Croatia

I have a slightly irrational hatred of travel agents. They're all on kickbacks from the airlines, Contiki and the tourist authorities of Middle Eastern petro-states. You enter Flight Centre Glen Waverley branch with plans for two weeks in Bali, and walk out with return tickets to a camel-strewn desert wasteland, wondering what the hell just happened. Meanwhile, Nicole, your helpful sales assistant, is straight on the phone to her boyfriend Troy to tell him that she's just hit the sales quota for packages to hell on earth, and the reward - 14 nights on P&O around the South Pacific - is on its way.

But now I realise that I'm really no better at booking things. Here's how I decided we should get to Croatia. Day 1: train from Texel in the north of the Netherlands to Amsterdam. Day 2: train from Amsterdam to Cologne, Germany. Train to airport. Fly from Cologne to Dubrovnik. Fourteen hours. Nicole's phone number is now on my speed dial.

We had arranged for Tony, the owner of our hostel, to pick us up from the airport, but he had forgotten this minor detail and we instead had to sidle over to the first cab lined up in the rank: a Mercedes with a hyperactive meter and a driver whose concern for the sheer drops off nearby cliff faces was under-developed. When we arrived at the hostel, Tony was half cut and offering us home-made wine and entertaining his guests. Nackered - we started in Amsterdam at some ungodly hour that morning - we opted for the bed.

So far, so bad, but the next day we hit the streets and quickly developed "beautiful thing-itis" - the assault on the senses from beautiful things that makes you completely unable to really appreciate them. Look at this:

We swam most days, ate lots of seafood, took Tony up on his offer of home-made wine one night, and ventured out to a nearby island, Lokrum. Bizarrely, there is a botanical garden on the island with a range of familiar species, including a eucalyptus named after me:

Because we had a few days up our sleeves, we signed up for some exhausting day tours to the neighbouring countries. Normally, tours shit me up the wall, and you'll remember the boating carnage that we found ourselves embroiled in whilst in Vietnam, but the idea of dropping over the border seemed very appealing.

Firstly, we went to Montenegro, a lighting tour of three or four key places, including the world's most ridiculous mountain pass that featured 25 hair-pin turns on a narrow road up a very large mountain. We stopped on the top of the mountain to eat salted pig and home-made cheese and drink more home-made wine, and to buy postcards that captured the full horror of the trail that we'd just completed. Unfortunately, I haven't got any decent photos of this part of the journey; all of them are blurred, either by my unsteady hand as I peered down 2km into the valley below, or by cloud and rain, which made the ride all the more pleasant. This photo is from Kotor, which had a nice walled old town and a bewildering array of shoe shops:

On this trip, we met two people from Melbourne who knew Bron's Mum from her days as a head honcho of the Eltham Revolutionary Freedom Fighter's Brigade aka Nillumbik Council. Actually, most of Australia was in Croatia while we were there; I seem to recall Christina Rowntree crapping on about the place on Getaway before we left, so that probably explains some of the influx.

The next day, we were up early again to visit Bosnia and Hercegovina. The trip was really just a dash to the town of Mostar and back, but that was enough for me. I have wanted to see the Old Bridge in Mostar since forever and it didn't let me down:

It was very hot in Mostar though - piercing sun and no breeze at all. But there was plenty of interpretive art on the sides of the buildings, made from the barrels of an AK-47s. The scars of the war are still well and truly on display.

A few days later, we hopped aboard a large ferry and made for Hvar, an island in the Adriatic. I can't really remember the specifics of the 11 days we spent here - it's a blur of beaches, blue water, seafood, grappa and bruises from lying on rocky beaches too long...

And at night:

On my birthday, we went up to a restaurant overlooking the main square in town. It soon emerged that Croatia and Germany were duking it out in the Euro Cup soccer. It was a tense encounter, but the Croats prevailed and then the locals of Hvar proceeded to unleash half of the world's supply of maritime flares into the sky...and I thought this stuff only happened when ethnic violence erupted at soccer games in Sydney and Melbourne.

It all went too fast and soon we were spending hours in internet cafes sending our CVs to recruiters in London, in between going to the beach and eating very cheap gelati.

Well, this is the emotional last paragraph where I attempt to sum up life on the road after four months. Here goes: I missed reading the newspaper on the day it was printed. I could no longer stand internet cafes, loud Americans looking to get "like, uh, totally wasted", doing currency conversions and having those "where have you been, we are you going" ice-breaker conversations. But we saw some truly amazing sights and despite dwindling finances and energy levels, had a blast.

Photos!

I've loaded photos from the trip onto this webiste:

http://picasaweb.google.com/andy.kohl

As you can see, there are very few captions. If I wasn't trying to end the first spell of unemployment I've had the displeasure of experiencing, I'd meticulously detail the wheres, whens and whos. But since I haven't, please feel free to email me if you want to know about the things I've snapped!

Coming soon...
- Croatia: why it rules
- England: why is it so cold?
- Job-hunting: why it sucks
- Poverty: how did it get to this?

The Netherlands

Amsterdam - the less said, the better. Put 4,000,000 amorous stoners alongside 4,000,000 hookers, add a reggae soundtrack and don't sell shampoo in your supermarkets, and you've got yourself quite something. Nothing good though.

The place we stayed at was the worst hotel I've ever been to, and I've seen some flea-ridden dives in my time. One night at about 4am, we listened to some member of the social strata known as the dregs of humanity verbally abuse his chosen prostitute in the laneway next to our room, and waited for the piece of merde to get physically violent. Fortunately, he didn't, or we didn't hear it.

Here are the details, for your records:

Hotel Manofa
Damrak 46-48
Amsterdam

This is a community service announcement...

We did manage a few pleasant canal-side strolls in the quieter parts of town, and some quality Dutch cookery. Here's a photo:


Then we went to the Hague, as if to find a jurist who we could cajole to rule against dreadlocks and Doors t-shirts. We failed in that endeavour, but found a great museum displaying the works of M.C. Escher (not to be confused with the urban poet MC Hammer).

Following all this, we decamped to the island of Texel in the north of the Netherlands for some fresh air. We had a few great days of riding along the coastal bike paths and admiring the scenery. When this trip's done, I plan to post all my photos online. But for now, here's what I've got:


And one of those self-taken, wacky on-the-go photos:


The grinning idiot and the red-shoed would-be Kathy Watt are off to Croatia tomorrow. Will write about that when we get back.

Belgium

Our Beligian adventure was only meant to include Bruges, but owing to some confusion at a train station in Brussels, we managed to see a fair bit of the country en route. My in-depth observations from an afternoon of meandering: the country is flat, bicycles are prevalent, and it's easy to find your way again if you're prepared to spend some time waiting at a deserted rural train station that smells of blood and bone.

Bruges was full of two groups of people that didn't look much like us: aged pensioners, and school kids with their note books at the ready (back in my day, we did history the hard way - with chalk, illustrated textbooks and anonymous spit-balls).

The sheer quantity of people around made it nearly impossible to see anything touristy without being bumped into by pimply-faced teenagers eating frites or those motorised old-timer mobiles, so I found myself wandering the back streets and parks, such as the above, a fair bit. We took a boat ride down the canals and ate chocolates and drank beer, and put up with the German socks-and-sandles brigade we were sharing the B&B with. It was nice.

London

We hit the wall in London, and decided to cut the trip short by about 6 weeks. So, we'll be back there on the 24th of June to find work and somewhere to live. I might get my camera out of my bag then, because looking through the viewfinder, I can't see that I took any pictures there.

It could be a dangerous place to live. On the Thursday we arrived, there were five gigs I wanted to see. The only thing that stopped me was that I didn't know where any of the venues were, and I got all self-conscious about my "just stepped out of a Kathmandu catalogue" look, which the local hipsters would no doubt see as reason enough to smash a beer glass on my forehead and steal my trainers.

We reunited with one half of our Berlin crew (of two. Thanks Jane) as well as John and Bec and John's mum, with whom we scraped into second place in the local pub's trivia contest, and saw Lucy "Princess Di" McFadden and her man, Andrew, for a roast and several pints. No pictures, only the memories and the memories of hangovers.

And we braved Terminal 5 at Heathrow and...no bags were lost.

France

This is the part of the blog in which I attempt to keep expressions like "cheese/garlic-eating surrender-monkey" to a minimum. It could be hard, but here goes...

We had two weeks in Paris to begin with, in an apartment at the pointy bit of one of those French apartment buildings. I don't have a photo, but you know what I mean, the apartment at the top where the roof starts to angle in. Perfect for little Frenchmen stunted by years of passive smoking from Mum's cigarillos, but occassionally dangerous if you happen to be this side of five foot tall.

We visited the local market early in the piece and stocked the fridge with plenty of cheese and vegetables and other things massively subsidised by the European Union. This was a welcome change to the now customary trip to the supermarket for just enough packet pasta to last until we have to pack our bags again. We also nailed an alarming number of three-course meals in the city's restaurants, largely made possible by the French menu-reading skills of Bron's friend from school, John and his partner, Bec, who paid us a visit from London.

On one particularly frenetic day of tourism, we visited Versaille and the Eiffel Tower with John and Bec. Here are the obligatory snaps:

Actually, before I go on, I should tell you about our little run-in with the gardener-extraordinaire and former male stripper, Jamie Durie. Well there's not too much to it, really - we were walking in the palace grounds and heard some whiney accent, looked up, and there was the tanned midget generously carrying his crew's camera tripod. Can anyone tell me whether they've seen a special episode of "Backyard Blitz" in which Jurie gets the bobcat out and replaces the manicured grandeur of Versaille with a patio and a Japanese water feature?

But I digress...

John and Bec graciously agreed to photograph us several times in front of this hulking brown metail thing, but I think I'll need to spend some time in photoshop adding a bit more light to the sky and erasing a few busloads of fellow tourists.

I manage to offend our temporary neighbours back at the apartment. We had some mail sent to us there - some train tickets and a birthday card for Bron from my Mum and Dad. Well, I was getting a bit eager to see that the goods had arrived, and reached into the locked mail box behind the main entrance door one day. I just assumed that this was fair game. But no, a housekeeper is employed to take mail from this locked box once a day and place it in individual mail boxes nearby, as I later found out. As I was fossicking through the now-retrieved mail, an old lady neighbour started looking concerned at this grave incursion into her private life and wagged her finger in my face, uttering the words "faux pas". I got the meaning of that. Word travelled fast through the apartment, and soon everyone was upbraiding me for this grande faux pas. The bloody cheese-eating surrender-monkeys.

My beloved former work colleagues gave Bron and I Paris musuem passes as a going-away present, and we loaded up on Paris culture with these lucrative bits of cardboard. Well, Bron did. I, meanwhile, went for a long bus journey through the suburbs to find the aerospace museum, to look at the Corcorde:


We also went to the ballet for Bron's birthday. It happened to the be the last night for some celebrated dancer, who, despite stacking it during the performance, received an extended round of applause at the end. Which he proceeded to milk for a further twenty-five minutes. Just as the curtain was falling, it rose again, and a further fifteen minutes of applause followed. By this stage, I was trying to find a match to set the smoke alarms off. On he went. It was about midnight by the time we ate that night.

After Paris, we headed down to Aix-en-Provence for a few days of country air. While I could pontificate about the beauty of provincial France, you have "Getaway" for that purpose, so I will instead bore you with the knowledge that I discovered the "macro" setting on my camera and spent a lot of timing taking pictures of flowers, like this:


We took a day trip to Marseille and were suitably impressed with the architecture, such as:


As we prepared to fly from Marseille to London, we got a taste of the long-established Britain-France national insult trading contest. In the departure lounge, the French informed us that our plane was delayed due to "UK air regulations". Okay, no worries, I've got some euros to blow on a stinking cup of Nescafe, I thought. After we eventually boarded the plane, the British crew apologised for the hold-up, citing "today's French air traffic controller's strike". Who to believe? I'm going with the Brits.

Feeding time at the zoo

(l-r: B. Jennings, half of Berlin, E. Anderson, A. Cole. Photo: J. Anderson)

(thanks for hanging out with us, Eliza and Jane!)