Paris May 2010

I went to Paris with Peta from Thu 27 May to Mon 31 May to have a long weekend around the UK May bank holiday.
She had never been to Paris before, so we took the touristy route around Paris.

I arrived in the afternoon, and ran around Charles de Gaulle trying to find out which terminal Peta's plane would arrive at. We finally met up, and took the RER downtown. We had a hotel room in the heart of the Marais district, so it was pretty expensive even though it was quite small. The location was very good, though, close to the 1 metro line. We had dinner at a very nice Italian restaurant in the Marais.

Friday morning we got up early to get in line for going up the towers of the Notre Dame. I still think it's one of the best views of Paris, although you have to be there early to not spend hours in the queue. We went on to visit the Arc de Triumph before taking the metro to Montmartre to see the Sacre Coeur and such in the ambience. We had an evening dinner at an Italian restaurant on Isle St. Louis.



Saturday we walked over to the Sainte-Chapelle, one of the prettiest churches in Paris. Unfortunately, it was being refurbished, so they had covered up one end of the church. We felt slightly ripped off from having paid 8 euros per head to see this. We went on to look at the Eiffel Tower. When we got there, the area and the surrounding park was completely filled with people in yellow and red outfits. Apparently there was some rugby event going on. We walked over to the Dome des Invalides to look at Napoleon's tomb, before taking the metro to the Latin Quarter to look for a place to have lunch. We didn't find anything to our liking there, so we went on to Bastille, and ended up having lunch at a really crappy lunch restaurant. We retired to our hotel room with a bottle of rose and some Ben & Jerrys to lift our spirits.

Sunday we were getting up early to go to the catacombs, only to discover when we got there that there had been a water leak in the surrounding area, so the catacombs were flooded. It looked like a severe leak as well, because we could see running water in the streets. We decided instead to walk down to the Cimetaire de Montparnasse , one of the more famous graveyards in Paris, featuring among others the graves of Sartre and Serge Gainsbourg. From there we walked down to the Tour Montparnasse to go up to the observation deck to look at the view. It was very expensive, but the view was really good. We had a very nice lunch in Montparnasse, before retiring to our hotel room for some Sancerre and chocolates. In the evening we had dinner at a very slow restaurant, and ended up waiting 25 minutes for the bill.



On our final day we went to see the obelisk at Place de Concorde, and visited L'Orangerie to look at Monet's water-lily paintings. We had some crepes with chestnut spread for lunch before going to the airport, very Parisian!

Pictures are here

Morocco

I went to Morocco with Peta from Feb 3rd to Feb 12th.
She had already been there a few days when I arrived, because she was initially going with some friends from work.

I started out flying to Marrakesh on Wed 3rd, landing in the afternoon, and my first experience with Morocco was being ripped off by the taxi at the airport, having to pay twice the normal price. Unfortunately I had no choice as there seemed to be one guy running all the taxis at the airport. The taxi drove me to a square, and I met Peta there, so she could walk me back to our riad. A riad is a traditional Moroccan house, converted to a hotel, and the result is a small hotel offering personal service usually comprising fewer than ten rooms.

We spent the evening walking around "sucking up the ambiance" and had dinner at a very dodgy restaurant close to the Jemma El-Fnaa (central square).

The next morning we walked around the center, picked up our train tickets and tried to find our final hotel. That turned out to be very difficult, as google maps had two locations for the hotel. We went to both locations, and did not find our hotel. Judging from the description we guessed where the hotel should be, and then Peta spotted a sign at the end of a side alley. This really shows how important it is in Marrakech to have someone from the riad meet you and take you to where it is.

We had dinner in the evening at a restaurant called "La Sultana" which served high-end French-Moroccan cuisine. We had a VERY nice meal, and I was really happy about us having found this place, even though the prices were on the level of European restaurants.



In walking around the center of Marrakech, I had noticed some things. There are tourist and souvenir shops everywhere, and there's lots of people hassling you, either trying to sell you things or trying to point out restaurants or offering to be guides. The good thing was that they backed off quickly, just telling them no was enough, so they were not like the touts in India who would keep following you and pestering you until you gave in.

A really annoying thing about Marrakech is the ever-present idiots on scooters. Most of the streets in the inner city of Marrakech are quite narrow, and there's people riding scooters really fast up and down them at all times. We were really stressed out by this the first couple of days, but after some time you sort of develop an inshallah attitude to them. Some of them seem to enjoy scaring tourists, though, I saw several aiming their scooters at us, and then pulling away at the last moment.



There are lots of cats in Morocco, so everywhere you see stray cats walking around. This was a treat for Peta, who is a real cat person. It was a bit funny to see lines of cats outside the butcher shops, waiting for someone to throw them something.

To see a little bit more of Morocco, we had booked a trip to Fez. The train journey was long, exacerbated by the fact that the trains had no air conditioning, and the windows were closed and could only be opened with a key. After 9 hours on the train, we were really tired when we got to Fez. The taxi driver at the train station tried to rip us off, but the taxi ride was still about half of what it would have been in Marrakech. We were dropped off in a square close to the old city, and we were eventually met by a woman from our riad. We stayed in an upscale riad, La Cle de Fez, and as it was off-season there were no other guests. We had a nice private dinner in the riad in front of the fireplace. The decor of the place was really fantastic, and we had a huge room, so I was very happy that I'd found this place when researching hotels before our trip.

The next morning we were met by a guide at the riad, and he took us on a tour around the souks of Fez. It was a good thing we decided to have a guide, because the souk area was a real maze. We had a quick stroll around the different areas, getting a good overview about what was where.

Even so, we spent a lot of time the next day finding the pottery souk. I embarrassed Peta by buying a fez in Fez, but I couldn't resist the opportunity ;-)



We had a long train journey back to Marrakech, and had dinner in the evening at a "fusion Thai/Moroccan"-place which had gotten good reviews in our guidebook. It was pretty unimpressive and very pricy. For our last days in Marrakech we stayed in a very pricy, 5-star riad, Riad Monceau. They did a very quick welcoming, the rooms weren't that great, and we didn't really feel it was that much nicer than the other riad we had stayed in, at half the price. This expensive riad was also right next to a mosque, so we were woken up by calls to prayer really early every morning.

For our last days, we visited the palace...which had been looted, so there was nothing left inside, and we went to see the Saadian tombs, which was a hidden final resting place for one of the royal families of Marrakech.
We also went to a spa, the Bains de Marrakesh. This was an upscale spa, mostly catering to French tourists. We had a standard couples-package, so we were scrubbed with black soap and eucalyptus, left in a steam room for a while, and then washed off with cold water, ending up on futons in bathrobes listening to new age music. It was my first spa-experience, and I must admit I found it a bit odd.



For our final dinner we went back to La Sultana for our final meal. It was a nice end to our first holiday together as a couple.

The last day I spent the morning walking Peta to her waiting taxi. I then slept for a bit, checked out of the hotel and spent some time on the internet, waiting to go to the airport. Her flight was severely delayed because of fog, mine only half an hour, but because my flight also made a stop in Agadir, I wasn't home until very late.

Pictures are here

India

I had some extra leave left over nearing the end of the year, and I wanted to have a vacation before departing for yet another exercise, so I had decided to book a trip to an exotic destination. I had also decided to try going on a group tour. I had been wanting to see India for a while, and a British company, Exodus, had several trips going there. I ended up deciding to go on a trip called "Rajastan Desert Adventure". They had two departures fairly close together, but I chose the later one as it included a trip to the famous Pushkar camel fair, reputedly the biggest livestock fair in Asia. It was also better aligned to the dates for my exercise in Poland in November.

Now the struggle was to get the holiday booked. Several of my colleagues had used the official agent for Exodus in Holland, Flach Travel, to book other trips. I tried sending them a couple of emails, and after a lot of emails back and forth I finally got something that looked like a confirmation that my trip was booked. Figuring that the rest of the group would be flying from Britain, I also asked him to book a hotel and flight package to connect to the tour. This turned out to be a big mistake. I asked the agent for direct flights, and he ended up booking me on a flight through Paris on the return... which was 100 euros more expensive than if I had booked the direct flights through KLM's website myself. The hotel they booked me on, the hotel where the trip started, turned out to have been booked at a rate that was 150% of the rate from the hotel's website. I'm aware of that travel agents have to make money somehow, but this was just ridiculous. I think it will be a long time before I use a travel agent again.

I had lots of trouble getting my tourist visa, mostly due to a mix of arrogance and stupidity at the embassy. It all started up with their web site declaring that you could not use the outsourced visa service as a foreigner unless you had a Verblijfsbewijs. Because of my special status in Holland, I do not have one of these, so I had to go through the regular visa procedure at the Indian embassy in The Hague. The line was not very long but it took forever, as the person at the counter seemed very keen on insulting every single person to come up to the counter. I saw 8 out of 10 people be turned away in front of me after lengthy discussions and screams of "We are the first line of defence for India!". For some reason they did not yell at me, but I spent two hours in line and waiting for my visa interview, as the visa granting officer had gone for a private errand to the bank. Upon finally getting to talk to the officer, he took a casual glance at my application, told me he saw no problem with this, and sent me back to the counter to pay my fee for getting the visa stamped. Back at the counter, the clerk refused to accept my paper for final stamping, screaming that I had to go to the outsourced visa service. After spending three hours in line to get my visa, I had to leave for the outsourced visa service. When I got there, they accepted my application and it turned out they had changed their requirement, so I no longer needed a Verblijfsbewijs to apply. The visa service, however, was spending forever processing my application. After a couple of weeks, I had to go over there and pick up my passport, because I needed it to fly to Germany. I returned it after a weekend in Munich, and finally one week later, after 20 days of processing and 95 euros in charges, my visa was ready.

My flight to India was delayed on the ground at Schiphol, because they had too few security guards to run the bag check properly. When I finally got to Delhi, I was stuck on the ground for another 40 minutes, because Delhi airport had forgotten to assign a gate to my flight. Arriving at the airport, I was unable to use the ATM. You can't change euros into rupees outside of India, so I had no rupees with me. This meant I had no rupees to pay for the taxi to the hotel. Luckily, after running around for a bit, I found a money-changing booth that would accept my euros. The hotel was pretty basic, so I was surprised it was so expensive. Turns out, the hotel standards in India are pretty low, and I would experience the full extent of this during my trip.

I had one day to myself in Delhi, so I made a quick plan for which sights I wanted to see in Delhi, and set off on a tuk-tuk from the hotel. Using the tuk-tuks to go around was not ideal. Most of them would overcharge like crazy, charging 3-4 times the basic rate for Indians. Some of them would try to trick me into hiring them for extended periods, and most of them tried to trick me into telling them which hotel I stayed at. One guy made a very persistent effort to sell me a copy of the Kama Sutra. Also, the tuk-tuks are very open, allowing you to inhale exhaust and smog from the crazy Delhi traffic. One crazy-eyed guy in a passing tuk-tuk grabbed my arm and started screaming. I was indeed a long way from home.

The touts and the tuk-tuk drivers weren't all bad. One rickshaw driver actually knew what he was doing, so he took me to the spice market, and showed me an area where they do gross sales of spice. I walked through the building, passing a lot of spice workers obviously confused by my presence, before going up to a rooftop where I had a panorama view of the market area. This driver was worth his money.




During the day I managed to visit Qutb Minar, Humayun's tomb, the Red Fort and the narrow shopping streets of the Chandri Chowk. I was also attacked by the shoeshine mafia in Connaught Place. This is a Delhi-specific scam I had read about before coming, but I had not expected it to happen to me. The scam works like this: a guy squirts dog-shit on your shoe while you're not looking, and then helpfully tells you that you have shit on your shoe. He then offers to clean it up for you, at an extortionate rate.

At Connaught Place, I had a guy run up to me from behind, tapping me on the shoulder. He told me I had shit on my shoe, and offered to clean it up for me. I knew what was going on, and I was pretty pissed off, but I figured, I had to have it cleaned off anyway. The guy did a half-assed job of cleaning it up, and then demanded 1400 rupees after cleaning it up. Normal tariff for a shoeshine in India is 10 rupees. I suddenly noticed he had a bunch of friends that had moved into position behind me. I told him this was way too much. One of the people hanging around walked up to me and "helpfully" told me that 1400 was way too much, normal rate was more like 500 rupees. I pulled out a 100 rupee note (the equivalent of 2 euros), the smallest note I had, tossed it at him and shouted that if I saw him again I would go get the police. I walked away hastily towards the safety of the inside of the shopping center, ready to run if they would try to jump me. They did not follow me inside, and when I came out again ten minutes later, they had disappeared.

Saturday morning I met up with my group, mostly British retirees. We took off and drove towards Agra, stopping for a quick stroll around the Agra Fort. It was not terribly exciting, but it did have some nice balconies where we could watch the Taj Mahal from a different angle. Our hotel was full of mosquitoes, as they kept the doors open and the lights turned on in the evening. I found this very odd in an area with malaria-risk.



Sunday morning we got up really early in order to catch Taj Mahal at sunrise. I must say that the Taj Mahal was an attraction that's better in real life than in pictures. I really enjoyed it, and I'm happy I got to see it in the morning, you could really see the light change in just one hour, and it was vastly more captivating in the morning light. Also, you could really feel the marble effect, with the Taj sucking the heat out of the surrounding area.

We drove on to Fatehpur Sikri, looking at the ruins, before driving on to a small town just outside Ranthambore National Park.

Monday we started out really early for our first game drive in the tiger reserve at Ranthambore National Park. We were driving around in open-topped vehicles called "Canters" and it was a very bumpy and dusty drive to get to the national park. We drove around for three hours but did not see a tiger. The terrain on the route we were taking in the morning was not ideal for tiger-spotting anyway, as it was very overgrown. We saw lots of deer and some crocodiles, though.

After our game drive, we had lunch, and went for a walk in the nearby village. We stopped at some local schools and spoke to some of the schoolchildren, which was very entertaining for some of the members of our group, as they were retired teachers.



We went for a second game drive in the evening, and this time we were more lucky. We were driving along on a route that was more open, allowing us to see more of the landscape. We saw lots of different animals, including a sloth bear, apparently rarely seen in the park. Towards the end of the game drive our driver stopped abruptly. He had noticed that the behavior of the animals had changed. We saw the animals tiptoeing around , being very skittish. Then we heard warning calls of the big sambar deer. We listened to this for maybe ten minutes before we suddenly heard the tiger roar. It really made the hairs on your neck rise up. The driver gunned the engine, and drove towards where we heard the roar like he was some sort of getaway driver for a bank robbery. I found it a bit theatrical at the time, but all in good fun. We drove to an open area close to the river where we had a good overview. Apparently, we had just missed the tiger, as the people in the other vehicles there had seen it drinking from the river. We sat around for maybe ten minutes without seeing anything before suddenly spotting something orange on the hill in front of us. I managed to get a couple of shots with my camera before it disappeared in the tall grass. We returned in triumph, having seen a tiger in the wild and we celebrated with some Indian rum and coke in the van.

Tuesday morning we started out really early, going to the pink city of Jaipur, the capital of Rajastan. We had a quick stroll around the Maharaja palace of Jaipur, but we were not all that impressed. We had lunch at a local cafe. I was not that hungry, so I only had a small naan. Turned out that was a very good decision. Probably from the meal at this cafe, one member of the group, Peta, got food poisoning, and she was out for four days...

We stayed at a rather low standard hotel in Jaipur. When we first checked in, I was convinced there were several families with children directly above us, as there was a lot of noise coming from above. It turned out it was the traditional dance performance for the freshly arrived tourists. We had a buffet dinner and were called up to dance with the performers. We would find later that this is very common in these tourist performances.

We woke up really early the next day, discovering that the hotel was next to a temple which started chanting things over loudspeakers from 5 in the morning. Today's program was visiting the Amber fort of Jaipur, a hilltop fortress, controlling the city walls of Jaipur. I remember being impressed at the size of the city walls, considering they straddled hilltops for long distances around the city. Must have taken them some time to build.

The afternoon was spent shopping in the bazaar areas of Jaipur. I bought some Christmas gifts and was properly cheated on a belt which wouldn't bend properly when I got back to The Hague. I only lost 10 euros, and I had fun haggling with the guy, so I didn't feel too bad about it.

I woke up in the middle of the night, thinking it was raining heavily, and went back to sleep. When I woke up in the morning I was puzzled. Raining in a desert city in the middle of dry season? It turned out that the big water tank on top of the hotel had sprung a leak, so there was water running down the sides of the hotel, running down the stairs, and down the elevator shaft. At least I have now stayed in the hotel with "Running water (down the walls)" ;-)



Thursday morning we drove off to see the Palace of the Winds, Hawa Mahal (a palace that really exemplifies the concept of facade...). This is one of the main attractions in Jaipur, so there's usually lots of tourists milling around, together with the usual bunch of street sellers, snake charmers etc.. I had fun watching the snake charmers, as some of them didn't seem too proficient, and you could see the snakes lunging after passing tourists. I just hope the snakes weren't poisonous... We spent the rest of the day driving to Pushkar, the site of the camel fair we were visiting. We moved into the tent camp that would serve as our home for the duration of our stay in Pushkar, had a quick lunch, before riding camel carts into the center of Pushkar, to do an evening walk around the center and the main fairgrounds. Turns out that because of the drought this year, the holy lake had turned into more of a holy puddle. That didn't stop the Saadu hermits from sitting around the lake smoking hashish to be more spiritual. Some of them were more spiritual than others; One guy ran up to us, dropped his robe and proceeded to show us the "rolling a penis around a stick"-trick. It was a bit surreal. I took great pleasure in seeing Kali-murals, something you don't really see that often. They were there because this is the city of Brahma, and Kali was one of his two wives. It was a bit funny to hear our guide explaining that the legend said if you had two wives, you had to make sure to keep them in different locations, otherwise there would be trouble.




Our tents were about half an hour's walk from the festival grounds, so it was pretty quiet. The only things that alarmed me slightly during the night were the wild dogs running around in the camp, grunting and barking and sniffing the tent walls. We made sure to button our tents up properly after that.

Friday morning we went for walk around Pushkar. We came late in the festival, so most of the trading of livestock was already finished, but there were still people selling horses, so there were huge numbers of animals still around. Apparently, this festival had been more popular with tourists in previous years, so there weren't that many around. This made us feel singled out, as there were large numbers of really annoying street-sellers following us around. One guy followed us for 20 minutes! We went visiting the Brahma temple in Pushkar (the only Brahma temple in India), and stopped for some amazingly expensive chai. The festival was trying to attract tourists by offering a "Cultural program", considering of "beard growing contests" and "milking contests" and similar high-brow entertainment. I decided to leave the tour group for a while to go off and take some photos. Rajastan is famous for the brightly colored dresses and turbans worn by the locals, and I really enjoyed having some alone time photographing the camels and the colorful clothes. I also managed to buy some really high quality pashminas at a very reasonable price.



In the evening, we went to see another part of the cultural programme, a dance performance. It was a bizarre display with a guy looking exactly like Colonel Gadaffi in woman's makeup performing some weird interpretive dance, explaining about the life of Krishna. It was very strange, and it went on for about an hour, so we really had our fill of culture before heading back to the tent camp. Back at the camp, the tent camp owner was hosting a 1-year birthday party for his daughter. It was very unexpected and we found it very interesting that they chose to invite a tour group to this family event.

Saturday we left Pushkar and spent the whole day driving to Jodhpur (The Blue City), where we visited the impressive Mehrangarh Fort. Situated on a hilltop, the fort really stands out in the landscape, and it is a really impressive structure. It has been used in numerous movies, mostly for the great views towards the blue-painted houses in certain districts of Jodhpur. I was really looking forward to seeing this for myself, but unfortunately we came at the wrong time of day, so I couldn't get any good photos because of the position of the sun. We had a quick stroll through the local market buying spices before having a shabby buffet dinner at the hotel. I was really pleased with finally staying in a hotel with hot water and working showers .



Sunday was spent on the road, driving way out West towards the Pakistani border to the desert town of Jaisalmer. It was a very long uneventful drive, just interrupted for stops for chai, and a stop to watch the desert sunset. We arrived quite late and had dinner al fresco on the roof of a restaurant with views of the illuminated fortress of Jaisalmer. We were entertained by trying to decipher the menu which included such gems as "Spegati Boneless". Soo... the spaghetti normally has bones in India? Later on we would find a roadside cafe that served "Chicken Sweat & Sour"...



Monday we walked around the historic inner city of Jaisalmer, inside the fort. It was a nice stroll around the narrow traditional streets, except for the pungent aroma of open-air sewers. I remember being impressed with all the Krishna murals we saw. We also visited a Jain temple and looked at some...unorthodox... pictures of Krishna and Lakhsmi. We also visited some of the traditional trader's houses and looked at their impressive facades. The only annoying thing about the walk was the local guide dragging us into several shopping outlets.

In the afternoon we were driven out into the desert, where there were camels waiting for us. We rode camels for about an hour to get to our desert camp. I had never ridden camels before, and it was a pretty bumpy ride. Also, my camel handler had not padded the wooden saddle properly, so my bum was tenderized by the trip. By the end of second day of the camel trekking, I had bleeding saddle sores, so it was very painful to sit on the coach when we drove on bumpy roads.

Upon arriving at our desert camp, we walked to the top of the dunes to look at the sunset. We saw lots of lizard tracks in the dunes, and some members of the group asked the guide whether there were scorpions and snakes around the camp. He then proceeded to tell them his best fib of the trip: "The scorpions and snakes only like the high ground... they don't come down here where we have our tents."

We had dinner and sat outside on folding chairs, drinking beer, talking and looking at the stars until late.




Tuesday morning was to be our main camel trekking day. I struggled to put my contacts in without access to running water, so I think I spent 15 minutes getting them in. We rode off in our camels, spending the entire day riding, stopping only to water and feed the camels. We also stopped to look at a gypsy village. The gypsies lived in huts made from branches tied together, and they were swarming us begging for "Bon-Bon". Apparently French groups had a habit of handing out sweets and shampoo to the gypsies. We ended up at a more permanent desert camp, where they had some drumming and dancing entertainment in the evening. At this point we were very fed up with all the touristy dancing and drumming.

The next two days were spent mainly on road transport, first to Bikaner, and then after a short trip of the fort and Maharaja palace in Bikaner we went on to Nawalgarh, where we had a quick stroll through the center with the Shekhavati trader houses.

We spent our last night in Rajastan staying in the Maharaja Palace in Nawalgarh, having dinner and then drinking beers, talking and looking at the stars. It was a very nice evening, not impeded by the noises of angry cows and barking dogs around the palace.

Friday morning we went bicycling on some very rickety bikes on the back roads of Nawalgarh. We stopped to look at a fruit farm before getting back in the mini-bus for our drive back to Delhi. We stayed at the same hotel in Delhi as when we arrived, and had a quick dinner before turning in, as the people returning to Britain had very early flights.

My flight wasn't until Saturday evening, so I had one more day of sightseeing in Delhi. Unfortunately I contracted Delhi belly, so I had a really upset stomach, which was not very compatible with sightseeing. I still managed to see the Delhi Gate, the National Museum (not that great and there were lots of school kids there, really annoying) and the Purana Quila. The Purana Quila looked very moody in the morning smog, so I'm glad I went to see it, although overall it was a bit underwhelming after seeing so many forts in Rajastan.

I noticed that the taxis ripped me off less on this day than on the day I arrived. I assumed I maybe had acquired more of a tan, so I no longer had that "fresh off the plane"-look, but it could also be that from dealing with the touts in Pushkar , I had gained some facial expressions that made them understand I was in no mood to be ripped off. I had no patience with these people, and they could sense that.

I went back to the really annoying Delhi airport to catch my flight, and they wouldn't let me through the departures doors so I could check in until a couple of hours before my flight departed. I was annoyed at this, because it meant I had to sit in a crappy paid "lounge" outside the airport, when I could have been in the KLM gold lounge inside the airport.

Before getting to my flight I had to go through the slowest and most inefficient security check I have ever encountered, involving having boarding passes stamped, luggage tags stamped and everyone checked manually before then being stopped by more guards checking that you had all your stamps. At the time I was very focused on getting home anyway, and annoyed at my travel agent for booking me through Paris instead of straight home.

Overall, I had a good trip. I saw lots of interesting things and it was very different from a lot of my previous travel experiences. Traveling in India is not for the squeamish, though. Toilet and sanitary arrangements were dreadful, and roadside restaurants were very basic. Also, hotel standards were poorer than anywhere else I've been in the world.

The main thing I took back from this trip, however, was meeting my girlfriend, Peta.

Pictures from Delhi and Agra
Pictures from Rajastan

Oktoberfest

Rune,Lukasz, Mafalda, Kamila and I went to visit the German cultural festival known as "Oktoberfest" from 25 Sep to 28 Sep. In addition to our party, Mimi and a lot of the Americans from work had chosen that weekend to visit Oktoberfest.

Rune and I flew in in the evening on Friday 25th, coming in very late to our hotel. We met up with Lukasz, Mafalda, Kamila and Thomas the morning after. Lukasz, Mafalda and Kamila were staying at Thomas' place and had arrived fairly early on Friday, so they were already several beers in front of us.

We made our way to the festival area, and walked around for a while, looking for tables at the outside bier gartens. Getting a spot inside the beer tents in the weekend is pretty close to impossible, since you have to reserve tickets more than half a year in advance, and big companies scoop up the tickets early. Not having seats turned out to be a big problem, as the waiters refuse to serve anyone not sitting. Thomas, being a Munich native, showed us that it was just a matter of getting a single seat, and working from there. There is no limits to how much beer you can order, so once we found an empty seat, Thomas ordered six beers and taught us how to drink while standing up without getting too tired in the arms. The 1-liter beer mugs they serve during Oktoberfest weigh quite a lot, and there are several different techniques for holding them in order to rest our arms. Always good to have a local to fill you in on the local customs. During the day we got fairly drunk, some more so than others. I managed to contract a cigar burn on my wrist, and I never smoke cigars, so I'm pretty sure I also had my share of the booze.




Sunday morning was a pretty slow day, owing to the events of the night before. It had been designated as our "Cultural day" in order to have an alibi for the trip. The cultural part of it was visiting the monastery at Andechs, just outside Munich. This is a popular tourist destination, because it is one of the oldest churches in Germany. Besides...they brew their own beer and have an enormous bier garten on the premises ;-). We spent most of the day in the bier garten, eating schweinhaxe, drinking radler and generally trying to recover from last nights events. In the afternoon we went to the outskirts of Munich to go to a jazz bier garten to meet up with the American crowd from work. When we showed up there were almost no people left, and no jazz. We moved on to a latino style bar downtown.

Monday morning we went down to the festival area again, and found seats in the Ochsenbraterei-tent. This is a tent with room for approximately 10.000 people, and their specialty is barbecuing bulls whole. The meat was delicious, and they had a lot of traditional entertainment like horn music and mass-holding duels. We walked around the festival grounds for a while, trying out the rides and the food on the way, before going to the airport and flying back to Holland.

Pictures are here.

Blogging resumed

I've had some fairly major changes in my life recently (all good :-) ) , so I haven't been as good at updating my travel blog as I should. Trying to get back on the horse now, so I'm finally getting around to posting some updates for the last half year.

Trip to southeast Asia

My summer vacation this year was a three-week trip to South-East Asia, going on a trip spanning Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia and Thailand. This was my first trip to Asia, so I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. I had been busy most of July traveling for work, so I hadn't had as much time as I would have liked to read guidebooks and prepare, but at least I had managed to book hotels and flights in advance.

I flew out of Amsterdam in the evening of Sat Aug 1st, and surprisingly, I managed to sleep on the plane, so I was actually rested when I arrived at Singapore airport. This was a pretty efficient airport, so it didn't take very long to get to my hotel. I had a fairly nice hotel next to the river, close to the main nightlife areas of Clarke Quay and Boat Quay. This was convenient in the evening for restaurants, but it was some distance away from the metro, so I had to walk a lot. Singapore was more attractive by night, with lots of colored lights everywhere, and a good selection of restaurants. Too bad it was so expensive...the prices for food and drink were very high - close to Norwegian standards! I usually paid 8-10 euro for a beer.



It was pretty easy to get around Singapore on the metro (they called it the "MRT"), but I felt there wasn't all that much to see there. I walked around in Chinatown, visited Little India and the Asian Civilizations museum. This museum was supposed to be one of the best attractions in Singapore, but I was rather unimpressed. They were trying to handle a big, exciting subject with rather poor exhibits, and tried to cover it up by putting computerized talking heads everywhere. It didn't work for me...

You very quickly get used to signs stating various things that are illegal in Singapore. One of the funnier ones was that it was illegal to carry durian on the MRT. Durian, called "The king of fruits" for some reason, is a South-East Asian specialty. It is a big, spiky fruit about the size of a coconut that has a very peculiar smell, and a strange taste. Guidebooks describe it as "eating garlic ice-cream next to an open sewer", and I agree on the sewer part. At first I thought there was an open sewer next to the stand where they were selling it. I figured this was my chance to try this wonder-fruit. The taste was very "different", and I ran around for fifteen minutes trying to find a shop to buy something to rinse out my mouth afterwards. Definitely not something I would try again, but at least I would not wonder about how it would taste. It was quite funny that after tasting it, I would recognize the smell in seconds afterwards, kind of like how one recognizes the smell of marijuana only after tasting it. Several times during my trip I would suddenly think "durian", look around and see a durian stand some distance away. It is probably an acquired taste...



After a couple of days in Singapore I caught a Malaysia Airlines flight to Kuala Lumpur. Entering Malaysia was slightly different. In addition to filling out the arrival card and the customs form (with "DEATH TO DRUG SMUGGLERS" in big red letters on the front...), I had to fill out a H1N1-form stating my current health, and which countries I had visited in the past 7 days. Upon arriving at the airport I had to wait in a big line to hand in this form to nurses in full protective gear, while they used thermal scanners to check my body temperature. Good thing I didn't have a fever at that time, because they had quarantine-areas at the airport for placing foreigners under arrest if they failed the medical screening...

Upon arriving at the airport, I noticed the large number of women in ninja-outfits walking around. Apparently there was some sort of holiday-season in the middle east, so that's why there were women in niqab everywhere. I giggled a bit upon seeing these women shopping for Jimmy Choo and Manolo Blahnik shoes at the KLCC shopping center...

I had a strange taxi-ride to my hotel in Kuala Lumpur. The city was very smelly and damp, the road layout was very messy, and we seemed to be driving in some very bad areas. Suddenly we were stuck in traffic in a really shady neighborhood. I gripped my laptop-bag tightly, fearing someone would rip open the car door and grab it. After a couple of minutes of inching our way through this neighborhood, the guy stopped and declared that this was my hotel. Turns out I had made a mistake with my hotel-booking, so I had managed to get a pretty shitty old hotel in a dubious location for my first night in KL. Good thing it was only for a single night. The room was pretty run down, and the non-adjustable airco seemed to be set for 15 degrees, so it was freezing cold inside. Every time I walked outside the hotel, guys would approach me in the street and offer me prostitutes. The worst part was that the hotel was next to a busy street and a public car park, so I lay awake several hours of the night listening to car alarms. It was a good reminder to spend more time researching before booking hotels online.

Kuala Lumpur seemed to have almost exclusively crooked taxi drivers. It was even worse than The Hague. They would without exception refuse to turn on their meter, and try to charge you a really high fixed price wherever you wanted to go.

In many ways Kuala Lumpur reminded me of Guatemala City. Proper slums, with a number of really up-market shopping malls. Less people with guns around, though...

Wednesday morning it was raining like crazy in Kuala Lumpur when I left for the airport to catch my super-cheap flight to the east coast (40 euro round-trip all-in was pretty good). Having a beach vacation in rainy weather isn't optimal, so I worried about how things would look on the other side. When I got to Kota Baharu however, it was bright and sunny, so there was a big difference between the east coast and the west coast. I was picked up by my driver at the airport, and driven to the boat jetty at Kuala Besut. The resort I was staying at had a private speedboat, so that was my ride to the Perhentian Islands.



I started off with a snorkeling trip right off the pier, on the reef of the main island. I had never gone snorkeling before. This was a very pleasant new experience for me. The water was very warm, crystal clear and there were schools of multi-colored fish everywhere. The reef also had some live coral, and I was amazed at the bright colors of some of the coral species. The "guide" had brought some bait for the fish, and this sent them into a feeding frenzy. I was bitten by some of the smaller fish (nothing serious, but I could feel the teeth), so I felt a bit apprehensive when some of the schools of fish were swarming around me. I never got bitten after the first day, though.

I quickly found out that everything on this island ran on island time, so every activity was at least half an hour late. Some of the activities were very crummy as well. On the first day I was supposed to do "Jungle trekking". Turns out, that was just walking a path to the top of the island and back.

On the second day, I went for a big snorkeling trip. The trip lasted almost four hours, going to four different locations, letting us snorkle with fish, sharks and turtles. I was lucky and spotted two big round-nosed sharks. Lots of people in the boat didn't see any. The giant turtle dive location had lots of stinging jellyfish, so lots of the tourists on the boat didn't go in. I and two other guys got within two meters of some giant turtles, and it was a pretty neat experience. I had to swim really fast to keep up with the turtles.



On the third day I found out that this was a pretty disorganized resort. It was a big surprise to the staff that I was supposed to go snorkeling on that day also (according to the package I paid for), so they sent me to a different dive operator. Turns out their tours started an hour later, so I sat around in the sun waiting for them to fill their boat. This day I went to the shark point again, but the guide this day was more eager, so he pointed out where to go for the sharks. I saw one big pointy-nosed one (probably like a meter and a half long) and one baby shark. Next we went giant turtle snorkeling. I only saw two giant turtles, but I wasn't stung as much by jellyfish this time. In the afternoon, I spent about an hour snorkeling off the house reef just outside the hotel, spotting a squid, some new big fishes, and admiring the colorful live coral.

I was impressed that they had Paulaner on the island, but it was fairly expensive (6 euro). A waitress told me they are not really allowed to serve alcohol, so they have to pay off the police to stop them from raiding the place. I wonder what else they pay them to have a blind eye to. (like the open sewage, burning garbage in the backyard etc). Some of the eastern provinces are very Muslim, with Sharia-law in effect, and I remember being surprised by the number of cars having "DEATH TO AMERICA" and "BOYCOTT USA PRODUCTS"-stickers...

I had bought an all-inclusive package for my stay on this island, since the all-inclusive package was only 10EUR more per day than booking without food. This turned out to be a mistake. They served very basic food, mostly just rice and rendang, and the food was not refilled, so you had to come early, otherwise the food would run out.

After three and a half day of snorkeling and relaxing on the beach, I returned to Kota Baharu. This was a disorganized, and very small airport. My plane was delayed for over an hour, so I had a long wait at the airport. A friend once explained to me the concept of "hot country time", and it looked like it was seriously in effect here, everything seemed to start half an hour to an hour after the stated time.

For my two day city-exploring stay in Kuala Lumpur, I stayed at Le Meridien, a 4 1/2 star hotel next to KL Central Station. Normally I try not to stay close to railway stations, as the surrounding areas tend to be shady. Not so this time, I think this is one of the better hotels I have ever stayed in. Big, comfy bed with euro-style sheets (cheap-ass places tend to have US-style), big room and a great view. The only snag was a very crappy internet connection. Staying so close to the main station made it really easy to explore Kuala Lumpur. Also, the hotel was only 10EUR more per night than the shitty hotel I stayed in for my first night in KL.



I got up really early the next morning to try to get hold of tickets to go to the skybridge of the Petronas towers. I was at the ticket counter an hour before they opened, but the tickets were already out. I guess I should have been there two hours before, but I really wasn't too keen to standing in line for several hours just to go halfway up the tower. I walked over to the KL tower instead, and watched the city from the observation deck.

I spent several hours walking around the city. It is probably one of the more exotic places I have been, right up there with Istanbul. There's a mix of Chinese and Malay culture, some places are really run down, and others are full of glitzy shopping malls. I was surprised there were so few mosques, considering that this is a very muslim country. Walking around, I explored the central part of Kuala Lumpur, and also some areas off the beaten track, after making the normal preparations (visit in daytime, no watch, no camera, carrying only a minimum of cash). Funny how different the articles for sale at the local markets are from the super-touristy markets at Petaling street.

You need to be quick on your feet to walk in KL, since there seems to be very few rules of the road, and traffic lights are mere decorations. Crossing the road means sprinting, and hoping for the best, or trying to make sure there's some car blocking others from driving into you. Sidewalks can also be quite dangerous, as the moped drivers will drive on them if the road is clogged.



Kuala Lumpur does not have much in the way of tourist attractions, so I went to see the national mosque and visited the Islamic Arts museum. They didn't have too many exhibits, but I found the showcasing of different architectural styles in various big mosques and the differences in calligraphy in various versions of the Koran to be interesting. Also, it was nice to be inside an air-conditioned building for a while. I am not used to 32 degrees and high humidity.

My next destination was Cameron Highlands. Cameron Highlands is an area in central Malaysia high up in the mountains (1500m-2000m) where the English set up farms for growing strawberries and tea. They also built hill station resorts where people could go to get out of the punishing heat of Kuala Lumpur (Cameron Highlands is usually never hotter than 22 degrees year-round).

To go there, I had to go by bus from the main bus station in Kuala Lumpur. I had purchased my ticket the day before, but when I showed up at the platform to catch my "Super-VIP bus" (whatever that meant...), my bus was nowhere to be found. There were a bunch of walkie-talkie wielding, chain-smoking bus handlers running around, but they just made motions for me to wait. I figured this was probably hot-country time at work again. After some time, a crowd of frustrated Middle-Eastern tourists also going to Cameron Highlands started shouting at the handlers. Finally, 45 minutes after the bus was supposed to leave, a handler shouted "Kam-run, Kam-run, Kam-run" and pointed down the terminal at a different aisle. Sure enough, there was my bus, crisis averted. Five hours later, I was at my hotel in Cameron Highlands.



I figured I needed a rest day, so I only went for a half-day "Nature Discovery" tour. This was a crowded mini-bus tour driving us to the highest peak in the area, before stopping to let us walk in the mossy cloud-forest. Development have scared away most of the big wildlife, and thieves have stolen the wild orchids, so there wasn't that much to see up there. Just walking through a forest, really. Most people on the trip were happy there were no more tigers up there, but it's sad to see how much of this country has been turned into plantations. One difference from forests back home was that they had lots of bamboo, and I got to see a couple of carnivorous pitcher plants, so it wasn't a total loss. Next we visited a tea plantation, to look at tea fields, and to see a tea factory. Finally we visited a shantytown for the Orang Asli, the local bushmen.
The hotel I stayed in also had amazingly cheap laundry (1/10th of what I would pay in Kuala Lumpur) so I exploited the opportunity to wash clothes for the rest of the trip.



After a five-hour bus-trip, I was back in Kuala Lumpur, and checked into the fancy five-star Crowne Plaza hotel I had booked to recover. This was a proper five-star, with a fantastic bathroom, at the price of a three-star in Europe. The weather was very rainy, and there wasn't all that much left to see in KL, so I enjoyed the king-size bathtub that came with the hotel room. By consulting my guidebooks, I found a hidden street full of upscale restaurants, so I ended my stay in Kuala Lumpur with a great meal.



The next morning I flew to Siem Reap, Cambodia. Siem Reap is the tourist hub of Cambodia, being the site of the Angkor Wat temple complex. I had been slightly anxious about going to Cambodia, as I didn't have a visa. My foreign department web pages told me I needed one, but it was very hard to find any information on how to get one. Fortunately, it was really easy. I just had to bring a passport photo and pay $25, and everything was OK. I rented a taxi for the day, and visited the main temples of Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom and Ta Prohm on the first day.



The temples were pretty interesting, some of them very nicely restored, but it was a real pain with the street sellers around the temples. Before the taxi had even stopped, there would be a couple banging on the windows shouting "MIS-TAH! MIS-TAH! guide-book? ONE DOLLAH! look, nice has colors and pictures and everything! ONE DOLLAH!". It's cute the first time, but after about 240 such approaches in just a couple of hours, it gets old. It was also really annoying how some of them would follow me around after I told them no.

It was extremely hot in Cambodia, and there was also a lot of moisture in the air, so I felt like I was being steamed alive. According to my guide/taxi driver this was the cold period, so I imagine the hot season must be unbearable.



On my second day in Cambodia I went to a more remote temple, Bantay Srei (the pink temple). This was much smaller than the other temples I had visited, and completely overrun by tour groups. The carvings were much more ornate, and better restored than the temples I had seen the previous day, so it was still interesting. On the way back, I stopped at the Land Mine Museum, a small museum showcasing various types of land mines removed by mine clearers. They also had some educational videos, and all the profits went to support children injured by land mines.



My taxi drove me around the countryside, allowing me to see rice fields, wooden shacks and water buffalos before going to see some smaller temples that were less popular with tourists. I especially liked Preah Khan, as it was fairly large and overgrown with jungle, like Ta Prohm, but there were almost no tourists.

At this point I was pretty fed up with temples, so I went for a boat trip on the Mekong river and the Ton Le Sap lake to look at floating villages. The floating villages are sort of a tourist trap, with the guides taking you to buy overpriced school supplies before you go to visit a local school. Still, it was a different experience, and my guide on the boat got really friendly after a couple of beers, telling me about his dream to become a language teacher...I spent the afternoon recovering from the hot and humid day by relaxing at the excellent pool at my hotel.

After two days in Cambodia, I left for Thailand, flying to Koh Samui. Samui had a really fancy, small airport. I remember being impressed with the huge fish-tank in the men's room. I took a ridiculously expensive taxi from the airport to the beach resort I was staying at. Turns out, calling it a beach resort was stretching the term a bit, since it only had beach access at low tide. Walking to the main street and to the main beach took me 25 minutes, so not a very good location. The main reason I booked this was that everything else was full, this being the high season for Samui. I was staying at the main beach in Samui, Chaweng, and this was seriously overdeveloped. There was not an inch of beach that was not connected to some hotel resort or restaurant. The "main street" was really nasty and crowded, full of touts selling counterfeit goods and massage girls. There was also a lot of traffic, mostly empty taxis, songchaews, motorcycle-taxis and advertisement-vans.
I gave up on exploring the island, and spent a few days relaxing by the pool. On my final day it was raining heavily, so I went to the airport and managed to charm the girl at the Bangkok Airways ticket counter into letting me switch to an earlier flight to Bangkok.



Wednesday morning I started out fairly early, spending some time figuring out the monorail/metro system. There were lots of transportation issues in Bangkok. Overall I seemed to spend a lot of time getting around. Traffic was more or less permanently gridlocked because of poor urban planning, so taxis were no option. Tuk-tuk's were cheaper, but they seemed to be stuck in traffic just as often as the taxis. Also, you're more exposed to traffic and exhaust fumes, and the tuk-tuk drivers seemed more sleazy. I only used the tuk-tuk twice, and both times, after they start driving, they went "You like dirty massage? You like fuck?" and started showing pictures of hookers. This is a problem with traveling alone as a guy. It's harder to shake the pimps when you're not bringing a woman. I'm getting quite good at getting rid of them now, having developed some technique from having stayed for three weeks in Turkey and also from traveling in general. They're also quite easy to spot, long before they open their mouth, because of body language combined with appearance. Instantly when I spot them, I know that whatever this guy is selling, I don't want it. I think the key is never engaging and just keeping pace and dismissing them. The moment you show interest, you are screwed; I remember one guy following me for five blocks trying to sell me pottery in Istanbul after I made the mistake of responding to him. I had heard stories about how persistent they are at pushing prostitutes in Thailand, but I didn't find it that bad, usually they back off straight away. The trinket and guidebook sellers around the temples in Angkor on the other hand...REALLY annoying.

There was also motorcycle taxis available, but I heard enough stories not to get on one, and I could also see how the guys were driving, running red lights, driving on sidewalks and against the flow of traffic.

Metro and Skytrain(Monorail) were not very useful for tourists, as the main tourist attractions are in the old town, and the metro/skytrain doesn't run there. The easiest way to get to the main attractions was to take the ferry upriver and walk. Unfortunately, the ferries stop running fairly early, so I found myself walking quite a lot. Still, it was faster than using taxis. Bangkok is not the easiest city to navigate on foot, as only main streets seem to be signposted intermittently with western-script names. I remember walking for almost half an hour without seeing a single sign in western alphabet

There's not a whole lot of things to see in Bangkok, so the main sites are pretty overrun with tourists. On my first day in Bangkok, I visited Wat Phra Kaeo (The shrine of the emerald buddha) and the Grand Palace complex. I must say I only found the shrine interesting. It is also rather crowded. Next I went to see the reclining buddha at Wat Pho, also not very interesting.



I went to see the Khao Sanh Road - the western ghetto of Bangkok. I found this enjoyable, a whole street living off the backpacker tradition, selling T-shirts, tattoos and backpacking equipment. It was also fun to see all the 19-year old backpackers fresh off the plane, searching for hostels and such.



Since there was not all that much to see in Bangkok, I went on a day trip to Ayutthaya, taking an early morning train to go up there. Ayutthaya is the old capital of Thailand (Siam at the time), and contains a number of older temples, some of which were razed by the Burmese when they invaded. I expected a lot of hassle with taking local trains to go up there, but the train conductors spoke basic English, and were very friendly, telling me when I needed to get off, and showing me which train to get on. This was very helpful in Ayuthaya, since they did not have a board showing which track the train would come in on. I rented a Tuk-Tuk for three hours to go from site to site, costing me a reasonable 12 Euro. Some of the sites were nice, but the temples felt somewhat repetitive. I went for a super-touristy elephant ride around a couple of the temples. It was intensely uncomfortable. I was alone on the elephant, and I found the saddle moving around quite a lot, so it didn't feel very safe at first. The saddle rocks back and forth quite a lot and this is very tiring. I see that in India they tend to put people sideways on the elephants. Maybe it gets easier with practice...regardless I'm not entirely convinced at how useful elephants are for transportation.




For my final days in Bangkok, I visited the Snake Farm, Wat Arun and Jim Thompson's house. The snake farm is a snake museum displaying live specimens of venomous and non-venomous snakes. This museum is connected to one of the main hospitals in Bangkok, and the purpose of he farm is to milk snakes for venom in order to produce serum for treating snake bites. They also do a very touristy show where the handler show off venomous snakes and then piss them off as much as possible.



"Jim Thompson's house" was a preserved traditional Thai teak mansion, not terribly interesting. Wat Arun ("temple of dawn") is a landmark temple along the Chao Phraya river, lavishly decorated with shards of broken Chinese pottery.

Overall I felt there wasn't that much to see and do in Bangkok, so spending four days there was too much. At least I had a nice hotel with free internet and a proper pool.

My favorite parts of the trip were snorkeling in Malaysia and exploring temples in Cambodia. Both Malaysia and Cambodia felt pretty exotic, while Thailand felt pretty touristy. Thai people were not so good at speaking English. Malay people were way better, but then again, they have the colonial heritage. One funny thing with the Malay was that they would understand UK English words only, so I had to ask for "the bill" rather than "the check" at restaurants.

It amazed me how cheap the local flights were in Malaysia. The flights I took in Thailand were more or less the same price as you would pay in Europe

I had a good three-week vacation, taking my mind off things back home and giving me a nice introduction to Asia. I will definitely go back to Asia, and now I know more what to expect.

Pictures:

Singapore

Malaysia

Cambodia

Thailand

Road trip to the Alps

I started out pretty early on Friday June 12th, to try to avoid the traffic in Holland. It is 7.5 hours of driving time to Munich, I think I spent 9.5 hours, because I took a lot of breaks (driving alone can be tiring). I managed to avoid queues so I had a fairly OK drive down there.

I also found it enjoyable to watch the exotic cars speed by when I got close to Munich. I see a lot of exotic cars in The Hague, but they're usually parked or stuck in traffic like the rest of us. Warms your heart a little to see them zipping around at high speeds on the freie fahrt-zone on the Autobahn.

My hotel in Munich was pretty easy to find, it was just off the Frankfurter Ring. The only complex thing about it was that they had one of those parking garages with car elevators, so I found it slightly tricky to park. You had to build up speed to get climb onto the ledge of the elevator and then slam on the brakes before you hit the wall. I managed to do it without incident, but I had to go back and forth a few times before I hit the spot. With the car safely stowed, I went for a brief sightseeing in the center before going to a haxenhaus to get my dinner. Munich has a lot of tourists, and the haxenhause was a predictably industrial and expensive tourist machine. They had good food and beer, though, so I was happy.



Saturday morning I drove towards Hohenschwangau, through lots of small towns, and in the end I drove on the last part of the Romantischer Straße, which had very good views. I arrived around 10.30 in Hohenschwangau and had no problems getting a parking spot. I bought tickets for the guided tours of the castles, and walked around for a bit while waiting for my first tour to begin. The royals building these castles had a thing for swans, so there were swan-paintings, swan-statues and swan-fountains everywhere. The Hohenschwangau castle had a huge swan on top of it which made the castle look funny to me, like it was the lair of a super-villain or something...



Both the castles had pretty good English-speaking tour guides, although it wasn't always that easy to hear what they said, because some of the tourists brought along screaming kids. Neuschwanstein is the impressive one, the one that inspired the castle in Disneyland and apparently it was so expensive it almost bankrupted the Bavarian state. The mad prince building all of these castles had an unfortunate drowning accident in very shallow water, so the castle was never finished. What they did finish there is still pretty impressive (Though not on the same scale as, say Versailles or Dolmabahce Sarayi)

The scenery is pretty nice around the castles with pointy mountains, valleys, lakes and streams. It was a very sunny day, so I took a detour down to my car from Neuschwanstein, escaping the crowds of tourists by walking down some unmarked trails. I had a nice 45 minutes walk down through the forest before getting into the steaming hot car I had left at the parking lot. Airco at full blast and driving with open windows for a while mostly took care of that, but it was still not very comfortable driving in the heat. I also got very drowsy, and almost fell asleep at the wheel. I freaked when that happened, pulled the car over to the side in a small village and slept in the back of the car for 15 minutes. That helped a lot, and I was able to do the rest of the four hour drive to Austria without being too tired.

Having a navigation device in the car is pretty handy, but sometimes it takes you for a ride to places you would rather not be. This day, it took me on a scenic detour through the Bavarian countryside, sometimes on single-lane farm roads. As a result I got in pretty late to Hallstatt, my destination in Austria, supposedly the prettiest one of the lakeside villages in the Salzkammergut region (Here's the video, Lukasz :-).



Driving was more entertaining in Austria, with very active driving on the last part past Gosau. The roads are very windy, and from the road you can see the Gosaukamm, which is just gorgeous. There's no cars in Hallstatt, so you have to park your car in the parking lots outside the village, but I got lucky and found a spot on the closest one. I had some trouble finding the gasthof I was staying in (only had the printed address, and no directions to get there), but after calling the owner I managed to find it, just off the main square. I spent the evening relaxing with a weissbier on my balcony while sorting my pictures of the day on my laptop.

Sunday morning I drove to the other side of the lake, to get to the gondola taking me up to Krippenstein. From there I walked the touristy path to the "five fingers" viewing platform overlooking Hallstatt. After doing the touristy thing, I did a small hike (four hours or so) around Heilbronner Kreuz down to the bottom lift. It was still early in the season, and there was lots of snow, so I spent a lot of time walking in snow. It was nice to walk around and look at the Dachstein-mountains, but large parts of the path were really skiing areas. I enjoy more hiking in unspoiled nature. I forgot to bring sunscreen up there, so I got horribly sunburnt. In general, there was not a whole lot to do in the evenings in Hallstatt other than drink beer on the balcony and admire the great view.

Monday June 15th, I got up early, paid my bill and took off towards the Grossglockner Hochstraße, one of the most scenic roads in Austria. The weather was very gray and it was not a very good day for crossing the pass. The road itself is pretty windy and steep, so I had to switch to manual gearbox to get up at a decent speed. The road had lots of nice stopoff points, so it would have been a really nice drive if the weather had been better. I didn't bother to take the side trips to the major viewpoints, since the weather was so bad I couldn't see the view anyway. I saw a bunch of marmots on and next to the road, and that was probably the most interesting part of the drive.

Going down to Heiligenblut was very nice. There were very steep valleys filled with postcard-perfect features like snow-covered mountains, flowery meadows and lots and lots of cows. I did the touristy thing and stopped to take THE picture in Heiligenblut - the church in the middle of the valley, unfortunately not with the classic snow-covered mountain backdrop (because of the fog).



I kept on driving through Lienz, going past some really impressive mountains into the Hochpustertal, crossing into Italy. I found my hotel in Dobbiaco pretty quickly, but had some problems checking in at first, because the clerk did not speak English or German. As luck would have it, I had printed the confirmation from the hotel before leaving from The Hague, so everything was resolved when I pulled out the piece of paper. The weather was still pretty shitty, so I spent the afternoon shopping for pasta, Limoncello and maps. This was pretty much off-season, and I had a hard time finding a place to have lunch. I ended up buying some stuff at a supermarket, and imbibing it and a Paulaner in my room. Luckily I had booked a hotel with food, so dinner was taken care of. They had decent food at the place, and I got a three-course dinner every evening. The waitresses mostly spoke Italian, but I know enough of the touristy basics to get served, so it worked out. Overall, the hotel was amazingly cheap. I paid 53 EUR a night for a decent room with breakfast and a proper dinner included.

Tuesday was the day I had planned to go see the Tre Cime di Lavaredo. I had been wanting to see this since I was in the Western Dolomites two years ago, and just like thoughts of a woman you could never get, my thoughts of this mountain had grown to an obsession. I was really in despair the evening before when all I could see were clouds. I was a lot more positive in the morning, when I could see some blue between the clouds. This could work out! I drove over to Lago di Misurina and started driving the incredibly steep toll road leading up to Rifugio Aurunzo, at the foot of the Tre Cime. The road was so steep I had to drive most of the way in first gear. At first it looked like the clouds were lifting. When I got up to the parking lot at the top, though, the fog was enveloping everything. You couldn't even see the base of the mountains. I was in a bad mood starting the walk around the peaks, but I figured I'd make the best of it. At least I would be getting some hiking in. I walked around, exploring some WW1 Italian trenches on the way. This was the front line in WW1 between Austria-Hungary and Italy, so there's trenches and bunkers criss-crossing these mountains. One of the trenches was also the entry-point to a via ferrata. I didn't have climbing gear and besides, I'm really not fond of heights, so I chickened out. I saw lots of other people walking it, though veery slowly.



When I arrived at Rifugio Locatelli, the wind suddenly picked up, and the clouds around the Tre Cime cleared up. I was able to see all of them from the perfect viewing position. I was ecstatic, snapping photos like crazy and taking in this amazing view. Half an hour further down the trail, the heavens opened, and I was hiking in the rain. I didn't mind too much, I had brought gore-tex clothing, and I had seen what I came for - the Tre Cime. The thunderclouds made them seem even more dramatic, so I had a very nice hike around them, going back to the car. In total, the hike was about four and a half hours. It was still only 2 o'clock, so I figured I could go sightseeing and have lunch in Cortina D'Ampezzo. Before departing from the Hague I had briefly considered staying there, but Dobbiaco was cheaper, and closer to the trails, so I ended up there. I'm glad I did, because Cortina was a real ghost town out of season. Everywhere I went they claimed they were "chiuso per mangiare", so I couldn't have lunch anywhere. I ended up driving back to Dobbiaco. There were some really nice mountains around Cortina, but I'd rather go there in winter, in season.



I had no internet access, no weather forecasts, and the weather looked really gloomy, so I decided to leave for Switzerland the next day.

The next day, the weather was perfect, and it would have been a nice day for hiking. Instead I wasted it driving for six hours to Interlaken...hmpf! The scenery is pretty nice in the northernmost part of Italy, with lots of really picturesque villages. This changed when I went through the Brenner Pass, going into Austria. Italy looks better, for sure. On the other hand I was, for a moment, very impressed with Austria when I discovered that in places they served Schweinhaxe and beer at the gas stations. If only I had been driving with someone...

I drove through Arlberg and then through Liechtenstein, before going across Switzerland to get to Interlaken. I spent a lot of time paying road tolls, stopping four times for toll booths and one time to get the sticker for the Swiss road-tax. Also, I had to look out for speed cameras in Switzerland, since my navigation device does not do cameras for Switzerland (it is illegal...)

I had no hotel room booked for Interlaken, but I was hoping for the best. I was visiting slightly off-season and there's a large number of hotels there. Turns out, there was no problem getting a decent hotel with parking and wi-fi. This being Switzerland, it was almost twice the price I paid in Austria and Italy.
Interlaken is the hiking capital of Switzerland, and the tourist machine is well oiled with lots of restaurants, hotels and easy access to the hiking paths through trains to the starting points of the lifts. For me, having a car, it was even easier with large, cheap parking lots right at the bottom of the lifts.

Having internet in my room, I had finally been able to check the weather forecast and it was not good. It looked halfway okay for Thursday and really bad for Friday, so I decided to go to the top of the Jungfrau on Thursday. It would have been bad to go up there and not have a view.



At first I balked at the price for the tickets to go up to the Jungfraujoch - 110 euros just to take the train from the valley floor to the top of the mountain. (Incidentally, that is more or less the price of a return ticket to Paris from The Hague...)
The trains are very crowded, and people come from all over the world to see this. Every year 500.000 tourists go up to the Jungfraujoch in these trains, so it's pretty much one of the most popular tourist attractions in Europe. It's pretty crowded at the top, but the view from the sphinx observatory was pretty good. From the observatory you can also access the Aletch glacier. I walked for about one hour to get to the Mönch-hütte, below the summit of the Mönch. It wasn't a very inspiring walk, but it was nice to "hike" at 3600m, and I was pretty eager to do something after having been cooped up for an hour with hundreds of Indians on the train.
The train ride down was very long and boring. It took about an hour and a half to get back down to Grindelwald. I spent the rest of the afternoon shopping for hiking gear in the excellent shops in Interlaken, and had a couple of beers on the hotel roof watching the sunset over the Jungfrau.



The next morning it was raining and there was fog covering all the mountains around Interlaken. I figured it could be different once I got 1000m further up, so I drove to Grindelwald and took the gondola up to First. Up there, I was just above the clouds, and I started walking towards Faulhorn, a popular hike around Grindelwald. Unfortunately, the weather changed quite rapidly, so soon I was hiking in wind and rain, and by the time I got to the top of Faulhorn I was walking in thick fog, rain and heavy side-wind. So much for seeing the fabulous view from Faulhorn. The benefit of bad weather, of course, was that there were no other tourists out, so I walked pretty close to several grouses on my way up to the summit. The hike only lasted about four hours or so, and it was only 600 meters or so of elevation, but it felt more strenuous, because of the bad weather. I drove back to Interlaken and spent a fair amount of time heating up in the shower. I decided then and there that there was no point in moving on to Chamonix, since the weather forecast for the next couple of days looked pretty bad. Luckily, I hadn't booked any hotels, so I could just drive home whenever I felt like it.



I tried to send my mother a text message but couldn't get through. I was pretty upset over this. In the period when I was traveling, my mother was hospitalized, so I had been sending her text messages every day (since I could not call her, see earlier blog post about Dutch phone service...), but for some reason inside Switzerland I could not send messages, with any carrier. I wrote a complaint to T-mobile customer service, but they just replied that for certain countries they had no reciprocal agreement for text messages, and they couldn't list which countries these were. I'm really starting to regret switching cell phone carrier now.

I spent the evening having dinner at a really excellent Italian restaurant close to "Interlaken west". They had really good food and it was also fairly cheap.

Saturday I got up at 8 and started driving back to Holland. People were driving really slowly in Switzerland, but the pace picked up when I crossed the border into Germany. I drove past Schwarzwald before my navigation unit routed me through France, Luxembourg and Belgium. I was back home around 19.00.

Overall: I did 3000 km driving in 9 days - way too much for driving alone. I managed too see most of the stuff I wanted to see, like the castles in Bavaria, the Tre Cime, and the view from to the top of Jungfraujoch. I did manage to go hiking in the Salzkammergut, but it wasn't as good as I expected. Will definitely try Carinthia instead the next time I go hiking in Austria. The Dolomites is my favorite region for hiking, but the weather was bad the days I was there. Better luck next time, hopefully. The Jungfrau-region was pretty crowded, and "industrial", so not my favorite kind of hiking. Also, the weather was really bad the one day I hiked there, so overall I didn't get to do as much hiking as I wanted to. I guess I was just trying to fit too many destinations into my trip. It would probably have been better to just pick two destinations and have one fallback destination if the weather had turned bad.

Unfortunately I did not make it to Chamonix either, so I will have to save that for some time when the weather is nicer...

Here are my pictures from Bavaria, Austria, Tre Cime and the Jungfrau area.