Encountering myself

African Adventures: Part III - The bumpy road to Malawi

2010-08-06T17:45:00.012+09:30

Before we'd left for Zanzibar we had bought tickets for four beds in a first class cabin of the Tazara Line train, to take us down to Mbeya in the south of Tanzania, from where we would take a bus into Malawi. We'd bought four beds because passengers get separated by gender unless the entire cabin is bought out, and Paul and I wanted to stay together (to be together, but also to look after our things because we'd heard reports of robberies on the train, especially by people opening your window from the outside at train stops at night and taking things while you sleep! Eek). We took the ferry back to Dar from Zanzibar, changed some money from Tanzanian Shillings into Malawian Kwacha, bought food for the journey, had a chai with Chaki and then headed to the train station - only to find out that there had been a cargo train accident on the line and our train would not run until the following evening! Bah. Back to Dar we went. We got ourselves a new hotel room, had dinner of chicken and chips with Chaki (all 3 of us had food, drinks and chais - for 8500Tsh in total, or about 4 pounds!), had a great sleep and then spent the next day in the markets bargaining for a million and one souvenirs.

Back to the train station that afternoon at 4 for the 6pm departure. I don't know why we thought it would leave on time haha, but we did get a bit restless waiting until the actual departure time of 10:30pm! When our train finally rolled up all of the passengers got into 4 or 5 lines waiting to enter the platform. A station worker stood at the entrance to the platform and allowed one line at a time to move forward, every so often stopping them and getting another line to start. This sounds quite reasonable, until you realise that the guy was screaming and shouting at everyone, being totally arbitrary in the numbers of people he would let through from each line, would wave people through impatiently like they were taking too long but then suddenly shove people around and yelling when they didn't stop quickly enough. He even shoved a boy out of the way which made him knock over a sign, and then he hit the kid for knocking the sign over! It was hilarious to watch but a bit terrifying when it came time to walk past the guy ourselves haha. Everyone in the station seemed to be giggling to themselves.

Finally we got onto the train, a whole cabin to ourselves complete with cockroaches and a fan which didn't work. Hey, at least there was a stick in there to jam the window open or closed with! We tried to sleep as much as we could but I've never been on such a loud, screechy, jerky, bumpy, rocky, grinding train ride in my life, let alone trying to block out the other passengers who seemed to love having a good chat in the corridor at 2am.. The 22 hours couldn't go quickly enough! When morning broke we had a nice time as we passed through a national park, read our books and snoozed. Towards the end of the journey as night fell again, the cockroaches and mosquitoes came out in force. Ugh. We made it into Mbeya around 8pm and were instantly surrounded by a thousand taxi drivers. I hate, hate, hate those situations, so we ended up walking up to a taxi with its light on but no driver and started shouting to see who owned it, rather than dealing with the mob. The driver eventually saw us and ran over, and we got a lift to the Sombrero Hotel for 6000Tsh (3 pounds). Really nice, cool hotel so we had a great sleep.

In the morning we went straight to the bus station to figure out our transport into Malawi. **ALERT - THERE IS NO DIRECT BUS FROM MBEYA INTO MALAWI** A kind young gentleman called Jack (DJ Magic as Paul nicknamed him - he looked like a DJ, he was from Malawi and his name was Jack, hence ma-gic) helped us out by guiding us into his office away from the hordes and showing us the timetable of buses we could take into Malawi. We just had to pay him one payment of 30,000Tsh (about 15 pounds) each and we would get a minibus to the border, then a big bus from the border to Karonga. Easy. On the mini bus to the border a woman sitting behind us tapped me on the shoulder and handed me her phone, on which she had typed 'be careful changing money there are lots of cheats and thieves'! It was nice of her to warn us, we got to chatting and ended up walking through the border with her. When we reached the other side, lo and behold, there was no bus waiting. In fact, there are no buses from the border! Oh we had been cheated big time. The nice woman was with us when we got surrounded by 6 loud guys offering to drive us to Karonga and as she sped up and tried to get away, they left us behind and followed after her. She negotiated with them for us and arranged for one of them to drive us there for 400 kwacha each - a 50km drive for 2 pounds! Not bad :)

Karonga was a hot, dusty, nowhere town, a transit point in the north of Malawi. We tried to find accommodation there but everything was 20 pounds and above! I don't think so. We decided to keep moving on to another town called Chitimba a bit further south and hitched a lift on the back of 2 young boys' bicycles to the bus station for 50 kwacha each :) The bus station was one of the most stressful I've ever been in. 10 guys surrounded us (why does everyone always need to surround us?!) all of them offering different vehicles, prices, times, distances, and apparently levels of safety! "No this man is drunk, he is not safe! No this man, he speeds! He crazy!" We were being told one bus was good, then being told the same bus was not running, then another bus was too slow, another was falling apart, another bus was full, another bus would not leave for hours.. Absolutely exhausting! I ended up walking away to ask a woman sitting down on a nearby bench for her help to make a decision and to get the right price. Then SHE got surrounded by the men! She ended up leading us, with the pack of guys, to a minivan and told us to get in because it was full and almost leaving. Just as we were about to, we spotted a driver of a van who actually looked like a decent guy - we asked him how much and when he would be leaving, and jumped in there instead. We had a bit of a chat and a joke with the driver, and still waited for a good hour to leave, and right as we were about to go - as in we had driven through the station and had reached the gate - the driver jumped out and a different one jumped in! We were furious because we'd chosen the bus because of the driver, and the new guy looked drunk. We gritted our teeth and beared it, while the guy sitting next to me who was pissed out of his mind sat with his face right next to mine, swaying back and forth and trying to make conversation, while the driver left the station but drove all the way back so the man sitting next to him could buy some more 'water'.. We figured if you waited for a completely perfect situation you would never get anywhere in Africa!

We made it to Chitimba! We got out of the bus when we saw the sign for the Chitimba Beach Campsite and walked down a dirt path in the sinking sunshine. We walked past about 10 separate kids who all introduced themselves then asked for our pen or water bottle or pen or bottle haha. We just kept saying "Hi, how are you? No. Hi, how are you? No" over and over haha. At the end of the dirt path was our heaven after a day of hell. A double room, mosquito net and bathroom with a thatched roof for 2800 kwacha (14 pounds) which opened straight onto the sand, a very cool and chilled out bar run by a cute rasta guy with music pumping, and other white people from one of those overland trucks lounging about.. Ahhh.

Posted from Adelaide

The train station's notice board

Market in Dar

Waiting in the train station

Beautiful scenery from the train

Mbeya at sunrise

DJ Magic.... The bastard

The road from Mbeya

Our mini bus driver getting fined for having too many passengers hahahaha

Walking from the bus stop to the border

Where our bus was meant to be..

Chitimba Beach Campsite

African Adventures: Part II - Zanzibar

2010-07-18T14:05:00.007+09:30

Zanzibar was an interesting one. The island lies about 40km off the coast of Tanzania and has been influenced by various cultures over the centuries including Indian and Arabic. It is part of the archipelago known as the Spice Islands, made up of Zanzibar and Pemba. We took the excellent Sea Bus ferry across there for $35US, which included Arnie Schwarzenegger movies to our delight, got our passports stamped at ‘Immigration’ and then got surrounded by men who wanted to show us how to find our hotel. How about this – LEAVE US ALONE!! But no such luck, as much as we tried to look like we knew what we were doing, or tried walking in the opposite direction, or walking super fast or super slow, we couldn’t lose them. In the end I assume they got commission from our hotel. We stayed in Zanzibar’s capital, Stone Town, for 3 nights. I think we felt a bit let down about the island because all I’d seen of it before is the picturesque photos of white sands and beautiful sunsets, which yes we did see, but for the most part Stone Town is a dingy, dark cobweb of alleyways. It was one of those places that you don’t want to be walking around in after sunset. In fact our hotel manager warned us to keep our stuff away from the windows in our room because he’d heard of a man who could climb up the wall and reach inside to steal things, ‘but don’t worry, he can’t get inside, he could only reach inside with his arm’. Sure, I believe that these wooden shutters with broken slats and no locks would be able to keep someone from entering the room! We wanted to move up a floor, which the guy finally agreed to after the third time we asked.

One of those things you ‘have to do’ is a spice tour where you’re driven out to a spice farm in a mini bus, walked around and shown different plants and trees for a couple of hours and then given a lunch made using some of the spices that you’ve just seen. We did this on our first day and it was actually really cool seeing cinnamon, cocoa beans, cloves, lemongrass, turmeric, star fruit (not really a spice..) and vanilla pods in their original form. Our lunch was also pretty nice and I bought an ointment made from lemongrass that soothes itchy or sun-burnt skin AND acts as a mosquito repellent! After the tour we were dropped by the sea front in Stone Town and wandered back to our hotel in the sun, stopping for a drink to watch some boys jumping into the water. Walking through the alleyways we came across the Zanzibar Coffee House which apparently serves some of their best coffee. There was a poster nearby for the up-coming Tanzanian Barista Championship which excited us coming from the coffee freak cafes of Edinburgh. We had a nice evening meal, sharing a pizza at a huge open bar overlooking the ocean – til the mosquitoes came out in force and we sped back to the hotel.

The following day we took a daladala out to the Jozani Forest where we took bicycles and rode a kilometre or so to a mangrove walk. We saw some amazing Red Colobus Monkeys, unique to Zanzibar, and got within a couple of metres of them! After the thrilling mangroves (not so much), we walked ourselves through the rainforest and were petrified by some other monkeys and Paul was eaten by a few ants. We stood on the road under the shade of the Jozani Forest sign after we were done and waited for a daladala to drive past and hopefully take us to Jambiani beach. We ended up hitching a lift in a 4WD (funny how I would never get into a car full of strangers at home, but in Africa I would..) which was great and found the white, never-ending beach. We chilled out in a beach hut bar run by a bunch of rastas, and then found a place for lunch which took a whopping hour to deliver our food.

We walked along the beach in the blistering sun for about 20 minutes and managed to burn like beetroots, then headed back to the little white-washed village to find a daladala back to Stone Town. Waiting in the village for about half an hour was really relaxing and interesting in the end – we sat under the shade of a rickety hut with a little old man and watched a group of guys riding their motorbikes, others walking around barefoot, while a little girl nearby dragged a squid around on the ground! The daladala back took about 3 hours and it was hilarious entertainment. Stuffed to the brim, including 8 tourists, one of which a Korean girl who was telling everyone on board that she was short-changed and it was bad for their economy because she writes in newspapers in 4 languages and she’s going to spread the word about how bad Tanzania is; an old man telling us he has 2 wives and is looking for a third, who cracked up laughing when I asked (knowing the answer already) whether women could have more than 1 husband; a young guy next to us talking excitedly about football; and more people being stuffed in every minute! At one point we reversed up to a house and the driver got up on the roof and started throwing planks of wood into the yard that we’d apparently been transporting for someone. I love Africa.

Posted from Adelaide

Our ferry

Leaving Dar

Entering Zanzibar

View from our hotel window

'Lipstick fruit' on the spice tour

Sunny days

Noone else probably cares but..

Stone Town's beach front

Red Colobus!

Paul looking excited about mangroves

Jambiani

African Adventures: Part I - Dar Es Salaam

2010-07-18T12:49:00.006+09:30

When I was trying to decide on where to go for my last adventure before flying home to Australia it was a toss-up between Greece, Croatia and Slovenia or Tanzania and Malawi. In the end Africa won out, mainly because of the ‘do it while you’re young’ argument. One day I’ll make it back to Greece to see where my grandpa is from, but I wasn’t so sure about Africa. I also wanted to go there because it felt like I had let myself have negative thoughts about Africa after Ghana and I wanted to give it a second chance. After some consideration Paul decided to join me and I’m really glad he did – wouldn’t have wanted to be there with anyone else :)

So this is how it went. On Tuesday the 16th of March 2010 we flew Edinburgh-Amsterdam-Nairobi-Dar Es Salaam with KLM, Kenya Airways and then Precision Air! Landing in Nairobi at sunrise was absolutely stunning, and then we had an entertaining flight with Precision Air during which the pilot was announcing things throughout the flight such as ‘the weather in Dar is now..’, ‘if you look to your right you’ll see Mt Kilimanjaro’ (WHICH WAS FREAKING AMAZING!!), ‘there are many national parks to visit in Tanzania such as..’ and finally ‘after this flight we’re flying to *insert place-name here* and you’re welcome to join us, all you need to do is buy a ticket at the airport!’. It was like having our own personal tour guide, hilarious.

As usual, arriving in a new country was daunting. It was hot and sticky, we were tired, the ‘queue’ to get visas was more of a crowd milling around the few barred windows with a guard-looking guy wandering around taking money and passports from people, while the immigration staff behind the bars seemed to be doing not much at all. It was 9:30am and it was already boiling hot. We did the whole try-to-get-out-money-from-an-ATM-without-anyone-noticing-or-realising-how-much-money-we-were-getting thing and then caught a taxi from the airport to a hotel we chose out of our Rough Guide, the aptly named Holiday Hotel. We arranged a room for 20,000 Tanzanian Shillings, or 10 pounds, and then headed out for lunch and a walk to the Kisutu Market where we bought lychees and bananas. After an afternoon nap we tried to find a place for dinner and ended up at New Zahir Restaurant just around the corner. It’s a busy place owned by 2 friendly brothers. We ate some form of chicken and rice dish and halfway through Paul started feeling really sick. Still not sure what that was – the heat, the food, the tiredness, the new country – but he went off to the (disgustingly smelly) bathroom for a few minutes. Meanwhile a friendly man, whose name I learned was Chaki, came up and spoke to me. I know you’re not supposed to talk to strangers but, after sharing a chai and a good chat, we ended up letting this guy take us to the roof-top of a nearby hotel so we could see the view over the harbour. Chaki’s one of these lovely people who wants to take you everywhere and pay for everything, and try as we might we couldn’t convince him otherwise.

The following day Paul and I woke up early, mainly because of the incredible heat, and went to ‘A Tea Room’ for breakfast of chai, boiled eggs and a dough ball they called a doughnut. We went back to the top of the hotel for a day-time view of the harbour, and then walked 45 minutes to the Kivukoni Fish Market. I’d almost say it was cooler than Tsukiji in Tokyo! It was split into the land-side market and the sea-side market. We checked out the sea-side first – dhows and fishermen in the water, hundreds of people milling around the tables and benches of fish. They were having auctions on the big ones, with 20-30 people shouting and pushing money around tables with huge fish in the centre. It was a smelly place! We walked across the road to the land-side market where there was a range of fruits and veg and other things being sold, and further inside was a huge shed with loads of people cooking up fish in MASSIVE wok-looking things. The rest of the day was interesting enough – a trip to the National Museum, fish in coconut sauce for lunch, dinner in the dangerous area of Dar called Kariakoo where we were offered a lift from a dodgy character and chatted up by a Masaai while we waited for a taxi, and then ended up with a chai with Chaki and I nearly stepped on a rat that ran under my feet as we walked back to the hotel! Gross.

On Friday March 19th, Chaki had offered to take us for a day trip to Bagamoyo, an old slave trading port. We met him at 6:30am for a fantastically greasy breakfast of chai, Spanish omelette and a sweet, deep-fried rice ball called kitumbua. As we stepped on the hour-long bus to Bagamoyo I heard a familiar tune – Alhaji, a song that I had heard a thousand times in Ghana! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXE1zBoQgHU – this is the only video I could find of the song, so probably just shut your eyes and listen to the hilarity given the fact that I was told the word Alhaji means ‘a man who has returned from Mecca’) We arrived and walked to his friend’s house to ‘order lunch with his wife’ as he put it. The family that we visited were lovely. Chaki’s friend called a tuk-tuk for us which we used for the rest of the day to visit some old ruins, a slave trading museum, an art centre and the beach. We went back to the family’s house for lunch of pulao rice and chai and then took a daladala (minibus) back to Dar which was falling apart and smelt of petrol..

Posted from Adelaide

Nairobi airport at sunrise

MOUNT KILIMANJARO!!

Our little hotel in Dar

At the top of the Harbour View Tower

Paul at the land-side market

Kivukoni

Kitumbua and chai. Mmmm..

Chaki's friends in Bagamoyo

White white sands, and the little boy poking his head over the wall kept edging closer and closer and eventually begged for money..

Me, Paul and Chaki in our tuk-tuk

It's been far too long

2010-07-15T17:35:00.000+09:30

I'm writing this sitting at my dining table in Adelaide with a cup of tea, enjoying the sun pouring in the window (but with the heater on, because, yes, it is winter!). In my last post I finished up writing about my trip to India, which was actually in May 2009. It's been an entire year, a lot has happened and I reached my final destination 10 weeks ago. My two years, two months and four days of travel is up. Weird feeling, not thinking about the next trip, not sharing a flat, not saving money for anything in particular, not even having to buy roll-on deoderant in case I jump on a plane in the next couple of months (these are the things travellers think about haha, and I will continue to do so anyway for environmental reasons). At the start of the trip I didn't think I would last being away for a whole year, let alone two, but I sure am glad that I did because around the time I was feeling the most home-sick is when I turned up in Edinburgh and met Rory. You never know what's around the corner hey?

Since I last wrote I stopped working at Kilimanjaro and started up at the City of Edinburgh Council where I met more fantastic people and enjoyed having my weekends free; the Fringe Festival came and went and I was lucky enough to see Rhys Darby and Adam Hills; I caught the Military Tattoo with the gals; travelled to Portugal for a week with the lovely Rory where we had a blast with the sunshine and sangria; mum came and visited for a couple of weeks over Christmas and New Years and we visited Manchester together, and then went to Dublin for NYE with Rory and caught up with my aunty and uncle, Gabrielle and Nick, in the winteriest winter you could imagine; I had one of my best birthdays ever with a flat cocktail party, and definitely my best Valentine's Day with an amazing home-cooked meal by Rory; and spent a night at the amazing Channings Hotel, again obviously with Rory! In between all the events and special times, there were also many nights out with good mates, great nights in with spag bol and a dvd, fantastic films, new music, exploring exciting foods like Malaysian feasts and Polish sausage, and seeing the ballet Swan Lake. Edinburgh, you've done me proud! Could not have hoped for a better 18 months.

To finish up the expedition, more travel and good times were required so Paul and I headed to Tanzania and Malawi for a month, and then I met up with my dad for a trip through Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore on my way home. So keep reading!

Posted from Adelaide

Rory and I in the Portugal sun

Seamus and I on a great night out at El Barrio, salsa club

.. and at the Salsa Bar

Edinburgh Military Tattoo

Dublin for NYE

Snow snow snow out of my bedroom window

Winter Wonderland from the ferris wheel above

Rory's Remembrance Day ceremony while he was involved with the Universities Air Squadron

About to climb Arthur's Seat with Rors

Summer in Edinburgh - display of wild animals in St Andrews Square

Swan Lake! Yes I know you're not supposed to take photos, but I'm glad I did!!

My birthday party

Leaving time..

Udaipur til the end

2009-09-01T04:41:00.006+09:30

We took a bus back to Ajmer and train out to our next destination of Udaipur - dubbed the white city for it's white-washed buildings. It's set around another huge body of water which makes it famously photogenic, but unfortunately for this city's citizens, the state of Rajastan is in the throws of a long-lasting drought which has dried up the water in Lake Pichola and is draining away the tourism rupees.. It's still a very lovely city, all hilly with nice looking temples and buildings everywhere, small alleyways to wander down and also holds the trophy for being the 'miniature painting' capital of Rajastan!

We arrived late at night and got ourselves a room in the Panorama Hotel for 200 rupees, headed straight to the rooftop restaurant for much needed food before they closed at 11. I ordered nutella toast and got a chai instead, so I ordered it again and got peanut butter toast haha. The following morning we ate cornflakes complete with dirt in the milk, and a banana lassi that was supposed to be a banana shake! Fantastic restaurant ;) One of the main touristy things to do in Udaipur is to take a boat ride around the lake, but that was out of the question with the lack of water unfortunately, so we did lots of just walking around. We took a fantastic cooking class in the evening where we learnt how to make real chai, mango curry, dal, pulao, biryani and pakora from a lovely lady called Meenu. Her two little children were adorable, as were her parents who owned the Queen Cafe where the lesson was held. While we were in Udaipur we saw about 5 or 6 crazy-looking loud processions of about 30 people walking through the streets with instruments and women rolling their heads around with silver buckets on top, being held at the arm by men - so strange that I can't even explain it properly! Meenu told us that they were families who were having bad luck in their lives which they blamed on a recently passed relative. The way they dealt with this was to get their late relative's image imprinted on a small silver plate which they brought from the temple to their home by way of this loud procession through the streets, and from then on they always set a place at the table for this person at special events - this was seen as a way of keeping the dead happy so that no more bad luck would come their way. Wonder if this ever works?!

The plan from Udaipur was to head further west into Rajastan to visit the desert and then go far east to see the holy city of Varanasi. I'd found out while in Pushkar that my grandpa was ill and in hospital, when we went to get on our bus out of Udaipur to head to Jodhpur I found out that he'd had a heart attack and by the time the following morning came he had passed away. India was stressful enough as it was without feeling this incredible sense of loss so I made the snap decision to leave Kevin alone and fly back to Edinburgh to be with Paul. With the help of the receptionist at my hotel I got myself an overnight train back to Delhi in the 'emergency quota' Indian Railways keeps open for every train trip and boarded a flight back to my second home. I cut the trip a week short and left Kevin behind so suddenly that it was a difficult decision to make, but as soon as I boarded my flight I knew it was the right one.

Posted from Edinburgh

Where did the water go??

Love Ganesh's motto haha

Kevin next to a huge version of a miniature painting

This woman caught me taking a photo of her and her donkey

Meenu on the right with her lovely family

The story of Pushkar painted on this portable wooden storyboard to take around to rural families who can't make it there to see for themselves!

One of the loud processions moving slowly through the street

The band that goes along with it

The world's largest turban!

Me and a lovely man who invited us into his home to show us how to make lemon tea

Very cool looking temple

Everything's holy in India!

Push that Kar..

2009-08-26T05:33:00.004+09:30

From Jaipur we got on another train to a small town called Ajmer, our pitstop on the way to an even smaller town called Pushkar. It was like walking into the claws of a waiting tiger when we walked out of Ajmer station - there were about 20 auto and cycle-rickshaw drivers waiting to greet us. It was so difficult to escape and a few of them literally walked down the street with us! "Rickshaw?" "No." "Where you going?Rickshaw?" "No!" "30 rupees to bus station. Rickshaw? Excuse me, rickshaw?" "NO!" "You going to Pushkar? Rickshaw to bus station only 30 rupees!" "NO! We're just walking! Leave us alone!" "Pushkar?" "NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!" You could almost resort to physical violence in that situation, honestly.. We found a restaurant listed in the Rough Guide that we could walk to and got there as fast as we could for lunch. We felt much calmer after eating and relaxing for a wee while so we managed to get an auto rickshaw to the bus station without much hassle after that. It was a bit nerve-wracking entering the bus station given my fear of buses in developing countries to see about 20 buses in front of us, all in varying states of disrepair, one of which had to drive us 30mins to Pushkar. We found our bus quickly and got in. The bus filled up, (with people only in the seats thankfully, none standing up) we paid our 9 rupees each and got moving. The bus ride was actually nice and safe feeling for the most part, besides the 5mins where we screamed our way down a mountain-side, swerving around hard corners without touching the brakes while overlooking steep cliffs... We survived though and that's the main part :)

Pushkar ended up being my favourite place in India that I saw. It is really geared towards backpackers, which I thought I might not like, but it turned out to be exactly what Kevin and I needed at the time. The town is built around a holy lake and the legend about the Creator God, Bramha describes the creation of this lake. When the demon Vajra Nabha killed Brahma's children, he in turn struck him with his weapon, a lotus flower. Vajra Nabha died with the impact, and the petals of the lotus fell at three places. One of them is Pushkar, where a lake sprung into being. Brahma is supposed to have performed sacrifice at this lake on Kartik Purnima (the full moon day of the Kartik month), hallowing the place. Sacred to Brahma, Pushkar boasts of its temple dedicated to him, which is the only one of its kind in the world. A dip in the waters of Pushkar and worship at his temple ensure salvation, so many people go there We stayed at the Milkman Guesthouse in an air-cooler room for 300 rupees - about 4pounds! The place had a ferocious dog which snarled, growled, barked and leapt at us every time we were near - wouldn't like to see that thing off its leash! It also had a great, relaxing roof-top garden and a lovely restaurant which served a mix of Indian and backpacker foods. Good to have pancakes back in the diet once more. A drink they served at the restaurant, and at lots of places around Pushkar, was the Lemon-ana - a mixture of water, mint, lemon and ginger and absolute bliss!

Wonderful breakfast on our first full day in Pushkar of banana shake, pancakes and chai, after which we went for a stroll through the town. It was a bit of an on-edge day for me caused by the ridiculous number of monkeys shaking the trees above our heads. We saw a HUGE one leap from a tree, run across the street to a child sitting down, snatch something from his hands and run off with it! The monkey was as big as the child! We went into the Bramha temple where a guy showed us around without us asking - much appreciated. We took off our shoes at the entrance and were given a piece of newspaper each with rose petals, flowers and sugar on top and walked into the temple after our new guide. We sprinkled rose petals and sugar at three different praying areas and picked up 2 marigolds at one of them. One of the smaller temples within the complex had a little old man sitting on the ground who put an orange dot on my forehead!

From there, our guide lead us out of the temple (passing 4 huge mamma monkeys with babies latching onto their stomachs who were walking into the temple) and down the road to the bathing ghats (steps) around the holy lake. We were each given a silver tray with our marigolds, more rose petals, sugar, rice, orange and red powder and an orange and red cotton bracelet. We took our shoes off again and walked down some steps to the lake where a priest took each of us separately. We'd read about a tourist scam that the priests will ask you about your family and then ask how much you want to donate to the temple, and then he says the prayer for each member of the family and gets you to pay the price you mentioned PER family member - which adds up! Given that, and the fact that we were surrounded by wasps which my priest swore wouldn't bite because they were holy, we were not exactly feeling the spirituality of the place to say the least. However the priest said his prayers for all of my family and Rory and got me to repeat them while having my eyes closed, after which I tipped the contents of the silver tray into the lake as a sacrifice to the gods and he tied the bracelet around my wrist. It was a nice little experience, especially when I figured out that the guy had put a red dot on top of the orange one on my forehead and put grains of rice on there too without me even noticing! Kevin's priest was slightly less accommodating, getting furious at the low price he wanted to pay for the prayers and refusing to go through with it! I had to tie his bracelet on for him :( He did get the rice on his forehead though haha.

The rest of our time in Pushkar was spent purely relaxing with Lemon-anas, hammocks, books and sunshine. Kevin did get up the energy to climb a hill to get a view over the city only to almost get attacked by a monkey charging full-pelt down towards him! Kevin stepped out of the way just in time and the monkey sped past him, so it wasn't him it was after but it could have been messy. Another hour missing and I would have sent the search parties, don't you worry :)

Posted from Edinburgh (months later.. sorry about that)

The Kitty Party does intrigue me!

I won't!

Eyeshadow

Some beautiful ladies buying vegetables; Kevin taking a photo in the background of a guy with a huge moustache

Bathing ghats

Entrance to the Bramha Temple

Sari shopping for Kevin's friend

The alleyway outside our hotel (Gabrielle I spoke to you while I was walking down here trying to get past a cow!)

Going all spiritual on your ass

Namaste

2009-05-05T23:53:00.014+09:30

From Istanbul I flew over a quarter of the world to New Delhi to meet up with my mate Kevin - lovely American chap I spent my time in Ghana with, and then saw again in Japan early last year. He's on a crazy 6-month long Asia expedition on his lonesome going through SE Asia, India, Nepal and hopefully getting up through China to Mongolia, so I said I'd love to join him for the India leg. He said he'd love to hit the dusty trail with me again and the rest is history :) So here I sit in an internet cafe in a tiny town called Pushkar, 2 hours west of Jaipur, watching cows walk past the open door. India. What can I say? We read somewhere that it would take a week or so just to get used to India and its heat and it has rung true - we're on our 8th day together and we finally feel fine. Admittedly we both got a dose of the ole' Delhi Belly within 3 days of seeing each other, and Delhi was in a heat wave that brought with it its hottest day in 50 years, so it would take anyone some time to adjust..

We've ripped through India's 'Golden Triangle' of Delhi, Agra and Jaipur in the past week. We pretty much took 2 days for each city, which before I got here I thought would be too little and thought we would stay far longer in each but now I'm glad we've done what we've done. It looks as though the towns and cities we're set to visit in the next 2 weeks will blow the so-called 'Golden Triangle' away!

So India. The most out-of-my-comfort-zone country I've visited in the past 14 months since leaving home but I really quite like it. It's dirty, dusty, hot and aggressive but it's also beautiful, colourful and surprising. When I first stepped out of the hotel door in New Delhi on my first morning (my plane got in at 3am so I hadn't seen anything when I arrived) I was in absolute awe of what was in front of me.

It was exactly as I imagined India to be - an absolute chaotic mess of people, cycle and auto rickshaws, falling apart buses, motorcycles and cars, along with the odd cow or horse and cart and lots of dogs; small stores selling the necessities and carts selling juice or offering cheap long distance phone calls; delicious fruit on every corner, not to mention the chai; little kids running about the place, men sitting around wearing their 70's style clothes under the shade and women walking gracefully dressed in saris. Sometimes it's difficult to enjoy being here with all that I've mentioned plus little kids hassling you for money, rickshaw drivers wanting to drive you everywhere and people staring or asking if Kevin's my husband, but if you can get past that, like we almost have, it's a rockin' place to experience!

Delhi was my least favourite of the cities we've seen so far. We sort of expected Delhi to be the most city-like but I think it's been the least. It's really spread out and the 'highlight' sights to see didn't interest me that much.. We saw the Red Fort on our first day, but Kevin got ill while we were there so we headed back to our hotel for the afternoon. The following day he felt a bit brighter so we took the spanking new metro to Connaught Place, the downtown area in Delhi where it seemed the most like an actual city - shops, restaurants, McDonald's, etc. Had a wee wander around but the most exciting part of the day was having my bag fixed! The strap broke while we walked along and I was considering looking for someone to fix it when a man sitting cross-legged on the street, a shoe polisher it looked like, waved me over to him. Kevin and I sat on the ground with him and he went to work on my bag - glueing, stitching, hammering. We were utterly impressed and he only charged me 150 rupees, or about 2 pounds! Couldn't get that sort of service in the UK!

After our 2 quite uneventful days in Delhi, we took a train to Agra to see the magestic Taj Mahal. The Taj Mahal is one of those wonderful things you can find around the world which everyone knows about and thinks is amazing, and when you get to see the actual place in person is actually as magnificent as you had hoped and imagined. We decided that a monument to love such as this deserved a guided tour so we hired a student guide to take us through. Turned out he was also a blooming photographer so he loved getting us to pose in various places and positions throughout the complex, not being afraid to let us know if our photo ideas were 'not possible'! The actual Taj is great, but there's also the gates leading into the complex, the mosque and the guest house - all fantastic. The detail in the architecture is un-matched by anything I've seen. Floral patterns are all throughout and one particular type of stone they use glows when there is a full moon! I guess I'll leave my photos to speak for me..

The city of Agra didn't really suit us either, especially because this is where I had my turn of the Belly, so we moved on promptly to Jaipur, the 3rd point of the 'Triangle'. It's dubbed the Pink City because all the buildings within the city walls are painted a peach colour! We liked this the most out of the 3 - wonderful, vibrant markets selling spices, chai, chilli and colourful fabrics, a cool palace with an amazingly arranged arms and weapons room, and an ancient observatory to boot! We had our first day of us both feeling great in Jaipur so this helped us to have a good time :)

The plan at the moment is to head further west towards the Thar Desert before whipping all the way to the east to see Varanasi, and then finally overnight-training it to Delhi for my flight back to the UK. We'll see how it all goes!

Peace
x

And PS Big love to my dear grandpa :) I wish I was at home right now with you xxx

Posted from Pushkar, India

Me with thali, an Indian dish which usually includes dal, rice and a couple of curries

The south gate which we walked through to visit the Taj

Ole' Taj and me

Freakin' monkeys are everywhere and I can't stand the things!

Mmmm mangoes..

Enough chilli for an Indian family feast ;)

The Aquarius..measuring..thing (didn't quite catch its significance, but there was one for each star sign haha)

Sari!

This is served to us after most meals in restaurants - sugar and aniseed which you chew together. Pretty good!

Pink buildings in Jaipur

Istanbul for ANZAC Day

2009-04-26T23:48:00.006+09:30

My new adventure began with saying farewell to my flatmates and mates in Edinburgh, along with my Netherlandish friends who were staying with me for the weekend, and FINALLY catching up with Rory after 2 weeks of not seeing each other. I made a big stirfry with rice for 6 of us and then I grabbed my bags and left for the overnight Megabus down to London. I was in London for about 2 hours or so but it was nice to be back again. Every time I go there it feels like home for some reason - maybe because it was our first stop on our Europe trip back in 05 :)

Everyone in Istanbul is really friendly and cheeky so I'm loving it! I flew from London to Istanbul and caught up with some Edinburgh mates that night who were with a crazy tour group of Aussies and NZers. We all sat in a restaurant on huge colourful cushions, smoked shisha (flavoured tobacco if you didn't know, and they had a list of about 15 flavours!) and drank beers while some buskers serenaded us with Turkish tunes. Paul arrived the next day and it was good to be back together again. I don't actually see him very often even though we're both living in Edinburgh at the moment! We spent lots of our time hanging out with the 2 guys we were sharing the 4-bed dorm with - Kader, a French-Moroccan who's living in Dublin, and Daniel, a cool guy from Melbs who's on his way to do Camp America in NY. We became a little family :) We haggled our way through the grand bazaar and the spice bazaar (where we found the tastiest kebabs for 1.5 lira - about 75p!), and visited the Blue Mosque which is right near our hostel. The staple foods here seem to be kebabs, rice pudding and Turkish icecream which are lovely but I'd love to eat anything else right now haha.

Paul and I headed off on Friday for our tour down to Gallipoli for ANZAC Day. We left Istanbul at 6:30am and finally arrived at the actual site at about 5:30pm - along the way we stopped for lunch, visited a museum about the Gallipoli war and visited the sites where the commemoration services would be held the following morning. By the time we got there all of the ground space was taken so we were left to find chairs in the grand stands - 13 hours of sitting and lying in plastic chairs in the freezing cold overnight is not the most comfortable, let me tell you! It was really cool though because they'd banned alcohol last year so everyone was pretty chilled out, and stuff was playing on the big screen or on the stage throughout the night so we were kept entertained. The army and navy bands from NZ and Aus played songs from 1915, we got to see speeches by K Rudd and the NZ PM, and at about 4am we got to see a medley of ANZAC Day ceremonies from around NZ and Aus.

At 5:30am we watched the dawn service and then walked up to watch the Australian service, walked further up the hill to watch the Turkish service, which we were too late for but could hear it from outside the gates and it sounded amazing, and then walked even further up the hill to the NZ service. It was a moving day but also very tiring. At the end of the NZ service some guys from the crowd got up and did the hakka! That was awesome and got the most cheers. Walking through the cemeteries reading the stones is by far the most upsetting part of ANZAC Cove. These men who died so senselessly in this war were usually between 20 and 25 and the words that their parents had engraved on their stones are hard to read without tearing up. I'm glad that I was able to visit Gallipoli - it sure does make you appreciate how lucky and precious our lives are.

Posted from Istanbul

Blue Mosque

Entrance to the grand bazaar

Spice bazaar

Crazy nougat type stuff

Men fishing over a bridge, next to a sign with men fishing over the bridge!

Turkish brass band playing in Istanbul with some crazy machine gun security

Our new mate Daniel enjoying a weird syrup-soaked pastry

Paul smoking his first shisha

Paul and I at ANZAC Cove

Sleep-time at Gallipoli

Famous speech by Ataturk about the ANZAC soldiers

Amazing scenery around the peninsula

The one that made me cry..

"Our dear son who lost his life to find it"

Listed names of soldiers who died at ANZAC but have no grave

The desertiest birthday you could imagine

2009-03-11T02:05:00.005+10:30

We took an overnight bus to Merzouga. We'd just left 20-degree weather in Fes but while we were driving we went through metre-high snow! The landscape in Morocco is so varied it's insane. Half-way through the night we stopped for a feast of meat, bread, salad and mint tea. It was past midnight by this point so it was the first meal of my birthday :) Colby asked if I happened to know what time I was born. I did - at 1:45am. He looked at his watch and said "that's RIGHT now!" So it might have also been the first time I've celebrated my birthday at the exact time I was born! The rest of the bus trip was uneventful and we arrived into Merzouga at sunrise.

After a quick snack at the hostel we had a nap on the most comfortable beds of our lives before heading into the town centre to buy scarves for our camel trip. Karim received a phone call from his sister saying that his mum was in hospital so he went back to Fes that night rather than coming into the desert with us as promised, but not before having about an hour long disagreement with Colby who wanted to change his arrangement and cut his trip a day short so he could head onto Marrakech with us. It was the most awkward situation Susan and I had ever been in - being caught between two guys, one who's promised his whole family a bunch of money from a traveller who now wants to change his plans, and who has also just gotten the news that his mum's sick in hospital, and the other who's being completely disagreeable and inconsiderate, but who's point of view we could also see because if he didn't change his plans it meant he would be stuck out in this hostel by himself for a whole extra day when even Karim wouldn't be there to keep him company! In the end, in a not very happy compromise from either of the two guys, they agreed that Colby could leave with us but he still had to pay the majority of his money - he ended up paying 50 pounds more than us! Even after this Karim guilted Susan and I into giving him an extra 200 dirhams each so that he could get back to Fes..

This only slightly tainted our experience because later that afternoon we were all introduced to our camels! Susan's was Ali Baba, mine was Hamouda (Karim told me to tell my mum that my camel would be named Hamouda earlier on the bus! I thought he was just being funny!) and Colby's was Hadanni. We had two guys who were going to be with us for the whole 3 days - Omagh and Saheed. Saheed did a lot of running around for us, setting up our beds, bringing us breakfast, etc. We really liked both of them. And so we set off over the dunes! For just a moment until my camel came loose from Susan's and Colby and I started our own trek through the desert.. Haha that was a fun 3 seconds! :) It was so incredible going over the sand dunes. It was a really lovely warm day with a light breeze, sand all around us. I had a hard time getting used to the movement of my camel so I probably looked ridiculous to the other two, but what can you do? Girl from Adelaide riding a camel doesn't exactly sound natural to me haha. Omagh and Saheed stopped us on top of a dune to watch the beautiful sunset before we continued on to our oasis. There was no water there but there were trees! We had an amazing desert tent to sleep in with huge heavy blankets to keep us warm in the freezing night. We ate dinner of chicken, vegetables, bread and tea under the stars before going over to join Omagh, Saheed and a few other Moroccan men near a fire where they were playing and singing songs using drums and some hand-held cymbals. I asked Omagh what they sang about and he said they sing about how their ancestors, the nomads of the area, came together about 30 years ago to form the town of Merzouga! It was a brilliant end to a fabulous 23rd birthday :D

We woke up at 6:30ish to stand on a tall dune and watch the sunrise. It was chilly and definitely not as beautiful as the sunset from the night before, but I'm still glad we did it. I slowly got used to squatting in the desert to pee, only once did I pee on my belt (somehow) and another time I peed on my shoe! We went back to bed in the tent after sunrise and slept until 10 when we woke up to breakfast of bread, jam, butter, laughing cow cheese, olives, tea and oranges. Straight after we'd eaten we got back on our camels and headed off to the black people's village, stopping halfway along in a tiny mud-building village which seemed to house only 5 people where we ate lunch before heading off again. We arrived in the evening right before they started playing music for us and about 7 other French tourists. The music was nice but it seemed a bit put-on to me, and as soon as the French tourists left the guys playing seemed to completely lose interest - they started smoking weed and drinking, playing their own very loud tunes on the drums. We hung out with them for a bit after we'd eaten dinner but then went to bed. They were really friendly and the main guy told me I should come back and live with them for a month working with the women doing handicrafts!

When we woke up on this final morning, all 3 of us were in pain from the camel-riding - our backs and bums were killing us! But we got back on the horse, so to speak, and rode our camels all the way back to Merzouga. Colby still needed to pay the remaining money so Omagh came in a share taxi with us to Rissani, a nearby town which was much bigger than Merzouga. We ate lunch there and got a short tour by one of Omagh's friends - he took us through the market and to a small store where we ended up spending a lot of time bargaining. Susan bought 2 pairs of earrings and I got 2 camel leather poofs! I got the guy from 650 dirhams down to 200! From there we walked to the bus station where we were told there would be a direct bus to Marrakech but we found out that it hadn't run for the past 10 days.. Convenient. It was tough to make a decision from here because all of our options didn't seem very attractive to us, but we ended up taking a share taxi to Errachidia which was about an hour and a half away where we were promised we would be able to get a bus to Marrakech in the morning. Our taxi smashed into a dog along the way - it completely broke the headlight so I'm sure we killed the dog. A friendly guy at the station helped us to buy tickets for our bus, took us across to his uncle's hotel where we stayed for 25 dirhams each (2 pounds!) and arranged dinner and wine from the black market for us! Good evening.

Our bus driver drove like a madman so we got into Marrakech at 4 in the arvo. Walking into the main square was like walking into the middle of a circus - tourists everywhere, snake charmers, henna ladies, open stalls in the centre selling food for dinner with smoke pouring out into the night, orange juice stands offering you their cheapest price, old men walking around completely covered in gold bells.. Mayhem! Such a difference to anywhere else in Morocco. I feel bad for people who just fly into and out of Marrakech and never leave! We ended up spending about 4 days here but it was definitely my least favourite place on this trip. Some highlights of Marrakech were - seeing a guy try to stab another guy in a marketplace, eating honey pancakes with mint tea for breakfast in the sunshine, walking through the souqs (markets) and getting people in the stalls to lower their prices before we've even looked at what they have, eating couscous and listening to a 2-piece band on our last night playing The Cranberries and Bob Dylan.

Our first experience upon re-entering the UK, besides the drizzly weather, was a man screaming abuse at his children - the little girl spilt something and went to clean it up and the father's response was the scream at the top of his lungs "don't you touch that mess! They get paid to clean and we don't!" Oh. My. God. It was slightly depressing getting back there after the sunshine and relaxation of Morocco, but it was wonderful getting back to the flat and catching up with Paul and the others, and then seeing Rory the next day :) So that's the end of my adventures again until April when I'm heading to Turkey for ANZAC Day and then onto India for about 3 weeks! Stay tuned.

Peace
x

Snow!

Amazing skies

Susan and I with little Mona, some relation to Karim

Camel time

Sunset

Our tent in the desert

Tracks made by a desert beetle

Saheed and Omagh

The guys warming their drums in the black people's village

Cutest exchange I've ever seen - he'd just given her a piece of laughing cow cheese and she couldn't open it so he was giving her a demonstration while she stared up at him

Colby and Susan with wine from the black market

Driving through some amazing mountains

Me in an orange juice stand, Marrakech

One of the evening stalls in the main square

Loving the Maroc!

2009-03-08T09:53:00.003+10:30

We got into Fes at 8pm. I'd had a cold and sore throat for a week at this point, and my wisdom tooth decided it was a great day to start pushing through as well so by the time we got there my mouth and head were in absolute agony! We could not be bothered with any bull-**** but when we asked for a taxi into the medina (old town centre) to Hotel Erraha we were told that there's "no water" in the medina so we should go to the something-something hotel in the new town. This is possibly the worst attempt at a scam I've ever heard! We demanded that he take us to the hotel anyway but he wasn't interested so we found another taxi who agreed to stop at the pharmacy on the way for me to find some paracetamol. I "took too long" in the pharmacy so by the time I got back out the price that we'd agreed on had inflated by 50% haha.

At the hotel we were checked in with hot showers not included for 40 dirhams each - about 3.20 pounds! Karim, our friendly hotel receptionist, sat us down with him and a Canadian traveller, Colby, while we ate dinner outside the hotel restaurant. Eating dinner outside - what a novelty for us semi-permanent UK citizens! The dinner of chicken, cousous, that amazing flat, white bread that we got with every meal and mint tea was just lovely. We went to bed fairly early that night after a tiring day and thoroughly enjoyed sleeping with our mattresses and pillows that felt like they were filled with concrete :p I told susan that if I hit her over the head with my pillow it'd probably kill her!

The next morning we went on a half-day tour through the old town with a lovely guy during which he took us through loads of small alleyways showing us the mosques and markets, the only small stall in Fes which sells camel meat (!!), the first section of a leather tannery where they were taking the wool off the skins, and a few blanket and rug stores where we had rug after rug rolled out in front of us to have a look at. He stopped us at a tiny shop for us to eat garlic soup for lunch - it was a creamy and very garlicy soup that they poured a ladle of olive oil into, and we ate with the flat, white bread. Took a bit of getting used to but I think we both liked it by the time we finished our bowls, and it only cost 5 dirhams (about 40p)! He also stopped us at his aunty's house just so that he could use the bathroom! It was an incredibly lovely house with amazing furnishings. She was really lovely - spoke French and almost no English, but she seemed to really like us so she served us mint tea and some homemade biscuits :)

We were offered by our hotel receptionist that we could go on a 3-day desert tour with the Candadian traveller if we left that night - we would be put up in his family's hostel in Merzouga, then trek out into the desert by camel to sleep in a tent, and finally spent the night in "the black people's village" where we would listen to the music they played for us. The cost was 140 pounds which we were pretty deterred by, but eventually we agreed that we would go along..

Posted from Edinburgh

Entrance to the old town in Fes

Garlic soup!

One of the few blanket stores we went into - we sat on the chairs you see at the bottom and had about 40 rugs and blankets rolled out for us to look at

Small alleys

First stage of the tanneries

Inside our guide's aunty's house :)

A beautiful palace-type thing

The flat, white bread en-masse

Camel meat!

The land of the flat, white bread

2009-03-06T00:38:00.004+10:30

Susan, my lovely Australian flatmate, and I headed off on an adventure on the 7th of February - spending 10 days in Morocco! Paul took over my room in Edinburgh while we were away, and after a breakfast with him and Rory, we said our goodbyes and walked to the station to train it to Glasgow Prestwick airport with its slogan 'Pure Dead Brilliant' written everywhere in huge purple lettering. Ridiculous slogan for an airport! We flew to Malaga in the south of Spain where we spent a night. It seems like a really lovely city with a beachy feel to it, massive wide boulevards and a huge castle ruin overlooking the place, but we didn't get the chance to explore. The next morning we got up extra early thinking we could get an morning ferry across to Tangier in Morocco, but it didn't quite work out as planned, as is often the case with travel! We spent about an hour at the bus station in Malaga trying to get help with figuring out whether there were buses to Tarifa or Algeciras, the two places from which you can get ferries across to Tangier, but people seemed fond of the "I-don't-understand-you-so-no" sort of responses. Eventually we figured out that we could get a bus to Algeciras at 9am so we had some breakfast while we waited. The bus journey was lovely - winding along the southern-Spanish coast line with beautiful white-washed buildings and the sun glittering on the ocean. It was such a relief to be away from the wind, rain and snow of Edinburgh!

In Algeciras we wandered over to the port to buy tickets for our ferry which was extra confusing - choices between about 20 different companies heading to Tangier or Ceuta, fast or slow ferries, about 3 different prices, 2 different leaving times but about 4 different arrival times! We ended up choosing the fast ferry to Tangier for 37euros which took an hour and a half. It was a horrendous ride to say the least - I've never been on a boat so bumpy in my life, people were throwing up all over the place and sometimes it felt like we were about to flip over! Surprisingly, it's probably also the first boat ride I didn't think I was about to die on. I guess that ferry from Japan to China did wonders for my fear of oceans.. When we finally arrived in Tangier, we breathed our breath of relief and walked up the plank (?) to dry land only to find that we were supposed to have had our passports stamped on the ferry! I don't know when they expected us to do this between holding down our stomachs and watching the other passengers slowing moving, white-faced, towards the back of the boat, but we had to get back on the boat to wait for the police to stamp them so we could finally enter Morocco.

We were pleasantly surprised with Tangier after hearing about how horrible it is - there were hardly any people who bugged us and I told the two that did that we had been here before so we didn't need their help - good line to use for the future! We ended up spending a few hours here wandering around, eating our first delicious Moroccan meal and trying to get money out of the ATMs. Good times. I loved just walking about enjoying the sights and sounds - took me straight back to Ghana again with the way that people were living and the way that they stared at us. We were happy to find that the Moroccan men paid more attention to local women than they did to us - relief! A man and his girlfriend offered to walk us to the station where we could find a grands taxi (shared taxi, which means 3 in the front, 4 in the back for those who don't know, as Susan didn't haha) to Asilah, our first stop. The guy who walked us there used to work for Busabout, a bus tour company which goes through Europe and also, apparently, Morocco! Cool as. At the station I asked for a shared taxi to Asilah but the guy gave me a ridiculous price which meant he was obviously a normal taxi driver. We walked away from him and into the station where we were surrounded by about 10 men trying to get our business/figure out what we wanted. So much fun :) Ended up getting to Asilah with no problems. People had been so incredibly lovely to us so far! Huge difference to the stories that we kept hearing about the millions of people surrounding you trying to sell you everything and anything. Even after we arrived in Asilah, our taxi driver asked us if we had a hotel and we asked where Hotel Sahara was - his friend came over and answered our question and then they both left us alone! Amazing :)

Hotel Sahara was so cute! We had a tiny room which opened onto an open courtyard with mosaic patterns all over, and the receptionist was a little old man who had no English but we communicated with him okay anyway, and everytime he said something that made us laugh he would give a little chuckle and pat us each on the arm. So adorable! We went for a wee wander in the balmy evening weather and had our first of many Moroccan mint teas - from this point on, mint tea came with almost every meal and sometimes we would be offered it if we just went into a shop to have a look - sometimes we'd have 5 a day! We were just about to head back for an early sleep when a man offered to take us to visit his 'nomad' friend's market which would be gone the next day. How could we resist? He took us for a bit of a walk and we ended up in a little shop where we ended up learning how to say hello and thankyou in Arab, and I bought a beautiful leather handbag for 120 dirhams (10 pounds). After that we headed back to our hotel, but not before being offered couscous and dancing the next day at our friendly guide's sister's house.

We both just loved Asilah. There was a bunch of caravans parked by the ocean, presumably owned by the nomads we had visited the night before, people used donkeys all over the place for transporting goods, the people were friendly, the food was great and the sun was shining! We ate breakfast at a place where the waiter didn't speak English, and we still hadn't found the time to learn French or Arabic, but we managed to communicate quite easily in a mix of all 3 languages that we wanted omelettes with cheese and orange juice. The guy had to bicycle off to buy eggs for us! So lovely. We'd planned on spending half the day there before heading off to grab a bus to Fes a bit further south, but we went to the bus station straight from breakfast to check on the bus times and the guys there told us to get our stuff quickly and run back or else we'd miss the only one for the day! And so we did run and get back on time to board our bus with no side mirror (the driver just held up a jagged piece of broken mirror when he needed it haha).. to Tangier!! No! They told us it was to Fes, but as we were driving along we noticed the signs on the street were pointing to Tangier. So that's where we ended up. We quickly bought tickets for a bus that was actually going to Fes and boarded it for a 7 and a half hour ride.

Posted from Edinburgh

Susan with her pure dead brilliant boarding card

Surprisingly nice Tangier

Sign in Asilah - yes you can go through here with your crazy donkey-led cart!

Some beautiful Moroccan country-side - something we didn't expect from the country

Someone's washing hanging in the empty building

Living illegally in the box room of life

2009-01-29T02:56:00.005+10:30

Wow. So much has happened recently and I’d almost forgotten to keep you all in the loop! The festive season came and went with its German Christmas markets, frosty weather and Christmas cheer and all we’re left with now is the frosty weather. I’m still most definitely loving the Edinburgh and am certainly glad to be missing out on the over 40-degree days in Adelaide at the moment. Good luck at the Big Day Out guys! 43 degrees is going to be a killer...

Susan, my lovely Waarnamboolian flatmate, got us free VIP tickets through her job at the city council to see the Christmas lights get turned on in the city, along with the opening of the Winter Wonderland, German Christmas markets and a whole bunch of show rides. We got to stand right by the ice-skating rink and watch silver Olympians and the under-14 squad doing their rounds on the ice, showing us what we probably shouldn’t try at home! Unfortunately the CD was skipping for the entire evening, leaving the skaters a bit lost with their routines. Oops!

Paul arrived in Edinburgh a few days before Christmas and we got to hang out a bit which was lovely, and then Saskia, my NZer friend I met in my first days in Edinburgh, came back up from London for the occasion. I made rum balls from mum’s recipe and spread the Christmas cheer by sending some to Rory’s family in Fife and giving some to my work mates. Susan, Paul and I, along with Magali (one of my workmates from NZ) made meringues for pavlova in my work kitchen – for future reference, if you try to beat eggs for a meringue by hand it takes 1 ½ hours! It turned out well though and come Christmas Day we all had a few gifts under the tree thanks to lovely packages from home and we put on a very successful lunch of lamb, turkey and vegetables followed by pavlova, rum balls and mulled wine! Susan was loving it dressed as Ms Claus :) Boxing Day was possibly the best any of us had ever had – an early afternoon spin on the show rides (during which I received a phone call from my old friend Kevin from Ghana! What a lovely surprise!), followed by lunch at Wetherspoon’s (cheap chain throughout the UK) and a viewing of the movie Australia in which we giggled throughout, and then a walk up to the top of Calton Hill to see the unfinished replica of the Acropolis and a fine view of the city by night.

On the 29th we had another fantastic day. Paul and I finally made the trek to the top of Arthur’s Seat, a lovely peak which right near the city centre. From my flat to the top it only took us about 45mins! Perfect day for it as well. That evening was the Torchlight Procession – a night when thousands of people take to the streets with flaming torches, marching to the top of Calton Hill to light a Viking ship on fire. This marks the start of Hogmanay! Rory came back down from Fife for this night and we all had an absolute ball. The fireworks at the end were some of the best I’ve ever seen as well!

New Year’s Eve itself was also a fun night! Susan, in her powers as council member, had scored us free tickets, not only to the street party, but also Ceilidh in the Gardens where we got to dance the Scottish jig along with a few other numbers. Susan had a few Aussie friends up from London staying with us so we had a nice little posse. Carrying around my 2L plastic bottle of Strongbow cider, I was quite the classy sight! We rang in the new year standing on Princes St, staring up the at fireworks as they lit up the city sky.

From the 4th to the 6th of January, Paul and I hired a car and went for a road trip up to the north of Scotland. It was just absolutely incredible... We visited St Andrews to see the ruins of a castle and cathedral, then drove across to Inveraray to see the place our cousin Adam and his wife Eva spent 2 years on their working holiday visa and were extremely kindly offered a free room in the hotel they worked at! The next morning we headed up further north through Inverness to Ullapool (seeing Loch Ness along the way!) where we spent the night in the car, and then the next day we drove back to Edinburgh through the amazing highlands, stopping at some cool places along the way. We even got to see a Highland cow!!

More recently, on the Sunday just passed, we held a Robert Burns Night/Australia Day lunch at our flat! Robert Burns Night is on January 25th and this year would have been the 250th birthday of the renowned Scottish poet, the man responsible for Auld Lang Syne. In our infinite wisdom we figured out that this fell at the same time as Australia Day in Australia so we decided it was a great time to do some cross-cultural event-organising! We had about 13 people over at our flat for the traditional Burns Day food of haggis, neeps and tatties (haggis, mashed turnips and mashed potatoes) with Scotch, Irn Bru (the national drink which outsells Coke!) and shortbread I made at work, mixed with Tim Tams, green and yellow facepaint, more Australian flag tattoos than you could poke a stick at and a whole playlist of Australian music! It all went quite well with the 2 cultures seemingly complementing each other perfectly. For the afternoon and night we all headed over to the Ozbar where we enjoyed Coopers, Pizza Shapes, Redskins and numerous shots while we listened to the Hottest 100 that they streamed as it started back at home. Brilliant day was had by all. For Monday the 26th of January here, we went to the Walkabout, the Australian bar chain throughout the UK, which was absolutely heaving with green and gold Wallabies jumpers, thongs, zinc cream, akubras, cork hats, I Heart Adelaide t-shirts, Snakebites (the supposed traditional drink of Australia – half beer, half cider with blackcurrant) and loads of Aussie rock like Last Train Out of Sydney and The Holy Grail. Oh yes we had a blast!

Susan and I have a trip to Morocco planned for mid-February so stay tuned for that ball of excitement :)

Peace x

Ms Claus and the gang at Christmas lunch in our kitchen

Looking over the city from Arthur's Seat

Rors and I at the Torchlight Procession

Susan and Paul wielding torches

Amazing fireworks..

The beautiful drive in northern Scotland

Highland cow!

Inveraray Castle in the morning light

The Australia Day gang

EatinBurgers - my new home!

2008-11-18T03:16:00.005+10:30

I arrived into Edinburgh city on the bus from the airport and it immediately felt like home to me. I'm not sure why this is - perhaps it's the multi-culturalism of the place, perhaps it's the big, grey stone buildings that make me feel like I'm actually in Scotland (yay!), perhaps it was because everyone here is so friendly, perhaps because I feel more positive about life here than I have felt for awhile, perhaps because it seems to be so easy to meet people here.. I've mentioned this feeling to almost every Australian I've met here and we all feel pretty much the same! There's something about this city. Initially I planned to only stay here until Christmas and then perhaps move to the south of England to try and find work there, but after being here for a month and still loving the vibe of the place, plus having found an amazing central flat with some incredible flatmates, I've decided to stay on here until February or March until I want to start travelling again. It's incredibly freezing cold here and it's only going to get worse over the next few months, but I'm loving it.

For my first 4 nights here I stayed at a Couchsurfers place about a 30min walk from the city centre. Ferlynn is a very cool Singaporean chick sharing a flat with 3 other CSers - 2 guys and 1 girl, all Spanish. They happened to be hosting a girl from NZ at the same time called Saskia, who has now become a good friend of mine even though she's moved down to London. On our first night in town, Ferlynn took us out to an awesome club called Espionage - 5 floors underground, each with a different style of music playing! We had an excellent time dancing the night away, and I even managed to pick up the Scottish bartender ;) Saskia and I spent almost the entire 3 days together until she took the bus to the south, and we had a brilliant time just looking around the city, going out and meeting people everywhere we went, and finding me a flat.

I looked at 2 flats - 1 is the one I'm now living in, and the other was even more central but it would mean sharing a room with another girl, and it was more expensive! I moved into this one on the Wednesday - not bad for only being in the city 4 days! The room I initially moved into was 220 pounds a month, which is ultra cheap for Edinburgh and especially when you consider the location. At the time there were 2 Spanish girls, 1 Scottish guy, 2 Australian girls and 2 NZer guys living here - crazy amount of people! The 2 NZer guys have now left for home and I've moved into one of their rooms. It's a box room with no window, but it feels like a little private cove to me, it has a ladder leading up to a double bed and it's EVEN cheaper at 170 a month! Now the mix of people in the house, besides me, is 2 Scottish guys, 1 Spanish girl and 2 Australian girls. One of the Aussies is leaving in a week and a Spanish girl is coming back home from India so it's going to be a very even spattering of cultures :)

I've finally just found myself a full-time job after weeks of searching! I now work at Wellington Coffee and Kiliminjaro Coffee for 6pounds an hour making coffee, paninis and soups and I'm loving it! The owner is ultra friendly and everyone I've worked with so far has been great.

So, what has happened in the last month besides all of this? I got to celebrate my first hallowe'en which was absolutely brilliant! Although I didn't dress up (I didn't realise how seriously it was taken here!), the people were out in full-force across the city. There were the Village People, Duffman, man-sized babies, wolves, the entire cast from Wizard of Oz and even Credit Crunch people! I went out for the night with Susan, one of the Aussies in the flat, and we went on a bar crawl just soaking up the party vibe.

I went on a day trip to Glasgow with Susan and Tim, one of the NZer boys. It was a really great day even though I'd had 40mins of sleep the night before haha. Glasgow is pretty cool, though I think the night-life is supposed to be one of the highlights of a trip there and we didn't experience that. We managed to visit the oldest house in Glasgow which was interesting - it was built in 1471! The city has a bad reputation for stabbings though..

I learnt about and tried to celebrate Guy Fawkes Night - a night of fireworks in memory of foiling a plan by a guy that tried to blow up the London parliament in 1605. I don't know why they still celebrate this, but there were fireworks on all over the place - official ones held by the council and random ones being let off by people in the city. Apparently it's celebrated in New Zealand too! That's another thing that I've learnt while I've been here - that NZ celebrates lots of UK holidays that we haven't even heard of in Aus. We worked up the nerve to bare the cold at around 8:30 and walked the 15mins to North Bridge but we'd missed the fireworks! Oh well.

So that's been my last month! You're all welcome to come and visit me in this wonderful city :) I'll probably be a bit slack on the blogging from now until February but I'll keep you in the loop on anything exciting that happens.

Peace and love
x

Saskia, my new NZ friend, dressed in tourists Scottish hat complete with red hair!

My amazing flatmates. From the left - Tim (NZ), Troy (NZ), Amaya (bottom, Spain), Kieran (Perth), me and Susan (Melbourne). Great bunch :)

The view of Arthur's Seat from The Meadows, a lovely green part of the city near my flat

Susan, Tim and I at the oldest house in Glasgow

Me and Rory, Scottish bartender turned mime

Credit Crunch Men

The Village People

Edinburgh Castle, right smack in the city centre!

Typically Scottish?

The Aussie chef and Jesus at a dress-up at my CSers place

The Scott Monument opposite the main shopping street

Praha

2008-10-20T00:39:00.000+10:30

Prague is indeed a very beautiful city. Paul and I went there to meet up with Pedro (NZer), Kristina (Latvian) and Dan (Czech) - 3 lovely people I worked with at The Frozen Mop - for Pedro's birthday. When we first arrived we couldn't contact them by any means - we couldn't get the public phones to work, we were both out of credit on our phones and we couldn't borrow a phone from anyone in the station! Paul ended up being able to recharge his phone by credit card which was lucky, and then we went to a nearby restaurant called Mona Lisa to eat dinner and wait for them to join us. It was brilliant to see them again even though Pedes was absolutely smashed and looking terrible! That night we dragged our bags to a pub and had a few drinks until about 2am, when we took taxis out to one of Dan's friend's houses - a disused hotel! We each got a hotel room with our own bathroom - it felt sort of strange being in an empty hotel, but fun :)

The next day we all put our bags in lockers at the station in the city and went for a wander around town. We grabbed some Czech lunch as recommended by Dan and sat for a couple of hours. The food we were eating, to me, tasted like curry without the curry - same consistency and sort of nutty flavour, but without the spice - and when I mentioned this to the others, we ended up having an hour long discussion on 'curry without the curry' and how that related to the meaning of life! It was one of those moments..

After walking around for a little while, we all took the train out to Dan's home village, about 40mins from Prague. Some of his mates met us at the station and drove us to his house, where his mum greeted us with plates full of food. We scoffed some down before walking to the local pub. It was a fun but disgraceful evening, with me ending up throwing up in the bathroom (second time ever!!) and yelling at the bartender to give me water (funny, the same thing happened last time I threw up in Vietnam...), Sky, Pedro's NZer friend who now works at the Mop with them, rolling all over Paul and I while we tried to sleep that night, ending with Paul kicking him out of bed and Sky throwing up all over Pedro's clothes on the floor - THAT followed with Kristina being angry at Pedes for not cleaning it up and throwing a vomit soaked jumper on him while he lay in bed! Oh my.. Sky basically couldn't get up the next day, so the rest of us were given a short tour of the village by Dan ending up with us having a few beers at the local football ground. That evening, Dan's mum treated us to more of the 'curry without the curry' food and apple strudel! We all just relaxed watching music on TV, reminiscing about the night before.

It was back to Prague the next day, catching the train at around 2:30 after Pedes, Sky and Paul had a juggle-off at the station. Kristina, Pedes, Sky, Paul and I checked into a hostel for the next 2 nights and then Dan took us on a tour of the city, walking across the river and up to the castle, followed by gluhwein at a small bar in the hills. We had another big night that night with lots of tequila and dancing. I even lost my phone which is the first time that's happened to me, surprising after all of my drunken antics over the years. The next day we were lucky enough to be able to visit a Czech police station to report the loss, our second police station in as many weeks!

For our final day in Prague, Paul and I spent some time together strolling around because we were going to be splitting up again that evening for who knows how long. I was feeling slightly stressed or anxious about us parting, but we had a great final day together. The 4 of us (Dan and Sky had left us already) walked around the main touristy parts of town, and walked all the way up to a museum only to decide that we couldn't afford it haha. We ate some amazingly large sausages for lunch. After Paul left in the afternoon, Pedes, Kristina and I hung out at the hostel and then took transport to the airport. We got off the bus about 2 stops too early and made an attempt to walk the rest of the way to the airport, before deciding we should just wait and catch another bus. Lucky we did - I think it was about another 3 km to the airport along a highway!!

It was a fun final week to my travel. That night I spent the night in the Belfast airport and took my early morning flight to Edinburgh - my home for the next few months!

Posted from Edinburgh

Lovely lake in Dan's village

Mmm..

Sky, Pedro and Paul loving life

These patterns are actually CARVED into the wall!

St Paulus and Petras

After the juggle-off

Beautiful old town square near our hostel

Ole' Salzy

2008-10-13T23:48:00.001+10:30

We didn't really know where to go from Pecs so we were just looking aimlessly through the LP trying to choose a place somewhere between there and Prague, our final destination together. In the end we were very happy with our decision to revisit Salzburg - another place that we had visited in 2005 with mum. It was so amazing seeing the place all covered in autumn colours instead of the black and white of snow.

We spent 4 nights in a hostel there and really just spent the time wandering around and enjoying the beauty of the city. I love it that everything in Austria and Germany these days is 'bio'! You can get almost everything in the supermarkets in 'bio' form - makes everything seem healthier and better for the environment :) There was a Biofest on in Salzburg on the Saturday while we were there which was lovely - lots of foods and wines and beers, along with entertainment and a kids cooking area. We didn't achieve much in Salzy that's worth writing about so I'll just let the pictures do the talking :)

Posted from Edinburgh

Excited to be back in Salzy

The beautiful river that runs through the centre

Lederhosen!

Statue of Mozart in Mozart Square

Kids cooking at the Biofest

The famous Mirabella gardens starring in The Sound of Music

Amazing

Frische krapfen! Great stuff.

Stellar backdrop

Picture taken during a few-hour stop in Linz on our way to Prague

Pearch

2008-10-09T22:03:00.003+10:30

Paul and I took a train from Budapest to a town in the south of Hungary spelt Pécs but pronounced pearch. It's a small town with loads of international students living there and it has a friendly, safe feeling about it. We managed to find another CSer here who was willing to take us in even though he had medical exams coming up! These crazy people.. His name is Simon and he's a cheerful German med student living in Pecs so he can get an international medicine degree. Paul and I each had an amazing futon couch to sleep on in an enormous living room, so we were happy with our new living arrangements. Simon took us out to a Hungarian restaurant for dinner where there was a pianist playing, and then took us for a quick tour of the town - lovely.

The next day, Simon was good enough to invite us to his lecture on the spinal cord! While it was in German and we couldn't understand a thing, it was one of the coolest things I'd seen in ages. They had all different sections of human brains on the table and they were using them to go through what they'd learnt throughout the semester. There was a corpse on a table as well, covered by a sheet, which Simon thought they would be discussing towards the end of the lecture. When the class ran out of time, he asked if we wanted to see it anyway and of course we did! He pulled back the sheet and there was a man, face down with shaved hair, a huge section cut out of his back where his spinal cord once sat and hard, yellow parts all over his body that were apparently once fat. Mmmm mmmmm.. :) So glad we got to see that though - the wonders of couchsurfing once again!

For the rest of our time in Pécs, Paul and I wandered around in the sunshine, enjoying the beachy feeling of the place, even though we were nowhere near the ocean. There was an international film festival going on at the time so we watched a Hungarian animated film sitting out in the sun on bean bags. Absolute bliss. In Pécs there's also a really cool mosque in the centre which has been converted into a church - the largest preserved building left over from the Ottoman occupation of Hungary. They basically took the Islamic symbol down from the top and put up a cross instead! Interesting.

Posted from Edinburgh

Mosque/church!

Wall full of locks of love

Shopping street

Us enjoying the sun at the film fest

Not feelin' Hungary..

2008-10-06T22:02:00.000+10:30

We arrived in Budapest by train from Vienna feeling excited to be in one of the most exciting capital cities in Europe. I'd been talking about it for ages, and lots of people who had been before had loved the place. We didn't really feel it, but that was probably more due to our experiences, rather than the city itself to be fair :)

We didn't have any accommodation organised before we arrived and figured we would sort it out once we got there. At the train station we went to one of the tourist info places to ask for the cheapest hostels in the city. He tried to convince us that we should stay in a hotel instead, and wouldn't give us any information about hostels. The second tourist info place said that the cheapest hostel was 13 euros, so we got directions and started walking. We came across a McDonalds along the way that had free wifi so we quickly checked out hostelbookers.com and found a hostel that was a block away that would take us in for 6-8euros each per night! Stoked, we went there and checked in - very cool 11th Hour Cinema Hostel which has a whole room full of bean bags for lying on while watching movies projected onto the wall.

Budapest is split into Buda and Pest (pronounced pesht), divided by the river running down the middle. We were staying on the Pest side, which is the area that most people stay in, and the castle is sitting on a hill on top of Buda. We had a nice wander along the river on the Pest side on our first evening followed by the traditional Hungarian goulash served at most restaurants on the 'tourist menu'.. It was pretty nice staying in a hostel again after so much couchsurfing! They say that if you stay in hostels for weeks on end you need a night in a hotel now and then to reboot - turns out the same thing applies to couchsurfing, but you need a hostel rather than a hotel! We met some fellow Australian and NZer travellers, as well as a hilarious Irish guy called Henry who we managed to spend some good time with.

On our first full day in Budapest we went across the river to Buda and had a stroll. We walked up to the castle area and walked through a few small streets, looking at churches and the like. For lunch we had these crazily cheap Hungarian snacks (300 forints each - about $2) - sort of like pizza bases made from deep-fried, fluffy pastry! Paul's was filled with cabbage and mine was topped with ham that tasted like fritz (only South Aussies will understand that one..as far as I'm concerned, it's the taste of childhood!) and cheese. I love finding little gems like that. That afternoon we were feeling tired so we went back to the hostel for some relaxation, used our laptops for awhile, watched Lost in Translation on the projector, and then went out for a fateful Chinese dinner with our Irish companion. Paul and I heralded it as a celebration because it was on our 7th month anniversary of departing from Australia, and we thought that Chinese was fitting considering we had been through China together! We were out for a total of 45mins but by the time we got back, someone had been into our hostel dorm and stolen Paul's laptop and external hard-drive, containing all of his photos from the past 7 months, as well as a Swedish guy's laptop, who had been sleeping in the room at the time. Mine was, luckily, locked away in my backpack. We were both slightly heart-broken. What sort of person does that to a fellow traveller? This devastated both of us for the whole next day and a half, until we realised that I had all of his Asia photos on DVD and he found the next 4 months worth of photos on a USB stick! The manager was good to us and let us go through every dorm room and locker in the hostel, but we found nothing. We still have our suspicions that it was the sneaky Swedish guy who was sleeping in the room at the time and also had his laptop 'stolen', but who knows..

The following day was a bit of a drag. We woke up feeling sour so we chilled out on the bean bags listening to music from our iPods over the stereo system, followed by a trip to the police station to make a report. That took a good couple of hours and the police weren't exactly the most friendly, giving people on Earth. Henry took us to a market-place that he'd found nearby for lunch. It looked like it was set in an old train station building, with a high arched roof, and it was full of small stalls selling all sorts of food. The food I chose to eat was pretty gross haha - some sort of meat stew, meat wrapped in meat, and pickled cabbage. Mmm.

That evening we departed for our new CSers place. We took the wrong bus and ended up in the middle of nowhere at night, but made it back with the help of a lovely girl. We eventually made it to the bus stop we were supposed to be at, 40 mins away from the city in a smaller town called Érd, and then walked along a dark road for 10mins until we found our new temporary home. The guy we were staying with, David, is a CS Nomadic Ambassador, which basically means he's a nomad. He travels all over the place and is completely into mountain climbing, even attempting Mt Everest and having had his climbing partner die during an attempt. He's a pretty interesting guy, and we had a long debate about the morality of him 'working' as a beggar in India for 6 months. He went to Mongolia at one stage and really loved the idea of the Mongolian yurt - a large, wooden-framed tent-type structure - so he bought one and brought it back to Budapest on a train. It now acts as his living room/a place for traveller's to stay. And so, here we were, sleeping in a Mongolian yurt 40 mins from Budapest in the middle of a gypsy area that had a bad reputation, but thoroughly enjoying the serenity.

David left the following morning to spend the weekend climbing in Austria, so we had the place to ourselves with instructions to feed the cats and turtles. We stayed there for the entire following day, relaxing and gathering our thoughts by the wood fire. That evening, because I basically hadn't stopped feeling anxious for the past month, I kept peeking out the window while we made our dinner, constantly worried that someone would come and attack us - stupid thoughts, I know. That made Paul start peeking out the window too - anxiety must be contagious! On one of the peeks, Paul says 'hang on! there's someone there!' and runs to the door. Argh! It turned out to be Aaron, a very cool NZer/Hungarian guy who was to be staying in the yurt with us as well. It was nice having a third person there because the chatter took my thoughts away from the worst..

Paul and I took the bus back to Budapest the next day. Although 'noone ever checks the tickets on the buses', a woman came directly up to us to check our tickets.. which we didn't have. ARGH!!! We were completely not going to be paying any more fines, so we talked and argued and talked and argued, got off the bus at the next stop and continued to talk and argue, until I think we spoke so much English that they couldn't argue anymore. They made us buy a ticket for the ride we'd just taken and then left us alone. Phew. We ended up walking into town which took less time than we'd thought. Lesson officially learned - never not buying a ticket ever again! That afternoon we checked out the citadel on top of a mountain and found a cool cave church, but then took the bus back to the yurt. We were supposed to buy cat food but the supermarket was closed! We had a brilliant evening, making dinner, listening to music and chatting with Aaron about the future of society. That was, until about 2am when David got home from Austria and knocked on the yurt door to ask what we had done to his turtles as one has escaped and one had died! We had no idea what had happened and said that it must have been the cats to which the response was 'I think that is unlikely..' Apparently the theory was that we had done something, because we look like such baby turtle killers.

The following morning, Paul bought the cat food and our breakfast foods. We exchanged music with Aaron and then took off for the train station. Good ole' Budapest..

Posted from Edinburgh

Aaron, me and Paul with yurt

Gross lunch with Henners and Paul

Our crazy deep-fried lunch

Tourist menu

The view over the river.. Love the river photos haha.

The grandeur of Wien

2008-10-03T23:51:00.000+09:30

We only spent 2 days in Vienna but we could have spent much longer. It's so grand and beautiful and we really loved strolling around! We arrived on the bus at 5am and it was slightly chilly! We took a subway into the city centre and walked around until we found a Starbucks that opened at 7am with free wifi. We found an email waiting from a Couchsurfer saying that he could take us in, which was lucky because otherwise we would be homeless! We dropped our luggage into lockers at the train station and then walked through the city. We simply had to have wiener schnitzels for lunch, and they were lovely :) In the afternoon we walked to the Kunst Haus Wien (art house Vienna), which is a pretty interesting art museum which houses the collection by Hundertwasser, a very cool Austrian guy who lived parts of his life in New Zealand. He was very into nature and thought that life should be based around natural things, rather than the opposite way around. The floor in the entrance to the museum was all bumpy and hilly because he believed that flat floors designed by architects diminished man's ability to make decisions, and detached him from nature. He also believed that if you build a house then it needs trees and grass incorporated into it, so he designed many houses with trees sticking out the windows, and grass and plants growing on the roof! Interesting theory..

From the museum entrance we could see the huge ferris wheel which we had seen in the movie Before Sunrise so we walked across the river to find it. It turned out to be in a huge amusement park which was still operating! It was pretty quiet since it was the middle of a Monday, but it was great fun walking through there anyway, watching people going on the rides. We even went on the Break Dance ride, which is one of our favourites! From there we took a city loop tram around the city to see the parliament and other cool things, but mainly napped along the way.. We met with Raph, our new Couchsurfer in the late afternoon. He was moving flats at the time and because his new flat was in such a mess he didn't think it would work out for us to stay there with him after all. Because of this though, he offered us his old, nearly empty, flat to have to ourselves for the 2 nights! We were stoked! He took us out there and basically handed over the keys for us to give back when we were ready to leave. It was like we were actually living in Vienna :) Raph stayed and joined us for a lovely dinner before leaving to continue studying for his exam that he had coming up (with all that he had going on, I can't believe he actually took us in at all! Amazing guy..)

After a great night's sleep aided by some old music on cassettes in Raph's house (there's something special about listening to music from cassettes - they have a different aura), we took a tram into town and visited the Hundertwasser Haus, a grand house designed by Hundertwasser himself with crazy colours, designs and, of course, lots of nature involved. Very cool! We spent the afternoon wandering around the streets, admiring the amazing buildings, and then in the early evening we headed over to the parliament - it's the most amazing parliament I've ever seen - huge and Greek-style with chariots on the roof, statues and columns everywhere, with a huge sweeping path up to the door! We'd bought tickets for a Chopin and Mozart concert that was on that night, so after inspecting the building and statues for awhile we walked over to the concert hall. The performance was pretty much incredible! Seeing Chopin and Mozart music being performed live by a mini-orchestra and watching a bit of opera, ballet and waltzing was amazingly exciting to experience :) The perfect touch to our already lovely Wien experience.

Posted from Edinburgh

Paul at the Westbahnhof (pron. vestbarnhof), Vienna's main train station

The Hundertwasser house - very natural!

Lovely river views from the bridge

Grand church in the city centre

Paul killing me with a club

Amazing architecture is all throughout the city..

Parliamentary buildings

The smashing Raph

Pole-land!

2008-09-30T21:35:00.000+09:30

I took 10 hours worth of train from Vilnius to Warsaw in Poland and had a pretty brilliant time! I met a very cool Italian guy before the train had even left the platform and we spent pretty much the entire 10 hours talking in a sort of 'Before Sunrise' sort of manner, for any of you who have seen that movie. Interesting time. We arrived in Warsaw in the evening and my friend Ela met me at the station - another fantastic AIESECer that I met in Ghana :) We took the bus from the station out to her house and I didn't stay awake too much longer. My first experiences of Poland were being told that people walk around the main station with syringes threatening to infect you with HIV if you don't give them money, being told that the city my new Italian friend was headed for was the worst in the world and that he shouldn't take the over-night train by himself, and then walking outside to see a guy kicking in another guy's head against a bin.. I decided that the next day I was due for some relaxing time by myself so I stayed in Ela's house while she went to work. I'm actually sort of glad that I did because I saw the most insane thing I've ever seen - I was just sitting, minding my own business on the couch when I heard sirens followed by a huge smash, then silence. My mind slowly registered that it's usually the other way around - crash, then sirens! I went to the window to see a crazy sight - an ambulance lying on it's side! It had tried to go through some lights with it's sirens blaring but someone had turned the corner, pretty fast apparently, straight into it and knocked it on it's side. I think they were on their way somewhere so they didn't have any patients, but one of the ambulance officers was in the back at the time and was taken off on a stretcher. It was an unreal scene.

Ela took the following day off work to hang out with me, which was very lovely of her. We went to the Warsaw Rising Museum which holds a pretty incredible interactive exhibition of the Warsaw rising movement from August 1, 1944. In an effort to save their capital city from the clutches of German occupation, the Polish people staged a resistance movement which lasted for 63 days. During the movement, 42% of the city was destroyed and later, after the Polish army surrendered, the Germans systematically burnt the city, block by block, destroying 85% of it. The plan, according to the Germans, was the make Warsaw either into merely a military transit station, or a lake! The resistance movement failed mainly because of the lack of support from the allied forces.

Later that afternoon we took a half-hour bus out to visit a very cool poster museum, but when we finally found it it was closed! We headed back into the city and Ela walked me around the old town, which is by far the best part of the city. It has some cool character. We ate Mexican food for dinner, mainly because the Polish place she wanted us to visit was too busy to take us in.

The next morning, I took a train to Krakow! I had bought my ticket before-hand, but when I boarded the train I got on the wrong type (I'd bought a ticket for a slow train but got on an ultra fast one) so I had to pay double :( I made it to Krakow (Cracow in Polish, pronounced krakov) 2 hours earlier than expected and spent the time wandering around. During Paul's trip to visit me in Munich, the Muff Team did indeed convince him to give up his job and come travelling with me again, so he arrived in Krakow at around 4pm after a 26 hour bus trip from London! It was brilliant to see him again, and exciting to think about our next few weeks of travel together! We went for a nice wander around the old town centre and ate dinner at a Polish 'milk kitchen' - a canteen style Polish eatery with ultra-cheap food, usually frequented by students. We ate some delicious soup, dumplings and potato pancakes before continuing on walking. Miguel, one of Paul's friends that he met in London, had kindly offered us a place to stay on his floor about a 20min walk from the city centre, and he met us in the old town late that night to take us back there. After we dropped off our gear, we headed back into town to meet up with some of his mates at a pub for a few hours. We managed to get fined 72.50zlotys (about $35) for not buying a ticket on the tram! The pub had some very cool 5-litre plastic tubes of beer with taps at the base that people could order for their table! Paul and I spent the whole following day wandering around the old town, just enjoying the vibe and the sunshine. It's really beautiful! We got to see Oskar Schindler's factory, where he saved some 1200 Jews during WWII by getting them to work in his amunitions factory, none of the amunitions produced here actually able to be fired. We ate some amazing dinner at a vegetarian restaurant called The Green Way and then picked up some quilts from one of Miguel's friends to make our stay on the floor a whole lot more comfortable.

On Saturday the 27th of September we took a bus out to Auschwitz, the well-known Nazi concentration camp just outside of Krakow. This is one place in the world that will blow anyone away, regardless of their background, interests, or even emotional maturity. Noone can walk through the buildings of Auschwitz without feeling a deep sense of loss and compassion. It is set up like a museum now, with something different in each of the buildings to display to visitors what went on within the walls of the camp, We spent 3 hours walking through and we didn't visit all of them, nor did we visit the nearby Birkenau where even more horrendous activities occurred. Auschwitz I was the original concentration camp and served as the administrative base for the entire complex, whereas Birkenau (Auschwitz II) was built mainly to serve the purpose of an extermination camp, killing over 1,000,000 people during its years of operation. The conditions of the people who came through these camps were horrific. Daily food consisted of half a litre of coffee, a bowl of soup and some bread. People who were able were forced to work 12-14 hours a day in hard labour. Between the starvation and overwork, most people only lasted 3-5 months before passing away. People dropped from 75kg down to 30 within months. People came from all over Europe to this camp, and to others throughout Poland, Germany, France, Austria, Czech Republic and Belarus. Many were fed lies about being given a business or work in the area and were told to bring their family and their most valuable possessions with them.

As new train loads of people came in, they were divided into groups. One was sent into the camp to be registered as workers, and the other group (about 3/4 of the total - usually ill, disabled, the elderly, children and women with children, all of whom were "unable to work") was told they were to be cleansed to prevent the spread of disease within the camp, and were sent to the 'showers'. Once inside they were told to undress and place their clothes directly in front of them so that they could find them easily once the shower was over, the friendly voices of the soldiers giving them nothing to be afraid about, and then the guards left the chamber and locked them inside. Seconds later, holes in the roof would open up and soldiers would drop in Zyclon B, a cyanide-based insecticide, which would release gaseous hydrogen cyanide when mixed with air. The screams were audible through the door and it was once the screams stopped a few minutes later that the soldiers knew the deed was done. They would wait for half an hour for the ventilation to rid the room of the gas before opening the doors and dragging out the bodies to the crematorium, the majority of the bodies huddled close to the door in an attempt to force it open in their terror. Sometimes the gas supplies would be low and people were still alive when they were thrown into the furnaces. Even writing this now brings tears to my eyes. At some point during the war, they were killing up to 10,000 people every day in Auschwitz-Birkenau. The entrance to the camp is a gate topped with the words "Albeit Macht Frei" - work brings freedom..

The following day, we had a much lighter one. We took a bus out to the Wieliczka salt mines, a famous tourist attraction about 20mins away from Krakow. The mine itself had been in operation for 900 years or so, making it one of the oldest continuously working salt mines in Europe, but the attraction is the fact that the miners used to carve sculptures and designs into the salt, including an entire church of St Kinga, all deep underground! Impressive. That night we took an overnight bus to Vienna!

Posted from Edinburgh

Me and Silvio, training it.

That ambulance..

Ela and I in the old town

Cute stencil graffiti in Warsaw - the words say something like 'there are many of us'

Auschwitz entrance gate

Piles of suitcases that were brought along by the camp prisoners

Some patterned bread rolls I saw all around Krakow

Vendor selling cigarettes with a teeny tiny window in the middle

Krakow old town

The entrance to Schindler's factory

The land of cottage cheese and mushrooms

2008-09-20T00:39:00.000+09:30

I arrived in Vilnius (sort of pronounced Vilnoos), the capital of Lithuania to a big surprise! While I was in Ghana I was privileged to meet a lovely Lithuanian AIESECer girl called Dalia who I'd always promised to visit. I contacted her in the weeks before I arrived and she was excited for my visit, but then I didn't hear from her at all for the week before my arrival even after several emails and facebook messages, so she never got to know that I'd booked a flight and confirmed that I was coming. I found myself a couchsurfer to stay with, figuring that I may not even see her while I was there. The day before I left I got the brainwave to contact Ela, another AIESECer that I'd met in my time in Ghana who also knew Dalia, to see if she had a contact number for her. She happened to have Dalia's boyfriend's number, so I sent him a text, very randomly as we had never met, saying that I knew Dalia and I was arriving in Vilnius that day, already had a place to stay but please get Dalia to contact me so we could catch up. Anyway, I arrived to Vilnius airport, looking around for a sign to the bus rank, when I heard 'hey obroni!!' (orbroni being Ghanaian-speak for 'white man') coming from my right. I turned around and there was Dalia! Her boyfriend had remembered to contact her about an hour or so before I arrived, giving her a huge shock at work, and she basically drove straight from work to the airport to pick me up! I think we were both still in shock as we drove away haha.

Anyway, with that long description out of the way, let's get onto the fun part! The reason for the title of this post, by the way, is because almost every meal I ate in Lithuania included mushrooms or cottage cheese :) I ended up staying at Dalia's place for 5 nights and I truly enjoyed Lithuania. She took me to a restaurant for some food before we went home from the airport, and I ate some amazing mushroom soup in a bowl made from bread! On my first full day there I explored the old town and saw some interesting things. The town is really lovely and it was exciting to see some differences between here and any Western European old town, this being my first Eastern European country I had visited. There's a bridge covered with padlocks in the city which is so cool - there's a tradition that after a couple gets married in Vilnius, the man will carry his wife across the bridge and they lock a padlock to the railing with their names and the date inscribed on it. Very sweet. An interesting looking red-brick church called St Anne's was apparently sighted by Napolean when he came through the country with his army in 1812 and he declared that he would carry it back to Paris 'on the palm of his hand'... whatever that means haha. It makes for an interesting story anyway! I went with Dalia's boyfriend, Mantas, to see the Museum of Genocide Victims, which is set in the old headquarters of the KGB, the Soviet Union's secret police and intelligence agency. It documents the occupation and includes information about eave-dropping, deportations and torture. Downstairs, people can even walk through the cells in which hundreds of prisoners were held - seeing the padded cell with a straight jacket hanging in the centre and the water torture cells was truly sobering. And finally, the city used to be surrounded by city walls and the only one of the 9 gates which remain is the Gate of Dawn, adorned with many pictures of religious figures. I saw the beautiful sight of a woman giving the gift of a warm hat to a homeless woman sitting beneath it and the two of them praying together..

There were a few things around the country that I wanted to see and I figured that I would take a bus out to see them all, but Dalia decided to take the following day off work so that we could take a road trip together! We left Vilnius on the Friday for a 4 hour drive to the north of the country as I wanted to see the Curonian Spit, a tiny strip of land that joins Lithuania to that small section of Russia that's sandwiched between Lithuania and Poland called Kaliningrad. Unfortunately for both of us, the tap water in Lithuania had decided that it didn't want to agree with me and we spent the whole drive pulling over a thousand times so that I could throw up or use a toilet.. I'm sure that Dalia was regretting taking the day off work to be with me! As for me, I've never felt stomach cramps as intense as those before.. We made it all the way though and we took a ferry across some body of water to the spit, then continued driving along to Nida, a small beach-side town half-way along the spit, almost heading into Russia. It's a really cute little town which many Germans use as their summer holiday destination. The spit is a great place to hike or cycle along apparently, but I was in no condition to do either and it was quite cold as there had been some crazy cold snap across the entire continent in the week before. Dalia managed to drive us out to a place where we could see some really cool sand dunes, one of the major attractions on the spit.

My stomach felt just good enough in the evening to swallow some more mushroom soup before we went to her friend's holiday home where we were staying for the night. After a good night's sleep I was feeling much better and we headed on our way to Šiauliai, another small town in the centre of the country who's major attraction is the 'hill of crosses'. The hill of crosses is believed to have been around since the 1800's, but most recently took on significance during Russia's occupation of the country that lasted until 1990 (Lithuania was the first country to become independent of the Soviet Union!), when many Lithuanians were deported into Siberia. Crosses were placed on a hill near Šiauliai in memory of the deported, Lithuanians using it to demostrate their allegiance to their original identity and culture, and the number or crosses grew to include crosses placed by people for many reasons. In defiance against the Soviet Union, Lithuanians would sneak past tanks, soldiers and machine guns in the night to place more and more crosses on the hill, only to have them torn down again the next day or so. The Soviets tore down the crosses over and over, even bull-dozing the hill 3 times! Since the occupation has been over, it has now become tradition for everyone who visits the hill to place their own cross there. The hill itself is quite small, but it is abolutely covered in crosses, estimated to be numbered at around 50,000, big, small and in between, and now from every corner of the world. The sound made by the wind passing through them is quite amazing.

We headed back to Vilnius that afternoon to rest and reboot, and the following day we headed out again. Dalia took me to a park called Grūto parkas. During the Soviet occupation of the country there were hundreds of Soviet and communist statues all around Lithuania, and all around the Union. In 1990 when the country became independent, all of the statues were torn down and dumped in different places until one man went around and collected as many of them as he could and displayed them in a park-style museum. Walking through the park is truly fascinating and I've never seen any statues of Lenin, Stalin or Marx, let alone so many in one place! It was cool walking through there with Dalia as well because she could remember some of the statues standing in the Vilnius city centre when she was younger. That afternoon we went out to Trakai Castle, a very beautiful red-brick castle standing in the centre of a huge lake, before driving to Dalia's parents' house where we were served a huge feast! Brilliant times :)

Posted from Edinburgh, Scotland (my new home for the next couple of months!)

The padded cell

St Anne's church

Padlock bridge, Vilnius

Near the Vilnius town centre

An old sauna

Dalia and I on our way to the Spit

Hill of crosses!

5 of the big Soviet kahunas with Lenin in the centre

The man himself

A drink machine from the Soviet times! Glad I was with Dalia for this one or I wouldn't have looked twice - apparently these machines were all over the city when she was a kid. Each one had a single glass which was washed only with a spray of water from the machine (and was never stolen!) and when someone put money in they were delivered a glass of soft drink. Cool stuff!

Trakai Castle

Our Christmas city

2008-09-17T22:40:00.000+09:30

I had a brilliant time in Munich! I was there for 5 days and Naomi, a lovely friend from Adelaide that I worked with at Bocca, allowed Paul and I to stay with her at her place about 2 metro stops away from Marienplatz, the main square. Gnomes met me at the train station and we hung out waiting for Paul to arrive from the airport. Once he got in and we dropped all our luggage at her place, we went for a wander around the city. It was really great to see the place again, though it was much busier and more touristy than we remembered from last time. It was brilliant to be able to walk around in anything less than 15 layers of clothes!

The following day we met up with Alana and Brook, the Melbourne couple that we walked the Great Wall with in Beijing. They came up from Slovenia, I came from Nuremberg and Paul came from London all so that we could have a reunion :) And a fine reunion it was - after our hugs and hellos we headed to the Hofbrauhaus, the huge and famous beer hall in Munich for 1 litre steins of beer and sausages, followed by a smaller beer place where we continued on the drinking and followed it up with apfelstrudel! Seeing those 2 again really did bring back some amazing memories.

It was decided that the next day, the 4 of us would take the trek out to see the Neuschwanstein Castle - the castle that inspired the Walt Disney logo! We met for coffee in the morning and then took a train from the hauptbahnhof to Füssen, a cute little town 2 hours from Munich. All 4 of us bought 1euro pairs of earmuffs because it was freezing cold (and Paul and I were wearing thongs hahaha..) so from then on we called ourselves Team Muff. From there we caught a bus and walked up a hill for 30 mins to see the beautiful castle. Overall I think it was worth it, even though standing at the base of the castle we couldn't see the top because of the fog and cloud cover. We managed to sneak in the exit door while some other people left and gave ourselves a free tour of the inside of the castle!

For Paul's last day in Munich we met up with the lovely Brook and Alana again for some internet and time spent perusing a map of Europe, and our final 2 litres of beer together in the Augustin Beer Hall. We got slightly rowdy, yelling out "twiddly-dee potatoes" to some Irishmen in the vicinity and doing our now ritualistic "whooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaa prost!" with a huge slamming together of steins, before we were warned to keep it down. We left soon after that, said our farewells and parted ways. Paul and I went home to some beautiful home-made pumpkin soup warming on the stove and a gift of a box of cornflakes from Gnomes to Paul.

With Paul out of our lives once more, on his way back to London, Naomi and I enjoyed a day together. She took me for a walk through the Englischer Garten and showed me some guys who were 'surfing' in the river - some Aussie guys apparently decided that they needed to surf there so they constructed a wave-making mechanism in the river, allowing people to actually surf in a river in the city centre! Pretty cool to watch. We bought sausages, potatoes, carrots and broccoli and made an amazingly tasty meal for dinner and watched some chick flicks streamed from the internet. The wonders of technology.. Gnomes also got me to try on the dirndl (traditional German dress) she'd bought to wear to the Oktoberfest, which looked terrible on me but was cool all the same :)

The following day was my flight to Vilnius, Lithuania.

Posted from Salzburg

Tourists waiting expectantly for the glockenspiel in the clock tower to start dancing in Marienplatz

Us with Brook and Alana.. Muff Team reunited!

Disney castle

Surfin' in the .. Munich city centre!

Gnomes and I with amazing dinner

Dirndl time

Bavaria

2008-09-12T20:31:00.000+09:30

After leaving Frankfurt I spent a week and a half going through 3 lovely towns in Bavaria – Würzburg, Bamberg and Nuremberg. I sort of half chose these towns at random from my Lonely Planet based on the fact that I had to get to Munich by the 12th of September and I needed to space out my time and money, and I ended up staying with Couchsurfers in all three towns!

And so, Würzburg.. Pronounced voitzborg, Würzburg is in a sort of province of Bavaria called Frankonia and the people there would prefer to be known as Frankonian rather than Bavarian or German! The region produces brilliant white wines that hardly ever get sold outside the area – probably why I chose this place to visit! I spent 3 nights here and on each of the nights, my Couchsurfer Christine, her friend Kata and I made home-cooked dinners. Christine is a fantastic free-style cooker and they were both vegetarian so we had interesting meals. The town is really pretty – set on a river with lots of old churches, vineyards all over the surrounding hills and a castle watching over the place. It’s a nice place to visit but it probably didn’t need 3 days haha.

Bamberg was my next stop and was a beautiful old town that has it’s own style of beers that taste like smoked bacon! It’s strange to smell what you’re drinking and catch a whif of pork but they go down pretty easily.. In Bamberg I stayed with an amazing girl called Amelie. I actually contacted her flatmate through CS but as she wasn’t going to be in town for the weekend, she set it up that I could sleep in her bed and share the flat with her flatmate! It was really kind of her. Amelie and I had a lot to talk about (for once) as she has lived parts of her life in Australia, she’s really interested in everything around her (such as politics, environment, etc) like I am, and she’s doing a PhD on the impacts of social structures on the import of organic products, comparing Germany and Australia – very interesting!

I spent a lot of time in Bamberg just hanging out enjoying the old town feeling in the sunshine, drinking the best coffees I’ve found since leaving Australia, and sampling various traditional German/Bavarian foods, as suggested by Amelie! She got me to try plum-filled dumplings with vanilla sauce, weisswurst (white sausage) with fresh pretzel and sweet mustard (very Munich..) and some sort of huge lump of pork with crackling, potato dumpling and beer sauce. German food is so hearty! One of her friends invited us to her house for dinner where she showed us amazing photos from her recent trip to Iceland, Amelie took me on another night to a beer garden overlooking the river and I also visited a huge church which holds a pope’s body inside! The whole weekend was one of experiences :)

My next and final stop before München was a town called Nuremberg (Nürnberg). Nuremberg’s a really interesting place. I finally got my travelling mojo back here, and I found myself actually entering museums again! I had 2 ½ days here so I thought I may as well get the 2-day Nuremberg pass for 19euros which allowed me free public transport and free entry into every museum, castle, church and exhibition possible – a pretty good deal if you use it right. Nuremberg’s old town is still surrounded by its town walls and it has cobble-stoned streets galore. It’s a really lovely place to just wander around in – there are plenty of cafes and bakeries to rest at, there’s a huge food market in Hauptmarkt, their market square, there’s a huge old church where people can sit on the steps and people-watch in the sunshine and there’s a massive castle up on the hill to visit if you can stretch your legs that far. I visited the Germanisches National Museum (which has loads of stuff but the thing that caught my eye was the huge room full of old and new musical instruments!), the Natural History Museum which has displays on different tribes and areas from around the world, the Toy Museum, the castle on the hill, and, most importantly, Dokumentationszentrum.

Nuremberg was used by Hitler as a major place to hold mass rallies during WWII and it was pegged by him as one of the 5 Nazi bases in Germany. Because of this history, the allied countries decided that it would be in this town that the members of the Nazi party would be tried and sentenced, in what is now known as the Nuremberg trials. During his time, Hitler hired an architect that he admired to design a colloseum-like structure to be used in Nuremberg soley for mass demonstrations – the same architect he hired to transform Berlin into the “Germania capital of the world” for use after they had conquered anyone and everyone. The colloseum-like structure was never finished because the war started, but now they have turned it into the most brilliant museum I’ve ever seen, Dokumentationszentrum. It documents the rise of Hitler, including the way he demolished democracy and instilled a sense of ‘community’ instead, the way he used Hitler Youth, the way he took over all the top roles within Germany and became all-powerful, the concentration and death camps, all the way through to the Nuremberg trials. It must be one of the most important museums in the world. I’ve never seen a collection quite like it and I couldn’t help but shed some tears while watching the cold description by one of the Nazi generals of exterminating thousands of people in the death chambers..

Posted from Warsaw, Poland

Vineyards really do surround the city!

Very cool looking church in the centre of Würzburg

Enjoying the sunshine

Würzburg - view from the castle

'Little Venice' in Bamberg

Gorgeous

Amelie and I

Grand church in Nuremberg

Fountain in the town centre which spurted water from women's breasts - huh?

Crazy little guy from the Congo that I found in the Natural History Museum

Advertisement for Hitler Youth

No that's not just a picture of a swastika - that's hundreds of people marching in formation at one of the rallies!

Frankfurt am Main

2008-09-07T20:38:00.004+09:30

Maarten was nice enough to drive me to Kleve, a small town just after the German border, so that it would be easier for me to get a train onto Frankfurt. And so we parted ways at the train station and I caught a train to Frankfurt, changing in Düsseldorf and Cologne on the way. Again, travelling has treated me well - Paul and I met 2 lovely Germans in Hoi An, Vietnam who happened to live in Frankfurt, and Sonja put me up in her house! She even persuaded me to stay for 2 days longer than I had planned and I really had a great time there with her, Michael (the other one we met in Vietnam) and her boyfriend Sebastian.

I arrived in Frankfurt on Friday night and Sonja met me at the Frankfurt am Main station and took me back to her flat. We ate a nice dinner of pizza at the restaurant downstairs, drank some wine and then headed to the Main River where a weekend-long festival was being held, called Museumsuferfest. We met up with Michael there - it was really great to see them both again! Sonja and I drank a bottle of wine each and danced away at a few different bands before heading back home again. We really spent the entire weekend at the festival - on Saturday it was perfect weather so we went there during the day and watched some cool African and world music bands before laying in the sun on the riverbank, going home to change, eat and grab some gin and tonic, and then heading back to the festival to meet up with Michael again and dance up a storm at an awesome Arabian style DJ.

On Sunday we slept in a little bit after the energetic dancing from the day before and then made banana pancakes for breakfast! On the last day we saw Michael and Sonja in Vietnam, we were in Hanoi and it was the night we were about to fly over to Japan so we decided that we HAD to have banana pancakes one more time. We managed to somehow convince a lady in a restaurant to make them for us, even though they weren't on her menu, so this Sunday morning breakfast was sort of in memory of the good times in Vietnam :)

Later that afternoon we went to the history museum where they had a fantastic exhibition on the year 1968, the year when student protests occurred all over the globe. It was a really interesting display and Sonja helped me to understand some of the meaning behind it by translating some sections. After that we headed to the museum of modern art which had a 12 minute video in which some artists had gotten together and created a huge chain reaction - you know, a tyre rolls onto a plank of wood causing it to tip over a bottle of liquid which has a chemical reaction with something else - but it went for 12 minutes which was very impressive!

Sonja and one of her good friends took me out for some traditional Hessen food (Hessen is the German state in which Frankfurt is in), including apfelwein (apple wine), handkäse mit musik (lit. hand cheese with music, so called because it is formed with the hands and 'mit musik' because it causes flatulence! - translucent sour milk cheese with vinegar and onions eaten with bread) and rippchen mit kraut (pork loin with sauerkraut). It was a very hearty meal! We spent a tiny bit more time at the festival watching jazz before we went home to bed.

For my final 2 days in the area I took day trips out to see Mainz and Heidelberg. Mainz I didn't enjoy very much - it was nice but it could have been walked through in an hour, but Heidelberg was really lovely. The small town is set on a river with beautiful hilly scenery on either side. I went for a walk up a path called Philosophenweg (philosophy way) and saw great views over the town. I managed to cook dinner for Sonja and Michael once with an 'almost perfect' salad (as claimed by Michael who says that if it was perfect then every other salad afterwards would be a disappointment.. :p) and Sonja took me out for more Frankfurter food - curryworst (chopped up sausage topped with ketchup and curry powder). It really was a great few days :)

Posted from Bamberg

The view from the train heading into Frankfurt

Sonja, Sebastian and I with pancakes!

Smoking section on the Frankfurt platform - just stand inside the painted yellow lines!

Main square in Frankfurt

Australian shop at the festival - it even sold Kool Mints, Tim Tams and Milo! ARGH!

Main River

A cute little girl trying to help out the African band!

Heidelberg

View from Philosophenweg

Michael, me and Sonja :)

Old friends and university towns

2008-08-31T19:20:00.009+09:30

While I was in Ghana I was lucky enough to meet 4 lovely Dutch people during our travels in the north of the country. Kevin and I went to a hippo sanctuary near a brilliant (...) town called Wa where we slept on a roof under mosquito nets and cooked food on coal by candlelight. We did manage to actually see 2 hippos as well! Anyway, one of the guys we met, Maarten, lives in Nijmegen in The Netherlands and offered to put Toby and I up in his room for awhile, on the condition that he could first take us to a small town called Amersfoort which no tourists know about. Who were we to argue?

Toby and I left Den Haag by train, after farewelling our couchsurfing friends and writing messages in permanent texta on their wall, and headed to Amersfoort. We managed to arrive at almost the same time as Maarten and we took off pretty much straight away to go and have some lunch. Toby and I had a gezond broodje (lit. healthy roll) and Maarten had a very Dutch uitsmijter (eggs and ham on bread - doean't sound very Dutch-ish but it's really common!). Maarten showed us around the town which he had visited plenty of times in the past, spouting out endless amounts of background information. We even managed to do a tour of the church which took us to the top for nice views.

In the afternoon we went by train again to Nijmegen, Maarten's home town. Not many tourists make it out this way but it's a really fine university city with a lovely square in the centre. We really enjoyed our time spent there - drinking beers in the oldest pub in town, eating home-made meals in the shared student kitchen of Maarten's home, walking around the town centre and sharing one of Maarten's favourite films with him - a great Dutch film called Simon which I highly recommend! It was a very relaxed couple of days before we moved on once more, this time even further south, to a town called Maastricht.

Maastricht and Nijmegen both claim to be the oldest town in The Netherlands. Unfortunately for Nijmegen, the town was accidentally bombed by the allied Americans during WWII! The American airforce was attempting to destroy the entire German airplane industry when poor weather conditions forced them to simply drop their bombs on 'targets of opportunity' before flying back to base - they couldn't fly for long distances with the bombs still on board. What they didn't realise was that the railway that they dropped their bombs on was actually in the town of Nijmegen, some kilometres across the border into one of their alliances, The Netherlands. The bombing killed 800 people and destroyed the city.

Maastricht turned out to be my favourite city in The Netherlands. It's positioned on the Maas river with beautiful canal houses lining either side, cobble-stoned streets throughout and many a place to sit, enjoy a local beer and watch the world go by. Again, this was definitely a town in which to do not much besides this! Maastricht is another university town and with the new year about to start, our hostel was full of new students from Germany, Finland and Poland just as excited as us to be exploring a new town.

Right at the bottom of The Netherlands there is what they call a 'mountain' (at only 300m, it's questionable!) which happens to be partly in NL, Belgium and Germany, with the meeting point between the 3 countries right at it's peak, called the Dreilandenpunt. We figured it was worth a look so we headed down there. We didn't quite know where to get off on the bus so we just kept staying on board, looking out for the town called Vaals but never seeing it. Eventually I noticed that the 'straats' had turned into 'strasses' - we were accidentally in Germany! Oops! We did eventually make it to the peak and I'm glad we did - I've never been at the meeting point between countries before! After our adventure, we made it back into Maastricht for afternoon tea before Toby and I split up - he headed down to Brussels and I went back up to Nijmegen to hang out with Maarten for awhile longer.

Back in Nijmegen, I really had a brilliant time chillin' with Maarten - a great guy to chat with! I spent a whole day relaxing in his room and then we had a BBQ indoors (it was raining :() with his fellow students, followed by a viewing of Garden State. On the second day, Maarten borrowed his dad's car so he could take me on a road trip to see some extra parts of The Netherlands. And so it happened - we visited Muiden to see a great castle, saw a small old town called Hoorn to follow the history of a major port town and the Dutch East India Company, drove along the longest dyke in the world (!!) and visited Franeker, a town in Friesland in the north of The Netherlands - they even have their own language. We ended the day with dinner with his dad, who happens to be just as kind and funny as Maarten himself! It really was a lovely time, and it was great to have someone to talk to about Ghana once again :)

And so I have now made it into Germany after 2 weeks in The Netherlands, but more on that later..

Posted in Frankfurt

An old town gate in Amersfoort, complete with people dressed up in old clothing!

View over Amersfoort from the top of the church

I really wanted to eat that glass for some reason..

I saw a hedgehog for the first time in my life!

I liked this poster just because it's cute but apprently it's very Dutch to have a mackeral on a piece of bread

Beautiful Grote Markt in Nijmegen

High alcohol beers!

Us in Maastricht

And this is why I loved Maastricht..

Dreilandenpunt

A whole train packed with NL tanks.. Are they going to war?

Maarten HATED this building haha

On the longest dyke in the world! Sea water to the left, fresh water to the right

Memorial to the guys who built the dyke

That Netherlandish country

2008-08-27T23:41:00.010+09:30

I finished working at the Mop on Sunday the 10th of August. I had a brilliant final shift, my final task being to take out a plate of mint sauce, English mustard and horseradish to a couple to enjoy with their roast lunch - the English sure do like their condiments! We had a great party up in the living quarters that night - everyone chipped in and bought me a bottle of tequila so of course I had fun! The following day I actually happened to be in a car accident. It was nothing serious of course, or else I wouldn't be writing this now, but the car I was in lost control in the rain on a small country lane, skidded out and ended up in a hedge. A nice guy with a truck pulled us out with some rope and we made it back to the Mop eventually. It would have to happen on the day before I leave England!

On the Tuesday I was set to fly out to Amsterdam from the Liverpool airport. I had my last Sailor Jerry's rum with ginger beer and fresh lime before Josh, one of my closest mates at the Mop, was kind enough to drive me the 40 minutes or so to the airport. The flight was uneventful and I landed in Amsterdam to meet up with Tobias, excited to be on the road again! Toby and I stayed at one of his friend's houses, a great guy called Eddie that he met through online graphic design groups. The house was about 20 minutes out of the city centre by tram and it was really lovely of him to let me stay there considering he didn't know me from a bar of soap.

Amsterdam is actually an absolutely beautiful city. All you ever hear about is the fact that you can smoke weed in the coffee shops and that it has canals, but there's a lot more to the place than just that. I really enjoyed looking at the Dutch architecture, strolling around the city and soaking up the Dutch culture. They really are fantastic people and I'm beginning to like the language even more than German! Toby and I didn't do a whole lot in Amsterdam besides wander through the streets, though we did manage to make it to the Anne Frank Huis - the house in which Anne Frank and her family hid for 2 years during the war, now made into a brill museum.

The reason I began my travels in Amsterdam was because Toby and I planned on going to a festival near the city called A Campingflight to Lowlands Paradise (Lowlands for short) months ago and the time to go had finally arrived! We met a Dutch guy called Rens and his Aussie mate, Raymond, while we were in Amsterdam who were also going to be at the festival and it was decided that we should set up camp together - a decision I'm very pleased with! The group of us ended up having 4 tents in total and we had an absolute blast seeing bands, drinking, relaxing and chatting. The people in the tents surrounding us were very cool as well - a bunch of Dutch people, 3 British guys and another group that included even more Aussies. I pretty much grinned for the entire weekend and have never jumped around to bands so much in my life! The highlights for me were definitely Booka Shade, Pendulum, Roisin Murphy and Franz Ferdinand. Oh, and probably watching Chris, a Canadian guy camping with us, run around in a full body bright blue Nike running suit! That was hilarious. There was also a crazy Japanese band called Asakusa Jinta who played insanely hyped-up trumpet based music. A good weekend was had by all!

After the festival was over, Tobias and I headed back to Amsterdam for just one more night before taking a train to Den Haag (The Hague), a lovely town near the sea. We stayed with a couchsurfer couple, Marco and Suzanne, who treated us very well, cooking us green curry and shoarma, introduced us to stroopwafels (pronounced stropvafels, small round disk-shaped thin waffles with thick maple syrup sandwiched between them!) and letting us peruse their DVD collection at our own leisure :) They ended up letting us stay for 3 nights while we enjoyed the city. Den Haag is actually the seat of government within The Netherlands and it also hosts the UN's International Court of Justice, but my favourite part was the Escher museum. MC Escher has long been my favourite artist but before I came to The Netherlands I didn't realise that he was Dutch! The museum had loads and loads of his artworks on display, each one managing to fascinate me. He was truly a unique guy!

On the day before moving on we took a day trip to visit 2 nearby towns called Delft and Leiden. Both of these towns were very pretty, with a small villagey feel to them. Delft reminded me a lot of Tanunda in Adelaide! We bought some brilliant cheese in Delft and enjoyed some traditional Dutch appelflappen (pronounced oppelfloppen, these are triangle-shaped puffpastries filled with apple and sprinkled with sugar - mmmm..), and then took photos of the huge windmill in the centre of Leiden - a very stereotypically Dutch day! As much as every Dutch person I've spoken to has hated the fact that everyone knows the cliche Dutch things like cheese, windmills, wooden shoes and the ability to smoke weed in coffee shops, these things (maybe besides the windmills) are all very common to see throughout the country. Hey, at least the only things people know about The Netherlands aren't a guy called Crocodile Dundee or the fact that there are dangerous animals roaming around...

Posted from Frankfurt

Me in Dam Square, Amsterdam

Poffertjes!

For some reason this type of thing is really common in NL - you insert your money into the slot associated with the food you want (burger, croquet, etc), open a tiny door and take the food out! Great for snacking

A menu for weed, space cake, hash - everything you could need!

Lowlands entrance gates

3 hilarious British guys in a tent nearby

Me with the guys we camped with - the guy immediately to the left of me was the most awesomely fun Aussie guy from Melbourne!

Wee little leprechauns

Stroopwafel!

Bicycle storage area at a train station

Entrance to Escher's museum

Self-explanatory (me rowing in a clog canoe...) :p

Photos of the Mop times

2008-08-10T23:17:00.001+09:30

As promised, here is some pictorial evidence..

Me and the crew - Pedro, Kristina and Josh

Wilmslow, our nearest town

Me and Pedro, my NZer room-mate

Josh, Pete the gay and Jamie - best Scottish head chef around :)

Posted from Nijmegen, Holland

Good times at the Mop

2008-08-01T02:40:00.029+09:30

In about one and a half weeks I leave my current post in Mobberley and begin travelling again, starting in Amsterdam for a festival and continuing on through Germany, Czech and hopefully into Poland! What better time than now to fill you in on where I'm actually working.. :p

So on my final night in Madrid I used one of my hostel room-mates' laptops and logged onto gumtree.com, traveller's haven for finding work, volunteer opportunities and accommodation. I was flying into Liverpool with the intention of getting work in the Lake District in the north-east of England. When finding work there proved to be a little more difficult than I'd hoped, I thought I would look for something a little closer to where I was flying into, and there happened to be a listing on gumtree for a pub called The Frozen Mop, set in a tiny country village called Mobberley which is halfway between Knutsford and Wilmslow, about half an hour by train out of Manchester (AKA The Man Chest). It sounded interesting and mentioned that there were a few 'antipodean' staff working there, a word used by the British to describe us Aussies, NZers and South Africans on the other side of the world. I gave them a call and the rest was history - after a sleepless night of lying on the Madrid airport floor and a 6am flight with Ryanair, I took a bus, train and taxi out to the Mop - my home for the past 2 months!

This place has treated me really well with £40 per week accommodation and a free meal a day, as much coffee and soda and lime that I would ever want and the opportunity to meet some fantastic, amazing people from all over. I've learnt a lot about England, Europe, New Zealand and, of course, myself :) I work with a mixture of people - Latvian, NZer, Czech, Slovakian, Scottish, English, South African - and we've had many a sleepless night in the staff accommodation caused by a mixture of snoring, WAY too much alcohol, mice in the walls, alarms going off and that wanker that somehow always turns on the heating full blast, making us sweat it out. Everyone that I work with here is an absolute character! Pedro, though you'll never read this, you've been a good mate and I still do love you even though I think I've been woken up by you at 5, 6 or 7am about 20 times just so you can ask for more alcohol, show me a frog you've picked up from outside or even just so you can give me a noogie or a 'people's elbow', or pull the mattress off my bed. Good times :)

So yeah, click on the link to see our pub website. We have amazing foods and drinks. They even sell my favourite red wine from home - D'Arenberg Love Grass shiraz! Next time hopefully I'll put up some photos for you all, but for now I need to sleep off the adventures of last night..

Love and peace
xx

My Spanish time alone

2008-06-30T05:58:00.000+09:30

I spent a few days in Granada chillin' at a cool as hostel with a cool as barman plus others and a had 2 sleepless nights before heading on to Madrid! It was a bit of a weird time because I was feeling half down in the dumps and half excited about the travelling. Granada was really lovely because it very Spanish with cobble-stoned streets and winding alleys but it also has a huge Islamic influence because it's so close to Morocco. It's a very laid-back town and it was a great way for me to wind down after the emotional goodbyes with Mum and Paul! I ate fantastic tapas with some girls from the hostel, met some brilliant people and enjoyed the amazing views of the Sierra Nevada mountains from the Alhambra - a well-preserved Islamic fortress used as a royal residence in the old days. Back at the hostel itself, Pepe the barman let me step behind the bar, plug in my iPod and play DJ to the people! Great nights..

I headed onto Madrid then where I met a cool Mexican/American guy called David who I shared Chinese food and an average pub crawl with. I didn't really warm to Madrid at all to be honest. The whole time I was there I was wishing that I was back in Granada relaxing with some chilled people with sangria, rather than in a city that really felt like any other city. I know some people really love Madrid but I don't think I gave it much of a chance :) The Museo del Prado is, however, one of the best art museums I've ever been in - amazing artwork! And that was that.. :)

Peace
x

Posted from Mobberley

Great tapas!

Massive paella at the hostel

Arabian street stalls

Churros y chocolat - long, deep-fried sticks of pastry which you dip into thick hot chocolate and eat - so unhealthy and delicious!

Inside the amazing Alhambra

The Sierra Nevada backdrop

Madrid's boulevards are huge!

Me and David with a free shot of liqueur from the Chinese restaurant

Espana!

2008-06-01T02:11:00.000+09:30

Back into the European culture and architecture! Barcelona is something else - definitely one of my favourite cities so far, up there among Hoi An, Melbourne, Munich, Adelaide and Kyoto! Mum, Paul and I spent 2 entire weeks there, the longest I've spent in one city while travelling, and it was well worth it. To be honest, all three of us were tired and were looking forward to some time spent just relaxing and not pushing ourselves to see all of the sights. We stayed in the Roma Reial Hotel in Placa Reial just off of La Rambla, one of the main strips in Barcelona. It was great staying in such a central place because it meant that even if we couldn't be bothered doing much, all we had to do was walk out of the placa and get a drink on La Rambla and we were experiencing Spanish/Catalan culture! Ahh sangria is one of the best drinks ever created - red wine mixed with rums, fruits and spices - delicious!

While we were there we visited 2 of the most interesting museums I've ever seen - the Museu Etnologic and Museu Egipci. The Ethnologic Museum took us through 10 different cultures from all corners of the world, while the Egyptian Museum displayed actual photographs taken during the excavation of Tutankhamun's body in Egypt! It's so funny to think that the men who were in the tomb excavating the body wore shiny black shoes and braces..

I made friends with our hotel receptionist over the 2 weeks and he took me out with his mates 3 times. I can't remember alll of the details, but I do know that we went to a shot bar where all of the shots were only 2euro! And these were crazy shots - I had one which was a shot of cointreau topped with half an orange skin which was filled with absinth - and all of this was lit on fire! On another night we stayed out until 5 at a place called Fellini. The music they played included everything from The Twist to a little bit of Britney, which made for a good night out.

We did manage to do some actual sightseeing, taking the Bus Turistic around the city for a day, visiting Port Vell, La Sagrada Familia and the Picasso Museum. Port Vell is stunning! The harbour is filled with docked boats, the sun is shining and crepes and icecreams can be bought all over the place. It's a really lovely place to take a stroll. Another thing I loved about Barcelona was the buskers - there were always loads of people on the streets either dressing up, doing magic, making music or performing in some way. It's such a fun place to be in!

The Barri Gothic area of Barcelona, right near our hotel, was a great place to explore. It was made up of lots of little alleyways (why is it that little alleyways are more fun than big roads??) all filled with the coolest shops and we spent quite a lot of time wandering around in there. We also enjoyed a flamenco show one night, watching a man dance away to a 3-piece band. Funky music! Ah there's so much goodness about Barcelona!

On our final day together, Paul and I took Mum to the airport for an emotional farewell. It had been an awesome couple of weeks together and it was really sad to see her go. Paul and I headed back into the city for our last couple of hours together after being stuck at the hip for the past 3 months. I did manage to make a complete fool of myself by trying to jump over something and instead falling flat on my face - literally smashing my right cheek on the concrete ground. I survived, and thankfully I didn't land on my nose or it would have broken for sure - my cheek still hurts to press now and it's been 2 weeks! After icing my face for awhile and eating our last pizza together, I went with Paul to the train station for him to start his next adventure in Montpellier in the south of France. It was a big day for me emotionally! And later that night I went to the train station again, this time for me to catch my overnight train to Granada..

Big thank you to Paul, my darling brother, for a brilliant 3 months of fun in Asia/The Middle East/Europe :D
Peace and love

x

Posted from Mobberley

One of the gothic quarter alleys

Mum and Paul with the infamous sangria

Tutankhamun

Our Placa Reial

Those amazing shots :)

An actual nice photo of the three of us :)

My face! Doesn't look as dramatic as it felt to me :)

Where were we??

2008-05-18T22:13:00.000+09:30

It has been awhile since I last blogged. Loads has happened so I'll try and catch up quickly.

After leaving Abu Dhabi, Paul and I flew into London for the second time in our lives. While I was still in the line for Immigration, I spoke with my good friend Sarah on the phone and she invited me to see Gotye in a live gig that night - in about 3 hours time in fact. Gotye is one of my favourite artists from Australia, and he happened to be having his first UK gig ever on that night! We left the airport, Paul met Nicola (an old friend from his NZ days) outside the train station, I dumped my bags in a luggage storage area, and then took the subway to Tottenham Court Road to meet Sarah. I managed to arrive about half an hour before Gotye went on stage! We had a brilliant night watching him perform and afterwards we even managed to get a photo with him and chatted for about 20mins!

I stayed at Sarah's house for a few nights and we didn't do a whole lot besides relax. I really needed to get back into Western culture slowly.. We managed to squeeze in half a day of laying in a park in the sunshine, seeing a matinee drama performance and a night of drinking at an Aussie pub called Walkabout with Paul and Jubby, a great friend who I've missed dearly.

On May 16 Mum joined us in London. The 3 of us met in our new hostel and it was fantastic to see her again! It was nice walking around Old London Town with the two of them, just catching up and taking in the sights. We didn't do a whole lot in our couple of days besides wandering around and enjoying the city. We ate a beautiful brunch at Sarah's workplace on the Saturday morning - the restaurant is called The Providores and it's owned by celebrity chef Peter Gordon.

After the short few days spent in London, Paul, Mum and I flew out to Barcelona for 2 beautiful, gorgeous weeks of sangria, relaxing and generally enjoying life :) There aren't a lot of photos from London..

Posted from Mobberley, England

Sarah and I with Gotye, or Wally

Sarah's very English flat

Paul and Jubby, probably half drunk by this stage

Change of scenery

2008-05-13T23:13:00.000+09:30

Welcome to Arabia! We arrived in Abu Dhabi just after midnight on the morning on Friday the 9th of May. Our first experience was our taxi driver speeding us into the city at around 130kmph, finger firmly lodged in his nose for the entire time and being distracted by almost everything around him - other cars, other drivers, lights, signs.. As he went to turn one corner he even crashed us into a curb because he was so distracted by the car next to him! Silly man but no damage done. We had arranged to stay with another Couchsurfer for this portion of our trip, so Rob, a 23yo Aussie expat from Sydney, met us at the Abu Dhabi Mall and walked us back to his flat. He's such a lovely guy and we ended up staying up until 3am chatting with him before going to sleep.

It was so hot that the clothes we washed in the morning dried within 15mins of being outside! We bought some Cornflakes (oh cereal, how I love thee), bananas and yoghurt from the Adnan 2000 Grocery downstairs in Rob's apartment block, and then went for a walk after eating. I thought I was going to die from heat exhaustion - the sun was fierce! It was really nice to have a change of scenery though - mosques in place of temples, palm trees in place of no trees.. :)

In the afternoon we went with Rob and his awesome Swedish mate Kristoffer to try and get out to LuLu Island, a small island off the coast that is apparently a great place to chill out. Unfortunately for us, the sheikh of Abu Dhabi had decided that he wanted to hold a boat race that afternoon and so had closed off the ferries that went across! Since that plan was shattered, we instead went to a public beach nearby - I think about 95% of the people there were arabic or Indian men, most of them wearing full-length robes. Needless to say I felt less than comfortable about donning my bikini! I did end up going into the water though, because it was public beach and hence I was allowed to by law, and also because I had 3 males with me so that made me feel safer. The water was absolutely glorious - perfect temperature!

After finishing up at the beach, we visited the Mall of the Emirates to have Starbucks and an 'optional snack'. They're building a ski slope inside this mall as well, just like the one at Ski Dubai, however with this one they're going to make it look like a mountain and include chalets where people will be able to sit around in and drink hot chocolate. So people will sit inside a chalet drinking hot chocolate, look outside and see the artificial snow and mountain surrounding them, and then look further still through the glass dome and see the desert outside!! Craziness. That night for dinner we ate at an Egyptian restaurant chain called Gad Restaurant with Rob, Kris and another girl - meats, dips and breads (no alcohol because it's illegal outside of hotel grounds in Abu Dhabi) - very nice!

On our second day with Rob, he invited us to join him, Kris and a couple of girls for a trip to Dubai to visit the Wild Wadi Water Park! We had wanted to visit Dubai anyway and this way we got to travel by car, plus had the added fun of being with a bunch of people! To get to Dubai from Abu Dhabi, you drive along the most dangerous stretch of road in the world - the most deaths per kilometre, and also the place where that huge pile-up of 100 or so cars was about 3 months ago. It felt quite safe to me, but Rob said that people go along there at around 200kmph, swerving or trying to be in formation with their friends' cars - that's what makes it dangerous.

It was cool going back to Dubai actually. It's the first city, besides Australian cities, that I have ever re-visited! It was nice knowing what was going on, knowing what to expect. Wild Wadi Water Park was pretty cool - loads of water slides, surfing and chilling out. I love the rides that you get to sit on a rubber tube and get pushed along by the water! There was one super-fast slide that made you go 80kmph! It hurt haha. We all had a great day together! In the afternoon we went to Dubai Mall, the one with Ski Dubai inside, for another coffee and 'optional snack' before leaving the rest of the gang to find our hotel for the night.

We took a taxi, but we have a feeling that he was trying to cheat us going the long way and going in circles, and then he dropped us off about 500m from the hotel because he was sick of driving in the traffic! I don't blame him for not wanting to - it was quite bad traffic - but that is his job afterall! It seemed as though our hotel didn't exist because people seemed to have never heard of it or were vague about its whereabouts, but we did eventually find the place. In the LP it had said that it was mainly used by Africans coming to do trade in Dubai - and it was true! The whole place was full of Africans, and when we looked out of our room window we saw a huge yard filled with boxes to be sent to Togo, Nigeria, etc. Ahhh it made me nostalgic about Ghana.. We grabbed some quick Indian food before going to bed that night. The food was delicious and the guy who served us was quite funny. At the end of the meal we were each given a small cup of hot, black, sweet tea with mint leaves in it - best tea ever and you should all try it!

For our final full day in the UAE we decided we would just spend a little bit of time in Dubai and then head back to Abu Dhabi. We took an abra (a small wooden passenger boat) across Dubai Creek, which was really lovely and also cheap, and then visited the Dubai Museum, before heading to the bus station. I'd visited the museum last year but it was nice to see again. The only museum I've been into with sand on the floor!

Back in Abu Dhabi we paid a visit to the Great Mosque, the only mosque in the UAE that allows non-muslim visitors. It was absolutely magnificent and beautiful - so grand! I was asked to put on a long black dress over my clothes and a black veil covering my head. It was interesting because I remembered visiting loads of churches in Europe when we had visited in 2005 and feeling like I was being disrespectful just by being there because I didn't agree with the beliefs of the churches - however when I walked around the mosque wearing the clothes that were given to me I felt completely at ease about it. I'm so glad that we made our way out there to make the visit, and we even had a free guide because our taxi driver came in with us!

That night we ate take-away Indian food with Rob and Kris while we watched episodes of Kath and Kim on DVD, teaching Kris about the ways of Australia. Hardly believing that the planned 2 1/2 months of our trip were over, the next morning we caught our flight to London..

Posted from Granada

Crazy monster car that didn't even fit in a lane

The public beach

For some reason there was a rainstorm inside a shopping centre! Those crazy Emiratis.. :)

Me, Kris, Rob and Paul at Wild Wadi

The Burj al Arab

Abra cruise across Dubai Creek

The Great Mosque

Me and our taxi driver who wanted a photo with me

Funkiest airport I've ever seen - Abu Dhabi

The brilliantly fantastischly great wall!

2008-05-11T02:06:00.000+09:30

On Monday the 5th of May, I got my chance to walk along the Great Wall in China. It has to be one of the most exciting things I have ever done in my life - my smile was spread ear-to-ear for pretty much the entire day, even during some of the more strenuous sections! Paul and I met an Australian couple, Brook and Alana, in our hostel on our first day in Beijing who decided to join us for our day of fun. We had already decided that, no matter how much it cost, we would hire a car and get taken out to the wall bright and early, therefore beating the crowds and the heat and so meeting the two other Aussies was a great bit of luck - they made our day on the wall much more fun that if it had just been the two of us, and also they made the trip out there cost just under the price of going with a bus laden with tourists! We organised the car to pick us up at our hostel at 6:30am, but, being that we were in China, the reservation was never actually made and so it only turned up at 7:30am after 3 phone calls to the company! It all worked out fine though, and eventually we were on our way, extremely excited, to the wall.

Between the four of us, we'd decided to do a 10km walk along the wall from a section called Jinshanling to one called Simatai. There are quite a few sections of the wall to choose from, all with varying degrees of difficulty, touristy-ness, preservation and distance from Beijing. The Simatai section of the wall sounds like a death-trap in the Lonely Planet - basically you need a pair of nothing less than hiking boots for the steep inclinations and palm-sweatingly steep steps - so we had pretty much crossed that off our list as an option - that was until we spoke to a couple we were on our tour with in Vietnam! Tom and Sandy, a friendly Tennessee couple, made their way to China at around the same time as us, though they were on another Intrepid tour. We're so thankful that we managed to meet up with them again in Beijing for dinner - they showed us some of their photos from their walk along the wall, along the same section that we ended up doing, and it cemented our decision to do it ourselves.

We started walking the Jinshanling section at 11:11am precisely (we thought we had better time it as the walk is meant to take 4 hours, and with 2 unfit girls in the group, plus 3 of us having asthma, we figured we would take much longer haha) and after almost exactly 4 hours of breath-taking scenery and exuberant fun we ended at Simatai. I don't even think I can describe how excited I was for this day - the feeling of walking on top of this amazing wall built centuries ago on the most beautiful day we had experienced since arriving in Beijing (thanks to the Chinese government's cloud seeding project which brought a huge downfall a couple of days earlier, clearing all the pollution from the sky *gives a big thumbs down to manual weather change just for the Olympics - boooo*), with great people, amongst hills and amazing scenery. And to top it all off, when we reached almost the highest tower we stopped to eat lunch, and would you believe I ate a banana sandwich on top of the Great Wall?! Yay Australians haha.

Along the way we had a sad moment though, when we remembered a warning that we had read somewhere about the wall - a tourist once decided to camp out alone on the wall and overnight he was killed for his belongings, a pointless murder for probably only a few things he had in his backpack. Being on the wall, we could almost feel the excitement that he would have felt when he was planning the trip, could imagine his excitement about being able to say that he had 'camped on the Great Wall', and a great sadness overcame us. We had a moment of silence for him as we drifted off from our conversation..

Jinshanling and Simatai are both relatively restored and preserved, but the walk in between the two has been left to crumble in places. There were hardly any other people on the wall, besides the odd few tourists, a group of people singing Waltzing Matilda as they marched (hehe), and the touts that walked along trying to sell us beer, t-shirts, books and postcards. Everything about the place was brilliant, and even the touts were a bunch of fun! Needless to say, after this great accomplishment the four of us went to an international bar near our hostel and drank buckets of alcohol with a great many colourful straws in them :D

I'll let the pictures do the rest of the talking..

All my love

xx

Posted from Barcelona

Amazing..

Falling off the edge!

A man trying to sell Brook postcards

Long way to go yet, Paul!

The crew with straws

Me, singing my head off

Beijing, Beijing!

2008-05-10T23:45:00.000+09:30

By the time we reached Beijing we were both exhausted, physically and mentally. The whole trip has been pretty jam-packed with sight-seeing and experiencing new things that we'd both reached the point where we basically couldn't be bothered anymore! Not to sound blasé about the fact that we were in Beijing of all the cities in the world, but we were buggered haha..

When we first arrived, we got in at 4:30am. We took a taxi to the hostel, which was the Qianmen Hostel in the lovely hutongs (little alleyways) area of Beijing, about a 5 minute walk from Tiananmen Square. Unfortunately, with the Olympics coming up, the Chinese government doesn't believe tourists want to see the old little alleyways, so they're all being torn down and rebuilt! The whole area was basically a construction site, not only unfortunate for us visiting at the time, but for the next bunch of tourists who come to Beijing and do a cycling tour of the hutongs, only to be met with gaudy reproductions! Honestly, their tourism association has a lot to answer for!

This was followed by 2 days of sleep, rest, quiet beers and internet.. :)

On Saturday night, we managed to meet up with Tom and Sandy, a lovely and friendly Tennessee couple who joined us on the tour through Vietnam we did with Intrepid. They'd decided that, at the end of 3-4 months of travelling through Asia, they deserved a bit of pampering so they were booked in at The Peninsula, a grand old 5 star hotel! They invited us over there for a drink before dinner, so we sat in the front bar drinking South Australian wines and chatting while the 4-piece string band seranaded us. It was SO nice! For dinner we went out and enjoyed our first and only Peking Duck - obviously a Beijing speciality, and it was absolutely lovely!

At 6am the next morning, Paul and I got up and walked over to Tiananmen Square so that we could try and get the place basically to ourselves for awhile to look at the famous painting of Mao, the inspirational man who established the People's Republic of China, on the Gate of Heavenly Peace and ponder the horrific Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989. It was really nice walking around that early in the morning, watching the military doing their marching and exercise through the square. There were already about 5 Chinese tourist groups walking around in their matching hats! Wow they get to it early!

On the Monday we went to the Great Wall (!!!!! more on that shortly..), and so the following day we went to get foot massages. It was so relaxing I kept dozing off! Paul had some Chinese medicine applied to cure smelly feet. They ended up smelling like soya sauce, which we found quite funny! Hehe. Later that day we went to visit the Summer Palace, the place where the royals used to hang out every summer. It was pretty nice, but PACKED full of Chinese tourists - it's quite difficult to enjoy relaxing scenes around a lake when there are a million other people next to you doing the same! I cannot even imagine what China will be like around the Olympics time - whoa! That night we went to see the Beijing Opera at the Laoshe Tea House. It was a medley of a variety of old Chinese talents - kung fu, voice mimicking, tea ceremony, opera and a little magic. It was a nice little stage and we got to drink tea throughout the performance! We aren't actually sure if we saw any opera though..

We finally visited the Forbidden City on the day before we left China. It's a pretty impressive place, particularly if you think about the fact that for 5 centuries noone could enter or leave without the emporer's prior permission! The entire place is either under renovation or has recently been renovated - they're painting the entire place in reds, greens and yellows, probably in time for the Olympics again.. It's so unfortunate - it really took away some of the excitement of going through there, knowing that most of the parts that weren't covered up were newly painted and restored - no emporer had brushed his hand against any of the paint on the walls that we saw and so on.. It sounds a little silly, but that's what history is all about isn't it? I love imagining the lives of people who lived long ago, and imagining that I could be looking at an exact part of a wall that they looked at every day as they walked past.. Who cares if the paint is faded? It's like going into a ancient cave in Australia and seeing the Aboriginal paintings, but then deciding the paint is too faded so it should be re-painted! But that's only my opinion.. :)

One of the best parts of China are the food or snack streets - usually a small alleyway or short street lined with small stalls run by people selling all sorts of foods - you can fill up here for around $1-2! After visiting Forbids we went down one of these small snack streets and had an absolute ball munching on dumplings and noodles, bargaining with a girl so we could buy Buddha head statues and Mao alarm clocks, and enjoying the atmosphere - so much fun!

For our final night in China and Beijing we ate a truly Chinese dinner of rice, stir-fry and dumplings with beer and tea and then headed out on a bus to see the Olympic stadiums! It was really exciting seeing them in real life, the bird's nest and the huge bubble-covered swimming centre. I've never seen an Olympic stadium in real life and it got me well excited to watch the games in August!

On Thursday the 8th of May we flew out of Beijing and into Abu Dhabi, a complete change of scenery for us! Early in the morning however, we paid a quick visit to the embalmed Mao in the centre of Tiananmen Square ('pickles' as we called him for short, completely disrespectful I know..). The line to see him was massive, as it is every day, and this time we came prepared with enclosed shoes and no bags or cameras (we were kicked out of the line the day before for just wearing thongs - oops!). Seeing Mao was far less eery than seeing Uncle Ho in Hanoi because the room was quite brightly lit and the Chinese people around us were shoving us along in the line, but I am really glad that we went to see him, founder of the Republic of China as he is.

With Paul's interest in the universe how could we not pay a visit to the ancient observatory listed in the LP? It was really interesting! There were 8 ancient instruments on display, all incorporating the act of observing the universe with beautiful Chinese decoration. For lunch we met up with Chris and John, our couchsurfing hosts from Xi'an. They were in Beijing just for the weekend so that Chris could visit the Australian Embassy, and it was very lucky for us because it meant we were able to see them again! It was fantastic meeting with them for our final, final Chinese meal.

Next post - the Great Wall!!

Posted from Barcelona

New Beijing, Great Olympics

The area around our hostel

Chillin in The Peninsula. Note the mini orchestra in the background :)

Rebuilding the hutongs

Me and Mao

Chinese tourist group with matching hats. Teehee..

Paul with Chinese medicine foot

One of the Beijing Opera performances

Paul with a cute girl he 'bargained with' for hours..

Tiananmen Square by night

Ancient Observatory

Beijing Airport!! Amazing new terminal

Depressed cities and Buddhist carvings

2008-05-02T20:50:00.000+09:30

Up until the day we booked our train ticket onwards from Xi'an we didn't really know what our plan was for the next few days. In fact, we ended up changing our plans after we'd bought our first ticket and decided to get off the train about 2 hours earlier than the destination we'd chosen. I think I like it like that! What we ended up with was a great little detour into two cities, Pingyao and Datong, both still visited by tourists but by far less than the other cities we'd seen so far. It's really fun finding some random cities in the Lonely Planet and making plans to see them :)

We left Xi'an late at night on the train and arrived in Pingyao at 8am. Pingyao is a city that apparently ran out of money during the 20th century - while all of the other Chinese cities were going through a massive economic boom, Pingyao was left behind to become a pile of rubble. The city walls are still in tact, one of the last Chinese cities with this unique feature, and so is the city, however it is clearly very old and undeveloped. It really felt like ancient China! We managed to get lost in the city's alleyways a few times, enjoying the serenity of non-modernisation. In the night-time the city's red lanterns are turned on and suddenly it feels like you're walking through a movie set! It was a really nice break from civilisation.

After just one night in Pingyao we caught a bus to Taiyuan, a stop on the way to Datong. I think that I actually hate bus travel now, so when we arrived in Taiyuan I declared that I would not get onto another long-distance bus if I could help it! With that, we set off to buy train tickets on to Datong. The train station was brimming full of surging people trying to get tickets, we tried calling the Chinese agency number listed in the LP but it was disconnected, and then walked to hotel listed in the LP as another option for buying train tickets, where the receptionist said there were 'no seats' even though she knew nothing about the trains. Our last hope was an 'advance booking office' on the other side of town so we jumped in a taxi. At first our driver tried to take us back to the train station, but after coaxing him to turn around and then to have a look at our map, we drove in the right direction. And we drove. And we drove. Unfortunately neither us or our driver knew where we were going! Our poor driver kept stopping the car and asking for directions, but noone knew of the place that we wanted. In the end we gave up and took our stuff out of the taxi, thanked him and walked off. I asked a lady walking past if she knew of it, showing her our map, and she asked me to hold on for a second and went to ask our poor taxi driver again! This ended up with another group of people standing around discussing directions, and eventually we got back in the taxi for another drive - the driver didn't even put on the meter because he felt so bad! We did find the place then, and we got tickets with no added hassle for a train that would be leaving in about 2 hours - another 'never been so happy in our lives' moment was had followed by much needed lunch and icecream :)

We arrived in Datong late at night after the most fun train we had in China. There were 2 little girls on there with us who would poke their heads out of their cabin and look at us, and if we ever looked up at that moment they would shriek their heads off, giggle and run back to their beds. Eventually I called them over to us and we asked them questions slowly in Chinese - that drew a huge crowd of maybe 15 people in the train corridor, all peering over each others' shoulders to catch a glimpse of us! It was so funny and fun, and we of course ended up having photos taken with most of the people. Ahh classic China moments..

In the morning we wanted to head out to the hanging monestary, an awesome monestary that was built into the side of a cliff face with wooden stilts acting as its support. Getting the bus ticket out to there was quite the experience as it usually is when purchasing tickets for.. well.. anything in China! Paul lined up for ages, people milling around and pushing in wherever possible, with the lady behind the glass ignoring everyone whenever she felt like it, drinking water, counting money, pushing things around on her desk.. Once we eventually got tickets, we got onto the bus we were directed to, but were kicked off shortly after being told it was the wrong bus. Grr. And finally, the bus was only meant to take 1 hour so we thought we would be able to get back to Datong city by about lunch-time, however it ended up taking 3 hours somehow. I don't even know how a 1 hour trip gets expanded out to 3 hours! We made it all the way out there, took photos for about 5 minutes and then got back on the bus to come back. The monestary was pretty cool haha.

After we'd eaten lunch we got back on a bus, this time to see the Yungang Grottoes (caves). These caves were just amazing! There were about 20 caves in a mountain, each with Buddha and other religious pictures and statues carved into the walls - but the best part is, it was all created in around the 400's! Very cool.

That evening was our final train to Beijing..

Posted from Barcelona

Sign in the train station - Please don't spit and litter everywhere

Being ridden along in Pingyao

Yes there are donkeys! Told you it's an old city..

Some happy men playing Chinese chess

We didn't feel the need to try this one

Movie-set charm

The hanging monestary - pretty cool eh?

Paul with massive incense sticks

Great carvings!

It feels like so long ago..

2008-04-29T21:20:00.000+09:30

Paul and I took 2 days and visited Hangzhou, a smaller town about 2 hours from Shanghai. It's based around a HUGE lake called West Lake and it's very beautiful - the Shanghainese (?) use it as their weekend trip place to get out of the city, understandably too! We used the 2 days to mainly relax and regroup while admiring some beautiful scenery.

We walked up a mountain-side to try and find the 'Yellow Dragon Dressed in Green', whatever that is haha, but we missed it completely! We did find a great lookout though where we got a nice view over the lake and we took some time to relax, before going to a tea house to drink Dragon Well tea, the local speciality. It was really nice drinking tea in a tea house set in a forest! After wandering back down the mountain we grabbed some cer-azy lunch from a convenience store - it was a rice and stir-fry pre-packaged meal that included the food, cutlery, water and a sachet which, when placed in the water, somehow heated up and boiled the water, steaming the food! Yummy and exciting at the same time :)

We split up for the 2nd day in Hangzhou - we really did need some time apart by this point, and Paul wanted to hire a bicycle which I couldn't be bothered doing. I wandered around for the entire morning, walking around the lake watching people doing their thing. It was really lovely because there were loads of people doing tai chi, dancing, playing musical instruments, walking around with their children and generally enjoying life! Very peaceful.

That afternoon we took the train back to Shanghai for one last night in RVenus's flat before taking a 21-hour train ride to Xi'an. The train ride was actually a lot of fun - we had top bunk, hard sleeper beds which are the worst possible because there's no room to sit up and there's no door across your cabin, but we ate noodles, slept, read and talked the time away.

We arrived in Xi'an at 5am and went to meet our new Couchsurfing hosts, Chris and John at the Xi'an International Studies University where they teach and live. They were so lovely to us while we were there! Chris is actually from Adelaide, which I think might have played a role in them accepting us to stay with them :) We managed to eat dinner with them twice, and have lunch with them and some of their friends, and they even took us to visit a deaf couple nearby that cook up a mean egg, bean sprout and carrot wrap creation!

While in Xi'an, we walked on top of the city walls, visited the Muslim Quarter, the Great Mosque and a Tibetan temple, the Big Goose Pagoda and of course, the Terracotta Warriors. The Muslim Quarter was really interesting because I believe it's the only place in the city where the Chinese Muslims can wear their headgear freely, which makes it an area with a high concentration of Muslim people selling their wares and foods. We had a great night wandering around there, snacking and trying to avoid being hit by bikes and people!

The Big Goose Pagoda isn't actually all that interesting in real life, despite what it's name would make you believe haha, but it has a great story behind it. A Buddhist guy once had the thought that Buddhism in China was diluted because it had come from India, and passed through several countries before reaching China, so he went to India to get copies of the original Buddhist scriptures. He brought them back to Xi'an to the Big Goose Pagoda and translated them into Chinese - so the pagoda is essentially the birthplace of the current Buddhism in China! Very cool.

The Terracotta Warriors were also amazing. The army, made entirely of terracotta, was built over 4 decades to protect Emporer Qin Shi Huang in the afterlife - nearly 8000 statues have been recovered but it is believed there are many more pits surrounding the tomb. Each statue has it's own facial features and clothes, and there are even horses and weapons in there with them - it really is quite amazing! While we were there, we were lucky enough to run into Tom and Sandy, a great American couple we met on our tour through Vietnam. It was fantastic to see them again as well!

I loved Xi'an as a whole. It was a much more chilled out city than Shanghai and with 50 universities, there were loads more young people around. I think staying in the university with Chris and John also affected the way we felt about the city - it's always helpful learning more about a place from people who have lived there for awhile!

Posted from London

Us on top of the mountain, looking over the West Lake

A monk praying to Buddha

West Lake

Me, enjoying the 21-hour train ride

Us with Chris and John, our CS hosts

Galavanting on top of the Xi'an city walls

That's a Big Goose if I ever saw one

Strange gelatin-based food in the Muslim Quarter

The Terracotta Army Warriors

Shangers!

2008-04-24T12:56:00.000+09:30

We arrived in Shanghai at around 11am and since I could use my phone again (hoorah!) I texted everyone to let them know :) I got to have a nice chat with my auntie Gabrielle as we pulled into the port too, which was exciting because she loved Shanghai! Back when I was in AIESEC, just before I went to Ghana, I helped organise sending 6 people from Adelaide to China on internships, and one of them, RVenus, agreed to take us in for our few days in Shanghai! She picked us up from the port and took us back to her place - an apartment shared with a Spanish dude and a Chinese girl on the 13th floor with great views of the city. It's so handy staying with someone who knows the city!

Soon after we settled in, even though we were fairly tired from the not many hours of sleep on our final ferry night, RVenus took us for a walk to Nanjing West Road to see all the fancy buildings and shopping places and then to one of her favourite 'food streets' - literally, a street with loads of food! We had fun walking through there, especially trying the candied strawberries on sticks! Just like toffee apples, but way better because we all know the apples inside are scheisse. :) (Actually we had one stick that had strawberries and tiny half apples on it, but the apples were covered in little spiderwebs!! Ewwww..)

We had a bit of a rest back in her apartment, watched Snatch (good movie!), and then headed back out to the food street for dinner once RV's friend D'anne (another Aussie AIESECer!) showed up. They gave us a culinary treat that night, sharing all of their favourite foods with us - great dumplings with pork and soup inside (the pork is mixed with gelatin sort of stuff and so when it's cooked it oozes out to form a soup inside the dumpling - sort of gross if you think about it too much, but sooo yummy!), spicy clear noodle soup, meat on sticks and, for dessert, Portuguese egg tarts (basically small custard tarts with a browned top - I haven't eaten custard in so long and oh I was in heaven..). I couldn't finish my noodle soup because it was so spicy and my lips were about to fall off, so I went to put it in the bin but a homeless man came up and held out his hands for it. I think it's the first time I've shared my food with a homeless person, and it's definitely something we should all start doing more often.

The next day we got up and slowly made our way out to the old area, walking around the Dragon Gate Mall. Very cool Chinese architecture! We really enjoyed walking around the area, and then we got a very cheap lunch of noodles and dumplings before heading to the Yuyuan Gardens. The garden was really lovely too, very green and sculptured among the city mess. In the afternoon we walked down The People's Avenue, which is very wide and lined with Chinese flags, back to RVenus's flat for a rest before dinner.

RV got home around 6 and we headed out for a hot pot dinner - such a good night! The three of us each had a pot on the table in front of us and RV ordered for us from the all Chinese menu a bunch of cool fresh foods including mushrooms, chicken pate, a variety of balls (chicken, shrimp, scallop, beef, fish), cabbage, tofu and potato. We each chose the broth that we wanted (I had curry), and then once it was boiling we added different foods as we wanted them! It takes awhile to eat it all because it gets cooked in sections, so it was really nice sitting there chatting the night away. After dinner, we took a taxi to a Mexican bar called Zapata's where a bunch of AIESECers were gathered for the night - with free entry, free margaritas for the girls and free beer for the guys for an hour, who's complaining? It was really fun meeting AIESECers on the other side of the world too. I wish that I'd been able to attend an international conference while I was still a strong member of AIESEC!

For our final full day in Shanghai, Paul and I went to the train station and booked our tickets to Hangzhou, our next stop in our China travels. Once we found the English-speaking desk it wasn't too difficult, but finding the deak itself was! We made it through though and walked over to the People's Park to explore a little. The Shanghai Museum is right in the centre so we did a very quick scoot through there - very quick because we didn't enjoy it haha. How much pottery and stamps can one person take? ;) The pedestrian mall on East Nanjing Road was nice so we chilled out and had a coffee there for awhile before going home again.

In the evening we went to an acrobats show and it was all the things it should be - fun, funny, scary, tense and amazing! Balancing upside down on a unicycle on a thin wire - it can be done! Some of the things they did with their bodies were just brilliant. The funniest part though was the guy who threw knives - he pulled someone up from the crowd and they tied him up against a wall and threw a jacket over his head so he couldn't see, then proceeded to pretend to throw knives all around his body (his assistant just stabbed them into the wall, rather than them being actually thrown) - the guy was shitting himself! Hilarious.

And so that brought to an end our time in Shanghai! It was only a short 2 1/2 days, but to be honest I wouldn't spend much longer in the city if I wasn't going to live there. It is nice, but there isn't a whole lot to do besides walk around.. Maybe if we weren't so tired we would have been a whole lot more adventurous :) Thanks again to RVenus who was a MASSIVE help to us - thanks for your kindness and hospitality! x

Posted from Beijing

Food street

Candied strawberries!

Mmm meat.. Mmm on a stick..

Dragon Gate Mall

The view from RVenus's apartment

No number 13 because it's bad luck, and no 14 because 4's bad luck!

Fishing in the People's Park

Hot pot dinner!

Love the translations of the menu..

Cer-azy acrobats!

Just the three of us :)

Invasion of space.. and water!

2008-04-21T17:31:00.004+09:30

Our final couple of days in Japan were played out pretty quietly. After we left Koya-san, we headed straight to Osaka after getting the rest of our stuff from Kevin's and saying our goodbyes. We had bought tickets for a baseball game (Hanshin Osaka Tigers vs Hiroshima Carps!) which was at 6pm so we were in a bit of a rush. It was my first baseball game and it was quite the ball of excitement! I've never heard so much chanting in my life - everyone had small plastic baseball bats they clapped together while they screamed out and there were guys with huge drums and trumpets leading the chants. In the 7th inning (apparently it happens in every game), almost every single Tigers fan blew up a long balloon and let them go at the same second - the high-pitched squeal of the balloons was crazy! We had a great time chanting along and having fun with the people selling beers in the stands - fantastic night! The Tigers won by the way, and since we were in their hometown of Osaka it made everyone happy :)

We'd decided to stay in a manga cafe for both of our final nights in Japan, mainly out of cheap-skatedness and laziness (we couldn't be bothered finding a hostel haha) so we were essentially homeless, transporting our backpacks from coin lockers in the train station during the days to the manga cafe at night. I think we each had about 2-3 hours sleep each night, so we were slightly zombie-like.

For our final full day in Japan we went and watched an IMAX film about deep sea creatures - a bit strange because I've only ever watched one other IMAX in my life, in Sydney, and it was the same film! In case you're asking yourselves this question, yes I did have a small nap :) The rest of the day wasn't very eventful because we were so exhausted - we hunted for a McDonalds for about an hour because I wanted a McFlurry, then we had a crappy coffee in the station, ate some gyoza (yummy Japanese dumplings) for lunch, and finally, after walking around shops for awhile, we had a nice dinner and then headed back to the manga for the night.

Finally, Friday the 18th of April had come - the day we were to catch our 48 hour ferry to Shanghai! We could have probably stayed in Japan for years exploring that brilliant country, but time moves on and so did we. Paul and I had splurged for a 1st class sleeper in the ferry (about a $40 difference between sharing with 4 people and sharing with about 20, sleeping on the floor, so we opted for the more comfy option), so we shared a room with a British couple on their way home from teaching English in Japan. The first night got quite rocky and I woke up at about 3:30am, unable to fall back asleep. I walked down the corridor, slamming into the walls because I couldn't hold myself upright, and sat on a couch for an hour trying not to feel sick. I think it was mainly psychological because I was worried about sinking haha, but the rest of the time on the ferry was fine.

There were 12 foreigners altogether on the ferry, and maybe 80 Chinese people - it was a bit of a shock for all of us coming from Japan!! For starters, we have never had so many photos taken of us in our lives - we were like circus freaks held captive. Paul and I once were sitting facing a wall, and I turned around to see a woman posing behind us having a photo taken of her with our BACKS! Weird. Secondly, there was a duty-free shop on board which opened twice a day and everytime it was about to reopen, for about the 15mins beforehand, some of the Chinese people would mill around waiting! I never saw reason behind this, since we were trapped on the ferry anyway so why not just stand up when it actually opened its doors? And thirdly, we had never been subject to such rudeness or pushiness in Japan! I tried to buy us some toothpaste from the duty free shop and women were pushing in front of me buying their hairdye of all things! Again, since we were trapped on the ferry, what's the hurry?? Also, trying to get answers out of any of the ship staff was hard work - they didn't like making things easy..

Being actually in China now, we can see that what we experienced was just a concentrated version of their culture in action - the staring and photographing continues, as does the pushiness and rudeness, but add to that the spitting, snotting and kids doing their business on the pavement and you've got the whole picture. Of course, that's all the bad parts and there are tonnes of good parts too - it's just hard to see them when you're used to having your own space and being basically invisible to the people around you! We're getting there, so please forgive us :)

There wasn't much for us to do on the ferry besides rest in our beds, sit around talking or wait until night so we could sing karaoke in the bar while it was open for 2 hours, 45mins :) We had a ball in the bar - Paul and I sang Hoobastank's The Reason, and our final song on the second night was Love Shack by B52s - 10 of us foreigners split into boys and girls and we each sang the relative parts as loud as we could! I'm sure we woke up the whole ship. It was great talking to them all though, hearing about what stage of travels they were in! It's been so interesting meeting all these people along the way. Most of us stayed up until about 3am chatting.

And on Sunday the 20th April, we pulled into the river in Shanghai, right next to the Bund..

Posted from Beijing

Cute shop sign in Osaka

Yay! Baseball!

The crowd getting ready to let 'em rip

Our home for 2 days

Roomies

Cool views leaving Japan

Most of the crew, posing with a random Japanese man (one of only 2 Japanese people on the boat. He said he felt lonely :( )

Coming into Shangers!

Koya-san

2008-04-16T05:03:00.011+09:30

We had the most breath-taking night away on Mount Koya, or Koya-san. I know that what I write here won't do the place any justice, but I'll do my best :)

Paul and I took 2 trains and a cable car up a winding mountain to the peak with amazing views the whole way. At the top we got help from the tourist centre and were lodged for the night at a lovely temple called Henjokoin where we were the only foreigners. Since we couldn't go in there until 2pm, we went for a walk up to Okunoin, a temple in the mountains. The cool thing about this place was the walk up to it - the path is surrounded by half a million tombs and gravestones. Every monk worth his salt in Japan has been placed here after death, or at least a lock of his hair. The whole area is covered in greenery and trees, and in the morning sun with hardly anyone else around it was just brilliant!

At the end of our walk, we were well rewarded when we entered Toro-do. This place is (hate to use the word again but..) a breath-taking lantern hall amongst the trees with hundreds and hundreds of lanterns lining the ceiling and walls, made all the more amazing by the fact that it's believed at least 2 of them have been burning for over 900 years! We walked in and were immediately silenced by a single monk sitting inside chanting and ringing a bell. I've never felt so moved by something related to religion! All this Buddhism stuff is getting to me :) The mood created by walking up the mountain among thousands of gravestones, the lanterns and the monk was phenomenal. We couldn't make our legs walk us out of there until the monk stopped chanting..

There's a wooden box up there with a hole in the side only large enough for an arm to reach through, with a heavy stone sitting inside. The theory behind it is that the stone is heavier or lighter depending on the weight of the sins burdoning the pilgrim who tries to lift it onto the shelf sitting behind. Of course we couldn't resist trying and the Japanese people loved laughing at Paul's attempt - he was even filmed by a couple of them! In the river nearby is a wooden plank display in memory of people who have drowned and aborted babies. We also came across a row of 10 Buddha statues, sitting there for people to throw water over in respect for the dead.

After we'd finished exploring the mountain near Okunoin, we walked back down to our room in Henjokoin. Everyone takes a Japanese bath before dinner so Suzuki asked us to do that shortly after we arrived. Paul had asked if we could participate in meditation while we stayed there, and Suzuki had agreed, so when he told us it was time to take our bath he suggested taking note of the feeling of relaxation that the water gave us so we could draw on that feeling later on.

We were so relaxed after our baths that we had a nap in our room before Suzuki called us for dinner. Paul and I ate our vegetarian dinner in a large tatami mat room by ourselves - tofu, tempura, soup, tea and sake! By the time we'd finished, the monks-in-training had been into our room to set up mattresses for us on the floor, so we had a rest for an hour or so before Suzuki called us to join in meditating.

The meditation was just... something I can't put into words. It was only the 2 of us, a Japanese girl and Suzuki in the meditation room, which happened to be the room we'd eaten dinner in. On the wall was a huge painting of a faint outline of Buddha in the bright moon. We all sat facing the painting on stools while Suzuki described to us what we should do during the 20 minutes he would give us. The first step in the meditation was to look at the picture and then close your eyes and try to picture it again. We were allowed to open our eyes as many times as we needed during this period so that we could picture the Buddha outside of ourselves. The next step is to keep our eyes closed and try to picture the Buddha being inside of us, feeling him in our hearts. And during the final part, we should try and feel ourselves connect with the Buddha we picture outside of ourselves, connecting ourselves with the universe in a way. I never thought meditation would ever be for me, but I suddenly got this amazingly peaceful feeling while I was sitting there! It felt as though I actually achieved what was meant to happen during meditation, something I'd always been extremely cynical about. As I said, it's something I can't put into words, but that feeling was like I had stepped out of myself and my spirit was completely and utterly at peace for a minute or two. Wonderful.

In the morning, feeling rested after a relaxed sleep, Paul and I woke up at 5:30 to try and catch the sunrise but we missed it. We had a great stroll around the cold, quiet streets before going back for 6:30am prayers. The prayers lasted for about an hour with 3 monks chanting, reading from their prayer books, rolling prayer beads and ringing bells and cymbals - pretty cool to be sitting there during that! Suzuki walked us through the halls after to explain how all of the statues and different rooms worked together, after which we had a vegetarian breakfast.

We left pretty soon after breakfast, but then went back straight away because Paul had heard that we could have painted Buddha paintings. Suzuki sat us down with ink, paper and calligraphy brushes and then left us to our own devices for a couple of hours. Paul, of course, chose the Buddha who overlooks the workings of the universe - the most difficult one, while I chose the Buddha who had started the religion - the most simple. You know how we are.. :) It was fun painting though, and afterwards we were sent to the man in charge of the temple (the head monk?) for him to mount our paintings on backing paper and finish them with more calligraphy and stamps. Suzuki led us to the prayer room we had been in for the morning prayers, lit a candle and sat us in the centre while he chanted, making some of Buddha's spirit go into our paintings. I felt more moved by his chants than I did during the morning prayers to be honest, maybe because it was just us in the room and he had a lovely voice.

That afternoon we had to make it all the way back to Kevin's house and then onto Osaka by evening so we left pretty much as soon as Suzuki had finished chanting, which was a pity. Honestly, our time at Koya-san was the highlight of my time in Japan!

Posted from Beijing

Excitement plus in the cable car

Beautiful views

Our temple at the end of the road

Okunoin

The weighty stone

10 Buddha statues

Memorial of people who have drowned and aborted babies

Suzuki!

Our lodging

Meditation Buddha

Inside the room where morning prayers were held

My Buddha painting :)

Bak in the Wak

2008-04-14T00:59:00.000+09:30

So the title was stolen from Kevin because clearly I've never been to Wakayama.. Anyway, to move on, Paul and I enjoyed a very relaxing first day in Kevin's apartment by literally sitting in Kevin's apartment. We definitely needed the time to wind down! In the evening, we went out for dinner to another izakaya (Japanese pub) with a bunch of Kevin's mates. We had a really lovely night but went home to sleep while the others went out and partied hard (Kevin got home, drunk, at about 5:30am! Tisk, tisk ;p).

On Sunday (13th April) we slept in and then headed to a nearby sushi restaurant for our first sushi meal in Japan. It was a really good experience and I actually thoroughly enjoyed all of the foods I tried! The place was called Kappa Create after an old Japanese legend. A creature called Kappa lives in lakes and rivers all over Japan. He sort of looks like a Ninja Turtle and he feeds on little children and horses. The legend goes that if you meet a Kappa, the way to kill them is to bow deeply to him - he will of course bow back deeply, spilling his brains out of an orifice on the top of his head. So.. strange name for a sushi restaurant but still. It was in the sushi train style where the food is going around on a conveyor-belt and you just take what tickles your fancy, but you could also order from a computer screen in front of you and it would be speed-delivered to your seat by a small shinkansen! Very exciting!

After lunch we headed to a CRAZY place called Round One - a huge orange building with 6 floors of entertainment for kids and adults alike. Some things we found - mini golf, fishing (with real fish that you had to throw back in.. oh the cruelty), archery, basketball, baseball, curling (on an ice rink!), arcade games, a mechanical bull, roller-blading/skating, motorbike riding (smallll motorbikes but you get to have a race with a lady with a flag and everything!), ten pin bowling, volleyball, golf, karaoke, eight ball, massage chairs and even water beds! It was like being in a maze of amazingness! So needless to say, we had a great afternoon :D

The following day, Paul and I made the day-trip out to Nara, an ancient capital of Japan. There are about a million and one temples and shrines in Nara which you could probably spend a year exploring but as we only had a short time (and are pretty much templed and shrined out at the best of times these days), we chose just a few sites to visit. We wandered through the Isuien Japanese Garden enjoying the serenity before heading over to the Todaiji Temple, the world's largest wooden building. We really enjoyed the temple, mainly because of the 3 huge Buddha statues inside - they were impressive! We wandered up the hill to the Nigatsu-do Hall from whose balcony we could see over the whole town, and then walked through the grounds of the Kasuga Taisha Shrine where there were hundreds of stone lanterns. We bought a few things from Nara and had some lovely interactions with the locals.

We had a really nice day in Nara and then got back to Wakayama to take Kevin out for dinner, thanking him for our time in his home. He was a fantastic host even if he didn't like our bananas.. :)

Posted from Osaka

Dinner at the izakaya

Yay it's sushi!

Curling at Round One

Japanese garden

Todaiji Temple - big building, ey?

Buddhas inside

Bell on the balcony of Ningatsu-do Hall - people ring this before praying

Some cool lanterns

The last supper

Hiroshima, a city of peace

2008-04-12T22:47:00.000+09:30

After our night of zero sleep, we took many trains to Hiroshima feeling quite zonked. We decided to spend the night in a manga (24hr comic and internet) cafe for the first time, because it would work out cheaper than a hostel and it would be more central - and so we did! It wasn't too bad sleeping in a chair..

In the morning we headed out on a ferry to an island called Miyajima which holds the famous 'floating torii' - you may have seen pictures. There were lots of deer on the island which were fun to be around, and we also saw another wedding procession! What is it with us and weddings? The outfits that the bride and groom were wearing were amazing - traditional and beautiful! The actual floating torii is quite lovely too. I can only imagine how beautiful it must be at sunset with the reflection in the water!

Back on the mainland, we went to explore Hiroshima. We ate some udon (thick wheat) noodles in a standing noodle shop in the Hiroshima Station before heading out - literally there are tall tables but no chairs so you eat standing up. I know that everyone's always busy, but surely standing up and eating is no faster than sitting down and eating if you're in a hurry? But that's just my humble opinion..

The Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima is just amazing. It would be difficult for anyone not to be moved standing in a place which has been demolished by the world's first atomic bomb only decades earlier, devastating a whole nation. After they started rebuilding the city, they excavated all of the human remains from around the area, cremated them and re-buried them in one place together, now underneath the Atomic Bomb Memorial Mound. Just standing there next to the mound is incredible.. The 'A-Bomb Dome' is on the other side of the river. It is a building that was built in 1915 and is one of the only buildings in Hiroshima to survive the blast - amazing considering the bomb actually exploded about 150m south and 600m above the building.

In the park is also the Children's Peace Monument, which I found the most breath-taking of all. A girl called Sadako Sasaki was exposed to the atomic bomb when she was just 2 years old. At first it was thought that she had escaped unharmed, however 9 years later when she was in grade 6 at school, she developed radiation-induced leukemia. As ancient Japanese tradition holds that a person who folds 1000 paper cranes can have one wish granted, Sadako started folding them and kept folding them way past the 1000 mark, wishing for world peace. After 8 months, she lost her battle and died. Her classmates pushed for a monument to be built to remember Sadako and all of the other children lost to the atomic bomb, and now stands the Children's Peace Monument, surrounded by glass containers full of paper cranes. The link between paper cranes and world peace can be traced back to Sadako and her battle with leukemia.

After a day of deep thought, we took our first and only shinkansen (bullet train) to Osaka! We decided that if we were going to do it, we would do it right - we reserved seats on the nozomi shinkansen, the fastest one which hits speeds of up to 300km/hr. We were pretty much exhausted by the time we got on the train and were slightly snappy at each other, and it was decided that, after all the hype, we preferred the local train travel that we had done over the bullet train travel :) Sure it's fast, but you don't see the country-side and it doesn't feel like you've achieved anything when you get off at the other side!

We changed trains at Osaka and made the hour-long journey out to Wakayama, where Kevin lives. We were lucky enough to get to stay with him for 4 nights in his tiny apartment, where we slept on futon mattresses, ate his food and used his internet. Thanks so much Kevin! x

Posted from Osaka

Beautiful views on the way to Hiroshima

My sleeping quarters

Not quite sure what 'Boys love' is and not sure that I want to know with the types of 'comics' they have here..

Out to Miyajima

The floating torii

Cool wedding

Stupid deer tried to run away while we tried to take the photo. We showed him!

Children's Peace Memorial

The A-Bomb Dome

Our shinkansen!

Service galore

These toilets are starting to scare me..

2008-04-08T22:40:00.000+09:30

The other day I walked into one. As soon as I sat down it said something to me in Japanese and then started playing a flushing sound with birds chirping in the background. I stood up and the toilet flushed. I put my hands under the soap dispenser and soap came out automatically. I put my hands under the tap and it ran. Then there was the automatic immediate-dry hand-dryer which blasts air out so hard that no water could survive. These machines could turn against us, people!

Ha-na-mi

2008-04-07T07:54:00.000+09:30

On Sunday we had a hanami (cherry blossom viewing) party organised by Kevin in the Maruyama-koen (park) and it was brilliant! Friends of his came from all over, and he got there early to stake us out a spot so we were right in there with the action. He and his mate Mark, from Ballarat, dressed up as characters and ran around, drunk, with their workplace's sign, taking photos with lots of little kids. I'm sure it was good publicity haha.

The park itself is massive, and because it was the peak of the cherry blossom season, the whole place was packed with people and set up like a festival with food stalls all over. We had a ball just running around people-watching, and also chillin' in our little area listening to Mark's CD mix drinking sake and umeshu (plum wine). A group of kids were in the park holding signs offering free hugs which I thought was fantastic - spread it around the world! We had a lovely day altogether, with me at the end mainly trying to keep Kevin from falling over :)

Paul and I made an early morning trip out to Fushimi-Inari Taisha, the temple with the famous 4km path up a mountain lined with red torii. We didn't stay too long, but it was great to be out there and be able to see it! That afternoon we went to the Miyako Odori geisha performance. We bought tickets so that we could see a tea ceremony first and that was pretty cool in itself - seeing geisha so close is fantastic, such self-control and elegance! We were each given a cup of tea and a sweet red bean sweet to eat, before heading in for the geisha performance. We were really happy that the audience was mainly made up of Japanese people with not too many Westerners. There were so many geisha and maiko up on the stage, and even a couple of men (maybe?) dressed as shogun (generals from long ago) - again, their self-control is just amazing! Unfortunately we couldn't take photos in there so I can't show you how cool it was.. Chris, a guy from our hostel, said that he went there with his sister once and sat in the front row - a girl was up on stage by herself doing artistic things with a fan and clearly had been concentrating on him because he nodded off to sleep at one point and she dropped her fan on stage!! It would have been so embarrassing for her...

On our final day in Kyoto, we left Kyoto and headed out to Himeji to visit an ancient castle. It was really pretty and nice, and the town seems really nice too, but we were wishing we were back in Kyoto for our final day of enjoyment.. We headed back to Kyoto in the afternoon and wandered around until evening when we grabbed our gang of new friends from the hostel for some farewell purikura! It was pouring with rain but the purikura made us happy. That night, Paul and I stayed awake all night creating DVDs of our photos with Melissa and Christopher, our two favourites from the hostel. We played uno, solitaire and babanuki (a new game I learnt and now love), listened to music, chatted and grabbed from noodles at 4:30am from the Mini Stop 24 hour convenience store. Another fantastisch day!

Posted from Osaka

Kevin (in blue) and Mark (in green) at our hanami party

Kevin with a passed out old man, pants undone for some reason..

2 geisha under the weeping sakura tree

The lovely river running through Kyoto

Making a hot-pot for dinner

Fushimi-Inari Taisha

Tea ceremony

Himeji Castle

The gang after purikura!