So Rob left on 5 November and it is now 2.5months later and he is returning in 2 days so I thought it was high time I kept everyone informed of how I´ve been keeping myself busy, not a difficult thing to do in London anyway, but with Christmas as well it was near impossible to have any spare time.
Firstly, Anni and I headed to Cardiff 2 weekends after Rob left to visit Sarah Laurence who has been living there since about July. We managed to get ourselves seats on the train after running ahead of people and a bit of pushyness on my part. We probably should have thought about the weekend rush for the first train, but it hadn´t crossed our minds and there were some poor people who had to stand or squat in the isle the whole 2 hour train ride. Friday night was a quiet one in and Saturday we headed into town to wander the walking streets and Christmas markets. Trying to find a pub that did steak and Guinness pie, which we had our heart set on, was a bit more of a challenge than we thought it would be mainly because all the pubs were packed with male Irish soccer fans who were over for the Ireland v Wales game which was being held in Cardiff that weekend. We went into about 5 pubs without any females in them. This seems to a trend in Cardiff, because when we meet Sarah later on in another pub there weren´t any ladies either and then out at night was definitely a higher men to women ratio. Still probably not the first point of call for single ladies cause they weren't of the classy variety or that good looking either.
Saturday night was a laugh, seeing Cardiff at it´s skanky best and bar hopping to places I couldn´t recall on Sunday. It pissed down with rain just as Anni and I were trying to catch a cab home, and there were none to be found. We couldn´t cross the road without getting soaked it was so bad. At one point we stopped into a phone booth to call a cab (and get out of the rain) and the phone mouth piece had been ripped off. A girl then joined as to tell us that she was really going to have to pee, at which we took as our kew to leave. We stopped into chippy lane for some chips and cheese and meet some friendly Irish fellas and then followed a bouncers advise to where to catch cabs. There were none and we meet some other people who had been given the same advise who had already been waiting about 10mins. There were actually some cabs but they wouldn´t take us, so after about a half hour and hypothermia later Anni convinced them that it was very irresponsible of them not to take us so we jumped into the cab and finally got home.
Sunday wasn´t much better weather, but we still tried to make the most of it and headed to the harbour before heading back to London by bus.
The following weekend I headed to Ireland to meet up with the Cuzzies. Odette my cousin is living in Dublin with her boyfriend Tony and her brother Nick was visiting with his fiancee Dee and her brother Phil. We hired cars and drove up to Belfast stopping along the way at a coastal town in Northern Ireland. On Saturday we wandered the streets of Belfast city, went to a German market, drank mulled wine and found ourselves some Guinness. I managed to drink Guinness the whole time I think. Good work.
On Sunday morning we did a black cab tour around the wall murials and the wall dividing the Catholic and Protestant areas before making our way slowly back to Dublin following the coast. Pretty good trip all in all I think and great to get out into the Irish countryside despite the weather.
Except, that on Monday morning when Odette and Tony dropped me at the airport at 5am (thanks guys) one of the rental cars wasn´t there. We didn´t really have time to think about it then, but when I arrived in London I got a text from Nick asking if I had the keys cause he couldn´t find them. We hadn´t got the additional insurance so any damage/thief etc had a $2,000+ excess. Bummer. So the rental company was advised and the excess charged to the credit card. Finally the the police were informed where the car was found in one piece along with the keys which were left in the car door by Nick when he went to retrieve his wallet. We still haven't decided who's more Irish, Nick for leaving the keys in the car door, or Odette for going to Stansted airport instead of Luton where her flight to Paris was leaving from.
So then there were the Xmas parties and far to much alcohol and getting sick because I wasn´t taking care of myself. And then Christmas itself with some other orphan kiwi´s which was heaps of fun and particularly good because of the Christmas costumes people decided to wear.
And finally to Barcelona for New Years where I return from with a sore throat because again of too much "making a party"(as our Spanish rental agent saids). We had a fantastic apartment with 10 people where we managed to get the Spanish Noise control to visit. I think we managed to get around most of the Barcelona sights, but really Barcelona doesn´t have the much to look at other than Gaudi art, which I don't think much of. The night life's great though. We went to a great club on New Years Eve which held 2000ish people and was like a rabbit warren warehouse, easy to get lost in it's many little secret rooms, which I of course did.
Now it is January and I am having a month of sobriaty. Except that I had a few glasses of wine last weekend. I was in a Piano bar, how could I say no.
Thursday, January 03, 2008
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Holiday Windup
A belated tidy up of the last month's activities.
From Slovenia we caught a train to Munchen (Munich) to partake in that amazing festival that is Oktoberfest - though of course these days it is mostly in September. This started out as a boozy party to celebrate the nuptials of the future king in 1810, but everyone had such a good time that they decided to keep on doing it.
To communicate the scale of the event is difficult, there is seating for 100,000 people in and around the 14 aircraft-hanger like beer tents, and there are also a large number of amusement park rides, roller-coasters etc that are arrayed over the half square kilometer site. Beer is served in 1 liter steins by women who look like they do this as a break from their usual jobs as blacksmiths, lumberjacks and bouncers. Half the patrons dress in the traditional lederhosen and dirndl (embroidered white cotton dresses) though obviously not both at the same time. There are bands, accordions, singing, drinking and eating, dancing on tables and of course numerous trips to the pissoir. It has a friendly atmosphere, no fights that we saw and a jolly good time is had by young (16 years is legal drinking age) and old over the almost three weeks that it is on for.
Day 1 we headed to the Hofbräu-Festzelt tent that is most popular with English speaking visitors and got roundly sloshed and in traditional fashion I had my undies ripped off while I was still wearing them, ouchie. Day 2 we took it a bit easier and decided to try some rides. Jane suddenly remembered after getting on the eurostar roller-coaster, that she didn't like heights. The slow ride to the top was completed to a repeated litany of "Oh fuck" from her, and then once we were released and accelerated to full speed there was a sound like an air-raid siren going off in my left ear, starting at a low pitch and rising to almost ultrasonic, with only brief pauses for sucking in a breath. She assures me she had her eyes closed the whole time. Both she and you can check it out the ride on youtube at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43-tkPeEhPk
We also toured some of the sights of Munchen, like the massive Hofbräuhaus beer hall which probably seats over a thousand people and the intriguing surfing spot in the middle of the city where people surf on a standing wave in the river. However for me the highlight had to be the Deutsches museum.
As a rule travel and tourism are pitched almost entirely at women, 99% of all shops in tourist areas are aimed at women, selling clothing, jewellery, useless household bric-a-brak and artsy crap that has zero appeal to anyone who can stand up when urinating. So it was a major delight to me to finally be able to do something that was of interest to a guy. The Deutsches museum is a technology museum with all the collected history of the great engineering nation of Germany (and yes they do mention the War). I wandered around for three hours while Jane moped in a cafe and saw many delights, probably the greatest of which were the first Diesel engine and the first Spark ignition engine - strangely anonymous amongst all the other exhibits, you wouldn't even know until you read the small placards, but if they were ever sold they would probably fetch tens of millions of dollars each.
All in all Munchen really was one of the highlights of our trip.
From Munchen we headed to Austria and Salzburg (literally "salt castle" as it has salt mines that have been worked for thousands of years). This was a mistake, as we hadn't realised that this was the scene of one of the most heinous post-war crimes ever perpetrated in Europe; "The Sound of Music". Now hating musicals as I do I am one of those who believes that a "problem like Maria" could have been best solved with a 12 gauge shotgun, both barrels, and perhaps followed up with a small nuke just to be on the safe side. However in Salzburg the streets are indeed alive with it, the hostels play the movie several times a day, there are Sound of Music tours, memorabilia and a depressing number of matronly american fans wandering around and chastising Jane for her use of profanity (frankly amazes us that there are still people who get upset by such things, there are definitely more important issues in the world, particularly if you are American). Salzburg is also the birthplace of Mozart, and there are several museums and daily concerts celebrating this. Ironic that Mozart hated the place and couldn't wait to get out.
We arrived in the weekend to discover that Austria is a land that time forgot, everything is closed - very olde worlde. It was a challenge even to find somewhere to eat on a Sunday (we had no choice as tourists), but after getting through the weekend we hired a car (also not open in weekend) and headed out to look at the Alps. They are of course lovely, and we had a nice day learning how to drive on the wrong side of the road, before heading to our chosen overnight spot, the very picturesque lakeside village of Hallstatt. Not having a map it took an hour to locate the accommodation and having done so we looked for a park. Austria does not like cars and the nearest park we could find was a kilometer away. Feeling rather sick this was more than I could handle so we said screw it and began to look for somewhere else more convenient to stay. Huge mistake as by now it was coming onto evening and of course unbeknownst to us hotel receptions in Austria close at about 6pm (we believe that the concept of "customer service" may not actually be directly translatable into Austrian German). As a result we drove around for two and a half hours until 8:30pm, getting pretty concerned before finally driving back to Hallstatt and the original hostel that was luckily also a bar/restaurant and therefore still open. We also found a park right outside. I felt pretty stupid.
Back to Salzburg and a quick tour of the Hellbrunn Castle which was a hunting day-residence for a jokester king about 300 years ago. He had a large number of hidden water jets and other intricate and clever water features and mobiles installed so he could drench his subjects/guests as they wandered around the place. You can just imagine what a complete dick he must have been. Pretty good place to finish the holiday. We flew out of Salzburg to London.
What a contrast. London is one of the most expensive cities on the planet. It cost more for a train ticket for the 30 minute ride into London from Stansted airport than it did for the three day tour of the Meekong Delta that we did or the two hour flight from Austria. Accommodation is also extremely expensive, but thankfully we have had help from our friends who we have let us crash with them (big thanks Helen, Richie, Mel and Ros). Now it is back to the grind, Jane is job hunting and after a quick course of antibiotics I am over the Giardia (having lost another 10kg on top of the 10kg I lost in Nepal I now weigh less than I did when I was 20years old). I am headed back to NZ to sort out my visa and have a bit more sunny weather so that I can look for work when I return to the UK in the New Year. Jane is staying on to learn the ropes in London. What we have seen of England so far we like, it is nice to be in a country where we speak the language and are familiar with much of the culture and can get the variety of food that we are used to in New Zealand. We are looking forward to settling in and having a good look around the old country and Europe over the next few years.
Thanks to all those we have spent time with on the trip, it has been a blast.
Robert and Jane
From Slovenia we caught a train to Munchen (Munich) to partake in that amazing festival that is Oktoberfest - though of course these days it is mostly in September. This started out as a boozy party to celebrate the nuptials of the future king in 1810, but everyone had such a good time that they decided to keep on doing it.
To communicate the scale of the event is difficult, there is seating for 100,000 people in and around the 14 aircraft-hanger like beer tents, and there are also a large number of amusement park rides, roller-coasters etc that are arrayed over the half square kilometer site. Beer is served in 1 liter steins by women who look like they do this as a break from their usual jobs as blacksmiths, lumberjacks and bouncers. Half the patrons dress in the traditional lederhosen and dirndl (embroidered white cotton dresses) though obviously not both at the same time. There are bands, accordions, singing, drinking and eating, dancing on tables and of course numerous trips to the pissoir. It has a friendly atmosphere, no fights that we saw and a jolly good time is had by young (16 years is legal drinking age) and old over the almost three weeks that it is on for.
Day 1 we headed to the Hofbräu-Festzelt tent that is most popular with English speaking visitors and got roundly sloshed and in traditional fashion I had my undies ripped off while I was still wearing them, ouchie. Day 2 we took it a bit easier and decided to try some rides. Jane suddenly remembered after getting on the eurostar roller-coaster, that she didn't like heights. The slow ride to the top was completed to a repeated litany of "Oh fuck" from her, and then once we were released and accelerated to full speed there was a sound like an air-raid siren going off in my left ear, starting at a low pitch and rising to almost ultrasonic, with only brief pauses for sucking in a breath. She assures me she had her eyes closed the whole time. Both she and you can check it out the ride on youtube at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43-tkPeEhPk
We also toured some of the sights of Munchen, like the massive Hofbräuhaus beer hall which probably seats over a thousand people and the intriguing surfing spot in the middle of the city where people surf on a standing wave in the river. However for me the highlight had to be the Deutsches museum.
As a rule travel and tourism are pitched almost entirely at women, 99% of all shops in tourist areas are aimed at women, selling clothing, jewellery, useless household bric-a-brak and artsy crap that has zero appeal to anyone who can stand up when urinating. So it was a major delight to me to finally be able to do something that was of interest to a guy. The Deutsches museum is a technology museum with all the collected history of the great engineering nation of Germany (and yes they do mention the War). I wandered around for three hours while Jane moped in a cafe and saw many delights, probably the greatest of which were the first Diesel engine and the first Spark ignition engine - strangely anonymous amongst all the other exhibits, you wouldn't even know until you read the small placards, but if they were ever sold they would probably fetch tens of millions of dollars each.
All in all Munchen really was one of the highlights of our trip.
From Munchen we headed to Austria and Salzburg (literally "salt castle" as it has salt mines that have been worked for thousands of years). This was a mistake, as we hadn't realised that this was the scene of one of the most heinous post-war crimes ever perpetrated in Europe; "The Sound of Music". Now hating musicals as I do I am one of those who believes that a "problem like Maria" could have been best solved with a 12 gauge shotgun, both barrels, and perhaps followed up with a small nuke just to be on the safe side. However in Salzburg the streets are indeed alive with it, the hostels play the movie several times a day, there are Sound of Music tours, memorabilia and a depressing number of matronly american fans wandering around and chastising Jane for her use of profanity (frankly amazes us that there are still people who get upset by such things, there are definitely more important issues in the world, particularly if you are American). Salzburg is also the birthplace of Mozart, and there are several museums and daily concerts celebrating this. Ironic that Mozart hated the place and couldn't wait to get out.
We arrived in the weekend to discover that Austria is a land that time forgot, everything is closed - very olde worlde. It was a challenge even to find somewhere to eat on a Sunday (we had no choice as tourists), but after getting through the weekend we hired a car (also not open in weekend) and headed out to look at the Alps. They are of course lovely, and we had a nice day learning how to drive on the wrong side of the road, before heading to our chosen overnight spot, the very picturesque lakeside village of Hallstatt. Not having a map it took an hour to locate the accommodation and having done so we looked for a park. Austria does not like cars and the nearest park we could find was a kilometer away. Feeling rather sick this was more than I could handle so we said screw it and began to look for somewhere else more convenient to stay. Huge mistake as by now it was coming onto evening and of course unbeknownst to us hotel receptions in Austria close at about 6pm (we believe that the concept of "customer service" may not actually be directly translatable into Austrian German). As a result we drove around for two and a half hours until 8:30pm, getting pretty concerned before finally driving back to Hallstatt and the original hostel that was luckily also a bar/restaurant and therefore still open. We also found a park right outside. I felt pretty stupid.
Back to Salzburg and a quick tour of the Hellbrunn Castle which was a hunting day-residence for a jokester king about 300 years ago. He had a large number of hidden water jets and other intricate and clever water features and mobiles installed so he could drench his subjects/guests as they wandered around the place. You can just imagine what a complete dick he must have been. Pretty good place to finish the holiday. We flew out of Salzburg to London.
What a contrast. London is one of the most expensive cities on the planet. It cost more for a train ticket for the 30 minute ride into London from Stansted airport than it did for the three day tour of the Meekong Delta that we did or the two hour flight from Austria. Accommodation is also extremely expensive, but thankfully we have had help from our friends who we have let us crash with them (big thanks Helen, Richie, Mel and Ros). Now it is back to the grind, Jane is job hunting and after a quick course of antibiotics I am over the Giardia (having lost another 10kg on top of the 10kg I lost in Nepal I now weigh less than I did when I was 20years old). I am headed back to NZ to sort out my visa and have a bit more sunny weather so that I can look for work when I return to the UK in the New Year. Jane is staying on to learn the ropes in London. What we have seen of England so far we like, it is nice to be in a country where we speak the language and are familiar with much of the culture and can get the variety of food that we are used to in New Zealand. We are looking forward to settling in and having a good look around the old country and Europe over the next few years.
Thanks to all those we have spent time with on the trip, it has been a blast.
Robert and Jane
Monday, October 01, 2007
Agean Queens
A lot to catch up on! Jane and I have been less eager to write the blog now that it is costing us $6 per hour to do so.
When we last left you dear reader we were in Fethiye, Turkey, getting ready to head off and see another of Turkey's wonders:
In 1886 there was a volcanic eruption in Tarawera in the North Island of New Zealand that destroyed the pink and white terraces - beautiful natural weirs and pools of calcium carbonate that featured in many paintings and a few very early photographs. This was widely regarded as a bad move on Mt Tarawera's part.
Fortunately the pink and white terraces were not a one-off. Pammukale in the south west of Turkey boasts a spectacular rip-off of this Kiwi innovation, Calcium Carbonate (A.K.A cement) dissolved in hot water gushes up from a natural spring that was the home of the Plutonium of Ancient city of Heirapolis. No the Romans didn't have nukes, this was the name of the temple of Pluto (ie Hades), where along with the spring water came noxious vapours that amongst other benefits managed to kill a couple of terminally pushy French tourists a few years back. Anyway the terraces of Pammukale extend over several kilometers and are a quite brilliant white colour, the dissolved calcium carbonate precipitates out in places where the water flows fastest, which has a natural tendency to build up the terraced ponds. Several thousand years ago this was also the home of a major Roman city - Heirapolis, named for the wife of Hercule's son (not Hera Zeus's wife). Estimates place this snake infested city at about 150-250,000 people, the principle being that you take the number of seats in the theatre and multiply by 10 to give the population. It's a pretty big theatre. This is also the place where one of the biblical Phillips (either P the apostle or P the evangelist) was maytred, but in this area you can pretty much spin a bottle, follow that direction and trip over some religiously important spot within a few kilometers.
Moving right along the next must see on the Turkey grand tour was Ephesus, a city supposedly named for Ephos, Queen of the Amazons who, all lurid legends aside, did not did chop off their right breasticles, nor even in fact exist except in fantasies. Anyway, it was an important port town, but then the sea up and left taking the port with it and leaving this town in the middle of a malarial swamp five kilometers from the sea. As might be imagined this reduced property values somewhat, but usefully helped to preserve it as something of a ghost town. There is a lot of wonderfully preserved classical era architecture in Ephesus, The library of Celsus is a very impressive monument to the learning to the Romans and their skullduggery - they've found a hidden tunnel from within the library to the bordello next door.
Surprisingly in all the ruins we saw it is the massive and heavy archways that seem to have survived best, the walls seem more likely to fail in earthquakes, or get recycled and the columns were almost always destroyed by man - for a good reason; the sections of the columns were stacked up on each other and keyed together with iron dowels around which molten lead was poured to rigidly lock them together. This was an excellent source of lead and iron for people of later ages. A lot of the carefully hewn marble was also appropriated by peoples to do their own thing. A terrible example of this is the Ancient Temple of Artemis (also known as Diana) near Ephesus that was one of the ancient wonders of the world. However times changed, the Early Christians came and had to destroy or put their stamp on that which came before and so used bits of the Temple to build amongst other things the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul and a grotty little church on a nearby hill. To me it is a measure of the civilisation of the Romans that they left much of what they came to control intact, adding to it or modifying it without needing to exorcise and destroy all evidence of what came before. If only Christianity had shown such forbearance (in literature as well) then perhaps we could have avoided the Dark Ages and enjoyed the renaissance a thousand years earlier.
Enough of Turkey already. Off to the Greek Isles. First substantive stop (after a bit of tedious island hopping) was Mykanos. This has been a party island for decades, Jane's dad got propositioned by a bloke there 30 years ago, and so it was somewhat appropriate that one of the first sights we see as we get off the boat at midnight is a Drag Queen with huge curly afro, heels and a red sequin dress. We settled in for two nights, one day spent at paradise beach, where there were guys waving their sunburnt willies around, and a fridge in the snack shop tried to electrocute me (shop assistent was helpful enough to explain to me that it was my fault for not wearing rubber shoes).
Around about here I joined up with a new travelling companion: Giardia, and it's sidekick Giardi-arse. This enhanced our holiday in the same way that leg amputation enhances running.
Naxos, 3 days, nice town, lovely beaches, worst white wine we've ever had, assuming it was in fact wine as billed and not a mistranslation of "reject vinegar". Not eating. Lack of appetite aside, after just a few days the ubiquetous Greek gyros (pita bread rolled into a cone filled with fat drenched meat, chips, tomato and mayonaise and generally massively inferior to what we get in New Zealand) were rapidly loosing their appeal. Fresh fruit and vegetables off the menu due to dodgy guts so unfortunately no salads.
Santorini, 3 days, crappy beaches, amazing views in this island that was blown apart by a massive volcanic eruption 3500 years ago. It is suggested that this was the mythical Atlantis, and the scraps of the city of Ancient Thira that somehow survived the eruption (though everyone scarpered - they apparently had some warning) perched as they are on top of a hill as far from the caldera as you can get are quite impressive. The white buildings on the cliff tops overlooking the huge flooded and still active caldera that is roughly 6km across are truely a quintessential mediterranean experience if you can afford what they are selling. The crappy 50cc scooter we hired that was only capable of going uphill if you got a good running start and cost 5 times as much as a better bike in Thailand did, really set the tone for Santorini, not a place you want to do on the cheap. Worst red wine we've ever had. Eating a little, evacuating a lot.
Crete; we started at Chania in the Northwest where I spent a couple of days in bed after another fatiguing ferry ride, we then did a 5 hour walk through Sumaria gorge from the heights of the mountains down to the beach, very pretty. Subsequently spent 4 days in bed in beautiful Paleochora trying to recuperate with the worst flatulence of my life while Jane went progressively more and more stircrazy.
Athens. Another long tiring ferry ride followed by walking the streets for several hours looking for accomodation and being laid low for two days yet again. The Parthenon and the temple of Olympian Zeus were very impressive. But otherwise give Athens a miss, one bright note: Athens was responsible for our best meal in Greece; it was Italian.
Jane decided she wanted to climb Mt Olympus, and so she did. Pretty massive effort; it was a climb of about 2000m up and 2500m down in one 11hour day, passing pitifully weak Germans and other Europeans all the way. I dutifully stayed in bed and propped my head up to praise her athletic prowess and feign sympathy for her self inflicted muscle aches.
After some discussion on the matter we have decided that the Greeks are without a doubt the most asthetically challenged people we have encountered on our trip. While they are friendly enough they appear to be taking many of their fashion tips from the 70's, women dye their hair badly, frequently sport mustaches and beards (no joke) and have a prediliction for wearing tight clothing over bodies that are definitely not deserving of such treatment. Wouldn't normally make such an observation but it really struck us pretty hard. On the other hand this might be just the place to go if you are a bit on the homely side (In the land of the blind the one eyed man is king).
Thesseloniki was our final stop and nothing more that a way out of Greece. We booked the train to Slovenia and for the second most expensive nights accomodation of our entire trip were treated to a stay in the grottiest place we've been in since we got to Europe. Final impressions of Greece were capped off by the guy in the urinals at the train station masturbating and learing at me as I was at the urinal beside him. And of course then the train trip was just awful.
In the recent James Bond movie Casino Royale they take a train to MonteNegro. A nice clean modern train. This identifies the film as entirely a work of fiction as we are sure said train does not exist. For the tidy sum of NZD$150 each we had a 25 hour train trip on a 3 carriage train that was we believe probably cleaned at some stage during the 90's. Eight passport inspections Greece - Macedonia - Serbia/MonteNegro - Croatia - Slovenia, no food, no drinks, no toilet seats, toilet paper or water to clean hands with. Don't ever do this. It is generally cheaper and certainly healthier to fly. Watching the Serbian countryside crawl past at a stately 20-30km per hour between random unexplained stops in the middle of nowhere did not provide us with the treasure trove of fond memories we had hoped for.
Things finally started to look up with arrival in Slovenia, Ljubljana ( ie Lyublyana) this is a very pretty place sometimes called a mini-Prague (not that we'd know the difference yet). It was the economic heart of the old Yugoslavia, and in the early 90's they told the increasingly chauvanistically Serbian Slobodan Milosovic and Serbia et al to go and collectively hump themselves. Luckily they had a convenient buffer in a similarly minded Croatia who were sitting between them and Serbia. Croatia of course ended up doing all the fighting necessary to back up the finer details of the point they were trying to make without Slovenian support, not winning them a lot of love in Croatian hearts. Anyway Ljubljana is full of nice little street cafes and bars which are the only places open on a Sunday (very olde worlde to us progressive Antipodeans), and everyone makes use of them. It also has very cheap medical care. And most importantly it has non-greek food.
Summarising:
-Turkey, fantastic, more interesting and definitely cheaper than Greece.
-Greece, in general give it a miss. Food is crap and/or expensive. Maybe visit the islands with friends and money. Early days yet but possibly don't come to Europe for the wine.
-Giardia, fantastic way to loose weight, shitty way to spend a holiday.
PS I may be being too hard on Greece, perhaps blame it on the bug, but then again.... Also much praise to Jane for the added weight (me) she has had to lug around this month.
When we last left you dear reader we were in Fethiye, Turkey, getting ready to head off and see another of Turkey's wonders:
In 1886 there was a volcanic eruption in Tarawera in the North Island of New Zealand that destroyed the pink and white terraces - beautiful natural weirs and pools of calcium carbonate that featured in many paintings and a few very early photographs. This was widely regarded as a bad move on Mt Tarawera's part.
Fortunately the pink and white terraces were not a one-off. Pammukale in the south west of Turkey boasts a spectacular rip-off of this Kiwi innovation, Calcium Carbonate (A.K.A cement) dissolved in hot water gushes up from a natural spring that was the home of the Plutonium of Ancient city of Heirapolis. No the Romans didn't have nukes, this was the name of the temple of Pluto (ie Hades), where along with the spring water came noxious vapours that amongst other benefits managed to kill a couple of terminally pushy French tourists a few years back. Anyway the terraces of Pammukale extend over several kilometers and are a quite brilliant white colour, the dissolved calcium carbonate precipitates out in places where the water flows fastest, which has a natural tendency to build up the terraced ponds. Several thousand years ago this was also the home of a major Roman city - Heirapolis, named for the wife of Hercule's son (not Hera Zeus's wife). Estimates place this snake infested city at about 150-250,000 people, the principle being that you take the number of seats in the theatre and multiply by 10 to give the population. It's a pretty big theatre. This is also the place where one of the biblical Phillips (either P the apostle or P the evangelist) was maytred, but in this area you can pretty much spin a bottle, follow that direction and trip over some religiously important spot within a few kilometers.
Moving right along the next must see on the Turkey grand tour was Ephesus, a city supposedly named for Ephos, Queen of the Amazons who, all lurid legends aside, did not did chop off their right breasticles, nor even in fact exist except in fantasies. Anyway, it was an important port town, but then the sea up and left taking the port with it and leaving this town in the middle of a malarial swamp five kilometers from the sea. As might be imagined this reduced property values somewhat, but usefully helped to preserve it as something of a ghost town. There is a lot of wonderfully preserved classical era architecture in Ephesus, The library of Celsus is a very impressive monument to the learning to the Romans and their skullduggery - they've found a hidden tunnel from within the library to the bordello next door.
Surprisingly in all the ruins we saw it is the massive and heavy archways that seem to have survived best, the walls seem more likely to fail in earthquakes, or get recycled and the columns were almost always destroyed by man - for a good reason; the sections of the columns were stacked up on each other and keyed together with iron dowels around which molten lead was poured to rigidly lock them together. This was an excellent source of lead and iron for people of later ages. A lot of the carefully hewn marble was also appropriated by peoples to do their own thing. A terrible example of this is the Ancient Temple of Artemis (also known as Diana) near Ephesus that was one of the ancient wonders of the world. However times changed, the Early Christians came and had to destroy or put their stamp on that which came before and so used bits of the Temple to build amongst other things the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul and a grotty little church on a nearby hill. To me it is a measure of the civilisation of the Romans that they left much of what they came to control intact, adding to it or modifying it without needing to exorcise and destroy all evidence of what came before. If only Christianity had shown such forbearance (in literature as well) then perhaps we could have avoided the Dark Ages and enjoyed the renaissance a thousand years earlier.
Enough of Turkey already. Off to the Greek Isles. First substantive stop (after a bit of tedious island hopping) was Mykanos. This has been a party island for decades, Jane's dad got propositioned by a bloke there 30 years ago, and so it was somewhat appropriate that one of the first sights we see as we get off the boat at midnight is a Drag Queen with huge curly afro, heels and a red sequin dress. We settled in for two nights, one day spent at paradise beach, where there were guys waving their sunburnt willies around, and a fridge in the snack shop tried to electrocute me (shop assistent was helpful enough to explain to me that it was my fault for not wearing rubber shoes).
Around about here I joined up with a new travelling companion: Giardia, and it's sidekick Giardi-arse. This enhanced our holiday in the same way that leg amputation enhances running.
Naxos, 3 days, nice town, lovely beaches, worst white wine we've ever had, assuming it was in fact wine as billed and not a mistranslation of "reject vinegar". Not eating. Lack of appetite aside, after just a few days the ubiquetous Greek gyros (pita bread rolled into a cone filled with fat drenched meat, chips, tomato and mayonaise and generally massively inferior to what we get in New Zealand) were rapidly loosing their appeal. Fresh fruit and vegetables off the menu due to dodgy guts so unfortunately no salads.
Santorini, 3 days, crappy beaches, amazing views in this island that was blown apart by a massive volcanic eruption 3500 years ago. It is suggested that this was the mythical Atlantis, and the scraps of the city of Ancient Thira that somehow survived the eruption (though everyone scarpered - they apparently had some warning) perched as they are on top of a hill as far from the caldera as you can get are quite impressive. The white buildings on the cliff tops overlooking the huge flooded and still active caldera that is roughly 6km across are truely a quintessential mediterranean experience if you can afford what they are selling. The crappy 50cc scooter we hired that was only capable of going uphill if you got a good running start and cost 5 times as much as a better bike in Thailand did, really set the tone for Santorini, not a place you want to do on the cheap. Worst red wine we've ever had. Eating a little, evacuating a lot.
Crete; we started at Chania in the Northwest where I spent a couple of days in bed after another fatiguing ferry ride, we then did a 5 hour walk through Sumaria gorge from the heights of the mountains down to the beach, very pretty. Subsequently spent 4 days in bed in beautiful Paleochora trying to recuperate with the worst flatulence of my life while Jane went progressively more and more stircrazy.
Athens. Another long tiring ferry ride followed by walking the streets for several hours looking for accomodation and being laid low for two days yet again. The Parthenon and the temple of Olympian Zeus were very impressive. But otherwise give Athens a miss, one bright note: Athens was responsible for our best meal in Greece; it was Italian.
Jane decided she wanted to climb Mt Olympus, and so she did. Pretty massive effort; it was a climb of about 2000m up and 2500m down in one 11hour day, passing pitifully weak Germans and other Europeans all the way. I dutifully stayed in bed and propped my head up to praise her athletic prowess and feign sympathy for her self inflicted muscle aches.
After some discussion on the matter we have decided that the Greeks are without a doubt the most asthetically challenged people we have encountered on our trip. While they are friendly enough they appear to be taking many of their fashion tips from the 70's, women dye their hair badly, frequently sport mustaches and beards (no joke) and have a prediliction for wearing tight clothing over bodies that are definitely not deserving of such treatment. Wouldn't normally make such an observation but it really struck us pretty hard. On the other hand this might be just the place to go if you are a bit on the homely side (In the land of the blind the one eyed man is king).
Thesseloniki was our final stop and nothing more that a way out of Greece. We booked the train to Slovenia and for the second most expensive nights accomodation of our entire trip were treated to a stay in the grottiest place we've been in since we got to Europe. Final impressions of Greece were capped off by the guy in the urinals at the train station masturbating and learing at me as I was at the urinal beside him. And of course then the train trip was just awful.
In the recent James Bond movie Casino Royale they take a train to MonteNegro. A nice clean modern train. This identifies the film as entirely a work of fiction as we are sure said train does not exist. For the tidy sum of NZD$150 each we had a 25 hour train trip on a 3 carriage train that was we believe probably cleaned at some stage during the 90's. Eight passport inspections Greece - Macedonia - Serbia/MonteNegro - Croatia - Slovenia, no food, no drinks, no toilet seats, toilet paper or water to clean hands with. Don't ever do this. It is generally cheaper and certainly healthier to fly. Watching the Serbian countryside crawl past at a stately 20-30km per hour between random unexplained stops in the middle of nowhere did not provide us with the treasure trove of fond memories we had hoped for.
Things finally started to look up with arrival in Slovenia, Ljubljana ( ie Lyublyana) this is a very pretty place sometimes called a mini-Prague (not that we'd know the difference yet). It was the economic heart of the old Yugoslavia, and in the early 90's they told the increasingly chauvanistically Serbian Slobodan Milosovic and Serbia et al to go and collectively hump themselves. Luckily they had a convenient buffer in a similarly minded Croatia who were sitting between them and Serbia. Croatia of course ended up doing all the fighting necessary to back up the finer details of the point they were trying to make without Slovenian support, not winning them a lot of love in Croatian hearts. Anyway Ljubljana is full of nice little street cafes and bars which are the only places open on a Sunday (very olde worlde to us progressive Antipodeans), and everyone makes use of them. It also has very cheap medical care. And most importantly it has non-greek food.
Summarising:
-Turkey, fantastic, more interesting and definitely cheaper than Greece.
-Greece, in general give it a miss. Food is crap and/or expensive. Maybe visit the islands with friends and money. Early days yet but possibly don't come to Europe for the wine.
-Giardia, fantastic way to loose weight, shitty way to spend a holiday.
PS I may be being too hard on Greece, perhaps blame it on the bug, but then again.... Also much praise to Jane for the added weight (me) she has had to lug around this month.
Monday, September 03, 2007
Olympian Efforts
Another long overnight bus trip from Goreme in Cappadocia to Antalya, connecting to an hour long regional bus along the coast and a 40 minute trip in a "Dolmus" or minibus from the mountain highway down a steep valley. At 10am we finally bowled into our accomodation at Olympos. Olympus is on the south west coast of Turkey and shares its name with nearby mount Olympos, it dates back to a few centuries BC when the place was Greek (Hellenistic period), though all that is left is ruins covering a 1500 year period with nothing currently inhabited. The ruins lie between the beach and the hostels and it costs a couple of dollars to go the beach via the ruins every day, money that is supposedly used for maintentance, but as with the rest of Turkey it is pretty obvious that this money is just going into someone's pocket. Nonetheless it is pretty essential expenditure as it is damned hot and the beach presents the only way of keeping cool.
Olympos was just a small valley surrounded by steep rocky hills until the tourist boom of the last 20 years. Now there are thousands of tourists during the summer months and a huge number of pansyions (hostels) have sprung up to take advantage, they are very comfortable and well run with outdoor lounges/bars/restaurants and very nice places to hang out, which seems to be the primary entertainment. A semi-local Australian told us that in fact all the businesses and hostels are actually run by the same extended family. Result: Lots of infighting, politics and price fixing. We stayed at Bayrams which was excellent and highly recommend it, it's about as close to the beach (1km) as you can get.
Exploring the Olympos ruins occupied a few hours, and was interesting to see the overgrown remenants - contrasts the more excavated and well groomed ruins we have seen elsewhere. Walking through the undergrowth I had a near-miss with stepping on a snake (admittedly tiny and speeding off in the opposite direction but still willies-inducing). Another fascinating excursion was a three hour trip one night to visit the Chimaera - a mythical fire-breathing beast with the forebody of a lion, body of a goat and a snake for a tail, real scary huh? In practice it is a small area 50m long and 10m wide on the side of a rocky hill where methane has been released continuously for a few thousand years and will spontaneously reignite (residual heat) when blown out. Not something you see every day.
After three days, lots of swimming and book reading we boarded a minibus to take us to the boat that we were going to tour along the coast to Fetiye, this included a brief stop in a town with a statue of Santa Claus in a central square, turns out this was related to a Church of St Nicolaus who was a one-time inhabitant of these parts and had a bit of a cult following as Saints tended to a thousand years ago - a local boy does well sort of thing. The boat cruise to Fetiye was a three days and nights affair fully catered with 13 passengers and 4 crew on a well set up 24m (80ft) tub of a sailing boat, that only cost NZD$400,000! We would stop at four or five coves or bays a day and would go swimming, snorkelling, diving (extra side trip that cost more, but dived on replica galley) all in ridiculously warm water. We saw octopuses, we ate great meals three times a day and slept on deck mats rather than in our cabins due to the heat. It was a bit of a voyage of the damned in that there were 8 Aussies with just 3 Kiwis and 2 Belgians as counterbalance but was a lot of fun, and was over far too quickly. The coast of South East Turkey slopes steeply into the sea and is high, rough, rocky and Arid. The best curio for this trip was the ancient sunken town of Dolchiste, which sank into the Ocean in an Earthquake 2000 years ago, leaving ruins on both side of a wide deep channel.
Fetiye was our destination, and served as our base for a further three days. A visit to Saklikent was a relief from the hot dry weather that makes the days quite tiring. Saklikent is a18km long chasm through the mountains up to 300m high and down to just 3m wid. In wet weather it serves as a gorge, but most of the year it is dry with polished marble walls, massive bolders and trees lodged in this crack that while hundreds of metres high is so narrow in places that you cannot see the sky. Huge cold springs leak out of the walls at the bottom end of this gorge sending forth a frigid river of water that only the stupid (ie Jane) are prepared to swim in. The shade and cold water make this a haven from the heat, and local developers have set up restaurants and cafes perched on platforms over the river. A walk, clamber and climb for an hour and a half up the gorge followed by a swim for Jane and sitting around for an hour on one of these platforms filled an afternoon. Nearby we also got to visit Alexander the Great's Cave (quite massive) and just beside it a thermal spring where you enter a building on the side of a hill, then walk down a narrow sloping underground tunnel into the hill then finally desend down ricketty stairs into a near vertical crack in the rock that is just a meter wide and maybe 15m long and is absolutely packed (as in sardines) with turkish men standing one in front of the other. It's hot, it's humid, and it's more than a little bit bizzare.
P.S. Quick congrats to Mark and Susan who just got married, Ross and Amanda who are about to get married and Dave and Katrina who just got engaged.
Olympos was just a small valley surrounded by steep rocky hills until the tourist boom of the last 20 years. Now there are thousands of tourists during the summer months and a huge number of pansyions (hostels) have sprung up to take advantage, they are very comfortable and well run with outdoor lounges/bars/restaurants and very nice places to hang out, which seems to be the primary entertainment. A semi-local Australian told us that in fact all the businesses and hostels are actually run by the same extended family. Result: Lots of infighting, politics and price fixing. We stayed at Bayrams which was excellent and highly recommend it, it's about as close to the beach (1km) as you can get.
Exploring the Olympos ruins occupied a few hours, and was interesting to see the overgrown remenants - contrasts the more excavated and well groomed ruins we have seen elsewhere. Walking through the undergrowth I had a near-miss with stepping on a snake (admittedly tiny and speeding off in the opposite direction but still willies-inducing). Another fascinating excursion was a three hour trip one night to visit the Chimaera - a mythical fire-breathing beast with the forebody of a lion, body of a goat and a snake for a tail, real scary huh? In practice it is a small area 50m long and 10m wide on the side of a rocky hill where methane has been released continuously for a few thousand years and will spontaneously reignite (residual heat) when blown out. Not something you see every day.
After three days, lots of swimming and book reading we boarded a minibus to take us to the boat that we were going to tour along the coast to Fetiye, this included a brief stop in a town with a statue of Santa Claus in a central square, turns out this was related to a Church of St Nicolaus who was a one-time inhabitant of these parts and had a bit of a cult following as Saints tended to a thousand years ago - a local boy does well sort of thing. The boat cruise to Fetiye was a three days and nights affair fully catered with 13 passengers and 4 crew on a well set up 24m (80ft) tub of a sailing boat, that only cost NZD$400,000! We would stop at four or five coves or bays a day and would go swimming, snorkelling, diving (extra side trip that cost more, but dived on replica galley) all in ridiculously warm water. We saw octopuses, we ate great meals three times a day and slept on deck mats rather than in our cabins due to the heat. It was a bit of a voyage of the damned in that there were 8 Aussies with just 3 Kiwis and 2 Belgians as counterbalance but was a lot of fun, and was over far too quickly. The coast of South East Turkey slopes steeply into the sea and is high, rough, rocky and Arid. The best curio for this trip was the ancient sunken town of Dolchiste, which sank into the Ocean in an Earthquake 2000 years ago, leaving ruins on both side of a wide deep channel.
Fetiye was our destination, and served as our base for a further three days. A visit to Saklikent was a relief from the hot dry weather that makes the days quite tiring. Saklikent is a18km long chasm through the mountains up to 300m high and down to just 3m wid. In wet weather it serves as a gorge, but most of the year it is dry with polished marble walls, massive bolders and trees lodged in this crack that while hundreds of metres high is so narrow in places that you cannot see the sky. Huge cold springs leak out of the walls at the bottom end of this gorge sending forth a frigid river of water that only the stupid (ie Jane) are prepared to swim in. The shade and cold water make this a haven from the heat, and local developers have set up restaurants and cafes perched on platforms over the river. A walk, clamber and climb for an hour and a half up the gorge followed by a swim for Jane and sitting around for an hour on one of these platforms filled an afternoon. Nearby we also got to visit Alexander the Great's Cave (quite massive) and just beside it a thermal spring where you enter a building on the side of a hill, then walk down a narrow sloping underground tunnel into the hill then finally desend down ricketty stairs into a near vertical crack in the rock that is just a meter wide and maybe 15m long and is absolutely packed (as in sardines) with turkish men standing one in front of the other. It's hot, it's humid, and it's more than a little bit bizzare.
P.S. Quick congrats to Mark and Susan who just got married, Ross and Amanda who are about to get married and Dave and Katrina who just got engaged.
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Turkey's heart; Kapadokya and Nemrut
We continue our trip through Turkey with a visit to Kapadokya (Anglicised to Cappadocia for some reason). This is an amazing region slap bang in the middle of Turkey where there were a few little volcanic eruptions 10 million years back that deposited a layer of ash about 100m thick. So what you might say. Well the useful thing about this is that this ash has consolidated into a soft stone (similar to limestone) that is easily worked even with stone tools. So imagine you are a hardworking Hititte 3-4000 years ago with a growing family and lots of marauding animals and people to guard yourself against. Do you build yourself a house of straw, a house of sticks or maybe a house of bricks? Not with the wolf at the door you don't. What you do do is make yourself a cave. This approach has continued through to the present day with every hillside, valley and ravine around Goreme looking somewhat moth-eaten. Myriad chambers have been constructed for people, pigeons (artificial nesting holes in cliffs - they were farmed for their shit!) and popes. There are 36 hidden underground cities dating back up to 3-4000 years, some capable of holding thousands of people with huge stone (Indiana Jones) wheels that roll across passages to block them off against invaders. There are huge numbers of houses and hotels carved out of rock, with the useful side effect of being cool in summer and warm in winter. And there are churches dating back to a particularly prolific period about 800-1000 years ago when every Saint needed a place to call his own. The stone continues to erode and frequent earthquakes are also a problem so they don't last forever, but a home that lasts a few hundred years ain't bad and there are still massive numbers of ruins in various states of repair to be seen.
The other feature this area is famous for is "Fairy chimneys" with lumps of hard bassalt on top of the ash layer protecting the ash from erosion and leaving hard knobs on top of tall ash-rock spires, some over 40m high with many hollowed out for houses. Fairy chimneys be damned, from the above description it should be obvious to all that they have far more in common with phalluses than fairies, but "valley of the penises" might not have the touristic pulling power they were looking for.
After a few days we took off for Nemrut mountain in the east of Turkey near Syria, Iraq, Iran and Armenia. This description is not entirely accurate as there are 3 Nemrut mountains in the region, all claiming to be the home ground of local lad King Nemrut (Nimrod in English) who had a good hard try at killing off the founder of Judaism, (from whence came Christianity and Islam); namely one Mr Prophet Abraham who lived roughly 3500-4000 years ago. Anyway a 12 hour ride in a minibus then up at 4am to hike to the top of the 2200m mountain (actually only the last 200m) to watch the sun rise over the tomb of Antioch. For those of you unfamiliar with the bible you might know him as the original owner of the holy hand-grenade in Monty-Python's Holy Grail. Anyway three unexcavated tombs are hidden under a 50m mound of small rocks that form the peak of this mountain, they are known to exist only from recent seismic surveying. There are two terraces with large statues of the relevant kings and a couple of Greek gods to both the the east and west of this tomb and at the time they would host occasional ceremonies and get-togethers for important personages. All in all very impressive when you realise just how remote this site is, many days travel to get to it without vehicles - think about trying to build something atop Mt Hutt in Canterbury, or Mt Ruapehu in the North Island of New Zealand or hosting a garden party in these locations and you get the general idea.
We moved on to Sanliurfa, birthplace of Abraham, and as such one of the only places in the world that is a common religious site to Jews, Christians and Muslims. Though there were only Muslims in evidence in this atypically alcohol free city. You can visit the cave where he is said to have been born and hidden for seven years at the base of the cliff where King Nimrod lived (Nimrod killed off all of Abraham's potential playmates due to an unfavourable prophecy about being replaced by Abraham that came to pass anyway). The cave was weird, partitioned into womens and mens halves with basically no cave wall showing and taps to take holy water home from, it is accessed off the courtyard to a huge mosque built by the Saudis a few years ago. Nearby is a large pool (think 2-3 olympic swimming pools sat end to end) of very well fed Carp said to have been miraculously created when Nimrod attempted to Barbeque Abraham.
Last stop on this 1500km 3 day tour was Harran an ancient city that Abraham moved to before heading south, bits of this walled city date back 4000 years (and a town at least 7000 years ago), it was the centre of empires and well looked after by successive conquerers, a truely impressive sight - until the Mongols showed up about 800 years back and kicked the crap out of the place. Not much left now but a large crumbling castle and ruined walls that were once tall and imposing, I was impressed with how high the city is above the surrounding plain. In my mind that 5-10 metres of extra height over an area of about a square kilometer has come predominantly via the bowels of humans and animals over a several thousand year period.
Now we are off to Olympos by overnight bus, we've had a great time on this part of our trip. More sight seeing less drinking. One other curiousity: In Turkey the hawkers are continually trying to start conversations with us. Standard approach is: Where are you from? Whats your name? Now buy my crap at extortionate prices. If you don't respond after the first question then they guess at your country. From this we have learnt that we are in fact from Holland, not New Zealand as previously thought. Who knew? This hasn't happened just once, but more like 10-15 times in a week.
The other feature this area is famous for is "Fairy chimneys" with lumps of hard bassalt on top of the ash layer protecting the ash from erosion and leaving hard knobs on top of tall ash-rock spires, some over 40m high with many hollowed out for houses. Fairy chimneys be damned, from the above description it should be obvious to all that they have far more in common with phalluses than fairies, but "valley of the penises" might not have the touristic pulling power they were looking for.
After a few days we took off for Nemrut mountain in the east of Turkey near Syria, Iraq, Iran and Armenia. This description is not entirely accurate as there are 3 Nemrut mountains in the region, all claiming to be the home ground of local lad King Nemrut (Nimrod in English) who had a good hard try at killing off the founder of Judaism, (from whence came Christianity and Islam); namely one Mr Prophet Abraham who lived roughly 3500-4000 years ago. Anyway a 12 hour ride in a minibus then up at 4am to hike to the top of the 2200m mountain (actually only the last 200m) to watch the sun rise over the tomb of Antioch. For those of you unfamiliar with the bible you might know him as the original owner of the holy hand-grenade in Monty-Python's Holy Grail. Anyway three unexcavated tombs are hidden under a 50m mound of small rocks that form the peak of this mountain, they are known to exist only from recent seismic surveying. There are two terraces with large statues of the relevant kings and a couple of Greek gods to both the the east and west of this tomb and at the time they would host occasional ceremonies and get-togethers for important personages. All in all very impressive when you realise just how remote this site is, many days travel to get to it without vehicles - think about trying to build something atop Mt Hutt in Canterbury, or Mt Ruapehu in the North Island of New Zealand or hosting a garden party in these locations and you get the general idea.
We moved on to Sanliurfa, birthplace of Abraham, and as such one of the only places in the world that is a common religious site to Jews, Christians and Muslims. Though there were only Muslims in evidence in this atypically alcohol free city. You can visit the cave where he is said to have been born and hidden for seven years at the base of the cliff where King Nimrod lived (Nimrod killed off all of Abraham's potential playmates due to an unfavourable prophecy about being replaced by Abraham that came to pass anyway). The cave was weird, partitioned into womens and mens halves with basically no cave wall showing and taps to take holy water home from, it is accessed off the courtyard to a huge mosque built by the Saudis a few years ago. Nearby is a large pool (think 2-3 olympic swimming pools sat end to end) of very well fed Carp said to have been miraculously created when Nimrod attempted to Barbeque Abraham.
Last stop on this 1500km 3 day tour was Harran an ancient city that Abraham moved to before heading south, bits of this walled city date back 4000 years (and a town at least 7000 years ago), it was the centre of empires and well looked after by successive conquerers, a truely impressive sight - until the Mongols showed up about 800 years back and kicked the crap out of the place. Not much left now but a large crumbling castle and ruined walls that were once tall and imposing, I was impressed with how high the city is above the surrounding plain. In my mind that 5-10 metres of extra height over an area of about a square kilometer has come predominantly via the bowels of humans and animals over a several thousand year period.
Now we are off to Olympos by overnight bus, we've had a great time on this part of our trip. More sight seeing less drinking. One other curiousity: In Turkey the hawkers are continually trying to start conversations with us. Standard approach is: Where are you from? Whats your name? Now buy my crap at extortionate prices. If you don't respond after the first question then they guess at your country. From this we have learnt that we are in fact from Holland, not New Zealand as previously thought. Who knew? This hasn't happened just once, but more like 10-15 times in a week.
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Fallen Empires and Individuals; Istanbul, Gallipoli and Troy
After our extended stay in Asia we have finally found our way to Europe and being rather budget little birdies (Kiwis) we are obviously sticking to the cheaper regions. With a desire to see a few ancient bits we have come to Turkey. First stop Istanbul:
After trialing the "no lonely planet guidebook" approach in Malaysia, we have determined that it sucks and it is much easier to get around with a little bit of local information in your pocket, otherwise you waste all of your holiday time trying to figure out A) where you are, and B) how to get out of A). So with a first night booked in Istanbul we made our #1 priority to obtain said book. Fortunately we found one in the book exchange at our hostel in Sultan-ahmet (main tourist area) and Jane's light fingers (not really) saw to the rest.
Turkey is a real jewel for the traveller in that it has a long history of being a fabulously wealthy and developed country, but has been laid low by the decline and fall of the Ottoman empire 80 years ago so that it is now a relatively cheap place to travel to with lots of amazing stuff to look at. Our hostel in Sultanahmet was situated about 200m from Hagia Sophia (Saint Sophia), a huge Cathedral built in just 6 years 1500 years ago when the Roman empire had relocated to Constantinople (Istanbul) in what was then Byzantia. With an immense domed roof (60m tall and 35m diameter) that has survived earthquakes, schisms, Crusaders and Muslamicists as well as a fair number of clergy just dying to be struck down by an appropriate act of God it is an incredible piece of work. Matched in some ways by the equally big but spring-chickenesque 400 year old Blue Mosque next door, and somewhat remarkably by the huge basilica cistern - a 1500 year old underground water storage tank just 100m from these two previous monuments and more than a hectare in area it lay hidden and forgotten for a thousand years without collapsing, now filled with a little water, massıve carp and Italian tourists.
We hung out in Istanbul for a few days while booking a tour for the rest of Turkey, filling in the rest of our time with a number of wholesome activities (given that drinking is so expensive here) including: A boat cruise up the Bosphorus (channel linking the Agean sea via the Dardenales channel and the inland Marmara sea to the Black sea). The Bosphorus is just 650m wide at narrowest and 35km long and has had tremendous strategic importance ever since trade began 5000 years ago separating Europe from Asia. It has remained one of the places to hang out and be seen for the despotic conquerer/empire builder on the move. We stopped to climb to the Yoros castle overlooking the Black sea entrance, pretty run down now 700 years after its heyday, a little rock climbıng required to get up on it. We were a lıttle chuffed to see this same castle being used in a turgid and incomprehensible soap-opera on the bus a few days later.
We also spent half a day at the Topkati palace in Sultanahmet, this was the home of the Ottoman rulers for hundreds and hundreds of years and is a huge shambles of walls and buildings now turned into a museum that houses some fascinating stuff, be it jewelry, weaponry (A 2m long greatsword!) or kitchens. The one catch is that in the bad old days was that to gain entrance to most of this stuff (particularly the harem) one could not be in possession of ones knob. That's right, shoes at the door and no dick's allowed. Actually even Turkish women were generally out of luck in getting in as it was illegal to turn a Turkish women into one of the Sultan's play-things, there being prohibitions in the Koran against enslaving or shagging muslim women, not that that extends to dirty infidels taken as slaves of course.
There was a further half a day wandering around the huge grand bazaar - many hectares of old streets and roads that have been roofed over for centuries and now houses huge numbers of shops selling clothing, jewelery and other sorts of useless crap that makes women all weak-kneed. However all hope was not lost, as just over the Golden Horn (an inlet off the Bosphorus) 1km away was a massive area of engineering shops selling huge varieties of male oriented stuff, including an underground mall full of gun shops that sold flick knives and automatic weapons. Not something you see every day in our ever-so civilized countries ('Merica excepted).
That's about it for Istanbul, we headed off for our tour of Turkey. First stop Gallipoli, very knowledgable guide from Anzac House, good tour, but personally pretty depressing. I won't try to be glib or sarcastıc about it. It was a popular war fought mainly by volunteers (on the English side at least) who wanted to see the world and had their heads filled with Jingoistıc crap that made it OK to kill the other guy (a view they generally lost very quickly when presented wıth the realities of war). But I fınd the sentiments espoused by the memorials hollow. Glory? Remembered Forever? Gave their lives for freedom? I see no glory in their deaths, we don't remember the names of the dead as much as their brothers who lived to a ripe old age, and it is hard to justify fighting for freedom in this campaign (Turkey only joined with Germany because Britain and Russia had decided that they were going to break up and take control of the Ottoman Empire post WW1). We won't be so willing to fight wars for money or land again will we? (OK so that was a little sarcastıc).
The saddest thing about Gallipoli, of which the world remains generally ignorant, is that it may be one of the main causes of the 1915-17 Armenian Genocide in which the Turks and Kurds massacred 1-1.5 million Ethnic Armenians living in Turkey that the Turks decided in this time of strife (as their Ottoman Empire was dying), were potentially dangerous (Christian) sympathisers with the British. To that end Gallipolli's 120,000 armed and mainly volunteer soldiers killed is an insignificant sideshow to the greater tragedy it may have created.
There are many parallels between this Gallipoli conflict and the campaign some 3500 years earlier and 20km south on the other side of the Dardenales (narrow strait leading from the Agean to the Black sea) as the Greeks took on Troy. Similar heroics and heros (the Turkish leader who rose through the ranks at Gallipoli and saw off the Brits was Ataturk - father of modern Turkey. Just quietly he was born in Greece, though with the residual enmity between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus the Turks won't mention it), the same strategic goal (forget Helen's 1000-ship launchıng face, it was the entrance to the Dardenales, important because square rig sailing craft could only enter the Dardenales when winds were favorable), and of course same bloody body count. There are now monuments to the fallen on both sides of the Dardenales; near Troy there are two man made hills that have stood as monuments to the Greek victors for 3000 years, will Gallipoli's endure?
We stayed the night in Cannukale, a great seaside town near the narrowest point of the Dardenales and more strategically relevant in the last 2000 years since sailing techniques improved, and went on a tour of Troy a few kilometers away. Troy is a fascinating place; a slowly expanding city rebuilt about 10 times between 5500 years ago and 2000 years ago as it recovered from various cataclysms and wars, before it lost strategic relevance and was covered in dirt and lost for a Millenium. There is amazing detail to be seen in the small portions that have been excavated. Rough unhewn sloping stone walls in the 5000 year old bronze age era, tidy masonry from 3000 year old Homerıc era iron age tools, details and features that align with descriptions in Homer's Illiad. Standıng at the spot where King Priam likely watched Archilles kill his son Hector, Wow. No they haven't found a horse, but they have the mock-up from the 2004 movie on the waterfront in Cannukale, besides which the horse is generally thought to have been a seige engine for knocking over the tall vertical mud brick walls that sat atop the cruder sloping stone foundation walls of Troy. So much for legends and warnings about greeks bearing gifts, it's a good bet the guys in Troy saw that one coming. Troy is a real treasure and deserves a look in at least once in a lifetime.
Next stop: (after an 18hr bus ride!) Cappadocia.
After trialing the "no lonely planet guidebook" approach in Malaysia, we have determined that it sucks and it is much easier to get around with a little bit of local information in your pocket, otherwise you waste all of your holiday time trying to figure out A) where you are, and B) how to get out of A). So with a first night booked in Istanbul we made our #1 priority to obtain said book. Fortunately we found one in the book exchange at our hostel in Sultan-ahmet (main tourist area) and Jane's light fingers (not really) saw to the rest.
Turkey is a real jewel for the traveller in that it has a long history of being a fabulously wealthy and developed country, but has been laid low by the decline and fall of the Ottoman empire 80 years ago so that it is now a relatively cheap place to travel to with lots of amazing stuff to look at. Our hostel in Sultanahmet was situated about 200m from Hagia Sophia (Saint Sophia), a huge Cathedral built in just 6 years 1500 years ago when the Roman empire had relocated to Constantinople (Istanbul) in what was then Byzantia. With an immense domed roof (60m tall and 35m diameter) that has survived earthquakes, schisms, Crusaders and Muslamicists as well as a fair number of clergy just dying to be struck down by an appropriate act of God it is an incredible piece of work. Matched in some ways by the equally big but spring-chickenesque 400 year old Blue Mosque next door, and somewhat remarkably by the huge basilica cistern - a 1500 year old underground water storage tank just 100m from these two previous monuments and more than a hectare in area it lay hidden and forgotten for a thousand years without collapsing, now filled with a little water, massıve carp and Italian tourists.
We hung out in Istanbul for a few days while booking a tour for the rest of Turkey, filling in the rest of our time with a number of wholesome activities (given that drinking is so expensive here) including: A boat cruise up the Bosphorus (channel linking the Agean sea via the Dardenales channel and the inland Marmara sea to the Black sea). The Bosphorus is just 650m wide at narrowest and 35km long and has had tremendous strategic importance ever since trade began 5000 years ago separating Europe from Asia. It has remained one of the places to hang out and be seen for the despotic conquerer/empire builder on the move. We stopped to climb to the Yoros castle overlooking the Black sea entrance, pretty run down now 700 years after its heyday, a little rock climbıng required to get up on it. We were a lıttle chuffed to see this same castle being used in a turgid and incomprehensible soap-opera on the bus a few days later.
We also spent half a day at the Topkati palace in Sultanahmet, this was the home of the Ottoman rulers for hundreds and hundreds of years and is a huge shambles of walls and buildings now turned into a museum that houses some fascinating stuff, be it jewelry, weaponry (A 2m long greatsword!) or kitchens. The one catch is that in the bad old days was that to gain entrance to most of this stuff (particularly the harem) one could not be in possession of ones knob. That's right, shoes at the door and no dick's allowed. Actually even Turkish women were generally out of luck in getting in as it was illegal to turn a Turkish women into one of the Sultan's play-things, there being prohibitions in the Koran against enslaving or shagging muslim women, not that that extends to dirty infidels taken as slaves of course.
There was a further half a day wandering around the huge grand bazaar - many hectares of old streets and roads that have been roofed over for centuries and now houses huge numbers of shops selling clothing, jewelery and other sorts of useless crap that makes women all weak-kneed. However all hope was not lost, as just over the Golden Horn (an inlet off the Bosphorus) 1km away was a massive area of engineering shops selling huge varieties of male oriented stuff, including an underground mall full of gun shops that sold flick knives and automatic weapons. Not something you see every day in our ever-so civilized countries ('Merica excepted).
That's about it for Istanbul, we headed off for our tour of Turkey. First stop Gallipoli, very knowledgable guide from Anzac House, good tour, but personally pretty depressing. I won't try to be glib or sarcastıc about it. It was a popular war fought mainly by volunteers (on the English side at least) who wanted to see the world and had their heads filled with Jingoistıc crap that made it OK to kill the other guy (a view they generally lost very quickly when presented wıth the realities of war). But I fınd the sentiments espoused by the memorials hollow. Glory? Remembered Forever? Gave their lives for freedom? I see no glory in their deaths, we don't remember the names of the dead as much as their brothers who lived to a ripe old age, and it is hard to justify fighting for freedom in this campaign (Turkey only joined with Germany because Britain and Russia had decided that they were going to break up and take control of the Ottoman Empire post WW1). We won't be so willing to fight wars for money or land again will we? (OK so that was a little sarcastıc).
The saddest thing about Gallipoli, of which the world remains generally ignorant, is that it may be one of the main causes of the 1915-17 Armenian Genocide in which the Turks and Kurds massacred 1-1.5 million Ethnic Armenians living in Turkey that the Turks decided in this time of strife (as their Ottoman Empire was dying), were potentially dangerous (Christian) sympathisers with the British. To that end Gallipolli's 120,000 armed and mainly volunteer soldiers killed is an insignificant sideshow to the greater tragedy it may have created.
There are many parallels between this Gallipoli conflict and the campaign some 3500 years earlier and 20km south on the other side of the Dardenales (narrow strait leading from the Agean to the Black sea) as the Greeks took on Troy. Similar heroics and heros (the Turkish leader who rose through the ranks at Gallipoli and saw off the Brits was Ataturk - father of modern Turkey. Just quietly he was born in Greece, though with the residual enmity between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus the Turks won't mention it), the same strategic goal (forget Helen's 1000-ship launchıng face, it was the entrance to the Dardenales, important because square rig sailing craft could only enter the Dardenales when winds were favorable), and of course same bloody body count. There are now monuments to the fallen on both sides of the Dardenales; near Troy there are two man made hills that have stood as monuments to the Greek victors for 3000 years, will Gallipoli's endure?
We stayed the night in Cannukale, a great seaside town near the narrowest point of the Dardenales and more strategically relevant in the last 2000 years since sailing techniques improved, and went on a tour of Troy a few kilometers away. Troy is a fascinating place; a slowly expanding city rebuilt about 10 times between 5500 years ago and 2000 years ago as it recovered from various cataclysms and wars, before it lost strategic relevance and was covered in dirt and lost for a Millenium. There is amazing detail to be seen in the small portions that have been excavated. Rough unhewn sloping stone walls in the 5000 year old bronze age era, tidy masonry from 3000 year old Homerıc era iron age tools, details and features that align with descriptions in Homer's Illiad. Standıng at the spot where King Priam likely watched Archilles kill his son Hector, Wow. No they haven't found a horse, but they have the mock-up from the 2004 movie on the waterfront in Cannukale, besides which the horse is generally thought to have been a seige engine for knocking over the tall vertical mud brick walls that sat atop the cruder sloping stone foundation walls of Troy. So much for legends and warnings about greeks bearing gifts, it's a good bet the guys in Troy saw that one coming. Troy is a real treasure and deserves a look in at least once in a lifetime.
Next stop: (after an 18hr bus ride!) Cappadocia.
Saturday, August 11, 2007
Malaysian Getaway
It is late summer and there large numbers of thermal refugees from Arabia holidaying in Malaysia and Indonesia to escape the 50 degree temperatures at home. As a result we were stuck for a few days in Penang, an Island about the size of lake Taupo with a population of half a million people and lots of manufacturing industry connected by bridge to the malaysian peninsula. Really not much more to say about the place, if holidaying don't bother.
We travelled on to Langkawi on the recommendation of a couple that we met in Vietnam. Langkawi is a beautiful group of forest covered hilly islands off the south of the Malay penisula near the Thai border, the biggest of which is about 30km across. Langkawi has a lot going for it; relatively sparsely populated (for Malaysia) with fantastic beaches, and it is a Duty Free Zone so alcohol is actually cheap (a minor miracle for a Muslim country). Development has been patchy with economic burps leading to the odd old half finished building and some boarded up businesses - in the way you might see in a slightly economically depressed area of a city or town. Langkawi (and Malaysia) is favoured with an incredibly benign climate where it is never too hot or cold, there is never strong wind and the worst extreme you have to build for is heavy rain, so there are a lot of open air cafes and restaurants that are nothing more than roofs on poles.
We got a cheap bungalow (NZ$11 per night) on Cenang beach , a huge long strip of beachfront resorts, shops, and cafes on the north west of the island. The couple running the place were a helpful if slightly disorganised (of which more later) couple, an ex Iranian Colonel from the Shah's days and his Japanese wife, both in their 60's.
Hiring a car was cheap - about NZ$25 for the day including fuel so we travelled around for a day, seeing some of the sights. The cable car was very scary, suspending us 100-200m above the forest canopy as we went to the highest point on the island, but very nice architecture and engineering. We also went to the seven pools where we swam in catchpools at the top of a big waterfall, the most pleasently cool we managed to be in four days on langkawi.
Going out at night was trickier than for other countries. Due to the predominantly muslim population a lot of places exclude alcohol entirely and westeners tended to cluster strongly in the few that do sell booze. Arabs and others are scattered in twos and threes through the other 100 restaurants and cafes, but even so most places are open till 2-3 in the morning every day of the week. We thought we had just not found the night spots and spent an hour and a half walking back and forth along the entire strip one night looking for where everyone was, eventually realising it just wasn't that sort of place unlike everywhere else we have been in Asia. This reconnaisance yeilded just three bars, of which one was right next door (Debbie's run by a Malaysian women with one arm and an Irish husband). But it also saw us walking along a dark road at 1am in the morning after a few drinks not paying too much attention to where we were going when I noticed a wiggly outline on the road a metre or two in front, did a double take and realised it was a snake. Jane and I both jumped, but the snake wasn't moving and neither were it's two friends a few metres away, we didn't stop to check but we think they may have been someone's dinner dropped on the road - catering-screwup rather than close-encounter (sort of dissapointing not seeing a snake after 4 months in Asia).
After four days it was time to check out, go to the airport and fly to Kuala Lumpur, hungover after meeting a couple of Brits the night before and drinking flaming lambourghini's (Just say no kids) we got to the motel checkout 40 minutes before we needed to check-in at the airport to be told that the wife with the keys to the security box and our passports had gone out somewhere without her cellphone. Husband jumps in car to go and find her (but without telling us when he would be back). We wait till 10 minutes before we have to check in but no-one had come back, unable to contact either of them we took the next step: We broke into their house, kicking down the front door, searching around, kicking down their bedroom door, then using a pry-bar to break into the security cabinet. Gear retrieved we then jumped in a taxi and hightailed it to the airport, jumping queues to get checked in in time and going directly to the gate in the hopes of avoiding any consequences. Not quite a clean getaway though, the Japanese lady owner somehow managed to get though to the gate without a boarding pass, and confronted us. She just looked totally shocked and hurt, saying that her house had been broken into three times in the last year now, and that her kitten had died this morning (believe it or not I patted it while lifting the matress it was sitting on looking for the box). But despite feeling bad we stuck to our guns and wouldn't give here any more money than the $20 token payment for damages that we had left. Pretty worried when Jane was asked to identify herself to the flight attendents before takeoff - thought we were about to get dragged off by the police, but turned out to be just a problem with our boarding passes, quickly fixed.
Kuala Lumpur was a lovely step into comfort after the last month of budget accommodation. Staying with my cousin Richard and his lovely new wife (of ten days) Joelle, in a delicsiously air conditioned apartment we were treated to a couple of great nights out at his new restaurant and bar "Twenty One" in the heart of the city. Richard has been in this game learning the craft for 15 years but this is the first place that he has owned personally (with his partner) and it is going brilliantly, but a very full-on life: up at 11am in bed at 5am, and having to be a convivial host and manager 340 days a year. To relieve stress he has a number of outlets, the latest of which (after being told to sell his motorbike) is a ridiculously big remote controlled "Monster" truck, with 5hp and capable of about 140km/hr. We headed out at 4am in the morning to a nearby motorway to play with this baby. Thankfully the video camera we've been carrying survived the little prang we had when doing some onboard video.
While Richard was off working Joelle took us to Batu (Stone) Cave inside Kuala Lumpur, this is a massive cave probably 40m wide and 100m high and 150m deep, used as a Budhist temple with a 20m Golden Budda statue out front. It is a truly spectacular natural formation complete with monkeys that climb the surounding cliffs and challenge people for food. Every year there is a religious ceremony in which thousands of the faithful gather as devotees pierce their faces with steel rods, and their bodies with hooks in penance.
Impressions of malaysia have been great, wonderfully helpful (taxi drivers were just fantastic) and friendly people, good food (mix of enthnicities, 10% Indian, 30% Chinese and 60% Muslim). Don't get hassled to buy stuff all the time like you do in other parts of Asia, and infrastructure all works. Kuala Lumpur is really almost a modern western city, pretty, lots of greenery, and cheap. Easy to have a good life here with a really good three bedroom apartment close to the city centre costing NZ$70 per week (unfurnished).
Next stop: Istanbul.
We travelled on to Langkawi on the recommendation of a couple that we met in Vietnam. Langkawi is a beautiful group of forest covered hilly islands off the south of the Malay penisula near the Thai border, the biggest of which is about 30km across. Langkawi has a lot going for it; relatively sparsely populated (for Malaysia) with fantastic beaches, and it is a Duty Free Zone so alcohol is actually cheap (a minor miracle for a Muslim country). Development has been patchy with economic burps leading to the odd old half finished building and some boarded up businesses - in the way you might see in a slightly economically depressed area of a city or town. Langkawi (and Malaysia) is favoured with an incredibly benign climate where it is never too hot or cold, there is never strong wind and the worst extreme you have to build for is heavy rain, so there are a lot of open air cafes and restaurants that are nothing more than roofs on poles.
We got a cheap bungalow (NZ$11 per night) on Cenang beach , a huge long strip of beachfront resorts, shops, and cafes on the north west of the island. The couple running the place were a helpful if slightly disorganised (of which more later) couple, an ex Iranian Colonel from the Shah's days and his Japanese wife, both in their 60's.
Hiring a car was cheap - about NZ$25 for the day including fuel so we travelled around for a day, seeing some of the sights. The cable car was very scary, suspending us 100-200m above the forest canopy as we went to the highest point on the island, but very nice architecture and engineering. We also went to the seven pools where we swam in catchpools at the top of a big waterfall, the most pleasently cool we managed to be in four days on langkawi.
Going out at night was trickier than for other countries. Due to the predominantly muslim population a lot of places exclude alcohol entirely and westeners tended to cluster strongly in the few that do sell booze. Arabs and others are scattered in twos and threes through the other 100 restaurants and cafes, but even so most places are open till 2-3 in the morning every day of the week. We thought we had just not found the night spots and spent an hour and a half walking back and forth along the entire strip one night looking for where everyone was, eventually realising it just wasn't that sort of place unlike everywhere else we have been in Asia. This reconnaisance yeilded just three bars, of which one was right next door (Debbie's run by a Malaysian women with one arm and an Irish husband). But it also saw us walking along a dark road at 1am in the morning after a few drinks not paying too much attention to where we were going when I noticed a wiggly outline on the road a metre or two in front, did a double take and realised it was a snake. Jane and I both jumped, but the snake wasn't moving and neither were it's two friends a few metres away, we didn't stop to check but we think they may have been someone's dinner dropped on the road - catering-screwup rather than close-encounter (sort of dissapointing not seeing a snake after 4 months in Asia).
After four days it was time to check out, go to the airport and fly to Kuala Lumpur, hungover after meeting a couple of Brits the night before and drinking flaming lambourghini's (Just say no kids) we got to the motel checkout 40 minutes before we needed to check-in at the airport to be told that the wife with the keys to the security box and our passports had gone out somewhere without her cellphone. Husband jumps in car to go and find her (but without telling us when he would be back). We wait till 10 minutes before we have to check in but no-one had come back, unable to contact either of them we took the next step: We broke into their house, kicking down the front door, searching around, kicking down their bedroom door, then using a pry-bar to break into the security cabinet. Gear retrieved we then jumped in a taxi and hightailed it to the airport, jumping queues to get checked in in time and going directly to the gate in the hopes of avoiding any consequences. Not quite a clean getaway though, the Japanese lady owner somehow managed to get though to the gate without a boarding pass, and confronted us. She just looked totally shocked and hurt, saying that her house had been broken into three times in the last year now, and that her kitten had died this morning (believe it or not I patted it while lifting the matress it was sitting on looking for the box). But despite feeling bad we stuck to our guns and wouldn't give here any more money than the $20 token payment for damages that we had left. Pretty worried when Jane was asked to identify herself to the flight attendents before takeoff - thought we were about to get dragged off by the police, but turned out to be just a problem with our boarding passes, quickly fixed.
Kuala Lumpur was a lovely step into comfort after the last month of budget accommodation. Staying with my cousin Richard and his lovely new wife (of ten days) Joelle, in a delicsiously air conditioned apartment we were treated to a couple of great nights out at his new restaurant and bar "Twenty One" in the heart of the city. Richard has been in this game learning the craft for 15 years but this is the first place that he has owned personally (with his partner) and it is going brilliantly, but a very full-on life: up at 11am in bed at 5am, and having to be a convivial host and manager 340 days a year. To relieve stress he has a number of outlets, the latest of which (after being told to sell his motorbike) is a ridiculously big remote controlled "Monster" truck, with 5hp and capable of about 140km/hr. We headed out at 4am in the morning to a nearby motorway to play with this baby. Thankfully the video camera we've been carrying survived the little prang we had when doing some onboard video.
While Richard was off working Joelle took us to Batu (Stone) Cave inside Kuala Lumpur, this is a massive cave probably 40m wide and 100m high and 150m deep, used as a Budhist temple with a 20m Golden Budda statue out front. It is a truly spectacular natural formation complete with monkeys that climb the surounding cliffs and challenge people for food. Every year there is a religious ceremony in which thousands of the faithful gather as devotees pierce their faces with steel rods, and their bodies with hooks in penance.
Impressions of malaysia have been great, wonderfully helpful (taxi drivers were just fantastic) and friendly people, good food (mix of enthnicities, 10% Indian, 30% Chinese and 60% Muslim). Don't get hassled to buy stuff all the time like you do in other parts of Asia, and infrastructure all works. Kuala Lumpur is really almost a modern western city, pretty, lots of greenery, and cheap. Easy to have a good life here with a really good three bedroom apartment close to the city centre costing NZ$70 per week (unfurnished).
Next stop: Istanbul.
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