Photos, Superlatives, and Stats!

We are pleased to announce that all our trip photos are now available online. You can see them at the following link:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/zudnic/collections/

Way back when, we promised some superlatives. Here they are.

Hotels Etc.

• Best Meal: We splurged on a high-end meal at the Victoria & Albert Waterfront in Cape Town.
• Worst Meal: Something that appeared to approximate Kraft Mac & Cheese that we made in Kaikoura, New Zealand.
• Best Hotel: Tie, Park Plaza, Beijing; Cradog B&B, Ireland
• Worst Hotel: Cactus Jack's, Rotorua, New Zealand - cold and grungy.
• Best Bed: Cradog B&B, Ireland
• Worst Bed: Our first hotel in Xi'an, China. The Chinese for some reason insist on rock-hard beds, and this was the worst.
• Best Bathroom: Park Plaza, Beijing
• Worst Bathroom: Jolly Boys Backpackers, Zambia - someone needs to tell these folks that shower curtains need to be changed at least once a year. And some hot water would be nice too.
  
• Best Breakfast: tie, Hotel Rugenpark, Interlaken, Switzerland; City Lodge, Johannesburg, South Africa. Both these places had wide variety of breakfast foods, attractively laid out.
• Worst Breakfast: Il Fiori Napoli, Naples - at an otherwise very nice B&B, breakfast here is coffee and a croissant they may or may not feel like heating up in the microwave.
• Wierdest Hotel Room Feature: The ceiling-mounted heating element at our hostel in Launceston, Tasmania. Heat rises, people.
  

People and Experiences

• Best Locals: South Africa. The nicest people in the world, we swear. At Kruger National Park, they volunteered to teach us the local way of barbecue, braai. When we visited other parts of the country, including very poor areas, we encountered nothing but wonderful people.
• Worst Locals: China. People are unwilling to help clueless foreigners, not to mention the spitting.
• Most Overrated: Italy. It's not that pretty (except Capri) and the people there are very rude. We left a bit bewildered why so many people rave about it.
  
• Most Underrated: South Africa. Such a wonderful country, beautiful countryside, spectacular animals, and the aforementioned locals.
• Best Trains: Austria - leather seats and waiter service.
• Worst Trains: China. People spitting on the floor, grimy walls, and no space.
• Best Flight: Tough to say, but generally flights on Cathay Pacific and Qantas had the best food and service. Qantas had by far the best inflight entertainment.
• Worst Flight: The one that was made the worst by the Airline was from Krakow to Dublin, departing at 6:00 AM, the flight attendant wouldn't allow passengers to spread out to empty seats. Madrid to Cairo had the worst time, departing at 12:30 AM and arriving at 3:30 AM. Also our JetStar flight from Melbourne to Hobart, Australia, was delayed by 3.5 hours.
• Best Airport: The quick, easy ones that weren't under construction, had decent food options, didn't gouge you on departure taxes. These included Queenstown, New Zealand; Cairns, Australia; and Krakow, Poland.
  
• Worst Airport: Livingstone, Zambia. Four flights departed around the same time - and the check-in room is about the size of your average Starbucks.
  
• Most Chaotic City: Tie, Naples, Italy and Cairo, Egypt. Cairo doesn't even have traffic lights. And in Naples, Vespa scooters follow no rules and are everywhere. Cairo:
• Most Relaxing City: Kaikoura, New Zealand - at the foot of the mountains, but on the ocean, Kaikoura is as beautiful a town as you will ever see.
• Most Peaceful Spot: Cradog B&B, Freshford, Ireland. Satellite TV, rolling hills, and two friendly dogs.
  
• Scariest Place: Johannesburg, South Africa - the crime rate here is out of control.
  
• Best City for Eating: Bangkok. Everything is wonderful and cheap.
• Worst City for Eating: Yichang, China. Very few restaurants, we had to eat at our hotel, which was pretty abysmal.
• Best Surprise - Capri Island, Italy. We went there on a whim, after missing a ferry to Positano. Capri is nothing short of stunningly beautiful. Who cares that it's a tourist trap?
• Biggest Disappointment - Madrid. For a major European capital, it's pretty boring.
• Best One-Day Activity - Swimming with dolphins in Kaikoura, New Zealand; diving the Great Barrier Reef, Australia.
  
• Prettiest City: You can't beat Cape Town's stunning location, and the cliff-clinging towns of Italy's Cinque Terre region are postcard-perfect.
• Ugliest City: Yichang, China.
• Happiest Moment: Watching four lionesses attempt to make dinner out of a herd of giraffes; reaching the top of the Devil's Ladder while climbing New Zealand's Tongariro Crossing.
• Scariest Moment: When we took the "scam bus" from Bangkok to Siem Reap, Cambodia, the bus stopped 5 km from the border and the driver demanded our passports for "express visa service" - then sped away with them on a moped. We got them back, thankfully.
• Best Find: Just north of Kaikoura, New Zealand, we found an isolated pool at the foot of a waterfall, where we found dozens of baby seals playing.
• Coolest Nature Experience: The aforementioned lion strike, plus seeing the world's rarest species of penguin lumber out of the water and back to her nest for the night in New Zealand.
• Most Interesting People We Met: Jim and Sheri, who are driving their Land Cruiser around the world for five years, through some pretty godforsaken places. Their website is worth a read.
• Most Rustic Country: Cambodia by a long shot. A gas station:
• Most Eye-Opening Experience: Driving through rural Cambodia and seeing the crushing poverty; Sam's Cultural Tour in Cape Town, where we got to visit the townships.
• Lowest Moment: Duct-taping together a ripped plastic shopping bag because we needed it and we were out of spares.

You might also be interested to hear the list of things that were confiscated by airline personnel in various places around the globe: duct tape, cans of tuna fish, re-usable ice bricks, mustard. All of these things are serious security risks, obviously.

Also, in one of our first blog posts, we listed some stats on the trip. After actually going, the numbers have been revised.

• 44,521 49,420 flight miles
• Five continents and at least nine 21 countries (including the Vatican)
• 17 24 airports
• Five Nine airlines (American, Qantas, Cathay Pacific, JetStar, Hainan, Air China, Comair (South Africa), British Airways, Iberia)
  
• This is a map of all our flights:
• If you're interested, these are all the airports: Boston, USA (BOS); Los Angeles, USA (LAX); Auckland, NZ (AKL); Queenstown, NZ (ZQN); Melbourne, Australia (MEL); Hobart, Australia (HBA); Cairns, Australia (CNS); Ayers Rock, Australia (AYQ); Sydney, Australia (SYD); Bangkok, Thailand (BKK); Siem Reap, Cambodia (REP); Hong Kong, Hong Kong (HKG); Beijing (Peking), China (PEK); Xi'an (Xian), China (XIY); Yichang, China (YIH); Johannesburg, South Africa (JNB); Cape Town, South Africa (CPT); Nelspruit, South Africa (MQP); Livingstone, Zambia (LVI); London - Heathrow, UK (LHR); Cairo, Egypt (CAI); Madrid, Spain (MAD); Kraków, Poland (KRK); Dublin, Ireland (DUB).
  

European Wrap-Up

So the camera came in the mail today, so we can finally wrap up our what-we-did blogs.

The last blog was from Krakow, in Poland, but it was pretty much a rant on how much we hate transportation in Eastern Europe. We didn't mention much about Prague or Krakow.

After Budapest we made our way to Prague, which is a cute wedding-cake of a town. The Old Town is picture-postcard Europe, where all the buildings are impossibly picturesque. The downside is that it doesn't really feel like a city. We felt this way in a few European places - they are so overrun with tourists that no one lives there any more. All the shops are souvenir stores and all the cafes are more expensive than they need to be. It doesn't take a long walk from the tourist center to get into the real town, which we preferred.

Most people who visit Prague rave about it, and if you wanted to pick one European city to visit to see what the Continent might have looked like 200 years ago, Prague is it. For us, one day was sufficient, and we moved on to Krakow.

The purpose of visiting Krakow was solely to visit the concentration camp at Auschwitz. The magnitude of the place should be self-explanatory and we'll publish just this one photo, which shows the platform at Birkenau where the new arrivals disembarked the train and were sorted.

The thing that really got our goat at Auschwitz was how blatantly disrespectful the visitors were. For example, in the gas chamber, you enter and there is a marble sign that says in English, Polish and Hebrew (paraphrasing) - "You are entering a place where tens of thousands of people were murdered. Please show respect and refrain from taking photos."

You guessed it, people were inside snapping away. We saw this kind of behavior all through the trip, including people taking flash photographs of priceless Egyptian and Pompeian relics. At least Auschwitz was relatively free of names carved into wood, which was alarmingly common throughout the sites we saw along the way.

In Eastern Europe, there are some interesting relics of the not-so-distant Communist past. We visited a statue park outside Budapest, where they have collected a few flamboyant and/or bizarre statues left over from the days behind the Iron Curtain.


You can see concrete-block housing just outside the historic city centers of many Eastern European cities. This example is in Prague.

Not to mention Communist-era cars.

From Krakow, we flew on SkyEurope (worst. airline. ever.) to Dublin, Ireland, where we were set to meet our friends Sean and Ann as they started their own round-the-world trip.

We beat Sean and Ann to Ireland by a day, so we rented the world's smallest car (as necessary in Ireland, they have the scariest roads on Earth) and drove to the boonies for a night.

The roads are small, but it sure is fun to drive!
We stayed in a nice B&B and visited the ruins of a place called Kells Priory, an old monastery.

Back in Dublin, once Sean and Ann arrived, we struggled to find things to do other than drink. Dublin is a serious party town and there isn't much to do there otherwise. We took one day and drove to Northern Ireland, where we visited a unique geological formation called the Giants Causeway. It is made up of hexagonal rocks that look like pilings.

The Causeway is set amongst some idyllic scenery, but the most interesting thing was the lengths that Sean would go to in order to get the best photo possible.

We're home, but the blog isn't quite done. Coming up.. superlatives, updates on the re-immersion process, and a photo extravaganza!

Stay Tuned for Scenes From the Next...

We got home last Tuesday, but we have some catching up to do on the blog.

One reason for the delay is that we lost our camera in Northern Ireland. Happily, a good Samaritan turned it in and the local hotel was kind enough to post it to us. (Here's a happy and hearty plug for the Causeway Hotel in Bushmills, No. Ireland.)

Once the camera arrives, we'll blog about our last few days in Europe. We'll also have some superlatives and closing thoughts (a-la Jerry Springer). So stay tuned!

Tales of European Transport

We thought it might make a good blog subject to discuss the myth that public transportation, and indeed traveling in general, within Europe is easy.

Here are a few things that have frustrated us.

We bought a Eurail pass, which cost a ton of money right up front. It theoretically allows us to travel within Europe endlessly. But there have been a ton of hidden fees and surprises.

Most trains are "mandatory reservation" trains, which means that your fare is covered by Eurail, but not necessarily the fee associated with the reserved seat. These fees have ranged from a few dollars to 90 Euro ($125) each for a sleeper train from Madrid to Lausanne, Switzerland (near Geneva). So that has really added up.

Then there's the issue of scope. The pass provided a map, which shows routes across Europe, but the countries where the pass isn't valid are shown in gray. Thinking this accurate, we got on the train in Budapest, changed in Vienna and headed north to Prague. When the Czech conductor came by to check our ticket, he said that our Eurail pass was not valid in the Czech Republic and that we either had to pay an upcharge or get off the train. Lacking local currency, we chose to get off in the next town, where we had to buy a ticket on the next one. It thankfully cost just a few dollars because it was a local train, but smelled of BO and took three hours longer than it should have.

So all our tickets in the Czech Republic and Poland we had to pay out of pocket. This little deception on Eurail's part has cost us a few hundred dollars.

And that doesn't even include the subway. After arriving in Prague four hours later than expected, we tried to buy a ticket on the metro. But at 8pm, all the ticket booths were closed, and the machines only took coins. This does not make sense in the country's biggest train station, where arriving passengers are mostly from other countries, and lucky to have local currency, let alone small coins. Luckily in Prague they don't actually take tickets when you get on the metro, so we had to risk it.

Sometimes, even when you do pay, they find nice little excuses to extort you. Arriving in Krakow this afternoon, we bought a ticket on the streetcar (2.50 Polish Zlotny, or about $.90) We got on the tram, and a man came by to check tickets. We produced ours, but we hadn't stamped the ticket in the appropriate box when we got on, resulting in a 150 zlotny fine ($56). Welcome to Krakow. This fine went in the guy's back pocket as well. This episode really ticked us off, because we were obviously tourists who had just arrived, bags and all, and it wasn't like we didn't buy a ticket.

Anyway, I apologize for the rant, but we are honestly getting a bit frustrated at European public transportation, which is supposedly so "easy" and "efficient."

Excuse me, I Abfahrted.

Please excuse the blog title. Sure, it's a bit juvenile, but we have to admit seeing the German word for "Departure" about four thousand times a day in various train stations is a bit amusing. The other day, we abfahrted in about a dozen different stations. Cue Beavis & Butt-Head.

Anyway we last left you in Naples, which is in the South of Italy. The day after our last blog, we visited Pompeii, which was a bustling Roman town. One day in 72 AD Mt Vesuvius, sitting just behind town, blew, causing the whole place to be buried in about six meters (20 feet) of volcanic ash in a matter of minutes. No one had time to flee, and a lot of the people died right where they sat. The town was basically buried as a time capsule.

It is a bit freaky to be in Pompeii because a lot of the remnants of daily life are still apparent - political slogans painted on people's houses, graffiti, etc. A lot of the artifacts were excavated by the authorities so the town is essentially a bare shell now.

Freakiest of all, the ash managed to preserve the bodies of the victims in such a way that the archaeologists were able to create plaster casts of them and show the positions the people were in when they died. This person was particularly poignant, as she or he appears to be praying or begging.

From Naples, we headed north to Venice, which is so exorbitantly expensive we were only able to stay one day. But it really is all it's cracked up to be. The canals are cool, and there are gondolas everywhere (the most amusing of them including a stereotype Italian singer man, with accordion, serenading a gondola full of Japanese tourists).
We basically spent the day wandering the streets, which was cool - basically, just being in Venice is the reason to go.
The main square in Venice (Piazza San Marco) is known for pigeons.

After that we spent a very. long. day. getting to Innsbruck, Austria. The train left Venice at about 10 AM and was supposed to get in at about 4.30 PM, but due to the overwhelming wonderfulness of the Italian train system, we didn't get there until 10:30, and then we were stupid enough to get on the wrong bus, so we didn't get in until midnight.

But we have been riding the trains all over Europe. They vary widely in quality. The Austrian trains are by far the best ones we have encountered so far. They are very comfortable.
Long hours on trains means we've been reading a lot. That's not to say that we don't get bored.

That's our Platypus water bag on my head.

Anyway, Innsbruck is famous for having hosted the 1968 and 1972 winter Olympics. It's a pretty town.

We went to visit the recently refurbished Olympic ski jump, which makes you wonder who would be crazy enough to start way up there and then jump off the ramp. We went to the top of the ramp and mentally went through the motions of jumping off. Pretty scary stuff. This is the only picture we could manage that actually shows the scale of the thing. The jumpers start at the very top.
If you're wondering what ski jumping looks like, here's a video on YouTube.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=UE31hCwYoMg&mode=related&search=

Unfortunately we didn't have a lot of time in Innsbruck, so we headed off to Budapest, which is the capital of Hungary. Budapest isn't a place a lot of Americans would think to come, but it's got pretty much everything you would think of in an European capital. The architecture here is stunning, it's orderly, and clean. We like it a lot more than other cities that you might otherwise think of, like Rome.

Here I am being stupid with some souvenirs for sale on the street.
Hungary has some pretty cool money. It's called forint and it's got these great photos of the heroes of Hungarian history. Here's a picture:
http://www.davidpride.com/Europe/Hungary/images/Forint.jpg

We are on a mad dash to finish up our travels in Europe. We are in Budapest two days, then on to Prague for just one day, then one day in Krakow to see the Auschwitz concentration camp. From there, we are off to Ireland for a few days to visit with our friends Sean and Ann who are going to be there right at the start of their own round the world trip. Then home. We are leaving in just ten days! Time does fly.

By the way, you can click on most of our photos and they will blow up to a bigger size.

Pronto?....ENGLISH!!!...Pronto?...ENGLISH!!!

Sorry it has taken us awhile to get you a blog.. we have after 4 months discovered that if you buy a card reader you don't have to search for hours to find an internet cafe that has photo capablities... This is genius at work folks.. only took 4 months.. I would say that 's a record!

OK.. Onto blogging.. We last left you in Switzerland, happy and free and singing the sounds of music while spinning on a mountain top. Yah , now we are in Italy.. the only spinng we have accomplished now is getting out of the way of the masses of vespa scooters without being flattened . This is a task that you cannot take lightly.. your very survival depends on it!

We started in a very beautiful region called Cinque Terre. Lovely, touristy as hell, but very nice. The name literally means 5 lands, corresponding to five towns in the region. The houses all cling to a side of a cliff over- looking spectaular ocean views. Here is a nice example. The town is bigger than it looks and continues on the other side of the cliff.

The terrain from Cinque Terre proved rather difficult. We arrived in the first Cinque Terre town, Riomaggiore, at 8pm and was told that our room was given away.. but "not to worry we have another place for you to stay across the street" and up a million stairs. Hot, sweaty and overall annoyed, we settled into our room to find that our sink was out on the balcony and our bathroom was in another person's room... wierd ????
Here is a great photo of Bob doing his morning rountine out on the balcony.
The view is great though.. not sure what the women below us thought of our morning routine...
We walked a few of the trails that connect the towns. The area is beautiful and not to be missed for anyone who visits. Here was the beginning of our first taste of italian culture.We have learned while we are here that all of the italian stereotypes are true. They are loud, argumentative and love to flail their hands wildly.. to those of my wonderful relatives reading this... I wonder where we got it????

We also did a quick day trip to Pisa, this is all you need to know..This is not the nicest town we have been to. We went to see the leaning tower and left. The tower is an impressive structure and you fear for the people that spent their hard earned 13euros (yah thats alot, $20USD) to climb it. Here is a nice picture of it peeking out from behind the church to say, "hello".
ONTO ROMA!!!! (insert flailing italian hands while saying)
Spent the next 3 days touring around Rome. I am not sure what I was expecting but it lacks the "european feeling" that you get so well in Paris. There is a ton of grafiti on thousand year old relics.What there is to see is impressive. We spent a day in the Vatican museum and learned very quickly that we should of gotten a guide to help.- There is just room after room of priceless art. Far to much to look at all in one sitting. Honestly, you get tired of looking up after awhile. Take a look at this picture, you can see the complexity of the art on the ceilling.Exhausting. There is easily 100 rooms just like this one, and yes that's real gold. We were amazed at the amount of wealth at the Vatican.

The Pope's guard, who by the way are from Switzerland, have some interesting outfits. They haven't been changed in a LONG time, and it shows.
We spent the next day at the Coliseum and the Roman forum. We got a guide for this, which paid off in the end. The factoids of this place make you appreciate the niceness of modern day sports. Just as a spectator... women were expected to stand on the top deck. The Vestal Virgins, however, got a place of honor to sit. The Coliseum was decked out with all the modern conviences of a game today, it had food stands, bathrooms (this ironically was only for the men), etc. Of interest... the women because they did not have any bathroom facilities were given "doggy bags" which they then deposited their waste into... now a lady can't be expected to hold onto her waste for the rest of the match so she throws it over the side onto the walking crowd below. What a fun treat if you are having a nice stroll outside. Don't even ask me how they used the bags, under all the togas while standing up...Too bad they didn't let us in on the trick, it would make camping a whole lot easier. Sorry I disgress, here I am near the Coliseum.


Bob had a run in with a gladiator.. errrr
From Rome we headed south to Naples. Not the biggest tourist attraction. It is fair to say that we are the only ones. We decided to use this as a base to get to Capri and Pompeii. The area here is not nice at all. You are lucky on an hourly basis while walking the streets to not get killed by oncoming traffic. We keep thinking at each place that "this is the worst traffic".. but I think Naples has won the prize. You are not even safe on the sidewalks from the Vespa scooters, if there is a free space to ride on, it is their right to occupy it, apparently.

Spent today in Capri. It was nice to leave the hustle and bustle of Naples and head out into the ocean to the pretty island of Capri. The geography of the island is ridiculous. All hills and houses clinging to the mountain, makes you wonder how they live here. There isn't enough flat space for even a soccer field.
We took a boat ride to see the grotto's. Now, for those of you who don't know what a grotto is in this context; it is a cave built by the sea erosion. The reason people travel far and wide to see these is you can actually travel inside them. The cave entry is very small and the water is very deep, and the only light that can enter the cave comes in through the water. This makes for some pretty amazing colors. Here is a picture but the camera doesn't do it justice.

What you see here is boat coming in the entrance. The ride inside comes complete with your own italian singer\rower\tip grubber. (a very well rounded man)


This catches us up for now. We are heading to Pompeii in search of Mount Vesuvius, tomorrow. Hopefully, that will yield some nice photos. We are heading to Venice, after that.

In closing, the blog title. I have been trying to use my spanglish to communicate with the italians. This doesn't always work, you get to spend the rest of the time saying only one word to each other hoping that by the 7th time one of you will get what the other is saying or magically learn the other language. This usually means you yell louder after each time, thinking that surely by yelling this will help. I tried to call a hostel to get a booking for a room.. he said "Pronto" (I thought this meant, "faster"... I learned later this is means hello) I said "ENGLISH"... he said (even louder) "PRONTO"... so I said louder.. "ENGLISH"... ahh after all this time through evolution these are our communication skills. Then he hung up.


---Gina

Needs More Cowbell!!

We're in Switzerland at the moment. Suffice it to say that the words are hard to find to describe this place. It's impossibly beautiful. Everywhere you look there is a giant mountain with a cow (wearing a genuine cowbell) or a little village in the foreground.

We came to Interlaken, Switzerland, by way of Chamonix, which is just over the border in France. We rode the cable car on the opposite side of the valley from Mont Blanc, but the cable car summit was unfortunately socked in. We still got some great views of Mont Blanc on the way up and we were able to get a cool photo from the summit, which is high enough to be above the clouds. Here's a photo of us at the top of the cable car:

From our base in Interlaken, we have spent a few days on the train, tooling around the Swiss high alpine villages. They are unfailingly stunning. We were originally going to stay here for two days, but we're on our fourth.. and counting!
This is at the summit of a scenic cable car at 10,000 feet.
This is the highest mountain in this region, Jungfrau, at sunset. We took this photo from the balcony of the B&B we are staying at.
Here I am at th foot of Jungfrau. You can see the rail line in the background.

We love it here, the scenery is world class and the peo0ple are great. The only downside is that is exorbitantly expensive. But, as you can hopefully see from the photos, it's a truly amazing place to be - definitely worth the expense.

Sorry for the short blog but this computer is not cooperating!