Europe

Well as I type this I am sitting my hostel common room in Stockholm.  I’m staying up for another hour or so with the cunning plan of being so tired I’ll sleep away tomorrow’s flight to Malaysia and then fight the jet lag to stay up all day.

Went for a quick walk around Stockholm’s old town tonight and it seems beautiful. Its a whole different experience seeing a city on my own though.

It has been a simply amazing trip. I have just uploaded the last of our photos including: Fussen, Amsterdam, Berlin and Sweden. Check them out on the photo page or directly on Flickr.

0848, 19 June 2009

And so I’m having breakfast while typing this at my hostel in Stockholm.
In about 30 minutes I’ll be gathering my backpack onto my back, and heading towards the bus station en-route to Arlanda airport.
Its been an amazing journey, Stockholm was a very pretty city to end our trip.

Kinda reminds me of Sydney with its harbourfront.

Or maybe my thoughts have just been turning to home, loved ones and familiar environments more recently. The last four months have been absolutely fantastic, an experience I wouldn’t have wanted to miss, we’ve collected quite a few memories to take back home.
But…. there is that word again - home.

It’s time to go home.

PS. We plan to do more posts! Mostly for our benefit to save memories somewhere in case they dissipate.

Emperor Hadrian built a big wall all the way across England. There is still quite a bit of it left including some forts. The wall is no longer used to keep the Scots out.

We hiked from Houstead’s fort to Once Brewed and then had a well deserved Twice Brewed bitter at the Twice Brewed pub.

If there is one thing I’ve learned on our trip its that the Romans have left their mark everywhere.

Some guy died and left his castle to the Scottish youth hostels association. 

We stayed there with Mum and Dad.

While staying a Dubrovnik we took a one day Kayaking trip to the island of Kolocep. We paddled there stopping by some awesome caves.

We had a picnic lunch on the island and then a quick swim in the clear waters before paddling home.

What follows is a few posts of some trip highlights. These will be short with probably a few sentences and a photo or two. I have done a terrible job of blogging as I go along but I want to make sure all the best thing we did are recorded here!

We took bought a four day Swiss rail pass and I had the time of my life. We spent three days of pretty solid train travel. On day on we started in Milan, and went up through Tirano and across the Bernina Pass to St. Moritz.  That night I saw snow fall for the first time ever. It was quite light snow but pretty cool!

On the second day we took the world’s slowest express train the Glacier Express.  It took eight hours to get from St. Moritz to Zermatt at the base of the Matterhorn.  Part of the track is so steep the changed to a special cog locomotive to pull us up!  In that whole eight hours I wasn’t bored for a moment the scenery was just fantastic.

I don’t think Seok Ming wants to hear any more about how wonderful I thought Switzerland was.

As Seok Ming mentioned we have spent some time Fusson waiting for the rain to clear. We went out riding this morning but had to wait under a tree for the rain to stop. It didn’t stop so we rode home and got warm and waited again for the rain to stop. It did stop and we decided to ride to Austria. Going to Austria has been on and off our itinerary, in the end we opted to go to Poland instead. Sitting in Fusson we decided that as we had hired bikes for the day and as Austria was only 8km away we should at least pay Austria a short visit.

As you can see as soon as we started riding the rain started again. I tried to order an Austrian beer in the only restaurant we found open in the town on the other side of the border. I think I ended up with a German beer. I am very pleased to have spent an hour in Austria and very pleased to be back in my warm German bed.

We’ve decided to go to Austria. Back in a couple of hours

Yes, I know, I know, we’ve been uncharitably silent the past month and a bit. And after promising to write all about Hadrians Wall too! How unreasonable! This condition must be corrected at once!

*hehe*

The past few weeks have flown by in a flash. I suppose we have made some attempts to continue uploading photos, but a post is undoubtedly long overdue. So long overdue that I hardly know where to start!

I suppose, first, a list of where we’ve been between here, Fussen; and London.
8th May - Dubrovnik
13th May - Budapest
18th May - Zdiar, Slovakia
22nd May - Krakow
28th May - Prague
3rd June - Munich
and yesterday, 5th June - Fussen, ie the original Disneyland Castle, Schloss Neuchwanstein.

We’ve booked ourselves a 14 hour bus ride to Amsterdam tomorrow evening, which will be an interesting experience.

Meanwhile, for today, we’re hiding out in our dorm room for a few hours while waiting for the rain to clear. Fussen is at the foot of the Bavarian alps, near the German/Austrian/Swiss border. It has beautiful Sound-Of-Music alpine landscape coupled with a nearby lake, which is probably why King Ludwig decided to build his holidays home(s) in the area. He was called Mad King Ludwig by the way, as his parliament got fed up with him hiding himself away in the mountains and building expensive fanciful castles, so they assembled a panel of doctors and got them to proclaim him mad and hence unable to govern the state anymore. Thats what happend, seriously, we wiki-ed it last night. Moral of the story: if you’re gonna be king, make sure you terrorise everyone so that they’re too afraid to organise an uprising against you. Only Type A personalities need apply.

Looking through the list of places above, I can’t really pick a favourite , though there’s a few places I wish we could have done differently. 

Croatia is all about the coastline, really. The new Greek islands while being the old Croatian islands. If we had more money or time it would have been lovely to island-hop to Hvar and Korcula.

Budapest was a livelier, larger, more alive version of Prague. We met a few backpackers who originally planned to stop there for a few days, but couldn’t summon the heart to leave for the past 8 months. If I could do it again, I might have chosen to stay at a different hostel, gone out at night more,  payed a little more euros for a better opera seat. Maybe also see other parts of Hungary - Pecs, Eger, Lake Balaton. Hungary is a beguiling mix of western capitalism with traces of its communist past. The same goes for Poland too. We ate quite a few times at Bar Mleczny, ‘milk bars’ which are what state-funded restaurants used to be like under communism. Food was cheap, so it was very easy to polish off polish dumplings, potato pancakes, cabbage, sauerkraut, and more cabbage.

A special mention needs to be made to the Ginger Monkey Hostel, in Zdiar, Slovakia. The Slovakian High Tatras are still fairly off the international travellers radar, and like most things undiscovered, there’s a mild reluctance to broadcast it out loud. Suffice to say we spent a very lovely 4 days hiking, reading, resting, baking and watching dvds there. I now know how to bake cookies with just a fork and a bowl too! 

Alright, I think I will end this here for the time being. Til the next next time (when I might be home!), here’s a photo from the front porch in Zdiar. Yes, there was a hammock.

London on April 27th 2009 was a very wet and cold day. These hip Londoners wear bright and colourful wellies partly as a fashion statement, but also to keep their feet dry I bet. Who would have ever thought that the old city had so much rain in her?
I guess because I’ve been here before London doesn’t really feel new to me. There’s definitely an adrenaline rush in spotting names usually seen on a Monopoly board, and in trying a ‘real’ English ale. For the record, the bartender wasn’t that impressed with our attempt to get an authentic British pub experience, he sorta sniffed and recommended the IPA or the Old Speckled Hen…. Hang on, maybe that IS the authentic British pub experience…
Hopefully the weather will be better later in the week, but just to be safe, we’ve planned rather rain-friendly trips to the Tower and the British Museum tomorrow. Seeing Big Ben while shivering in the rain today wasn’t particularly comfortable!
Time to sleep soon, so before I forget, here’s a little reminder to myself to blog about Ireland, Hadrians Wall, Durham and the Lake District before too many days pass and it all fades into memory. I will do it! Really.