Friday, 22 September 2006
Norway and Germany
Turns out Ian has a lot of friends in Norway, most of whom he met while back in Australia through the dive club at UNSW, and a few he has met while in Sweden. So as it turned out we managed to spend most of the trip staying at his friends houses - saving us a lot of money!! So a big thank you to Eivind, Rigmor and Catrine who all put us up in theır homes. Also a big thanks to Elizabeth and Aril who showed us around Innfjorden and took us to see Trollveggen and to Sølvi who took us sheep collecting on a mountain just outside of Bergen.
We were glad to have the car as it gave us lots of freedom to stop wherever we wanted and make side trips as we chose. The highlights of the drive were definately Trollstiegen and Geirangerfjorden. Trollstiegen is a road with a series of switchbacks up a very scenic mountain, that we felt the need to stop at almost every turn to take more photos!! Geirangerfjorden is one of the more famous fjords in Norway and we caught a ferry through it with our car, which was thoroughly enjoyable - also because we didn't need to keep stopping the car to take photos.
We aslo visited this really cool Stavekirk (timber church) at Borgund, they built them using a particular method of timber contruction, but the building is pretty much entirely from timber and really funky (you'll just have to wait for photos).
On our final day in Norway Sølvi took us to a mountain just outside of Bergen to 'collect sheep'. Basically what happens is the sheep of several small farms graze on the mountains in summer, our job was to 'collect' them. We walked about an hour and a half into the mountains, formed an approximate line with Ian, Jeremy and myself in the valley, and Sølvi and her sister on a ridge on either side of us. We walked back in the direction we came from, us behind them so that any sheep that tried to run down the ridge and back up the valley we would stop (hopefully). It was a fun, but exhausting day and we brought about 13 sheep down ourselves, and assisted with another 10 or 15, whıch is a pretty good.
Norway was also bloody expensive...
A 400mL beer in Bergen, 13AUD
A 'cheap' curry, 30AUD
Petrol by the litre, 2.50AUD
'Spending' a week meeting wonderful people and seeing fabulous scenery... PRICELESS
From Norway we flew to Munich to spend a few days celebrating Octoberfest with Dan, Jeremy's friend from uni. We managed to do some sightseeing while we were there, we saw the concentration camp 'Dachau' and made a trip out to Neuschwanstein Castle with some new friends we made - and thanks to the travels we did with Steph in Germany earlier in the year we knew to ask for a group ticket for the train saving the five of us 175 Euros all up!!
In the evenings we celebrated in the beer halls paying around 14AUD for a stein of beer (still better than Norway). Even Jo had some beer, she was not able to finish her stein, but did manage to put away a stein of Radler (Shandy).
After farewelling Munich, we flew to Istanbul where we will be meetıng up wıth Tori in a few days to travel down the Aegean Coast.
Saturday, 9 September 2006
Heja Sverige!
We started in Stockholm and spent a couple of days checking it out, we’ve explored Gamel Stan (the old town), saw the Royal Palace and the 'Vasa' a 378 year old Swedish warship that had been recovered from the mud of Stockholm Harbour after being buried for 333 years. Unfortunately the ship sunk about 20 minutes into its maiden voyage back in 1628, and basically everyone decided to blame the designer of the Vasa, who conveniently died 1 year before its completion. We also checked out 'Skansen', which is like the Swedish equivalent of 'Old Sydney Town' crossed with a Scandinavian zoo. On our last night in Sweden we met up with Susie and David who currently live in Stockholm but we first met them when they were living in Germany earlier in the year.
Some handy advice from the Swedes in Stockholm
Scandanavian housing at Skansen
The Swedes get suggestive with their speeding signs
We left
Lovely spot for a Saturday afternoon BBQ
We made sure to try a sampling of Swedish cider as well, after a recommendation from some Swedish girls that Jo works with. We tried some different flavours including apple, pear, forest berries, strawberry and lime, and another one with a fruit nobody knew exactly what it was. Jo thought they were fantastic, and has started plans to set up a company that exports Swedish cider but Jeremy was not so impressed he thought they were just sweeter and fruitier and that Swedish cider is chick cider! Which makes sense seeing that it was a couple of Swedish girls who recommended them. Speaking of Swedish girls... I have often heard people say that
One reason why
Sunday, 3 September 2006
2006: A (Belated) Spain Odyssey
It all began one dark and stormy night in
… Several hours pass…
… Jeremy is struck by a thought of mammoth proportions. “Jo? Do you realise that we have to get up in 3 hours?”… and thus begins our holiday to España! Olé!
While we did many exciting things in
Jo and I stayed in the ‘old city’ of
We checked out the bull fighting Museum and the bull ring which exhibits the uniforms of some of Valencia’s most famous Matadors (Bull-fighters) still bearing the original rips and old blood stains that presumably resulted in that matadors death. Well when you don’t speak the language you have to do your own equations
Picture of Matador + Ornate Uniform (complete with rips and blood stains) + Picture of Matador doing a very graceless impression of a shish-kebab = Picture of Matador’s State funeral (as they say maths is the universal language)
We also made a couple of trips to the beach and soaked up some much needed saltwater, sand, sun and cigarette butts! No offence
Fast forwarding through an 8 hour train trip to
Jo and I spent 5 hours walking through the ‘
Madrid
Due to the last minute planning of our arrival in
As we arrived in San Sebastian we had no accommodation booked, and knew that arriving at 7pmish our chances of finding any were slim, but we were backpackers heading towards a beach town during the hot hot summer in Spain, and Nick and Tori had told us exciting stories of sleeping through rush-hour in Munich train station on a plasticated table cloth. We'll be fine, we can sleep on the beach, what could possibly go wrong?
View out the bus window as we approached San Seb:
Now, everybody knows that the rain in
Fearing the rain for its capacity to make us wet and sleeping difficult, we inhaled some burgers and set off around the old town looking for a room. San Seb old town has heaps of little pensions, basically an apartment with dorm rooms rented out by the resident, like a tiny hostel. The first five or six we buzzed we got no answer or an abrupt "we're full". But then we struck gold, or at least tin, but tin that eventually evaded us, as tin is wont to do.
We were buzzed up to an old lady in a dressing gown who apparently had a room, but spoke no English. Tori's knowledge of Italian served us well, and eventually we figured out that she would take two of us, and her manfriend the other three, put up on crappy beds in a bare room for 25 euro each a night ($50 aussie).
We went to inspect manfriend's room, a few blocks away, which was even worse. Thinking the price a bit steep, we discussed amongst ourselves, and agreed to try to talk her down to 20 each, and then there was a brief but fierce rock-paper-scissors battle to decide who got the crap beds, and who got the even crapper beds. We then went back to the woman, only to find that in the meantime she had given the room to someone else.
Back on the streets with nowhere to sleep, rain not heavy but lingering in the background.
For the next part of this story, you would do well to look at the annotated photograph located here, perhaps you could open it in another window, and refer to it as needed.
A couple of us sat and minded bags in the street while the others went off to search for a sleeping place. They were gone a long time, and apparently they journeyed far and wide, but they came back marching proud with victorious glints in their eyes.
They had found a long portico type thing at the beach (location "A"). There were a few bums sleeping at one end, but it was quite long so we headed for the non-bum end and sat ourselves down on the concrete.
Singalong story time at Location A:
After sitting and chatting for a while, quite pleased with our location, we started thinking about getting out the sleeping bags and the plasticated table cloth and getting some shut-eye. We witnessed a domestic between a bum couple and in the process learnt what we assume is a terrible swear word in Basque. Or perhaps the name of the guy. Anyway, after a while the cops came through and started hassling the bums trying to move them on. We watched all this with fingers crossed, but slowly but surely they worked their way along the line to us.
We decided honesty was best, and explained our situation. The police were really very nice, very sweet and kind. They said "well, we can't let you sleep here, it's forbidden. But what we can do is tell you an area where you can sleep. The good news is: there are no police patrols, so you won't be moved along. The bad news is: there are no police patrols, so you'll have to be careful".
The area they spoke of was the other end of the beach past the tunnel, occupying the lower-right-hand corner of the annotated photograph. There was no covered section here, but at that stage it had stopped raining so we thought we'd take our chances in the open.
We were going to sleep on the beach amongst the rows of deck chairs, but then Jeremy and I went for a pre-sleep walk up the beach, and found the building marked with the red "B" in the photograph. It was kinda a surf-club/restaurant/kiosk type thing, but we noticed it had a rooftop dining area which was not locked. We snuck up to have a scout around and, finding it to our approval, went back for the others.
It had no roof, but had walls which provided good protection from the wind, which we would have suffered from on the beach. By now I think it was about
Rooftop restaurant at location B:
At, I think, about
But then, how it hadn't happened earlier I'll never know, but one of us set off some sort of motion detector and big bright floodlights went on everywhere, blinding us in a most unwelcome way. As we recovered our vision we realised there were surveillance cameras everywhere, and we were sitting there like deer in the proverbials. So we quickly gathered together our stuff and snuck down the stairs, giving quite a shock to a bunch of spanish guys who were sitting downstairs having some quiet beers, and certainly didn't expect five backpackers to come down bleary eyed carrying sleepingbags.
At this stage the rain was coming down, so we made straight for the only cover we knew of, the pedestrian tunnel marked with the yellow "C" in the photograph. About 3:30 am now, and we lay out our sleeping bags on the cold hard tiles and tried to sleep.
At
Early morning at Location C:
Some were lucky enough to sleep. We stayed in bed until about
Packing up stuff at Location C:
Just after sunrise, as we went back to town to find a room:
We found a room at "Pension Aussie", but couldn't move in until
The proprietor, a slightly strange Aussie ex-pat, tried to convince us we should see the city and shouldn't sleep, but as soon as the clock hit
I'm not sure if I had slept at all during the night. I didn't think I did, but perhaps I did drop in and out of sleep a bit in the tunnel. Either way, after so much bone-bruising concrete and metal, the softness of a mattress and a pillow that afternoon felt like heaven itself, I was so thankful I nearly found religion. Except I couldn't find one that worshipped comfortable bedding.
- Thanks for that Ian you just saved us a few hours :)
And that ladies and gentlemen is why we were “Thleepless in Than Thebathian”.
Good | Bad |
Arriving in | Smelling |
Conforming to the festival dress code | Wearing those same clothes from three days straight, without showers. |
Joining a festival band as they patrol the streets singing songs and asking people on balconies to throw water at them | Getting red wine thrown on you instead of water |
Finding a place to sleep for the night | That place being in the middle of a round-a- bout |
Running with the bulls!!!! | When the bull next to you falls over and gets up looking for someone to blame! |
Not getting gored by said bull | All the drunk/drugged idiots who run without sleep! MORONS! |
Getting hugged by Jo when she realises that you didn’t die | Coming down from adrenaline high |
Finding our same sleeping spot free again | Ian getting robbed during the night for his cheap digital watch and his prescription glasses – such inconsiderate thieves! |
Getting to sleep in | Waking up late because Ian’s cheap digital watch was our alarm clock and… well… read above |
Getting our cameras out of storage in time to catch the running again | Having to fight our way to the front of the fence to stick our cameras through and catch just the barest glimpse of the race. |
Not getting our cameras smashed by the police who forbid the filming of the event unless you paid for a press pass! | Eating another bloody Boca… Bocadarell… a friggin roll with cheese and ham on it for breakfast… again! |
Getting the hell out of | The anarchy that ensues when the police just don’t bother |
In summary
Street Party in Pamplona
Agua!
The Bull Run
Three Lucky Survivers
Bayonne
Well after scrambling for a bus out of
Well we spent our final few days in
Cool Fountain...
La Sagrada Familia
THE END! - Phew!