda want to lie around your room and die quietly - check your email, watch a movie, eat something home-cooked and get your washing done. well... you maybe. my flight got in yesterday afternoon by 4PM i'd cleared Customs and Immigration and was on the platform for the Piccadilly Line into town. by 7:30PM i'd got back to basecamp, thrown a load of washing in the machine, dived through the shower, found some clean clothes and was sitting on the footpath outside the Red Lion in Soho with a beer in my hand. i'm loving this little pub - it has cheap-arse beer and a bohemian/proletariat atmosphere where everyone sits out in the street with plastic cups. somehow i managed to roll on until past twelve, whereupon i promptly turned into a pumpkin and headed for bed.
i'm really wishing i'd made the effort to get sociable with these folks sooner. i'm going to miss them when i go, and that day's getting closer and closer each time i pass out at night and drag my stiff and sore bones out of bed again each morning. i'm amazed i survived going out last night at all - Hvar turned out to be something of a debacle. it's a pleasant enough place with another fortress up on the hill which i wandered off to explore - my addiction to high places and all - before grabbing a a cheap burger at a greasy-spoon, then a couple of dishes at possibly the only sushi bar in Croatia. a little while later i met back up with the Kiwis and we hit the night club built in a converted convent and from there the night just got messy. i wound up having one or two cocktails to many and staggered my way back to the boat. one of the girls was mucking around and fell in the harbor, killing her phone in the process. Reagan almost went in - we were all acting like fools and laughing like drains, playing leapfrog with the mooring posts and he got stuck half-way over, rolling off and almost straight in the drink. i managed to stop him just in time, jumping for him and skidding on my butt across the limestone so i could grab his arm just in time. a couple of the girls got onboard just in time to not get left behind... and we all woke up with hangovers. it was a really very subdued day when we pulled into Split again and there certainly wasn't any partying that night. in the end i fetched up with a couple of the girls out grabbing a quiet bite and wound up getting talking to another Aussie tourist who'd been sitting alone at the next table. she seemed genuinely pleased to have some company.
i was pretty much over exploring by the time i had to get off the boat on saturday so i killed the morning cruising a free wifi connection i'd found the week before and getting myself to the airport where i had something of a disconcerting moment at check-in. it turns out that after a week of eating too much and lying around on deck doing fuck-all i'd managed to lose nearly a kilo and a half. hmm...
today was yet another peaceful afternoon in Green Park with the carnies, which turned into a mission out to my place for jugs of cocktails and Eritrean food. we walked the entire way for the fun of it, and since Jacq had her new stilts she did the entire trek with her knees at my eye-height.
tomorrow i need to be back out at Heathrow to pick up Marcia - she's spending 2 weeks in London between a conference in Toronto and a research posting in Mannheim, Germany. i'm really not looking forward to getting up at 5AM to be at the airport by 7AM, but these things you do. it'll be good to have her around for a fortnight - one last hurrah of playing tour-guide before i pack up my shit and fuck off into the distance, leaving behind this city i've fallen for but have to leave anyway.
damn... that sounds like a really bad habit i've gotten into, doesn't it?
i'm really wishing i'd made the effort to get sociable with these folks sooner. i'm going to miss them when i go, and that day's getting closer and closer each time i pass out at night and drag my stiff and sore bones out of bed again each morning. i'm amazed i survived going out last night at all - Hvar turned out to be something of a debacle. it's a pleasant enough place with another fortress up on the hill which i wandered off to explore - my addiction to high places and all - before grabbing a a cheap burger at a greasy-spoon, then a couple of dishes at possibly the only sushi bar in Croatia. a little while later i met back up with the Kiwis and we hit the night club built in a converted convent and from there the night just got messy. i wound up having one or two cocktails to many and staggered my way back to the boat. one of the girls was mucking around and fell in the harbor, killing her phone in the process. Reagan almost went in - we were all acting like fools and laughing like drains, playing leapfrog with the mooring posts and he got stuck half-way over, rolling off and almost straight in the drink. i managed to stop him just in time, jumping for him and skidding on my butt across the limestone so i could grab his arm just in time. a couple of the girls got onboard just in time to not get left behind... and we all woke up with hangovers. it was a really very subdued day when we pulled into Split again and there certainly wasn't any partying that night. in the end i fetched up with a couple of the girls out grabbing a quiet bite and wound up getting talking to another Aussie tourist who'd been sitting alone at the next table. she seemed genuinely pleased to have some company.
i was pretty much over exploring by the time i had to get off the boat on saturday so i killed the morning cruising a free wifi connection i'd found the week before and getting myself to the airport where i had something of a disconcerting moment at check-in. it turns out that after a week of eating too much and lying around on deck doing fuck-all i'd managed to lose nearly a kilo and a half. hmm...
today was yet another peaceful afternoon in Green Park with the carnies, which turned into a mission out to my place for jugs of cocktails and Eritrean food. we walked the entire way for the fun of it, and since Jacq had her new stilts she did the entire trek with her knees at my eye-height.
tomorrow i need to be back out at Heathrow to pick up Marcia - she's spending 2 weeks in London between a conference in Toronto and a research posting in Mannheim, Germany. i'm really not looking forward to getting up at 5AM to be at the airport by 7AM, but these things you do. it'll be good to have her around for a fortnight - one last hurrah of playing tour-guide before i pack up my shit and fuck off into the distance, leaving behind this city i've fallen for but have to leave anyway.
damn... that sounds like a really bad habit i've gotten into, doesn't it?
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Croatia: wow... i can't actually remember the last time i got sunburned...
9/6/09 10:59PM
i have these vague memories of being a kid and getting sunburned. we'd head up the coast for a few days and go camping near the beach at some little hamlet between Perth and Lancelin and i'd forget to sunscreen some part of me (often stupid things like the tops of my feet or knees) or just neglect to put more on half-way through the day, then spend the next couple of days avoiding hot showers. i should have realised that i'd turned into a fucking pom after going through a year of winter. i've been spoiled by the English weather and piss-poor sunshine. i've spent hours in Green Park on sundays with my shirt off and barely gotten a tan. 3 hours on the top deck of a boat sailing the Adriatic and a moment of stupidity where i forgot to wash the salty water off myself and i've gone red as a fucking lobster. i'm amazed no one's tried to revoke my passport.
what a fabulous day that was tho - my first day actually sailing since this trip started turned out to be day 3 of the trip, clear, blue and sunny with crisp morning air which rapidly turned warm as the sun rose in the sky and the white top deck became rapidly populated by reading Aussies and Kiwis in their swimwear. i thought i'd turned both sides nicely. i thought i'd gone into the shade early enough. my biggest mistake was not rinsing off after we stopped for a swim. salt water residue continues to dehydrate the skin long after you've gone out of the sun, turning "a light burn" into "you are destined to peel". it was glorious though - peaceful, quiet, nothing but the flipping of pages, some chillout music over the boat's hifi, thrum of the diesel engines and wash of the sea off the bow.
i'm a little irritated though - we were due to set sail from Split on Saturday at around midday, but were held in port due to strong winds. as a result we got an extra day to wander around split and i'm missing out on the dive i was so looking forward to. i made the most of the day, wandering around with various people from different boats (there are a few different boats and tour companies doing more or less the same route as we are, so we've seen a lot of the same faces in port). on Sunday morning we were picked up by a bus and taken off on a day-trip to Mostar in Bosnia which is famous primarily for its bridge (dating back to sometime around when Jesus rode dinosaurs through Mordor), the Serbian army shelled the fuck out of it during the war back in the 90's. it was rebuilt out of the same materials, using the same methods, almost stone-for-stone and now you can't tell it's ever changed) and its impressive collection of bombed-out and bullet-scarred buildings. we go a good couple of hours wandering around and being shown some of the landmarks, including a "traditional Turkish house". Turkish house in Bosnia? WTF? well it turns out that the Ottoman Empire once stretched well into Eastern Europe, leaving a strong Turkish influence in Bosnia which would explain why so many of the cafes had food i remember my grandmother making in my childhood - halva, chevapi, turkish delight, baklava and that spiral ricotta and leek pie that i've come to love more and more as the years have gone by. we were given enough time to wander around the place before the bus took us back to Croatia, past a couple of old forts and villages, then north up the Dalmatian Riviera to meet back up with the boat at Makarska.
the last two days have been pretty much the same thing: drag myself out of my cabin (there's 14 of us on a boat that can carry 24 so i've managed a cabin to myself which is good since there's fuck-all room in it) and up the stairs into the Saloon where Mate (pronounced Mar-teh) has breakfast laid out. fresh bread, cheese, maybe ham, maybe boiled eggs, terrifyingly bad instant coffee that i've been sinking 2 cups of each morning, cereal go down my throat before i grab my book and head upstairs onto the top deck and into the cool breeze and bright sun which bakes more and more as the day goes by. most of the tourists can be found up there lying around in their swimwear (or less in the case of V, the Maltese Sydney-sider) at various stages of the day. sometime before lunch we'll drop anchor in a sheltered cove somewhere and it's time to go swimming in the cold, clear water, taking it in turns to dive off the top deck, or higher - off the captain's cabin: a 4-6 metre jump depending on your level of commitment, a fraction of a second of freefall before the splash. i've got some great photos - anyone who's not game for the jump's been willing to take rapid-fire photos. after a while the bell will ring for lunch and we'll be fed soup and mains - chicken, beef, fish, all sorts of odds and ends, all if it good (although some of the girls have complained about it being to salty. me: i like salt. i think it comes with the heritage. while we're eating the captain will weigh-anchor and we motor on into a different port.
after Makarska we pulled into Mjlet, a small town notable only for the national park it shares an island with on which there is a lake, in which there's another tiny island with an old monastery on it. we're offered a BBQ dinner that night on the boat - 30 Euros for more meat than we can handle followed by crepes, and all the beer and wine we can get down our throats in 3 hours. somehow i managed to not wake up with too much of a hangover the next morning, which is good since yesterday we pulled into Dubrovnik while we were polishing off our fish and rice.
Dubrovnik is one of those places i think everyone should see. it's an old, walled city of limestone and terracotta which has been beautifully maintained and, if necessary, rebuilt in the original style with the original materials (i think it's a hobby in this part of the world). broad, elegant streets intersect with tight, stepped alleyways. hanging with the Kiwis, it took us 2 hours to walk around the top of the walls - stops for photos, stops for ice cream, stops for drinks. you'd have to be really talented to take a bad photo in Dubrovnik: it's so achingly and effortlessly beautiful that you just want to fill your memory card. it gets even better when the walls run down the sea-ward side of the town where in 2 different places i saw hidden passages open out onto the rocks at the base of the walls and people have set up bars overlooking the ocean. go for a swim, get in a bit more sunbathing in the baking sun then hop back up the rocks for a beer? yes please! although, i had to forego the sunbathing bit, red as i was from the previous day.
i can't go on about Dubrovnik enough. all i can really say is that you Should Look At Some Of The Photos And See What i Mean. i can't get over how this place was brutalised during the war - i've seen some of the photos of streets i've walked down and buildings i've stood under, debris in the streets, roofs shattered and caved in, and now it's all been restored as if none of it ever happened, the fresh terracotta on you can see from the walls the only sign that anything ever happened.
today we pulled into Korcula (Kor-chu-lah) which is kinda like Dubrovnik's smaller, less developed sibling. what it lacks in scale, however, it makes up for in cocktail bars. i lucked into a quick dinghy-ride with the captain and spent an hour or so wandering around looking for the house where Marco Polo grew up, generally running into various people from the different boats and wandering around with one or another until i got bored of the idea, before joining a couple of the girls for complicated cocktails overlooking the marina. we wound up skipping the big drawcard in the end - a bar on the top of one of the old watchtowers which you can only get to up a ladder and where the drinks are raised up the outside of the wall in a little basket on the end of a rope. we've agreed that tonight's to be an early one in preparation for the Hvar, the second to last stop and a renouned party stop, so i'm taking the opportunity to chill out and enjoy the rocking of the boat.
i have these vague memories of being a kid and getting sunburned. we'd head up the coast for a few days and go camping near the beach at some little hamlet between Perth and Lancelin and i'd forget to sunscreen some part of me (often stupid things like the tops of my feet or knees) or just neglect to put more on half-way through the day, then spend the next couple of days avoiding hot showers. i should have realised that i'd turned into a fucking pom after going through a year of winter. i've been spoiled by the English weather and piss-poor sunshine. i've spent hours in Green Park on sundays with my shirt off and barely gotten a tan. 3 hours on the top deck of a boat sailing the Adriatic and a moment of stupidity where i forgot to wash the salty water off myself and i've gone red as a fucking lobster. i'm amazed no one's tried to revoke my passport.
what a fabulous day that was tho - my first day actually sailing since this trip started turned out to be day 3 of the trip, clear, blue and sunny with crisp morning air which rapidly turned warm as the sun rose in the sky and the white top deck became rapidly populated by reading Aussies and Kiwis in their swimwear. i thought i'd turned both sides nicely. i thought i'd gone into the shade early enough. my biggest mistake was not rinsing off after we stopped for a swim. salt water residue continues to dehydrate the skin long after you've gone out of the sun, turning "a light burn" into "you are destined to peel". it was glorious though - peaceful, quiet, nothing but the flipping of pages, some chillout music over the boat's hifi, thrum of the diesel engines and wash of the sea off the bow.
i'm a little irritated though - we were due to set sail from Split on Saturday at around midday, but were held in port due to strong winds. as a result we got an extra day to wander around split and i'm missing out on the dive i was so looking forward to. i made the most of the day, wandering around with various people from different boats (there are a few different boats and tour companies doing more or less the same route as we are, so we've seen a lot of the same faces in port). on Sunday morning we were picked up by a bus and taken off on a day-trip to Mostar in Bosnia which is famous primarily for its bridge (dating back to sometime around when Jesus rode dinosaurs through Mordor), the Serbian army shelled the fuck out of it during the war back in the 90's. it was rebuilt out of the same materials, using the same methods, almost stone-for-stone and now you can't tell it's ever changed) and its impressive collection of bombed-out and bullet-scarred buildings. we go a good couple of hours wandering around and being shown some of the landmarks, including a "traditional Turkish house". Turkish house in Bosnia? WTF? well it turns out that the Ottoman Empire once stretched well into Eastern Europe, leaving a strong Turkish influence in Bosnia which would explain why so many of the cafes had food i remember my grandmother making in my childhood - halva, chevapi, turkish delight, baklava and that spiral ricotta and leek pie that i've come to love more and more as the years have gone by. we were given enough time to wander around the place before the bus took us back to Croatia, past a couple of old forts and villages, then north up the Dalmatian Riviera to meet back up with the boat at Makarska.
the last two days have been pretty much the same thing: drag myself out of my cabin (there's 14 of us on a boat that can carry 24 so i've managed a cabin to myself which is good since there's fuck-all room in it) and up the stairs into the Saloon where Mate (pronounced Mar-teh) has breakfast laid out. fresh bread, cheese, maybe ham, maybe boiled eggs, terrifyingly bad instant coffee that i've been sinking 2 cups of each morning, cereal go down my throat before i grab my book and head upstairs onto the top deck and into the cool breeze and bright sun which bakes more and more as the day goes by. most of the tourists can be found up there lying around in their swimwear (or less in the case of V, the Maltese Sydney-sider) at various stages of the day. sometime before lunch we'll drop anchor in a sheltered cove somewhere and it's time to go swimming in the cold, clear water, taking it in turns to dive off the top deck, or higher - off the captain's cabin: a 4-6 metre jump depending on your level of commitment, a fraction of a second of freefall before the splash. i've got some great photos - anyone who's not game for the jump's been willing to take rapid-fire photos. after a while the bell will ring for lunch and we'll be fed soup and mains - chicken, beef, fish, all sorts of odds and ends, all if it good (although some of the girls have complained about it being to salty. me: i like salt. i think it comes with the heritage. while we're eating the captain will weigh-anchor and we motor on into a different port.
after Makarska we pulled into Mjlet, a small town notable only for the national park it shares an island with on which there is a lake, in which there's another tiny island with an old monastery on it. we're offered a BBQ dinner that night on the boat - 30 Euros for more meat than we can handle followed by crepes, and all the beer and wine we can get down our throats in 3 hours. somehow i managed to not wake up with too much of a hangover the next morning, which is good since yesterday we pulled into Dubrovnik while we were polishing off our fish and rice.
Dubrovnik is one of those places i think everyone should see. it's an old, walled city of limestone and terracotta which has been beautifully maintained and, if necessary, rebuilt in the original style with the original materials (i think it's a hobby in this part of the world). broad, elegant streets intersect with tight, stepped alleyways. hanging with the Kiwis, it took us 2 hours to walk around the top of the walls - stops for photos, stops for ice cream, stops for drinks. you'd have to be really talented to take a bad photo in Dubrovnik: it's so achingly and effortlessly beautiful that you just want to fill your memory card. it gets even better when the walls run down the sea-ward side of the town where in 2 different places i saw hidden passages open out onto the rocks at the base of the walls and people have set up bars overlooking the ocean. go for a swim, get in a bit more sunbathing in the baking sun then hop back up the rocks for a beer? yes please! although, i had to forego the sunbathing bit, red as i was from the previous day.
i can't go on about Dubrovnik enough. all i can really say is that you Should Look At Some Of The Photos And See What i Mean. i can't get over how this place was brutalised during the war - i've seen some of the photos of streets i've walked down and buildings i've stood under, debris in the streets, roofs shattered and caved in, and now it's all been restored as if none of it ever happened, the fresh terracotta on you can see from the walls the only sign that anything ever happened.
today we pulled into Korcula (Kor-chu-lah) which is kinda like Dubrovnik's smaller, less developed sibling. what it lacks in scale, however, it makes up for in cocktail bars. i lucked into a quick dinghy-ride with the captain and spent an hour or so wandering around looking for the house where Marco Polo grew up, generally running into various people from the different boats and wandering around with one or another until i got bored of the idea, before joining a couple of the girls for complicated cocktails overlooking the marina. we wound up skipping the big drawcard in the end - a bar on the top of one of the old watchtowers which you can only get to up a ladder and where the drinks are raised up the outside of the wall in a little basket on the end of a rope. we've agreed that tonight's to be an early one in preparation for the Hvar, the second to last stop and a renouned party stop, so i'm taking the opportunity to chill out and enjoy the rocking of the boat.
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Croatia: yes, there really is a place called Split...
there's a pervasive stench of smoldering rubber as i walk through the entry of the terminal. the bearing on someone's roller luggage has gone and the friction of the wheel dragging has it hot enough to burn skin if i'm any judge. i should know - i've tasted this smell before. my fault for buying cheap-arse luggage in Singapore a long time ago and a suitcase i left far, far away. at least the trip out to Gatwick was painless - in fact it was so easy it barely even registered until i was already there. there's sod-all queue at the check-in counter for Croatian Airlines and i wind up getting chatty with the attendant who's keen to know the secret to my weight-loss (i take the opportunity while we're chatting to hop up on the luggage-scales, to find out that i currently weigh in at 84.5kg while fully clothed and with my pockets full of gadgets) and in the doing i manage to get an aisle seat in a row of 3 with an empty seat in the middle. score!
20 minutes and the standard security procedures later (you don't seem to need to emigrate from the UK - i've only been stamped out once and that was when i was leaving by ferry of all things) and i'm killing time with the zombie hordes in the dead-zone of the departure lounge at Gatwick Airport. an unadvertised upgrade made to the security scanners in the late-80's was a psychic hack which turns your brain to mush, making you pliable and obedient until you walk through the magnetic coil at the other end which reinstates your free-will. this is why they always ask you to remove your headgear when you go through security: it stops you from hiding a tinfoil hat under your fedora. unfortunately this security feature can be counteracted by being particularly stupid and possessing no discernable imagination, being nicely brainwashed in advance or by reciting particular passages of religious verse to yourself backwards in Sumerian. i swear this is why everyone i see waiting around an airport looks like they're moments away from going Resident Evil on my arse.
i count 3 different WS Smith bookshops, all with more or less the same collection of crap. there's a Buy-3-Get-4 deal going and i can't find more than 2 in any of the 3 stores that i'd want to read, much less spend money on... and they're all marked up by a 3rd anyway. i should be fairly well stocked for books on this trip - i'm packing a Charles Stross book that i know i can read twice if i have to, and a copy of Orcs that The Grey Man threw me the other day that looks big enough to use as a life-raft in case the boat sinks.
aeroplanes traditionally have the worst coffee on the planet and Croatian Airlines might actually be the worst i've ever had. that said, no matter how bad the coffee is on the flight i'm always compelled to have a second cup, or third if i'm on yet another of the Qantas post-Red-Eye-Horror connections i used to take far too often on my way from Perth to Canberra and back in years gone by. it's not a desire for the flavor... or even the caffeine, i think. it seems to satisfy some metaphysical need in my soul that craves recycled coffee grounds that've been cut with sump oil and mud harvested from the Glastonbury Festival, cursed in the name of an elder-god for good measure and had a thimble-full of plastic UHT milk stirred in, served in a plastic cup by an Air Hostie Barbie with a Slavic accent.
the plane was only an hour late in leaving and the food would be best-described as a crime against gastronomy, but i had more leg-room than i think i've ever had in economy short of being in an exit-aisle. the seats are of an older design and you can see the fabric starting to fray but i'd trade all the built-in cushions and plush faux-velour for having the ability to stretch out like this next time i'm flying long-haul. today i'm not - it's a little over 2 hours flight from London Gatwick to Split but for once i was comfortable in an A320-100 and that in itself was golden. the pretty-boy sitting in the window seat has tracks shaved in the the sides of his hair. he looks like a reject from this year's Eurovision, but he offered me a mint after massacring his meal so he's obviously friendly enough.
i'm through immigration and customs with a nice new stamp filling in some of the blank-space on page 4 of my passport (and completely throwing out the chronology - the next free page is 13, dammit) and throw 5 Euros at the bus driver to take me into town. it would have been nice to get here with a bit of daylight to spare because it's a lovely little place, even if it's a pigwhore to navigate. white limestone streets and buildings breaking into tight alleyways lead all through the centre of town. the main bus/ferry port is at one end of the Riva - a long, brightly lit promenade neatly laid out and built into buildings that look like they've stood since the Schizm, lined with palm trees and walked by well-dressed Beautiful People. i'll be here for an evening again in a week so i should get the chance to find somewhere to hang out where i don't stand out like a sore-scum.
i have some directions fossicked from the web last night at somewhere around 3AM, but without a printer i wasn't able to print out the Google Maps output so i'm reliant on finding people who a) speak english and b) know the streets. an english-speaking local with (amazingly) more technology hanging off him than me pulls out his GPS-phone and shows me the way, but it's still half an hour before i find the hostel i managed to book into last night. Meri, who owns and runs the little guest-house, lets me in and even takes me down to find somewhere to get a quiet bite at 10PM, which is how i've fetched up sitting in an open square outside a little cafe playing dance hits from the 80's. a quick glance at the menu gives me the feeling that i'm going to be OK here - coffee costs the equivalent of a pound, pints come in at around £2.50, which is what it cost me for a couple of massive slices of pizza down on the Riva.
at least my street-smarts haven't failed me. they've been developing nicely in the last few months, but i reckon i'm going to need all of them and more in the next little while as i venture out of the UK and out into Europe. that said, it feels really good to be a little off the beaten track, in a place i'd only ever heard of in "Where in Europe is Carmen Sandiego?" before a couple of months ago. i think i'm going to have to see if i can find someone who'll make me a coffee and sit around in this little square for a while, listening to the group of guys a couple of doors down who've just started singing in close harmony - a song i've never heard in a language i don't understand in a place i can barely point out on the map.
life is good. travel is better. Split, on the other hand, is fucking gorgeous.
20 minutes and the standard security procedures later (you don't seem to need to emigrate from the UK - i've only been stamped out once and that was when i was leaving by ferry of all things) and i'm killing time with the zombie hordes in the dead-zone of the departure lounge at Gatwick Airport. an unadvertised upgrade made to the security scanners in the late-80's was a psychic hack which turns your brain to mush, making you pliable and obedient until you walk through the magnetic coil at the other end which reinstates your free-will. this is why they always ask you to remove your headgear when you go through security: it stops you from hiding a tinfoil hat under your fedora. unfortunately this security feature can be counteracted by being particularly stupid and possessing no discernable imagination, being nicely brainwashed in advance or by reciting particular passages of religious verse to yourself backwards in Sumerian. i swear this is why everyone i see waiting around an airport looks like they're moments away from going Resident Evil on my arse.
i count 3 different WS Smith bookshops, all with more or less the same collection of crap. there's a Buy-3-Get-4 deal going and i can't find more than 2 in any of the 3 stores that i'd want to read, much less spend money on... and they're all marked up by a 3rd anyway. i should be fairly well stocked for books on this trip - i'm packing a Charles Stross book that i know i can read twice if i have to, and a copy of Orcs that The Grey Man threw me the other day that looks big enough to use as a life-raft in case the boat sinks.
aeroplanes traditionally have the worst coffee on the planet and Croatian Airlines might actually be the worst i've ever had. that said, no matter how bad the coffee is on the flight i'm always compelled to have a second cup, or third if i'm on yet another of the Qantas post-Red-Eye-Horror connections i used to take far too often on my way from Perth to Canberra and back in years gone by. it's not a desire for the flavor... or even the caffeine, i think. it seems to satisfy some metaphysical need in my soul that craves recycled coffee grounds that've been cut with sump oil and mud harvested from the Glastonbury Festival, cursed in the name of an elder-god for good measure and had a thimble-full of plastic UHT milk stirred in, served in a plastic cup by an Air Hostie Barbie with a Slavic accent.
the plane was only an hour late in leaving and the food would be best-described as a crime against gastronomy, but i had more leg-room than i think i've ever had in economy short of being in an exit-aisle. the seats are of an older design and you can see the fabric starting to fray but i'd trade all the built-in cushions and plush faux-velour for having the ability to stretch out like this next time i'm flying long-haul. today i'm not - it's a little over 2 hours flight from London Gatwick to Split but for once i was comfortable in an A320-100 and that in itself was golden. the pretty-boy sitting in the window seat has tracks shaved in the the sides of his hair. he looks like a reject from this year's Eurovision, but he offered me a mint after massacring his meal so he's obviously friendly enough.
i'm through immigration and customs with a nice new stamp filling in some of the blank-space on page 4 of my passport (and completely throwing out the chronology - the next free page is 13, dammit) and throw 5 Euros at the bus driver to take me into town. it would have been nice to get here with a bit of daylight to spare because it's a lovely little place, even if it's a pigwhore to navigate. white limestone streets and buildings breaking into tight alleyways lead all through the centre of town. the main bus/ferry port is at one end of the Riva - a long, brightly lit promenade neatly laid out and built into buildings that look like they've stood since the Schizm, lined with palm trees and walked by well-dressed Beautiful People. i'll be here for an evening again in a week so i should get the chance to find somewhere to hang out where i don't stand out like a sore-scum.
i have some directions fossicked from the web last night at somewhere around 3AM, but without a printer i wasn't able to print out the Google Maps output so i'm reliant on finding people who a) speak english and b) know the streets. an english-speaking local with (amazingly) more technology hanging off him than me pulls out his GPS-phone and shows me the way, but it's still half an hour before i find the hostel i managed to book into last night. Meri, who owns and runs the little guest-house, lets me in and even takes me down to find somewhere to get a quiet bite at 10PM, which is how i've fetched up sitting in an open square outside a little cafe playing dance hits from the 80's. a quick glance at the menu gives me the feeling that i'm going to be OK here - coffee costs the equivalent of a pound, pints come in at around £2.50, which is what it cost me for a couple of massive slices of pizza down on the Riva.
at least my street-smarts haven't failed me. they've been developing nicely in the last few months, but i reckon i'm going to need all of them and more in the next little while as i venture out of the UK and out into Europe. that said, it feels really good to be a little off the beaten track, in a place i'd only ever heard of in "Where in Europe is Carmen Sandiego?" before a couple of months ago. i think i'm going to have to see if i can find someone who'll make me a coffee and sit around in this little square for a while, listening to the group of guys a couple of doors down who've just started singing in close harmony - a song i've never heard in a language i don't understand in a place i can barely point out on the map.
life is good. travel is better. Split, on the other hand, is fucking gorgeous.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
in the company of friends...
it can be kinda odd seeing people you know from home when you're distinctly Away From Home. i have friends i've met in Perth, Canberra, Melbourne and here in London... it's just a little offputting when they start to mix themselves up. it took a bit of getting used to when Moonbug moved to Canberra. now through amusing happenstance we're both on the other side of the planet, living an hour's bus ride from each other. when Julia moved to Perth from Canberra and came back telling stories of her adventures in some of my old haunts it was strange hearing her perspective. now i've just spent the last week hanging with Ondine and The Marten and somehow it wasn't weird at all. there wasn't even a period of "what have you been up to talk", but then with Ondine there never is. the conversation picks up again like it's only been a day and the rest fills itself in over time after we've finished our okonomiyaki and headed off down the road.
it's been a pleasant time playing tour guide, running them around Camden and Borough Markets, through the touristy areas around Trafalgar Square and generally breaking her by making her walk too damn far. it's been quite civilised as well with lunch at a Michelin Star Chinese restaurant just off Tottenham Court Road one day, and High Tea at the Dorchester Hotel on another followed by the feeding of squirels in Hyde Park. now, if only the Depeche Mode concert they'd come all this way to see hadn't been cancelled i think this would have been an altogether flawless trip for them.
meanwhile, i've been on the cusp of buying my homeward-bound tickets for the last few days. i'd have done it tonight if i'd not received a call about a promising-looking job completely out of the blue yesterday. i'm not excactly holding outv much hope for it. to be honest, i don't really want it. i've been spending my quiet hours with Google Maps open to a full view of Europe, my finger tracing lines on my screen of destinations and investigations of how i'm going to reach them. getting a job now would just get in the way of me wearing the soles of my shoes down to nothing on medieval cobbles and filling my hard drives with photos. that said, if they offer i'll take. i can always get back to Europe another time, whereas arriving back in Canberra penniless would be less than ideal. i'll know sometime next week, and when this job falls through like all the others i'll be able to wash my hands of the entire "working" idea and focus on blowing my slush fund hitting as many countries as i can before i run out of time then go watch my kid brother tie the knot.
it's been a pleasant time playing tour guide, running them around Camden and Borough Markets, through the touristy areas around Trafalgar Square and generally breaking her by making her walk too damn far. it's been quite civilised as well with lunch at a Michelin Star Chinese restaurant just off Tottenham Court Road one day, and High Tea at the Dorchester Hotel on another followed by the feeding of squirels in Hyde Park. now, if only the Depeche Mode concert they'd come all this way to see hadn't been cancelled i think this would have been an altogether flawless trip for them.
meanwhile, i've been on the cusp of buying my homeward-bound tickets for the last few days. i'd have done it tonight if i'd not received a call about a promising-looking job completely out of the blue yesterday. i'm not excactly holding outv much hope for it. to be honest, i don't really want it. i've been spending my quiet hours with Google Maps open to a full view of Europe, my finger tracing lines on my screen of destinations and investigations of how i'm going to reach them. getting a job now would just get in the way of me wearing the soles of my shoes down to nothing on medieval cobbles and filling my hard drives with photos. that said, if they offer i'll take. i can always get back to Europe another time, whereas arriving back in Canberra penniless would be less than ideal. i'll know sometime next week, and when this job falls through like all the others i'll be able to wash my hands of the entire "working" idea and focus on blowing my slush fund hitting as many countries as i can before i run out of time then go watch my kid brother tie the knot.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Gloucestershire: two boys from Perth and a rented Kia vs. the West Midlands...
what a weekend. no, seriously, what an epic fucking weekend. to think it nearly ended before it began, but i'll get to that. SpeedFox and i have had this planned for a while now - ever since we realised when it was going down. it started, as many of these ideas do, in a pub.
"Hey, have you heard of the Gloucester Cheese Rolling?"
hell yeah i have!
"You want to go?"
do i have a penchant for wearing too much black???
it's got to be one of the silliest things you've ever heard of. bloke throws a wheel of Double Gloucester down a hill with a 1:2 gradient and a mob of yahoos chase it. first one to the bottom gets the cheese. comparative silliness includes the Running of the Bulls and the Tomatina Festival, with similar injury ratios. colour me keen as mustard.
of course, there were a couple of setbacks. for starters, by the time we worked out when it was happening Fox was seconds away from hitting the "Confirm" button on a weekender in Belgium. louise was originally going to come along but managed to get herself uninvited, then with days remaining before we were set to head off the prices for hire-cars doubled overnight. we thought all was lost - our plans for the weekend really required having our own independent transport - until i came up with a bright idea which saved the day. see, it was only the hire prices in LONDON which had doubled...
our final plan was elegant in its simplicity: catch the first train out of Paddington to Bristol at 7AM on Saturday morning, pick up the car at 9 and head for Cardiff for breakfast. wander around Wales until we were sick of the idea and head for Coleford, a sleepy little farming village in the Forest of Dean (where SpeedFox was born and where we'd scored lodgings with his aunt and uncle). we get ourselves an early night and be up at 2:30AM to be in the car by 3 and on the road to Salisbury so that we can get to Stonehenge by 5:30. breakfast in Bath, then fire on to explore the Forest and the Wye Valley in the afternoon. have a well-deserved sleep-in on Sunday night, then off to Gloucester to attack a hill with a couple of other maniacs, thousands of spectators and global news coverage and generally try not to die before making a break for London and ditch the hire car at the Hertz down the road from my place in Kennington. what could possibly go wrong?
in the end: nothing. nothing whatsoever. well, almost.
getting up at 5AM sucks. when we met at Paddington we'd had about 7 hours sleep between us. itchy eyeballs aside, it was a pleasant train ride made easier by sugar-free energy drinks. we found the Hertz with the help of a map Fox had printed off the day before and were out of town quicker than you can say "which way to Cardiff?", which is a pleasant little town. we got in a little over an hour later, grabbed a bite to eat and spend the rest of our time there wandering around Cardiff Castle. amusingly, it was Fox who suggested that i make a scene and get my poi out in the courtyard of the old keep and of course i couldn't resist. it's well-worth a visit, even just for the quiet time of sitting around the grass being pleasantly surrounded by history (and tourists, let's not forget the tourists).
having had our fill of Wales we decided it was time to head for Coleford. Fox's aunt and uncle were sitting in the sun out the front when we got there so we joined them for a nice cup of tea and a chat before we went off to explore Simmonds Yat in the Valley. it took us a couple of wrong turns to find what we were looking for, but when we did the views were spectacular, and we eyed off a pub that we pledged to hit at the next opportunity. meanwhile, we were nearly late back at Coleford for tea kindly supplied by Fox's family, then we capped off the evening with a quiet pint at The Miner where he remembers his folk having a going-away party back when he was 6 and they were moving away to Oz.
getting up with less than 4 hours of sleep hurt. Fox lived his dream and took the wheel down to Salisbury so that i could play DJ and navigator (our little Kia had both USB and audio input so my PSD brought the noise). driving around england in the long pre-dawn was a great way to get around quickly, with sod-all anyone else on the roads. getting off the Motorway had us dodging deer and rabbits, and at one point the road was lined with bunnies all sitting and looking away from the road at regularly spaced intervals - our very own honor-guard, Watership Down style.
we finally hit Stonehenge at 5:15AM, just in time to see the sun crest the horizon. there were a pile of shivering people who'd come for their Stone Circle Access, and after a micro-briefing (don't damage the stones, no food, drink or smoking. now go have fun) we were let loose and spent an hour wandering around taking photos and with Fox as a willing cameraman i even managed to get a video of me flinging my poi around while he walked around me in a semicircle to get in as much of the scenery as he could.
you don't usually get to go INTO the circle at Stonehenge. if you rock up during the day you go through a tunnel under the road and are greeted with a discrete fence that prevents you from getting more within around 20 metres of the circle. book in advance, pay a little more and arrive before or after the regular session is closed and you get to go play. why the fuck else do you think we were there at ridiculous-o'clock in the morning?
when we got to Bath it was a ghost-town. the only people who seemed to be up and about were us and a few haunted-looking backpackers who were obviously on their way somewhere else. what was awesome was the chance to drive around the hilly streets exploring the place and getting to walk the streets without interferencne. we couldn't find a feed tho and by 9:30 we'd been there for nearly 2 hours and were getting hungry. we didn't find food until nearly 11, and had gone to Bristol via Avonmouth. we were originally heading for Weston-Super-Mare because it was a) on the coast, b) on the map and c) had a cool name, but every time we spied a sign for it we wound up lost and decided that the gods did not smile on WSM and we should try elsewhere. i finally got my Big Breakfast tho (which was... reasonably large), so at least i didn't go without.
by 1PM we were back in the Forest and buggered. we'd had a full day and covered 200 miles before breakfast on fuck-all sleep and we'd had it. alarms were set and we got 3 hours of sleep (each!) and were up in time to get back to Simonds Yat and hit The Royal for well-deserved beers in the sun.
i have a concept i've been working on for a while now: the Crystaline Perfect Moment: a quantum second in time that stretches out long enough for you to absorb everything about it and ingrain the entirety of the sensorium like a 3D photograph with the smell and taste and the warmth of the sun against your skin, the sound of the birds fucking around in the background and the view of whatever you're looking at. sitting at a park bench in front of The Royal with a view of the Wye Valley with a half-finished pint of cold Kronenboug, the tree-sperm floting in the air with a good friend sitting across the table... this was one of those moments. "how's the serenity?" SpeedFox quotes from The Castle. we must have say there for 2 hours, until the sun finally dropped behind the ridge across the river and we headed into town for some food and a few more beers to round off a fantastic day.
we hit Gloucester about an hour before the first race the next day. it's a tradition shrouded in history, but for once i'm not really interested too much in the background. take 100m of 1:2 gradient hill and throw yourself down it. thousands come to watch or participate, crowding the sides of the hill or the flatish plain below. we didn't manage to get in a race in the end, but once it was all over anyone who still wanted to go down hopped the fence, lined up and went down as a horde. i was a little worried about my knees, knowing that one foot wrong and i'd twist or jar something and it'd be all over red rover so i prioritised sliding on my arse to trying to stay upright. take three steps, slide, get some footing for another couple of steps, slide again and roll, slide, run, slide and roll until you hit the bare-10m of runoff before the bales of hay. the rugby team jumped out of my way - i was rolling sideways as i hit the bottom and somehow manged to get on my feet with enough time to hit the hay head-on, face to face with a woman who seemed part of the official team.
G'DAY!
"Are you alright?"
i'm AWESOME! that was FUCKING INCREDIBLE!!!!
she must get a lot of that.
we'd waited in line for hours, drinking a couple of tinnies of Dutch Courage and making friends with a couple of kids behind us in the queue. they'd come down from Canterbury and camped on the hill the night before. it'd taken them 3 hours to walk from the middle of Gloucester so we insisted on taking them into town. it wasn't far out of our way and there were 5 seats in the car so why not?
we fly down the road to Ross-on-Wye and pull into the car park of the restaurant right behind Fox's aunt and uncle. we were in a hurry, but it helped that the A road was windy and begged to be taken at speed. we were still muddy and filthy so he dived into the toilets to get changed and i headed down into the town to do the same, making use of the public convenience to clean off the caked-on mud and change into something clean then crossing over into the park on the River Wye to have a makeshift picnic and read my book on a park-bench.
come 11PM and i was dropping him off at his place in Hammersmith then heading for basecamp. i'd got a message from louise on Saturday night when i turned my phone back on saying that she'd found the perfect place to move into and was shifting on Sunday, so once i'd dumped the car back at Hertz i walked into a half-empty room and all the peace and quiet i could want. how's the serenity? today included the now-regular ritual of going over the photos and uploading them to the web and preparing for the hate-mail from people screaming "YOU BASTARD!"
but seriously, what a great fucking weekend.
"Hey, have you heard of the Gloucester Cheese Rolling?"
hell yeah i have!
"You want to go?"
do i have a penchant for wearing too much black???
it's got to be one of the silliest things you've ever heard of. bloke throws a wheel of Double Gloucester down a hill with a 1:2 gradient and a mob of yahoos chase it. first one to the bottom gets the cheese. comparative silliness includes the Running of the Bulls and the Tomatina Festival, with similar injury ratios. colour me keen as mustard.
of course, there were a couple of setbacks. for starters, by the time we worked out when it was happening Fox was seconds away from hitting the "Confirm" button on a weekender in Belgium. louise was originally going to come along but managed to get herself uninvited, then with days remaining before we were set to head off the prices for hire-cars doubled overnight. we thought all was lost - our plans for the weekend really required having our own independent transport - until i came up with a bright idea which saved the day. see, it was only the hire prices in LONDON which had doubled...
our final plan was elegant in its simplicity: catch the first train out of Paddington to Bristol at 7AM on Saturday morning, pick up the car at 9 and head for Cardiff for breakfast. wander around Wales until we were sick of the idea and head for Coleford, a sleepy little farming village in the Forest of Dean (where SpeedFox was born and where we'd scored lodgings with his aunt and uncle). we get ourselves an early night and be up at 2:30AM to be in the car by 3 and on the road to Salisbury so that we can get to Stonehenge by 5:30. breakfast in Bath, then fire on to explore the Forest and the Wye Valley in the afternoon. have a well-deserved sleep-in on Sunday night, then off to Gloucester to attack a hill with a couple of other maniacs, thousands of spectators and global news coverage and generally try not to die before making a break for London and ditch the hire car at the Hertz down the road from my place in Kennington. what could possibly go wrong?
in the end: nothing. nothing whatsoever. well, almost.
getting up at 5AM sucks. when we met at Paddington we'd had about 7 hours sleep between us. itchy eyeballs aside, it was a pleasant train ride made easier by sugar-free energy drinks. we found the Hertz with the help of a map Fox had printed off the day before and were out of town quicker than you can say "which way to Cardiff?", which is a pleasant little town. we got in a little over an hour later, grabbed a bite to eat and spend the rest of our time there wandering around Cardiff Castle. amusingly, it was Fox who suggested that i make a scene and get my poi out in the courtyard of the old keep and of course i couldn't resist. it's well-worth a visit, even just for the quiet time of sitting around the grass being pleasantly surrounded by history (and tourists, let's not forget the tourists).
having had our fill of Wales we decided it was time to head for Coleford. Fox's aunt and uncle were sitting in the sun out the front when we got there so we joined them for a nice cup of tea and a chat before we went off to explore Simmonds Yat in the Valley. it took us a couple of wrong turns to find what we were looking for, but when we did the views were spectacular, and we eyed off a pub that we pledged to hit at the next opportunity. meanwhile, we were nearly late back at Coleford for tea kindly supplied by Fox's family, then we capped off the evening with a quiet pint at The Miner where he remembers his folk having a going-away party back when he was 6 and they were moving away to Oz.
getting up with less than 4 hours of sleep hurt. Fox lived his dream and took the wheel down to Salisbury so that i could play DJ and navigator (our little Kia had both USB and audio input so my PSD brought the noise). driving around england in the long pre-dawn was a great way to get around quickly, with sod-all anyone else on the roads. getting off the Motorway had us dodging deer and rabbits, and at one point the road was lined with bunnies all sitting and looking away from the road at regularly spaced intervals - our very own honor-guard, Watership Down style.
we finally hit Stonehenge at 5:15AM, just in time to see the sun crest the horizon. there were a pile of shivering people who'd come for their Stone Circle Access, and after a micro-briefing (don't damage the stones, no food, drink or smoking. now go have fun) we were let loose and spent an hour wandering around taking photos and with Fox as a willing cameraman i even managed to get a video of me flinging my poi around while he walked around me in a semicircle to get in as much of the scenery as he could.
you don't usually get to go INTO the circle at Stonehenge. if you rock up during the day you go through a tunnel under the road and are greeted with a discrete fence that prevents you from getting more within around 20 metres of the circle. book in advance, pay a little more and arrive before or after the regular session is closed and you get to go play. why the fuck else do you think we were there at ridiculous-o'clock in the morning?
when we got to Bath it was a ghost-town. the only people who seemed to be up and about were us and a few haunted-looking backpackers who were obviously on their way somewhere else. what was awesome was the chance to drive around the hilly streets exploring the place and getting to walk the streets without interferencne. we couldn't find a feed tho and by 9:30 we'd been there for nearly 2 hours and were getting hungry. we didn't find food until nearly 11, and had gone to Bristol via Avonmouth. we were originally heading for Weston-Super-Mare because it was a) on the coast, b) on the map and c) had a cool name, but every time we spied a sign for it we wound up lost and decided that the gods did not smile on WSM and we should try elsewhere. i finally got my Big Breakfast tho (which was... reasonably large), so at least i didn't go without.
by 1PM we were back in the Forest and buggered. we'd had a full day and covered 200 miles before breakfast on fuck-all sleep and we'd had it. alarms were set and we got 3 hours of sleep (each!) and were up in time to get back to Simonds Yat and hit The Royal for well-deserved beers in the sun.
i have a concept i've been working on for a while now: the Crystaline Perfect Moment: a quantum second in time that stretches out long enough for you to absorb everything about it and ingrain the entirety of the sensorium like a 3D photograph with the smell and taste and the warmth of the sun against your skin, the sound of the birds fucking around in the background and the view of whatever you're looking at. sitting at a park bench in front of The Royal with a view of the Wye Valley with a half-finished pint of cold Kronenboug, the tree-sperm floting in the air with a good friend sitting across the table... this was one of those moments. "how's the serenity?" SpeedFox quotes from The Castle. we must have say there for 2 hours, until the sun finally dropped behind the ridge across the river and we headed into town for some food and a few more beers to round off a fantastic day.
we hit Gloucester about an hour before the first race the next day. it's a tradition shrouded in history, but for once i'm not really interested too much in the background. take 100m of 1:2 gradient hill and throw yourself down it. thousands come to watch or participate, crowding the sides of the hill or the flatish plain below. we didn't manage to get in a race in the end, but once it was all over anyone who still wanted to go down hopped the fence, lined up and went down as a horde. i was a little worried about my knees, knowing that one foot wrong and i'd twist or jar something and it'd be all over red rover so i prioritised sliding on my arse to trying to stay upright. take three steps, slide, get some footing for another couple of steps, slide again and roll, slide, run, slide and roll until you hit the bare-10m of runoff before the bales of hay. the rugby team jumped out of my way - i was rolling sideways as i hit the bottom and somehow manged to get on my feet with enough time to hit the hay head-on, face to face with a woman who seemed part of the official team.
G'DAY!
"Are you alright?"
i'm AWESOME! that was FUCKING INCREDIBLE!!!!
she must get a lot of that.
we'd waited in line for hours, drinking a couple of tinnies of Dutch Courage and making friends with a couple of kids behind us in the queue. they'd come down from Canterbury and camped on the hill the night before. it'd taken them 3 hours to walk from the middle of Gloucester so we insisted on taking them into town. it wasn't far out of our way and there were 5 seats in the car so why not?
we fly down the road to Ross-on-Wye and pull into the car park of the restaurant right behind Fox's aunt and uncle. we were in a hurry, but it helped that the A road was windy and begged to be taken at speed. we were still muddy and filthy so he dived into the toilets to get changed and i headed down into the town to do the same, making use of the public convenience to clean off the caked-on mud and change into something clean then crossing over into the park on the River Wye to have a makeshift picnic and read my book on a park-bench.
come 11PM and i was dropping him off at his place in Hammersmith then heading for basecamp. i'd got a message from louise on Saturday night when i turned my phone back on saying that she'd found the perfect place to move into and was shifting on Sunday, so once i'd dumped the car back at Hertz i walked into a half-empty room and all the peace and quiet i could want. how's the serenity? today included the now-regular ritual of going over the photos and uploading them to the web and preparing for the hate-mail from people screaming "YOU BASTARD!"
but seriously, what a great fucking weekend.
Friday, May 22, 2009
time off to catch my breath...
i've had a nice quiet week since getting back from Dublin - Eurovision on saturday night after wandering around Shoreditch looking at urban art, playing with carnies in the park on sunday and now a week of chilling around the flat, venturing out here and there for a bit of amusement whenever i can be bothered. Ireland left me nowhere near as exhausted or shattered as Egypt. the pace was better for a start, and i didn't feel like i had to be constantly on the go for fear of missing something important. this meant that the next day i was ready to hit the street which is particularly good since Ellen and i did plenty of walking.
i met Ellen through Moonbug back in December and while we've not been particularly close we've gotten along quiet nicely ever since and so when she picked up a guide-book outlining routes to take through various parts of London where you can see the works of the guerilla-artist Banksy i jumped at it. two people all dressed up for an evening out must have looked odd squeezing between fence-posts or climbing over walls, but these are the things you have to do if you want to see some of the secret scenery of Shoreditch. if you've not heard of Banksy you really should look him up. his work is anti-establishment without being rabidly anarchistic and interestingly executed.
i've hit a nice little groove for the time being. i'm still looking at jobs when i can be bothered, but i'm not really giving it much of my brainspace. in fact, i'm really just going with whatever seems to flow which is part of the reason i've not been blogging a whole lot. i don't really have anything much to say at the moment while i focus on cruising and enjoying the moment, even if that moment involves spending hours at a time cruising the net while i chat to people on IM, or talk to people across the world on Skype. life is going to heat up again soon enough and when it does i'll be screaming off in whatever direction i've found myself facing so i might as well be mentally prepared when it happens...
i met Ellen through Moonbug back in December and while we've not been particularly close we've gotten along quiet nicely ever since and so when she picked up a guide-book outlining routes to take through various parts of London where you can see the works of the guerilla-artist Banksy i jumped at it. two people all dressed up for an evening out must have looked odd squeezing between fence-posts or climbing over walls, but these are the things you have to do if you want to see some of the secret scenery of Shoreditch. if you've not heard of Banksy you really should look him up. his work is anti-establishment without being rabidly anarchistic and interestingly executed.
i've hit a nice little groove for the time being. i'm still looking at jobs when i can be bothered, but i'm not really giving it much of my brainspace. in fact, i'm really just going with whatever seems to flow which is part of the reason i've not been blogging a whole lot. i don't really have anything much to say at the moment while i focus on cruising and enjoying the moment, even if that moment involves spending hours at a time cruising the net while i chat to people on IM, or talk to people across the world on Skype. life is going to heat up again soon enough and when it does i'll be screaming off in whatever direction i've found myself facing so i might as well be mentally prepared when it happens...
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Ireland: Guinness is good for you!
we're already in Dingle, but we're heading to Dingle. it's a little confusing, especially when you wind up on a boat leaving Dingle Harbor in Dingle to go chasing the Dingle Dolphins off the Dingle Penninsula. there was once a fisherman who lived in those parts known affectionately as Fungus due to his general lack of hygiene and microbiologically curious growths who had a dolphin as a companion. Fungus is gone, but Fungi the dolphin remains and is regularly pestered by tourists - myself included. after wandering around the charming little town of Dingle i couldn't resist the chance to hop on a boat and bother the wildlife, and had a lovely time watching them splash around while i got to know the Claires (Sydney and Perth in order of age). i'd have taken more photos, but my camera battery was dying a death and i had no idea when i'd next get a chance to charge it so i kept it in my pocket a lot of the time. i'm just glad that most of the ones i did take came out nicely.
we're doing a bog-lap of the Dingle Penninsula. the next one along is Kerry which is the popular one. the route around it is referred to as "The Ring of Kerry", which you may have heard of. Dingle is the same sort of area, but smaller, more densely packed and fits more easily into the tour which is why we get it instead. i've grabbed a seat next to Nathan which may have been a miscalculation since we're both largeish gentlemen and the seating's a little cramped. still, i grabbed as an opportunity to get to know him a little better and it works out well enough. i manage to get some charge on my camera in the cafe overlooking the Sleeping Giant (an island which, if you look at it right, strongly resembles a colossal man lying on his back in the ocean) which means that Ginelle and i get to play our now-standard "grab one of me, i'll get one of you" game before we hop back on the bus for a nap before we get to Killarney.
Galway's a university town. Killarney's a tourist town through and through. word is that the population triples in the summer when everyone comes down to enjoy the National Park - one of only four in Ireland. when i think National Parks, my cultural bias is for large swathes of bushland, untouched but for fire trails and walking paths. Killarney's a lovingly tended park - tended grass and patches of forest, rivers, streams and lakes (with castles in the middle of them). i'm an "optional extras" junkie, so i take the chance to sit on a horse-drawn carriage rather than walking and we spend an hour clip-clopping our way through the place before getting dropped at our hostel. my body's screaming out to lie down on my bunk and do nothing for a while, but i can't bring myself to so i ditch the tourists and head of for a walk around the town. Killarney's a small town though, so it's not long before i run into Vic (England) who tags a long until i randomly find Paul and the other sibs at a pub. Vic keeps going and i stop for a pint and we hang out until we have to go get cleaned up tea. i don't feel that i have to spell out where we wind up later that evening. to cover band was decent and for the fourth time that day i hear Kids by MGMT played. everyone else is well into it, but i'm feeling a bit ill for some reason. the drinks don't taste right and i only have a couple before i leave them to it and head for bed. it was a great "one last hurrah", but it's been a long week and i need sleep, and i wind up sitting around the common room for another hour reading my book while the night-attendant sleeps on the couch across from my comfy armchair.
a solid night of unconsciousness and i'm feeling fucking great, ready to hit the last day with gusto. Paul and Jodie don't look so great, but sweet jebus they're troopers. they've drunk me under the table every night and they're still moving. i'd try to blame it on my greatly-reduced mass, but that would be a cop-out. the glorious weather's taken a break and the clouds have moved in, promising rain Vic tells me. we've been hanging out a lot on the bus while i educate her in the joys of melodic death metal and oz-rock. it helps that she's small so we don't get much in each other's way. it starts drizzling when we get back on the bus after wandering Blarney Castle.
the story goes that there once was a prince who knew he could be king, should be king, but had a bit of an embarrassing speech-impediment. one day he was on one of his long walks around the forest when he came across a witch to whom he poured out his story. she told him to head back home, but look for a stone along the way (he'd know it when he saw it, she said), give it a kiss, keep it close and one day he would indeed be king. fast-forward past the obvious and he does indeed become king of the land and his reign is prosperous, owing in great part to him being able to talk himself out of wars and whatnot, and he built the stone into his castle to keep it safe. now it's a tourist-trap that's disinfected four times a day (more often at the moment, i'd hope, what with the Swine Flu paranoia going around) that you have to lie down and hang down a metre or so backwards to touch your lips to while a beefy Irishman holds you by your coat. it's a gorgeous castle with grounds i could have spent half a day walking around. Nathan and i walk and talk and take each other's photos before we load up and hit Tipperary for lunch (it wasn't really a long way) and then spin on back to Dublin.
i drank a lot of Guinness in Ireland, and it does taste better. because you're in Ireland. and Ireland's awesome. i tended to alternate between Guinness Extra Stout and Bulmers Apple Cider. of course, say Guinness in relation to Dublin and everyone goes on about the Guinness Storehouse at the site of the original brewery at St James Gate and i'm here to tell you that... well... it's not all that. after the Heineken Experience in Amsterdam the Guinness Storehouse was pretty crappy. it's in a fantastic building, with vaguely interesting exhibits, but what you want to do if you go is to go through the "this is how we make our beer" and "here's how we advertise our beer" and "here's the history of the Guinness Phenomenon" shit in the first 20 minutes then fuck off at speed up the elevator to the Gravity Bar at the top of the building. go to the bar and get your free (by which they mean included in the entry fee) pint and find a seat with a view. this shouldn't be too hard. it has windows around ~350 degrees (the elevators aren't transparent) of its circumference with a commanding view of Dublin. it's off in the west of town, so it's not like you're on top of Hilite 33 in Perth, but it's a great view nonetheless. it's a shame we were all a bit too wrecked to enjoy it properly. a week of constant "see things, go drinking, wash, rinse, repeat" has Paul, Jodie and me sitting there trying to enjoy ourselves while we wait to get the fuck out and go have a lie down.
oh, and the gift shop's not all that, either. sorry, i don't need the same tshirt as 300,000 other fuckheads and i've got enough bottle openers.
the Kiwis are out after tea - we hit a chinese buffet in central Dublin because it's a) good, b) plentiful and c) not fucking pub food. they're dead on their feet, which is a shame because i'm in the mood to go exploring. daylight savings means that it's light well past 9PM around this end of the world. luckily, Nathan comes to the rescue with an idea, which is why we find our way to the Brazen Head: the oldest pub in Ireland, established in 1198. it was only supposed to be for a pint, then we'd head back to the hostel but we weren't done so we headed into Temple Bar to have a pint at... Temple Bar. we're still not done, so we find a quiet little local pub near the hostel and have a pint there, walking around in the rain while we compare notes and talk about this, that and nothing.
the next night we're meeting up again. i've spent the day doing a 3-hour walking tour around Dublin (the sort run by students and paid in tips), then wearing myself out hiking around to places that look interesting on the map. Dublin's a fantastic place to wander around. it's small enough that it's pretty much all foot-accessible, big enough that there's plenty of stuff and dense enough that there's plenty to see between point A and point B. i get to pose next to Oscar Wilde again in Mirian Park, emulating a photo i was shown by my good friend Eduardo J. Bovine when i saw him last in Perth all that time ago, saw the sites of the old Viking settlement, the bullet holes in the GPO and the spot where the Rebellion surrendered in 1916 (marked by a red spot on the map, and nothing whatsoever at the site. there IS a great bookshop at the top of the T-intersection which i can strongly recommend. they had possibly the best second-hand section i've ever seen). 7:30PM and i'm at the Dublin Spire (erected for the Millennium, completed in 2002. nuff said, really) meeting up with Nathan, Sydney-Claire, Vic and her mum Julia and do you want to guess what we did? that's right - how better to cap off a week of drinking than by hitting a few pubs? spin forward to somewhere past midnight and Nathan and i are saying farewell with a bear-hug, a promise to find each other on Facebook and offers of lodgings should either of us be in the other's home-town (hmm... now i have a reason to go to Edmonton, Canada :).
i want to fill in what's left of my time in Dublin by seeing as much of it as possible, but after an hour of walking i'm spent. i can see me coming back one day if the stars align, but i think i've had enough for now. unlike the arrival, my departure's uneventful. bus to the ferryport, ferry to Holyhead, the train arrives early and i have no problems changing at Chester. i fall through the door into a dark room at basecamp - louise is out doing whatever she does when she's out - unpack and settle into bed to watch some of the TV i've missed in last week. she rolls in somewhere after midnight and we trade hello's as if i've been out the day not a week, and that's all good with me. i'm still high from the joy of travel and forming embryonic plans for the next trip. it really is a good time to be alive...
we're doing a bog-lap of the Dingle Penninsula. the next one along is Kerry which is the popular one. the route around it is referred to as "The Ring of Kerry", which you may have heard of. Dingle is the same sort of area, but smaller, more densely packed and fits more easily into the tour which is why we get it instead. i've grabbed a seat next to Nathan which may have been a miscalculation since we're both largeish gentlemen and the seating's a little cramped. still, i grabbed as an opportunity to get to know him a little better and it works out well enough. i manage to get some charge on my camera in the cafe overlooking the Sleeping Giant (an island which, if you look at it right, strongly resembles a colossal man lying on his back in the ocean) which means that Ginelle and i get to play our now-standard "grab one of me, i'll get one of you" game before we hop back on the bus for a nap before we get to Killarney.
Galway's a university town. Killarney's a tourist town through and through. word is that the population triples in the summer when everyone comes down to enjoy the National Park - one of only four in Ireland. when i think National Parks, my cultural bias is for large swathes of bushland, untouched but for fire trails and walking paths. Killarney's a lovingly tended park - tended grass and patches of forest, rivers, streams and lakes (with castles in the middle of them). i'm an "optional extras" junkie, so i take the chance to sit on a horse-drawn carriage rather than walking and we spend an hour clip-clopping our way through the place before getting dropped at our hostel. my body's screaming out to lie down on my bunk and do nothing for a while, but i can't bring myself to so i ditch the tourists and head of for a walk around the town. Killarney's a small town though, so it's not long before i run into Vic (England) who tags a long until i randomly find Paul and the other sibs at a pub. Vic keeps going and i stop for a pint and we hang out until we have to go get cleaned up tea. i don't feel that i have to spell out where we wind up later that evening. to cover band was decent and for the fourth time that day i hear Kids by MGMT played. everyone else is well into it, but i'm feeling a bit ill for some reason. the drinks don't taste right and i only have a couple before i leave them to it and head for bed. it was a great "one last hurrah", but it's been a long week and i need sleep, and i wind up sitting around the common room for another hour reading my book while the night-attendant sleeps on the couch across from my comfy armchair.
a solid night of unconsciousness and i'm feeling fucking great, ready to hit the last day with gusto. Paul and Jodie don't look so great, but sweet jebus they're troopers. they've drunk me under the table every night and they're still moving. i'd try to blame it on my greatly-reduced mass, but that would be a cop-out. the glorious weather's taken a break and the clouds have moved in, promising rain Vic tells me. we've been hanging out a lot on the bus while i educate her in the joys of melodic death metal and oz-rock. it helps that she's small so we don't get much in each other's way. it starts drizzling when we get back on the bus after wandering Blarney Castle.
the story goes that there once was a prince who knew he could be king, should be king, but had a bit of an embarrassing speech-impediment. one day he was on one of his long walks around the forest when he came across a witch to whom he poured out his story. she told him to head back home, but look for a stone along the way (he'd know it when he saw it, she said), give it a kiss, keep it close and one day he would indeed be king. fast-forward past the obvious and he does indeed become king of the land and his reign is prosperous, owing in great part to him being able to talk himself out of wars and whatnot, and he built the stone into his castle to keep it safe. now it's a tourist-trap that's disinfected four times a day (more often at the moment, i'd hope, what with the Swine Flu paranoia going around) that you have to lie down and hang down a metre or so backwards to touch your lips to while a beefy Irishman holds you by your coat. it's a gorgeous castle with grounds i could have spent half a day walking around. Nathan and i walk and talk and take each other's photos before we load up and hit Tipperary for lunch (it wasn't really a long way) and then spin on back to Dublin.
i drank a lot of Guinness in Ireland, and it does taste better. because you're in Ireland. and Ireland's awesome. i tended to alternate between Guinness Extra Stout and Bulmers Apple Cider. of course, say Guinness in relation to Dublin and everyone goes on about the Guinness Storehouse at the site of the original brewery at St James Gate and i'm here to tell you that... well... it's not all that. after the Heineken Experience in Amsterdam the Guinness Storehouse was pretty crappy. it's in a fantastic building, with vaguely interesting exhibits, but what you want to do if you go is to go through the "this is how we make our beer" and "here's how we advertise our beer" and "here's the history of the Guinness Phenomenon" shit in the first 20 minutes then fuck off at speed up the elevator to the Gravity Bar at the top of the building. go to the bar and get your free (by which they mean included in the entry fee) pint and find a seat with a view. this shouldn't be too hard. it has windows around ~350 degrees (the elevators aren't transparent) of its circumference with a commanding view of Dublin. it's off in the west of town, so it's not like you're on top of Hilite 33 in Perth, but it's a great view nonetheless. it's a shame we were all a bit too wrecked to enjoy it properly. a week of constant "see things, go drinking, wash, rinse, repeat" has Paul, Jodie and me sitting there trying to enjoy ourselves while we wait to get the fuck out and go have a lie down.
oh, and the gift shop's not all that, either. sorry, i don't need the same tshirt as 300,000 other fuckheads and i've got enough bottle openers.
the Kiwis are out after tea - we hit a chinese buffet in central Dublin because it's a) good, b) plentiful and c) not fucking pub food. they're dead on their feet, which is a shame because i'm in the mood to go exploring. daylight savings means that it's light well past 9PM around this end of the world. luckily, Nathan comes to the rescue with an idea, which is why we find our way to the Brazen Head: the oldest pub in Ireland, established in 1198. it was only supposed to be for a pint, then we'd head back to the hostel but we weren't done so we headed into Temple Bar to have a pint at... Temple Bar. we're still not done, so we find a quiet little local pub near the hostel and have a pint there, walking around in the rain while we compare notes and talk about this, that and nothing.
the next night we're meeting up again. i've spent the day doing a 3-hour walking tour around Dublin (the sort run by students and paid in tips), then wearing myself out hiking around to places that look interesting on the map. Dublin's a fantastic place to wander around. it's small enough that it's pretty much all foot-accessible, big enough that there's plenty of stuff and dense enough that there's plenty to see between point A and point B. i get to pose next to Oscar Wilde again in Mirian Park, emulating a photo i was shown by my good friend Eduardo J. Bovine when i saw him last in Perth all that time ago, saw the sites of the old Viking settlement, the bullet holes in the GPO and the spot where the Rebellion surrendered in 1916 (marked by a red spot on the map, and nothing whatsoever at the site. there IS a great bookshop at the top of the T-intersection which i can strongly recommend. they had possibly the best second-hand section i've ever seen). 7:30PM and i'm at the Dublin Spire (erected for the Millennium, completed in 2002. nuff said, really) meeting up with Nathan, Sydney-Claire, Vic and her mum Julia and do you want to guess what we did? that's right - how better to cap off a week of drinking than by hitting a few pubs? spin forward to somewhere past midnight and Nathan and i are saying farewell with a bear-hug, a promise to find each other on Facebook and offers of lodgings should either of us be in the other's home-town (hmm... now i have a reason to go to Edmonton, Canada :).
i want to fill in what's left of my time in Dublin by seeing as much of it as possible, but after an hour of walking i'm spent. i can see me coming back one day if the stars align, but i think i've had enough for now. unlike the arrival, my departure's uneventful. bus to the ferryport, ferry to Holyhead, the train arrives early and i have no problems changing at Chester. i fall through the door into a dark room at basecamp - louise is out doing whatever she does when she's out - unpack and settle into bed to watch some of the TV i've missed in last week. she rolls in somewhere after midnight and we trade hello's as if i've been out the day not a week, and that's all good with me. i'm still high from the joy of travel and forming embryonic plans for the next trip. it really is a good time to be alive...
Ireland: Is it where you were or who you met while you were there that makes the cider taste so sweet?
by the time i woke up in Dublin 6 days had passed, day after day driving through beautiful countryside, night after night in a different pub and hostel. our hostel in Derry was comfortable and well organised. the hostel in Belfast considerably less so. Galway was EXCELLENT, whereas the interior of the one in Annascaul i barely remember since i spent so little time in it, and almost none of it sober. Killarney was somewhere around average and Dublin did the job well enough, even with the radiators fused to "BLAST FURNACE" (nothing leaving the window ajar didn't fix). after a night out on the piss in Derry i woke up feeling amazingly good considering and stepped out into the dark, overcast morning with my coffee and realised that my mind was blank. nothing to worry about, nothing to plan or consider, just get on the bus and see what the day had in store for me: something i've been hanging out for since before i left Oz all those months ago.
over the rest of the week our merry bus meandered through most of the island of Ireland - the pins in the map on my Picasa album that misses a chunk of the south-east. we didn't really stop much in County Cork, i'm afraid. it's times like this that make me wish my camera auto-geotagged my shots, but micronised GPS is still a ways off, i guess. we managed to get to all the places i wanted to go to (Giant's Causeway, Blarney Castle), as well as places i never knew i wanted to see (The Burren, Cliffs of Moher).
i have a fascination for the Giant's Causeway - an area of volcanic rock which somehow cooled into an array of hexagonal columns marching out into the ocean. it's an almost unique rock formation where mathematical elegance meets the real world to the tune of the waves rolling in off the Irish Sea. it's the sort of place all the tourists want to see and while it's smaller than i'd expected it was still awesome to see and while every man and his dog's been there and wandered around, i kinda wonder how many people have stood in the freezing rain and flung poi around...
most of the tourists didn't hang around long - it was too cold and windy for most of them, but i got in as much as i could before heading back for the bus. next stop was the Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge which started life as an access route for fishermen to get nicely in the path of migratory salmon, now another tourist trap. don't be fooled; it's safe as safe, but the views are incredible and EVERYONE wants a photo of them walking back and forth. i'm just glad it was open - they close it off when the wind's too strong. as far as i was concerned, it was worth it just to be able to look back and look out on the coastline. standing on a plank of wood suspended over 26 metres of air by a few ropes was just a bonus.
before we know it we're in Belfast, sitting in a couple of Black Cabs being driven around some of the political landmarks of the city, and there are many. after the definite bias of the last day it was refreshing when our driver told us that they consider themselves to be neutral - "we hate everyone equally," he says, and we laugh. i'm still not sure whether he was kidding. where in Derry there are murals illustrating the Catholics struggle, in Belfast we found ourselves in a Protestant low-rent area where they all came from the other side. we hear stories about the perils of disloyalty, both real and perceived. we sign the Peace Wall built to separate the residential zones which to this day have gates which close at night in an attempt to kerb the violence (it's explained that soon after the gates were installed the IRA fired an RPG over the top of them to prove a point, demolishing a church in the process. point made, i guess). we go to see the Sinn Fein HQ, site of even more bloodshed, and a prison where ten men died in a hunger strike over their status as Political Prisoners. we're warned to leave the pub half an hour or so before closing time so that anyone watching is less likely to guess at our allegiances based on the direction we head off in. by the time we hit the pub everyone's a little... wary. we're not far from the Europa Hotel which is claimed to be the most bombed building in the world (at one point the IRA decided that the best way to get the attention of the journalists was to start blowing a few of them up. it worked, apparently), and somehow after that we never did feel particularly comfortable.
that night had to be the least fun we had on the entire trip. we fetched up in a pub which was fairly OK for a while, then went off to try another which, while pretty cool, was packed and had nowhere to sit. we moved on to another we'd been recommended to find out it was student disco night, too loud and full of fat girls wearing far too little. back to the original venue and it was louder, messier and irritating. i would up walking a couple of the girls back to the hostel and sitting up chatting with one of the americans while she finished her pizza.
i can't say i'd recommend Belfast as The Place To Visit in Ireland. Dublin is nicer by far IMHO, although your mileage may vary. i got talking to a Brit the other day who's opinion was entirely the opposite. still, i may mention this a few times later until i feel like the point's been driven home enough.
the hostel was crappy, but at least i wasn't in it long. next morning we're off towards Galway way out on the west coast. the weather's cleared up and it's warm, sunny, clouds decorating the sky because plain blue's just so BORING DAHLING! out on the road and the world is green and blue and white, magnificent, glorious, perfect. we've a lot of driving ahead of us, so Tom's grabbed a copy of "In The Name Of The Father" - a movie about a group of Irish folk from Belfast wrongly imprisoned for a bombing in the 70's in the English town of Guildford. more political propaganda, but it's illustrative of the sort of things that went on in the Troubles. i let it play in the background while i watch the scenery i wish would never end scrolls past, thinking of nothing much more than how to frame the next shot. we stop at the shady green cemetery which is the final resting place of W.B. Yeats (as in "tread softly, for you tread on my dreams") and rattle off photos before blasting down to a little seaside town called Strand Hill where i get to dip my toe into the North Atlantic and go nuts with my poi. as i'm packing up Ginelle (Canadian) comes running up to join in and we almost miss the bus, dancing around the beach and generally having a ball, then onto Galway.
i fucking loved Galway. i was about ready to piss into my water bottle by the time we got there (i piss-bolted (pardon the pun) down an alleyway when we pulled up i was so desperate. long drives + diabetes = bladder strain), but soon enough our kit's stowed the sibs and i went a-wandering, fetching up down the docks after a bit of tourist-tat shopping to find that the grass is covered in students sitting around having a beer. beer. on the grass. next to the water. we're down the bottlo faster than you can say 'scuse mate, which way to the offie? and 20 minutes later we're in the middle of it, lying around the grass, enjoying the sunshine and generally having a glorious time of it and while it's only a footnote here, it was one of the highlights of the trip. the pace of the tour was just about right - plenty of things to see, but also plenty of time to chill out and soak up the atmosphere.
another night, another pub and we're in The Quay where i've decided that tonight i'm on cider and we watch the cover band. we're having a blast and laughing like drains - Paul and i get rowdy when they play All Along The Watchtower while Jodie runs around with her plushie sheep. after too many drinks we find the rest of the group at Bar 903 up the road after posing for photos with the Oscar Wilde statue and i call it at somewhere around 1AM to sleep.
the Cliffs of Moher are out in Connaught, the area Oliver Cromwell pushed the Catholics into during the Plantation. after the plush, fertile lands in the east the west is next-to-barren, rocky and hard to cultivate. much of it is bare limestone with shallow soil in the low-areas, contrasting grey and green. during the 17th century the kings of England decided to confiscate catholic lands and hand them over to protestant nobles and army veterans. the Irish were forced to rent their lands back, and anyone surplus to requirements was pushed west "Death or Connaught" was the choice, and millions wound up trying to eke out a living in the Burren. during the Potato Famine nearly 2 million people died out there when their cash crops were barely enough to pay the rent and their food crop shrivelled black with Blight. now it's a tourist mecca and we're driving around looking at the rock walls build all over the place - Famine Walls. some were built to divvy up land for farming, some just to give people something to do. they had a lot of rocks to get out of the way so that they could till the soil they had to go somewhere, so they went into the walls. now the walls remain protected by the National Trust as a reminder and a county-wide monument.
meanwhile, limestone is a pretty soft, fragile sort of rock. unlike the volcanics like granite which are hard and wear slowly, limestone erodes like nobody's business. the waves of the North Atlantic have been battering at these shores for millenia, grinding away from the bottom and undermining the landscape which makes for some unbelieveable cliffs (think Great Ocean Road region in Victoria, Australia). we stop in an area that gives a great idea of what the Burren is all about on one side of the road, then drops off not far from the other. of course, i HAVE to go horsing around and my new friend Nathan (Canadian) helps out taking some insane photos.
from 30-40 metre drops to 250, our next stop is at the Cliffs of Moher which i'd not actually heard of prior to the tour. gentle green slopes drop off into the abyss and the water is so far down you can't even hear the waves. a section of it's been nannyfied and safetied with walls and pavement with a sign which reads "Please do not go past this point" blocking the way to the old goat-trail along the top of the cliffs to the south and is easily defeated. Ginelle's camera's just died - she tried to turn it on as we got off the bus and it's not playing anymore. she's shattered. i know the feeling - that's happened to me twice now in the last few years, so i tell her that's fucked up, but look: come along with me, use my camera for any shots you want to take and i'll copy them over to your card with my laptop later. over the next half-hour we take some mind-blowing photos, and even get videos of us flinging poi around on top of the cliff, two paces away from the dropoff. it's yet another insane part of the world and whenever i look at the photos i'm speechless.
it's also stuck me with a new hobby - getting photos and video of me playing with my fire-toys in amazing parts of the world. sure, Where The Hell Is Matt? got in first, but i'm not getting paid to do it motherfucker. meanwhile, all this adventuring is thirsty work, so it's onwards to the Dingle Penninsula and our introduction to the Irish Carbomb.
Paddywagon Tours decided at one point to set up shop in a little town called Annascaul. it's one of those quiet little villages with somewhere around 330 people living within a 6 mile radius. it's rural and pleasant and fairly conservative, which is of course why they took over a hostel, painted it bright green and named it the Randy Leprechaun. don't ask me, i'm just a fucking tourist, ok? it caused a... um... small amount of controversy, but they finally talked the townsfolk around and so there it sits. it's only open when the tour's there, and i have the feeling it owes its existence mostly to its convenient location for the next day's bog-lap around the Dingle Penninsula. still, it's neat, tidy and has its own bar, and in that they serve Irish Carbombs at 3 for a tenner. it's a bizarre, but entertaining concoction which i have the feeling you'd have to be mad to come up with, and Irish to name so ironically, but what the fuck? take a half-pint of Guinness in a glass. sit it next to a shot of 50/50 Baileys Irish Cream and whiskey. now pick them both up, depth-charge the shot and scull it. now to the other 2 in rapid succession. the men's record is 29 in a night. the lady's record is now 15 since Jodie went in with a bunch of Euros and something to prove. me? i only had 6, and a couple of pints. i was pacing myself... which somehow didn't stop me being talked into doing karaoke. call it peer-pressure. call it i'm surrounded by relative strangers so what the fuck? either way, i was in Ireland, so i sang U2, and i'm at that sort of stage of my life so i sang "i Still Haven't Found What i'm Looking For" and everyone must have been good and drunk by that point because they answered with roaring applause. don't ask me, i can't sing for shit, ok? they must have just been too polite to yell "Get off the stage!"
after that things got messy. Jodie spent some hours searching for her lost camera, only to find that it had fallen under Paul's jeans when she put him to bed. Pam was so sick that she spent most of the next morning clutching a double-plastic bag. faces on the bus were a mixture of "oh god i need more sleep" weariness and "please kill me" despair. no time. NO TIME! we're off to Dingle!
over the rest of the week our merry bus meandered through most of the island of Ireland - the pins in the map on my Picasa album that misses a chunk of the south-east. we didn't really stop much in County Cork, i'm afraid. it's times like this that make me wish my camera auto-geotagged my shots, but micronised GPS is still a ways off, i guess. we managed to get to all the places i wanted to go to (Giant's Causeway, Blarney Castle), as well as places i never knew i wanted to see (The Burren, Cliffs of Moher).
i have a fascination for the Giant's Causeway - an area of volcanic rock which somehow cooled into an array of hexagonal columns marching out into the ocean. it's an almost unique rock formation where mathematical elegance meets the real world to the tune of the waves rolling in off the Irish Sea. it's the sort of place all the tourists want to see and while it's smaller than i'd expected it was still awesome to see and while every man and his dog's been there and wandered around, i kinda wonder how many people have stood in the freezing rain and flung poi around...
most of the tourists didn't hang around long - it was too cold and windy for most of them, but i got in as much as i could before heading back for the bus. next stop was the Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge which started life as an access route for fishermen to get nicely in the path of migratory salmon, now another tourist trap. don't be fooled; it's safe as safe, but the views are incredible and EVERYONE wants a photo of them walking back and forth. i'm just glad it was open - they close it off when the wind's too strong. as far as i was concerned, it was worth it just to be able to look back and look out on the coastline. standing on a plank of wood suspended over 26 metres of air by a few ropes was just a bonus.
before we know it we're in Belfast, sitting in a couple of Black Cabs being driven around some of the political landmarks of the city, and there are many. after the definite bias of the last day it was refreshing when our driver told us that they consider themselves to be neutral - "we hate everyone equally," he says, and we laugh. i'm still not sure whether he was kidding. where in Derry there are murals illustrating the Catholics struggle, in Belfast we found ourselves in a Protestant low-rent area where they all came from the other side. we hear stories about the perils of disloyalty, both real and perceived. we sign the Peace Wall built to separate the residential zones which to this day have gates which close at night in an attempt to kerb the violence (it's explained that soon after the gates were installed the IRA fired an RPG over the top of them to prove a point, demolishing a church in the process. point made, i guess). we go to see the Sinn Fein HQ, site of even more bloodshed, and a prison where ten men died in a hunger strike over their status as Political Prisoners. we're warned to leave the pub half an hour or so before closing time so that anyone watching is less likely to guess at our allegiances based on the direction we head off in. by the time we hit the pub everyone's a little... wary. we're not far from the Europa Hotel which is claimed to be the most bombed building in the world (at one point the IRA decided that the best way to get the attention of the journalists was to start blowing a few of them up. it worked, apparently), and somehow after that we never did feel particularly comfortable.
that night had to be the least fun we had on the entire trip. we fetched up in a pub which was fairly OK for a while, then went off to try another which, while pretty cool, was packed and had nowhere to sit. we moved on to another we'd been recommended to find out it was student disco night, too loud and full of fat girls wearing far too little. back to the original venue and it was louder, messier and irritating. i would up walking a couple of the girls back to the hostel and sitting up chatting with one of the americans while she finished her pizza.
i can't say i'd recommend Belfast as The Place To Visit in Ireland. Dublin is nicer by far IMHO, although your mileage may vary. i got talking to a Brit the other day who's opinion was entirely the opposite. still, i may mention this a few times later until i feel like the point's been driven home enough.
the hostel was crappy, but at least i wasn't in it long. next morning we're off towards Galway way out on the west coast. the weather's cleared up and it's warm, sunny, clouds decorating the sky because plain blue's just so BORING DAHLING! out on the road and the world is green and blue and white, magnificent, glorious, perfect. we've a lot of driving ahead of us, so Tom's grabbed a copy of "In The Name Of The Father" - a movie about a group of Irish folk from Belfast wrongly imprisoned for a bombing in the 70's in the English town of Guildford. more political propaganda, but it's illustrative of the sort of things that went on in the Troubles. i let it play in the background while i watch the scenery i wish would never end scrolls past, thinking of nothing much more than how to frame the next shot. we stop at the shady green cemetery which is the final resting place of W.B. Yeats (as in "tread softly, for you tread on my dreams") and rattle off photos before blasting down to a little seaside town called Strand Hill where i get to dip my toe into the North Atlantic and go nuts with my poi. as i'm packing up Ginelle (Canadian) comes running up to join in and we almost miss the bus, dancing around the beach and generally having a ball, then onto Galway.
i fucking loved Galway. i was about ready to piss into my water bottle by the time we got there (i piss-bolted (pardon the pun) down an alleyway when we pulled up i was so desperate. long drives + diabetes = bladder strain), but soon enough our kit's stowed the sibs and i went a-wandering, fetching up down the docks after a bit of tourist-tat shopping to find that the grass is covered in students sitting around having a beer. beer. on the grass. next to the water. we're down the bottlo faster than you can say 'scuse mate, which way to the offie? and 20 minutes later we're in the middle of it, lying around the grass, enjoying the sunshine and generally having a glorious time of it and while it's only a footnote here, it was one of the highlights of the trip. the pace of the tour was just about right - plenty of things to see, but also plenty of time to chill out and soak up the atmosphere.
another night, another pub and we're in The Quay where i've decided that tonight i'm on cider and we watch the cover band. we're having a blast and laughing like drains - Paul and i get rowdy when they play All Along The Watchtower while Jodie runs around with her plushie sheep. after too many drinks we find the rest of the group at Bar 903 up the road after posing for photos with the Oscar Wilde statue and i call it at somewhere around 1AM to sleep.
the Cliffs of Moher are out in Connaught, the area Oliver Cromwell pushed the Catholics into during the Plantation. after the plush, fertile lands in the east the west is next-to-barren, rocky and hard to cultivate. much of it is bare limestone with shallow soil in the low-areas, contrasting grey and green. during the 17th century the kings of England decided to confiscate catholic lands and hand them over to protestant nobles and army veterans. the Irish were forced to rent their lands back, and anyone surplus to requirements was pushed west "Death or Connaught" was the choice, and millions wound up trying to eke out a living in the Burren. during the Potato Famine nearly 2 million people died out there when their cash crops were barely enough to pay the rent and their food crop shrivelled black with Blight. now it's a tourist mecca and we're driving around looking at the rock walls build all over the place - Famine Walls. some were built to divvy up land for farming, some just to give people something to do. they had a lot of rocks to get out of the way so that they could till the soil they had to go somewhere, so they went into the walls. now the walls remain protected by the National Trust as a reminder and a county-wide monument.
meanwhile, limestone is a pretty soft, fragile sort of rock. unlike the volcanics like granite which are hard and wear slowly, limestone erodes like nobody's business. the waves of the North Atlantic have been battering at these shores for millenia, grinding away from the bottom and undermining the landscape which makes for some unbelieveable cliffs (think Great Ocean Road region in Victoria, Australia). we stop in an area that gives a great idea of what the Burren is all about on one side of the road, then drops off not far from the other. of course, i HAVE to go horsing around and my new friend Nathan (Canadian) helps out taking some insane photos.
from 30-40 metre drops to 250, our next stop is at the Cliffs of Moher which i'd not actually heard of prior to the tour. gentle green slopes drop off into the abyss and the water is so far down you can't even hear the waves. a section of it's been nannyfied and safetied with walls and pavement with a sign which reads "Please do not go past this point" blocking the way to the old goat-trail along the top of the cliffs to the south and is easily defeated. Ginelle's camera's just died - she tried to turn it on as we got off the bus and it's not playing anymore. she's shattered. i know the feeling - that's happened to me twice now in the last few years, so i tell her that's fucked up, but look: come along with me, use my camera for any shots you want to take and i'll copy them over to your card with my laptop later. over the next half-hour we take some mind-blowing photos, and even get videos of us flinging poi around on top of the cliff, two paces away from the dropoff. it's yet another insane part of the world and whenever i look at the photos i'm speechless.
it's also stuck me with a new hobby - getting photos and video of me playing with my fire-toys in amazing parts of the world. sure, Where The Hell Is Matt? got in first, but i'm not getting paid to do it motherfucker. meanwhile, all this adventuring is thirsty work, so it's onwards to the Dingle Penninsula and our introduction to the Irish Carbomb.
Paddywagon Tours decided at one point to set up shop in a little town called Annascaul. it's one of those quiet little villages with somewhere around 330 people living within a 6 mile radius. it's rural and pleasant and fairly conservative, which is of course why they took over a hostel, painted it bright green and named it the Randy Leprechaun. don't ask me, i'm just a fucking tourist, ok? it caused a... um... small amount of controversy, but they finally talked the townsfolk around and so there it sits. it's only open when the tour's there, and i have the feeling it owes its existence mostly to its convenient location for the next day's bog-lap around the Dingle Penninsula. still, it's neat, tidy and has its own bar, and in that they serve Irish Carbombs at 3 for a tenner. it's a bizarre, but entertaining concoction which i have the feeling you'd have to be mad to come up with, and Irish to name so ironically, but what the fuck? take a half-pint of Guinness in a glass. sit it next to a shot of 50/50 Baileys Irish Cream and whiskey. now pick them both up, depth-charge the shot and scull it. now to the other 2 in rapid succession. the men's record is 29 in a night. the lady's record is now 15 since Jodie went in with a bunch of Euros and something to prove. me? i only had 6, and a couple of pints. i was pacing myself... which somehow didn't stop me being talked into doing karaoke. call it peer-pressure. call it i'm surrounded by relative strangers so what the fuck? either way, i was in Ireland, so i sang U2, and i'm at that sort of stage of my life so i sang "i Still Haven't Found What i'm Looking For" and everyone must have been good and drunk by that point because they answered with roaring applause. don't ask me, i can't sing for shit, ok? they must have just been too polite to yell "Get off the stage!"
after that things got messy. Jodie spent some hours searching for her lost camera, only to find that it had fallen under Paul's jeans when she put him to bed. Pam was so sick that she spent most of the next morning clutching a double-plastic bag. faces on the bus were a mixture of "oh god i need more sleep" weariness and "please kill me" despair. no time. NO TIME! we're off to Dingle!
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