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.