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[rachelisnotatwork]

Sweltering round the Fatherland

I did not leave Berlin willingly. In fact I complained constantly throughout the one final brunch I demanded. And on our way to the car rental place. And most of the drive down to Dresden. After nearly 5 weeks in our glorious Airbnb I felt like we probably had at least some light squatters’ rights.

It didn’t help that our apartment in Dresden was in what I’m sure an estate agent would describe as an “up and coming” area, i.e. a bit of a shit hole. It also managed, no matter what we did, to be hotter than the outside world and our host- clearly dubious about the continence of the guests, had covered the bed with extremely noisy plastic undersheets that heated the bedroom to essentially the equivalent of sleeping in a Finnish sauna. That plus a disappointing evening meal did nothing to discourage my belief that leaving Berlin was a mistake.

We had two days in Dresden and it’s surrounds. Because some of the museums are closed on Monday, we decided to use our Monday to go visit “Saxon Switzerland”. The name Saxon Switzerland sets the bar high and naturally it then disappoints because it’s more hilly than Alp-y. I would blame an over-zealous tourist board committee but apparently it was some homesick 18th century Swiss artists.

First off we visited a place called the Bastei bridge, which is a bridge built between giant rock formations. It is pretty beautiful although I feel someone without crushing vertigo could probably appreciate it more, especially since the top was also frequented by a man with an extremely badly behaved Alsatian, thus combining my fear of heights and dogs in one terrifying location.

Our next stop was more pleasant. We walked through the woods and then took a boat ride along the Obere Schleuse, which is a shallow river in a gorge between Germany and the Czech Republic. The boat was gondoliered by a guy who gave a little tour as he punted us slowly down the river. He had what I strongly suspect was a very thick local accent but Marcel thought there might be a chance he’d had a stroke. Either way it was fairly impenetrable to me, expect bizarrely a few minutes where he talked about lichen growth. So I guess that month at language school was really worth it?

The only downside of the trip was that the walk to the boat had been entirely down into the gorge and thus the walk home was entirely uphill. It was fairly steep and exhausting, and what wasn’t particularly reassuring was to find a gravestone half way up one of the steep climbs with a gravestone from the 19th century with a very specific time of death for a forester from something called a “Blutschlage” (literal translation: blood blow). So I guess I should be pleased we got out with just a few insect bites.

The next day we’d booked onto an English-language tour of Dresden. Almost everyone else was north of 75, which made us feel super young. And had also reached the complaining years. The ticket could be torn off to leave a free postcard of Dresden. One Australian woman then complained to the guide that it didn’t include a stamp and wouldn’t let it go.

The tour was pretty good though. The centre of Dresden is stunning as was mostly built by August the Strong, who really liked to party. My favourite fact from the tour was that he’d weigh guests before and after parties and those who hadn’t gained enough weight weren’t invited again because they were clearly no fun. He built a huge complex called the Zwinger for summer parties in addition to a huge palace for one of his mistresses (he had a lot) so he didn’t have to go far for the night.

The downside of touring Dresden is the crushing guilt you get to feel if you are British (or American) for brutally firebombing it. They have pretty much completed the reconstructions now but when you look at the before photos… well, it was no big surprise that both groups were some of the biggest contributors to the fund to rebuild the cathedral (the blacker stones are the only original ones).

After the tour finished we went up the cathedral for the view.

Then we went into the Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon. This is largely a collection of clocks and super creepy automatons from the 18th century, so right up my street. Afterwards we had coffee and cake on a cafe on the roof and I went on what felt like an epic trip in the boiling sun to find a toilet somewhere I could use (doesn’t seem to be a legal requirement for cafes to have one here) and ended up begging a cleaning lady to use a museum one. Think Marcel thought I was pretty much dead by then, I was gone so long.

The next day we headed up North. Whilst our final destination was the island of Ruegen, we had a planned stop for the day at a place called Godnasee. This is a lake in the middle of nowhere, where we had a delightful afternoon swimming, sunbathing and reading. The nice thing about East Germany is it is full of lakes and is rapidly depopulating, so it is very easy to find an empty swimming spot.

We got to Ruegen in the evening, just in time for a quick walk before dinner. There were two national parks we wanted to visit in our two days and because the weather was due to be better at the one further away, we went to the Nationalpark Vorpommersche Boddenlandschaft the next day. The spot we picked  to go to was a lighthouse on a beach that was a 5km walk/cycle ride/horse and carriage ride away from the nearest car park. We decided to walk because of my lack of cycling aptitude and because legs are a lot cheaper than horse-drawn carriages (thanks to the endless slow tragedy of UK politics, the Euro to pound ratio could be best described as...sub-optimal for us).

This turned out to be a mistake. Apparently Marcel had showered in mosquito pheromones that morning or something so after a few minutes he was besieged by such a huge crowd of them that, whilst he was the main attraction, some of them by dint of sheer numbers bumped into me. This lead to less of a “walk” through the woods than a mad charge frantically waving our arms until we eventually reached the lighthouse. The beach there is quite pretty and in typical fashion, once you walk a short distance from the lighthouse, quite empty.

We took a route back through some wetlands to stay in the sunshine and hopefully avoid the mosquito plague- a successful plan. It also brought us across a cafe that served the only accommodation in the park (a caravan park) so stopped to eat the traditional hot sunny day beach food of...struedel.

On our way back we stopped in the city of Stralsund. It is a pretty little city that used to be a Hansa city (so lots of nice brick architecture), spent a long time being part of Sweden and is now the political seat of Angela Merkel. We had a nice wander around and came across a Simson pharmacy, so I felt quite at home.

The next day we headed out to explore Ruegen itself. Our first stop was a wander along the chalk cliffs there. Sort of surprised we found them and that they were decently high as driving around the island it had seemed as flat as a pancake. 

The previous day I had been messaging my friend Karo and mentioned I felt like I was the only British person for about a hundred miles and she directed me towards a place called Woody’s Little Britain, which is a British “emporium” featuring scones and cream tea in the middle of nowhere. Naturally we went. It was pretty boiling, which felt pretty unBritish and the cream was whipped not clotted (Debrett’s would be horrified) but the scones were pretty good.

Afterwards we headed to the beach. Ruegen has some huge long beaches, so we parked up and wandered through the woods to about 10km of pretty empty beach. Marcel went for a swim. I declined because the ocean was full of seaweed and also after Australia, I’m pretty convinced the sea is out to murder me. So I remained on the beach, which in the fashion of East German beaches was full of naked people and noted with amusement that the extremely elderly naked woman sitting a few metres down from us had cracked out a pair of binoculars to look down the beach. I initially just thought she was a shameless pervert, but apparently she was looking to see if her elderly nude swimming companion was coming down the beach (or at least I assumed that was what she was doing, because he did eventually turn up. We didn’t cover the vocab for that in language school).

The following day we headed West. Our first stop was the town of Wismar. Or more precisely a cafe within because we’d left without breakfast and then got stuck in traffic so were both hungry, overly-hot and grumpy on arrival.  We then wandered around the town. It is again, a pretty Hansa city, although this one we bombed a bit. We went up a rebuilt cathedral, which I did point out to Marcel that thanks to our bombing could be reconstructed with a lift right up to the tower in (you’re welcome guys!). It is still a port city which apparently brings logs from everywhere to turn into sawdust, or so the giant piles of logs and delicious smell of sawdust that wafts through the town suggests.

After that we went to Schwerin, which is also lovely and historic. It also has a famous castle which looks a bit gauche if you ask me, but Marcel just says looks German. 

We had a late lunch and then accidentally discovered some weird mooning monument with no explanation. A rather lengthily googling seems to suggest it is a scene from the life of the founder of this town, who got mooned by the folk of his home town when returning home for a visit because he’d directed all the trade that used to go to their town to Schwerin. I would have thought this was the kind of thing that merited a plaque as far lesser things have generated one, but apparently not.

We ended up having a subpar dinner in town and disappointed, both of us developed a craving for ice cream. This is apparently not something you can get in Schwerin after 9pm so we ended up driving to an out of town McDonald’s for late-night McFlurry’s and then I got all indignant that the lids weren’t hedgehog-friendly like we have in the UK, confirming to all the national stereotypes of weird British eccentrics who are overly sentimental about animals.

The following day we weren’t due in Luebeck, our next stop, until the evening and beautiful weather was forecast. So Marcel found us an amazing canoeing place to go. This was on the river Warnow and was a 15km trip down river through a nature reserve. The initial part of our trip was a little more exercise than I’d have liked as we happened to set off at the same time as a large school trip of teenagers. Not wanting to enjoy the beauty and solitude of a nature reserve with 30 shrieking teenagers, we decided to use our superior canoeing skills to put some distance between us and them. Annoyingly though either we are shitter at canoeing than we thought or they were perhaps a school canoe team as we had to paddle REALLY hard to keep any distance between us and them. And when we did create some distance, we managed to catch up with a family that had decided to enhance their trip to this protected nature reserve by mounting a boombox onto their canoe in order to play some incredibly loud techno. Thankfully they decided to pull over for a break before I could ram them and knock their stupid boombox into the water, and shortly after that Marcel wanted to take a side stream so we could “have a picnic at a castle”. This involved some very hard paddling upstream through a shady, stinky mosquito swamp that didn’t actually end in a castle but just in a village with the German word for castle in. Thankfully there was a field we could eat our picnic lunch in, and that placated my bad mood somewhat.

The advantage of this stop was that by the time we rejoined the river, pretty much no one was on it. We still had about 8km to go and this was the wilder, less-maintained stretch with lots of weaving around trees to be done. German prep for these sort of trips is also a lot more casual than English prep so a good few times we were left wondering where to go and which part of a rocky course was better to navigate. But it was beautiful, sunny, thousands of electric blue damselflies constantly flitted around us and there was a spot for a gorgeous (albeit cold) swim.

We finally got into Lubeck and our ancient house in the evening. We then had a great dinner at a place called Schlumacher’s, so that was a great day out. We fell into bed pretty exhausted, and then I nearly fell out again, because that is the problem with elderly houses with subsidence.

The next day we decided to go on a tour of Lubeck. Lubeck clearly doesn’t get a lot of English-speaking tourists as it only has a once-weekly tour in English and that did not happen to coincide with our stays. Completely disregarding my previous experience of near total incomprehension with a german tour, I merrily signed us up for one again. This went slightly better initially as our tour guide was old so spoke slowly and bellowed loudly, but it was boiling hot, I rapidly fatigued and the tour was two incredibly hot hours and by the end I was desperate for him to stop talking as by this stage I wasn’t really getting any of it and everyone kept laughing at jokes I couldn’t get. I ate a huge ice cream to recover from the experience.

Lubeck is an ancient Hansa city that is pretty much entirely a UNESCO world-heritage site for ancient buildings. However the original city was built on swampy ground with some eccentric choices (like a fortified gate that had 3m thick walls on one-side and 1m thick on the other, leading the heavier side sinking a lot faster). The whole town is full of extremely wonky buildings, which you are fairly surprised are still standing. On the outside you can see essentially ornamental pole ends that support the floors and hold the two sides of the buildings together.

In the afternoon, hot and having toured most of Luebeck (as it prides itself on being “the city of short distances”), we decided to retire to the swimming lake opposite our front door. There we wiled away an enjoyable afternoon swimming, sunbathing and eating hot chips with mayonnaise. Glorious.

My grandfather was born in Kiel and the next day we had a plan to drop in there on the way to our next airbnb in the countryside. We had briefly considered staying in Kiel before we discovered it was Kieler Woche, which is some sort of sailing festival shebang. So we decided to limit it to a day trip.

It was exceedingly hot and our trip to Kiel brought forth the following observations 1) sailing festivals are pretty dull if you are on shore and thus are mostly a series of kiosks 2) Kiel was apparently bombed to the ground in WW2 but unlike areas that went for a painstaking reconstruction, they went for the construction of multiple ugly shopping malls 3) I know it sounds like it is impossible but apparently the town has absolutely no shade in it and I had forgotten to put suncream on and get extremely grumpy when I’m too hot.

So all in all, I would not recommend Kiel and our trip there was brief. By the end of a hot sweaty couple of hours there we were both dying for somewhere to cool down and so googled the nearest beaches. We found a nearby beach called Heidkate and headed straight for there.

How nice the beaches are around there appears to be a pretty well-kept secret (perhaps real Germans know. Imitation Germans like Marcel do not). Miles and miles of white sand, grassy dunes and the clean, calm Baltic sea. We found a quiet spot, quickly changed into our swimwear and raced into the...well, Baltic water. It was cold, but in a lovely cold way, especially when you are hot. And lead to the strange dichotomy of having a boiling hot upper half that was sweltering in the sun, and a frosty cold lower half. The sea was so calm between the groynes (and shallow) that even with my sea-phobia I swam again and again, in between coming up to lie on the beach and warm up thoroughly. 

It was really tough to drag ourselves away...and we ended up leaving rather late (it stays very bright for a deceptively long time here so what we thought was about 5pm was actually 7pm) so we didn’t end up getting to our airbnb in the North Friesland (apparently Marcel says it is a byword for German hicks) until 9.30pm. It was still light though, so we hung out on our terrace and watched a huge number of bumblebees flitting between the wildflowers.

The next day we decided to visit both “seas”. First we headed to the North Sea. There are huge “sands” here called the Wattenmeer. Or at least that’s what I thought they were. What they actually are is enormous windswept mudflats. This is exactly as appealing as it sounds. It was also 7c colder than where we’d come from, so we hastily turned around and headed over to the Baltic side again.

We found ourselves a lovely stretch of sand near Flensburg from which you could pretty much spit on Denmark (should you so want; I quite like the Danes so didn’t). The sea was incredibly shallow and warm as we waded out over the white sandy sea bed. And then noticed we weren’t the only things who liked the warm and shallow water. There were hundreds and hundreds of moon jellyfish. These can’t sting people, but sharing the water with a huge number of dinner plate-sized jellyfish is just a bit...off-putting. I decided this would more be a reading on the beach afternoon than a swimming day.

The next morning we packed up and set off for Hamburg. Since our last couple of days were city days, we took the car to Hamburg airport, dropped it off in the lengthily car rental queue and took the S-Bahn into town. We checked into our hotel and went for lunch. Whilst waiting for our food, we got a call from Enterprise who were wondering where our car was. Because apparently we are sometimes great planners and book to drop our car off in the downtown area right by our hotel. It turns out though we are not great rememberers and were both convinced we had to drop it off at the airport. Somewhat mortifying. They did find the car eventually though.

Many, many years ago when I was at undergraduate, my friend had sent me a trailer for a place in Hamburg called Miniatur Wunderland as a piss-take. It showed a tiny model train world with dead prostitutes, red light districts and car accidents. I immediately was desperate to go. It took a long time to finally get there, but finally, finally it was time! Now you know when you hype something up massively, and then you go and it is actually a big disappointment? This was emphatically not one of those times! It was even better than I thought it was going to be. We spent three hours there and I could have easily spent longer watching tiny fire engines driving around putting out tiny fires and pressing buttons (there are so many buttons you can press to activate things- pro tip, visit in the late afternoon when all those 4 year olds that would normally be hogging them are having dinner).  It was amazing. And also huge. I mean tiny, but huge in that it covers nearly two floors of a big warehouse.

The following morning we went on a free walking tour of the city. One of the things Miniatur Wunderland has is a tiny version of Hamburg. Having seen all of the sights in miniature the day before, this lead to a rather disorientating case of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, where I started to doubt what size they were, or I was. It is quite a pretty city though (on one side, on the other is about a million shipping containers and container ships). 

It has always been a big shipping centre so there are lots of historic shipping offices in there. Our guide took us inside one, nominally to see the interior décor but actually so we could ride in a Paternoster lift. These are the endlessly moving doorless lifts that are super dangerous, so everyone else got rid of them. Germans however are weirdly protective over them and refuse to let them decommission them. And whilst I appreciate they are super dangerous for kids, the elderly, anyone moving slowly etc, they are pretty cool to ride. Marcel and I agreed it was pretty much the highlight of our day (nerds4eva).

After that we climbed a tower for the views, then had some lunch. Marcel decided he wanted to do a boat tour of the canals. There weren’t any English language ones but I decided it would probably be okay with German (having again, learnt nothing from prior experience). This time though I was completely screwed because we got on the boat last of all and so were sitting at the back. Where the speakers were broken. So I couldn’t even hear him properly. Anyway, Marcel said he had terrible and monotonous delivery, so I probably didn’t miss much. And it was a nice sunny day to be pottering about on a boat.

After that we decided to go through the Elbe tunnel. This is a 108 year old beautifully tiled tunnel under the Elbe. It has a few additional bonuses in addition to that. 1) you can ride down in giant freight lifts for the occasional cars they let through and 2) It is really nice and cool down there. During a heatwave in a city with no air-con, it was quite hard to feign interest in getting out on the other side to see the view.

A couple of years ago Hamburg completed their new concert hall, the Elbphilharmonie. It was supposed to cost about 200 million euros and take 3 years to build. It overran by 7 years and the final cost was about 800 million euros. Had to admit to a slight schadenfreude in discovering we aren’t the only country that can’t organise a piss-up in a brewery when it comes to accurately and speedily building new projects. The concerts now sell out months in advance but you can get a free ticket to go inside it. So we did. Marcel was very excited as he discovered they have the world’s largest curved escalator. I was too because I imagined it might be curved in the way of a grand curved staircase in some Antebellum mansion. Actually it was just an hump-backed escalator. Underwhelming.

In the evening we decided to take full advantage of the fact our hotel was creepily empty despite being very nice (Marcel being blunt ended up asking why we were pretty much the only guests. They said it was because they’d newly opened, so I recommend getting in there for a stay before they fill up. Fraser Suites Hamburg) to use the sauna. I love saunas. However I normally only think of visiting them when it is cold out. It turns out if you’ve spent all day in a heatwave, it isn’t half as nice. Does mean if you wash your hair though it dries super fast, so less effort than a hair dryer.

Marcel knows me well so had booked a chocolate tour at Chocoversum for our final morning (softening the blow of leaving). I was keen because tours always involve free chocolate. But this was actually a really educational tour. You learnt all about the history of the plant, how to transport it in a cargo ship, how to roast and extract it, what all the machines are called and how they work, plus you get to make your own chocolate bar. So now if the apocalypse comes, I’m extremely prepared to restart civilisation/aka chocolate production.

After that Marcel wanted to walk around the Alster Lakes before our flight. It was pretty hot for walking but Marcel had picked a scenic restaurant quite far away. We got to there and it was a beautiful spot, on a pier so pretty much all of the tables had a lake view. To find it only took cash. And we were nowhere near an ATM and deliberately hadn’t got any more cash out because German ATMs charge you 5.99 to get cash out. So we turned back and found somewhere that would have been perfectly nice if we hadn’t just seen a better one.

And then, alas it was time to leave the Fatherland for the Motherland. It had been an amazing trip and we were pretty depressed to leave. But hey, London in summer is also full of endless sunny days...right?

[rachelisnotatwork]

Ich war eine Berlinerin

A long time ago I decided in a daydreaming moment to spend a month at language school in Germany. In my head this was going to be largely drifting around town feeling cultured and multi-lingual. So I merrily booked some lessons and an airbnb in Berlin. Then it got closer to the time and I remembered I absolutely hated every minute of German lessons at school, and the only way to drift around feeling cultured and multi-lingual would be from cramming German into my aged brain. This triggered what could best be described as the “complaining phase”, which was weeks of bitching to Marcel that I didn’t want to go, I hate German grammar and this was the worst idea of my life.

We arrived 5 days before language school started in order to get settled. This mostly involved me complaining at a number of places around the city, and on a trip out of town. Our first weekend was forecast to be sunny so we decided to head out into the countryside of the East to go canoeing. Step one was rent a car, which turned out to be phenomenally expensive and involve driving out to the airport. We then immediately took the wrong turning and circled the whole airport trying to find our way out...and straight into a non-moving traffic jam. Google maps refused to consider there might be any possible alternative routes to spending 2 hours in a traffic jam. Neither did our car satnav. So instead I decided to get creative with the map and managed to navigate around the whole thing, whilst being incredibly smug about it (which I’m sure Marcel deeply appreciated).

When we finally got out to the East I was pleasantly surprised. The only real news that reaches the UK of rural East Germany is neo-Nazis and depopulation. Thankfully the first wasn’t visible where we were, and the second meant lots of wildlife. We saw a real live stork (not delivering a baby) before we even got there.

Our canoe trip was down the Havel to try and see beavers (of the wildlife variety). It was a stunning day and a pleasantly quiet river. Naturally we saw zero beavers, and due to Marcel’s ambitious nature we had to paddle back at speed to get back from our 16km run before dark. My muscles were screaming (and only screamed more over the next few days). We also had to return the car before 21.30, which involved driving back and then getting lost in the airport AGAIN and circling it twice. Now feel like I know the roundabouts of Tegel extremely well.

After bitching about language school heavily, it turned out to be...surprisingly fun. Or I got stockholm syndrome. Not really sure, but after a couple of weeks I had settled into a very nice routine of morning classes, then a leisurely lunch at our awesome airbnbs with the best views in the world, followed by museums or excursions in the afternoon. My language school card bought me an annual museums pass for 25 euros, so I got to relive the student dream again!

It was pretty hot whilst we were there so we got into the local lake swimming culture. Our favourite turned out to be Krumme Lanke. It is surrounded by forest but still accessible from town. On day one we were there, we saw a grass snake emerge from the bank and go for a little swim with it’s head above water. Being from the UK where wildlife is...sparse, this was extremely exciting. When we returned a few days later, it was much busier and I thought to myself “poor snake, it has no chance of a swim today”. Only to find myself looking down whilst swimming in the water a couple of hours later to find the snake swimming entirely underwater by my legs. Turns out whilst I like wildlife there are limits and that is definitely one of my limits.

One of the other benefits of it being hot was I decided a policy of daily ice creams was essential. We started off at our local ice cream place but then one day found an amazing place that was about a 15 minute walk from our house. I then took to making Marcel take daily walks in the broiling heat with me to eat them. We also discovered that German museums don’t really do air-con after some of the hottest museum trips of my life to the Stasi Museum and Ephraim-Palais Museum. Sort of surprised we didn’t have to step over the collapsed forms of over-heated tourists between exhibits.

My language school did an afternoon programme of lectures, seminars and activities. Whilst Marcel was around, I didn’t attend any as for some weird reason Marcel didn’t want to hang out and listen to someone explain things very slowly in basic German to a bunch of language learners. Odd that. However at one point he went off to visit his relatives near Frankfurt and I decided to attend a seminar on art in the Third Reich. This was a great lecture but lead me to become...somewhat over-confident with my German. On Marcel’s return I decided we should escape the boiling weather by doing one of the tours run by “Underground Berlin”. They did one inside a flak turm and because the tour timing was more convenient in German that in English, I decided I’d be fine going on that one.

My first indication that I might not be fine was when our guide took a huge breath before starting because it turned out he was one of those people who had a lot of information to impart and didn’t want to waste time doing so. A rapid torrent of German poured forth from him, with me barely able to assess where one word finished and the next started. Which would have been fine if it hadn’t been the safety briefing he was giving as he handed out hard hats. Would strongly advise not getting over-confident with your language skills when you are going to be touring a half-blown up bomb site. I spent most of the tour understanding nothing but trying desperately to copy the others in the hope of not dying down there. Marcel very nicely said it was very technical and harder to understand than his C2 language exam he had to do to prove he was a real German, and then gave me a long summary afterwards about what the whole tour had actually been about. Anyway it was a really cool site and I thoroughly recommend you sign up for the (English language) tour of it. Plus the park it is in has red squirrels, which Marcel and I got unbelievably excited about but actually turns out to be really common in Europe.

Other cool tours we did included one of the Bundestag, which was free although it was hardly spontaneous. You had to email to book tickets ages in advance and then bring your passport (weirdly not the only exhibition I had to do that for, also had to do it for the world press photography exhibition which was taking place in a political party’s head office [as you do]. I think this might feel more normal for Germans who are used to carrying ID at all times, but if you are British it is quite hard to remember and feels strange). The tour was pretty interesting though and there is uncovered Russian graffiti all over the walls inside from the second world war, which was cool to see.

Beyond that we largely mooched and ate a lot. We were staying upstairs from a fondue restaurant and a vietnamese place, and just around the corner from a vegan Szechaun restaurant. As a result, we did ate out a LOT. Also given how hot it got, we very much appreciated not using our kitchen and letting someone else heat up their place by using their oven. Instead we’d just eat out and admire the views from our amazing balcony.

It got hotter and hotter until towards the end of our stay we had three days of epic thunderstorms in a row. We had a great view from our balcony of the Fernsehturm, which Marcel managed to see get hit by lightening twice, both times after I had despaired of seeing it happen. The first two days the thunderstorms were at about midnight and kept us awake with constant lightening and huge claps of thunder. The last day it happened at about 6.30. Which was sub-optimal as that was when my mother’s flight from London was due to land. Weather went from fine to “wind so strong the leaves and flying upward past our 5th floor balcony, followed by rain and mist so thick we couldn’t see anything anymore” in about 5 minutes. We constantly checked my mother’s flight updates online and her landing time kept getting pushed back and back. And then suddenly it just disappeared entirely from the landing/landed screen. Note to German airports, this is not very reassuring. Nor is it when you phone the airport and ask what happened to the flight and you say you “don’t know”. We then looked on the BA website, who said the flight had been diverted to Hamburg. We phoned Hamburg to check this and they said they didn’t know and hadn’t heard about that. Thankfully at just about the point when a full freak out was starting, my mother texted to say they had landed in Hamburg after several terrifying abortive attempts to land in Berlin. They did then fly them back to Berlin when the storm finished so she arrived pretty late and then we had to take a huge diversion back to her hotel because of trees blown over the in the street. Oh the delightful summer weather.

By the end of the month, I was entirely in love with Berlin and the relaxed life of a language school attendee. But alas we’d planned a road trip and our airbnb booking was running out so I had to say a very reluctant goodbye to my language class and Berlin and hit the road.

[rachelisnotatwork]

Conferencing North of the Wall

Deeply irritatingly, after a winter completely free of sniffles, coughs and fevers, whilst everyone wilted around me and I felt increasingly smug, the first day of spring saw my run of good luck come to an end and a stinking cold develop. So whilst we’d planned a few nice days of holiday before our conference in Belfast, I pretty much had to be peeled, hacking, wheezing and shivering, off the sofa to head over to there.

Naturally we’d booked to fly from Stanstead, which at the time seems like a good (financial) deal, and then the reality kicks in and we have to get two tubes and a train and leave hours of time. The plus side was the exhausting struggle of that plus the cough and cold remedies I was chugging down like there was no tomorrow pretty much meant I got onto the plane, passed out and woke up in Belfast. Unfortunately not the good Belfast airport, because there turn out to be two (who knew? The whole place is tiny. Why on earth do they need two airports?) but the rubbish one which is way outside of town and has posters on the wall about Belfast’s favourite coleslaw (I like to think they had a brutal and hard-fought referendum on that one).

We went to pick up our car, which was the first car we’ve ever got that has “lane assist”. This is probably a helpful function if you find yourself falling asleep on a US highway at 3am, as if you go anywhere near the lines in the centre of the road or at the sides, it starts an irritating beeping sound. This is not a helpful feature if you are in rural Northern Ireland, where the roads are so narrow you are constantly in it’s rage zone and the peeping pretty much never ends. No more nap time for me.

Because I’d been fast asleep on the flight, we hadn’t eaten the lunch we bought in the Stanstead Pret. I decided as we meandered slowly across the countryside towards our cottage outside Derry, to find a tourist attraction to stop at. The nearest appeared to be something called the Tirkane Sweat house. Clicking on it revealed something that looked like a cross between a grass igloo and an ice house. I was intrigued. I failed to mention to Marcel that the review also mentioned cave spiders. I wasn’t sure if they meant it as a joke.

It was beautifully sunny out, and the sweat lodge (built in the 18th century) was located by a tiny stream. The entrance however appears to have been designed for badgers. Beplagued with cold, I was not in the mood for crawling into an abandoned sweat lodge full of spiders, so I decided to let Marcel explore that one alone. Apparently they weren’t joking about the cave spiders. Sorry Marcel.

We drove on to our cottage, through blazing sunshine, verdantly green fields, herds of sheep and a weirdly high number of donkeys. I think I saw more donkeys in a week in Northern Ireland than I’ve seen in my entire life to date. If anyone knows why they love donkeys so much in these parts, please let me know. It looked lovely. It didn’t smell so great though, as apparently the trick to all those glowing green fields is spraying manure on them.

Our cottage was in the middle of nowhere, and the views looked amazing in the sun. 

We’d vaguely discussed going into Derry for dinners, but since I was feeling like shit, I decided we’d self-cater (aka Marcel would make dinner) and so we went to Tesco’s, stocked up on all the supplies and bought a board game as the wifi was broken there. Then we wiled away a pleasant evening in front of the fire, bitterly competing to win the most games.

The next day was forecast to have the better weather, so we decided to do all the “big” local sites. This started with Dunlace Castle. Only you had to pay £5.50 each and up close it didn’t look that impressive and was having some restoration works done, so we decided to stick with the (free) views from the surrounds of Dunlace castle.

The next stop off was the Giant’s Causeway. This is so beloved of UK school textbooks, that I felt like I was on a geography field trip 20 years too late. This was probably helped by being surrounded by herds of windswept teenagers in pac-a-macs. It was National Trust so we got in for free and it is pretty interesting geologically, but I think the main pleasure of the site would have been the hikes you can do around it where you can see some of the similar rock formations without groups of surly teenagers huddled on them (and large numbers of American tourists, revisiting their very, very distant Irish roots). However, alas I was still wheezing like a dying accordion and it took forever and all my breath to get up and down to the Causeway (I refused to take the bus with all the lazy people) so no hikes for us.

After that we headed on to the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge, which is also owned by the National Trust (another free entry! Win!). This was my suggestion and Marcel was surprised by it because I’m notoriously not great with heights (understatement) and this is a swinging rope bridge that sways 30m over the rocks below. I reassured him though that I was totally up for it. We walked the mile there, along a cliff top path, watching gulls swoop below us whilst bored-looking sheep watched us. We descended the steps down to it. I took one look at it and decided that was a hard nope from me, and refused to go any further. No idea what temporary delusion made me ever think I might. Marcel did head across there though. I bravely photographed him.

All that exercise (a mile is a long way to walk if you are wheezing away with a cough and asthma) and fear-by-proxy had left me hungry. We luckily found a lovely cafe nearby for rhubarb tart, which was located in a village (Ballintoy) that served as a harbour for a scene in Game of Thrones. It was quite windy and the sea rather pleasantly kept breaking over the rocks and the sea wall, which was nice to watch in a “thank god I’m on dry land” way.

On our way back, we decided to swing past The Dark Hedges, which is a photogenic avenue of beech trees that features in pretty much all of Northern Ireland’s tourism materials and a few movies and TV shows. Local and visiting idiots had carved their names into the fairly ancient beech trees, which meant I was seething with pure rage throughout. I like to think of myself as a fairly liberal person…apart from when it comes to people who write their names on historical sites and sites of natural beauty, where I feel the only reasonable punishment is removal of both hands with a fairly blunt axe.

The next morning we were slightly delayed as our airbnb owners had arranged for the BT wifi repair man to come and we had to let him in. I was slightly of the mind that I didn’t really care if we didn’t have internet for the <24 hours of the rest of our stay and I wasn’t really up for hanging around so the next guests could have wifi, but Marcel is a nicer person/a pushover so we did. Our repair man was extremely chatty and did give us some tourist tips, so I guess that was something

We started off having a wander around Derry. It has city walls and from there you can look over most of the town and see bits like Bogside (famous for the Bloody Sunday massacre), the cathedral and the guild hall. It was a relatively pleasant wander, but that was really all I felt I needed to see or do in Derry.

The weather however had just turned sunny as we left Derry to drive up for a fort called Grianan of Aileach. Luckily the whole Brexit debacle had been suspended, because it was just over the border in Donegal. It was my favourite sort of hill fort, in that you could drive right up to it and then get incredible views of the surrounding countryside with very minimal effort.

After a quick lunch (which we could thankfully pay for on card as we had no euros) we headed off to a beach Marcel had picked called Five Fingers Strand at the very north of the Inishowen peninsula. It was my favourite sort of beach- sandy, dramatic scenery behind it and windswept enough that it was pleasantly empty and you didn’t get too hot going for a walk along it, looking at the incredibly rough sea (definitely not a good swimming spot). It was a lovely end to the day out.

The next morning we had to say a sad goodbye to our cottage. We had to be in Belfast in the evening, but we decided to take a very scenic route there. First off, we stopped and wandered down the beach and around the very scenic village of Cushendun. It is apparently the closest point in Northern Ireland to the mainland UK as the Mull of Kintyre is just 16 miles across the water and due to the fact it was a beautifully clear day, very visible. Having been to Iona and it’s abbey on our round the UK road trip, it did make you realise why the Irish monks started out over there since they must have pretty much been able to see the heathens on the horizon.

Our next stop was to look around the walled gardens at Glenarm Castle. They are pretty nicely done and made a nice stop off and wander around, although our plan to visit their tea room for lunch was somewhat thwarted by apparently everyone else in a 50 mile radius having the same plan. 

Starving, we ended up driving into Larne. Not a great looking town but they were having an arts festival that involved having lots of umbrellas hanging in the streets, which cheered things up a bit.

We had to drive the car back to the shitty airport and then get a bus into town to our airbnb so by the time we arrived we weren’t much for exploring the joys of Belfast in the rain but instead hunkered down with takeout for an early evening.

The next day I had designated our “explore Belfast” day. Unfortunately a bunch of attractions aren’t open on a Monday, which this was, so that was a bit of a planning fail on my part. The Titanic museum, which is probably Belfast’s biggest attraction was though so we walked on over there (via a big fish and some very random sculptures made of recycling). 

The museum is huge and is slightly misnamed as a good proportion of it is just on life in Belfast at that time. Which was pretty interesting, as I know the story of the Titanic, but to be honest I don’t know much of Northern Ireland apart from the Troubles. Anyway, now I know all about it’s linen industry, rapid growth and rope factories. So you learn something new everyday. Also I do like giant engineering projects, so a museum that dedicated a lot of time to that whilst surrounded by cargo ships offloading and giant cranes made me happy. I wanted to see it’s dry dock, which is down the road because I read you could go down into it and really get a sense of the scale, so we wandered on down there….to find the only access was through a cafe, which had unexpectedly closed a fortnight previously. So that was a wee bit annoying, but hey, got some exercise.

By the evening, we were pretty tired from all our wanderings and since our whole point of being in Northern Ireland, the conference, started the next day, we decided to stay in and get an early night.

The next morning we walked the extremely agreeable 3 minutes from our Airbnb to the Europa hotel, which is apparently the most bombed hotel in the world. Dunno quite what made everyone hate it so much they bombed it 36 times, since it seemed pretty nice. The result of this is that there are pretty much no bins anywhere in the place. This normally wouldn’t be a problem but they fed us about every 10 minutes at the conference and you’d end up wandering around with a disposable cup or plate for ages, ruing the absence of bins. However the combination of 20 minute lectures for our short attention spans and being fed nice food at extremely regular intervals meant I had rather an enjoyable time.

That evening we had a booking at a restaurant Marcel had seen reviewed in the guardian a few months previously called Six by Nico, that serves a different six course tasting menu every 6 weeks. When we were there it was based on a fish and chips theme, which luckily they interpreted very liberally for vegetarians. We also got free snacks so by the end I pretty much had to be rolled home.

Perhaps as a result of the indigestion I couldn’t really sleep that night. I got up to go to the loo at about 2am and as I got back into bed I saw the orange lights from the street flickering on the ceiling and thought “man, street lights flicker more than I realised”. Then Marcel, woken by the shouting I was oblivious to thanks to my ear plugs got out of bed and pointed out the apartment block on the other side of the car park was on fire.

Now we have a Northern Irish friend who has quite the loud speaking voice. I always thought it was just one of his characteristics, but then on arriving in Northern Ireland I realised actually EVERYONE there has somewhat of a foghorn for a voice. And now all the foghorns in our block of flats were directed at bellowing the people in the flats opposite out of their flats. Whilst we could obviously see the flames much more clearly than they could, it was amazing how slow and reluctant people were to evacuate when there was very clearly a lot of smoke billowing out. It was pretty horrifying how quickly it spread from the original flat to the flat above- in under 2 minutes it had set fire to their balcony, set fire to the uPVC windows, exploded the glass and spread into the flat above. Even though the fire brigade came pretty rapidly and poured what seemed like thousands of litres of water onto it, it took ages to control. It was was a very sombre reminder to check our smoke alarms, carbon monoxide alarm etc on our return.

It also meant we were somewhat shattered at the conference the next day. I’m terrible for falling asleep in lectures at the best of times, so expended all my energy on staying awake (luckily the seating was pretty uncomfortable). That meant by the evening neither of us were interested in doing much so we stayed home and I re-read A Country Doctor’s Notebook, which I first read as a medical student. Still love how whilst medicine has changed so much, the emotions of those providing it really haven’t. When I read it the first time around it was a huge comfort to remember at least I wouldn’t be left to amputate a leg single-handedly on my first day. It is still a comfort that I haven’t had to do that after practising for 7 years.

The next day was the last day of the conference, which meant dragging our suitcase to the hotel and persuading them to let us leave it in their left luggage room. Which they were surprisingly okay with, despite the history of bombs and the total absence of bins. I shan’t question the logic of that because it was hugely in our favour. The conference finished early on the last day, and so we had time to visit one of the attractions that first drew me to Northern Ireland. The Game of Thrones tapestry. Now I do like Game of Thrones, but what I really love is eccentric projects, the bigger the better, and a 66m tapestry commemorating the gore, orgies and weirdness of a TV show was right up my street. Reader, it was JUST AS GOOD as I thought it would be. I loved it. I also like to think of all the confused 90 year old grandma’s hand-stitching the details of orgies and brutal murders, wondering what the hell this was all about.

The museum it was in (The Ulster Museum) was pretty good too so I was very pleased with it for the grand entry price of free. It is right next to some gardens with a victorian glasshouse and fernery (apparently that was all the rage in Victorian Britain) so that was a nice end to our time in Belfast, before heading off back to the airport.

Whilst the weather had held until we were on the bus, by the time was reached the airport it was 4c with freezing horizontal rain and high winds. Normally not a problem but our plane naturally was on the other side of the tarmac and we had to walk about 5 minutes over to it and then queue, trying to angle our bodies like penguins in a huddle, to be out of the worst wind to board. By the time people got on the plane they were streaming water onto the floors and seats. Not the best goodbye to a fun week in Northern Ireland.

In other goodbyes, my suitcase, which has been fraying around the corners for a while and has a wonky wheel, finally developed a huge crack in the handle that meant it is finally time to say goodbye. This suitcase has been with me I think on every trip on this blog and held up amazingly well as that’s probably 18 months of being sat on every day whilst I try and wrench the zips closed over it’s overstuffed contents. I will miss it and suitcase, I’m sorry that whilst you got to see all of the lower 48 and Hawaii, you never saw Alaska. I hope Greenland compensated.

[rachelisnotatwork]

Iceland: finally we see the light!

The worst bit about flying to Iceland, or I should probably add flying to Iceland when you are too cheap to pay for a decent airline, is that you have to dress like you are going on a solo trek to the South Pole in order to reduce the weight in your suitcase. Luckily it was quite cold the day we left but we were still glowing, red-faced, as we headed to the airport wearing snow boots, scarves, big coats, all our heaviest stuff in our hand luggage etc.

The flight there was pretty uneventful and it was a beautifully clear day, which meant for good views over the sleeping tourist by the window. When we arrived we just had to pick up our car and go.

Now by this stage in the “life of constant holidays” game, we are pretty much Hertz deluxe members which means what normally happens is we book a smart car and turn up to be upgraded to a minibus. Often we have to scale back the excesses of the upgrade because we don’t want the hassle of trying to park a giant car/fuelling up a giant car. So we were pretty confident that whilst we’d booked a tiny and shit car, that wouldn’t be what we were given. Well that smugness came to an abrupt end when we collected our tiny and shit car. Turns out that Iceland isn’t one of those free upgrade locations...and car rental is expensive here so they had no desire to give us a freebie. So we puttered into town in our tiny and shit car, a journey made far more stressful than it needed to be by the fact that Marcel’s phone is an early adopter of Brexit and the GPS locator dot on google maps only seems to work in the UK. After a lot of swearing we did make it to our surprisingly chilly airbnb. It was in a converted garage and the host had made the interesting decision not to install an extractor fan but instead keep the windows open 24/7 (in Iceland electricity is pretty much free so no one cares about their heating bills). We closed the windows because the humidity definitely wasn’t our problem. 

We decided in the evening we’d go to the Pizza Restaurant we liked, so we headed into town, struggled to park (there’s a lot of snow, which means getting a tiny shit car into a space is quite hard) and skittered down the pavement in the -10c weather to the restaurant. Only to find it had stopped being a pizza joint last week and was now trialling its new menu. I wasn’t hugely keen as they didn’t have much of a vegetarian selection but Marcel didn’t want to re-park or go out walking in the cold so decided to stick with it.

I asked for a pearl barley dish, without the lamb that was supposed to be on top of it. Marcel selected their rutabaga dish. I advised him not to select this as vegetarian is always interpreted in expensive restaurants as “on a diet”. He said I was being silly and it would be a decent portion. He ended up with a palm-sized dish of pureed rutabaga with some crispy slices of it on top. Didn’t want to say “I told you so” but felt I had to, because that’s what life is like in a long-term relationship. 

The next day we headed out of town after a delicious breakfast somewhere that looked like a construction site, but was actually a decent cafe. We had quite a long way to drive so we decided we’d drive straight out to Vik and lunch there. As we headed out of town, the roads got pretty icy and once the wind picked up there were drifts of snow on the road. Always reassuring to see some people digging out a 4 x 4 that’s skidded off the road when you are in a tiny 2WD city car with about 4 inches of clearance.

We had lunch in Vik, which has got much busier since the last time we were there (it has 2 places you can lunch now rather than one) and went for a quick but windy walk on the beach, before setting off again.

We wanted to visit Jökulsárlón the next day in the morning and since there’s not much in the way of accommodation in those parts we had booked into a place called the Fosshotel Glacier Lagoon. It was surprisingly busy and we had to park right the other side of the car park. In my business putting on my gloves, I completely failed to notice Marcel getting out the car and immediately falling over on the ice, but thankfully he was uninjured and thus was able to complete his usual suitcase duties.

Our room had a pretty nice window seat overlooking the view down to the sea so we snuggled up on there and read books before dinner. The only option was the hotel restaurant and I decided I didn’t want to know how much I was going to pay for dinner so refused to do the conversions. It was an...interesting meal. My starter involved so much horse radish I spent the rest of dinner constantly wanting to sneeze. We’d decided we wanted to go hang out in the sauna after dinner so were slightly impatiently waiting for the bill, which they were tardy bringing. The delay was soon compensated for though by the announcement from the staff just after we’d paid our bill that the Northern lights were visible outside. We immediately stampeded onto the balcony to see a very impressive green streak of light across the sky.

We were torn between “this could disappear any second” and “I’m really cold and I want to go get my coat” so in the end we made a mad dash for our room, layers and my camera. Maddeningly, I almost always bring my tripod with me on holiday, but this time pressed for space and weight and with so many unsuccessful trips behind us I’d not bothered. I’m not sure I’d have photographed things much better with it though, because I hadn’t really appreciated that there’s nothing really to focus on through your view finder when what you are trying to photograph is green shimmering light on a black background. I tried though.

It did look amazing. We walked out to the front of the hotel (which incidentally involved us and a bunch of other guests stampeding past the sauna full of confused nude people to get out the quickest exit) and stood in the snow, watching the green waves slowly undulate and shiver across the sky. I hadn’t really got a grasp on the speed of how they move before. Sometimes they seemed like they barely moved at all, and indeed for at least an hour there was one solid green band across the sky that didn’t really change. In other areas you had to look at the edges to notice any movement at all. But occasionally something rapid would furl and unfurl and move across the whole sky in 10-20 seconds.

The other thing that I hadn’t anticipated is that I guess the light in the atmosphere warps our perception of the light from the stars so they looked very unfamiliar. Much bluer than normal and Sirius was swapping between flashing blue and orange so rapidly we thought it was a plane for a while.

Eventually we got cold so went back inside and sat on our window seat and watched it until about midnight. After that it had got pretty dim and we decided we’d better shut the blinds or neither of us would really get any sleep.

The next morning we rose with the dawn and headed over to Jökulsárlón. We did not want to pay 28 euros a head for breakfast in our hotel and we’d vaguely remembered there was a cafe there, so we decided to eat there. I don’t remember the food options being so basic last time. It has also got considerably busier so the indoor toilet is no longer open to visitors and we had to go out to the (thankfully perfectly clean) portaloos in the car park which were absolutely freezing. Climbing up a small hillock to look over the lagoon exposed us to such lacerating winds that my phone promptly went from 98% battery to 9% from the horrors of the cold. I had to tuck it inside all my layers to keep it alive. It was beautiful though.

There are two things to see at Jökulsárlón- the lagoon where ice bergs calve and you can see cute seals pop in and out between them and the so-called Diamond Beach where the ice bergs meet the sea and often get washed up on the shore. Last time we’d driven between the two sites but with the thick snow on the ground we didn’t dare take our car to the beach and instead plodded through the deep snow and strong winds over there.

It was beautiful, especially since unlike last time the sun was out and was glittering through the ice. However the wind was so cold it burnt my face, which ended up really painful and weirdly bright red on one side by the time we returned to the car.

We had gone to Jökulsárlón quite early because we had another 5 hours drive ahead to our Airbnb in Seyðisfjörður. The only reason we’d come back to Iceland was we’d loved our airbnb in Seyðisfjörður so much the last time we’d been there that we resolved we’d return one winter and just hang out there. And this was our plan.

The views as we drove east were spectacular. 

The road conditions driving out east were….pretty appalling. After Jökulsárlón, there aren’t many tourists which means there really isn’t much traffic. I think we saw more reindeers than cars as we fishtailed on ice and wondered why in the hell they only had crash barriers off the side of some of the roads that hooked around cliffs over the sea. At one point we drove past an abandoned van on it’s side with “accident” tape around it. By the time it was getting dark there was such a high wind driving over one of the passes you couldn’t see more than the 5m road marking pole in front of you. Which is when you really rue your car rental choices of a Kia Rio.

The winds had at least calmed down a bit by the time we arrived in Seyðisfjörður. All we had to do was get up our drive to our airbnb overlooking the valley. I said to Marcel I hoped the car would make it. He said he wouldn’t mind if we got stuck in the snow now because we could walk to our airbnb. He had to say that...seconds later our car gently skidded off the road and into the huge snow bank on the side of the drive.

Our hosts had apparently been supposed to email saying meet them in the town because the drive way had been blocked by a lot of snow, but they hadn’t. However they did use their monster truck to spend the next 45 minutes extracting us from the snowbank, so swings and roundabouts. In the end we ended up leaving our car at their house in town and getting a lift up to our cabin with our stuff. Thankfully we’d already done a shop and planned to self-cater so we could recuperate from the long and slightly terrifying drive with a soak in the hot tub and dinner.

Our hosts had been very emphatic that we could ask them for lifts in and out of town whenever we wanted, but a combination of Britishness and embarrassment about disturbing their dinner to get them to dig our car out meant that we decided to walk into town instead. It was a pretty gentle and pleasant 2.5km downhill and we felt very smug especially when we saw some locals “walking” their dog by driving slowly as the dog chased the car (later saw the tracks of someone who’d been driving their snowmobile to exercise their dog). 

The supermarket in town was...weirdly British. There were McVities digestives (Marcel discovered the chocolate and caramel ones on this holiday so I ended up having two packets wedged in my pocket for the journey home). Suede was playing over the tannoy. And a woman, who turned out to be the owner with a very strong midlands accent on the till. Apparently she met her Icelandic husband in Nottingham.

We pottered back up the hill (slightly less pleasant walk against gravity and into the wind when it is -12c outside) and spent the rest of the day living the dream eating biscuits, reading books and popping in and out of the hot tub. Just as good as I remembered it.

The next day we got slightly more adventurous and decided to go on a little snowshoeing adventure. It was -14c out and REALLY windy so I decided I didn’t want to venture far. Marcel wanted to go on the ridge behind our cottage but I said it looked avalanchy so we continued along our level of the valley a bit further. I love snowshoeing but our tracks were getting covered in seconds with the waves of snow blowing across the ground and it was incredibly cold so we only stayed out for about half an hour. When we got back Marcel said he was going to ask our hosts if it were safe to go up higher into the mountains but his conclusion was that it couldn’t be an avalanche risk area or they wouldn’t have built the town there. A quick google later and we discovered that the town is the site of Iceland’s worst ever avalanche tragedy with 24 people killed at the end of the 19th century and a factory flattened at the end of the 20th century. After that we decided to stick to the hot tub in safer activities.

The next day, despite stocking up on enough chocolate digestives to last several lifetimes, we had to go back into town to start our car because we’d forgotten that car batteries don’t really like it brutally cold. So down to town we pottered. Problem was, Marcel forgot that key fob batteries also don’t like it cold and he’d left the fob in an outer pocket. So when we got to the car we couldn’t remotely open it. We had to manually open it with the key in the lock, which triggered the alarm to go off. I think our hosts, whose house we’d parked outside, were fairly sure we were actually handicapped when it came to motor vehicles. We drove the car around a little bit and then tried to park it again, only to find ourselves menaced by a goose. I know this sounds like a joke but it was hanging out in our parking space, wouldn’t move and then tried to get inside our car. We had to lure it away with crisps (not sure if salt and vinegar crisps are good for geese. If anyone found a dead goose later that day, sorry[ish]). 

We pottered back up the hill and settled down to the rest of the day; an exhausting cycle of hot tub and reading in our beautiful cottage.

By the night time it had started to lightly snow. We decided we’d have a really long final hot tub soak so lazed in there like hippos. I was trying to catch some snowflakes on my tongue (sod’s law, none seemed to fall in my mouth but they kept repeatedly landing directly on my eyeballs) and suddenly we saw the northern lights again. Which was incredibly luck considering the night was reasonably cloudy. They whirled around for about 5 minutes and then disappeared, which was a very nice last evening at our cottage.

The next day we nervously checked the road conditions and headed off. Going south there was a huge storm forecast and the road was pretty much out of bounds. Luckily we were heading back to Reyjavik via the northern route. Step one of the journey was get over the pass to Egilsstaðir. No problem. The next step of the journey, which was between Egilsstaðir and Mývatn, is the least driven part of the circular road around Iceland, Route 1. We drove for about an hour. All was well. Then we noticed some cars slowing down ahead to find that the snow had drifted across an uphill portion of the road, where a little car had skidded and got stuck on the opposite side of the road (not dangerous, because there’s about 10 cars an hour on this road). This was unsettling to us in our tiny Kia as we clearly couldn’t turn around as the Southern roads were out, there is no other road ploughed at this time of year to get around this, and our car was clearly no better suited to it than the skidded car that a jeep was now trying to rescue. Marcel got out of the car and walked the hill to better look at it. We had zero phone reception (annoyingly we did at most places along the route but we had none there) to call the roads number to see when the next snowplough was due. So in the end we decided to risk it. We skidded and skittered but we eventually made it through!  Which was both good and bad as now we were aware that if we hit any further bad road conditions we’d be really screwed as we’d be unlikely to be able to go back the way we came as the snow was continuing to drift. We did however make it to Mývatn okay, which was good because after that the road is a bit more used so a bit more ploughed.

We had lunch in the cow restaurant we’d been to before and ate rye bread cooked in a lava vent and looked out the window at the 3ft of snow piled outside and debated thermal baths over further snowshoeing. 

There was however a road that wasn’t ploughed in winter but led up to a caldera, which we thought might be nice to snowshoe on as would have a level terrain under the snow and a decent end point. So we drove down there….only to find that some extremely optimistic/dim tourist had decided to drive their 2wd small car on what was clearly an unploughed road with several feet of snow on it and got stuck, and now the entrance to the unploughed road was filled with vehicles trying to rescue them. With our plans to snowshoe thwarted, we decided to head to the Mývatn baths.

The downside of this is that they turned out to be in a selectively extremely windy spot. We got out the car to find a wind speed best described as “scouring”. We are made of stern stuff though so headed bravely onwards. The pools are obviously hot, but the wind was so strong it was generating waves in the pool (fine) and then breaking those waves into spray in the air. Which meant the only tolerable thing to do was float on your back with only your nose and mouth above water. Unfortunately I suffer from a terrible affliction known as “extremely buoyant legs” so struggled over the next hour to stop them surfacing and exposing my feet and knees to a little light hypothermia. I ended up tucking them under Marcel’s legs which are incredibly unbuoyant (how lucky that of all the people in the world I found my leg buoyancy opposite).

We eventually got out and drove onto Akureyri. Our accomodation was right in the middle of town on a steep hill. So steep and so badly gritted (which I feel is a strange thing for a road in a pretty big [for Iceland] town in a very snowy part of the world to be) that our car got stuck trying to get up it. Eventually we got enough traction to make it into the car park of our hotel, but we decided to limit dinner choices to “restaurants within walking distance”. Luckily there was a burger joint in our street that we could totter carefully to.

Our final day was 6 hours of driving to get to the airport in time for our flight. Which was pretty stressful. Not going to lie. There seemed to be an uncanny (given how empty the roads were) link between where the snow was thickest and most slippery and the sudden emergence of a large lorry barrelling along in the other direction (the ring road is a single lane in each direction for about 99% of the road). But we made it! With just enough time to collapse with nervous exhaustion and eat some sandwiches before our flight home. Despite the terrors of driving and the discovery that renting a tiny car in winter is only a good idea 75% of the time, it was an amazing relaxing week and also FINALLY we got some decent northern lights!

[rachelisnotatwork]

Week 10 and a bit: super American America

We woke up on Monday morning fairly famished, so headed out for a brunch. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your point of view, we’d forgotten we were now in America so I ended up with two breakfast pancakes roughly the size of satellite dishes that would have fed a family of four. It did however achieve the mission of sating our hunger.

I decided whilst we were in LA we might as well see an exhibition and picked the Tutankhamun exhibition at the California Science Centre (I guess all that mummification is...sciency?) We had a bit of a debate on going because the Science Centre is right next to the stadium and there was some sort of sporting event on (I want to say football). Cons, traffic was going to be shit, but pros, we thought due to  traffic and the fact there was also a sporting event on that people might want to watch, they’d be fewer people at the exhibition.

The car park was hilariously full of people who were clearly not even slightly interested in science (sports flags waving everywhere) but this did mean the exhibition was fairly empty except for us and a couple of school trips of very small children. The exhibition was pretty stunning- gloves, wooden boxes and chairs – all of which looked like they’d been made last week, not 3,000 years ago alongside some pretty dramatic statue work. The small children however were not impressed and kept asking their teacher why they were there to see scuffed stuff and why was that considered impressive because they had object x/y/z that didn’t have any scratches in at all at home.

After getting our full Egyptology on, we headed out of the increasingly rammed car park and headed to the airport to swap our car. When we’d picked up our car it had had all the windows open. This was apparently because the person who had rented it before us didn’t understand what a no smoking sign meant. Hertz was very apologetic and upgraded us to some sort of SUV tank. Aboard the tank, we headed South. I would say my nieces were pretty pleased to see us, given we could hear their screams of excitement from around the corner (the neighbours must have been thrilled) and it was lovely to see them again.

The next morning, having been woken at a brutally early hour (according to me, probably a very civilised hour according to my sister) we got up and took my niece to the playground so my sister could go to an exercise class. Then in the afternoon we decided to head down to La Jolla to see the seals. We took Violet with us, who insisted on wearing a knitted Christmas dress. And then as soon as we arrived by the sea, on paddling. Now obviously California is warmer than the UK in November but the water is still pretty nippy. Violet was very keen on being in it, but rapidly got cold and decided a far more fun version of paddling was to sit on Marcel’s shoulders and make him paddle. By the time we were thoroughly freezing from this game, she remembered we’d promised ice cream earlier so we had to take her for that, stamping our feet and trying to warm up in the cold. She also got very grumpy that I insisted on covering said woollen Christmas dress in about 4,000 napkins, which she felt spoilt the Christmas theme but given that I know how messily she eats and thus the sacrifice of about half an acre of rainforest was worth it.

The next day Trinity had started her Thanksgiving break so we decided to take her out by herself for the day as we’d taken just Violet out the day before whilst T was still at school. We headed down to San Diego and to the Air and Space Museum because I love space and dammit, I’m paying for the tickets. There was unfortunately a lot, lot, lot more air than space but they did have one of those 3D cinemas with tilting chairs that T enjoyed and which made me very motion-sick.

Unfortunately my sister got sick whilst we were away so we had to come back from our day out early. We did have time however to stop on the way back at Extraordinary Desserts and buy disgracefully high calorie snacks, which I fed them at tea time (this time I made Violet eat in her underpants rather than sacrifice another few acres of rainforest).

It was still light and my sister was still feeling pretty ill so we took the kids out of the house and down to the beach so they could burn off some steam. Marcel wanted to get a hair cut so he left me with the kids on the beach. Where we ran wild for an hour and it was really fun.

By the evening we were pretty exhausted from this whole babysitting shebang and so took advantage of Alice being physically present if not really up to much to head out for dinner when the kids were in bed. We ate Mexican food and generally felt quite shell-shocked, surrounded by crowds of young adults home for the holidays.

The following day was Thanksgiving. Now I had not been looking forward to this as Alice’s new partner had generously invited us to his family’s Thanksgiving. Which was very nice and friendly of him, but Marcel and I are not really super outgoing people (to phrase it mildly) and we’d been filled with dread about this for weeks. A dread that didn’t lift even slightly when it turned out Alice was too ill to go. So we headed off with the kids to a complete strangers house. Luckily they were very kind and welcoming, but Violet at this point decided it was all too much for her and curled up on my lap and refused to look at anyone. Which was unusual for her (you normally can’t get her to shut up) and also made small talk even harder than usual as I had a human snail on my lap and given I’ve limited small child experience, no idea what to do to make her move. Eventually though she got bored and climbed down to hang out with a 3 year old “wild child” who threw her shoes in the fire pit. And we survived a prayer circle (!), way too much food and Marcel getting selected to help decorate gingerbread houses.  

The kids were so exhausted they fell asleep on the ten minute drive home and we felt pretty similar. We did however notice there was a beautiful big full moon so after the kids were in bed we decided to go down to the aptly named Moonlight beach for a walk. It was so bright it was almost like daylight and you could pick out the strands of seaweed on the sand as we wandered down the beach. We also started to notice when we were pretty far along that there wasn’t much beach left… We hadn’t bothered to check a tide table. A swift retreat was beat as I felt like few emergency responders would be happy with having to pluck stranded tourists off the cliff rocks to end the day.

The original plan had been to give my sister a break by taking the kids away for the weekend. By Friday morning, these novice babysitters were pretty much in need of a break but since the Airbnb was booked, we headed off.

The first stop was something called Pomegranate Days at a Camel Dairy. Bizarrely Alice had wanted to come to this too so was along for this part of the ride. The day apparently would feature a turkey stampede, camel rides, feeding the camels pomegranates and a circus. Step one was a petting zoo of sheep. Naturally they wanted you to buy pellets to feed the sheep. Naturally having paid to get into said hell of small children and animals, I did not want to. Luckily toddlers drop a lot of sheep food and I had two children with me with nimble fingers so I let them collect the dropped stuff to feed it to the sheep. We then went to watch the Turkey Stampede, an event the adults found much funnier than the children because of the jokes the owners made about the bad choices they’d made that left them making a living from training turkeys to race.

Whilst we’d been watching the Turkey Stampede, Alice had been joining the very, very long queue for camel rides which took longer than the drive out there. Marcel and I had declined to buy camel riding tickets on the basis we’d done it before (and camels are fairly awful beasts at the best of times) so instead just got to join the similarly lengthily loo queue.

Afterwards it was camel feeding time. Unfortunately by this stage the camels had started rejecting pomegranates and so they’d brought out apples to feed them. Which was disappointing as I love pomegranates and had been planning on eating mine rather than feeding it to some ornery camel. The kids enjoyed it though. Finally there was just a circus to make it through before we headed our separate ways.

We took the kids off to Julian, which is a town mostly famous for being “old” (in American terms) and full of pie. The latter appealed to me a lot more than the former so I insisted on our first stop being pie. Unfortunately we were not the only tourists with this idea but thanks to deployment of small and speedy children, we managed to bagsy a table and a lot of pie. Violet got into a conversation with a dementia sufferer, which was great because there’s nothing small children enjoy more than repeating themselves so she got to tell this lady over and over again that she was 4 and was very much enjoying her cherry pie.

By the time we left the pie place, a thick mist had descended on the town, which being at altitude was a lot colder than the coast. Marcel dropped us off at the airbnb and then went to buy food, leaving me to get a fire going in our very rural airbnb...surrounded by creepy fog. Naturally I immediately leapt to “serial killer” territory, but placated my fears with the knowledge that I run much faster than Violet and you only need to be able to outrun the slowest person…

The next morning we had more pie for breakfast (nutritional win) and then headed off to a fort that claimed to have some sort of holiday day going on with lots of activities. Clearly my idea of a fort and the local idea of one differ significantly because this was pretty much a farm. They had a petting zoo (win), a big pile of straw bales for kids to climb on (win), a reptile show (win), a hayride with no hay because people kept complaining about the hay (how American), and a couple of craft activities. These included candle dipping, where I managed to make a candle that looked like a giant cat turd, and painting ornaments where the kids slathered them with so much paint they didn’t dry at all before we had to leave and I had to hang them off my outstretched fingers in the car on the way home.

When we got back home the owner’s were bringing their horse in for the night and kindly said the girls could feed it. Trinity was assigned to getting hay whilst Violet was told she could chuck carrots into his feed bucket. Violet, hitherto showing approximately zero sporting promise, turns out to have a pitch like a major league baseball star and nearly took the horse’s eye out with her first effort. I chucked the carrots in from then on...

In the evening there was a tree lighting ceremony in town with Santa and a lot of country music. They taught you the steps and Violet learnt to skip to the side and back, which short circuited some part of her brain with extreme excitement and she insisted on doing that solidly for the rest of the ceremony. The very limited supermarket options in town meant Marcel decided he’d drop us home and go and collect take out pizza….only the take out pizza joint was somewhat overwhelmed and he didn’t get home until nearly 9pm. Luckily Violet had refused pizza in favour of the remainder of her frozen chicken nuggets and chips so I put her to bed and Trinity and I sustained ourselves on toasted marshmallows until Marcel’s return.

The next day we had more pie for breakfast (because why not) and then because we’d fed the children pie with ice cream for breakfast, we decided to take them for a hike. 

Only we didn’t call it a hike because previously whenever we’d stopped the car Violet had asked whether we were planning on taking a hike because she “hates hikes”. Cuyamaca Rancho State Park is near there, so we headed out there. Now previously when hiking in America in a lot of areas there’s been warnings about mountain lions, which we’ve fairly ignored because they tend to only attack littler people and the advice is all about not letting children run ahead. But when we got out and saw the warning signs, I suddenly realised oooohhhhh, we actually need to be careful about this this time. And so I explained it to the kids. Trinity immediately got a giant stick which she wore as a yoke throughout to protect her neck and developed a paranoia about walking under any trees. Violet told us if we let her get eaten by a mountain lion she’d be so cross she’d eat us (clearly hasn’t quite grasped death yet) but since she wanted to sit on Marcel’s shoulders for a lot of the walk that wasn’t much of a concern.

There was a lake there where Violet entertained herself for a good half hour lobbing fairly huge rocks into the water and it was quite difficult to persuade her to leave. When I pointed out she’d said she hated hiking but seemed to be enjoying herself, she said that’s because this wasn’t hiking this was “throwing things”. Clearly it is all in the branding…

On the way back we noticed a lot of trees that looked they were riddled with bullet holes (there were signs saying there is also hunting in the park, which adds an extra frisson of danger to the walk beyond the mountain lions) however when we got up closer we realised they were actually made by some sort of animal and all stuffed with acorns (wikipedia later informed me it was the Acorn Woodpecker). They were incredibly difficult to get out, but the children set themselves hard to the task of prising off acorns and in Violet’s case shoving them in my pockets (where I kept finding them days later, including after I’d landed at Heathrow).

Hiking was so successful they both passed out in the car on the way home, which kept them pretty quiet in the fairly shitty traffic back to Encinitas.

On Monday they both had to go to school so we had a few hours of peace and quiet. We decided to go for a walk in the nearby Annie’s Canyon. This turns out to be a tiny slot canyon in a very suburban nearby town. It is quite surprising. And also quite claustrophobic. But you essentially can’t turn around, so onward and upward (quite literally).

After that we were meeting with Alice, the children and her new partner Alex and his children on a nearby beach. Violet as per usual wanted to spend a lot of time paddling whilst the other children played football. 

Fine, I’m relatively happy paddling in the sea with her. Only after about an hour she suddenly announced she needed the loo. This beach was remarkably poorly provisioned and the only thing resembling a loo was a port-a-loo about half a mile away. I guessed from the desperation on her face plus her walking speed that we weren’t going to make that. She told me she just needed to pee so I suggested she pee in the shallows. She was dubious about this plan and insisted I’d need to hold her hand in case a wave knocked her over. I agreed because we didn’t have a lot of options. So she peed...and followed that up by taking a dump in the sea. Then running away screaming with her swimsuit bottoms around her ankles. The tide was coming in and seconds later the poo followed her up the beach. Luckily Marcel is a solid man in a poo crisis and found a plastic bag and dealt with it whilst I interrogated Violet on why she’d been a sneaky sea pooper. Her argument was “I’m a little kid, you can’t blame me”. Which was a fair argument.

Violet, exhausted by her playing and defiling of the ocean wanted to go home earlier than the other kids so my sister set off to drive her home. We played on the beach a bit more before remembering that Marcel had given Alice our car keys to put in her bag so that they didn’t get lost whilst he played football. So poor Alice had to drive back whilst Trinity, Marcel and I hung out on the completely dark beach.

Violet was so exhausted she slept on the couch through the other 4 children running whooping through the house and it was pretty hard to wake her up for dinner and keep her awake as she swayed on her chair for long enough to eat dinner.

Tuesday was to be our last day with the kids. Violet only had a half day of pre-school and so after shopping I went with Alice to collect her. Then Marcel and I took her down to the slightly bigger, flatter park, to practice her scootering. She is a very smart, funny child but unfortunately she’s inherited the von Simson co-ordination genes (i.e. she has none) and it was painful to watch her practice her scootering. Quite literally. She dropped it onto my toe and accidentally rammed me with it about 50 times. I think she had fun though. Couldn’t really see through the tears. On the way back home she met a very friendly cat, so much so I was tempted to make the photo into a “Is this your cat?” poster to see if she could pet it another day.

In the evening we were heading out for dinner with Alice and Alex and leaving the kids with a babysitter. So we said our emotional goodbyes at dinner. Violet leant in for a hug, stared deep into my eyes and said "I've got a lump of chocolate stuck to the roof of my mouth...no wait, it's okay, it's come off".

However the next morning James paid a surprise visit so Alice kept Violet off pre-school. We took her down to the playground where she could play and then I taught her how to work out which of the acorns she’d collected were good for planting (those that sink in water) versus bad (ones that float), which she absorbed as a fact and then immediately applied this logic to batteries (luckily stopped before she chucked them in water). We then planted her acorns, which I’m fairly sure she’ll forget to water and they’ll never grow. We said goodbye to the girls and then headed to the airport- thankfully there was way less traffic than predicted as we’d left a little late and we had plenty of time to kill in the incredibly tiny terminal that Virgin flies out of. Flight home was way better than the flight to the USA because I had an aisle seat and no drugged old ladies nearby. Marcel wasn’t quite so lucky in that the man next to him gave him a huge lecture about how he basically wasn’t allowed to put his arm on the arm rest because if he did it would touch that guy’s arm. Clearly the world is full of Americans who don’t really get how economy class works, but what the hey. It was never going to be great coming home after 10 weeks on the road.

[rachelisnotatwork]

Week 9: in which we bid goodbye to Australia

New Zealand has many good features. Decent public transport to the airport isn’t one of them. To get to the airport you need to get a bus for an annoyingly long period of time.

Luckily for us the bus stop was right outside a brunch restaurant so had a huge breakfast and sat about sipping hot drinks until the last moment when we dashed out to the bus.

Our flight back was uneventful (how I like my flights) and we swung by Hertz to pick up our new rental car. Now we spend a lot of time renting from Hertz and it has now mostly reached the stage of customer loyalty where we rent a smartcar and arrive to find ourselves upgraded to a brand-new minivan. So imagine our disappointment when we got exactly the car we’d rented. Entitlement crushed.

We drove back into town, picked up Esther and packed the back of the car with the obscene amount of food Esther had purchased and/or prepared (delightful characteristic of all members of the Bischoff family- they pack about a week’s worth of food for every 24 hours you are away) and headed off to the Blue Mountains.

We had rented a very nice airbnb with a big fireplace, so I set myself up to do what I do best, which is tend the fire and then eat delicious meals prepared for me.

The next morning we headed out for a hike. Marcel had spent the previous evening flipping through a book of walks and found one that started at a place called Pulpit’s Rock. This turned out to be one of those nightmarishly vertiginous places, so I stayed on another (fairly horrendously vertiginous) rock and photographed the Bischoff siblings.

We then followed a very empty path along the cliffs overhanging the valley. Pros, good views. Cons- there was a lot of bloody ups and downs. And despite it ranking as an easy walk, a lot of those ups and downs were via thigh high rocks. So imagine 4km of constant up and down scrabbling over big rocks with a huge drop on one side. It was pretty sweaty.

We decided we didn’t want to go the whole way back, so called a taxi as recommended by the guidebook to take us back to where we’d parked our car. Our taxi driver rather alarmingly (given it is a fairly small touristy area) never heard of it but he did eventually find it in his giant laminated book of maps.

We collected the car and headed into town so Marcel could print and email a signed police statement (oh the joys of being a doctor) and then we headed out to admire the view at Echo Point and eat ice creams.

In the evening we went out to the Korean we’d eaten at the last time we were in town with Ruth and Ian and I had nut tea and little pancakes shaped like fish, filled with red bean paste, and felt very overly full.

The last time we’d been there we’d done a huge walk down into the valley by Three Sisters. Since the weather was pretty bad for the rest of the time we had forecast in the blue mountains, no one wanted to set out on a 4 hour walk. So instead we decided to get tickets for something called “Scenic World Blue Mountains”. This got you access to a cable car that went across a waterfall, a funnicular down into the valley, a dinosaur walk and then a cable car back up.

We started off with the cable car across the top of the waterfall. We could have queued to travel back, but since the queue to get on it had taken about 20 minutes and the walk back around the top of the falls was only about 15 minutes, we decided to go with the walk. Easier said than done though as it was amazingly badly signed. Big on my list of things to do is “not get lost in the Australian bush” and that ambition nearly got thwarted.

Next we headed down on the world’s steepest funicular. It was, steep. Not much more to say about that. I’ve ridden quite a lot of funiculars, most of which seemed pretty steep and this didn’t seem that out of the ordinary, although it was the only one that ended up in a “dinosaur walk”. Although again that walk was pretty hard to find. When we did find it, it featured a lot of animatronic dinosaurs that I have to say, as a dinosaur pedant, were not native to Australia.  It was fairly surreal though.

We then attempted to go along one of the nearby hiking paths, but the path irritatingly had a lot of fallen trees on and instead of clearing them, they’d just cut some steps into them to help you climb over them, which is a slow and irritating way to hike especially when you find the path ends in a landslide.

So back we headed and up in the cable car. To recover from our exhausting dinosaur viewing and attempted hiking, we headed to a chocolate shop in town and ate obscene amounts of cake before toddling off home for more lazing in front of the fire.

The next day promised torrential rain from dawn. So we were fairly surprised to get out of bed and find blue skies and sun blazing down. We decided to plan some short walks to lookouts instead so that if the weather changed we wouldn’t be too far from home.

Our first stop off was a place called Anvil Rock. This had an amazing view over the mountains and was completely empty, just us.

As we walked back to the car with me leading the way, Esther talked about her fear of snakes and I said they just weren’t something that worried me that much because they are pretty shy and we make such a lot of noise walking they’d just move away. At that moment Marcel piped up from the back to point out I’d just stepped over a frozen in fear snake. Oops. Attempts at identification suggest it was a juvenile brown snake (aka super poisonous) but I maintain it’s mouth was pretty small and it would most likely have just bitten my trainer.

Near Anvil Rock is a pretty cool-looking place called Windswept Caves, so we stopped and admired those before driving on to another nearby lookout, which was nice, but not as good as Anvil Rock.

After that we drove on to a place called Lincoln’s Rock. This is one of those unfenced lookouts that reduces me from normal human being to sweaty blob of fear that has to be prised from the nearest solid object that is miles from the edge. So Marcel and Esther enjoyed the view and I photographed idiot tourists risking their lives for selfies.

After that we went to take a quick walk to a viewing point overlooking Wentworth Falls. We just about made it there before the terrible weather, but we definitely didn’t make it back before the rain. We drove our soggy selves back and spent our last evening admiring astoundingly thick fog through the windows.

The next morning we drove back to Sydney and dropped the car off at the airport (because we just love driving to the airport there). Then we headed out to see Ruth and meet the newest member of their family, who hadn’t been there the last time we’d visited, Elliott. It was lovely to catch up with them all and go for a walk along the seafront and have dinner and do the crossword (just like being back at uni. Except for the gorgeous seaside views).

Saturday morning we checked in online for our flights the next morning and headed out for the day. About an hour after we checked in for our flight we got one of those casual emails that say “there’s been a slight change to your departure time”. We logged in expecting to see a 5-10 minute change. Instead it had been moved to 10 hours later. Marcel then spent an enragingly long time on the phone getting shunted between departments trying to find out what the hell was going on. Presumably because we called and complained early, we got bumped to a delta flight that was leaving roughly when our scheduled flight was supposed to leave. We had middle seats on opposite sides of the plane but the Delta spokesperson promised I’d get my vegetarian meal and that if we went to the airport early we could get our seats swapped to sit together.

So we headed out to enjoy our last day in Sydney. We took a ferry out to Manly and then took a walk around the headland there, which features an old plague graveyard and great views over the harbour. We also happened across an echidna wandering about doing it’s thing, which was a nice little last wildlife spot.

After dinner we said a “probably” goodbye to Esther and headed to our airbnb.

The next morning we arrived at the airport painfully early to find our flight had been hugely overbooked and there was no chance of sitting together and no vegetarian meal booked for me. Given it was a 14 hour flight, I was less than thrilled. A 14 hour flight that was also an hour and a half delayed in setting off (and we’d got to the airport 3 hours early so that was 4.5 hours of hanging around before 14 hours on the plane).

I was even less thrilled when I took my seat. This was between two elderly women from the Southern US. They were friends, but refused to swap to sit next to each other so instead I ended up wedged in the middle. They then got out wipes and cleaned everything in site, which was funny because the only germy thing in sight was the one who was sitting in the window seat who coughed and sneezed constantly. The one in the aisle let her handbag fall open and it was full of more benzodiazapines than a well-stocked pharmacy. They then spent the next hour constantly talking over me, before the one in the aisle seat had some wine. This in combination with the contents of her handbag caused her to pass out for the next 8 hours, entirely blocking any exit to the toilet.

The one sitting in the window seat (coughing constantly) didn’t sleep but maintained a strange policy (for someone who elected to sit next to a stranger) of refusing to speak to me. So for example she couldn’t work out how to turn on her reading light and instead would read by mine and then sigh loudly if I turned mine off to watch a movie. I was feeling petty at this stage so didn’t volunteer to help.

14 hours can stretch to a very long time when you are dying for a wee and are trapped in the middle on an incredibly uncomfortable seat. When I finally towards the end of the flight decided to try and sleep (when the aisle lady had woken up and I could finally go to the loo), the lady in the window seat decided to loudly tell her friend, over me, that she wanted to use the bathroom. I decided if she wanted me to move she could just ask (previously when she’d wanted to use the loo she just stared at me until I asked her if she wanted to go to the loo and then she just nodded) and so feigned sleep. She then decided to have a really loud conversation to see if she could “accidentally” wake me (and then presumably stare at me until I offered to move) but by now I was feeling really annoyed so I just pretended to be asleep for an hour out of spite. Which is also a very boring way to spend time. By the time we arrived at LAX I was pretty much done with ever travelling again…. But instead Sunday had begun again (oh the magic of the international date line!)

Luckily this Sunday was much better. We picked up a car, had brunch and then drove to our friend’s Kat and Karl’s lovely new house, took a nap, ate lots of cheese and crackers and then went out for an amazing Mexican meal with them and Saman and Ashley. So round 2 of Sunday was WAY better than Round 1 and ended the week on a good note.

Ways I thought I might die in Australia this week: heat stroke, being bitten by a snake with a good sense of irony, fallen off a ridge edge, dropped dead of the vertigo induced by the possibility of falling off the edge, ruptured bladder from being stuck between drugged up old ladies.

[rachelisnotatwork]

Week 8: in which we get rained on a lot and drop into NZ for the weekend

The week started...pretty grey and cold. We had a day to explore Alpine National Park, which thankfully has a lot of its big views visible from the car because it wasn’t very inspiring to get out of it. What all the tourism brochures neglected to mention about Alpine National Park (and in fact all of the Snowy Mountains region) is that there was a huge forest fire in 2003. This is part of the ecosystem etc, but it leaves a lot of Mountain Ash corpses sticking up, bleached white, above the brush. That plus the thick, grey cloud diminished the beauty of the view somewhat.

This was also the only time we’ve been at significant altitude in Australia. This meant snow (moderately exciting) but also high winds, which meant getting out even briefly at the viewpoints was somewhat unpleasant.

Since it was not actively raining when we reached the top, we decided to go on a walk from the weirdly named town of Dinner Plain. The walk was also fairly weirdly named; A Room with A View. The first thing we viewed was an enormous black snake, that was waiting patiently to cross the path in front of us. This was a bit surprising as there were patches of snow still around in the mountains and my limited understanding of snake biology is that they don’t like the cold. This one seemed pretty happy though. We think it was a red-bellied black snake, which is venomous, but only in a probably lifetime of miserable health complications after an ITU stay, rather than an instant death way like most Australian snakes.

The path was also really badly signed so we were quite pleased to find the eventual view point. The views were pretty good and from there we realised that we had done the circular walk the wrong way (there were actually arrows on trees but you could only see them from the other side). Did make it easier to find our way back though.

Our Airbnb had a tin roof and Marcel casually commented it would be nice to have heavy rain because he liked the sound of it. He probably regretted that statement, and I definitely did, when it teemed with rain overnight. The sound on the sloping tin roof, a few feet above our head, was not dissimilar I imagine to being stuck inside a coffee grinder. Not much sleep was had.

Alpine National Park is continuous with Kosciuszko National Park, which is just over the border in New South Wales. We had booked a night there, so headed out into the relentless rain the next morning.

Now Marcel was feeling rather guilty still about his corvid murder of the week before, and saw an opportunity to redeem himself. The rain had brought out a number of eastern long-necked turtles into the road, and every time we saw one Marcel would stop the car, turn around, drive back, get out in the pouring rain and move the turtle. He was feeling pretty good about this...until he drove over a magpie that decided to pay zero attention to the oncoming car.

I have always been keen on visiting the Snowy Mountains as they are home of the silver brumby in the Silver Brumby books I loved in my childhood. Unfortunately so thick was the mist and the heavy rain that we didn’t see much of it. 

Weirdly though when we descended into our town for the night, East Jindabyne, the sun appeared. We decided to try a little walk in a low area of the park called Sawpit Creek.

It was beautifully sunny and there were lots of adorable wallabies around. 

Feeling optimistic about the weather we decided to head back into the park...only to find if we went even a small distance up in altitude, the thick clouds and rain began again.

We abandoned it and headed to our airbnb for the night. A proper storm came on so we could watch lightening across the lake. That and the sad face of the random cat that appeared by our screen door. Now I know cats in Australia are terrible invasive predators...but this one was super cute. So we let it inside and fed it cheese.

The next day we had hoped the weather would be better locally so we could explore the mountains. It was not. Never mind we thought, we are driving to the coast where there are some beautiful beaches, the weather must be better there so we will just enjoy them for the day. The forecast for there was also teeming rain.

So in utter desperation for something to do to fill the rainy day...we headed for Canberra. Now Canberra is not the world’s most exciting capital. The National Museum there is pretty decent though. We ignored the opportunity to pay to see the visiting exhibit featuring “treasures of the British Museum” and instead went to the free galleries. Which whilst not particularly cohesive on the history of Australia featured cool things like a mummified Tasmanian Tiger head, a collection of glass eyes and spear heads made from wine bottles. It passed the afternoon well.

Fortunately the next day dawned gorgeous. After a week of pretty much solid rain it was blue skies and sunshine all around. Unfortunately we only had one hour to look at the best of the local beaches in Jervis Bay (we picked Hyams) before we had to head to Sydney.

After a run in with an annoying question talking parking warden, we finally made our way to Esther’s flat, dumped what must have been an alarming amount of stuff at hers and dropped our filthy car back at the airport (sorry Hertz).

We then headed back into town. Earlier in the day I’d been talking with Marcel about how Australia was fine for a visit but I didn’t like the population’s right-leaning stance and casual racism. He said he didn’t think they were that racist. As we walked by the harbour bridge through the botanical gardens, we found ourselves calling the police as a man screamed racist abuse at non-white tourists, spat in their faces and hit one of them. No joy there in being right. Also the police were extremely tardy on bothering to turn up despite the fact that area of town must have had a lot. Despite this we enjoyed a lovely dinner with Esther before heading back out to the airport for a night in an airport hotel.

The reasoning for this was that whilst we were in this part of the world we might as well “pop” to New Zealand. It is a 3 hour flight from Sydney to Auckland, but that is a lot fewer hours than it is from London and it is a lot cheaper.

So on Friday we headed off to New Zealand. After the customary lengthily grilling at the flight counter about onward flights (really tempted to ask how often people, with hand luggage only, who are citizens of a rainy island with so-so social benefits, illegally emigrate to other rainy islands with so-so social benefits) we headed off.

We arrived to find… it starting to rain. Luckily it held off for a bit that evening so that we could go to a night market and stuff ourselves full of weird food including bubble waffles with our hosts Anita and Pete.

The next morning it woke up...beautifully sunny. Which was unsettling as this is NZ and it likes to rain on us in NZ. I did however remember that New Zealand sun= basically like shoving your body into fire and slathered myself with factor 50 before heading out. We meandered in the warm sun down to a market for breakfast, on to a chapel on top of a hill (never realised before how hilly Auckland is. Too hilly is my brief conclusion) and then after meeting up with Kate, we wandered slowly along the sea front, stopping for drinks, before we got to a Breton galette place about 10km down the shore.

After stuffing ourselves, we waddled slowly back home. To find that no matter how thickly you slather on the suncream, NZ sun finds some way to chargrill you, and my forehead and patches around my neckline were pretty much maroon.

The next day we’d planned to go to a place called Piha beach. The weather forecast suggest it would be cloudy but wouldn’t rain there until the mid-afternoon. We had brunch. The sky gloomed ominously. We headed to the beach. It started to spit cold rain into our faces pretty much the second we arrived.  I would have thought this was our standard NZ curse, but this was the second time the exact same thing had happened to Anita, so I think she was our Jonah of that trip.

When we got back to Auckland, Marcel and I decided to head over to Devonport, a little village suburb of Auckland that you can get to by ferry. We confirmed our suspicions that Anita was definitely the jinxed one when we enjoyed lovely sunshine all afternoon whilst a dark cloud glowered over Auckland.

In the evening, reunited, we headed out for Mexican, and then to an ice cream store called Giapo that did weird flavours. Now I thought you’d just go in and order your weird ice cream. But no. Instead you are admitted in your pair/group/alone to stand around a small table, whilst a server brings out a selection of their favourite ice creams for you to try and discusses each one. I imagine it similar to being at a wine tasting, only more socially awkward as none of us were expecting it and weren’t really sure how to praise ice cream in an appropriate manner. I did ended up going for one of the ones our server had introduced but I hadn’t thought of, guacemole with strawberries. The ice cream was delicious. The corn nacho crumb that it was coated in I was less keen on.

We ended up finishing the night (and the week) watching The Meg, a gloriously terrible Jason Statham shark movie, whilst all shouting at the screen. Hilarious fun and reminded me of long-ago weekends down in Dorset.

Ways I thought I might die in Australia this week: fairly minimal as the rain prevented us leaving the car much. Perhaps just an apoplexy of wrath from the rain refusing to shut up as it banged down on our tin roof earlier this week. Oh and falling off a steep mountain pass in our car. And getting bitten by a surprisingly cold-tolerant snake.

[rachelisnotatwork]

Week 7: in which we enrage some wildlife and meet our old nemesis, rain

We started this week by hitting the Great Ocean Road! Which horrifyingly was full of other tourists… The road is famous for amazing views out across the sea. My camera, which has been being an absolute bastard on this holiday, naturally decided to immediately die. So alas our photo opportunities were limited to the iPhone.

Whilst there are a few famous spots on the Great Ocean Road, there are also a lot of smaller stop offs. We started off with some of the smaller ones, and then worked our way up to Bay of Islands, London Bridge (the bridge part of which collapsed years ago, leaving two horrified tourists now on top of a stack) and then headed to the Twelve Apostles.

When we got out at the Twelve Apostles, we noticed a sign warning of snakes. Marcel said “chance would be a fine thing” as he hadn’t seen any and were keen. About 30 seconds later, I spotted a snake slithering onto the path (very excited about this, I’m TERRIBLE at wildlife spotting so I never spot ANYTHING first). It was a pretty busy bit of the path, so soon other people had noticed. Including some Spanish-sounding tourists who crouched down to get a selfie with it. We asked if they knew what species it was as that seemed like the world’s worst idea in a country known for excessively venomous snakes and the guy of the couple said he did not but he didn’t “feel” it was venomous. Some Australians arrived a few seconds later to point out it was a Tiger Snake, Australia’s second most deadly snake. We will never be out of a job.

The views from the Twelve Apostles were pretty good. Marcel wanted to go down to a beach nearby so we headed to some cliffs were some steps, The Gibson Steps, have been cut in. Marcel is attracted to anything with an irritatingly large number of stairs like moths are attracted to light, but this only had 86 steps so I agreed. Unfortunately they weren’t 86 ordinary steps, they were 86 knee-high steps hewn into rock. And the beach at the bottom was very windy, so we didn’t even have that much time to relax down there and for my knees to recover, before I had to drag my shitty knees back up them.

In the afternoon, we went for two walks – the first in a rather lovely little park called Melba Gully, which is apparently the wettest spot in Victoria (although thankfully it wasn’t raining). It went through fern forests that looked like they could have been the back drop to Jurassic Park and up to an area called “Big Tree”, which was a whole bunch more steps...to a tree that had fallen down in 2009. Not amused. There were some impressively large fallen trees there though. Tried to get Marcel to climb inside a hollow one but he refused on the basis of snakes and spiders.

We then headed out to Cape Otway lighthouse, which had shut by the time we arrived, but it did have a walk down to a very lonely graveyard for the previous lighthouse keepers and their families. It clearly doesn’t get many visitors as we alarmed a mob of wallabies.

The next day we headed into the Cape Otway National Park to walk to Triplet Falls. My knees had been feeling the steps of the previous day, so we selected this walk as it described itself as “boardwalks”. How much up and down can there be in boardwalks? Turns out a lot, if you define spread out steps as boardwalks. The view was pretty at the end, although it turns out Australia has a sharply delineated belt just North of Adelaide where fly territory ends and giant mosquito territory starts, so we didn’t relax and enjoy the view for long. We did however on the way back find an abandoned steam engine and railway cart from when logging was a big industry there.

Marcel was desperate to stop off at a place called Kennett River, which is known for it’s large wild koala population. We stopped off at a cafe at the start of it first. I looked out the window somewhat nervously, as the cafe sold bird food and there were a lot of tourists outside being used as a perch by greedy parakeets and parrots.

Now if there is one thing I’m REALLY not cool with, it’s birds. I hate them. Hate their creepy feet and beady eyes and general flappiness. Marcel assured me that I’d be fine out of the cafe, because the birds would only be interested in people with food. We headed outside. The first ten metres or so it was all going fine. And then I saw a parakeet headed straight at me. I started shrieking “No no no no no” and running away but it still managed to land on me, just as I pretty much crashed into a bemused Chinese tourist who was having a cigarette. I shook it off and another one descended and landed straight on my head. I windmilled my arms at it and tried to throw my hoodie over my head but it was determined. Marcel meanwhile was probably crying with laughing but I was in too much of a panic to notice. Eventually I got myself bird-free to find Marcel was ENCOURAGING the disgusting beasts to land on him so I could take a photo. Not amused.

We eventually shook off the birds and headed up the hill. And there were a lot of koalas about. All sleeping and generally looking dopey.

We took the car and headed further into the forest, but the mountain ashes grew really huge and so even if a koala could have been bothered to climb that high (and they aren’t nature’s athletes), we wouldn’t have been able to see it. So we turned back. We saw a kookaburra just sitting on the side of the road so decided to stop and take a closer look. My friend Sophie promised me that if you roll your “rrrs” at kookaburras they like it and will talk back. The kookaburra just looked at us like we were idiots but seconds later a furious noise emerged from a nearby tree. Apparently my rrrr- rolling sounds like the challenge of an angry koala or something because one emerged and seemed furious. It bellowed for a while and then climbed another tree whilst shouting the whole time.

We drove back around to the bottom where the terrifying parrots were to find another koala descending right in front of us and moving to another tree. Which was cute to see so up-close, but was tense knowing any moment you could be attached by a creepy footed parakeet.

We ended the day up in Lorne, going up to the look out point and then eating surprisingly good Mexican food at a place called Mexican Republic, where I liked our food so much we kept ordering more until we practically had to roll our way home.

The next morning we’d booked onto a 3 hour horse ride through the bush and down to the beach. We rolled out of bed to find….it was pouring with rain. This was somewhat surprising/annoying as rain hasn’t really been much of a feature of this trip so far. So it was fairly exasperating to find it had turned up for the one time we’d booked into a non-refundable outdoor activity. But we are British so we donned rainwear, borrowed hats (the hats were labelled according to head size; we both required melon head) and headed out on our horses.

The rain got a lot lighter and then pretty much stopped. Unfortunately this new dampness brought all the mosquitos out who laughed in the face of the scant protection offered to my legs by leggings and so I looked pretty much like a Morris dancer on my horse, constantly slapping my thighs.

The beach bit though was great- thanks to the weather it was empty and we had plenty of room so we could have several canters along it until the horses tired.

We got back and pretty much creaked off our horses- neither of us has been riding for years and 3 hours of fast riding were starting to burn.

We drove on to Melbourne- fortuitously stopping at a chocolate factory for lunch, where I pretty much managed with my aching muscles to guide large volumes of hot chocolate towards my face. 

The next day we slept in late and then headed out for brunch with my friend Nadine. It was pretty exciting to see another friend after about 6 weeks in just each other’s company AND brunch is my favourite meal of the day. Afterwards we wandered the botanical gardens and caught up and then Marcel and I headed back to our end of town to rest our aching legs a bit before dinner (via some of Melbourne’s old arcades). 

We headed out to St Kilda’s for dinner as there is a pier there that hosts a colony of little blue penguins. I wasn’t expecting much as I couldn’t imagine many penguins in a big city. But actually there are loads there and they are much more used to people than most penguins so wandered past, pretty much slapping your legs out the way whilst bellowing to each other. It was pretty adorable. And there was a cheese bar nearby where Marcel and I spent far too much money and ate far too much cheese.

The next morning we had brunch (again! Oh the city miracles!) and headed out of town to our next accommodation, which was near an area called Wilson’s Promontory, which we were keen to explore the next day.

On the way down there, it started to rain. And rain. As we were growing close to our destination, the sky was pretty much black and the rain lashed down in sheets. Suddenly a crow shot down from the sky right into our windscreen and bounced off. Marcel was horrified to have killed a corvid, since they are so clever and social (even when we went back to check on it, the others had come to mourn it), probably not helped by me claiming they’d probably wreak bloody revenge on him since they have really long memories.

Since the weather was rubbish and our accommodation was nice with a look out over the hills- we hunkered down early and lazed in front of the wood-burning stove (slight hiccup there when our hosts asked it we had firelighters and Marcel had a lapse and assumed that they meant matches- leaving me to start a fire with toilet paper). As the evening went on the wind really picked up and as the house was on a crag and up on stilts, with particularly harsh gusts you could feel the bed shaking.

The next morning I awoke to find Marcel already awake. Apparently at dawn he’d been awoken by a banging and cawing noise. On going to the window he found a crow pecking at the glass and staring at him. He was suitable freaked out.

The weather unfortunately hadn’t improved much. We drove down to Wilson’s Promontory, where the rain had stopped but the high wind persisted. We got out onto a beautiful white sand beach- to get a face full of sand. The wind was whipping it up, into our faces, hair, clothing etc. Found it in my ears later.

We beat a swift retreat to a forest walk, which was at least a little sheltered, and then we tried again on their famous “squeaky” beach of mica, but whilst the grains were larger here so we didn’t get sand in our faces, it wasn’t exactly encouraging to hang about in, so we headed back early for another evening of fires and eating my new, weird discovery, Cadbury’s chocolate...with crisps in.

The next morning we were both awoken again by the crow in the morning, banging on the glass and cawing. We decided it must be a regular thing it did, and that maybe it got fed. So we asked our hosts when we checked out. Apparently no one has ever mentioned a crow before, so it seems we are being stalked by a vengeful crow. Watch this space for crow attacks.

We were heading next to Alpine National Park, which was not that far geographically from where we were but thanks to the eccentricities of the local roads, we had to head back into Melbourne to head out to it. We got there in the late afternoon, which was time to enjoy a (bizarrely badly signed) walk around a park before heading to our new accommodation for dinner.

We also had a wood-burning stove there, so the week ended with me indulging my pyromaniac tendencies and contributing a bit more to global warming (as if all these long-haul flights didn’t make me feel bad enough...but not bad enough to stop).

Ways I thought I might die in Australia this week: bitten by a tiger snake that was trying to escape someone’s selfie, crumbling cliff edges on the Great Ocean Road, run over by a car trying to escape parakeets, losing a fight with a koala I’ve accidentally enraged, bucked off my horse after accidentally slapping it whilst trying to get rid of mosquitos, swept up in my bed in the high winds (and if not killed, deposited in Oz. The Other Oz), sandblasted to nothing on a windswept beach, murdered by a super vengeful crow, of diabetes secondary to eating chocolate with crisps in

[rachelisnotatwork]

Week 6: in which there’s a big rock, papier-mache apples, a giant fork and I probably get arsenic poisoning

Google is normally pretty good at guessing how long drives will take...apart from in rural Australia. I think it must base it’s data on the seemingly endless caravans and camper vans, because it assumes an average speed of 80kmph in the Northern Territories when the speed limit is 130 kmph on the highway and there isn’t much (apart from the occasional overtaking of a caravan or road train) to stop you driving that speed.

The result was that whilst we’d planned the entire day to drive down from Alice Springs to Kings Canyon, we were done by around about late lunchtime. We decided to go for a short easy walk down by Katherine Springs. It was into a valley so we were hopeful for shade as it was a “cool” 36c. Alas there was no shade apart from by the almost dried-up waterhole at the end of the walk, and there were enough of Australia’s fucking persistent flies to discourage that (seriously, I don’t know how they survive as you go somewhere with no signs of life, water or really anything you’d think a fly could live on but the second you get out of the car 500 turn up and try and fly up your nose). Thanks to the flies and the heat, we’d done the walk at a pretty decent clip so we still had plenty of time before sunset.

The main reason people go to Kings Canyon is to do the rim walk, which you have to start by 9am on most days because it is too hot in the afternoon for anyone to want to do CPR on your sunburnt corpse if you collapse from heatstroke. There is however a walk in the canyon, which we did although the end of it was shut due to a landslide. This landslide cemented the reasons I’d not be doing the walk the next morning- 1) I hate dawn 2) my knees hate steps and there are 1000 involved 3) I hate heights, especially when I think the cliff top I’m walking on has a chance of sliding in a landfall into a valley.

It was growing close to sunset at this point so we headed to our hotel at Kings Canyon Resort. This is the only hotel for about a hundred kilometres and they are very well aware of that fact, so they were both the most expensive hotel we’ve stayed in on this trip and the providers of the worst service. Think comically bad, including a buffet crawling with flies and most of the lights in our room being broken. Thankfully since Marcel had to get up at 5am to start the walk at the recommended sunrise, we could go to bed early.

The plan before we’d visited the resort was that Marcel would return at about 10am and then we’d have a nice brunch/early lunch. However the walk time (4 hours) was presumably for overweight elderly tourists because he was back home by 7.30am. Which I was thrilled about as I had pretty much no desire to stay any longer at the resort. We went for the free breakfast (fly-ridden again) and then tried to plan what to do with our day. Because we’d thought we wouldn’t have left until later in the day, we had just planned on driving to our next lodging (a road house in the middle of nowhere) before visiting Uluru the day after. However we didn’t really want to arrive at our road house in the middle of nowhere at 11am, so we decided we’d move our timetable forward a day and visit Uluru that day.

We arrived in time to have some (thankfully fly-free, palatable) lunch before heading to the national park. There are two attractions in the National Park, Uluru and the Kata Tjuta, which is a collection of rocks similar to Uluru but very close to each other. We decided to go there first.

When you drive into the park, you are given a leaflet warning you about the heat and also about hyponatraemia from over-drinking water. I’m not surprised that they had to warn people about hyponatraemia as everywhere inside the park it says to drink at least 1 litre of water an hour. Assuming you are out there for the daylight hours, that would be 13 litres of water a day. Not a sensible amount to drink.

There is one bigger long walk at Kata Tjuta, which was closed because it was too hot, and one shorter one that was open and described itself as going into a lush valley. I assumed this would mean shaded. I assumed wrong. It was in full 37C sun all the way.

Afterwards we headed over to Uluru. I have always thought “but isn’t it just a really big rock?” The answer is, yes, yes it is. It is really very big, but...I guess I’m a bit spoilt from travelling because Utah is very full of big red rocks, which might not be quite as big but they form lots of nice things to see that are much more accessible and most of the time it isn’t hotter than the surface of the Sun there. It’s quite a nice rock, but it costs a small fortune to get there and we’d pretty much driven for days to get there.

We did a few short walks around it’s base and went to the sunset viewing area to see the sun go down. It looked just like it does in the photos. Which means you can go now to google images and avoid the whole hassle.

We had dinner in the town by Uluru as we were about a three hour drive from our roadhouse and that would have stopped serving food long before we got there (we tried to book accommodation 6 weeks in advance in the town with Uluru in but by the time we tried everything was booked out). We then headed out onto the completely empty roads (it is really in the middle of nowhere so there is no through traffic). The drive back was mildly hair-raising as we shared the road with a LOT of wildlife. A dingo, a herd of horses that emerged from the darkness, several herds of cows that we had to slam on our brakes for and a pair of kangaroos. Arrived at our road house at near midnight feeling very lucky that we hadn’t crashed into any large animals as amongst everything else, there is no reception on roads like that and it would have been about 150km to the nearest emergency phone.

Our roadhouse accommodation had just left an envelope with our room keys in stuck to the door. There was a little bit of information about the property including the line “Our water is from a bore hole”. Okay I thought, lots of people’s are, doesn’t seem to taste any worse than any of the other water around here (water tastes terrible in most of Australia, I assume because they are so short of it that it is either desalinated or from some underground reservoir). It was only the next morning when we went into their cafe that we saw the notices above the taps about how you couldn’t drink the water or even boil it for tea. So when I die of arsenic poisoning, we will know why.

There wasn’t much to do at the roadhouse beyond pose at the sign marking the centre of Australia and see their “famous” chicken, Chuck Norris, who apparently thinks he is a kangaroo. He just looked and acted like a regular chicken but I guess there isn’t much in the way of entertainment or fame in those parts.

We had been supposed to have two nights at this road house, but instead we drove onto our next destination, Coober Pedy, a day early.

Coober Pedy is a very strange town. Opals were found in that area and the town sprang up around the mining community. The surrounding area could best be described as a boiling wasteland, so everyone lived in mine tunnels and so about half the town is underground. Driving up to our hotel, it just looked like a hillock. A hillock with a door in the side. We headed in and were shown to a rather cosy, albeit dark room, carved out of the rock with a slight whistling from air coming down the ventilation pipe.

The next day we decided to explore the sights of the town. The first stop was the Serbian Orthodox Church. This was carved by very devoted miner on his day’s off. The place was empty except for one elderly man, very determined to insert the vacuum cleaner he was wielding in front of my camera every time I tried to take a picture.

After that we headed to The Big Miner (a large miner) and a dumped spaceship prop from a movie.

Then we headed to go on a self-guided tour of an old mine. They made you wear helmets. I snorted slightly at this as I thought it was health and safety gone overboard. However the tunnels were about 5ft tall and I hit my head about 500 times in 20 minutes. Part of that was due to being repeatedly startled by creepy mannequins. 

Attached to the mine was a museum, which was mostly full of random rocks but it did have some clippings from some great 1920s and 1930s newspapers that they’d found left down the mine. 

It also featured a poster on the snakes of Australia, including this one that really doesn’t cope well with rejection.

After relaxing in our room for a bit, we headed out to an area called The Breakaways for sunset. These are some hills in the middle of an area called the Moon Plain, which is miles and miles of nothingness which is apparently of a very similar composition to Mars.

The Breakaways were still boiling despite it nearly being sunset and despite there being no tourists, or really any signs of life, as soon as we got out the car we found….lots of flies willing to try and fly into our eyeballs. Thankfully once you climbed any of the hills it got really windy, which confounded them for a few brief minutes. 

We couldn’t stay there until actual sunset as there are pretty much only two restaurants in town and one of them seemed by its menu to be committed to casual racism so we had to make it back before the other place, a pizza joint, shut.

The next day we left Coober Pedy and drove down to Adelaide. This was our longest drive of the trip- 9 hours, because there was pretty much nothing worth stopping at. It was also the biggest contrast. We went from 37c desert to huge fields of hay being harvested and by the time we arrived in Adelaide it was only 10c! I had to dust out my thermals from where they’d been hanging out in the bottom of my suitcase. We’d had quite enough of the car by that stage so walked to a surprisingly good neighbourhood Japanese restaurant (Yakitori Takumi, if you ever find yourself in North Adelaide) and then on our way back home, not only did we find a giant fork to pose with, we also found a late night chocolate dessert bar!

Adelaide is a very green city, so we decided to make it an outdoorsy sort of day. We had brunch (oh the joys of being back in a big city) and then walked to the Botanical Garden. There was a huge queue there to see a corpse flower that was flowering, which we decided to skip (despite the inbuilt British love of queueing) but we did head into the Museum of Economic Botany, mostly because we were curious what that meant. It turned out to be “plants that you can in someway exploit”. Anyway, it was pretty interesting and contained a huge collection of incredibly realistic papier-mache apples. I don’t quite remember how that fit in with the theme, but they were impressive.

Afterwards we decided we’d see if we could circumnavigate the centre by walking through all of the cities network of parks. It was a lovely sunny day and the parks there are beautiful...and also riddled with weddings and wedding parties getting photographed on a hot spring day. At one point we wandered into a Japanese garden to find a queue of bridal parties waiting to pose for photos.

We got pretty tired and stopped for ice cream at a place called 48 flavours (does just what is says on the tin) and I was intrigued enough to get a pear, walnut, fig and roquefort ice cream. Marcel was horrified. I rather enjoyed it though and it gave me enough energy to stagger home. Probably would not have worn my flip flops that morning if I’d known we were going to walk 16kms…

Sunday it was time to say goodbye to Adelaide (after brunch of course) and drive down to our next stop, Warrnambool. We’d thought we’d get there a while before dark because google had always predicted our journeys to take much longer than we actually took. We had however forgotten about the existence of other cars. We were now in the part of Australia with other cars, settlements to pass through with low speed limits etc. It was…annoying. I did find a giant rhino to pose with though.

We had wanted to walk at a small park where an extinct volcano had left a lake, because it was apparently one of the spots where you could see emus, kangaroos and koalas in one place. I’d seen a koala earlier in the day, ambling along the side of the road, whilst driving, however Marcel had been busy pouring over the map at the time and missed it. He was thus desperate to see one. We arrived shortly before sundown. It was cold. 12c. There was no one else in the park (win) and right in front of the (unmanned) visitors centre there were emus and kangaroos grazing. However walking around the lake we saw approximately 0 koalas. 

Plus on the way back to the car park our route was blocked by a very large male kangaroo. The problem with male kangaroos is that when they challenge each other to a fight, they stand up straight, so our bipedalism is taken as an invitation to a boxing match. We had to take a huge detour to our car as we had little interest in being disembowelled by an angry kangaroo.

By the time we arrived in Warrnambool it was 8c and I was suffering from temperature shock from having gone from nearly 40c to misty breath and cold toes in a week. Luckily our airbnb had a huge bath so after grabbing some Thai take out, I spend the evening wallowing in that, topping up the hot water and wondering how we could be in the same country we’ve been sweating in for the last 6 weeks.

Ways I’ve thought I might die in Australia this week: the standard heatstroke, hyponatraemia, some sort of epic GI disease secondary to a buffet of flies, death by crashing into a cow in the dark, poisoned by borehole water, from the collapse of an ancient opal mine, beaten by angry brides for ruining the background of their photoshoot, disembowelled by an angry kangaroo, hypothermia.

[rachelisnotatwork]

Week 5: the one in which we meet all of Australia’s creepiest creatures (and some cute ones)

The site we’d been smoked out of is just one of two sites in Kakadu that are famous for rock paintings. We decided to head out to the next one the next day. It was extremely muggy when we got up in the morning with thick cloud and constant rumbling thunder. Apparently these dry thunderstorms are incredibly common at this time of year; they promise rain that never comes and start bush fires. We came across one of these burning by the side of the road just as we came out of town. It was pretty small (hence we drove past it) but even passing it at 100kmph you got an incredible wave of heat off it.

We decided to drop into the visitors centre to learn something more about the area/enjoy some air-con before seeing the rock paintings. It was alas not air-conned. We thus poured sweat and steamed away in the 40c heat whilst learning about frogs etc.

By the time we arrived at the first site there was a bit of a breeze. This was pleasant. The rock art was pleasant. We walked to the second site. Just as we stepped under the rock awnings to the sheltered spot where ancient people had sheltered from thunderstorms and doodled on the walls, teeming rain began. And continued. Apparently the weather hadn’t got the memo it was still supposed to be the dry season. We assumed it would last a couple of minutes. It did not. 20 minutes later, us and a very wet tour group were still in there.

Eventually we made a dash for the car. We were booked into a sunset river cruise about 60km away so our hope was we’d drive out of the weather. Which we did. By the time we arrived at the yellow water cruise site, the weather was cloudy but there was no rain. This lasted about ten minutes after we set off, after which the heavens opened with thunder and lightening. And the rain was cold. And furious. We were in a little aluminium boat (having just received a safety briefing involving having no limbs over the side at all unless we wanted crocodiles to pull us under) with open sides. Our tour operator, who was driving the boat, said he was just going to “stick near the trees to protect us from lightening”. This was a strategy I was not sure was based in science at all. Also if we weren’t struck my lightening, having a boat capsized because a tree has been struck and fallen onto the boat, is what I would describe as suboptimal in a river packed full of saltwater crocodiles.

And we did see a LOT of those. Hanging out, fighting, trying to catch fish from our bow waves. It was pretty horrifying. Bit like being in Jurassic Park- since as nature’s perfect killing machines, they haven’t needed to evolve since then. We did also see water buffalo, cows and brumbies, but some huge bird thing, and eventually the rain stopped. Plus we didn’t get struck by lightening and no one got dragged overboard by a crocodile, so that’s a win.

The next day was thankfully more sunny. We were heading back to Katherine, because we’d not yet had a chance to visit Katherine Gorge, which is the big “must see” of the area. However on the way there was another beautiful swimming spot to visit- Edith Falls. Marcel suggested we could either read and swim or swim and go for a hike. Since it was, as usual for sunny days, about 38c and I could see the hike and it was full of climbing giant rocky hills, I told him he could go for a hike and I’d stick around and swim and read. He considered the hike but the swimming hole really was delightful and in the end he stuck with me.

The pool had a warning sign saying the waterfall at the back of it was 150m away and to swim within your ability. Apparently everyone who visited Edith Springs (all 7-8 of them) had a very low impression of their abilities (perhaps having had a similar riptide experience to me) so they all stuck within about 3m of the steps down into the lake. We swum over to the waterfall and had the whole place to ourselves, all afternoon, which was rather delightful. We alternated between swimming and reading and enjoying a ridiculously beautiful spot that was nearly empty.

We awoke the next morning to the sounds of a thunderstorm. Which again shouldn’t have been happening and was also a little dispiriting as our afternoon plan was 4 hours of kayaking. An activity that is distinctly less enjoyable in teeming rain. However we decided to see how things played out. Our first planned activity of the day was a trip to Cutta-Cutta Caves, which is a series of caves near Katherine that Marcel mostly wanted to visit as they apparently have a lot of snakes. This he did not tell me when he booked us onto it. I was somewhat unkeen to enter the caves most caves flood in the rain and I didn’t want a repeat of the Thai football team, only in a cave jam-packed with snakes. However by the time we’d arrived the rain had stopped and our guide promised us that the only snakes in the caves most days were tree snakes and “they are only mildly venomous so if you get bitten you just have to chill out for a couple of hours with a beer”. Probably this just meant your leg would fall off. Mild by Australian venom standards.  

We were the only people on the cave tour. It was thankfully very dry, unfortunately not cold (not deep enough) and we did see some tree snakes. One of them was doing a great impression of a stalactite. They apparently hang out on the walls and eat bats as they fly in and out the cave.

After that we set off for the gorges. By this time, the sun was out and it was boiling hot again. This was in some respects great (good for kayaking) but in other respects suboptimal, as you aren’t supposed to “pollute” the freshwater with suncream. So I had decided to put on my burkini. Which is fine but to get to the gorges where you can kayak, you have to take a boat trip through the first gorge because it could potentially have crocodiles. So we had to walk 500m down to the dock and then sit on a boat for 15 minutes. Swaddled in neck-to-foot black swimwear, I was concerned I was going to die of heat stroke before reaching the kayak.

We grabbed our double kayak (he tried to give us two solo ones but screw paddling for myself) and paddled to the nearest marked beach for a swim (some of the gorge beaches are designated for the freshwater crocodiles to lay their eggs). Swimming having just cooked in my suit for that long felt amazing. We had an amazing afternoon of paddling, swimming, paddling, picnicking and swimming. There was only one other pair out in kayaks and we only saw them once all afternoon so it felt like we were pretty much the only people in the gorge system. It was amazing.

This was at least gave us some nice memories to revel in during the next day. In which we drove for hours and hours and hours to get to Tenant Creek, a town that is generally described as a shithole. It wasn’t particularly obviously awful, but the only recommended activity in town was to visit the local lake “recreational park”. Being big on swimming and finally being out of crocodile territory we grabbed our swimsuits and headed out there. To find at this time of year it is a muddy waterhole, surrounded by an all-male collection of peacocks, guinea fowl, geese and about a million ants that immediately tried to eat our feet. We did not stay for long.

The next day we drove on down to Alice Springs, via the Devil’s Marbles (a bunch of large, roundish rocks) which we found underwhelming (although full of interesting frog facts).

We set off quite early because we’d booked onto a kangaroo tour that only runs in the evenings on the week days and so we had to make the Friday night trip out to the sanctuary. The sanctuary there is run by a guy who has spent years saving orphaned baby kangaroos (second to their general idiocy as adults when it comes to cars). He had a BBC TV programme made about him because clearly nothing ticks the British boxes like slightly handsome man and adorable baby animals. 

The tour was fantastic though, because he always has a bunch of orphaned kangaroos on the go, so you spend the tour holding baby kangaroos and feeding them whilst he shows you the sanctuary. It was amazing and about level 10 Australian on the scale of experiences.

Just as soon as we’d left it started teeming with rain and a thunderstorm began. We dashed back to our airbnb to discover the rain had brought out….a fucking giant spider. Like the size of your nightmares. I immediately requested Marcel killed it. He refused as thought it might be dangerous...so thought it would be safer to catch and release. I suggested it was his funeral but I would stand on the other side of the room and watch. One terrifying spider released.

We sat down at the table and tried to relax. Google suggested it was a harmless Huntsman spider. We decided whatever it was we were glad it was gone, only to notice sitting on the picture frame right by the table was ANOTHER FUCKING MASSIVE ONE. Catch and release repeated again. Then I made Marcel pretty much crawl around the airbnb with a torch before I would sit down on any surface.

The next day we decided we’d have a lazy day in town. It was a cool 29c, which felt amazing. We wandered into the free aviation museum to see the wreck of the Kookaburra- a plane that was scrambled to rescue the plane that crashed on the mudflats of Wyndham (the ones I talked about a few years ago where they drank coffee and rum cocktails until they were rescued) and crashed killing the rescuers. I was mostly just curious to see how tiny a 1920s plane was. So tiny. So fragile.

After that we went to the Desert Animal Park, which was basically a zoo of local creatures. Given I’ve never seen a Quoll, dingo, weird thorny devil lizard thing, it was pretty exciting. Also they had a bird show featuring a magpie that called out on command etc. A pleasantly relaxing afternoon was had by all.

When we got back home though, relaxation time was over fairly immediately as we came back to find one of the giant spiders wanted back in and was hanging out on the screen door.

Marcel chased it under the house with a broom and we spent the evening with our legs drawn up on the sofa, watching movies and feeling very twitchy glaring at the shadows.

On Sunday, we decided to head out of town for a swim. We went out to a place called Ellery Creek Big Hole. For the last few weeks all of our swims had been in gloriously warm waters. However around Alice Springs it gets cold at night, and the water in the Big Hole was deep and very very cold. It was hot enough that it made swimming pleasant, but the cold was quite shocking. We spent the afternoon alternating between swimming and warming up on the sand around the pool.

And so concluded week 5. Warm swims left behind us, but still plenty of adventures ahead!

Ways I’ve thought I might die in Australia this week: caught in a wildfire, drowned in a flash flood when rain came in epic proportions, struck by lightening, eaten by a crocodile after the boat was sunk by a tree that had been hit by lightening, overly keen crocodile grabbing one of my limbs that was too close to the side of the boat and dragging me under, drowned in a flash-flooded cave, killed by a not particularly venomous tree snake because I’m weak, of heat stroke in my burkini, death by spider bite, death by heart attack having imagined a giant spider just crawled over my foot, cold immersion syndrome from swimming in cold water after getting used to bathing in essentially bathwater temperatures

[rachelisnotatwork]

Week 4- in which we find a random marsupial, pose with some giant crocodile statues and get lightly smoked

Kununurra is hot. In a way it is probably hard to imagine unless you are currently a) in Kununurra or b) trapped in a sunbed inside a steam bath. Temperatures are 40c every day and humidity is 80%. I know North Americans love to describe temperatures as “feels like”. It feels like about 70C.

I was therefore pretty unhappy with Monday’s plan from Marcel, which was to do a “proper” hike at the Keep River National Park, just over the border into the Northern Territory. This was “just 6-7km”, which I agree is a reasonable hike...in the UK. In this pounding, relentless, sticky heat, 60-70m seems like a hike too far. However since I say no to a lot (about 90%) of Marcel’s suggestions, I thought I’d see how it went.

However how it went was we drove for an hour, turned into the national park entrance and found it was shut because it was on fire. Which appears to be the case for pretty much everything here as it is so hot most trees seem to have spontaneously combusted. What was slightly irritating (apart from driving an hour to something that is shut) is we crossed the border into the Northern Territories about 100m before the park entrance. But when we turned around and drove back approximately 3 minutes later, we were told we could not take back the supermarket apples we’d brought across the border 3 minutes ago as fruit cannot cross the border. So we had to sit there awkwardly in front of the border guard, eat the apples and then given him the apple cores before we could drive back into town.

By this stage Marcel had agreed with me that it was too hot to do pretty much anything so we went to plan b; swimming holes. Whilst this part of Australia is in the reach of the saltwater crocodile (aka nature’s biggest arsehole) these were spots too far from proper bodies of water for them to be able to swim to. The first was a pleasant but tiny spot called Molly Springs. This basically involved staggering about 50m from the car park to collapse into a pool of pleasantly cold water, fed by a small waterfall.

We cooled down a bit there and then headed to our second swimming spot, The Grotto. This was a pool inside a canyon, with 140 steps cut into the rock leading down to it. Slightly vertiginous steps, but given I was desperate for cold water, I got over my fears. The pool was large, very cool (it is 100m deep) and we had it entirely to ourselves, which are all features I enjoy greatly in a swimming spot. Although I did ruin it slightly for myself as I scrambled over the rocks at the bottom to get into the water by imagining just how fucked we’d be if bitten by a snake, a valley floor and 140 steps from our car, the only car for miles around, with no phone reception and a good hour plus drive to anywhere with phone reception. And the advice if you get bitten by a snake to bandage your leg and not move it at all.  However we managed not to get bitten so didn’t have to work out how to extract ourselves from that situation.

We had got out a bit before sunset because Marcel had read that Wyndam, the next town along, had a great lookout spot for sunset called Five Rivers. It wasn’t that far away but google suggested it would take an hour. We thought it was being pessimistic. However what google knew and we didn’t, was that the tarmac had been pulled up as part of road works. So that was 30km getting covered in red dust, going in and out of roadworks. We swung up to the overlook just before sunset.

The mudflats it overlooks played a small part in Australian history when a famous aviator got lost and made an emergency landing there, living off coffee and brandy until he was rescued (it was known as the Coffee Royal Affair after the drink brands as there were some accusations it was a publicity stunt but two aviators died trying to rescue him). They are...broad. The view is pretty good from up there, but it was enhanced a lot by having a colony of fairly adorable rock wallabies that were being fed by a rather eccentric looking elderly local.

My reason for wanting to visit Wyndham was at the bottom of the town though, so in the fading light I made Marcel hotfoot it down there so he could photograph me with the giant crocodile. I do love “big things” as they call giant statues in these parts.

The next day we’d arranged to go on a sunset cruise on the huge lake created by damming the Ord River back in the 1960s. After a lazy morning, we headed there early and ate a (hot) picnic by the river. Then we headed out on a boat designed for about 50 people that had about 15 on. The lake is beautiful and attracts a lot of animals. We swiftly went to see some adorable rock wallabies and then headed on to see some wallaroos. 

Since it was still boiling, he moored the boat for us to swim. Apparently the government obligation to keep the Ord River free of crocodiles plus the dam prevent them from being any saltwater crocodiles in the lake, although he went “It’s like the Loch Ness Monster, lots of people including experts claim they’ve seen a saltwater crocodile in here but no one has photos”. Given the plausibility of a mostly submerged killer crocodile somewhere in a giant, giant lake being hard to photograph, this did not hugely reassure me but it was boiling and the water was delightfully cold and clear so I headed in.

Afterwards he took us to the shoreline to see some little freshwater crocodiles. These apparently don’t like to eat people, which is good because he informed us that there were 25,000 in the lake we’d just swum in. The little one we saw was certainly very shy. 

In the same area, the boat was besieged by fish. Our guide gave us some bread and told us to dangle it over the water so the fish could see it but not to drop it in. Having followed these slightly strange instructions, we shortly found out that this is because this type of fish can spit water considerable distances (including as I discovered straight into your face and mouth) in order to knock insects off leaves and branches into the water. It was pretty hilarious (and fun) to be repeatedly spat at by grumpy fish.

As the sun came down, he moored the boat so we could have another swim, which was gorgeous at that time of day with the sky turning red before we headed back to shore.

Earlier in the week we’d bought a pass to enter a huge private estate in the area for a hike. The next morning we set off for this hike, getting up at the ungodly hour of 6am so we could start hiking at 7.30am “before it gets too hot”. The temperature at 7.30am was 32c, which I think I’m not alone in thinking is already what I’d define as too hot to be pleasant to hike in. Our first problem though was that the hike started at a (now closed as the tourist season had ended) resort at the end of a gravel road. As we reached the end of the gravel road, a river had overspilled the road, submerging it approximately knee-deep. Since our car is not covered for driving in through rivers, we decided to wade over it and leave the car parked to the side of the road.

It turns out we weren’t the only people the man selling passes had told to get there at 7.30am before it got too hot because as we were busy taking off our shoes and wading across, 5-6 proper 4 x 4s just drove straight through it. Marcel was surprised by this because he grew up off-roading in Zimbabwe and the advice is always to wade through water to check its depth before you drive a car across. But not a single one of the cars did this. When we got back to town he googled this and apparently you are told not to do this in Northern Australia because those bastard saltwater crocodiles will probably eat you as you wade across. But we didn’t know that at the time and it was pretty near the resort so there probably/hopefully wasn’t one there.

The walk described itself as a Grade 4 walk (which we’ve done several of before), “mostly flat with some steep parts”. It wasn’t 100% lying when it said “mostly flat” if you were counting gradients of a walk, but what they didn’t mention was “this entire gorge is just rammed full of rocks washed down in the rainy season and this walk is 2km of clambering over boulders”. Which is approximately zero fun when there is no shade, it is already heading towards the mid-30s temperature-wise and my patellas dislocate at the drop of a hat (let alone when scrambling over rocks). And there were tons of other hikers there so it wasn’t even peaceful. I was not a very cheerful hiker and when we reached the “steep” part at the end (now scramble up a steep boulder scree!) I said no more.

So we headed back and to the other destination we’d been planning for the end of the morning, some thermal springs. I must confess that in the now 38c heat, I wasn’t really seeking more warm water, but they were absolutely gorgeous, empty (as all the hikers had been told to visit after finishing the Emma Gorge walk) and 32c, which did mean if you submerged yourself you were cooler than being in the outside air. We had a very pleasant couple of hours there before all the hikers came and we left.

By lunchtime we felt like we’d been up for a small lifetime thanks to the early start, so we had an easy afternoon eating chocolate rum cake at a local distillery and doing some laundry as we prepared ourselves to head to our next destination.

On Thursday we drove. There really wasn’t much to say about Thursday. The road was long and the only other traffic going our way were road trains full of cattle, staring sadly out the back at us as some miasma of cattle piss and sweat rained down on the car. As we got closer to our destination, we arrived at a number of road works where there were long stretches of cones, no obvious roadworks going on and traffic lights where the amber signal was a countdown. We arrived at the first one and I was excited to see the countdown was on 8, so I assumed that would be 8 seconds until we moved off. It was not. It was 8 sodding minutes. Each traffic light had a ten minute countdown on it and we hit three of these. The earliest we hit was 6 minutes. Not cool. Especially since there was never anyone working or any traffic in the opposite direction.

Our stop for the evening was a town called Katherine. It is a pretty depressing place, made more so by the police we saw standing outside both of the town’s liquour stores when we wandered out to buy food. Another tourist had clearly just asked what they were doing there as we walked past, and the policeman was explaining they regularly stood there of an evening in order to arrest people with outstanding domestic violence warrants when they came in to buy their drink. Lovely.

The motel however had a pool and since it is almost always over 30 degrees after dark, we had a good night swim.

By driving so much on Thursday, we didn’t have much driving to do on Friday. Our end destination was Darwin but we’d planned it so we could stop in Litchfield National Park on the way. Litchfield has a series of lovely swimming spots that they clear of saltwater crocodiles after each rainy season (you hope fully…).

The first falls we stopped off at, Florence Falls, had two methods of reaching it, some stairs or a walk called “shady creek” down to them. Marcel was keen on some walking that day so I suggested we tried the shady creek route. The shade was...somewhat sparse. It was 1km but it felt like about 10km as we boiled in the sun. It did however make the swim when we arrived in the cold water feel amazing. I deliberately stayed in the water, sitting on a rock, submerged to the chin, not moving until I was really cold when I got out in the hopes of staying cool on the 163 steps back up to the car park via the short route. It was not successful. I was pouring sweat again by the time I reached the top.

Our next falls of the day, Wangi, was a lot easier to get to but strangely much more empty and huge (this may have been as I later read because they’ve managed to have some very rare freshwater crocodile attacks there, which whilst they are never fatal, getting lightly mauled never really adds to an afternoon). It was a gorgeous place to swim- cool clear water, waterfalls you could hang out under watching rainbows form in the spray. It was pretty hard to drag ourselves out.

We arrived in Darwin as the sun was setting. After 3 weeks in very sparsely inhabited areas, it felt strange to see skyscrapers again. We were however excited about eating out and after a quick shower headed out for Indian. On the way home we stopped to get Cold Rock ice creams, which I became a bit obsessed with when I was in Australia in 2003 with raging pneumonia, and eating those, whilst febrile, wheezing and coughing, was about the only enjoyable part of my day. It was alas not as good as I remembered.

We had one day in Darwin and to be honest we were pretty lazy with it. We had brunch (brunch! Oh the city miracles), went to a bookshop, stocked up on chocolate (an essential) and went to their big museum, the Museum of the Northern Territories. It is a very nice museum. Air-conditioned, free, and filled with both an interesting exhibition of aboriginal art and also lots of information on killer animals including a stuffed 5m saltwater crocodile called Sweetheart.

It also has an interesting exhibition on Cyclone Tracey, which completely flattened the town in the 1970s. This includes a completely pitch black booth you can sit in and hear recordings a local man made of the 200mph winds from inside his house. It is deeply unsettling to hear the wind howl and the sound of metal being scraped and banged across roads as cars, roofs and walls came down.

Towards the evening we went on a sunset walk down the beach, making sure to stay very clear of the waterline as we are currently during the approximately 10 months of the year where arsehole box jellyfish are about.

We went back to our hotel bungalow and got changed for dinner. When we came out we saw in the darkness some small creature bobbing on the railing by the door. We used the torches on our phone to ensure it wasn’t a giant rat, and discovered a strange marsupial thing about the size of a half-grown cat clearly weighing up whether to approach us. When I bent forward with my phone camera to take a picture it ran up. Now I’m a sensible mature adult who knows feeding wildlife is a terrible idea. Unless it is on the table outside my hotel room looking adorable. I made Marcel fetch biscuits, which it was thrilled with. So thrilled with, it then tried to climb on me which I was less keen on as I had no idea what it was but it had scratchy-looking feet and also I knew if I ended up in A&E having been bitten by it they would judge me for being the idiot who fed it biscuits.

On our way to dinner I googled it and I’m pretty sure it was a northern brushtailed possum. Google then gave me a list of exterminators, so I’m pretty sure the hotel would not have been thrilled to find out that clearly their guests are feeding it judging on how tame it was (and how adorable it was).

The next day we headed out of town to Kakadu National Park via a giant boxing crocodile. 

It was a bit of a drive but there was enough time to go to Ubirr, an area with some pretty amazing Aboriginal rock paintings. 

The area also has a rocky area that is supposedly great to climb for sunset. We decided we’d see all the rock paintings and climb the outcropping last. Not least because it was boiling hot, extremely humid and we could hear thunder grumbling in the distance, so we were hoping it would be a bit cooler by the time the light was fading. We headed up the outcropping, stopping at the various different paintings on the way up. We were about three quarters of the way up when a man coming down told us we should climb to the top now if we wanted to go “because there is a huge rain cloud rolling in really quickly”. We turned around to see thick black cloud pretty much submerging the trees and rocks 500m away. We started climbing up, only to be hit about 30 seconds later by a powerful smell of smoke. This wasn’t a giant rain cloud. This was an enormous black pall of smoke, presumably because some of the lightening that had accompanied that thunder had hit part of the tinder-dry woods that surrounded us in every direction.

Having some awareness of how fast wildfires can travel, a strong desire not to burn alive and an awareness that my asthma inhalers were about 60km away in my suitcase (yes, I know as a doctor I should set a better example…), I bolted down the rock with a turn of speed rarely seen in this heat. Before I’d even reached the bottom my eyes were stinging and watering from the smoke. By the time we reached the car, we were covered in little black speckles of ash. Luckily the one road out of the area was in the opposite direction to the wind and the smoke so we headed out there pretty swiftly and made it back safely to civilisation.

And so ended week 4 with me thinking “FFS Australia, can’t I even enjoy a little light strolling with out you finding some way to try and kill me?” Dunno why people do extreme sports here. Just trying to survive is extreme enough for me.

Ways I’ve thought I might die in Australia this week: heatstroke just trying to exist in Kununurra, falling off steps into a gorge, being bitten by a snake in a remote gorge, being eaten by saltwater crocodile whilst wading across water you didn’t want to risk your rental car in, being eaten by a saltwater crocodile that didn’t fall for the trap to keep it out, being eaten by a freshwater crocodile that didn’t get the memo that they are supposed to be the good giant crocodiles, being stung by a washed up box jelly fish tentacle that is just sitting on the beach, of boredom at a traffic light, in a wildfire because it is so hot the world is on fire.

[rachelisnotatwork]

Week 2: in which it is very windy and we nearly drown (spoiler alert) but we do find a giant prawn

On Monday we left our rather gorgeous B&B in Kalbarri and headed further up North. The drive was a bit...monotonous. There was literally nothing to stop at or see for three hours, nor even any corners. Just a straight road, one lane in either direction, and some dead kangaroos by the side of the road.

After three hours, we reached the start of the peninsula we were going to stay on. Our first stop off was stromatolites. In case you don’t know what this is (I didn’t) it is a microbial mat that gradually builds up and turns into a rock. This is just as scenic as you imagine it to be. I was...underwhelmed. Apparently they were very important in oxygenating the earth and early life, so I guess thanks? The best bit was it was near the only shop for several hundred kilometres and they sold magnums, so ice cream and toilet stop win (no wilderness wees for me here since everything is toxic and I’m bad at spotting wildlife).

Our next stop was a place called shell bay, which is a super saline bay (evapouration, lack of currents etc) that only has one type of cockle living and dying there in epic proportions. It was quite pretty so I guess that wins over microbial mats. We also got asked by some tourists where the nearest petrol station was because their reserve light was on and had been for ages. The news there were none for at least 50km was not received well.

Our final stop off was Eagle Bluff, which is an overlook with a boardwalk. We saw a turtle from above, and I learnt about nervous sharks, which are frankly the only sharks I feel I might be on board with since I like timidity in my biting predators. 

I also learnt about the existence of stone fish, which it suggests you take precautions to avoid. I was already concerned about going in the sea due to sharks, jellyfish, saltwater crocodiles and sea snakes (which I wasn’t even aware were actual creatures, not mythological beasts until this trip). I googled stone fish and added them to the “For Fuck’s Sake” list. Apparently they hang out looking like a stone (or bury themselves in the sand) but unlike a stone their backs are covered in spikes that can penetrate a boot sole and these are covered in agonising toxins that can both kill you and if doesn’t kill you, forever wither your limb due to the nerve damage. Fabulous.

We finally drove into Denham in the late afternoon. It is a town of 600 people in the middle of nowhere but it has a surprisingly decent supermarket. After a late afternoon snack of vintage cheddar and pumpernickel, we set out for a walk.

We tried somewhere called the Little Lagoon first. On the way we saw an echidna crossing the road and were very glad, since some tourists had stopped on the opposite side of the road to photograph it, that we hadn’t swung around the corner 20 seconds earlier and flattened it in front of the crowd. The lagoon itself was very dull, but we did follow the creek of it to the beach to enjoy sunset.

Directly after sunset the wind really picked up, which was a bit alarming as we are staying in a mobile home (accommodation is both sparse and expensive) and it started to creak somewhat ominously with the wind. We did however survive until morning which is always a plus.

Tuesday morning we drove across to Monkey Mia (deeply confusing name as there are definitely no monkeys in Australia but it is something to do with aboriginal names for dolphins and a pearling ship) to go on a nature spotting boat trip.

Monkey Mia is some sort of national park reserve but in a deeply un-national park fashion, they feed the dolphins in the morning (whilst putting up lots of signs telling you how feeding wildlife is awful and you mustn’t do it). This is mainly at 7.45am, which might as well be never on my schedule, so we thought we wouldn’t bother as they only sometimes feed them later. But luckily for us, we embarked on our boat tour just as they started feeding some so we got some great views of greedy dolphins indulging in unnatural behaviour (which is obviously exactly what you want on a nature cruise).

At first I was a little dispirited as our boat featured a crowd of elderly pensioners from a coach tour, so thought the whole trip would be full of elderly fallers and people bawling to hear each other over their hearing aids. But actually the first pensioner who struck up a conversation with us had emigrated to Australia 60 years ago because her husband was a doctor and he was horrified about the NHS coming into being. So they headed off down under and he became a rural doctor in the middle of nowhere, providing all the medical services a hospital probably does now and she used to assist him when he did operations on the kitchen table. Now she seemed to be off having a great time not being old- after explaining how the last time she hung out in the net they drag off the back of the boat so you get repeatedly dunked (it’s for kids and she said she thought “Am I too old for this? And then thought NO”), she headed off to climb onto the roof of the boat. She later did a Titanic impression and gave us pilfered cheese and crackers. My new life goal is to be her when I’m old. The next one told us about how he grew up in Perth but his sweetheart was in Tasmania, so he used to load up his car with days worth of petrol, water and food and head out across the untarmacked enormous Nullarbor desert hoping for the best. Made us feel a bit wussy with our aircon and cooler bag full of snacks in the car.

In addition to fun pensioner spotting, we also saw a lot of dolphins and turtles. One of the dolphins even decided to hang out at the front of our boat, surfing the bow wave and doing twirls in it. We then spent a long time cruising to look for dugongs, and getting irritated because we kept spotting turtles instead. Eventually we did see a mother and calf, although given how they swim you couldn’t really see the faces which are the most distinguishing part.

We cruised back and laughed at some pelicans on the beach.

Then we ate lunch at a restaurant overlooking the shore. From the terrace you could see the water. In which two children frolicked. We watched as a dolphin slowly swam closer and closer until he surfaced right behind one of the kids, who was a boy of about ten. Said child turned, saw the dolphin, shot about ten foot up into the air and ran out of the ocean in flailing all of his limbs. Pretty sure the dolphin was laughing.

After lunch we decided since there were so many dolphins just merrily splashing about in the water, we’d go kayaking. We rented a kayak. We headed out into the water. All of the wildlife immediately disappeared and the wind picked up so we spent about an hour trying not to get blown out to sea.

After we got back to shore some children were encircling a goanna. With the touching faith children have in adults, they asked me if it was dangerous. I said yes, because I think you have to assume everything here could probably liquefy your organs with a scratch. So apologies to those parents, as I assume their kids are probably having nightmares about lizards now.

When we had booked our original boat tour, we also got a free sunset cruise with the same company. So at 16.45 we headed back to the jetty to see that all the dolphins who had spent the last hour hiding were currently participating in a right by the shore war with the pelicans, who were giving as good as they got. Apparently pelicans piss dolphins off by following them around. When the dolphin has diligently found a fish and herded it to the surface, before it can move in for the kill the pelican that has been tailing it swoops in and nabs the fish. Knew pelicans had the look of right bastards about them.

That was about the best animal spotting we had on the sunset cruise. The dolphins aren’t supposed to be fed after midday but I concluded from the fact they kept hanging around all day by the feeding part of the shore, that they are like cats. Eternal optimists and poor time-keepers, always hoping someone might give them some fish.

The cruise was beautiful but the wind really picked up. To 31 knots, to be precise, which is 35mph, which is a lot more wind then you want when it is getting cold, you are in summery clothes and you are very, very exposed on the roof of a catamaran. They had to lower the sail because they were concerned the wind was going to damage it.

When we got back to shore there was another dolphin being scenic and hanging out right by the beach, which made our rather windy trip and cold trip seem rather pointless. But on the way home, driving carefully to avoid a kangaroo massacre, we did see a gorgeous blood red moon rising.

Wednesday we set off to drive to our next spot, the town of Carnarvon. We got there sufficiently early to waste most of the afternoon buying a hat for Marcel (indecisive is too weak a term. There needs to be new vocabulary for the experience of shopping with Marcel), but there was a brief amount of time left to visit a local attraction, the blowholes. They are a bit out of town past some huge salt plains and at a turn off marked with a huge sign saying “King Waves Kill”. This is not hugely reassuring when you are off to stand on a cliff edge drenched by them. It was incredibly windy up there. So windy that the lifebelt on a pole had been flattened to the ground. As a consequence it was not the most relaxing or enjoyable stop. We tried to walk on the beach near it, but again felt like the wind was going to scour the flesh off our bones. Western Australia is...breezy.

Instead we decided to have a wander in town and walked across the old tram lines to Whitlock Island. We didn’t get as far across as the other side of it though, where they have a (sadly shut at the moment) one mile jetty out to sea. Apparently boats used to offload there and then their cargo was carried on trams that used SAILS to help them travel back down the jetty and across the island and into town.

This isn’t the only slightly strange thing about Carnarvon. The reason we had stopped there was to visit the space museum, as during the space race years there was an active station there for communicating with space craft. I had always assumed they just chatted with Houston, but at various different points across the globe they had stations manned by scientists and astronauts to communicate with the space crafts at different points in their orbits. The museum was rather sweet and featured a huge cat called Buzz who liked to sit on the counter and ignore visitors. 

Carnarvon was also, strangely, the site of the first live broadcast to and from the UK, because of some satellite they put into the wrong level of orbit, which afforded them 12 minutes to time to broadcast live TV. The BBC decided to use this to provide an early version of video chat and they had an old TV playing the broadcast from the 1960s of very awkward people in Carnarvon talking to similarly awkward parents and siblings sitting in a studio in the UK. Oddly fascinating.

Carnarvon is a huge fruit growing town, so on the way out of town I made Marcel stop so we could buy two of the hugest papayas I’ve seen in my life that I lovingly wrapped in his jumper on the back seat. We then drove on up to Exmouth.

Exmouth is a surprisingly charming town located up on a peninsula by the Ningaloo reef. It is surprisingly lively for it’s size and we stayed in a lovely place (the Ningaloo B&B should you ever find yourself in that part of the word) where our hostess took the local tourist magazine and showed us all the best places to snorkel, shop and eat. We had a great dinner that night at a craft beer and pizza place called the Whalebone Brewing Company. Marcel was in seventh heaven.

The next day we headed into the national park. We had decided to go for a couple of the walks and then snorkel to cool down. The walks were fine, although we failed to see any of the parks famed rock wallabies. 

We then decided to head to the beach to snorkel. Our first stop was Oyster Stacks, which they advised could only be snorkelled at mid-high tide. It was alas low tide. So we got out and headed to the next bay.

The next beach along was called Turquoise Bay. The tourist magazine produced by the town recommended the “drift loop” where you walk up the beach, get in and swim out and then drift along the shore over the coral “before getting out near the sandbar”. We drove to the car park where there was a warning that because of currents only moderate to strong swimmers should go in the water. I felt we both hit the category of moderate, so we headed out.

The next ten minutes were an interesting lesson of how good times can go bad exceptionally quickly. The water was pretty cold but the current was managable- it was down the beach but I checked at the entry point that I could swim out and back without drifting at all. So we set out over the reef. The water was cold but we saw some beautiful fish and a 5ft reef shark swam right by us, which was pretty cool (they are generally known to be massive wusses so we weren’t concerned). We were reaching the sandbar so we decided to get out. Only to find that the current here was pretty much a riptide out and around the sandbar. We couldn’t really swim through it to the shore. We got to a point where we should have just about been able to stand and Marcel could, but I was just skidded along the seabed and further towards the sandbar. I kept fighting, getting a face and mouth full of seawater to get in a bit shallower and the tide pulled my flippers off my feet, which I think is the definition of a tide that NO swimmer, regardless of strength, should be in. Eventually I was shallow enough to bury my feet in, and then shallow enough to bury my hands and feet in because the current was so strong I still couldn’t stand in it. So eventually I crawled out the water, farily traumatised with cuts on my toes from where the flippers were ripped off and a fairly large bruise on my hand from it hitting something. A later read of tripadvisor had lots of helpful information from locals about the fact that you shouldn’t swim there at low tide nor go anywhere near the sandbar as the combination of low tide and a hole in the reef near the sandbar creates a riptide out through the reef into the bay. Which would be undesirable in many, many ways as no one would have noticed we were gone, the waves outside the reef are fairly huge and smash down on the reef and it was already late afternoon, so doubt anyone would have spotted our distress. So thanks a bunch National Parks Service and the local tourist information literature for forgetting to mention those fairly important facts for people who don’t want to drown.

At this point I was fairly keen to go home and never see the ocean again. We headed back and celebrated our survival by eating a kilo (and I’m not joking there) of papaya; these papayas were the size of a calf’s head. Bloated, we headed out to an astronomy evening I had booked, which was delightful. The sky around there is very clear and very dark and in winter and spring, you can see Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and Mars in the night sky, all of which we saw with the telescopes. The views were so good you could see the ice cap on Mars.

The next morning we woke up to find an emu with his 4 chicks hanging out in the front garden. Emu fathers raise the chicks for 18 months and are pretty defensive of them, so we stayed safely inside the porch.

We had had more snorkelling planned for the next day but I flat out refused to go into the sea despite Marcel’s claim I shouldn’t let one bad experience put me off (I feel like near-drowning is a very good reason not to ever go in the sea anywhere in Australia ever again, or possibly any sea anywhere ever again) so I left him to it and told him I’d be on the look out for if he got swept out beyond the reef. We had a picnic afterwards on sandy bay, which is beautiful, albeit it windy. 

Saw a few huge sea turtles pootling about on our walk there but this wasn’t enough to tempt me back into the sea. On our way back we stopped at the lighthouse. In WW2 it was an important defence site and it is mostly interesting as no one ever removed the sandbags and over the last 70 years they’ve pretty much turned into rocks. They also had some information about the early Qantas flights to Europe, which used seaplanes and were very, very slow. They were up in the air without landing for over 24 hours at a time, so long you’d see the sunrise twice and this was celebrated on landing with a card certifying your membership of the “rare and secret order of the double sunrise”. Times really were more exciting then.

We had to head back earlier than the previous day though because on the advice of our host we’d booked into a whale-watching tour. I have never really bothered signing up for a whale watching tour before as I felt it was unlikely we’d see much of them and Marcel gets really sea sick, so the thought of paying a small fortune to watch Marcel hyperventilate and vomit (whilst not seeing any sea creatures) was not appealing. But this was inside the other side of the penisula (the bit without the coral, badly signed beaches and riptides) which is super calm and this area is where the whales stop on their migration down from the Kimberley area (where they give birth) back to Antarctica, to teach the babies social skills somewhere safe.

I was hoping our boat would be empty as their was some super important Aussie Rules football match on (I didn’t think it was possible to care less about football, but then I discovered they have this weird subtype of it down here that I care even less about) but alas there were other tourists. We headed out and within about 5 minutes were treated to a baby humpback whale repeatedly breaching and playing by the side of the boat. It was super cute. I was ecstatic. And then to continue the theme of bad luck with cameras and sea life, my camera which had claimed it was fine for battery power that morning packed up and died of low battery.

Thankfully I had my iPhone as over the next few hours we were repeatedly treated to the sights and sounds of whales breaching, fin slapping, tail slapping and blowing. Since most of them were mothers and calves, each action by the mother would be copied a few seconds later by the calf. It was pretty amazing. There were so many whales in the bay that looking across the ocean, the plumes of water from whales blowing looked like molehills scattered over a lawn. We also saw a couple of “heat runs”, which is a collection of randy males swimming after a female, hoping to impress her. Even the boat staff said they didn’t normally see this much activity. I felt a bit sorry for them because they were trying to serve canapes but everyone was ignoring them for the whales. It was incredible. I almost forgave Exmouth for the near-drowning. But I didn’t because, epic grudge.

The next morning we set off for Tom Price. On the way out of town I found this giant prawn, and was very happy. Australia is famous for big things by the road (presumably to break up the monoty) and this was the first one we’d spotted.

Tom Price is a mining town, best described as “in the middle of nowhere”, whose only redeeming feature is its proximity to a national park. The option was staying there or glamping. There is no glamour possible in camping, and I do not camp, so the mining town it was.

The drive was about 7 hours. We passed ONE petrol station in 6 hours and two feral cows. That was it for signs of human habitation and animal life. Just a straight road, one lane in either direction, occasional cars passing in the other direction. 

We listened to a lot of Bill Bryson’s “Down Under”, which has done nothing to soothe my fears of death by animal life. There are two roads into Tom Price, a more direct one that is used by the mining traffic but is unpaved, and a much longer paved road to the only other town in the area. We took that one, so did get to see some civilisation, and at about that point some hills, which I tell you after pretty much entirely flat desert from Perth is pretty exciting.

The accommodation options in Tom Price are...limited. We were staying in a cabin in a caravan park. Except by cabin, it was more really a converted shipping container into a tiny very basic studio. The interior décor was… a single fridge magnet for the local rural suicide hotline.

I decided to do some laundry before dinner. The laundry room was rather 1970s, and probably to prevent you getting decent value for money, all the knobs to select the cycle on the washing machines had been removed so I put my laundry in under the suspicion what I was actually getting was a cold wash.

I headed back out to get my wash with Marcel. On the way we noticed dozens of tiny frogs. How cute I thought. I removed my washing from the machine to find...one in the bottom of the drum. I was horrified to think I’d killed a frog, but then I realised it was staggering around, head tipped askance and clearly very dizzy (later a friend directed me towards an article about how Nasa used frogs to investigate how the human vestibular system would function in space as apparently frogs have very similar ones to ours and get motion sick from the same activities, so I felt very guilty). Having no idea whether the frog was toxic (as everything else here bloody well is), we spent ages with an elderly magazine we’d found trying to scoop it out of the machine. 

It eventually climbed aboard and staggered off into the night to live another day. I then spent a frantic amount of time googling frogs to see if I had washed some toxic frog venom off said frog and onto my clothes. Looks like it was a harmless desert tree frog though. Probably one of only two creatures that can’t kill you here. And so ended week 2, with a slightly higher drama laundry load than I’d anticipated.

Ways I’ve thought I might die in Australia this week:

Death by stone fish, collapsing mobile home and/or ending up in Oz after we disappeared in a tornado, swept out to sea by a king wave whilst admiring a blowhole, capsized on a windy sunset cruise, death by riptide (actually not paranoid about that one but entirely reasonable), eviscerated by an overly defensive emu dad, squashed by a large whale breaching onto our boat, killed by frog toxin from envenomed underpants.

[rachelisnotatwork]

Week one: Heading back down under

This time I let Marcel pick our big holiday destination, and he picked Australia. Can’t say I was super keen, as a work colleague fairly accurately summed up my feelings towards Australia: “It is an oven full of spiders”. I’m not big on visiting places were everything can kill you. But considering Marcel’s sister has emigrated to Australia and Marcel has wanted to go on a big road trip there for years, I sort of felt I couldn’t say no (I was thinking it though).

Our flight was a very civilised 9pm on a Sunday. However we were lending out our flat whilst we were away and in the run up to leaving we’d been pulling lots of shifts to pay for it (the oven full of spiders is surprisingly expensive) and so that left us spending the weekend frantically packing, cleaning and mopping the place.

We managed to head off without any too obvious catastrophes and headed off on our first flight to Singapore. We hit turbulence pretty much straight away. Nevermind I thought, that will soon settle down. It did not. We were jiggled constantly all 12.5 hours of the way there. Quite hard to sleep whilst being constantly jolted. Thankfully there was an excellent movie selection.

When we arrived, we headed straight to our hotel, One Farrer Place. We had stayed there on our previous trip and quite liked it, plus we got a huge discount on a booking website. When we arrived, our receptionist told us the bad news that our class of hotel room (the cheapest) was booked out. So we had to be upgraded to a huge room with free-standing bath tub on the top floor. Which is the sort of bad news I’m happy to deal with.

We were so tired, we couldn’t be bothered to go far for dinner. We were staying in Little India, which is a great place for vegetarians but less good if you always ask for Asian Vegetarian as a meal on your flight. I couldn’t really face my 4th curry in 24 hours. So instead we ate at a surprisingly good but completely empty Thai restaurant in the hotel next door. The air-con was so frigid we ate poolside and enjoyed the warm night air.

The next day we had a lazy morning by the pool, then headed out to meet our friend Ryan for lunch. We had had a fairly late breakfast but managed to stuff ourselves at Lau Pa Sat food market, because we are committed like that. We had basically chosen Singapore as a repeat stop-off for two reasons; to see Ryan and to eat a lot of good, cheap food. Both missions were accomplished.

After that we had a wander around the Gardens by the Bay. The last time we’d been there the Flower Dome had been shut. We went in this time. It was a bit underwhelming, especially since it was having a sunflower show and there were lots of weird Dorothy-themed statues there. Plus sunflowers aren’t the most...diverse group of flowers to display in huge numbers. The cloud forest was better.

When we came out it was pouring with rain (unexpected, although given it is so humid I’m not sure why I was so surprised) so we got a taxi to dinner. Last time I was obsessed with this tofu starter dish we ate at a place called The National Kitchen, so I went back and ordered so many of them the waiter kept thinking I was making a mistake. I was not. We went home and I passed out in a python-like coma.

Our flight was unfunnily early the next day so we got a taxi to the airport. Check-in was super quick and seamless (got to love the slightly dictatorial nature of Singapore. Everything just works...so well) so we had loads of time. After breakfast and laughing at the Heavenly Wang sign (because we are immature) we found out that they have a free butterfly garden in the airport (because why not?) so whiled away some pleasant time there.

Our flight to Perth was a lot smoother, which was great because the audio on my entertainment system didn’t work, so thankfully I could read a book without getting airsick. We touched down shortly afterwards and went to wait for our baggage. Marcel went to the loo and came out complaining that someone had produced something that smelt God-awful as he was washing his hands. I kept complaining that he smelt of some sort of sulphurous nightmare. He claimed I was imagining it. Until he smelt his hands and realised Perth airport had invested in some soap that appears to be going for the smell of “digestive distress”.

We got through security and went to pick up our car (with me staying a good ten foot from him). The Hertz lady decided to tell Marcel whilst taking him down to our car, about how the Outback is full of “real sickos” that will murder you. Great chat before a road trip.

After driving to our airbnb and dropping off our stuff, we went to Kings Canyon Park to stretch our legs a bit and see an overview of the city. Spring is wild flower season and their botanical gardens were in bloom, which a lot of beautiful flowers that smelt atrocious and may have been the base for the airport soap. One of the rare occasions when admiring a photo might have been better. We did see some kokaburras in a tree at the end of our trip, which was very satisfying on a stereotype level.

We were aware Perth was a rare opportunity before we headed into the food wastelands of rural Australia to eat some good food, so we wracked our brains for a cuisine we wouldn’t be able to get easily and would miss. We settled for Mexican and ate an obscene amount.

The next day we drove over to Freemantle (apparently a sight Lonely Planet recommends but the thing that was most impressive there was the GIANT container ships getting loaded by giant cranes). We went there because we wanted to see a virtual reality documentary they’d made about the Australian Antarctic base. When we arrived everyone in the audience was north of 80. I never imagined my first experience of using a VR headset would be in the company of the least likely cohort to use them. It was pretty cool though. It was only half an hour, which was a mixed blessing because it was really impressive BUT I was starting to get motion sick so was pretty glad it came to an end.

After that we headed into town to do some boring pre-trip shopping (essentials like sim card, basic food supplies, a large water container, a shit ton of books and expensive chocolates). After that there wasn’t much time left so we went for another nice wander in Kings Canyon and I found a bunch of statues to pose with and embarrass Marcel.

The next morning after breakfast we hit the open road. I thought that the bits around Perth might still be quite busy. Especially since it was going into a holiday weekend (the bastards get a long weekend for the Queen’s birthday here! Why don’t we?) But no, pretty much as soon as we left the outskirts of Perth we were about the only car on the road. Despite the lack of traffic we saw about 500 dead kangaroos on the hard shoulder. Depressing and also slightly alarming.

On the way to our first town, we stopped at a National Park called the Pinnacles. As we were buying a parks pass, I was slightly horrified to see the woman selling tickets appeared to be in some sort of giant bee keepers outfit. This turned out to be because the place was RIDDLED with flies. Despite being a beautiful and mysterious rock occurrence, every time we got out of the car about a thousand flies attempted to fly into our noses and eyes. Frantic waving of your arms around your head did pretty much nothing. Our trip there was short. We did see a galah though, which I made very angry by accident getting close, so that was another stereotype win.

We instead decided to go for a walk on the beach opposite which was windy. This was a good choice as the flies were completely thwarted by the wind. The beach was beautiful and empty. We looked at the turquoise sea and decided to dip our toes into it. It was FREEZING. We then decided to walk along the shore line. We walked happily in the wet sand for a bit before finding it was full of washed up jellyfish, probably of high toxicity. Apart from the near death experiences, it was a good walk.

We arrived in time to watch the sunset in Jurien Bay. We cooked dinner ourselves since nothing was open but a bottle shop when we arrived, and had an early night as we had an early start the next day.

I must confess I was rather apprehensive as the morning came as Marcel had arranged for us to swim with sea lions. I had many reservations about this venture. Secondly, shark attacks are often explained away by sharks “mistaking” people for seals/sea lions so dressing up as one in a wetsuit and hanging out with them seems a rapid way to get eaten by a shark. Thirdly, the water was, as evidenced by our explorations yesterday, freezing. Fourthly, there seemed to be a lot of jellyfish in these parts… However we’d paid up so we set off after breakfast for the harbour.

The boat was lovely and new and did provide wetsuits although sadly they were of the short armed and short legged variety. I kept asking for larger ones because I hate tight-fitting stuff. This turned out to be an error as when we got there, brisk winds abound, and had to jump into the water, I realised that having a super baggy one that just lets cold water run over you is not the point of a wetsuit.

The experience was pretty amazing though. The sea lions live on a protected island inside a reef, so that took out the shark fear. They are very curious and like to swim twirling around you, blowing bubbles, it you twirl too. Which was really fun to do, although I got worried that I don’t really understand the behavioural patterns of sea lions and I might be signalling that I was keen to mate for life with one of them. Annoyingly just before we left I found an underwater camera that Marcel had bought a decade ago and despite finding the batteries had leaked, I cleaned the inside with a cotton wool bud and vinegar (as the internet recommended) and found a blank memory card for it and charged it and took it into the sea to find the waterproof seal had clearly eroded and it died in about 4 seconds, leaking battery gloop. So alas no photos.

We were given restoring hot drinks and tim tams once back on the boat, which Marcel found very exciting and wouldn’t believe was just essentially a penguin bar. We headed back to shore and had lunch during which I very, very slowly thawed out (over about 3 hours).

After that we drove up to Kalbarri, a town on the outskirts of Kalbarri national park. We walked out under a very starry sky to an Indian restaurant, which was surprisingly decent for a tiny town in the middle of nowhere.

The next day we headed into the National Park past about a thousand dead kangaroos. The park is famous for its gorges, so we headed to the furthest away one first and went for a walk along the river bank, hoping that being by the water would distract the inland fly plague from trying to drink from our eyeballs every 0.3 seconds. Alas it did not.

We then headed to a few spectacular lookouts, largely power-walking around them to avoid being besieged by flies.

The last one allowed you to see into a beautiful bend in the river gorge, which you could hike down to if you were feeling sporty/tolerant of flies, which we were not. We could however from above, see a guy spend about 20 minutes setting up the perfect selfie of him in his camp site. Which was quite amusing to watch.

It was heading towards late afternoon as we drove back through the park. We saw about 100m ahead of us, a kangaroo gracefully bounce out into road. Awwh, how cute we thought. And then it immediately got hit by an SUV going in the opposite direction. Now we know why there are so many dead kangaroos by the side of the road and also why almost all the cars have giant kangaroo bars on the front. Car that had hit the kangaroo and thus was responsible for removing the giant corpse from the road was filled with a large tourist family including wailing kids in the backseat who probably hadn’t just had the right sort of kangaroo memories generated.

Apparently, hitting kangaroos can kill you, if they come through the windscreen. So the week ended with me having to add that to the giant list of ways I’m concerned I might die in Australia.

So far the list goes as follows. I will keep it updated:

Ways I've thought I might die in Australia this week:

death by falling off a cliff/into a river/into the path of an oncoming car because you couldn't see anything due to frantically waving your arms because of the flies, contracting trachoma from said flies and then being savaged by your guide dog, being bitten by a sea lion, being eaten by a shark whilst pretending to be a sea lion, being stung by a washed up box jellyfish whilst trying to mind your own business on the beach, hypothermia from the freezing cold Indian ocean (it is definitely warmer at the Indian end), being killed after hitting a kangaroo that bounces up and through your windscreen

[rachelisnotatwork]

A very belated post about our mini break in Wales

My sister had been planning on spending the month of July in the UK, so we had booked time off in the middle of the month for a trip away with her. However her circumstances changed, leaving us with a week with no work booked and for once, brilliant sunshine in the UK.

After our autumn road trip, we had a few places we enjoyed so much we were happy to go back to and after looking at the last minute airbnb options, we decided we’d head back to South Wales. However to make the most of the nice weather, we needed to leave Friday morning. And not only was I working a night shift on Thursday night, but due to a number of circumstances I had to work until 8.30am rather than 6am.

So I crawled into the car when I would normally have headed to bed. Nevermind thought I, I will just sleep in the car. Now my mother’s 2004 Skoda Octavia, which we were borrowing, has many great features (pretty much always runs, seamlessly fits in with late-night mini cabs, has working air-con) but it turns out comfortable seats for sleeping isn’t one of them. 6 painfully achy, tired hours later, we ended up in the Pontardawe Tesco. Which is a fairly disorientating experience if you have been awake 24 hours and everything is in Welsh. I wandered the aisles, hollow-eyed, bumping into stacks of biscuits until we’d got the basics for dinner and then spent an unfunnily long time trying to find our airbnb (which in addition to being gorgeous was actually really well-signed).

The next morning I woke up feeling mildly more human. After breakfast on our patio in the sun, we headed out to Llathony priory in the Brecon Beacons. Weirdly we seemed to arrive shortly after about 50 middle aged men in very classic cars, so when we arrived they were all having tea with what we assumed was the vicar of the priory. Except for then he left in a classic car too- so he just turned out to be a man of the cloth who likes 1930s cars as well as Jesus.

After pottering around the priory grounds, we headed out of a walk on a footpath above the hills.

It was pretty boiling in the midday sun though so we soon headed back down into the valley and on for our next destination- Hay-on-Wye for some lunch.

Our original plan was lunch, ice cream (I went for gooseberry crumble and then regretted my impulsiveness- it wasn’t gross but it everyone else’s ice cream looked better), a river walk and then a browse of the many bookshops there.

Only when we walked onto the bridge above the river, we saw a big billboard with the question on “want to canoe?” and then we could see a canoeist getting dispatched into the beautifully sunny river. And the answer was yes, definitely yes.

Especially because after we pottered down there, they turned out to offer a three hour trip down the river where they would pick you up at the end from a pub where you moored your canoe and drive you back. Well there are bookshops everywhere you can visit, but it isn’t often that on a gloriously sunny day someone offers you a three hour canoe trip for a mere £25.

15 minutes later we were on the water- the last canoers they were planning on renting to that day. Which was fantastic because it meant we were the only people on the river for the majority of the trip. We were going with the river, so minimum paddling was required as we pottered gently downstream. The first mile or so had swimmers and sunbathers on the banks before it was just us and a lot of irate herons, who didn’t like us coming past. We alas didn’t have our swimming stuff since it was a spontaneous trip, but we dangled our feet in the water and because the water level was quite low at one point Marcel got out to push us (I helpfully stayed in the boat to keep it safe) . It was a gorgeous afternoon and the end destination (a pub) came way too soon.

We drove back via a lake, where we tried to have a walk (weirdly to the sounds of Indian music blasting from a local caravan park) but were thwarted by reedy banks. There was however the opportunity to pose with the sword in the stone. But after that we headed home through the Brecon Beacons, enjoying the last of the evening sun.

The next day was beach day. First we headed back to Three Cliffs Bay, which we last saw fairly empty on a windswept September day. We were a bit apprehensive about what it would be like on a sunny Sunday in July and remembering that parking was a bit of a nightmare, we decided to approach it from the other side.

Thankfully since it is still quite a long walk down, it was boiling hot and there were other beaches nearby you could just drive down to, it was- whilst considerably fuller than September, still pleasant enough. We paddled in the river that runs along the beach (warm until you sunk a few inches down through the soft sand and then freezing cold) and sat in the sun.

The walk back up was less enjoyable- the sand was incredibly steep and soft meaning each step forward slid you at least half a step back and also was boiling hot. Soles got a little grilled… we did see a lizard though (my first in the UK). At the top on the heathland there were some trees but the whole village where we parked was besieged by cows and they had crammed into every available piece of shade.

After that we headed to a place called Cwm Ivy. We’d picked a cafe called, creatively enough, the Cwm Ivy Cafe. It had amazing views of the salt marsh- which was a pretty good start to the afternoon.

We then headed down to the beach. The tide was pretty far out, which is a bit dispiriting if you’ve just climbed through several hundred metres of hot dunes to crest the last one and find you are still a good 500m from the cooling sea. However the beach was pretty much empty (how I like my beaches) and the sea although shallow was bathtub warm.

We wandered through the shallows before realising we weren’t the only people who like it bath tub warm. There were several of the largest jellyfish I’ve seen in my life (think 50cm plus) floating in the shallows and washed up on the shore. That got us out of the water pretty speedily.

We made it a big loop and came back through the dunes at the other side and then through a forest- halfway back we found a field of friendly welsh ponies, which was an extra plus on our walk. We finally staggered back to the car slightly sunburnt and exhausted in the way you can only be after a day in the hot, hot sun.

The following day was not forecast to be so nice. We debated visiting some local caves (I was tempted by the promised attached shire horse centre and dinosaur adventure) but decided to risk it and see some castles.

Our first stop was Carreg Cennen. The downside of Welsh castles is they were very keen on putting them at the top of big hills. Luckily there was a cute foal in the field on the way up to pet whilst I tried to catch my breath. Until it started enthusiastically eating my kagoul…

At the top the ruin was pretty empty. The views were vertiginous and when we headed down from that, there was an attached cave. I got part of the way down there before remembering I really don’t like claustrophobic dark slimy places and this was all of the above. So I left Marcel to get besieged by bats etc.

He survived and we headed over to our next stop, Dinefwr. This is a national trust property (win, since we’ve still got our membership) and it has a stately home, deer park and ruined castle on the grounds.

We started with a cream tea, which was fortuitous as that coincided with the rain. We then went on to have a pleasant wander through the deer park (deer not that keen on us so only visible from a good distance) and through the forest before climbing up to the castle. This ruin had fabulous views over the valley and it was pleasantly blustery up there, meaning we cooled down quickly after our second big hill climb of the day. Unfortunately I’d forgotten to bring a hair band so spent a good chunk of the afternoon imitating Cousin It.

We had planned to head home on Tuesday but instead we decided to extend our trip for another day. So instead of heading back to London, we headed into Tenby. Tenby looks exactly like St Ives, but instead of being all expensive restaurants and £300 a night hotels, it is cheap holiday tat and sausage baps. Strange because it is really very beautiful and has big white sandy beaches.

We decided to go full Famous Five and get a boat out to Caldey Island. The island houses a community of monks, they make chocolate and apparently have seals basking on the shore. Since we are both prematurely middle-aged that was right up our street!

We took a very empty boat out (us and one other couple) and were thrilled when we arrived to see a very busy queue waiting to board to go back including a school trip (nothing worse than visiting something at the same time as a school trip). After a brief stop for lunch (vegetarian food scarce, ate something called a Lemon Squidge cake, which appeared to be related to the lemon drizzle but more unhealthy) we headed out for a walk.

First step was the wonky Old Priory, oldest Catholic church still in use and home of something called the Ogham Stone. It was underwhelming. The angle of the steeple though was something to be admired since it looked ready to topple and crush a tourist at any moment.

We then stopped in at the chocolate factory (disappointingly small) and after that headed out onto the headlands to walk around the cliffs. Great views but alas no seals seen. Also no Famous Five mysteries to be solved except for a 500m long stripe of black paint wavering through the grass in one of the fields. Which was exactly as exciting as it sounds.

We had a brief walk through the woods to try and see some red squirrels but were harassed throughout by horse flies and we decided we didn’t care that much about red squirrels. So instead we headed back to the beach to get the boat back home.

Excitingly the tide was so low we had to get onto this weird ex-military amphibious vehicle which then drove out into the water and offloaded us onto a boat out there. All the small children (and me) were agog with excitement when we drove off into the waves.

Back in town we got ice creams and pottered slowly back to the car- another great day in Wales.

Finally it was time to head home. On the way back we decided to stop off on Merthyr Mawr for a walk along the beach. It was as most Welsh beaches are, beautifully empty, although at one point from the dunes popped a small group of teenagers with a clipboard, pretty much running towards us as the only tourists, to ask us to fill in a survey for their geography GCSE. Also there was a big group of riders going along the beach and in and out of the sea, which was a lovely way to end our holiday. Definitely coming back again next summer!

[rachelisnotatwork]

Spring sojourn in Stockholm

We had very kindly been invited to visit Stockholm by some emergency medicine doctors and shadow the workings of their hospital for a week. After gratefully accepting, we decided to tack on a few holiday days at the end because...well this is Marcel and I!

I had been to Stockholm before, way back in 2006 when I had just finished university. I’d really enjoyed it and also thought it might well be a city my mother would enjoy. So I invited her to join us for the weekend.

She asked me to find her a hotel to stay and so I picked the nearest one to the airbnb we’d rented that had decent reviews. It turned out to be owned by a member of Abba, because….Swedish stereotypes. We had dinner there on her first night; thankfully no Abba was playing. Huge win though, we discovered the walk between our airbnb and her hotel passed something called The Secret Little Horse and as a statue poser, I was a big fan.

The next day dawned super sunny, so I was glad I had asked my mother to bring me sunglasses (Sweden has many upsides. The cost of living there is not one of them. Since I didn’t want to empty my overdraft, I didn’t want to buy sunglasses there). We were staying on the island of Södermalm, which meant climbing up a large hill (where does Marcel find them??) secured a beautiful view of the harbour.

After that we headed into town and into the Vasa museum. The Vasa Museum is a literal morality tale about what happens if no one dares to defy an over-reaching king. It is a huge warship that was built and carved to the nines to be the pride of the Swedish fleet and got less than a mile away from it’s launch spot before sinking. It was built much too narrow and much too tall, but no one wanted to say anything and so it was launched, only to capsize and go under as soon as the wind came up. After several hundred years in the brackish harbour (which apparently arrests the degradation of wood) it was pulled up amazingly intact for the likes of you and I to gawp at.

Since it was a beautiful day outside, we headed next on a boat over to another island which contained Skansen, a large open air historical museum with a sort of zoo attached. I’m not sure if it counts as a zoo if it only hosts animals native to your country. But the sort of animals you don’t normally see roaming central Stockholm (moose, bears, wolves etc). My mother was most disappointed that the wolverines still seemed to be hibernating despite my explanation that the name is far more exciting than the animal reality.

After a pleasant lunch by a duck pond, we headed down into the old city centre (Gamla Stan) and wandered about, although I think the thing my mother found most exciting was the vacuum-emptying roadside bins.

Rather fatigued by that point, we headed home for a rest before a huge and delicious Greek dinner at a place called Dionysos (if you ever find yourself in southern Stockholm craving greek food.

The next morning we headed out to a sculpture park called Millesgården. It apparently used to have beautiful views of Stockholm. I’m imagining this was before they built all the factories and cruise ship berths across the bay. It was hosting an excellent exhibition inside of Chinese silk (fascinating if you are a fabric nerd, which I am) and then outside it housed a permanent collection of the owner’s sculptures. Not sold on his talents. Clearly people must have liked them at the time since it funded a pretty nice house with a view but….yeah no.

Afterwards we headed over to the City Hall. Whilst normally not a scintillating destination, Stockholm’s is a little more exciting than most as it features a place called the Blue Hall where the Nobel banquet is served, and also an extremely gaudy room covered in gold-plating (apparently only 10kg, but 10kg of gold-plating goes a LONG way) which is...something.

Because we are hardcore tourists and we only had two days, we then headed to the Swedish photography museum, which was on the same island we were staying and had a great mix of stuff in it’s current exhibitions. It also had a restaurant on the top floor with beautiful views across the harbour, so was worth visiting for that alone.

And so ended a brief, but fun weekend in Stockholm. We could have happily stayed longer but the bank balance was suffering and so we headed back to the UK.

[rachelisnotatwork]

Anniversary in Andalusia

For once in our lives we entirely pre-planned a trip! And neither of us worked the night before! And we booked a flight at a reasonable departure time! We decided we wanted to go on holiday somewhere for our ten year anniversary and not feeling super flush, we went with the time-honoured student holiday method of plugging your dates into skyscanner and asking it for flights to anywhere and then picking the first place that sounds appealing/isn’t an industrial city in Poland.

So off to Andalusia we went! We arrived in the early evening and went to pick up our rental car. We used our free points with Hertz and all those road trips mean we’ve a LOT of free points with Hertz so they are endlessly trying to upgrade us. This time they gave us a Zafira. Knowing the size of Spanish streets we immediately asked for a downgrade to something more manageable. And good thing we did as an Opel Astra pretty much skimmed the sides of most streets in town as Marcel discovered when we drove into our first city stop; Seville.

We were staying at some apartments above a tapas bar called Bar Eslava which would apparently deliver tapas to your room. Marcel decided the tapas might be tepid if we did this so made us go downstairs for it, which meant because we went “early” at 10pm we had to queue for ages. Apparently it is some of the best tapas in Seville but...it was only OK. Think we’ve been spoilt by living near El Parador in London, which is the best tapas ever.

The next morning we started off by visiting Seville cathedral. It was a bit gaudy. My favourite feature was that the bell tower was built defensively so instead of stairs there are a series of ramps so you can ride a horse to the top. Alas they don’t have this facility any more for lazy and unfit tourists (i.e. me) so I had to use my own stupid legs to get to the top.

Inside they had a nice orange grove and Christopher Colombus’s grave (super gaudy) and about a million chapels but I’ve a limit on how many chapels I find interesting (roughly none) so we moved on. 

Our next stop was the Alcazar. There was a big queue, but luckily there was also a tiny tour guide called Raquel, touting the line for people to skip it for an English-speaking guided tour that cost a few euros more. Quite like guided tours anyway, ESPECIALLY if I don’t have to queue.

The Alcazar is beautiful and our guide was great, especially because she insisted on calling sex the “beautiful activities” (we were looking at the King and Queen’s bedrooms. We weren’t just getting a guided tour + orgy). She also pointed out all the places that Game of Thrones were filmed in, which is really what you are paying the guided tour money for. The weather was cold but very sunny so we had a really nice relaxed wander through the gardens there before heading out for our next stop.

The next place we wandered to was Plaza de Espana, which looks ancient but was actually built less than 100 years ago for a exposition. Lots of opportunities there to laugh at tourists who can’t row despite it being the world’s easiest place to row.

Finally we headed back into the centre to climb these weird new architectural structure things that look a bit like trees and get a view from the top. There was a lift, which is even better than a horse-less horse ramp, so I was happy to get another view from above of the city.

The next day we were heading to Ronda, but we decided to plan a few detours on the way. Our first stop was a place called Italica. It is the site of some beautiful Roman ruins, and it is free to get into. Bearing in mind it is free, I don’t want to sound too ungrateful but the mapping and signposting there is shit. It has two main attractions, an arena (that again featured in Game of Thrones) and some mosiacs. Giant arena, easy to find, mosaics less so. The last time I recall seeing Roman mosaics I was 11 and on a school trip to Fishbourne Palace, and I remember them being boring as hell. I had forgotten that now I’m prematurely middle-aged and a National Trust member because this time around I found them DELIGHTFUL. Great mosaics and the death of a bit more of my youth.

Afterwards we took a drive through the “white villages” near Ronda. These are a series of very beautiful hill towns near Ronda, full of houses painted white (thankfully not villages full of racial supremacists. At least I don’t think they were…) we stopped in one called Zahara de la Sierra for lunch where I ate about a cubic foot of cheese and worried about getting carbon monoxide poisoning from a patio heater inside the restaurant. Marcel wanted to climb up to the tower above the town after lunch but thankfully we couldn’t find the right entrance to the path because it looked very steep and I was sleepy and full of cheese.

We got to Ronda in the late afternoon and promptly got hideously lost, including having to back down a street because the Opel Astra was too big to fit out of the tiny turning at the end. We did eventually find our lovely (albeit cold) B&B and after bracing ourselves we headed through the tiny darkened cobble streets for dinner. I had a distinctly mediocre veggie burger and then trod in dog shit on the way back through the tiny darkened cobbled streets so did not go to bed full of love for the freezing cold Ronda.

Luckily in the morning I was won over. Firstly by breakfast churros and then by a lovely wander through what is a very stunning town. And a silly statue pose with a bullfighting statue.

Only downside is it was really very hilly. Felt extremely unfit. We ended up in the old Arabic baths, which are stunning and featured a super friendly cat that wouldn’t take “no you can’t sit on my lap” for an answer.

Eventually we headed off to Granada, where we were staying at the dubiously named (but actually very nice although noisy) Stay Classy Apartments. Our “host” received us with his approximately 5 year old daughter who I think had been told could go to the cinema afterwards and was royally fucked off we were delaying her plans. Lots of death stares and muttered Spanish.

That evening we went out to an amazing Italian restaurant called cacho&pepe that only has two tables and amazingly we got one of them. We then proceeded to eat so much burrata in our starter that neither of us had room for our mains but you will be pleased to know that we ploughed bravely onwards.

The next day was our ten year anniversary (fuck we are old). We celebrated with breakfast churros and then going on a guided tour of the Alhambra. It is at the top of a hill and we were feeling lazy so we decided to get the bus up. There was a big queue at the bus stop and when the bus arrived it was basically about a 15 seater minibus. We thought there was no hope. We had underestimated the willingness of the bus driver to cram people in. We were the last people on, but by that stage it was like a Japanese rush hour train. I was virtually sitting in the driver’s lap. But hey, we got up to the top of the big hill for 1 euro 40 so...win.

The Alhambra is really huge. I cannot express this enough. It’s fucking massive. We got an audio tour. The audio tour had about 90 files on. It is really, really stunning but by the end…. I gave zero fucks about anything I was seeing. Especially since there is pretty much no food inside so the only sustenance was a magnum ice cream sandwich and we were there for HOURS. Worth it though but I feel I’ve learnt enough facts for a lifetime.

We then got a taxi up to this point that looks over the whole complex. I thought most of the town centre was pedestrianised. Our taxi driver didn’t seem to think so as he barrelled down tiny alleys as tourists leapt into doorways to avoid being crushed. Saved a lot of hill climbing though and the view was pretty lovely from over there with mountains behind it.

We’d hoped to get pasta again that evening but alas the two tables were full so instead we went to a vegetarian/vegan tapas place which seems pretty unusual for Spain. It was pretty good though and they had more than two tables so luckily could accommodate us.

The next day we woke up and...it was raining. Which is both unusual and annoying for Southern Spain. What was also annoying is that in trying to get out of the garage, the car ended up getting scraped on one side and shut in the garage door on the other. I had run upstairs to return the garage door remote to the flat so returned 5 minutes later to find Marcel irate, the car somewhat worse for wear and lots of elderly Spanish men trying to offer advice on how to rescue to the car. I think we might be getting demoted by Hertz…

Marcel had planned a stop off at a village with a gorge you can hike in behind but...it was still pouring with rain when we got there. Most of the countryside around there is olive groves and Marcel, after hours of driving past laden olive trees couldn’t resist the temptation to stop and try one. He did not enjoy this experience and spent about the next ten minutes spitting on the ground and trying to wash his mouth out.

Annoyingly when we arrived in Cordoba the weather was stunning, so we really shouldn’t have bothered with our rainy detour. We checked in and then took a wander to a sunny square where we ate pancakes and enjoyed a bit of late afternoon sun. Then we wandered around and explored town before dinner. There are orange trees everywhere. We couldn’t resist trying an orange. It was alas the sour orange variety brought by the Muslim rulers that apparently makes for good perfume. It does not make for good eating unless you like the feeling of your tongue shrivelling.

The next morning we headed to the giant mosque thing that then was a chapel. It was pretty nice inside although we didn’t get the audio tour (feeling somewhat fatigued with those) so I just read the wikipedia article and then had a potter inside.

Afterwards we went to their Alcazar which is pretty dull inside (save some nice mosaics) but has some pretty nice gardens for lurking in on a sunny day and after that we headed to this palace that had 14 courtyards. So more pottering in sunny spots. We topped the afternoon off by heading back to the sunny square for more pancakes as it was pancake day in the UK. It’s a tough life but someone has to do it.

On our last morning we checked out and then went to find a post office so we could send a parcel to my nieces. This proved to be hard as apparently Spanish post offices just can’t be expected to be open during office hours on a week day. We did eventually find one and then agonisingly muddled our way through filling out the customs declaration with our stunning lack of Spanish and the post office lady’s complete lack of English.

We headed out of town to the ruin of Medina al-Zahra, which is a town from the days when there were Muslim rulers. Again it was free for EU residents (win) and had a great museum. The ruin was okay; it had some quite nice looking gardens but no matter what we did we couldn’t get into them. The main hall, which is supposed to be the gem of the site was closed for rennovation. Appropriately enough though for the last day of our holiday it was really beautiful and sunny and hot enough to be wandering around with bare arms.

As our flight wasn’t until the evening, we made another stop off along the way at Castillo Almodovar del Rio, which is a beautiful castle on top of a little outcrop. When I say we stopped there, I mean we went up and looked around the outside of the castle and admired the views and lazed in the sun because essentially all castles are the same on the inside (defensive fortifications, dungeons etc). 

Afterwards we sat on a terrace in a restaurant below and I stuffed myself full of cheese one last time. Then we headed to the airport, sad another holiday week was over but pleasantly surprised Hertz didn’t notice the doors weren’t quite what they were...

[rachelisnotatwork]

Norway: finally we see the light(s)

About a year ago, I decided on a whim that the period between bank holiday and New Year was the most boring time of year (I didn’t decide that on a whim, I’ve always felt that way) and I’d like to be out of the country for it. So we booked a quick break in Tromso, because I like snowy cold breaks where there is a good excuse to drink even more hot chocolate and read more books than usual.

Unfortunately I had not anticipated the logistical problems that come with going on holiday on a bank holiday. I knew no trains ran on Christmas Day, but I did not know that they also don’t run on Boxing Day. So booking a flight from Gatwick Airport was frankly a terrible idea. Having done a run of nights over Christmas, I had to crawl out of bed and head down to Victoria to get a coach. We pre-booked an easybus as the national rail advice about their rail replacement buses were basically “they will be overcrowded and you will likely have to wait for several before you can get on board and will experience significant delays”. I feel this is the sort of thing you shouldn’t admit to poorly planning for in advance. Our easybus then took literally the worst possible, most traffic-snarled route out of London. It took 2 long hours to get to Gatwick. We were at the second stop, in the South Terminal. Our bus driver circled the North Terminal repeatedly, which was a bit confusing until he stopped, opened the driver door and asked someone for directions because apparently he’d never driven to Gatwick before. Luckily he got a little bit less lost finding the South Terminal.

Being tired, I promptly fell asleep going to Oslo, and we had a fairly painless transfer there to our second flight (I say fairly painless but we did get coralled by a chatty American and I had forgotten quite how devastatingly expensive Scandinavia is). On our flight up, I took a second nap (it had been a very long day) but did get woken by the exciting announcement that you could see the Northern Lights if you looked out the window! I had the middle seat but Marcel needed the loo, so I basically stole his seat. And they were… a bit underwhelming. They were white to start with, which I was aware was a colour, but you always see the green ones. And they were a bit dim. But hey, at least they are a real thing!

We landed and picked up our car and drove to our airbnb. It was pretty late by this stage and we were cold, because there is always a toss up between dressing like you want to be dressed when you reach your destination and not dying of hyperthermia bundled up in arctic wear on the plane. When we got out, you could also see some dim slightly green ones to the horizon.

We let outselves into our airbnb (it was about 22.30 and our hosts had left the door open for us) and found...they had left the heating off over the holidays. Given we were in the Arctic, this meant the flat was what could best be described as miserably cold. It also had underfloor heating, which turned out to basically need about 6 hours to even get tepid. So we made some dinner and huddled around the one plug in heater trying to get warm enough to go to bed.

The next morning we admired the frozen view outside, which was pleasingly “light” considering the sun doesn’t rise over the horizon at this time of year. 

Then we introduced ourselves to our hosts, who lived upstairs. They told us that they’d heard us arrive and about half an hour after that “the aurora was just amazing; we’ve lived here for 8 years and it takes a lot to impress us” and that they’d thought about texting us but didn’t want to bother us because we might be tired. The phrase “slightly murderous” didn’t even get close.

We had a bit of a lazy morning planning the rest of our trip (in typical us fashioned, we’d planned nothing) before we pottered into town. First off we decided to get a late breakfast. Unbeknown to us, between Christmas and New Year is the busiest time of year in Tromso (apparently we aren’t the only people who find it dull as shit) so most places were heaving. We eventually found somewhere.

Both Marcel and I had been to Tromso before and remembered visiting the Polar Museum. So we decided to drop back in. We drove over there, parked up, paid...and Marcel realised he’d somehow lost the house keys to our airbnb. He then made us retrace our steps everywhere to look for them. Bear in mind it is both completely dark by this stage and snowing. Suffice to say, we did not find them again.

We went back to the museum. It didn’t look from the outside like either of us remembered, but it had been over ten years for both of us. We headed in. The museum is basically supposed to be about polar exploration (and it does have sections on both Amundsen and Nansen) but mostly it seems to be a celebration of the animals of the Arctic and how they can be slaughtered. Featuring lots of taxidermised samples (arctic foxes squashed in bear traps, seals by the hakapik collection, a bear in the process of sticking it’s head into a trap that shoots it in the head when it eats the food) and celebrations of successful hunters. 

This confused both of us because this was entirely not what either of us remembered as I remembered there was a ship about the history of sealing (they really love to tell you in Norway about how much they like bludgeoning seals) but that there were also live seals. This museum had neither live seals nor a ship. A quick google revealed that there are two attractions in Tromso, one called the Polar Museum and one called Polaris. Turns out we’d been both been to Polaris. But hey, who doesn’t like learning more about just how many polar bears you can kill in one season with a suicide trap?

We headed back quite early because our hosts were going out and we needed the spare key and also I was dying for a nap. Turns out if you go somewhere post-nights which only has about 3 hours of semi-light, where the sun never rises above the horizon, you will not reset your sleep-wake cycle. After I woke up, I did check outside the house for Northern Lights. There was a brief wavering flag of dim green over the house, but it departed not to come back.

The next day we got up pretty early to go on a snowshoeing tour. I love proper snowy winter, but I’m massively unfit, have shitty knees and am the complete opposite of an adrenaline junkie because I know exactly how grim the injuries you can sustain are because I’m there patching them up. So so far in life, I’ve not found my winter sport (Marcel is keen to try husky sledding, but my general fear and loathing of dogs means I’m super not up for trusting my life to 9 of them) but snowshoeing sounded like it might be it. The general advice is “if you can walk you can snowshoe” and I have mastered putting one foot in front of the other!

We met outside a hotel and then they drove us to… a large city park. But think Hampstead Heath rather than Hyde. Full of forest and groomed cross-country skiing trails. We were given snowshoes (which disappointingly were not the giant tennis racquet things I’d been expecting from watching movies, but instead looked a lot more like the lovechild between a ski and a snowboard, only with crampons on the bottom), some poles and off we went. It was minus 10, so to start with I was pretty cold and my toes felt like frozen chipolatas despite my three pairs of socks and snowboots. But pretty soon I was roasting. It’s really fun, but also quite hard work especially when the snow is powdery and soft. We stopped midway through for cake and...hot Ribena. The Americans on our tour who were not familiar with Ribena thought it was amazing and sophisticated. Didn’t mention it is a drink for kids in the UK. Periodically Norwegians zipped past us on cross country skis, looking lithe and smugly healthy. At one point a group of tourists trying out cross country skiing came past us, looking very unsteady and slithering all over the place, which reaffirmed my desire to stick with snowshoeing. By the end Marcel and I were converts to hiking with snowshoes and decided we’d rent some of our own and strike out the next day too.

We finished at 12, which gave us about an hour of dying light (the sun never goes over the horizon in winter but you have three hours of “light” from it being close to the horizon) before it got dark again. We decided to ride the cable car up to above Tromso. It was an arse to find the entrance to as out satnav kept trying to direct us up (snow-covered) pedestrian only paths, but we did eventually get there. Initially my heart sank as it claimed it would be running half-hourly and take 28 people per trip...and there were a lot more than 28 people waiting. But they’d presumably adjusted to demand so it was running pretty much every 5-10 minutes.

The top was stunning. There was still enough light to see the town, which was lit up with street lights, and the mountains were glowing to the west from the “sunrise/set”. It was also freezing. After a while of wandering we decided to hit up the cafe. We did get a window seat with an amazing view. I also got a really tasty leek soup. Downside? The soup cost £15. I hate having a weak currency.

When we got down, we decided we would go to Polaris. I remembered there being seals. In the interval they’ve gone from having 2 seals to having 4, which is great because seals are adorable (and make me feel slightly guilty about my Greenlandic seal skin). The rest of the polar aquarium is… a bit dull. The polar regions do not lend themselves to the most colourful of fish and most of the stuff there is just terrifyingly ugly. There is a freezing touch pond where you can risk frostbite to squidge a sea anenome though. Which is super gross and slightly awesome, so I would highly recommend risking a finger for it.

When we’d both been there back in 2006 (separately), entry to Polaris let you into a museum on a sealing ship next door. I’m not sure if they stopped doing it due to complaints or if it was just closed that day, but alas we didn’t get that free and moderately traumatising bonus this time.

On our way back to our flat, we stopped off to rent some snowshoes from the company we’d done a tour from. We asked the woman behind the counter for advice on an easy snowshoe hike. She recommended climbing a 473m peak that took 2 hours in each direction. Clearly the baseline Norwegian assumption of fitness is a bit higher than it is in the UK.

The next morning we stopped off to get a replacement key sorted for our Airbnb and Marcel got one for free by flirting with the elderly lady behind the counter (I’m not 100% sure this is how he would tell the story).  Anyway, bonus, because everything in Norway is expensive.

We picked a fairly remote spot that occasionally grooms tracks for cross country skiiers on the basis that if they groom tracks there, it can’t be in an avalanche region (the whole area is a bit prone to it). They clearly hadn’t been out in a while but dog sledders had been so we went for a very pleasant hike in -17c weather. On our way back there was a gorgeous bright orange moon hanging over the lake, but naturally my phone did not do it justice. Marcel’s phone died from the horror of the weather, so at least my phone did it some justice.

Afterwards we decided to use the twilight to drive out to Sommarøy, a town on an island about 45 mintues from Tromso. The road wends its way between snowy mountains, on which we could see the head lamps of skiers bobbing down. We’d regularly pass lakes reflecting the huge beautiful moon and I cursed having left my camera behind.

When we reached the end, we gave some consideration to eating in the one cafe there but given one of the recent reviews described it as “Truely the saddest meal I’ve ever eaten” we decided to hold off. As we started driving back, we had to stop as some reindeer crossed the road. Ridiculously festive!

We dropped off our snowshoes on the way back, and decided to fill up with petrol on the way back. Only Marcel could not work out how to open the petrol cap. Consulting the manual involved hitting a wall of Norwegian. Google suggested you just neeeded to press it but Marcel claimed to have tried that with no success. I decided to have a go. You did just need to press it, but because of the cold weather it was iced shut. Oh the joys of winter. By the time we arrived home I was starving starving. I turned the oven on as we had some bread rolls to bake and sat down on the sofa to wait for the oven to heat up. And the power went off. For some reason, the fuse for the kitchen had been pretty tempermental during our stay and we’d had to flip it a few times, so I got up to turn it back on. And noticed all the fuses were fine in the cupboard. So we looked out the window and noticed….all of the street lights and all of the housing lights were off. Now power cuts are a fairly regular thing when we visit Zimbabwe but the weather is nice and also there is a generator and open fires for warmth. In Europe, I couldn’t remember the last time we’d had a power cut and I was slightly horrified that it was happening in a house that didn’t have gas (so cooking, hot water and heating were entirely dependent on there being an electricity supply), wasn’t insulated particularly well, was in a country where the sun hadn’t risen for several months and it was -8 outside. I was also extremely hangry because we couldn’t cook any food.

Luckily there were a few candles for mood lighting, and Marcel had found the matches for them on the night of our arrival when we were trying to find some instructions for the heating. So we light them all, ate some crisps and played banagrams by candle light.

And the power still didn’t come back on. Marcel’s phone and pad were dead and mine was pretty low on battery. We did manage to find the local newspaper’s facebook website, and they mentioned the local power plant was “working on it”. I decided to do what I do best in times of trouble, which was curl up under my massive coat and take a nap. After two hours I was woken up by the lights coming back on, which I was ecstatic about. Still unclear what caused the power cut as google translate wasn’t...operating as well as it sometimes can.

The next day we got up at 5am to head to the airport. I was hoping we’d be rewarded with some more Northern Lights as the skies were crystal clear. We were not. We did manage to spend the last of our change on some (ruinously expensive) hot drinks though, and we were deposited in Oslo bang on time at 9.55am, despite the freezing fog. We then had 3 hours 20 minutes to kill before our connecting flight. Nevermind thought I, I shall revert to my default plan for when the going gets tough (see previous paragraph’s nap strategy). Only they had designed all the chairs in the airport so you just couldn’t stretch out and relax. I ate homemade cheese sandwiches and fumed. They then sent a message changing our gate and saying we’d be leaving 10 minutes late. I fumed some more and relocated to the new gate. We sat there for a while and they changed our flight to 40 minutes late. I bought some £4 bottles of water and fantasised about burning the airport to the ground. Then for a laugh they decided to change our gate for the third time to one which only had twenty chairs and the rest of us were basically standing in something about the size of a living room. Eventually we boarded.

When did finally land, we had to head back to Hammersmith to pick up the cats, then get an uber across London. We got home at 7pm, which was 8pm Norwegian time and 14 hours since we left our Airbnb in Tromso. Short haul my arse.

With all that travelling, the break felt way too short but my love for snow and the artic was piqued again. We’d sat down before I was back on google because… we need more adventures!