Montenegro

After enduring the 6 hour bus ride from Split to Dubrovnik and then the 3.5 hours or so the next day, I arrived in Budva, in Montenegro. Montenegro is a country of only around 650,000 people, 15,000 or so of whom live in Budva. The number of tourists vastly exceeds this and all the beaches are privately owned and absolutely rammed full at this time of year. Here's a section of beach to give you the idea:


Here's a shot of Budva's old town, with a beach on the left and the surrounding mountains in the background:


The hostel here, Hippo Hostel, is the only hostel in Montenegro and is really cool. Being off the beaten track a bit, it attracts a more interesting breed of traveler. Also, it has a convenience store across the road which is open 24/7 and sells cold beer. Perfect. I've spent 6 nights here in total and could easily spend longer, it's great fun even though the town itself isn't that brilliant.

Among the things I did during my first four-night stay here was go on a paddleboat expedition around Sveti Nicola, the island a kilometer or two offshore from Budva. The expedition was led by Dave, who together with his partner Nadja owns and runs Hippo. Here's a shot of our group taking quick refuge from the sun in a cave:


I also went on a daytrip excursion in which myself and 3 others were driven around by an English expat called Marcus. Among the places we visited were the immense Lake Skadar, a creepy and bat-infested old Austro-Hungarian barracks, a farm where we purchased and ate some local cheese, prosciutto and wine, and a village in the bottom of a valley, with no roads in or out, with a population of 4. And some goats. We bought a kilo of goat's cheese from them for 5 euro. At one point in the trip we also got a nice view of Kotor Bay:


I had received word the day I arrived in Montenegro that my planned three day rafting trip was cancelled. After some deliberating about whether I would be able to make it to Bosnia, which everyone I've talked to has been enthusiastic about, I decided it would not be possible and I would just have a couple of days in the north of Montenegro and the rest at Hippo Hostel. On Saturday the 16th I headed north to Zabljak (JAH-bluck, with a soft, French-style "j"), a small town located just near Durmitor National Park and the Tara Canyon. I had to go via the capital Podgorica, which would have to be one of the ugliest cities I have ever seen. I had the fortune to have made friends with Christina, a Canadian girl who headed up to Zabljak a day earlier and booked rafting and a shared room for us. Here she is with Zabljak in the background:


That night we headed out for a meal and ran into a Finnish couple who had been staying at Hippo. We all went out to a local bar, which was mostly full of Serbians. Montenegro is about the only country in the region which doesn't have a mutual animosity with Serbia. They were a loyal member of the former Yugoslavia, which eventually devolved into "Serbia and Montenegro", from which Montenegro became independent following a 55% vote in 2007. Montenegrins voted for independence not out of dislike for Serbia, but because they wanted to fast-track membership of the EU, towards which Serbia has a much more equivocal stance. Later in the night we were accosted by a good-humoured and extremely drunk Serbian man, who tried to impress on us that Serbia was not as imperialist and bloodthirsty as it might appear on CNN. "We HATE Albanians", he explained, "but a month ago I go on holiday to Albania. I do not kill them, they do not kill me. Great success!". I'm paraphrasing but that was the gist of his argument.

The next day Christina and I got up to go rafting on the Tara river.


I was well aware that there'd be no adrenalin thrill ride available. In fact, I was so sure that I wouldn't even get wet that I had my camera clipped to my lifejacket. What I was there for was sightseeing:




The country was nice enough, but I was expecting a canyon and what I got was essentially a valley. It was definitely not unmissable or anything like that and I think Slovenia has much more beautiful places to visit. It was nice enough though and the area surrounding Zabljak was pretty and had a tranquil feel. That night Christina and I climbed a small local hill to watch the sun set.



The next day I parted ways with Christina and headed back to Budva, where I spent last night. I have tonight here as well and plan to actually get out to a bar or club, which I haven't managed to do at all despite 5 nights here, generally because spending all day in the sun is exhausting. Strange as it might sound to you guys back home struggling through winter, I've had enough sun. Other things I have had about enough of include non-English speaking countries and crap, unhealthy food. I'm still having a great time at this hostel, but I'm also looking forward to getting in to Edinburgh tomorrow night.

Hrvartska

Which is the Croatian word for "Croatia". The country became independent following a war with the Serbian-led remains of Yugoslavia in 1991-1995, one of the seemingly infinite number of Yugoslav wars. Although not yet part of the EU, Croatia is reasonably pro-Western. My roommate on the sailing trip was from Pennsylvania and told me that a number of his countrymen were convinced that Croatia was a dangerous place for Americans to travel. This is odd because Croatia is one of the more reliably pro-American states in the region. Although NATO didn't intervene in the Serb-Croat war itself, they did launch Operation Deliberate Force against Serb forces in Bosnia in 1995. Croatia was of the view that they'd take any bombing of Serb forces that they could get. On one of the islands I visited, there was a shop selling those unfunny alcohol joke shirts (stuff like "One Tequila, Two Tequila, Three Tequila, Floor"). Nestled inamongst these shirts was one emblazoned with the legend "Don't worry NATO...", then a picture of a warplane, then "CROATIA is behind you!".

Anyway I've gone off on a bit of a tangent here. I flew out of Valencia to Split via Rome and arrived quite late Friday night. I was worried about whether I'd be able to find any food so late, a worry which turned out to be ridiculous when I got into Split, which was buzzing with tourists and had about 8 million restaurants still trying to ply their trade. It wasn't surprising that I knew almost nothing about Split. My travel preparation has got so lax at this point that I landed in Croatia without even any clue what the local currency was. I just went to an ATM and asked for 1600 something somethings, which turned out to be "kuna". Based on the publicity each city gets, I was expecting Split to be small and Dubrovnik to be large, but it turns out Split is 5 times the size of Dubrovnik. Oops.

Anyway, I made it into Split and hit the sack in preparation for my tour the next day. My hostel had a bunch of jerks in it, the type where everything they say or do is designed to make themselves look cool, and I was dreading spending 8 days with those type of people. However when I boarded my boat the next day, we turned out to have a really good group of people, all pretty easygoing. The places we visited were:

Hvar - The rich people's playground. I wandered up to a fortress on the hill behind the town and got a great view of the harbour, but I forgot my camera so that will have to wait until I get the pics off someone else. At night we visited another fortress which had been converted into a nightclub. I and several other sailing trippers stripped down and went swimming in their big indoor fountain. They were cross.

Mljet - Very small township with a national park at the back with a couple of lakes. Pretty without being all that stunning.

Dubrovnik - Old walled city, very pretty.



Korcula - Also known as "Mini Dubrovnik", another walled city. Nice but nothing special.

Makarska - Huge tourist town on the coast, lot of partying. There's a nightclub inside a cave on the edge of the ocean, so you can go swimming mid-party. Really cool place.

Omis - An old pirate island. Not a lot to do so we had a pirate party on the boat. I purchased a sword which at the press of a button lit up and made "CHING!" noises. This was a hit.

Pretty short summary, but then there's not much to say about endless swimming, sunbathing, and beer drinking on deckchairs. I had a great trip - this is the kind of thing tours are built for, visiting towns where you really only need one night to check the place out. The whole trip was drama-free except for the last night where our (female) guide drank way too much, for reasons I won't get into, and was sick. I was looking after her and came pretty close to getting into a fight with a drunk Italian guy who started trying to feel her up. Interesting times.

Today I'm heading to Dubrovnik where I'm spending a quiet night to break up the trip to Budva in Montenegro. I have 4 nights there before heading on my rafting trip down the Tara canyon.

Liverpool Game

After flying from Lisbon to Barcelona, we spent an uneventful night in a pretty ordinary hostel in Barcelona - great location but not much opportunity to meet people, so we had an early night. The next day we caught the train to our hostel in Valencia, where we discovered that our tickets (which we had paid EUR 170 each for) had never arrived. Bugger. We're not sure if the site was a scam or what, but Dane is giving them a chance to make reparations before reversing the credit card transaction. Having made it this far, we caught the train to Vila-Real anyway, intending to scalp tickets. On the way there we met a nice lady from Vila-Real by the name of Amelia, who spoke English and helped us out a lot with various things, driving us to the stadium and calling a taxi for us in Spanish afterwards. On getting to the stadium we discovered that there were still plenty of tickets on sale, even though pre-match publicity had said that it was sold out. We scalped a couple of tickets from a Liverpool supporter anyway, for half price of 40 EUR, but then discovered that they were in different sections, so we shelled out another 80 EUR for another ticket in the same section, so we ended up paying 80 each anyway. This was a lot better than the 170 each we paid to the scalping site, but we had no way of knowing we didn't have to do that.

Vila-Real is a town of less than 50,000 people which somehow manages to support a football team which probably ranks in the top 5 in La Liga in Spain. The stadium was smallish - a 25,000 capacity - which was good since we were up close and personal with the players. The game itself was a bit lacklustre, which was to be expected - it was a friendly, and though I think Vilareal mostly ran their top team, Liverpool took the opportunity to give their young kids a run. They did play the new striker Keane for the whole of the first half though. By the way, at Barcelona-Sants train station, we saw three Liverpool fans who were already wearing the official number 7 Keane shirt, even though he only signed to the club a day or two earlier. Crazy.

The player everyone wanted to see was Fernando Torres, Liverpool's premier striker. He started warming up on the sidelines in front of us midway through the second half, accompanied by cheers and whispers from the Spanish crowd of his Spanish nickname "El Nino". He was instrumental in Spain's win in the Euro Cup this year and is therefore loved throughout Spain even though he now plays for an English club. To give a sense of how valuable he was in his debut season for Liverpool, a passable strike rate for a striker is 1 goal per 3 appearances and a good striker scores 1 goal per 2 appearances. Torres, in his first season in the Premier League, scored 33 goals in 46 appearances, and has replaced the captain Stephen Gerrard as the most popular player among fans. He only played around the last 15 minutes and despite one good opportunity was unable to break the scoring drought. The game ended nil all.

Dane and I will probably spend tonight in the hostel bar, then tomorrow I fly to Split, Croatia via Rome, and he flies back to London. I'm joining my 8-day sailing tour of Croatia tomorrow, so there will be an internet drought. More after that.

Portugal

I was originally going to write separate posts for every region of Portugal but I can't really be bothered doing that so I'll give a quick rundown of my whole week and a half or so in the country. The short version is that it's a really cool place. Being a little more off the tourist trail than say Barcelona means that you get a better quality of traveler there. It's cheap, really cheap. And the cities are really pretty. I'm pretty lazy with photos though and have like one shot from my whole time there, which I may or may not upload later.

I started my trip with a couple of nights in Lagos, in the south. I didn't know much about the place and was expecting a lazy beach town, but what I got was the most insanely full-bore party town I think I've ever been to. Some of the stories of degeneracy I heard there were pretty jaw dropping and don't really bear repeating on a public blog. I will however repeat them privately on request. Bit too crazy a place for me, but a spot to bear in mind if I ever feel like drinking myself to death.

Porto was quite a bit quieter, a very pretty city with a lot of nice architecture. We stayed at a great hotel and became pretty good friends with a couple of Slovenian girls who we met again in Lisbon (and I will probably meet one of them again in Croatia). Didn't accomplish anything too jaw dropping there though. On the last day Dane and I hired a car and drove out along the Douro, but had the misfortune to be given horrible advice by a girl in a tourist office who could barely speak English, which led to our wasting most of the day. On the way back into Porto we took a wrong turn and ended up in downtown Porto, which is one of those driving-nightmare European old towns, with a twisted jumble of streets, most of which are one way, with drivers who will cut you off given the slightest chance. Driving on the right in an unfamiliar manual car, I didn't enjoy this much, but we managed to get back to the car hire place just in time to return it and board a train to Lisbon.

Lisbon is a great city which I would recommend to anyone doing the Europe trail. There's a bit of something for everyone. A lot of great sightseeing to do, or so I'm told. I spent most of the days sleeping, having got home from bars at such hours of the day as 7am. The nightlife is excellent - the locals are friendly and, as I mentioned, the tourists are a cut above the type you get in places like Barcelona or Rome. While there's certainly Lagos-style degeneracy if you go looking for it, there are also classier clubs with an upmarket feel. I also managed to hook up with the first girl I uttered a word to in the first club we went to, and you have to love a city where that happens. Highlights also included hanging out with a couple of Australian guys who were complete womanizing, drug-taking, alcohol-swilling maniacs, but who also managed to be friendly, funny, intelligent guys, rather than jerks like most of that type are. Lowlights included Dane and I losing an absurd amount of money at poker in a 24 hour period. We were already up for the trip so neither of us are down too much but it wasn't much fun!

So that was Portugal... and today we flew back to Barcelona, where I am currently watching my laundry dry and stealing free wireless. We're staying only one night before getting the train down to Valencia. We have two nights in Valencia, but the first one will be spent at the Estadio di Madrigal in Villareal, watching Liverpool vs Villareal. That's if our tickets arrive safely at our Valencia hostel. Liverpool have just signed a new striker so we're hopeful we may get to see his debut game (edit: we just found out that he will indeed be playing his first game for Liverpool, so that's pretty cool).

Blog finally up to date!

Barcelona

Barcelona seems like ages ago now, even though I only left there eight days ago. I do remember that I arrived there with the intention of largely ignoring the culture (Barcelona not being a particularly Spanish city anyway) and doing some partying. That my time there is a bit fuzzy now suggests that I achieved my aims. I do remember walking back to the hostel down La Rambla and getting propositioned by no less than four hookers, so they must have thought I looked in the mood to have fun (that, or very drunk). The only touristy things I achieved while there were taking a look at the Sagrada Familiar, the insane unfinished creation of Anton Gaudi, and going on a hike along the Carretera de les Aigües, a gravel path up above Barcelona that gives great views of the enormous city. I have photos of all of the above (ok, wait, not the hookers) but I can't really be bothered putting them up right now. I just wanted to get this post written before I completely forget that I even went to Barcelona. I'm in Lisbon now, so posts about Lagos and Porto are also in the works. Dane is napping so I might write them now. Or not.

Nice

It's good to have the net again. I've been in Porto for about the last 5 nights, in two different hostels, and in both of them my laptop wouldn't talk to their router. Hence the lack of blogging.

After arriving in Nice and checking into my hotel I met up with Julia and her boyfriend and after grabbing some lunch, we gathered supplies and retired to the beach with an esky to drink two bottles of champagne that I had brought with me. After polishing those off we relaxed at the apartment of a friend of theirs, and after eating some Indian food we had a pretty early one. The next day we met at the train station for a daytrip to Monaco, which is only about 20 minutes away by train. After wandering up by the palace for a while, we spent a while in a public swimming pool and then changed into more respectable clothes to go up to Monte Carlo Casino. It cost 10 euro to get into the casino and while the building was beautiful, it was a bit of a disappointment. It was early on a Saturday evening but not much was going on. I was hoping to play some poker but none was running. Oh well. I have a panorama shot of Monte Carlo harbour, it’s pretty big so I could keep the detail in it, so I've put it on a separate link: click here to check it out.

After bailing out back to Nice, we had a night on the town, although Julia and her boyfriend went home earlyish, while I kicked on solo until 5:30 in the morning or something. On returning to my hotel I was sober enough to realise that I'd feel like crap the next morning. My flight to Barcelona left late night the next night, so I decided I should book my room another night and spend most of the day napping. I tried to put this plan into action but the guy at the desk at 6am or whatever it was didn't speak a lot of English, especially not slurred English, and I was unsure if I had made myself understood. I therefore set my alarm for noon the next day, which was checkout time. When it went off, I was hungover as expected, but grabbed the phone and called reception. It turned out that I had succeeded in booking another night.... in the room next door, which involved packing up all my stuff, going down to reception and getting a new key, which defied the point of being able to stay in bed. I grumpily requested they cancel it, gathered my stuff together, and went and got my head straight in the lobby instead. Then I hung out at Julia's apartment until it was time to go and get my flight.

I didn't really achieve much in Nice, but I did have a really fun night out and it was good catching up with Julia. Doecke had told me that Nice sucked and Monaco was great, while I had the opposite experience. He didn't like Nice because it was unfriendly (not my experience) and full of drunk tourists (surely that's the whole point), while I didn't much like Monaco because there was nothing to do once you're over staring at people's Fararis. I wouldn't actually say I disliked the place, but a daytrip was definitely enough.

Onwards to Barcelona!

Champagne-Ardenne

The day after Rock Werchter ended, we hired a car in Brussels and Doecke drove us southwest into France. Our destination: Reims (say: Rhayms), the capital of the region of Champagne-Ardenne. After setting up camp in our hostel, and learning to our displeasure that gambling sites were blocked on the internet there, we walked into the center of Reims and managed to score a table at Le Foch, a Michelin one-star restaurant there. The prices were very reasonable - I had a 4-course menu plus cheese for 45 euro - and the food was excellent. An older couple from Alsace had the table adjacent to us and the man helped us translate the menu, talked to us a little about the regional peculiarities of Alsace, and at the end of the meal gave us his address and contact details with an invitation to visit him in Strasbourg. I have no idea who started the rumour about the French being arrogant and unfriendly, but it would be right up there with "The food in Italy is great" on a top-ten of completely untrue statements about Europe.

The next day we caught the train to Epernay (something like Ay-pear-nay), the wine capital of Champagne. First we went to a bar I had read about, called C-Comme Champagne, where five different small producer wines are served by the glass, changing weekly. We got a glass of each and they ranged from average through to very good. Then it was time to tour the cellars of Moet et Chandon. After learning about the methode champenoise, Doecke asked if there were any champagnes made without sugar added after fermentation as is normally done. After finding out that these "zero-dosage" wines do exist, he decided he wanted to try one, so we headed back to C-Comme Champagne and asked if they had any. They only had one, so we bought a bottle to drink, and coincidentally the producer (owner or winemaker or maybe both, I'm not sure) of the champagne was in the bar at the time. He was a friendly guy who chatted to us for a while about the wine we had bought, his business and the region in general. It was a really good experience. We had dinner at a place that allowed you to bring your own wine to drink (a very uncommon idea in France - and no corkage charge!), but unfortunately I selected a particularly poor Chateauneuf-du-Pape from the local wine store. Pretty good food though and well priced.

That night I decided that my plan of heading to Bordeaux after Champagne was no good. I had just had two full days of wine-related acitivities and didn't fancy spending the weekend doing more of the same in a city without a backpacker scene, when I could be doing something more social. Instead I decided to catch a sleeper train to Nice the next night and catch up with Julia, a girl I had met on my Europe trip last year. This plan would also allow me the opportunity to daytrip to Monaco.

The next day we visited a forest near Reims which is famous for having a number of beech trees which are mutated in some way - either a genetic variation or a viral infection - that leaves them gnarled and deformed. It's supposed to be spooky or something, but we found it pretty underwhelming. It did provide us with an opportunity to drive around the countryside of Champagne though.




Then I said my goodbyes to Dane and Mike (although I'll be seeing Dane again in Portugal in not too much longer) and hopped on my sleeper train to Nice. I was kind of dreading the 12-hour trip but actually it wasn't bad at all. Trains are much better than planes in so many ways. It isn't just that you have a little bed and can walk around whenever you want - it's things like not listening to the low-frequency drone from jet engines for 12 hours.... and rather than having to breathe stuffy dehumidified air, you have the opportunity at any time to go to the window and get a blast of country air in your face... then you can hang out at the window and look at the blanket of ground fog over rural France, watch little villages with illuminated churches on hills as they fly past and wonder what the lives of the people who live there are like....

And now we're on to Nice... but that's another blog post.

Rock Werchter

After arriving at Rock Werchter, located next to a small town called Werchter just outside of the city of Leuven, we set up camp in the tent city in area A2, just one of about 15 camping areas.



We got there late, and Mike managed to miss Counting Crows for the third time. The first time, he bought tickets to their show in Adelaide and then got the day of the concert wrong, and the second time he bought tickets and they canceled.

Through a guy from Adelaide called Dan, we were introduced to a group of around 20 people, mostly Australians living in London, with a few Norwegians. One guy had brought an Australian flag, which was flown in the middle of our camp, Camp Australia:


On the last day, the flag blew off the pole and was (we think) stolen. Another guy had a Trinidad & Tobago flag he'd bought at the last soccer World Cup, so we briefly became Camp Trinidad & Tobago. There were several boxing kangaroos flying elsewhere. I also saw an England flag, a California flag, an Amsterdam flag and a Japanese flag.

On to the acts. I only saw about two bands a day. Some people like to see everything at a festival, but I find it just tires me and makes me less enthused about the bands I actually want to see. Dane and I took advantage of the free buses into Leuven on a couple of days to see a film and watch the Wimbledon final.

Anyway....

THE GREAT

Radiohead: Probably the band people were most interested in, their setlist was not what I would have chosen. They only played one track off my favourite album, The Bends, and that was Sulk which I don't like at all. However, their performance was so strong that even the tracks I didn't know or particularly like were great. In particular they put in a great performance of what I was later told was You And Whose Army. Other highlights for me included Paranoid Android, 15 Step and Nude. They played the whole of In Rainbows bar one or two tracks. Thom's voice sounded great and the unity of the band was amazing. A festival highlight for sure.

Underworld: These guys really benefited from the most enthusiastic crowd of the festival. The second-stage tent was crammed full and overflowing with vocal fans, while Beck over at the main stage had a larger but more lukewarm crowd. At one point the singer said "Thanks for turning this into the main stage" and that's definitely how it felt. Highlights included Born Slippy (obviously), Two Months Off and King Of Snake.

Ben Folds: Excellent performance as usual, Folds has a lot of charisma, there was plenty of crowd participation, and again the crowd was really into it. My highlight was probably a tweaked version of the joke cover Bitches Ain't Shit.

THE GOOD

Chemical Brothers: Almost made it to the Great section. The visual show they put on was incredible and the good tracks were great, but I've left them down here because frankly the new album sucks and half an hour of that in the middle of the set had me nearly falling asleep. Some of the blame for this should probably go to the fact that they stopped playing at 3am, but meh.

REM: I'm not the world's biggest REM fan, but they put on a solid show with a good mix of old and new.

Panic At The Disco: Good solid pop, if you like that sort of thing.

THE BAD

Only one entry in this section....

Moby: I know a lot of people enjoyed this, but I thought he was awful. Musically it was pretty terrible. Most of the songs were over a generic 4-4 beat with slightly off beat bassline designed to make people jump up and down. When he was first on stage he was playing guitar and got it completely out of time. He sang on some of the tracks, and when he does that on albums he has multiple takes and studio production magic to assist him, but the fact is that he can't sing at all. He has no charisma or stage presence whatsoever; just as I'd nearly start to enjoy myself, he'd prance around the stage and go "Yeah!" or "Come on!" into the mike and ruin everything.

I saw a few other bands, but I don't have enough of an opinion to write about them.

After another night in Brussels, we headed to the Champagne region in France. Will blog about that in a sec.

Slovenia

All my flights to Ljubljana took about 35 hours total. Nothing really to report except that the view of Hong Kong during landing was amazing and has made me excited about going there as part of a trip around Asia. After making it to Ljubljana Airport I split a taxi into town with an ethnic-Swedish Finnish girl who was fluent in English and competent in Hungarian and enjoyed talking at a million miles an hour in all of them. After making it to my hostel I relaxed for a few hours before heading out drinking with a 6'8" ex-professional volleyball player from Canada.

Slovenia is a country of around 2 million people. It's one of those places that has been kicked around between about 800 different regimes over the course of the last couple of millennia. Most recently it was part of Yugoslavia, but this ended after the Ten Days War in 1991, through which Slovenia became the first Balkan state to gain independence.

Ljubljana, the capital, only has about 300,000 inhabitants. It was quite a nice city, but without much to distinguish it from other European cities. I was fine with only having one night there. The drawcards of Slovenia are to be found out in Bled and the surrounding Triglav National Park. On my second day I caught the bus to Bled with the Canadian and a Swedish guy and spent the day wandering around the stunning lake and revisiting the castle. In the evening I met up with Mike and Dane and we played cards with some people off the Triglav daytrip they'd just done.

We had three more days in Bled. Highlights included:

- Swimming out to Bled Island with Dane. From the point on the shore that we started from, it was probably 400 metres each way. Dane is a pretty good swimmer, but I'm hopeless and ended up doing survival strokes most of the way. The island doesn't have much on it other than the church, which we didn't go into because it was Sunday and we were in nothing but shorts and dripping wet. There are 99 steps up to the church from the dock. A tradition is for newly married men to carry their wives up the steps. Lacking brides, we just wandered round the island and caught our breath (OK, I caught my breath) before swimming back.

- Kayaking on the Sava Bohinjka river. Mike and I went on a morning trip to do this. The section of the river has a few basic rapids - something like grade 1 - which was perfect as it provided a bit of interest while keeping our chance of dying acceptably low. Mike tipped over once but I managed to stay upright.

- ATV quad biking. It took me a few minutes to get the hang of driving them. At first, because I was sitting in a saddle and using handlebars, my subconscious was convinced I was riding a bike, and kept issuing me with imminent death warnings every time the thing tilted past a certain angle, or lost a little traction. Eventually my inner voice came to the conclusion that I must actually be driving a car and settled down, enabling me to relax and enjoy the scenery, which was incredible. Slovenia is a strong challenger to Norway for prettiest country in Europe. It's a jumble of amazing skyscraping rocky alps, fluorescent blue rivers and lakes, and lush, deep green forests. It looks more like something out of Middle Earth than a real place.

The only thing I missed out on was hiking the nearby Vintgar Gorge, which is supposed to be awesome, but I think there's a very good chance I'll be back to Bled for a third time in the future.

I tried to take photos on the last day, but discovered my camera was out of batteries and didn't have time to recharge it. I suggest checking out the photos here or looking at my Bled photos from last year here.

I'm now typing this in my underwear in a hotel in Brussels, Belgium, having woken up a bit too early on the first morning of Rock Werchter, the music festival we're headed to next. I have 50 minutes left to check out, so I'd better get moving.

CV In Europe 2 - Electric Boogaloo

CATHAY PACIFIC AIRWAYS FLIGHT CX 104
DEPART ADELAIDE/ADELAIDE ARPT 1110 26 JUN 08
ARRIVE HONG KONG/HONG KONG INT 2205 26 JUN 08

CATHAY PACIFIC AIRWAYS FLIGHT CX 289
DEPART HONG KONG/HONG KONG INT 2350 26 JUN 08
ARRIVE FRANKFURT/FRANKFURT INT 0600 27 JUN 08

--

CATHAY PACIFIC AIRWAYS FLIGHT CX 254
DEPART LONDON/HEATHROW 2235 29 AUG 08
ARRIVE HONG KONG/HONG KONG INT 1750 30 AUG 08

CATHAY PACIFIC AIRWAYS FLIGHT CX 105
DEPART HONG KONG/HONG KONG INT 2335 30 AUG 08
ARRIVE ADELAIDE/ADELAIDE ARPT 0940 31 AUG 08

Basic plan at the moment, after the festival in Belgium in early July, is to head southwest through the Loire Valley and Bordeaux in France, then down to Barcelona, across to Granada, and up through Portugal. Then I plan to fly from Lisbon to somewhere in Croatia, do an island-hopping tour there, and explore Montenegro a little. Then I fly up to Edinburgh to do a tour of Scotland and catch some of the Edinburgh Fringe, before flying home ex London.

Rock Concerts & Car Crashes

We got quite a late start catching the ferry from Moskenes to Bodø. After dinnering to Bodø we planned to stay at a camping and guesthouse place in the middle of nowhere, called Lusøy I think. Upon arriving there, though, we discovered a goddamn week long music festival taking place right exactly where we had planned to sleep. It was fairly late at this point and we couldn't keep going because we had to catch a ferry that didn't operate again until the next morning. We therefore had little choice but to join in the party. We couldn't enter the concert grounds because entry was something stupid like 600 crowns (~$A 120), but there turned out to be plenty going on outside. Specifically, most of the locals were getting so drunk that they couldn't even move, and we were getting offered beer and moonshine from all directions. I slept in the car at about 3:30, but Mike just stayed up all night. As a consequence, I had to do most of the driving the next day on our way to Trondheim.

When we finally arrived in Trondheim, we didn't have the address of our hostel, which was called the "Trondheim InterRail Center". We presumed it would be near the central train station, so we began trying to find that. The traffic conditions in the city were pretty bad. In particular, often there was only one traffic light visible when nearing an intersection and often that was in the opposite corner to where your car is. So at one point I'm rounding a corner, doing maybe 40, when the sun jumps into my eyes. I squinted and spotted a red traffic light at the end of the corner, just as Mike simultaneously yelled "Dude! Red!". I hit the brakes and we pulled up pretty sharply (but nowhere near locking them up) and ended up a foot or two over the line. Mike had time to turn to me and say something like "Be more careful, that wasn't cool", before there was an almighty squeal behind us and a car drove into the back of us doing maybe 30, 35 kph.

The car was pretty undamaged. The lower back panel would need replacing, but that's plastic anyway, and the underlying metal was bent a little. The car was definitely 100% driveable. We pulled around the corner and got the guy's details. Even though I'd driven a bit unsafely, it was of course pretty clear that it was his fault, what with us being stationary at a red light at the time of the crash. He also mentioned that this was his "third accident this year". To be fair, that doesn't necessarily reflect badly on him given the stunning driving we saw in the rest of our time in Trondheim. One time, we were travelling down a main road, when another guy moving in the same direction as us stops, slams it in reverse, and starts reversing down the road at us. Another time, Mike was approaching a red light at which several cars are stopped, when suddenly one just hallucinates that the light has turned green or something, and hits the gas and heads through the red. But my favourite is complicated enough that it requires an mspaint diagram:



We had tried to turn left out of the side road when we noticed the obstacle blocking our path. Mike tried to swing around in a U-turn as shown by the arrow. However, the car in front of us was blocking the turn - but they had space to move forward, which would enable us to make the turn. Mike hooted the horn and the driver of the other car turned around and acknowledged us with a nod. Then, she.... slammed it into reverse and started reversing towards the front of our car. Mike and I both just gaped at this for a second or two, after which Mike had the presence of mind to throw the car into reverse and move backwards. He later admitted that had there been a car behind us, he might well have hit it, because he didn't have time to check. Had he not moved when he did, I think there's a very good chance we'd have been hit, maybe 75 or 80 percent.

When we eventually made it to our hostel, we found it located in the local university student building, which was absolutely massive. The dorms were massive and kind of dirty and the bathrooms very limited and also dirty, but we didn't mind because it was a really cool place. The bar there was great. We hung out in a local guy's apartment, listening to his extensive music collection, then later I slept and Mike headed out on the town. When he finally got back at like 3:30, the door to the hostel was locked. Mike therefore decided to climb in an open window and found himself in a locked private bar, so he just helped himself to the party supplies in there and used the internet until someone came and let him out in the morning. Trondheim was a great town, maybe my favourite in Scandinavia.

After two nights in Trondheim we continued towards Stockholm, stopping for a quiet night in a nice hostel in Sundsvall. We hit Stockholm on the 8th, setting up camp in a very centrally located budget hotel.

Pining For The Fjords

The day after finishing the hike it was Lauren's 30th birthday. She wanted to go see a fjord, so we headed across the Norwegian border to Narvik, where we stopped for a spot of lunch and to acquire a cable. The Aygo's stereo is pretty basic, but one feature it does have is an auxilliary socket, enabling us to play music off our iPods while driving. Then we headed south into a nearby fjord, where we spent the day roaming around stunning scenery in awesome weather. That night we went to a restaurant in Narvik which had been recommended to Lauren. I had reindeer - it was excellent. Reindeer is a common meat up here, cheaper than stuff like beef and lamb which mostly has to be shipped in. Right at the end of the day, Mike somehow managed to put a nasty gash in his leg while climbing over one of those metal road-edge barrier things. This gave me my first ever opportunity to drive on the right hand side of the road, something Mike has been doing for months. The difficulty of piloting a manual left hand drive car on the right side of the road was exacerbated by the unfamiliarity of the car and the fact that I hadn't driven at all for two months, and I was off to a shaky start. The first right turn I attempted, instinct took over and I wound up on the left side of the road. Also, I kept hitting the windscreen wipers when trying to use the indicator, because they're on opposite sides of the wheel to normal. We did make it back to the hostel in Abisko, however, and I've gotten used to the road rules now. I don't like the car much. It's geared strangely, with first gear responsible for everything up to around 30kph, then second taking you up to 50kph and third all the way to 75kph or so. I have no idea what fifth gear is even for, since the car seems to top out at like 130. That brings me to the lack of power. The thing feels like it's powered by a hairdryer motor, and what power it does have is delivered only at a rev count of at least 3000 and preferably 3500. So if you change up and the revs drop to 2000, flooring it results only in the car emitting a low moan, like a cow in pain. At least it's fuel efficient, which is important when driving in a country where petrol costs about three times what it does in Australia.

The next day the girls caught the train back to Stockholm and Mike and I began our Norske trip. First stop was Tromsø, a northern university town built mostly on a big island, sort of like a kiddy version of Manhattan. (If you're wondering how to pronounce that o letter, it's sort of like the "u" in "gun", with a bit more length in it. Also, you roll the r's. So sort of like "Trrromsuuh".) It was here that we went to our first Norwegian bar. I've already alluded to the high prices in Norway; it's one of the most expensive countries in the world, much worse than the already expensive Sweden. Apparently it's because of the oil reserves - since they can basically dig money out of the ground, there's a big inflationary effect. A (metric) pint in a bar here will cost you somewhere in the neighbourhood of $A 13. Even for seasoned money wasters like myself, some of the prices are pretty jaw dropping.

In Tromsø we hiked up a mountain close to the town and got some pretty nice views. The rest of the time we spent planning the remainder of our trip. We decided to head to Lofoten for like 4 nights, then south to Trondheim and then across back to Stockholm to return the car. From Tromsø we headed south down a stunning scenic route recommended by a tourist guide. We stopped for some mini-hikes and suchlike and so, despite an early start, didn't make Lofoten in a day. We therefore booked a room at a guesthouse in Sortland, which was just the home of an old couple. The room was an incredibly cheap 250 NKR (~$A 50) and slept both of us, and the breakfast (65 NKR, ~$A 12) was completely insane. It covered a full large size table. There were rolls, bread, scrambled eggs, different types of cold meats, herring, some other unidentifiable fish thing, yoghurt, fruit, strawberries from their own garden, coffee, tea, orange juice, etc etc etc etc. Everything you can possibly imagine. After eating well there, we continued to Lofoten. I'm writing this on our last night here at a very cozy hostel in Stamsund. We've lazed around a lot, but also managed a hike to the tallest mountain on this island (about 730 vertical metres hiked) and a brief, embarrassingly incompetent stint in one of the free rowboats the hostel hires. Tomorrow we head south towards Trondheim, but will probably have to stop for a night again, most likely somewhere in Mosjøen.

Land Of The Midnight Sun

Other than prepare for our upcoming hiking trip, we didn't achieve much in Stockholm. Mike mostly spent the time sleeping and I didn't have the enthusiasm for anything except putting in a token appearance at the bar across the road from the hostel. I did manage to smash my head quite badly against one of the bunks, but stemmed the bleeding pretty fast. We also managed to see Transformers, a movie I had heard a lot of good reports of, apparently from people who saw a different movie than we did. Come the Saturday evening, we boarded our 18 hour train for Abisko in Swedish Lappland. Alana (Mike's ex-girlfriend) and her friend Lauren were to join the train in Uppsala, not far north of Stockholm. It was a long trip, but I had ensured sleep by acquiring a Valium from a Mexican prescription-drug fiend in our hostel room. It certainly did the job, but I felt pretty awful after waking the next day and probably won't try that strategy again. We didn't arrive in Abisko until the afternoon, so we crashed at the hostel there overnight in preparation for beginning our hikes the next day.

We awoke late on the Monday morning and then Mike spent some time mercilessly repacking the girls' ludicrously overpacked bags. I packed very light, anticipating good facilities at the huts along the way. We eventually got underway at something like 2pm, but the late start wasn't a problem since there's daylight 24 hours a day. To ensure good morale, Mike had acquired a team uniform for us in New York City:




I don't think I've mentioned this yet, but my camera took a knock in Ireland and doesn't work. More accurately, the shutter button doesn't work. The rest of the camera works great, but having no shutter button makes taking photos a bit tricky. I'm therefore reliant on Mike at the moment for my photos.

We walked through relatively flat terrain the first day. The path was very well defined, and through boggy areas makeshift boardwalks had generally been constructed. A German guy later told us that Norwegians referred derisively to Swedish walking trails as "motorways". We walked a long way, though - around 35km, all the way to Alesjaure, the second "hut" along the Kungsleden, or King's Trail. They call them huts, but really they're hostels, complete with bunk beds, pillows, blankets, cooking facilities, a shop and so forth. Weather was excellent throughout the day, bright and sunny, right up until we reached Alesjaure at past midnight.

The next day Lauren felt a little ill, so we decided to have a rest day. Alana, Mike and I took advantage of the sauna.The idea was that after sweating for a while, you ran out and down a hill and jumped in the river. The problem was that the hill was too treacherous to run down, and the river was shallow and carpeted with very slippery stones at the point where you were supposed to jump in, so it wasn't really possible.

Next day we left the Kungsleden to head towards our next hut, Vistasvagge. It was an 18km walk through a valley lined with imposing mountains and even a small glacier or two. There were some patches of bad weather, but it wasn't too bad overall. The lowlight of the day was Mike leading us down the wrong path and us having to traipse across a swamp to correct our course, whereupon Lauren and I were both stung by some insect. I think it might be some sort of deer fly. It materialises out of the swamp, lands on your lower leg, bites you, and flies off. The whole process takes about half a second. Then the surrounding area goes red and stings like crazy for a few minutes. Justice was inflicted about half an hour later when Mike got stung twice after we got back on the path. After we reached Vistasvagge, Alana spent the night getting taught magic tricks by some 11 year old kid, while the rest of us just relaxed.

The third day hike started off with miserable weather, but things cleared up a bit after a while. We had to get up at 6am because the plan was to hike 20km and catch a boat a further 12km down to Nikkolotka at 12:30. The hike was unfortunately through some pretty boring territory. Towards the end the weather closed in again and the boat ride was incredibly cold, as it was like being blasted with 40kph winds while saturated and cold. Things didn't improve when we got to Nikkolotka and discovered that we had the time of our bus to Kiruna wrong and it had already left. We had a hire car to pick up, so we all hitchhiked into Kiruna and reconvened at the hire place. After discovering we'd hired a manual Toyota Aygo, we headed back to Abisko armed with pizza and wine and spent the night in a hostel there.

I'll write about Norway later, but for now it's just important to mention that I have started suffering from travel fatigue. I think visiting more new places just because I can would be a waste now, so after we return the car in Stockholm, I plan to go to Helsinki to hang out with some locals Mike knows, and then call it a day and fly back to Adelaide from there.

England

This one's easy. Apart from catch up with Emma and Waitey, and Bonnie from Planet, (and lose a bunch of money playing poker) I did absolutely nothing. It was great.

I'm now in Stockholm (first impressions: great) with Mike, and we're about to go sort out car hiring and some other stuff.

Also, as always, my Ireland pics have been put up on my Picasa page. The shutter button on my camera is broken, so I might be relying on Wes for pics from now on.

Ireland

What do I say about Ireland? I liked it a lot - the people are friendly and there's an air of jovial optimism throughout, even in the once-troubled North. I could give a blow by blow description of the tour I went on, but that would miss the point, I think. The tour was more of an immersion in the existing pub culture of Ireland and the ties the country and its people retain to their often turbulent history. I had a good group and it was probably my favourite tour that I've been on so far.

A couple of highlights, though - the magical Aran islands, where I enjoyed the hell out of biking up and down the island. I might have to get hold of a bike when I get home. Being in Derry on July 12th and having the infamous Orange Lodge parade march right past us was pretty crazy - ten (or even five) years ago, going anywhere near the thing would have been suicidal. This year, the riot police were out, but looking bored, and the worst we saw was some young teenagers throwing stones at a couple of buildings. Having spent a bit of time in the region, my personal opinion is that, similarly to Palestine, the Republicans had a just cause, but destroyed my sympathy for then by randomly setting off bombs everywhere.

I'd like to return to Ireland in the future and maybe spend some time in Dublin, but I wasn't sorry when the tour was over - it's hard to keep up that pace for long.

Italy

I hope I don't offend anyone with this, but this would have to be my least favourite country in Europe, so far anyway. The beer sucks. The food, at standard price points, sucks. Almost everything is broken and/or dirty. The people are rude, to each other and also to customers in restaurants and bars. It sort of combines the rudeness and poor service of some of Eastern Europe with the high prices and rampant tourism of the West. I know a lot of people love it, but I'm not sure why.

Still, I'm having a fine time, thanks to the hostels I've stayed at, which have been good enough that it doesn't matter what city they're located in. I've been three nights in Rome already and except for sightseeing and eating I haven't ventured outside the hostel at all.

Backing up a sec though, Florence was OK, but after I got over the great view of the campsite I was at (up by Piazzale Michelangelo, which is a must visit if you go to Florence) there wasn't a lot to do. It was hard to work up the enthusiasm to go out to bars in town when the hostel was a nice place to socialise with other backpackers. One day, however, I did daytrip to Cinque Terre, a World Heritage listed series of 5 little fishing towns along the western coast of Italy. I hiked the two and a half hour or so distance between them and it was really nice there. A highlight was taking a dip in the Mediterranean at the northernmost village, which is the prettiest.

By the way, I uploaded all my photos from the trip so far here, including the Intrepid photos and the ones from Cinque Terre etc. No time to comment on them really, but I recommend taking a look at the Bled and Cinque Terre photos.

After Florence I headed south to Rome and have been here for three nights. St Peter's Basilica managed to be simultaneously impressive and dull. All religious art looks the same and I'm incredibly sick of it. If I see one more painting of Mary holding the infant Jesus I may set it on fire. The Colosseum was better, although due to the unbelievable inefficiency of, well, everything in Italy, the line took about 5 years to get through and I felt going inside actually somehow made the structure LESS impressive. The imposing outer wall is the best angle on it, I think.

Anyway, being in Italy was bad enough, and writing huge blog posts about it is definitely not how I intend to spend my time. It's American Independence Day today so no doubt the Americans here will be in the mood to party. I'm flying to Ireland tomorrow, next dispatch will probably not be till after the 8 day tour I'm doing, which ends on the 14th.

Bohemia And Beyond

I stayed up all night dinking in Krakow the night before my early morning flight to Prague. I'll go off on a quick tangent here about something I love and something I hate about Europe.

Something I love: not only can you, as in the United States, buy liquor virtually anywhere, but you can consume said liquor anywhere you like. Walking along the street, in parks, on public transport, whatever. As with pot in Amsterdam, seeing this policy in operation makes me wonder why people expend so much effort preventing other people doing it. I suppose at worst it might lead to some broken glass in the streets (although this wasn't in evidence), to which the European response appears to be "Wear shoes, then".

Something I hate: charging money to use toilets. Public toilets are bad enough - there's nothing worse than fumbling with change in an unfamiliar currency when you're busting for a piss. On my last night in Krakow, however, I encountered my first pub which actually charged to use the pub toilets. The attitude seems to be that they can charge me for their beer both entering and leaving my body.

OK, end of tangent. After my flight to Prague I was pretty wrecked. I had a hostel bed booked so I headed directly there. When I booked my flights to Europe, my travel agent repeatedly inquired whether I was going to Prague. "You must," she insisted "stay in Czech Inn in Prague". I dutifully booked it, even though hostelworld.com had several other higher rated hostels. This is the last time I trust a random travel agent over hostelworld. It's not that it was a bad hostel. It was very slick and newly furnished, but this concealed some fundamental problems, the most glaring of which was the location. The normal tradeoff for an out of the way location is a quiet hostel. Czech Inn accomplished the difficult feat of being nowhere near anything useful, yet still located smack on a main road. My room was on the corner of the hostel facing the road. Given the hot weather, closing the windows was unthinkable, so they were wide open. The effect was as if there was a highway through the middle of the room. The traffic noise was thunderous and made sleeping tricky. Nevertheless, after my flight from Krakow, I slept fitfully until about 3:30pm, effectively writing off my first day.

The next day I daytripped out to Kutna Hora, a little town an hour or so out of Prague. The attraction there is the Kostnice Ossuary, a church decorated by an artist with bones dug up from around 20,000 people earlier buried in the church grounds. There's a chandelier built of bones and a huge Hungarian coat of arms made from bones.

The following day was the 16th, the first day of my Intrepid tour. After wasting a bunch of time doing laundry at a very inefficient laundromat, I checked in at the joining point. I knew already there were going to be 9 people on the tour. "Ah," said the lady from the accommodation agency "you must be Christopher". I was about to ask how the hell she knew that, when the most likely.explanation popped into my mind, and I lead forward and scanned the list of people on my tour. Yep. All females other than me. But it turned out that they weren't all "girls". There's no age limit for Intrepid trips, but it still surprised me a bit to learn that we had three women in their 60s on the trip. The other five girls were all normal backpacker age. But given the loose structure of the trip, my contact with the older ones was minimal, which was lucky since one of them was a total pain in the ass. There was also a trip leader (a Hungarian girl) and a trainee trip leader (an English guy, so actually I wasn't the only guy around). All the five younger girls were cool. Three of them (Ruth, Alison, Julie) were quietish, one of them (Julia) was a party girl and the other (Annie) was sort of in between.

There's no way I'm writing a blow by blow description of the whole tour, so here's some random stuff in point form. Pics will have to wait till I have time to upload them:

- Prague was nice, but I didn't have that killer a time there. I think that was probably just because I didn't know the good spots to go; Julia, from the tour, said she had an amazing time there.

- Cesky Krumlov was pretty, but there wasn't a whole lot to do.

- Vienna was good fun - we went to some nice bars there - and the architecture is incredibly grandiose. I found it a little amusing - it feels like they still think they're head of some immense empire, instead of basically being Germany's sidekick.

- Budapest was great. I can see where it gets its nickname "The Paris of Eastern Europe". It's kind of a cafe society, and capital of a country with a strong identity. The "House of Terror" museum here, featuring the crimes of the Nazis and (mostly) the Communists, is really good. It cost 10 million to build. We went to a great bar that was a converted auto mechanic shop. It was very atmospheric. It's a shame a place like that in Australia would be shut down by some stupid health and safety law. We also got caught in the most insane storm in Budapest. It was a nice, sunny day, if a little humid. Then - wham! Out of the sky comes a huge, tropical-type storm. Hail got whipped into us by ferocious winds. Then the rain came, and it was like running along the bottom of a lake. We got completely saturated.

- Bled was amazing. The scenery and atmosphere in the town itself was brilliant, but the main thing was the full day adventure tour we went on. When I say full day, I mean it - 8am to 7:30pm. It's called the "Emerald Mountain Adventure" and involves getting driven around to different places in the Julian Alps. At some we hiked a little up mountains, at one place we went to see the spring source of a river, we went whitewater rafting, we swam under a waterfall, we jumped off a 12 metre high bridge into a river.... all for only 88 euro, so pretty good value. The Julian Alps are brilliant countryside and the Slovenians we met (admittedly in a tourist town) were the nicest people I've met in Eastern Europe. I was strongly considering quitting the tour in Bled and staying for two extra nights, but nobody would stay there with me, so I instead resolved to return later and have a good look round Slovenia, including the capital Ljubljana and the cave systems and so forth.

- Venice was pretty much exactly what I expected - a town thoroughly whored out to busloads full of middle-aged sightseers. The portion of the streets not occupied by slack-jawed Americans was covered with stalls hawking all manner of useless souvenir rubbish, plus immigrants thrusting roses into the hands of passing girls and demanding payment from their boyfriends. The Piazza San Marco and Grand Canal are worth seeing, though, so I think it's worth calling in to the place, but you definitely don't want to stay longer than a night.

I'm in Verona at the moment, having spent last night in a hotel here with Julie and Annie from the tour. Today I'm headed to Florence. My trip plan from there is: 27th-30th Florence (including a daytrip to Pisa/Cinque Terre, and maybe one to Sienna), 1st-4th Rome, then I'm flying to Dublin on the 5th and joining an 8-day Shamrocker tour around Ireland starting on the 7th. That finishes on Saturday the 14th, just in time for me to fly to London and go to a house party at Emma and Waitey's. Then I'm staying in London until the 19th, when I'm meeting Doecke and we're flying to Stockholm, where a day or two later we meet up with Alana and her friend Lauren and go hiking in the north of Sweden.

Poland

I'm not going to spend much time on Warsaw. My hostel was pretty average, located in a residential area miles from anything useful. There's no incentive to put hostels in a good area in Warsaw, I think, because there isn't a heap of tourism. Apparently Warsaw does have an old town, but I never saw it. I just took like an hour-long walk out to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising memorial. On the first night I went out to a club, which was actually really fun. The second night I just hung around the hostel drinking and chatting with a couple of American guys called Warner and Paul, who were coincidentally both travelling to Krakow on the same day as me, and staying in the same hostel there.

Krakow is entirely different to Warsaw. It's one of my favourite places on the trip so far. It's extremely touristy, but not ruined by tourists. The first thing I saw on arriving at Krakow was this:



It's a huge board that shows exactly what rooms are and aren't available in hotels all over the city. Pretty cool. After we made it to our hostel, which is brilliantly located in the heart of the old town, we headed out at night to check out the town, and were confronted with a massive open-air concert, complete with orchestra and choir, in the middle of the Old Town Square:




Apparently it was because it's 750 years since Krakow became a city. Who knew?

Krakow is an extremely pretty town. Here's some random shots I've taken since I've been here:









That last is my hostel's street. If you zoom in on the middle you might be able to see a little green/yellow/red striped sign; that's my hostel.

After seeing the open-air concert, I checked my mail. You might remember two English girls, Katherine and Lindsey, that I met in Paris. In a huge piece of randomness, I had an email from Katherine telling me that they'd just arrived in Krakow! I replied asking if they wanted to meet, and we arranged to meet up the next day. I met them the next afternoon and we checked out the royal castle and cathedral. We organised to do something called the "Booze Cruise" that night. It was supposed to be a three hour cruise down the river, with unlimited alcohol and a BBQ included. However when I headed down there that night, there was nothing going on. I somehow missed the girls, but it was the same deal for them. So after some email back-and-forth, myself, Paul and Warner all headed to their hostel just out of old town and drank at the bar there.

The following day I signed up for the afternoon tour of Auschwitz. Auschwitz is the German translation of the name of the Polish village it is located in, Oświęcim. It's actually three camps. The first, Auschwitz I, was a typical concentration camp. The second, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, was the largest Nazi camp and was the famous extermination camp. The third was a camp built closer to a work site so that weak prisoners from Birkenau would not have to hike a long distance before work. The Auschwitz museum is located at Auschwitz I. Only original buildings are preserved at Birkenau - there are no exhibits.

This is Auschwitz I:




The museum was quite confronting. After being gassed, victims would be stripped of personal belongings and had their hair shaved. Valuable belongings would be shipped back to Germany and the rest destroyed. Even their hair was shipped back, and (here's something I didn't know) textiles were made from it, for use in uniforms and so on. They had examples of the cloth there. When the camp was liberated, piles of personal belongings and hair that the SS didn't have time to do anything with were still lying in camp warehouses. These discoveries are exhibited at the museum. There is an entire glass-walled room piled high with shaved-off hair. There is a MASSIVE room containing 40,000 pairs of victims' shoes.

Some of the punishment cells are also open. I'll leave the details of that to people who want to read about it: go here and search for "block 11". It's hard to believe that all this took place a mere 50 years ago, and not in the Dark Ages.

There was also the opportunity to look through the only gas chamber and crematorium located at Auschwitz I. The others (at Birkenau) were all destroyed by the SS when they fled the camp prior to liberation by the Red Army.

After the museum we took the bus over to Auschwitz II-Birkenau. It's HUGE.



This is the platform where victims would come in via train. Those judged unable to work (a large majority) were immediately sent to the gas chambers. The others were housed in one of the Auschwitz camps and worked to death.



This is the women's camp at Birkenau, which for obvious reasons was a lot smaller than the men's camp, but even it is far too large to fit in shot. It consisted of brick buildings, unlike the men's camp which was mostly wooden barracks. Most of these barracks were burnt down and only the brick chimneys survive. Hopefully these next two images will give an idea of the scope of the men's camp:




More later, but this post is big enough already, I think. Tomorrow I'm catching a plane to Prague at.... 5:30 in the morning. The alternative was a 9-hour train ride, since the Polish trains are, ahem, not quite up to the standard of Western Europe.