Frankling Footsteps

Amelie's Birth

2006-08-06T10:56:00.000+01:00

Amelie Bella Frankling has finally arrived.

The relevant statistics are:

* Weight: 4.295kg

* Length: 51cm

* Date / Time of Birth: Saturday 5th August 2006 at 8:58am (Australian Eastern Standard Time).

* Labour: 5 hours 45 minutes

* Gestation: Due Date + 9 days (51 days longer than Isaac)

Within hours, Amelie had received her first Government handout, an “I just made the count" T-shirt advertising the Australian Census next Tuesday.

Jennifer advises that she is not taken in by the calls of the Australian Treasurer, Peter Costello, to have a third child "for the country".

Mother and baby are fine, Isaac probably remains a little confused and Dad is still a bit tired.

The Franklings

Chile

2005-07-16T23:58:00.000+01:00

Back in the pre-Isaac days Jen and I went to Chile. It was chosen after the usual extensive and “random walk” due diligence process that has been the Frankling's way of choosing holidays for some time. This postcard is a celebration of that 2004 trip, and we like to hope it has been matured well for the delay, like a good Chilean red.

Chile is a rather ridiculous looking country which is 4329km long and averaging 180km wide: proportionally its the longest country in the world compared to its width. However the Andes mountain / volcano range on its eastern borders largely explain this apparent cartographic silliness, especially if you consider much of Chile was cut off from Argentina in winter during colonial times. Its the richest and arguably most democratic place in South America, although this can't be hard when you have competition like Bolivia.

It would be basically impossible to see a fair selection of the country in 3 weeks without a Lan Chile Airpass, which we duly bought. Our basic plan was to divide our alloted time into the 3 chunks of Chile that seemed to have the most highlights between them, yet because of the distances separating them were likely to be quite distinct. Chile, has, to this point, set a new record for us for sheer holiday logistical planning. In the end there were 13 flights, bus trips, 2 car hires and a couple of sections shared with travelers we met on the way. At one point we even considered chartering a helicopter into Torres del Paine National Park to try and save the better part of 2 days, until we were balked at the £2300 cost. No doubt many of you will email in comments along the lines of how we will have to replace such trips with package holidays for the next 20 years because we now have offspring. Watch this space.

First stop was Patagonia, after 6 back to back flights, an unnecessary taxi ride and a 3 hour bus trip. The taxi ride came about as we needed to get to a bus terminal in down town Punta Arenas from the airport. We didn't have much time to catch the last bus of the day so our first non airport experience of Chile consisted of the taxi driver apparently breaking local road rules to get us to the terminal on time. We got there with a few minutes to spare only to be... driven back rather slowly to the airport to offload people before heading north. While we whinge about many forms of transport in this postcard we can report back that the buses in Chile are a true delight: clean, comfortable, regular and remarkably cheap.

The primary reason we went to Patagonia was to see Torres del Paine: a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve which is famous for its natural beauty, in particular the glaciers, wildlife and the Torres (Towers). The plan was to spend 5 nights in the park doing the classic “W” walk, which basically takes in most of the sights you can see without being seriously kitted out. We kept our kit requirements down by getting full board in the backpacker lodges for the 5 day trek. This must be one of the few places in the world where you can trek in a true wilderness area on (really) full board accommodation. This might strike some of you as cheating but it turned out to be money very well spent.

As we came into the park we saw all the standard tourist things such as the vistas of the Torres, guanacos, a raging river, and the fairly obligatory boat ride over Lago Pehoe to our “base camp”: Refugio Pehoe. That first day was actually rather pleasant, starting with our afternoon walk around part of Lago Pehoe in what was to turn out to be unusually warm conditions. The evening consisted of an excellent hearty meal in the Refugio washed down with some Chilean red. The company was varied, and included a rock climbing Roman Catholic priest from New Orleans who was on holiday from his ecclesiastical duties in Bolivia. Then there was the young American woman who, upon realising that she had been walking alone for an hour in a part of Torres known for its incidence of pumas, had taken the precaution of recording her farewells and last will and testament on her camcorder.

The next day we set off for Refugio Grey, situated strategically on the north eastern end of Lago Grey very close to Grey's Glacier. The walk could be done in about 3.5 hours without taking breaks but we took considerably more. There were a lot of of scenic vistas to see on the way but some of the best involved seeing glacial “calves” on Lago Grey.

After dropping off our kit at Refugio Grey, we spent some time clambering over a large rocky promontory just to the north of camp. In the darkening light, Jen took some of her best shots of glacial calves, as well as the terminal face of the Glacier proper, which at this point was only a few hundred metres away. Evidence of the impact of the glacier on the landscape was all around us, and was the setting for a truly memorable afternoon. After we returned we organised to join a Glacier trip the following day. The training included being taught crampon tips, such as not wearing them while in the zodiac.

Now throughout the entire trip we kept on meeting people who were on trips that made our 3 weeks seem inconsequential. However that night in the Refugio we met the (grandfather) of all backpackers, who, now at the age of 72 had spent the majority of each of the last 14 years exploring around the world!

In the book Between Extremes, the authors say the following about Grey's Glacier: “In the distance the shimmering topaz of the vast expanse of frozen water confronted us...this eternal wall of water had...broken open granite mountains. Evidence of epochs of glacial sculpting was everywhere around us”. This is an accurate depiction of the emotive scene we encountered, as we set out for our walk across the Glacier, led by the ebullient and androgynous guide Micki. Our time on the ice was great fun, with Andrew in particular really feeling comfortable in traversing the glacier speedily with the aid of his trusty icepick, as evidenced by this blurred action shot. The highlight was an ice cave, with its amazing blues and clear delineated layers of ice. There was also an ice climb which we passed on. This involve scaling a sheer 10m high ice wall using just your icepicks, crampons, and a climbing style demonstrated by Micki which could roughly be described as “loving the ice”. On the way back we had to again cross the “no man's land” of icy sludge & rock between the glacier and land proper, which is surprisingly treacherous.

All in all the glacier experience was great, except there was another, younger and much larger group we had to wait for, who held us up by about 2 hours. Why couldn't our group have been taken back on the zodiac first? By the time we got back and had a quick “lunch” it was already 3pm , the weather was closing in and it was starting to blow a gale. We had to retrace our path of the previous day and it probably goes without saying that the experience was not fun, what with the scenery in reverse, the wind, the rain and the failing light.

That evening back at Refugio Pehoe we were very happy that we weren't actually camping. Apart from the weight of carrying camping gear around and the unpleasantness of the weather we had became aware of another local occupational hazard of tenting: super mice. These little guys had adapted to chewing through tents each night at the camping grounds in search of sustenance. In fact there was even a rumour going around that the mice actually preferred eating tent. The net result was that the tent guys had to endure rain, cold, a Patagonian gale AND ruined tents.

We pressed on the next day from Refugio Pehoe around the tonguetwistable Lago Nordenskjold towards Refugio Los Cuernos. This was perhaps the most memorable day walking. The conditions ranged from average to poor to attrocious. A little way over half way you make it to the turn off to the Valley del Frances, the so called “middle” bit of the W with apparently panoramic views from the top. “Base station” for this mini climb is Campamento Italiano, named presumably after Italians who thought the nearby Rio and good cover under the trees was a good place for a camp. Well when we got there it was quite cold with the wind blowing strongly through the trees: we hate to think what its like out of season. Some poor souls had camped the night, braving the lack of toilet facilities and in some cases attempting to fend off the super mice by tying their kit up trees. Jen in particular was keen to see views from the top so we asked a few of the residents about their experiences. Some people had climbed an extra 2000 feet to Campamento Britanico (not sure what this says about the relative intrepidness / intelligence of the British and Italians), and one intrepid couple had gone even further only to reported the visibility was so poor that enjoying the Valley de Frances vista was out of the question.

So we struggled around the “W”. At this point I should mention that we weren't exactly carrying light backpacks, sans camping gear and food. No, because Jen had read in guidebooks that “The W” was “basically flat” we were carrying all sorts of extras in our fittingly named Karrimor backpacks, including Jen's Clinique, which actually made our loads quite heavy. The only problem was that the W turned out to be anything but flat, and our tallish backpacks were getting caught in the high wind. All this was fairly bearable until the path careered down to Nordenskjold and we had to walk for a while on a rocky beach. OK, walk is an exaggeration. Try lurching dangerously as the wind howled around us, trying desperately to avoid smashing face first onto rocks. Jen used her walking poles for stabilisation while Andrew just used his legs. All the time we were trying to judge when to inch forward again in between gusts. And then it happened. Andrew looked behind him at the Lake and saw an almost solid wall / squall of water ripped up from the Lake hurtling towards us (this photo after the event doesn't really do it justice but note the white "haze" on the lake). Andrew had just enough time to shout to Jen to “get down!” before we both got well and truly showered. Getting to the other end of that beach, which can't have been that long, was the culmination of a slightly unpleasant short adventure. The rest of the trip to our Refugio for that evening was uneventful. That night we felt truly sorry for the campers. At times it seemed the wind was wanting to demolish the Refugio – the conditions really were rough. Campers had (wisely) chosen to pay the small fee to cook their food inside, and generally lounge around with the rest of us inside, before being banished to the storm at the alloted 11pm. With conditions like this, the smells and noises of the mandatory unisex group dorms were definitely preferable. However the Dorms did provide some concern, given that one night Andrew was allocated the top part of a giant triple decker bunk bed which had a guard rail so low it would have had trouble keeping even bed bugs in. This didn't help Andrew's mild case of vertigo, and really help focused his mind about whether he needed to go to the toilet. Outside, the campers got flooded...

The walk the next day to Refugio Chileno would take us nearly all the way to the base of the famous Torres del Paines. The walk was fairly uneventful weather wise but our muscles were beginning to complain. We were most of the way through our hike by this point and it was becoming increasingly obvious that most of the famed fauna of Torres del Paine had gone north for the winter. We got left with guanaco, a bird or two, 2 caterpillars and domesticated cattle & horses.

Before dawn the next day we joined an extended group of walkers to attempt to make the lookout for the Torres. The autumn night was predictably freezing as we expended some effort trying to find the path. As we cleared the forest there was perhaps half an hour of climbing up the moraine, which could easily have been the backdrop for more than one Lord of the Rings scene. The “lookout” was a jumble of boulders on a lip between the moraine proper and a very striking alpine lake at the base of the Torres. The vista was beautifully austere, and we froze waiting for the sun to spectacularly hit the Torres in the fashion of the postcards, but that never really happened.

A few days later we were about a thousand km north and driving a hire car south from Puerto Montt airport in our way to the island of Chiloe. The short trip down the Chilean mainland to the ferry to Chiloe passed uneventfully. Chiloe, is the third largest island in South America, after Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego and Marajo respectively. It is a famed mystical green isle that has been compared to many places, including our homeland Tasmania. We should have realised that for the Brits to turn down the offer of taking sovereignty over the island in the 1820s probably should have been warning enough. It turns out the reason it is so green is because it seems to have considerably wetter weather than Britain – and Jen reckons its nothing like as good as Tasmania. Our base for Chiloe was with a crazy Canadian called Carl in the town of Chonchi. Carl had thought about running a guest house on Sark in the Channel Islands but plumped for Chiloe instead. He had a laid back attitude to life which included giving non existent directions to his guest house, telling us that “we couldn't miss it – it was obvious”. His supposedly excellent directions didn't extend to when it was raining and dark, and as we've already said it did a lot of the former. Worse was to follow – 4 different sets of locals didn't know where he was either. Things got so bad Andrew had to calm Jen down with a steak sandwich in the middle of our search. We eventually found Carl's ramshackle establishment Hospedaje La Esmeralda down an unmade road. Carl made up for all this through his telling of other tall stories, which presumably included a small measure of truth, and his truly excellent breakfasts of eggs and home made bread.

It was at Carl's that we struck up a friendship with Rod and Lee Jones, an Australian couple who were traveling the world on a shoestring. While they gave us some rather excellent tips on how to go on half price Antarctic cruises which we have filed away for future reference, it was other knowledge of theirs which would come in handy that day. They were planning to travel around Chiloe on bus, but discovered the service wasn't very convenient, like apparently so many things in Chiloe. Given some of our more interesting travel experiences have been when we've given strangers a lift, we offered them a ride for the day in our car. The plan was to head north along the eastern Chiloe coast, visiting some of the tiny coastal communities nestled in inlets along the way. It looked like a pleasant short drive . We were barely out of the provincial capital Castro when the dirt / mud incline which was an excuse for a major road starting giving us trouble. So much trouble that all of us bar Jen got out and walked to reduce the weight in the car. That didn't help. Then Jen handed the keys to Rod who had to use his considerable 4WD skills to get us up the first hill. From there things got somewhat worse. As the hours ticked by we discovered that our map didn't actually detail most of the roads we were traveling on. We went down one steep road to a bay ostensibly to look at some cute hamlet, and proceeded to all find semi-private places to micturate behind. And at one spot the incline back up was so bad we seriously considered driving across the beach to the next town. We suspect even the locals thought our actions surprising, brave or perhaps just plain stupid. But we eventually made it back to the road the map deigned to show and went to some drizzly town called Dalcahue with a boring market, UNESCO World Heritage listed 19^th century wooden church blah, blah, blah. Minutes later we were back in the car driving north again to Quemchi. This turned out to be the highlight of the day, providing a rather excellent late lunch of fresh fish at El Chejo, which included a tour of the dishes available in the kitchen, given our Spanish was so bad. We're particularly thankful for this, since it meant we avoided ordering the mussels, which were just sitting out the back door. After lunch we did the tourist sightseeing thing before eventually realising the Church we were looking at was holding a funeral. We made our way back to Chonchi via the super fast Pan American Highway which runs down the spine of the Island, not even tempted by the pastry chef who was selling his goods/wares at a stop along the way. Its no wonder Chiloe is the place where the Pan American Highway finally peters out. The place is so depressing we won't waste any of the other photos on you.

The next day Rod & Lee packed up and left on the bus, and Jen and I departed in our car. For both couples this was earlier than originally planned.

So we crossed the strait on the ferry again and headed north. This trip was memorable for how much it looked liked parts of Australia. We stopped the night at Frutillar, a lakeside holiday resort popular with Chileans. Much of the architecture pointed to the original German settlers. In general there was meticulously preservation in a manner faintly reminiscent of The Truman Show, so its perhaps appropriate that different things in the town have been sponsored by Nestle, which also is in the business of sweet things. The whole place was made more memorable by being very out of season, so we had just about everything to ourselves, including the home stay where their english was as bad as our spanish. We wiled away our evening in a Frutillar restaurant, knocking back the Pisco Sour and eating the recommended Mix Grill, which to our horror had so much meat it reminded us of a gluttonous 50th birthday party we attended in Andorra in 2001. Frutillar would be the ideal place for an espanol Saga holiday.

After all this veneer, we headed somewhere with a much greater purpose in life: Pucon. Described by Lonely Planet as a “hot spot for vacationing Santiaguinos, a must stop on the gringo trail... the most touristy place in southern Chile”. As good fun loving adventure types, how could we resist this most authentic of Chilean experiences? We checked into La Tetera, famed for its breakfasts, only to discover that just down the corridor were...Rod & Lee Jones. This was definitely a case of keeping up with the Joneses.

Upon checking out our various adventure options we discovered that:

the water was way too low for white water rafting in the Rio Trancura
the water was too low to try a variation on river boogie boarding
the weather was too poor to climb the active Volcan Villarica

So we ended up doing no adventure sports at all in what must be the disputed adventure capital of Chile.

So we hooked up with the Jones's for another day out.

Our first noteworthy sojourn was at an amazing set of river waterfalls fed from an underground outlet of the large lake Ojos de Caburga. Some of the waterfalls are shown here.

The next memorable stop was Parque Nacional Huerquehue, a 12,500 hectare reserve of alpine lakes and monkey puzzle trees. The road got more difficult until it completely fizzled out near a Refugio. The walk was... very pretty and atmospheric but also mainly uphill, cold, drizzly and the mud...lets just say the our few hours hiking involved some slippery moments. We eventually admitted defeat and passed up the opportunity to do the most scenic “Northern Loop” of the Parque, and retreated to the Refugio. There we found various tourists, including Rod & Lee, relaxing near a log fire, sipping hot chocolate etc.

For our final stop, what better way to cap off all our exertion than a sunset dip in a hot spring? So we parked ourselves at Termas Los Pozones, which came complete with a car park, concrete lined hot springs & unisex non-illuminated changing cubicles.

On our last day in central Chile we had a fairly forgettable experience driving to a small town with a museum dedicated to the Mapuche, an indigenous people. It was near here in 1960 the strongest ever recorded earthquake occurred (9.5 on the Richter Scale). Unfortunately the tiny museum, complete with its spanish only explanations, barely moved us. One market did however draw our attention for its colours. We eventually drew our time in central Chile to a close by flying out of Temuco and on to Calama, in the Norte Grande of Chile.

Calama is the mining town supporting the world's biggest copper mine, and a useful launch point into the Atacama, the world's second driest desert, a place so inhospitable it has been used as a testing place for Mars missions.

Our first stop and base for the next few days was San Pedro de Atacama, well and truly on turista trail and anything but dry in the bars. Other essentials included internet bars, mobile cash machines etc. This place, while now existing seemingly only for the tourists, has a certain dusty, mud wall kind of charm, and got to be so popular due to its close proximity to so many attractions. In no particular order we saw:

3 different species of flamingos (the Chilean, Andean & James) in the middle of bizarre salt formations on the Salar de Atacama. Some years ago their numbers had dropped off dramatically as they were disrupted by the tourist influx. But these salmon shaded concordesque birds were now seemingly oblivious to this fact, focussing more on this particularly great water source in one of the driest spots on earth. The glare was really intense and when we weren't rapidly desiccating and dusting up our gastronasal systems we rested under the shade of a building which incongruously looked like it was built out of grey nougat.
Valle de Luna, home to fantastically eroded salt mountains. Its was OK, but we've been somewhat jaded by having seen the fantastically eroded stone of Wadi Rum. As we wiled away the time waiting for the sunset the Brits near us talked about their Ipods.
The geysers of El Tatio. Even getting there involved an obscenely early start followed by a long rough, dark ride in one of the many tourist buses in a chaotic convoy. The geysers are great to look at and photograph as the sun comes up, which rather clashed with the guides serving us breakfast and the rest of their timetable. The lung busting 4321m altitude certainly added to the surreal landscape, as did the the hot breakfast in -6 to -8C conditions. Afterwards many of our group enjoyed a dip(!), while we chatted with an Israeli ex-Reservist. The trip was capped off with a stroll through a picturesque, remote and quiet hamlet that was mercifully low on the tourist vendors who typically hawk “authentic” merchandise from Bolivia.
Laguna Miniques and Laguna Miscanti. These were 2 scenic but barren high altitude lakes where we had glare laden and lung stretching walks. The highlight of the return trip was Andrew spotting a particular nonchalant fox, and spotting the place markers every 20m along the road.

Next stop on our Norte Grande tour was Iquique, an intriguingly named and situated desert city. This city of about 200,000 people is compressed into a cramped strip of land between 600m sand escarpments and the Oceano Pacifico. Actually the dunes serve many purposes, including being useful for paragliding, evening advertising light shows and Roman Catholic Easter pilgrimages. Iquique made its money from the exploitation of nitrates inland and the best part of the downtown area were the resulting 19^th century buildings. But by and large there is not much here that would interest a tourist, perhaps evidenced by the real scarcity of them.

As we were wandering the downtown streets we noticed a woman walking purposefully towards us. She had such a purpose in her step that our first reaction was that she must be a restaurant tout. Actually she was nothing of the sort and this chance encounter lead to a remarkable coalition. Meet Queenie and Jerome, 2 Dutch backpackers who were trying to find people to make the numbers up for a tour the next day. Once we got talking over some excellent ice cream it became clear that we wanted to see many of the same things, and that the most flexible / cost effective solution would be for them to share our car over the next 4 days, a whole new spin on “going dutch”.

The next day we kicked off our own little Anglo-Dutch-Australian road movie, driving back up the sand escarpments. First stop Humberstone, an abandoned nitrate company town which has been lovingly semi-restored by some of its ex residents. This place truly rocked, and was probably Andrew's favourite sight in Chile. In its time it was apparently a great place to live. Industrial landscape photographers could easily retire in a place like this.

We pressed on in the heat south through the unusual Salar de Pintados salt plains to the 355 geoglyphs of Pintados. We were to see a lot of these remarkable stone arrangements over the next few days and will show you a variety of pictures of the. However it was the derelict station hamlet of Pintados which really sticks in our minds: population 1 man, 1 dog & innumerable postcards of topless ladies. Misplaced loneliness is obviously a major civic issue in Pintados.

From there the drive was north to Arica past various sites including:

perhaps the most famous geoglyph in Chile, Gigante del Atacama, supposedly 86m high. 50% of the car's occupants thought he was a (smaller) giant of probably no more than 20m high, which generated a pointless and occasionally entertaining debate.
the incredibly well hidden British Cemetery (we kid you not)
a huge valley the road was forced to descend into and then back out of. It must cause a detour of at least 25km.
a giant Coca Cola Petroglyph on the outskirts of Arica, (but will the indigenous people ever get the trademark back?)

From Arica we headed nearly all the way up to the Peruvian border, before hanging a right going eastwards on Highway 11. We gained altitude very rapidly, our trip punctuated only by the occasional sight. Our eventual destination was Putre, part gringo acclimatisation stop over before tackling Parque Nacional Lauca, part small bustling town part military base.

The following morning we headed off into Lauca, an altiplano national park. The wildlife was truly amazing, including the viscacha, a relative of the chincilla who act like they wouldn't be out of place in a cartoon. But the real zoological highlight was that 3 of the 6 camelid species on the planet (vicunas, llamas and alpacas), could be seen in most places. Then there was the scenery, for which we'll let the pictures do the talking. The only other noteworthy event was a hill somewhere we decide to climb for the view. It must have been at least 4600m high. Suffice to say that never before has gentle exercise uphill seemed so excruciatingly hard, and every breath a struggle.

Overall our exploration of the outstanding park and somewhat boring surrounding areas took 2 days. To rest our weary limbs each evening we relaxed in a radioactive mud bath, before wearily heading back to Putre. By bedtime we felt knackered, when the real fun began. Jen couldn't sleep because she was worried our faulty alarm clock not going off. But it was Andrew who really drew the short straw. Suffice to say that Andrew's personal signs of altitude sickness would be a light fever like condition with a side serving of nightmares.

We enjoyable (and cost saving) time with Queenie and Jerome. Queenie put us to shame with her Spanish skills and further shamed our monolingualism by reading Jane Austen in English for pleasure. Our time with Jerome and Queenie came to an end after we retraced our path back down off the altiplano and deposited them in Arica.

Retracing our steps from Arica to Iquique was our last proper day, notable only for a large detour to the remote pacific coast town of Pisagua. It has to be one of the most unusually situated towns we have seen on Earth. Pisagua is infamous for being the site of a Pinochet era concentration camp. While largely deserted , the town is also well known for a 19^th century municipal theatre (being steadily reclaimed by the sea ), bell tower and a pre-Columbian cemetery. We sat at a restaurant and enjoyed an Easter Sunday lunch of locally caught fish in the brilliant light.

Our return trip to Jersey was really only notable for Iberia's bad service and questionable taste in movies, and a 12 hour wait in Madrid Airport which gave us a small taste of The Terminal).

Would we suggest others go to Chile? Well that depends, and our opinion is coloured by all those money poor but time rich backpackers we encountered who told us about the joys of Argentina, Bolivia and Peru. Large parts of central Chile are perhaps the richest / most westernised parts of South America, which doesn't add to the “X factor”. But then Chile incorporates so much, including that wild west feel, nature and land mines. If you have seen the likes of Tasmania and New Zealand than you could probably think twice about the need to see that much of the bottom 2/3 of the country. With so much good countryside the cities don't appear to even try and attract travelers, what with their standard issue grid layouts and endless repeating of street names town to town. Santiago is a huge metropolis served by battalions of buses, and is perhaps one of the few capitals that tourists seem to largely ignore. Our week in the north was genuinely a new experience for us, although similar cheaper experiences are available Bolivia and Peru. So the short answer is perhaps don't go if you are planning to spend a number of months in South America, but for those who are time pushed perhaps Chile could be seen as a “South American Sampler”.

Regards,

Andrew & Jen (Isaac will be contributing to holiday stories soon enough)

PS: I half expect to get reams of responses to this postcard along the lines: “Now that you are parents you won't be going on holidays etc etc.” Lets see what happens...

PPS: Notes on Some of the Tech Used to Write This Postcard:

The writing was done on OpenOffice, the free, open source, pretty well compatible alternative to Microsoft Office. We don't use the former now for anything on our new PC.
Wikipedia, the source of many of the links here, is a free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. It is a truly amazing resource which is growing by more than a 1000 articles a day.
We are progressively migrating our web photo hosting over to Smugmug. These guys really know how to display photos well and the customer service is outstanding.

Isaac's Birth & Ongoing Photos

2004-12-22T22:20:00.000Z

Dear all,

Well with hindsight we should probably have seen this happening a few days before hand but our little bundle of joy still managed to give us quite a shock by arriving early. Perhaps it was Jen's somewhat strong Braxton Hicks contractions on Saturday that should have alerted us to a problem. Or maybe the fact that she decided to clean under the stairs on Sunday, a space that Andrew finds difficult to move in. Or maybe it was the investment letter that arrived on Monday addressed to Jen with a picture of a baby on the envelope saying “Eighteen years from now, someone might thank you for reading this...”

In any event Jen decided to ask about the pains during her normal scan which was scheduled for 2:30pm on Monday. She was eventually scanned about 3pm and referred for assessment since she had been having contractions of some sort every 5 minutes since about 8:30am (including while doing surgery etc at work until 1:30pm!). However the maternity ward was supposedly so busy that it took until 7:30pm for Jennifer to be examined. We found out afterwards that all the labour rooms were busy with women who were eventually discharged for not being in labour.

Jen told the doctor that eventually saw her that she wasn't sure whether she was a) in labour or b) she was just being a big wimp over what were actually Braxton Hicks contractions before being unhelpfully given a suggestion of c) cystitis by the doctor. After he examined her, we were told that Jen had been quietly labouring, and was now 3-4cm dilated and that we would be parents within 24 hours. Because Jen was only 34 weeks we were also advised that we would be shown the special care unit in the next few minutes before being whisked off to a delivery room.

Psychologically this was a huge shock for which we weren't really ready and to understate things it takes some getting used to. Also, since Jen and I were both kitted out in work clothes and had basically nothing with us at the time a friend helped Andrew get the necessary stuff ready at home that evening. Jen also felt compelled to give Andrew his Christmas present early, a set of cards appropriately called Things You Really Should Have Done Before Having Children (incidentally she bought these on Monday afternoon, while she was in labour).

There are some advantages however to everything happening early including:

getting out of the last 2 antenatal classes (including the tautologically named “Active Birth”)
the fact that Andrew receives £500 off his 2004 tax bill since baby was born before 31st December
and there are so many holidays at this time of the year to spend with baby.

We won't dwell on the gory bits of the process accept to say that they don't call it labour for nothing. Jen was very brave surviving on a malfunctioning TENS Machine and gas and air. Andrew did the right things most of the time, apart from when he commented to the midwife that it was the shortest day of the year to which she reminded him “Its probably not for Jen!” Our little boy arrived into the world accompanied by the standard compliment of bodily fluids and proceeded to express himself. Here are some of the vital statistics of the process:

Labour: Approximately 32 hours in length
Andrew Hit: 0 Times
Time of Birth: 4:30pm GMT on Tuesday 21/12/2004
Weight: 2.58kg (5 pounds 11 ounces)
Estimated weight if full term: 4.54 kg (10 pounds). This made Jen happy our baby came early.
Length: 44.5cm
Head Circumference: 32.5cm

Post birth we entered the rather strange world of having a pre-term baby – albeit a rather huge one who had only 1 monitor on him. You can look at and pick up your baby but he can't leave the room and only the parents and grandparents can see the child. It takes longer to really realise you have a child because your not required to constantly change nappies, provide feeds etc, although that's not always an unpleasant thing in every respect... The hospital also gets all these babies into a set routine which (if it works) we are quite happy about.

Making decisions about basics such as a name today proved quite hard with all the business of “the day after”, but we managed to do that fairly quickly given our extensive due diligence (!) over the months. Isaac Solomon roughly translates to “laughing peaceful one”, which given his mannerisms so far seems to fit him...

Here are some pictures of Isaac sleeping in a variety of poses.

Now the joys of parenting really begin...

Love,

Andrew & Jen (& a sleeping Isaac)

PS Thanks to everyone who has helped in whatever way so far and/or sent congratulations.

Ongoing Photos:

Christmas 2004:

eyes open

making his mark

bath time.

Early January 2005:

Jen & Isaac before leaving hospital

Isaac about to get into his snow suit to go home

Isaac in snow suit, strapped in ready to go home

Isaac getting his hair washed by Mum

Bath time at home

Time for a cuddle from Dad

Time for an outing

Time for an outing close-up

29th January 2005:

Isaac Entertaining Us

Bath time with Grandma Kathryn

Dinner time with Dad

4th February 2005:

Snooze time with Dad

18th June 2005:

Its hot work but someone has to do it

9th July 2005:

Tummy Time

11th July 2005:

Playtime

Travel Info. Sources

2004-08-22T01:05:00.000+01:00

Below is a smattering of the different resources we can look at before we go on a trip. Some of these we have used for a while and some we are just starting to explore. Hopefully you encounter some gems you weren’t aware of. Obviously these resources are changeable and I might post changes from time to time….

Destination Guides

One of the first things to consider is whether the weather will be broadly what you would want to cope with. World Climate is definitely comprehensive.

There tends to be a bias in Guide Book publishing towards left wing post modernism or unnecessarily luxurious / expensive tourism, neither of which chimes well with us. So compromises have to be made. Like the majority of travellers we have used the ubiquitous Lonely Planet for many years, probably in part because they are fairly good and the range is vast. Where available however we find Footprint to be a little better – and we do like to encourage the competition. Bradt is great for real adventure destinations. Back more on the beaten track the Eyewitness series from Doris Kindersley is gorgeous but packs in less information.

I think however we may start to look at other more electronic solutions to improve on the timeliness and comprehensiveness of what is in the guidebooks.

“Open source” web based travel guides are now starting to have an impact eg World 66, Wikitravel and Wikipedia (just search for the travel destination you are interested in). Perhaps even busier however, for now, is the non open source Thorn Tree from Lonely Planet. Other guides that may be of interest are: Before You Die, World Heritage listings and the plethora of sites that track festivals in different countries.

A good "visual check" for the destination can be to search for images on Corbis or Google Images.

One other set of guides likely to be of use in the future in riskier destinations, (although perhaps for not a few years), are the Ijet Worldcue Traveler service. These are bang up to date security assessments of a country compiled by ex-spies, often for considerably less than the cost of travel insurance. I’m looking forward to giving them a go.

Accommodation Guides

There are an awful lot of websites that are basically fronts for booking expensive hotels. However there is also some really interesting sites which can help you avoid poor expensive accommodation. TripAdvisor is probably the best known and I can thoroughly recommend it.

My sister Jane recently recommended Hostelworld. What really sets this apart is the integrated booking and detailed recommendations – for example you should search for a Hostel with a low “Fun” rating if you want a good nights sleep.

As we get older I think our tastes in accommodation are probably changing to have a great emphasis on comfort and individuality at a reasonable price. We used an Alastair Sawday’s Special Places to Stay book for our 2003 French trip and were very impressed. The accommodation became very much a part of the holiday. I’ve also started looking at the Guides de Charme website. Unfortunately these guides are largely restricted to certain Western European destinations. Also worth considering are Ciao and DooYoo.

Road Transport (Europe)

Planning a trip has never been easier with the likes of Viamichelin and Mappy.

Air Transport

For cheap flights, the Money Saving Expert's meta search looks very interesting. For complex trips its hard to beat the variety of little advantages Trailfinders gives you, but you will have to use the phone.

Language Barriers

Many people have been using the broadly acceptable translation tools on the web for some time. There are different solutions, perhaps the most readily acceptable being Google Translate. What very few people will be aware of now though is that foreign language text can now be converted quite effectively into audio. Play with this website which is a demonstration for a commercial product and see what I mean.

Andrew

Belize

2004-08-19T20:48:00.000+01:00

Note: Jen took lots of photos but unfortunately they got seriously damaged. So we've used the eyes of others through the Google Images and SmugMug services to give you photos of this beautiful country.

In March Jennifer and I went to Belize.

OK, OK. The very first question that springs to mind, (unless you have a perverse interest in bizarre geography), is where is this place? Belize, formerly British Honduras, is a tiny country the size of Wales, nestled in central America between Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, Guatemala and the Caribbean Sea.

But first we had to get there. From (Old!) Jersey this is no fewer than 4 flights. We started 0700 Saturday and got in about 1500 Sunday (all local times), with an overnight stop in Houston. The little we saw of Texas was big, flat and spacious.

Going to Belize evoked strong emotions in us. I had first been convinced to go when a travel magazine Conde Nast Traveller, had a glowing report on it. It asked where else could one swim with the dolphins in the morning and explore Mayan ruins in the Jungle in the afternoon. And of course there was that movie starring Harrison Ford called The Mosquito Coast. It is a little off the beaten track. The prospect of visiting Belize intrigued.

First a totally biased summary of Belizean history. First, there were the Mayans. These guys had a pretty amazing civilization. The Spanish came along and pretty well wrecked it, although in Belize things were not as bad, because the British were there. Why were the British there? Primarily for logging.

Belize is a bizarre place. As Conde Naste put it, Belize has a history like a James Michener novel. The first British governor decided to swap professions and become a pirate, protected by the coral reef. All sorts of people were there, turned up or “got mixed up”: mestizos (Spanish / Mayan), Creole (European / African), Garifuna (African / Carib), British, the Mayans, Indians, Lebanese and Chinese. Even German Mennonites turned up in the 1950’s. Perhaps a defining part of Belize has been that the tough environment, and the threat for a long time from the Spanish, has brought these peoples together. Belize is very multicultural and relaxed. The Belizeans finally saw off the Spanish threat during a battle in the late 18^th century around one of the cayes (pronounced keys – islands). Rather strongly outnumbered, the Belizeans prevailed with the help of the geography. What followed in the subsequent decades was a battle to get recognised as a full colony of the British Empire, finally acceded to under Queen Victoria’s reign. Things since then have been pretty quiet really, with independence being gained in 1981. And things are still pretty uncrowded, with perhaps 250,000 people. These days however you would be often hard pushed to think this had ever been a British colony: the Americans are there in a BIG way.

As we flew over Belize towards the airport, we got our first sense of the landscape. Lush vegetation, snaking rivers, island strings off the coast.

Our base for the first week was San Ignacio, the capital of the western district of Cayo.

Perhaps this is a good time to say: don’t go to Belize if you want a comfortable holiday. During our 2 week stay :

We got extensive mosquito, fly and other insect bites
Andrew electrocuted himself in his sleep (finger stuck in conveniently handy, dodgy and live power point)
Bugs dropped onto me in bed
We got mild food poisoning and spent a couple of days with gastro discomfort. Andrew in particular became a regular friend of the toilet
Sunburn is pretty inevitable
We crossed into Guatemala the same day 2 guys were killed in the border town : in a drugs motivated gang shoot out.
With the temperature around 35C+, particularly away from the coast, you get hot and dusty very quickly doing an excursion.
We had hotel water smelling of sulphur dioxide
The power went down
The public transport system broke down
We sampled some pretty awful roads

After those caveats, it might seem strange to say it but Belize is an amazing country and well worth the inconveniences.

Our time at San Ignacio was full of great memories. We canoed into Barton Creek cave with Mayan artefacts. We saw a waterfall at a distance which was about 500m tall (apparently SAS guys ran out of rope when they first tried to abseil down it in the 1960s - so they had to find some more). And there was lots of wildlife to look at, perhaps the most memorable was catching sight of a hummingbird from our hotel veranda!

But the highlight was Tikal in Guatemala. This huge Mayan site that was abandoned many hundreds of years ago. Climbing the Mayan pyramids in the hot Guatemalan jungle was amazing. Getting down was worse.

In our second week we went to Placencia on the central south coast. The flight down was magnificent, with Andrew sitting in the seat to the right of the pilot, complete with spare controls, although Andrew didn't look as good as the person in the picture. As we landed on a runway which literally came out of a mangrove swamp. This was much more to Jen’s liking. Palm trees. Hammocks. See breeze. A view of False Caye from our bedroom. Lots of ways to relax. And the people running the place were more friendly.

We boated out to Laughing Bird Caye, named after one of the bird species there. The Caye was great. A real coral reef island. Great scenery. Amazing diving. So many species of life: barracuda, sea cucumbers, octopus and crayfish. Jen even saw the little fish that go inside the mouths of bigger fish to clean them, as well as cleaning their gills. The big fish just sit their patiently while they have their “oral” and “facial(?)”. And to top it all off there were all these pelicans that dive bomb into the water on a regular basis to feast on the small fish. We loved this place so much we went back later in the week.

Also down south we spent time in a place called Monkey River. Now we aren’t really that big into nature watching. But what they have in Belize is truly staggering, crocodiles, 540 odd species of birds etc blah, blah, blah. And we did truly appreciate encountering wild howler monkeys. But this involved leaving Monkey River and entering the Jungle. Big mistake. Remember the comment about The Mosquito Coast? Who hadn’t brought long pants (Andrew)? Who found the industrial (?) strength repellant didn’t seem to repel (Andrew)? How easy is it for mosquitoes to bite through thin clothing (very)?

In the jungle the mosquitoes attacked. In swarms. Forget all the horrible diseases you can die of carried by these critters that you have all those horrible needles for. These guys were simply out for blood – lots of it! At any one average time, there were perhaps 20-30 “incomings!”. Jen fared a marginally better. Without enough clothing Andrew thought there was only one solution to stop the biting: keep on moving, even when the group has stopped. What he didn't realise was that the mosquitoes are attracted to movement. And it is pretty hard and embarrassing to keep up a one man aerobics show in the hot and humid jungle. Every time the Guide stopped to show us something Andrew got really depressed – more aerobics! The guide found us some howler monkeys – who cares! Anyone want to see my King Kong impersonation, complete with ‘mosquito planes’? Even as we got back into the boat and sped away we were fighting a rearguard action against the determined mosquitoes who had holed themselves up in the boat. Despite all our best efforts we still got a lot of bites. Worse still, those little guys managed to fly into some pretty amazing (ahem) places…

We went to another Jungle area later in the week which was a much more pleasant experience. This time we were ready with the clothing, and a grand total of ONE mosquito came out to play. Go figure. This was a Jaguar reserve, and (fairly) thankfully we didn’t see any of the big cats.

However the leafcutter ants there provided an amazing spectacle. It was like being in a David Attenborough nature documentary. The ants, with their neat road, were busily stripping some poor tree and busily carrying back little cut pieces of leaf to their nest. It looked amazing. They chew these leaves up and then feed on the mold that results. The sun had got too warm on one patch of the path so a group of ants had dropped their pieces of leaf. Apparently, they come back to collect dropped pieces later. Our guide stamped on the nest and drew out some soldier ants – scary ants! Their jaws are very large. They occasionally patrol the paths the workers ants use as well. Apparently the Mayans used to get the soldier ants to bite and hold together broken skin. They would pull off the body and just leave the heads clamping the skin: creating a natural suture.

We exited this jungle by “tubing” down a river. This was like Dodgem cars in slow motion, with everyone sporting a wet bottom (the linked photo may be of a different river but the visuals are very reminiscent of our experience). I was way out in front until I grounded on a shallow patch in the river, my derriere to low to slide over the stones. As I desperately tried to escape predicament, Jen floated past to the finishing point.

We didn’t really want to leave Belize. In particular our second week was RELAXING. It has taken us a week to really get back into work on Jersey. This was on balance a great holiday, so much better than that week on a bus in Italy...

France

2004-08-18T19:07:00.000+01:00

Hi everyone,

The 12 hour drive from St Malo to Annecy would have been longer without the assistance of Viamichelin. For most of the second half there was very heavy rain and the prospect of aquaplaning. Thankfully the Toyota’s sunroof, which couldn’t close, was fixed just a few days before we went on holiday! The trip itself was only really notable for the “Tony & Gary” conversations that Jen and I had (e.g. she wondered how many poodles there were in France while I wondered how many Pizzerias there were – what insight does this give into our minds?), and because I caught an elderly man peering over the urinal divider.

So we arrived in our first digs near Annecy pretty tired from our experience.

Now at this point I must admit that Jen was keener on doing this French holiday than I was; perhaps I feel we have seen a lot of France in recent years. I don’t share her love affair with the Republic, what with its weird sanitation practices and ubiquitous roundabouts and toll stations. And then there is the Gallic excuse for customer service. Service stations could be shut for hours during the day and when they reopened wouldn’t take our cards (MasterCard, Visa, Link or Delta!). And maybe no one needs to eat or use a normal toilet in France at lunchtime, since all the tourists must love and want to use McDonald’s and the locals can all speed home on the peage.

Well I am pleased to say that our first bad experience on this holiday can’t be attributed to the French. Our proprietor was “Bev”, who was English and could have walked straight out of a range of British Soaps. There was a 24X7 fixation with playing ITV from the huge TV in the corner of the living room. To really ensure we didn’t enjoy our stay she chain-smoked, suffered from verbal diarrhoea, and gave us half finished, dirty and cold rental accommodation with pathetic curtains. To top it all off it rained for most of the first few days, which gave us a lot of time to think about the downsides of pre-booking multiple days without a prior recommendation.

Such were the deprivations we had to put up with to get accommodation so close to Annecy, which many people had told us was wonderful.

Well we can safely tell those people that while Annecy has some charm it is both more expensive and dirtier than Lake Bled in Slovenia - please email us if you would like a copy of that postcard. Since we had carted our bikes most of the way across France it seemed remiss of us not to pretend to ride around the lake. That was OK, but the best fun we actually had at Annecy was far more lethargic: eating al fresco on a pontoon observed by hungry garrulous geese while we watching the copious numbers of paragliders coming off a mountain.

As I said it rained a lot in the first few days of this holiday and to avoid going stir crazy we voluntarily got in the car to go to Ikea, partly because it is one of the few stores we find fun and partly because Jen wanted some more cheap furniture (the prospect of assembling it excites her as well). The closest one was actually in Switzerland and not really that close. What we didn’t realise before setting out was the €30 Annual charge applied by the Swiss to use their motorways – there are no day passes!

It would be remiss of us to complain about everything around Annecy because one experience stood out above all the others: Mount Blanc. Yes, getting near it as a tourist is actually really expensive but where else can you suffer the effects of a lack of acclimatisation after a cable car trip? And I doubt you can have hot chocolate and pizza in any other warm café and simultaneously watch climbers attempt to climb an icy 4807m peak through the window. It was worth every frozen gasp as you realised you had climbed those flights of stairs around the complex just a little too quickly.

Thankfully Jennifer had discovered prior to our trip that there are some wonderful, rather than awful, quirky places to stay, if you get the right advice (eg “Alastair Sawday’s Special Places to Stay”). Our next set of digs was with the redoubtable, Minitel using octagenarian (?) Madame Lina. She fed us olive oil cake and gargantuan breakfasts that were French culinary art forms. She kept her money in the fridge. And Madame Lina told the most amazing stories. She told us about how, when growing up, she had to look after her little cousin who had been sent by his parents to France to escape the Spanish Civil War. We heard about the unfaithfulness of her husband half a century ago. But most poignant of all was her story of her son’s captivity at the hands of the Vietcong, and his subsequent release. Supposedly the VC had checked her family’s socialist credentials through French contacts before releasing him. Madame Lina even sent us a Christmas card.

At the end of our stay, Madam Lina reserved with her twin brothers our first glider flight. After this spot of nepotistical booking she proceeded to tell us that one of them had nearly died last year and the other was suffering from a heart condition.

We arrived at the airport for our glider flight in a state of excitement and trepidation. We needn’t have worried: Madam had forgotten to mention that her brothers no longer pilot gliders for paying customers. I was first to go and was inserted in the front and told what to touch and not to touch in what situation. This was followed by a worryingly short lesson on how to jump out of the glider should we get into trouble. Alarmingly this wouldn’t have included how to use my parachute if I hadn’t asked. We spent a fair bit of time in the air being pulled to a decent height and spot by the plane before being disconnected…

A partial myth to dispel is that glider’s are silent. This is certainly the case watching them from the ground but it is actually quite noisy in the cockpit with the gushing of the wind. You have to be patient gliding: basically most of your time is spent trying to find and climb thermals coming off ridges. And you also have to be calm, since it was slightly unnerving dropping at times up to 4 metres a second in a structure that very obviously reminded you of your predicament. Flying late in the morning quickly makes you aware of another issue: generally its best to fly mid to late afternoon when the rising thermals are at their strongest. Thus Jen got a slightly better ride, although like all these kinds of things she wanted to leave her stomach contents elsewhere when her pilot spiralled the glider over his house to check if lunch was ready. While the views and experiences gained though gliding were good, we feel that paragliding (as mentioned in our Slovenia Postcard), is actually more enjoyable.

Our next accommodation, Ma Cachette, was run by 3 South Africans: Pierre, Johan and Frederick. The garden was superb, the rooms were glorious, the hosts were excellent and the price was very reasonable. Perhaps best of all was dinner with the hosts and 4 other guests (2 Swiss and 2 South Africans). Everything was done to perfection and none of us could guess that the beautifully light ice cream we had for dessert was actually based on olive oil. Jen was surprised that such a nice place was run by 3 men: we spent some time discussing other stereotypes.

You may be wondering at this point what we actually did on this holiday apart from take notes about our accommodation and have the odd spot of exercise and adventure. In an outrageous plug for Jen’s photos I can report our outdoor excursions to le Mont-Dore, the Vercors, Perouges, Turenne (photo mis-labelled), Puy Mary and the Ardeche Gorge. She took photos of a Church in le Puy-en-Velay that must have had difficulty with its “Growth Strategy”. We also the visited the poignant remains of the original Oradour-sur-Glane, where over 600 men, women and children were murdered by the SS in June 1944.

But by and large the interesting things to do and see didn’t exactly occupy our 2 weeks. Perhaps this is best summed up by our experience of Ille de Re, the island connected to La Rochelle by bridge. Famed as the having the best beach weather in France outside of the Mediterranean, it came recommended by different sources. The only problem was that a Gallic Horde obviously agree with this, and are happy to accept accommodation that is clearly free of material planning restrictions. The keenly marketed “natural areas” didn’t look that natural. Ille de Re is flat, has little of interest, and the traffic was slow even though its was term time. It wasn’t worth the significant detour we made and the extra night in a bed and breakfast.

Thankfully our holiday had a very pleasant ending. We spent the last part with our friends Josh, Julia (the last 2 South Africans) and Laura at a French Farmhouse just outside St Malo. There were no sights to see but there was plenty of bread, cheese, wine, exercise and laughter to be had.

Andrew & Jen

Notes:

· Other photos in Jen’s French collection can be seen here. If you have trouble with Fotango Photos in general, click on “Refresh” or try again later.

Jordan

2004-08-17T20:27:00.000+01:00

What do people know about Jordan? Famously and perhaps rather self indulgently created by Winston Churchill "in an afternoon", Jordan is regularly overlooked or unfairly associated with its neighbours: Israel, Saudi Arabia, Syria or Iraq. It is a land full of Biblical places and of course Lawrence of Arabia.

It's appropriate to address safety concerns upfront: lots of people thought we were crazy to be going. Perhaps the most entertaining reaction was from the taxi driver who took us to Jersey Airport, referring to us as "Mr and Mrs Bond". The first day we were there was the deadline for Iraq to come clean with the U.N.; although with a 12,000 page document written in Arabic and multiple CDs for the Security Council to plough through we came to appreciate the delaying power of paperwork. With all due respect: considering Jordan to be dangerous is simply being sincerely misinformed. Yet it is this kind of misinformation that provides terrorists with exactly the result they want, as well as destroying the livelihoods of locals.

Our flights with KLM (bad connections, average service, lost luggage) are best not dwelt upon. Upon arrival at Amman the driver of our hire car, Jarmal, met us. Prior to arrival I had somewhat romantically envisaged that our time would be a cross between Lawrence of Arabia and Driving Miss Daisy. However Jarmal was more accurately described as a hustler with frustrated Daytona ambitions: but more on that later.

Our first night was spent at Madaba, a city built on the ancient capital of the Moabites. Somewhere in the surrounding ancient Moabite kingdom is the final resting place of Moses. This city is one of the strongholds of the 10% of Jordan's population who are Christians, has amazing mosaics, and is an excellent place to explore Western Jordan from. Our hotel was clean, friendly and non-descript, except Jen was amused by the squirty thing on the side of the toilet. Not realising that Jordan is a sans paper jurisdiction, Andrew blocked the toilet. Amazingly the proprietor allowed us access to the plumbing for another night.

The first day, Sunday, we ventured out to see Jerash in the north, a pretty spectacular ruined city of mainly Roman origin. It was here that we first got a good feel for how badly tourism has been affected in Jordan: we saw less than 2 dozen tourists in the few hours we were there, even though Jerash is probably in the top four destinations.

Later that day we went to where Jesus was very probably baptised in the River Jordan: now on the Jordanian side of the river. Despite the scurrilous and highly successful Israeli claims that he was baptised on their side, the Bible and archeology supports the Jordanians: why else would the early Byzantines build three Churches on a particular spot that were all either washed away by the Jordan or damaged by earthquakes?

The Jordan River itself these days is a rather massive letdown. Our Jordan Handbook describes the situation rather well: "…for all its vast historic and symbolic importance the Jordan here is in reality just a small, muddy and altogether unassuming stream…". What makes the place rather surreal however are the visible efforts of both Jordan and Israel to muscle in on the lucrative pilgrim trade against the backdrop of one of the more overtly militarised borders in the world. For example, the Jordanians have built a Millennium Baptism Pool in the hope the pilgrims will materialise; and its just down the road from where a few Jordanian troops, kitted out with a jeep mounted heavy machine gun, occasionally look at the nearby Israeli lookout. Ostensibly both sides are presumably there to stop the usual suspects from trying to sneak into the West Bank to cause havoc, probably a part of the 1994 Peace Treaty. It looks like a marriage of convenience.

A small tip: if you do decide to go to Jordan we strongly suggest you take Mastercard not VISA. Different places told us that the Jordanian Visa processing centre often refuses to process non-Jordanian VISA cards. We even lost over an hour of holiday time, as we had to backtrack to the car hire company and give them new payment details.

On Monday we headed south from Madaba on the King's Highway into the mountains, following a roughly elliptical route that would take us four days. Early on we crossed the spectacular 4km wide and 0.4km+ deep Wadi Mujib gorge. The first significant stop was the Crusader Fortress in the town of Kerak. Looking around this site could perhaps best be described as paying money to be sandblasted, although there were some good vistas. One of the handful of tourists we met that day was in Kerak; he had just come from the localised trouble spot of Ma'an, reporting "the locals were really pleased to see him". Continuing on we arrived at the partly reinhabited Bedouin village of Dana. Rather incongruously Dana is strewn with rubbish, even though it makes it money from eco-tourism conducted in the valley below.

We started walking into Petra the next morning about 7:15am. Entry is via the atmospheric Siq or gully, now concreted to provide access for wheelchairs etc. Although The Treasury has fronted innumerable postcards, little can prepare you for your first glimpse: it's that good. Petra is justifiably Jordan's premier tourist spot. Even given the current geo-political situation, the time of year and the time of day, we were surprised to enter Petra proper as the solitary tourists. In fact we didn't see any for the first 3 hours, nor thankfully were we hassled by Bedouin touts. Our sole companions during this time were both black and noisy. First was a goat that rather endearingly followed us and then lead us up a steep rocky path. Further on, a cat took over, but we silenced him with bread. It was so quiet even a number of the Bedouin "shops" were deserted; at least some of their owners were probably still celebrating the end of Ramadan

Our peace was not to last. As we came down the other side of the rocky hill we started to see tourists and the touting begin. Bedouins were selling a plethora of ugly trinkets and unnecessary services, and they employed hard sell. The "locally made" trinkets are manufactured largely in the Far East, with a reasonably standard price of "1 Dinar". Then there are ubiquitous "Roman" and "Nabatean" coins local Bedouins "just happen to have dug up" which are being flogged for the same bargain basement cost. First we didn't buy any because if they were genuine it was probably illegal to trade them. Later we found out the Bedouins actually make these, and "age" them for a few weeks in sand. Perhaps the most opportunistic Bedouin was a kid of about 4 who insisted on guiding us for about 20 metres and wanted a 1 Dinar fee for it. Despite extra government incentives few Bedouin children around Petra go to school: during peak season a Bedouin with a horse can earn about £2700 a month taking tourists around, a fortune in a poor country.

Despite the commercialism, there are so many interesting things to see at Petra that you won't be disappointed. Unfortunately during our time there it was overcast but it was still worth the effort. Perhaps our best memory was of The Monastery, accessible only after a strenuous walk running the gauntlet for Bedouin stalls. This 47m wide and 40m high building carved into the side of a peak is truly staggering. Unlike The Treasury, there are great views near by and brave people can clamber around on top. When we arrived a Bedouin was inside playing traditional music: it was very atmospheric.

We enjoyed the national dish, Mensaff, at the Red Cave restaurant near Petra. Mensaff consists typically of lamb, herbs, rice, almonds and yoghurt, served with a minor tower of unleavened discs of bread. Our first evening there we also endured a Turkish massage. The masseur kept telling Andrew to relax and "fall asleep" as he busily attempted to crack joints while pulling limbs in various directions. Andrew was quite happy that he didn't attempt to stand on him while he was doing this, given his not inconsequential frame. Jennifer's experience was painful and bruising. That is one thing we aren't going to try again.

After Petra we stayed overnight in a smoky, sandy and expensive Bedouin camp, although the entertainment was somewhat amusing. The next day we rose at 5:50am to prepare for our full day trip around Lawrence of Arabia country: Wadi Rum, complete with our own Bedouin Guide and 4x4. Rum is truly spectacular desert wilderness: a landscape photographer's dream. Imagine large lumps of rock in a pretty desert, eroded over the eons to resemble giant pancake piles dripping with maple syrup. Throw in desert colours, clear blue sky, ancient rock drawings, some Bedouins, goats and camels to complete the picture. And bar the minor crowd at the sunset spot at the end of the day, it was even freer of tourists than other major tourists spots.

A short word on the differences between the sexes in Jordan. Women wear everything from the full burqa or full burqa with a gap for the eyes (rare), covering for the hair (common), or no head covering at all (uncommon). Women are seen commonly on the street although it has to be said that every night in Jordan appears to be largely "lads night out", where moustache free non-smokers are very rare on the ground.

Our relationship with our driver Jarmal was perhaps best described as bitter sweet. He did get us out of a few difficult situations, but then he got us into a few as well. It took a fair while for him to realise that what we wanted was a driver not a guide, and he often seemed upset that we had our own ideas what to do. To smooth things over Andrew even sat up one night with him and his chain-smoking buddies eating undercooked sweet potato and sometimes burnt chestnuts. We were slightly perturbed at times that we had to manage Jarmal's emotions: whose holiday was it supposed to be?

Early on we told Jarmal about our horrific Italian driving experiences; did he try to compete with these? His "Toot first and ask questions later" attitude was admittedly common in Jordanian drivers. However more bizarre was Jarmal's desire to sit on the left hand side of the road as much as possible, even though Jordan drives on the right. We finally put our feet down when he was doing 182km/hr in a 90km/hr zone.

After Petra we stayed a night in Aqaba, but didn't have time to see some coral. The return trip (the western side of the ellipse) is a fast modern road. We stopped at Lot's Cave, not far from the probable Sodom and Gomorrah site. Unfortunately after hiking up the hill we discovered a sign saying it was closed for repairs. On the way back down, dirty looking kids, age perhaps no more than 12, asked for money. We said no and kept walking. Then one shouted, demanding money. We kept walking. Then the rock throwing started. We kept walking. Thankfully these urchins obviously hadn't practiced on armoured Israeli patrols, because no rock got close.

Next stop the Dead Sea, the lowest point on earth. Boats are banned under the peace treaty with Israel. We had a choice of 3 places to go to for a dip ranging from the luxurious to the run down: in the interests of economy we chose the latter, the Government owned "resort". After paying the entrance fee we were asked for more money in the shambolic rotting change rooms. Then it was a short walk down to the water, which only had a walkway part of the way down. We walked past the deserted lifeguard tower: why do you need a lifeguard for a body of water in which it is physically impossible to sink? Perhaps its for lone babies and people who are blinded by getting salt water in their eyes. The Dead Sea experience itself is bizarre and fun: you float so well you can't swim properly, and the salt feels soft and itchy at the same time. After a while we clambered back out, up the dirt ridge to the popular outdoor shower, before Andrew felt obliged to give a donation in the shambolic change rooms. We are still not really sure what we paid for given the locals just pull over at the side of road and jump in. It would have been cheaper to buy bottled water for a "shower" afterwards.

On the Saturday we headed out on the highway towards Iraq, visiting a few "desert fortresses", Lawrence's fort, and a wildlife centre. Then it was back to the capital Amman (formerly called Philadelphia), to see the ruins in the centre of city which included an amphitheatre. However even Jarmal commented that by this stage we were just filling in time: these sights just couldn't compare with those earlier in the week. In the evening Jarmal took us out to his favourite restaurant, which served excellent food, albeit in traditional mountainous quantities.

After stretching things out on Saturday we still ended up at Queen Alia International Airport over 6 hours early for our flight. This was a frustrating wait. Men, including officials, smoked seemingly everywhere, ignoring the ubiquitous "No Smoking" signs and frequent announcements. And it is the Airport which belies as much as anywhere that Jordan is still very much a developing country: there were no fewer than 9 checks / counters to get through to get on to the plane. Talk about unnecessary job creation.

The wonder of places like Petra and Wadi Rum made the small challenges we faced just that. We can thoroughly recommend a week in Jordan: go and be petrafied.

Andrew & Jen

Notes:

· The entire photo collection can be seen here

Slovenia

2004-08-16T20:16:00.000+01:00

For such an amazing place, few people in the West know very much about Slovenia that is correct:

· Slovenia sits east of north eastern Italy and has a population of about 2 million people. The standard of living is equivalent to that of Greece or Portugal

· It is commonly confused with Slovakia, most famously by George W. Bush.

· The war of independence from Yugoslavia lasted 10 days in 1991 and cost 66 people their lives. There are no land mines. Slovenia largely escaped the recent carnage in the Balkans. The polite and honest Slovenians are keen to move on.

The "two for the price of one" two-hour flight from Gatwick on Saturday was very pleasant. From the air western Slovenia is a patchwork of mountains and verdant hills and fields. The forests covering almost half of the country extend right up to the edge of the airport.

All this vegetation needs a lot of rain. In Slovenia, even the hitchhikers and bicycle riders use umbrellas. A classic symbol of Slovenia is the hay drying rack in a field, covered to protect against the precipitation. They are used to dry a whole host of other things as well from wood to corncobs. Thankfully rain impacted our holiday remarkably little.

The capital Ljubljana is a quiet pretty city, which we navigated virtually stress free: how can this city be so close to Italy? While it is well planned, we got the distinct impression that we were battle hardened by our few hours trying to navigate across Naples in March. Ljubljana might be a pleasant place to spend a day, but it is not the reason most people go to Slovenia. The country also has a slice of apparently sunny coastline, which you will miss if you blink. The day we went turned into a damp squib with a dangerously foggy return trip to our farmstay.

The countryside has so many surprises. On our first full day we went to a Beekeeping Museum: an apiarist's dream complete with traditional folk-art beehives. We walked down the truly breathtaking Ventgar Gorge with its amazing light. And we were transported on a "pletna" rowing boat over the fairy tale Lake Bled to the gorgeous church draped small island of Blejski Otok, the only true island in Slovenia. Across the lake stood a classic castle, perched high on a sheer cliff.

This is still a strongly agricultural country. In the fields scythes are often still used. Slovenia even has a Museum of Alpine Dairy Farming (they seem to like their esoteric museums). Even the monks at Pleterje Monastery still tend land near their wonderful simple church: complete with an altar made out of plain stones and taped choral singing activated by approaching tourists.

Slovenia must be the only country in the world where the journey is often more spectacular than the destination. We spent so much of the first few days simply being stunned by all the vistas of alpine beauty.

But there was stunning scenery at our destinations as well:
· The natural caves, arches and river idyll of Rakov Skocjan
· Walking through the clouds on Velika Plannina following a vertigo inducing cable car ride
· The jaw-dropping scenery of the Logarska Dolina Valley: stunning even by Slovenian standards
· Vast numbers of churches, often perched on high
· A good number of striking castles
· The amazing Skocjan Cave, a World Heritage listed massive expanse of a cavern which felt like the start of our own personal journey to the centre of the earth

It seemed almost mandatory to venture into the mountains. The far northwest around the Vrsic Pass is truly beautiful, where it is almost impossible to believe now that almost a million people lost their lives in the madness that was World War One. We walked, clad in t-shirts and shorts across snow in a glorious and almost deserted area under mountain peaks. My lower density per square centimetre of shoe largely saved me from Jen's regular iniquity of falling through the snow.

And the food was generally great: from the wonderful shellfish of the Topli Val restaurant, to our pumpkin seed oil drizzled salad to the gorgeous traditional cooking of farm hostess Jana.

Not every experience was great. We drove to the "forgotten" northeast corner, which sits adjacent to Hungary. Yes, there were storks nesting on telegraph poles, but the land was flat and boring and the attractions were either closed or not that great. The forgotten corner is forgotten for good reason.

It is truly mystifying why there are still less tourists than before 1991. The scariest things today are:

· Dodging manure spreaders
· The number of adventure sports on offer
· The "workout" the windy mountain roads exact on drivers
· The number of road kill hedgehogs
· The linguistic dexterity of the Slovenians. Italian, German, English and Serbo-Croatian are commonly spoken. Much of the graffiti is in English
· The amazingly fit Slovenian cyclists, including children, climbing steep roads
· Inconveniently close borders. We accidentally drove to the border with Italy only to turn back. And we deliberately drove to the border with Croatia to take a short cut back into Slovenia but were turned back.

It almost wouldn't be a postcard these days without some unusual tale. We decided to get healthy and go to one of the natural spa towns. The first one seriously diverged from our expectations: it was full of foreign geriatric convalescents, sort of like a health farm for chronologically challenged Eastern Europeans. So we went further a field to another. Unfortunately Jen's search for a toilet at this new Spa was hampered by Slovenian signage. While Jen was busy with her call of nature, I got the Full Monty experience: we had accidentally walked into the naturalist section, and we're still not sure whether it was mixed sex.

The finale of our holiday was our first tandem paragliding experience off a local mountain. The adventure operators played Louis Armstrong's What a Wonderful World for us as we ascended before hand. At the launch site there was appropriately enough an empty can of "It Gives You Wings" Red Bull. Jen was reasonably nervous and was pretty happy for my pilot and me to go first. It was a shock to be airborne so quickly and successfully after all the worst-case scenario instructions. Floating above the tree-clad mountain was truly wonderful, and I enjoyed my "driving" lessons. It was great to be able to chat and pose for photos when Jen's paraglider came close. Our strongest memories are of when the pilots deliberately induced very rapid spins, which provided a maximum g-force of about 3 -4: at 6g people start to pass out. I found mine simply rather unsettling. Jennifer felt really unwell, but resisted the urge to vomit over the local village, overcoming her nausea an hour after the flight. Even so, we both agreed it was a great experience and want to do it again.

As we were preparing to leave we were treated to a great thunder and lightning storm: it’s a good thing we paraglided in the morning.

Slovenia is definitely one of our Top 5 Holidays of all time. And it was so cheap, one example being our 8 night stay at a self-catering farmhouse complex for a little over £130. We urge you to go while it is still reasonably unspoilt by mass tourism.

Andrew & Jen.

2 Italies: Southern Italy & Tuscany / Italian Lakes

2004-08-16T00:02:00.000+01:00

Jen and I flew into Napoli recently.

OK, lets get this out in the open straight away. Jen and I obviously have weird holidays in Italy. Our last holiday there included a larger than life tour guide who was arrested for possessing drugs and indecently exposing himself at a public bus stop. The postcard is attached at the bottom if you want to be amused. This holiday was colourful as well.

We took one wrong turn at the airport and we were on the wrong freeway heading the wrong way out of the city. By the time we got off it, we had largely crossed Napoli, and we were forced for the next few hours to navigate through it.

Now Lonely Planet equates wanting to drive in Napoli to "having a death wish". This is not the romanticized Rome traversed by scooter. We were forced to. Chaotic Cambodia was a cakewalk compared to a place where the road rules are clearly optional extras. We experienced:

· Watching a car overtaking the car that was overtaking us

· Making 3 lanes of traffic on a 2 lane road

· Overtaking in tunnels

· Overtaking on blind corners

· Constant tailgating, often at high speeds

· Many people not stopping for nuisances like red lights and pedestrians

· Pulling out into traffic and then looking

Jen felt like she had about 10 near misses in about 2 hours so its no wonder they don't appear to waste money on panel beaters. One key tip: if you drive in a completely Anglo-Saxon fashion you will have an accident.

We eventually made our way through and on to our destination Sorrento, gateway to Capri and the Amalfi coast, and a traffic congested tourist trap. Our accommodation was a classic case of mis-selling: romantic bungalows set among citrus orchards turned out to be a school holiday camp amongst the pulped oranges.

During our week the weather was unseasonably bad and the light typically poor although not always. Normally it is t-shirts in February but this late March weather called for 3 layers of clothing and aching extremities. We were planning on going up Mount Vesuvius but that got snowed upon during the night. So instead we went to Pompei where the wind chill factor meant we got snowed upon. And it rained.

Despite the chill and rain, Pompei was amazing. It is one of those perhaps rare places that live up to the tourist hype and it is Italy's number one attraction. Apart from being amazingly preserved, it is the sophistication of the Romans that amazes. While Pompei was a relatively minor part in the Roman Empire before it got solid filled, it still sported such highlights as alfresco eating furniture, an amphitheatre, a Weights and Measures office, and 89 take away food joints. Since it suffered an earthquake 17 years prior to being pumice packed, the other thing we took away from Pompei was that it was an ancient version of Changing Rooms on a massive scale when Vesuvius enveloped it.

After Pompei we spent time at the Herculaneum site, which was also buried by Vesuvius in 79AD, the main attraction being an amazing mosaic in an excavated home, the likes of which are nearly all in museums.

The next day we took a boat trip to Capri. It is obvious why this stunning 6 km long piece of sun kissed rock has been on the tourist circuit for a few millennia. Features like the beautiful slopes and the stark sheer cliffs, the very pretty narrow streets and the Arc Naturale must have all helped. And then there is the apparently amazing Blue Grotto, a natural spectacular light show: it’s a pity the see was too rough for us to get enter. And the view of Capri from the top of Mount Solaro after the cable car ride is truly amazing. It is a playground of the rich and famous. For instance, we dined in a superb restaurant called La Capannina, which has served Dustin Hoffman and a person suspiciously similar to Jack Lemmon.

Roman emperors relaxed in Capri for centuries after Augustus liked it so much that he purchased it in exchange for a larger and wealthier island. Tiberius ruled the Empire from there for 10 years. The historian Tacitus says Tiberius spent time indulging in hobbies of the group sex kind, although there is no independent evidence of this. When we visited the remains of his pad Villa Jovis, the most striking feature were the huge water cisterns (which we suspect would have flooded the servant's quarters if they had collapsed).

The dramatic landscape meant the Capri experience for us was like a giant outdoor step machine: for instance we descended 800 steps after visiting the spectacular mansion of a doctor who prescribed placebos to royalty. The locals have adapted to the narrow lung busting inclines in various ways such as getting the dog to pick up the odd item at the shop.

The next day as we left Capri Jen had "rock hard and sore legs" (no surprise there). We returned to Sorrento before navigating the hairpins of the strikingly scenic Amalfi coast. Towards the end of the day we were given a display in papermaking by an old Italian man with a carunculous nose at Amalfi, where papermaking is a centuries old tradition.

Further down the coast we visited the ruins of Paestum, a Greek colonial settlement founded 25 centuries ago. It's reclamation from a scorpion and snake filled swamp in the early 20th century has revealed 3 fine temple structures. The surrounding area is now a large producer of mozzarella, much of it being the authentic buffalo derived variety!

We crossed pretty mountain scenery touched with snow to enjoy Certosa di San Lorenzo near Padula. This is a stupendously over designed and gargantuan monastery which took over 500 years to build before the monks left. It is so big that the courtyard was used during WW1 to hold Austrian prisoners of war.

When we found our digs for the night we broke a personal rule and ate at the Hotel restaurant. What an experience. We hit a boisterous party of school boys and their culinary budget that we were apparently subjected to was obviously very tight: basic pasta, pea and ham soup & pasta, mozzarella and tomatoes etc. Our 3 course meals with copious bread, adequate water & nasty wine strongly resembled University College Formal Dinner Nights. Two pubescent lads and a maitre d' with white gloves and uncombed hair attended us. We were going to complain about the expected extortionate bill but the total price was truly shocking: 5€! Given it is doubtful we have ever had such a cheap sit down meal anywhere in Europe we couldn't complain. Definitely cheap and cheerful.

If we were going to eat bad food, at least we wanted to choose it. So during the holiday we sated memories of Australia by munching on the Italian equivalent of the junk food Twisties. And we induced nausea when we demolished a pagan symbol Italian Style, aka Monster Easter egg. But we didn't try all the local delicacies.

We pushed further into the Southern Italian heartland where few tourists tread. It is easy to see why with the few attractions a good distance apart. Matera, famous for its former troglodytes, was worth 15 minutes of our time yet we got lost on foot in its (designed?) streets for hours without a toilet in sight. Ostuni was supposed to be a nice white washed town but it has a big, modern and ugly foreground.

The exception to these disappointments was Alberobello, a stunning town of "trulli" (conical roofed houses), many of them with symbols painted on the side. Staying in one was great and Jen was a truly happy shutterbug with so many things to photograph.

Spurred on by boredom, we left the Deep South a day earlier and deliberately headed towards the city with the highest population density in Europe, the mafia infested planning disaster known as Napoli. We figure that many of our best holiday experiences tend to be when we have low / non-existent expectations, so on that score Napoli was shaping up as a stunner.

Given our previous experience with the city the reentry was planned with military precision and Jen displayed some of her most positive emotions of the holiday once we had successfully returned the car to the airport without any dents.

We settled into our hotel only a few minutes from the airport that looked like it was in a Napoli wasteland next to a multi-level freeway but that still didn't stop taxi drivers from charging double for "being outside Naples". The hotel was weird. Never before have we gone down to the foyer in the morning to discover staff sleeping on the couches. Never before have we seen staff smoking in front of a "No Smoking" Sign. And never before have we eaten in the Hotel restaurant where the only other diners were the staff and the main course was a larger version of the first course.

For our final day we headed into Napoli and yes it exceeded our expectations. We enjoyed translations of the graffiti in the caves where thousands hid during WW2, coping with only a handful of toilets. The Museum had truly stunning Roman mosaics and an ancient statue so complex it is almost impossible to conceive how it could have been created. While the chaotic transport system initially stressed us we eventually got blasé enough to cross a Napoli road while eating excellent gelato and watching out for canine excreta.

Northern Italians apparently say that the contribution from the South towards the country's economy includes higher taxes and the Mafia. Our tourism experience was more positive than that, but still somewhat mixed. On the downside was bad accommodation and significant distances between things in the South. Also, the food was generally disappointing. But places life Pompei, Capri and Alberobello were truly special.

Until next time,

Andrew & Jen

*****************************************

Our First Trip to Italy: The Original Electronic Postcard from Tuscany and the Italian Lakes

Well Jennifer and I set off on Friday 27 May 1999 on the bleary 0705 flight to Gatwick.

Lets get one thing straight: taking 36 hours to get to Italy via Plane/Train/Coach/Ferry/Coach, with a pompous bronchitic man behind you spewing phlegm at you over 5 countries is not our idea of fun. In fact we were having misgivings before we had even met the man: we knew we had made the wrong transport choice when we were already running an hour late at the Dover Bus Interchange.

Unless you are a) over 80 AND/OR b) disabled, fly/drive is far superior, even fly/coach is better.

But in the interests of stupidity your correspondents tested
coaching: the joy of no videos, the complaining punters,
overly long and frequent toilet breaks, inability to stop
and take photos etc. etc.

But now the story gets interesting. Meet "Nick", our
hotblooded Italian 28 year old guide. Nick is animated. He
started us off playing "I Spy" while we languished in
Dover. He always carried his bags and had a thick Italian
accent (so we couldn't understand him)! Nick succeeded in
not being our tour manager - but more on that later.

The only interesting parts of our 36 hours of masochism
were:

* Luxembourg; at about 2am on Sunday we all piled out of
the bus to take advantage of the very low taxes on
goods at the petrol station. Petrol is only 29p (about
AUD0.76) a litre there - quite possibly the cheapest in
Europe.
* Switzerland; on the approach to the 17km Gothard Tunnel
(!) we saw lots of the surrounding mountains in the
preceding 2km traffic jam (the drivers have seen it up
to 19km!) Switzerland seems a very pretty, orderly and
tidy country - definitely worth a revisit.
* the currencies; on our trip we travelled across 5
currency zones (though the Luxembourg Franc is pegged
to the Belgian one). The checkout chicks at the road
side centres are amazing - accepting a whole hosts of
currencies, but typically only giving out change in the
local currency. The trick was to successfully get rid
of currency from countries you were getting father away
from, which typically meant buying something. This was
complicated by the fact that most places wouldn't
accept foreign coins, it was hard to see which country
the coins came from in the dark, you needed about 5
wallets and it helped to be au fait with exchange rates
and quick mental calculations.

Also a quick note about languages. Contrary to my belief
(Andrew), it was the Southern Europeans (Italians)
displaying more English skills than some of their more
northerly neighbours (eg Swiss Germans). Many a time menus
etc were in a number of languages, and we could get by with
the French ones. Often we would try our best (!) Italian
with handy phrasebook help and get a nice response in
English. The Italians don't seem to have the same language
hangups as the French. Contrast that to the Swiss Germans -
everything appeared to be in German, and people didn't
understand English.

But lets cut to our Tuscan arrival. We stayed at the
"Oceano" hotel in a Tuscan coastal resort town. Two salient
issues: Tuscany is not noted for its coast: which probably
isn't surprising given it takes a long time to find the
skerrick of beach which isn't private, after which you are
rewarded by jelly fish infested waters. So no wonderful
Tuscany of the postcards: no cedar trees, hills awash with
colour at night, walled hill villages etc etc. Just a very
sub-standard alternative to a Jersey beach. The second
salient issue was the hotel was very tight with food: try as
we may, we weren't allowed any of the cereal for breakfast:
that was for the full tariff people. As one lady commented,
you were never going to get fat at the Oceano.

Our first tour was to Pisa on the Sunday. Nick, our tour
guide, was almost 30 minutes late getting on the bus - which
didn't go down very well. Pisa itself is somewhat of a
dump. Sure there is this tower which would have been
moderately interesting if it had been vertical. But its
been closed to the public since 1986. And the lean is just
well, a lean. Plus there is a long line of kitshcy tourist
booths, selling - you guessed it, the minature electrically
powered version. It probably didn't help that the weather
was awful and the streets surrounding the tower are very
non-picturesque. And Nick the Tour Manager was late -
having left his bag in Pisa; and he tried unsuccessfully to
bring a lady friend back with on the coach. He was
becoming, as some diplomat delicately put it "About as
useful as a chocolate teapot".

On Monday we went to Florence. This time our tour leader
was STILL the last on the coach. Florence is such a pretty
city - largely through the Machiavellian and other excesses
of the Medicis, and it is easy to see why it is called
romantic. Our tour guide of the day had to leave us in the
lurch at the end of the tour because Nick couldn't be found
(hmm, I didn't realise the Tour Manager was paid to have
more free time than the tourists!). Jen met an English
Expatriate Painter and bought some of his pictures.

On Tuesday it was Lucca (a day of rest would have been
nice). Nick was (you guessed it) was late. Lucca has great
understatement. A pretty tower in the middle of the town
with trees growing out of the top. An amazing town wall
which could have fitted a 3 lane highway on top - more used
against floods than invaders I suspect. We had an excellent
lunch that included Calzione (rolled over Pizza) and Chianti
- it was very tough going in the hot Tuscan sun. At the end
of it, again, Nick was late, running dramatically to catch
the pulling away bus. On the way back Nick pointed out the
roadside prostitutes (even though there were children on
board), and tried to have us singing "Who stole the cookie
from the cookie jar".

At dinner that night the senior driver got up and said he
was disgusted with the situation, right in front of Nick.
The travel company had sacked Nick that afternoon and then
promptly reinstated him after he said the drivers had lied
about his time keeping etc. People promptly got up and left
as it looked like a brawl could have started. To the best
of my knowledge, Nick didn't help deal with any of the
Group's issues during the holiday.

Then came Wednesday, travel day from Tuscany. We had seen
little wonderful countryside, and all that from the coach,
missed the splendour of the 13 towered town of San Giormorna
(sp?) and missed the character of Sienna. Once again, Nick
was no where to be seen, 10 minutes after the starting time,
but this time the coach drivers had permission to leave
without him. Which they did. The travel day was broken up
with Verona, famous for pickpocketing gypsies (a common
Italian city problem), the fake Juliet's Balcony and the
Roman Amphitheatre which they don't tell you on the outside
is covered with metal seats. Did I mention that Jen nearly
fainted / twisted her ankle before we had a very average
lunch?

I am trying to be balanced and not paint too rosy a picture
of Italy. Which becomes quite hard, once we had driven next
to Lake Garda. Such a refreshing revelation: a tourist spot
that adequately meets the hype. Lake Garda ia the biggest
fresh water swimming pool in Europe, and has stunning
mountains on two sides. We stayed at the "Moderna" in the
village of Melchesine.

Melchesine is drop dead gorgeous. Most streets are actually
winding alleys with cobblestones. There are photo
opportunities in all directions. The fortress towers over
the spot beautifully. The shopping is great, there being a
Gelateria pretty well everywhere within a cones throw (We
enjoyed the many flavours of the excellent Italian ice cream
1 - 2 times a day). Car traffic is kept to a minimum. And
swimming in the lake is great - fresh clear water at a nice
refreshing temperature.

The hotel even provided such nice touches as having olive
oil at the table for dipping your bread in, and giving us a
nice room with a pretty view of the mountain behind us.

On Thursday we went to Venice. Jen liked Venice a whole lot
more than I did. I felt it was just an Italian town
surrounded by water, with its very own "Leaning Tower". I
think I would have the most fun if I could have commandeered
a jet ski for the canals, or put some of those prolific
pidgeons in a pie. Did I mention the friendliness of the
natives? We had one old crone flaying at us with her
walking stick because we weren't getting out of her way fast
enough.

For Thursday and Friday we had a replacement tour guide
called "Bruna". She was much more committed than Nick, but
her English was considerably worse. Our first guide didn't
tell us anything and the second one didn't tell us hardly
anything that we could understand.

And on Thursday night the unthinkable happened: Nick was
spotted in Melchesine. After being sacked as Tour Manager,
he had chased us across Italy to be our "friends" again, and
was asking for money.

Friday was a mistake. We should have stayed in Melchesine
and taken the cable car to the summit, followed by a
lesiurely bicycle ride around the lake. Instead we had
opted for the tour of the Lake, and what followed was a
progression of reasonably dreary lakeside village
experiences (with Jen and I fighting about our favourite
experience), none as a nice as the village we were staying
in. To make matters more frustrating, the day was capped
off with a 2 hour lake crossing. I would have though it was
some tourist boat, providing us with relevant, nice and
timely local trivia. Instead it was a cold and slow
commuter boat, with the captain announcing everything in
Italian. We learnt later that the tour company had
stipulated that the lake "tour" must be a minimum 90 minutes
long, but hadn't deemed it necessary for there to be any
information/activities of interest.

On Friday night we learned that Nick had been arrested at
3am at the Melchesine Bus Stop for possessing and perhaps
selling marijuana. Plus he was charged with indecent
exposure (he struck me as a having rather strange clothes
sense with his Leprechaun socks and Scottish kilt - though
we suppose he was following clothing traditions in one
sense). Now with our knowledge that "Nicholas had been
nickerless when he got nicked", the truth was out. Earlier
in the week I had speculated whether he was actually a drug
dealer, with his 2 bags always next to him. Apparently also
rampantly poor timekeeping is another often good indicator
of such substance abuse. I suppose I was most annoyed that
our tour company gave him £200 to get back to his
accomodation in England, even though he had quite clearly
broken his contract and willingly broken the law. It also
amazing how he could show his happy face around the place,
and treat the trip like one big holiday for himself: it must
have been the drugs. Nick was happy to the last: we last
encountered him on Friday night, when he waved like a silly
Puppy at us from outside the Hotel he was banned from
setting foot in.

The trip back from Italy was mind and body numbingly as bad
as the trip there, except it was worse, since we had seen
the scenery, the same spitual experience and there wasn't a
holiday to look forward to.

Jen is wanting us to sue the tour company for a partially
ruined holiday: so far they have russled up perhaps £1 a
person in the form of 1 complimentary bottle of wine per 4
adults.

Just to make everything perfect, the weather was absolutely
perfect that week in Jersey by all accounts.

If you have ever felt nauseous about the sickly sweet nature
of postcards from people enjoying the most wildly excellent
holidays, then I trust this has been a refreshing change.
At the very least, its been memorable.

Andrew & Jen

Cambodia/Thailand (plus links to older posts)

2004-08-14T23:59:00.001+01:00

Cambodia & Thailand

Before we made it to Cambodia we spent time in Bangkok. Even allowing for the jetlag, the big tourist sites such as temples and the Palace were frankly under whelming.
Bangkok is a big, polluted, overcrowded, young and brash city. Simply having to cross the street is a promotional for the Thai life assurance industry. Scattered through the morass of traffic there are numerous Michael Jackson imitators, hoping to escape the worst effects of the fumes. And Tuk-Tuk's are everywhere, being the weapon of choice for the young adrenaline filled taxi driver: open air souped up lawnmower driving excitement.
The King is extremely highly regarded in Thailand. A previous incumbent sent his children to Europe to learn western ways, and there is the King and I bit. At first this seems somewhat odd. However when the Westerners arrived, Thailand was the only country in South East Asia that Europeans didn't colonise, because the Thais managed to convince them that they were already "civilized". The international focus continues today: for example, royalty skis in Switzerland and has its finishing schools there. A prominent photo of the King in Bangkok for his birthday showed him sporting a camera: photography is one of his favourite hobbies. The monarchy appears to be pushing the envelope fast: it wasn't that long ago when ordinary Thais didn't even know what the King looked like. What will the next monarch do, send text messages to his subjects?
Parts of Bangkok appear to have morphed into "Gap Year Central": sort of like a giant airport waiting lounge where young Westerner's launch their adult life. We walked down "Backpacker Boulevard", 10 years later in life than the norm. It was also "Bootleg Boulevard": it had illegal software, music, even E.U. drivers licenses . And it was a stronghold of the touts: "And how about a suit for you sir, made to measure? I know where you can get a special price." Jen had the feeling that downtown Bangkok could have very easily been downtown Sydney: complete with the shopping malls and scarcity of Caucasian faces. Thai dining seemed to continue this clash of cultures. Fried pig's womb. Marijuana based meals. A campy transvestite waiter.
We were happy to leave for Cambodia.
What do most people know about Cambodia? Not much, apart from the Kim Wilde song Cambodia and the excellent movie about the awful reign of the Khmer Rouge: The Killing Fields.
Nothing can compare you for the mass of large jungle complexes that are crowned by Angkor Wat, built between the ninth and fourteenth centuries in northern Cambodia. Our guide showed Angelina Jolie around it, since it was one of the sets in Tomb Raider. Sites started off as Hindu, finished up Buddhist, and swapped on the King's whim in between. There was Ta Keo that wasn't finished after a small hill of stone was shifted there. Ta Prohm has been deliberately left to a slow destruction by the encroaching jungle, which provides for some great pictures. Preah Khan is a massive low level complex dedicated to 515 divinities. There are literally tens of thousands of images carved across these sites, detailing life in great focus. My favourite was the circus: complete with strong man juggling three dwarves and a tightrope walker.
For sheer scale nothing beat the actual Angkor Wat complex. Crossing the very large moat, the massive depictions of the Mt Mehru from Hindu Mythology were absolutely stunning, especially at sunrise. The height of some of these complexes sometimes meant scaling precipitous stairs very slowly. This is archaeology on a grand scale, definitely boot camp for tourists; bigger even than the Mayan Tikal in Guatemala.
There were so many amazing views around Angkor Wat that we have included a selection of extra images:
A N G K O R !
Throughout these myriad sites the current Cambodian situation came into sharp relief. This is an economy opening up to the outside world. For instance, there were many brands that we haven't seen since Australia. When the UN ushered in elections in 1993, there were two major side effects: everyone wanted to start learning English, and the USD became the currency of choice. An outworking of this were kids that looked about 5 selling beers for US dollars, touting in English. Even the Government demands USD over its own currency when extracting the airport exit fee from tourists. Everywhere there is some aid project: it accounts for one sixth of the economy. Finally, apply a ramshackle legal system with laws that are often "fluid". In parts Cambodia is modern day Asian Wild West.
Before we headed down to the capital Phnom Penh (PP), we went to Tonle Sap. This is a central lake that at its greatest height every year covers one seventh of the landmass of Cambodia. Here we saw the floating villages, housing in distinct areas Khmae (the dominant people in Cambodia), Vietnamese and Cham. These were completed with a variety of essentials such as the occasional floating pig pen. However some of it we saw was put on for the tourists: like the little girl that was holding the python. Did the Cambodians think we would find this entertaining or educational? We left that particular boat witnessing a puppy wrestling with one of the monkeys.
It is only in very recent years that Cambodia has returned to any sort of semblance. While the Khmer Rouge were driven from power in 1979, the guerilla war continued until 1998. Their impact is everywhere. From the bullet holes in Angkor Wat, which they used as a hospital, to the nervous laughter of our guide when he recalled the auto-genocide of the Cambodian people. Their landmines silently waiting to kill. Huge numbers of people, particularly children, were trained to commit atrocities, and virtually all are living freely. It appears peace and reconciliation are deemed more important than justice. The torture centre of Tuol Sleng in PP, and the memorial at the Killing Fields outside it are chilling reminders of the potential for us all to commit evil on a huge scale.
Cambodia is now teeming with children. After many years of people fearing their neighbours might kill them, procreating on a large scale has definitely arrived in Cambodia. Pediatric hospitals built with aid money try to cope with this "populate after perishing" policy. Young people play with kites or volleyballs seemingly everywhere.
PP predated the French, but they set it out in an orderly fashion and introduced the french bread. The principal industry in Cambodia is clothing manufacture, and there are many factories around PP. We managed to pick up many cheap seconds, such as Gap tops for a few dollars. The most popular way to get around on shopping trips is the moto: its not uncommon to see three, four or even more people on these motorbikes weaving through the chaotic motion that can only be charitably be called traffic.
We spent some time in PP with missionary friends (the Painters) from Australia. The Christmas Church service we went to on December 23rd went for about 3 hours and was entirely in Khmae, one of the world's most complex languages and completely alien to western European language speakers. My reading that morning of the account of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 was highly appropriate. Apart from words like "Israel", "Assyria", "Marie", "Joseph" and "Amen", we might as well have been on a different planet. The nativity play in Khmae was notable for the very large amount the wise men had to say (I don't remember that in the Bible), and the birth pain noises of "Marie": which as you can imagine somewhat transcends cultures.
The next day we headed down the coast to Sihanoukville, Cambodia's only legal port and centre of the small Riviera. This is the kind of place that Graham Greene would have loved: hints of a grand past, probably pre Khmer Rouge, shine through the shambolic present. There was the quite possibly closed hulk of the Independence Hotel on the hill, and Victory Beach around the point. Independence and Victory from what? And the present does not make it obvious that these names are appropriate.
We parked ourselves in the VIP room of a hotel with wonderful views of the beach. It was ours, complete with peeling paint, for a mere $15 a night.
Christmas Day was a relatively quiet affair until our USD 2 buffet in the evening watching Britney and various Boy Bands videos, complete with karaoke friendly lyrics. Until very recently karaoke was very popular in Cambodia, in part due to it often being a front for "taxi girls" aka prostitutes. Rumour has it that when too well connected people were discovered in these establishments the powers that be decided to shut them down.
The beaches and islands off the coast were very scenic. The water was clean and warm, and on occasion schools of tiny fish leapt into the air. This was a good opportunity for swimming, enjoying the great weather and for Josh (the youngest Painter) to get over his fear of water. Other highlights down the coast included almost not recognising what we suspect was the Cambodian Coast Guard (two operational boats counted), and having our van held up by naval recruits pretending to be ducks waddling down the road.
Cambodia was highly memorable.

Andrew & Jen

Cyprus (plus links to Egypt and Belize)

2004-08-14T00:01:00.001+01:00

Cyprus is a country that due to its strategic position numerous peoples have wanted a slice of, and many of them left a lot. The Brits are still playing war games and sending a million tourists a year. We decided to avoid the “Little England” mass-market resorts: since we thought this was hardly experiencing a different culture. Our digs were in the little village called Tochni inside the Cypriot Republic. We were lead to our village house by an Aussie Greek Cypriot who talked to us about his Sydney property dealings at length. The village had amazing rough stonework, numerous friendly and probably flea ridden cats and a Greek Orthodox bell ringer active at 6:30 on Sunday morning.

OK, we admit, we went all that way and we ending up spending TWO days in water fun parks. Under the hot sun, we enjoyed the amazing variety of rides, certainly the best we had ever experienced. Some great / unusual rides:
· The "Kamikaze", a long, straight slide with a huge steep drop at the start for one person, with lots of water at the end to slow you down. Think “enema” (thankfully we had our legs crossed to avoid this) and having to extract your bathers from your body. Jen baulked repeatedly before taking the plunge.
· The "Fall of Icarus": think skateboarding ramp with water. Two people in a inflated tube get launched down one side on an angle, then go up the other side almost vertically before spinning out of control down a separate section. Apparently we went to the only place in the world that had this.
· The "Aeolos Whirlpool": you spin round a flume before dropping through the hole in the middle into the pool below. Think water down a plughole or those coin donation contraptions.

There isn’t much scenery in Cyprus in late summer. The Troodos Mountains are commonly agreed to be picturesque. We walked a trail around the highest one. Talk about monotonous: it was one of the longer 7km of our lives. We got to see a lot of trees growing on piles of rocks.

The primarily Roman Archaeology was impressive: ancient mosaics better than we had ever seen before; impressive burial sites; amphitheatres and temple remains.

Generally, the Cypriot built up areas were pretty ugly and showing the worst excesses of modern development (including a lot of the tourist destinations and Nicosia). A couple of highlights were:
· Omodos; a pretty village which happens to be the national wine capital, and the place where Jen was amusingly coerced into riding a donkey by an overly affectionate Greek man of retirement age.

· Fikardou; hidden away in the hills and truly tiny but well worth the effort. We arrived late in the afternoon and the light was wonderful on the Ottoman period houses:

For the active tourist its pretty hard to fill a week, without crossing over into the Turkish occupied northern part. So on Thursday we did what the vast majority of tourists never do, having carefully studied the Lonely Planet advice. The only crossing is in the capital Nicosia (that’s the capital for both the Greek and Turkish “countries”). As we got closer we walked past barbed wire and signs advising “no photography”. The U.N. patrolled “no-mans land” was clearly visible and because of the Eucalyptus, ubiquitous in Cyprus, it was easy to imagine it was a ceasefire in a civil war in some mythical northern Australian city. The Greek police checkpoint had prominent and ominous pictures of people killed by the Turks in recent years. After signing for our day pass, we stepped around the concrete barricades into the “no-mans land”. We walked past the Ledra Palace Hotel, where the U.N. is rather comfortably holed up. Then we got confused: it was not immediately obvious where we were supposed to walk to next: not exactly comforting. So we decided to keep walking slowly along the road. It was a relief to see the Turkish checkpoint and sign in.

I needn’t have been concerned about transport on the other side because the taxi drivers know the drill. Mustafa persisted until he got to drive us around (for his troubles he got about £40 cobbled together out of a variety of currencies at the end of the day). Our first impression of the North was that it was considerably quieter than the South, and the Turkish military presence is everywhere: during the day we drove past four different camps. Thankfully, tourism is on a much smaller scale in the North and we enjoyed our best sightseeing. Some memorable moments:
· the lung sapping panoramas from St Hilarion
· swimming with locals in the sea under the impressive fortress guarding the beautiful port of Kyrenia.

Finally we returned to Ledra Palace to beat the 5pm Greek Cypriot curfew: there can’t be many people that have crossed a U.N. peacekeeping buffer zone in their bathers.

Egyptian Sinai (with link to BeNeLux)

2004-08-11T23:29:00.001+01:00

Well, Egypt. Firstly, lets cover what we didn’t do, ie about 98% of the country. So we won’t be regaling you with stories of the Pyramids, Nile, Luxor etc.

We flew into Sharm el Sheikh “Sharm”, famous mainly for diving. Judging by the visitors, the predominant feel is of an Italian Riviera. Sharm is on the Sinai coast near the point where the Strait of Tiran meets the Red Sea.

Sharm Airport was a bit of a sham. Basically think developing world tourist airport. The visa people tried various methods to extract extra cash. The unnecessary duplication of X ray machines. There were lots of people standing around doing very little. And then there the guys offering to carry your bags for money. One man moved some of ours all of about 2 metres before asking for money: which we didn’t give.

Our accommodation for the week was the Hyatt Regency. Bill Clinton had dropped in to mediate at a Middle East Peace Conference held there 2 months earlier. This was our first 5 star hotel experience (reasonably priced thanks to the package), and we were very impressed. The pool facilities were superb: waterfalls, a man made river to swim along, great water slide, and a coral reef just off the shore. Amazing choices were available in the breakfast buffet. And the room was very comfortable. Jennifer said she slept better than at home: a high compliment indeed.

Egyptian tourism is suffering heavily due to the Palestinian uprising. Someone told us that tourist numbers in Sharm were down 50-60% on last year. This doesn’t really make sense. Egypt is not Israel and further, is at peace with Israel. Having said that, Jen was out doing a spot of night photography one evening, and saw a large flash come from the direction of Saudi Arabia. Her initial thought was they had launched some sort of missile, declaring war on Israel. It bemused her when she realised she had just seen lightning.

We snorkelled on different days. There seemed to be more living coral than Belize: although at one site masses of Italians seem intent on destroying the coral through their ignorance. At other spots we saw wrecks on the reefs. Snorkelling seems to have the odd physiological effect of requiring you to go to the toilet almost as soon as you clamber on the boat. This, if you are breaking up your snorkelling means you are regularly needing to “de-suit” simply to go to the toilet. Another odd effect is the speed at which a hearty appetite is developed. We felt odd tucking into an excellent lunch during Ramadan while the Muslim staff watched.

On one day we swam ashore to a charming sun drenched clump of dirty lunar landscape called Tiran island. Tiran deserves special mention. The Saudis gave it to the Egyptians, very nice of them considering its strategic importance due to the shipping lane. And the Israelis grabbed it and fortified it during one of those little conflicts of the last few decades. The only reason we swam ashore was for a glimpse of Saudi across the strait. We made it to the top of a gradual hill, had our glimpse and returned to the boat, roughly following a vehicle track (a good thing? – read on). Following one subsequent rogue comment and a little investigation, I now see Tiran in a somewhat different light. According to a 5th September 1996 story in the Hawaii Army Weekly all is perhaps not as it seems. To summarise, at one point in the not too distant past the island featured all of the following problems: sharks, peacekeepers, landmines, dangerous feral dogs, the nightly boom of animals clearing landmines. Snorkelling has definitely whetted our appetite to learn how to dive.

Banana boating and parasailing were also on the agenda. We were really looking forward to the latter, and as the time drew closer, Andrew got quite nervous. Egyptian TV decided to film another parasailer on our boat. You hear about various methods of takeoffs and landings, but both in our case were the back of the boat: relieving Andrew somewhat. We were to be the finale, the only two person parasail. When the big moment arrived, Andrew experienced anti-climax and it was Jen’s turn to feel nauseous. But all ended up alright, and on the descent we were dunked repeatedly by the amused driver.

We also undertook some expeditions into the Sinai. These were made possible courtesy of the Israeli Army Engineer who built the sealed road during the occupation by the Israelis. He subsequently died when his jeep ran over land mines that he had planted himself. They had shifted from his map’s position after a flash flood.

The highlights of the tours were:
· the Coloured Canyon; this is a very beautiful spot in the Sinai desert. The rock colours and shapes were stunning, as was the light. There were a number of good vistas. It was very easy to feel like Lawrence of Arabia. The only problem was the canyon kept on getting narrower. Until we got stuck in a tourist traffic jam in the middle of the desert. Just around the corner a lot of laughing was going on – what was everyone up to? A rock had fallen from the top of the canyon and wedged itself near the bottom, the cliff faces at this point being less than a metre apart. The gap for humans to slip through was small, but getting in wasn’t anything on getting out: the latter was a steep slide of at least 2 metres. We are amazed that Dave, the rotund chain smoking cockney pub operator from the east end of London made it at all. We’re surprised they don’t make people fit through an equivalent space (think airport luggage) BEFORE taking them on the tour:
· a Bedouin Dinner; the interaction with the Bedouins was rather limited and the camels were predictably uncomfortable and grumpy, but sunset in the desert and the meal were wonderful. Jen had asked whether an all night option was available, the response to which was gales of laughter and comments about 50 camels being an appropriate price.

We were also supposed to climb Mount Sinai, the place where Moses received the Tablets, to see the sunrise. However frustratingly we didn’t actually make it since the bus that picked us up at 22:30 had to turn around since a flash flood in the desert had washed away the road.

One night we made the mistake of being the only guests in a restaurant after having been told “I’ll fix you a special price at the end of your meal”. The proprietor interrupted our meal occasionally to advise us of some of the intricacies of the Egyptian pop music being pumped out on the restaurant television. The food was great, it was just a little awkward having circa 10 underemployed staff members watching you. And our “special price” ended up being about GBP 30, not cheap even by Jersey standards.

We bartered much better as the week went on, although it was complicated by the fact that Egyptian pound notes seem to go down to some impossibly small value and are often rather flimsy. They were a graphic representation of the concept of “filthy lucre”: the money changer in the UK who provided us our initial notes even gave us a health warning!

The flight back to Gatwick was buffeted with strong winds. But our pilot was a real professional, and we exited the plane to the tune of Sade’s “Smooth Operator”.
On balance this was probably our best holiday yet: we hardly spoke about what we would do next.

BeNeLux

2004-08-10T22:58:00.000+01:00

Electronic PostCard from BeNeLux - April 2003

Hi everyone,

We went to Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg (collectively known as Benelux) for 2 weeks some time back. Now we know that many of you may think that the Netherlands has a dodgy reputation which doesn't extend to conventional "sightseeing", Belgium a humdrum one and Luxembourg not one at all. But hopefully you will be pleasantly surprised at how many things there are to do that aren't illegal or boring in other countries.

Firstly some background. Our friend, Adam G., an Australian Greek friend had recently moved to the Netherlands to contract for IBM after being voluntarily drafted into the Greek Army (don’t ask). So we decided to avail ourselves of his downtown Amsterdam location to see some of the sights. He was even keen to help us “cost average” down our Belgian and Luxembourg holiday in the following week by tagging along. His dedication was quite touching since he had given up a trip to a Columbian wedding (allegedly attended by single supermodels) to spend time with us.

Adam is quite a complex hardworking type with a strong paranoid streak. His interests include:
· OLAP Data Warehousing
· Photography
· Complaining about his investment portfolio which looks like an intercontinental road smash
· Complaining about having to use ancient technology, because of his investment portfolio. His Palm PDA is 7 years old – so old in fact it is really just a mini Newton rip-off on steroids
· Eating like a hobbit
· Chasing unattainable women
If you are interested ladies his “Hot or Not” web link is here:

Like all decent Frankling travel stories there has to be unnecessary complicating factors. Getting into the spirit of things on the first day we bought a heavy, bulky Ikea flat packed outdoor table and large parasol to go with it. Then Andrew & Adam had to lug it up 4 flights of steep narrow stairs which are so typical of Amsterdam accommodation, past something that looked suspiciously like dog faeces. Adam hasn’t even been able to appreciate the assembled result, although to be fair, he didn’t mention his building did not have a lift.

Once ensconced in Adam’s flat we proceeded to learn about the finer points of the Dutch and Dutch culture in the following days such as:
· Virtually no one accepts credit card – while The Netherlands is an advanced western economy the Dutch are obviously tight.
· The general concept of customer service is that the Dutch will stare at you without attempting to serve you. Our hysterical laughing at an Enkhuizen Café (not space cake assisted) was in stark contrast to the staff.
· Cash machines must be very expensive since they are almost non-existent. One day in downtown Amsterdam we queued for 25 minutes to get cash.
· Things are really expensive and/or silly: eg membership of a video rental store costs €2 a month. The world famous Keukenhof, which is basically just masses of people looking at masses of nicely arranged tulips, other bulbs & signs; cost the better part of €30 for 2 people and a car. It was quickly dubbed Rippenhof.
· Sex and drugs appear to be available just about anytime but supermarkets close really early.
· The Dutch really are quite tall and thin. Adam described them as a “race of praying mantises”; but perhaps that was due to Adam’s experience with the local women.
· The famous Dutch attitude towards alternative lifestyle choices seems to have been around for much longer than most people realise.
· Open, portable urinals are put out in Amsterdam’s streets each weekend to try and reduce anti-social behaviour (Adam was keen to demonstrate).
· The ubiquitous, interesting and multifunctional bicycles.

If you get past the culture, in general we found Amsterdam to be a really pretty city. The canals and the narrow merchant houses that lean into the street add a dimension that most cities lack. This was particularly apparent as we went around the streetscapes in the evening taking photos with Adam.

We hit most of the high sights and a number of the smaller ones, and have listed some photos here: Van Gogh Museum, Vondelpark, Rembrandthuis, “Our Lord in the Attic” Chapel (Amstelkring Museum). Given our photographic bent, we also thoroughly enjoyed the World Press Photo Competition being displayed in Oude kerk. A little outside Amsterdam in Haarlem was the amazing Hiding Place where Corrie Ten Boom and other Christians hid Jews during WW2. Perhaps the only major disappointment (for Andrew at least) was that the Rijksmuseum, packed with various master’s paintings, was closed because they had just discovered asbestos in it.

On the weekends and Queen’s Day we took the opportunity to show Adam around some of the rest of the new country he called home. High lights included:
· Getting caught up in an overt display of Dutch nationalism complete with prams and orange balloons.
· Suffering rubbish bicycles at De Hoge Veluwe National Park. Still you could always nick someone else’s complimentary bike at the next stop.
· Deventer, a quiet non-touristy town with lots to photograph (sorry Andrew).
· Signs of Dutch eccentricity.

The Queen’s Day Street Party itself in Amsterdam was somewhat of a disappointment. If you can imagine semi-biblical quantities of rubbish mixed with split beer and sound systems seemingly borrowed from a The Who Concert (think jet engines) you’ll get the idea. It was rather like the world’s largest university party.

During our second week the 3 of us went to Belgium and Luxembourg, taking our car. The general idea was to do a rough clockwise loop before returning to Amsterdam.

Before we had even left the Netherlands we discovered how poor a packer Adam was, as we had to debate the merits of whether there was any downside for a Greek national to be travelling in Western Europe without his passport.

Our first stop was Waterloo of Eurovision fame. This was to be our base from where we would catch the train into Brussels. It was some time until the next train into Brussels so we decided to have a bite to eat in a café / bar near the station. With the 1970’s disco ball, antlers, faded south pacific wall photo and indoor mini golf course it was obvious that Belgians know how to have fun.

Brussels itself is an odd place and hard to describe easily. There are some interesting architectural sites such as the Train Station and the Art Nouveau Musee Horta. The Grand Place is certainly spectacular at night. The one day per year access to the Royal Glass Houses was certainly an eye opener, in part because of the almost non-existent security. And it would be remiss of us not to mention the memorable suburb of “Garbageville” which surrounded our backpackers. But Brussels appeared to lack a certain charm, which perhaps reflects its status as a young capital full of Eurocrats in stark contrast to its Flanders surrounds. Still it’s obviously well and truly on the tourist circuit, as evidenced by the young women con artists who wanted money for signing a petition.

Leaving Brussels we nipped back into the Netherlands for Maastricht, that rather ridiculous Dutch protrusion, which was a waste of time. The trip through Eastern Belgium to Luxembourg was boring; the town of Bastogne made famous in a Band of Brothers episode, was well, nothing like it was in Band of Brothers.

Luxembourg has obviously been seriously underrated by so many as a country, let alone a tourist destination. A possible exception are the Germans who send their investments their on holiday, and who presumably are more comfortable to pay €6 a litre for water at a restaurant than we were. Well, although you wouldn’t want to give it more than a couple of days, we can honestly say that Luxembourg was a very pleasant surprise. We particularly enjoyed the castles being renovated and the commanding position held by the heavily fortified Luxembourg City, although Andrew didn’t appreciate receiving a cranial guano deposit. And Luxembourg has the distinction of selling Belgian chocolate, branded by its cocoa content, at probably the lowest prices in the European Union…

We continued our invasion of the Low Countries with a push through the Ardennes into the rest of Southern Belgium. There was the working monastery at Orval with the ruined Abbaye Notre Dame. However perhaps most memorable was the antics of my (Andrew’s) companions. I can honestly say that being photographic caddy can be quite testing at times. Not only did I have to move out of shots & try not to get too bored, there was a fairly constant litany of whinges from the photographers regarding the poor quality of photographic opportunities. “If only X,Y, or Z weren’t in the photo…” was commonly expressed, to which my common response became “Just Photoshop it”. One time, Adam mistook bleach for soap and washed his hands with it. To entertain me more, Jen swallowed a fly and started hiccupping. On yet another occasion Adam accidentally Full Montied Andrew because he was the only one who couldn’t keep the door shut on a shower cubicle built for height challenged individuals without limbs (sorry, no picture available). This was so much more fun than Accommodation Plan A, which a dash to the well known (?) Belgian Coast late in the evening only to discover that our F1 Access Code didn’t work.

We left our backpackers, which offered breakfast in bed and the showers for midgets to go and explore Brugge, which must have one of the highest concentrations of tourists in Belgium. For once the photographic whinging died down and I think you will see why when you see some of the results.

B
R
U
G
G
E
!

The whinging recommenced with a vengeance when we got to Antwerp. Despite our nice hotel, the great range of beer (630 in one place) and gourmet chocolates this particularly outbreak seems to have been based on the complexity of actually getting in and out of Antwerp. It’s a wonder that Jen hasn’t agreed to get GPS a long time ago.

From Antwerp we headed back towards Amsterdam on our final leg. The Dutch seaside was pleasant enough but probably fairly forgettable if you actually had to holiday there, assuming you have seen a good beach. However, it was the different aspects of Dutch Engineering that were really impressive, such as:
· The truly gargantuan Dykes, which give you a really good sense of how low much of the Netherlands really is.
· Rotterdam, the world’s largest port. Driving past the port area at night was truly amazing, taking about half an hour at a not very leisurely pace.
· The World Heritage listed windmills at Kinderdijk, which were a truly striking sight in the fine weather of our last day.

These countries offer so much than beer, chocolate and alternative ways to prepare for matrimony.

Go and see them.

Regards,

Andrew & Jennifer

Notes:
· No illegal substances were abused in the production of this email.
· Adam gave up the option to review this email pre-release because he didn’t want to get in the way of the “creative process”!
· For the truly committed here are even more photos.