A tribute to Lisa Cordwell

Dear Lisa, you wanted a mention,
We hope this will make you content
But don't think it will bring much attention,
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Italia - part 2

From Venice we took the train to Rome, where we saw the Roman stuff and the Roman Catholic stuff, and Trev well and truly jumped on the Swine Flu Express. So he did a lot of laying in bed sweating and shivering and I did a lot of sitting in internet cafes trying to figure out if we went to a doctor they would just give him Tamiflu or decide to quarantine or deport. We also ate a lot of pizza with no cheese on, which may sound rubbish but is actually far superior to the cheesy variety.

Then it was on to Genoa, where it turned out that the largest aquarium in Europe had immense medicinal properties.

We also spent a day in the Cinque Terre national park; five beautiful villages linked by a hiking trail along the coast for the toughies and a train for those recovering from flu.

We said goodbye to Italy on the train through Monaco to Nice (does it count as a country visit even if we didn't get off?), where we wolfed down a quick Nicoise salad for lunch before setting off.

So now we have une voiture, une Guide Michelin, sept jours et un tres fort grasp of franglais. Vive la France!

Gem.

Italy - Part Uno

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Balkans and beyond

Gemma says that I have to write a blog post. I've explained that this may not the best way of encouraging creativity. My protestations, alas, have come to nought. Besides, we've started this thing and kept it up until now - so I guess our reader(s) deserve some sort of denouement. Gemma has been seen adding up the distances we've travelled by various means of transport - so it should be a thrilling climax.

We've started spending more time thinking about getting home and everything that goes with it. We've been worrying about starting back at work, fighting with the company that is/should be shipping our stuff, and making lists; of tasks that need to be done for the wedding, possible areas of London to settle in and of trilobite specimens to look at if there is any free time before Christmas. All quite dreary. Luckily I was only responsible for one of these. I am very lucky to have such an organised fiancee.

In a further intervention, I've been reliably informed that I should be writing about where we've been and should stop being 'horrible'.

Since we last wrote, we've almost completed the balkans leg of our journey and are now on the bus from Rijeka in northern Croatia to Trieste. We'll spend a couple of nights there, visiting Emma, Sandro and new-ish baby Arturo. Its amazing how many new babies of friends there will be to meet when we get home... at least 5, without being thorough.

Anyway, from where we last wrote in Kotor we headed further North in Montenegro to Herceg Novi, mainly to catch the direct bus from there to Bosnia. We also got an afternoon on the beach and some nice clams for dinner.

We then spent a couple of nights in Sarajevo and a night in Mostar. The weather finally turned on us in Bosnia. This was a disappointed for Gemma, but I feel that overcast skies, grey light and light rain lend a more authentic atmosphere to eastern european cities. Ideally  accompanied by pensioners selling unpaired shoes by the side of the road and musty cafes that only serve salted pork fat. I guess it reminds me of happy years living in east London... Other than the weather, Sarajevo was a big disappointment: the food was good, the city attractive and the people cheerful and friendly. There were at least a lot of bullet-holes.

Mostar was even prettier, and even more bullet-ridden. The town only has one real attraction, an old bridge. Our Europe Lonely Planet boldly translates the name of the bridge (Stari Most) as 'petrified moon', a reference to its 'slender and refined beauty'. I'm not sure where they find their writers from; everyone else translates it as 'old bridge'. I expected Mostar to be a bit of a disappointment, but it is a very good bridge.

The weather improved slightly when we got back to the coast at Dubrovnik. At least enough for a few hours of sunbathing each day. We splashed out a bit, rented an apartment overlooking the beautiful old city and ate oysters for the first time on the trip. We could have happily stayed for longer.

Finally, we travelled up the coast of Croatia by overnight ferry. It was much more comfortable than the 12+ hour bus would have been and no more expensive than bus tickets and a hotel room. We had a few hours on the beach in Rijeka when we got off the boat. It will probably be our last bit of sun for a while - the water was freezing and its now chucking it down as we cross the Slovenian border. Our plan after Trieste is to spend a couple of days in each of Venice (G's never been), Rome (I've never been) and Genoa (you should be able to guess why we're stopping there?), then head across France to rent a car and drive up the West coast (better than the East coast), to finish with a day or two at my parents' place in Brittany and a couple of days in Paris.

Pictures to follow...

T.

P.S. Neill - I don't have your new address, so Mum's got your postcard.

New pictures - Greece, Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro

Here we go with some recent piccies....

Hiking on the Pelion Peninsula (Dad took this one):

Monestries perched on the mountain tops in Meteora, northern Greece:

A nice little church in Orhid, Macedonia:

Spot the non-mainstream flag.... Vivcani, Macedonia:

Waiting for snails for lunch in Vivcani:

Crap site number one in Tirana (a bell made out of bullet shells):

Kotor Old Town in Montenegro (really lovely):

Not (H)Ohrid at all...

...in fact, our brief sojourn in Macedonia was pretty nice!

We caught a series of local buses and reached Ohrid at tea time. It was a pretty pleasant town, with pretty Balkan houses and churches on a hillside, but not a lot going on (except for an awful lot of pizza restaurants).

The following day we were excited to visit the village of Vivcani (mainly to boost the country count), close to Ohrid.  Fed up with border battles in the 90s and cross about an attempt to divert their spring water to a nearby town, they declared themselves independent. The village shop now sells passports and local currency.  The government have studiously ignored them.  I'm not sure what we were expecting (barbed wire and stock plied weapons, maybe), but again, there was not much to see. We did have a very nice lunch, though, of homemade sausage and snails.

Yesterday we set off for Albania with a mental taxi driver, who kept us amused for the first hour, then just grated immensely. He had (apparently) driven both Liza Minelli and the Crown Princess of Japan, and we should have been very honoured to be in his car.  We tuned out of most of his incessant chatter, but I thought his solution to the Macedonia name problem was pretty good: if Greece want Macedonia for themselves, they should let Macedonia be called Greece... Make the Greeks pick one name, but they can't have both!

Arriving in Tirana we took ourselves out on a walking tour of the main sights... of which there are very few! I don't know if our tolerance for Soviet-style concrete blocks has diminished post-Greece, or if Tirana is especially nondescript, but we were done pretty quickly.  At least they have made an effort here, but painting the aforementioned blocks in a variety of bright coloured geometric patterns (think pink and purple concentric circles, yellow and blue stripes) isn't particularly effective at disguising them!

Dinner was in Blloku, the area surrounding Hoxha's old house, which used to be the homes of Communist Party officials, but is now streets full of boutiques, bars and trendy young things. Obviously, we fit right in.

This morning we decided to bail early on Tirana and head north to Montenegro. I think this is the right decision now we're getting close to the end of the trip and don't want to be wasting days, but it's made us think we haven't really given it a fair chance. Maybe we'll just have to come back.  Trevor thinks we may as well fly as go so quickly (but he's just being grumpy and I am ignoring him).

But anyway, we're on the bus heading North again, hoping to hit the MN coast by mid-afternoon.

Gems.

A proper post for a change

Oh dear, the blog seems to have degenerated completely over the last few weeks. Looking back, its been downhill since my 'curry' post.

There's a couple of reasons for this. We've been doing more drinking than actually travelling, and we've arrived in proper touristy places. It seems horribly self-indulgent to write about places that many of you will have visited and probably explored rather more thoroughly than we've found ourselves capable of. Besides, is anyone really interested in what we're eating for dinner (expensive seafood), how tanned we're getting (very), where the nicest beaches have been for sunbathing (Krios on Paros, although the water was a bit chilly) and snorkelling (south coast of the Pelion peninsula, I saw an octopus) or our deliberations on whether to hire a white convertible Smart car or a quad bike to get around Santorini (we got the bus)?

Thought not.

Rest assured, we've been having a really nice time.

We're now on our way out of Greece and away from the coast for at least a few days. More specifically, we're travelling from Meteora in the western half of central Greece to Ohrid in Macedonia. It should be a fun day - we need to take 5 separate bus journeys between small provincial Greek towns to avoid a huge diversion via Thessaloniki. There is always a chance that one of the buses we're hoping to take won't exist and we'll get stuck somewhere. I really like not knowing where we'll end up, but it stresses Gem a bit.

I'm not planning to use Macedonia's interim official name 'Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia'. Greece has blocked the use of the name 'Macedonia', as part of Greece is also called Macedonia and they view it as a slavic attempt to appropriate part of greek heritage (essentially Alexander the Great and his transcontinental rampage). On the other hand, I'm not sure why the Macedonians (i.e. FYROMers) really care what name they have to put on the letterhead when they write to the UN, when everyone will continue to call the place Macedoina regardless. Of all international disputes, this has to be one of the most petty.

Meteora is a group of monasteries built on once inaccessible rocky pinnacles. The monks once had to climb ladders, get winched up and down in nets, cross rope bridges, swing on a trapeze and use all manner of Indiana Jones-esque contrivances to get to the shops. The views are spectacular, but I can't help feeling that some of the magic has gone now that they are accessible by road and Italian tour bus.

We said goodbye to Gem's parents this morning. They'd been with us for a week since we got to Athens. David's kindly been paying for most of our dinners and wine, which hasn't really helped blog quality. We successfully converted them to the card game that has been keeping us occupied, and our usual lights out at 9.30 after a cheap dinner and a beer have been replaced by staggering back up the hill at 11 after a marathon game and a few kilograms of house white. That is except last night, as the 'home made' wine didn't taste like it had followed any recognizable oenological process.

Our plan for the next week is to spend a day in Ohrid, then travel from there to Tirana. From Tirana we'll visit the world's newest country, Montenegro, for a couple more days at the seaside, most likely in Kotor.

T.

Santorini, Paros and Athens

Here are some photos... (in reverse order)> Post to follow.